Reducing Sugar Intake Improves Heart Health

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 600,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. And while there's no fool-proof way to prevent it, there are ways to lower your risk, including reducing your intake of sugar.

It's no secret that sugar is bad for your health. It promotes weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, and even heart disease. Up until now, however, the correlation between sugar consumption and heart health has remained largely a mystery. But researchers now attribute sugar's damaging effects on the heart to reduced levels of triglycerides and a key protein known as ApoC-III.

For the study, researchers from Touro University California and UC San Francisco analyzed dozens of children between the ages of 9 and 18 as part of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health Watch. All of the studies' participants has at least one metabolic disorder, such as high blood pressure. Throughout the nine-day study, participants were given food and beverages that mirrored roughly the same diet as their "normal" diet at home. However, the one difference was that sugary foods were replaced with starchy foods. 

So, what did researchers discover from this study? They found that restricting sugar from participants' diets results in a33% lower levels of triglycerides and 49% lower levels of ApoC-III.

"While statins are effective in lowering LDL, they only reduce heart disease risk by 50 percent,” said Gugliucci, one of the study's lead authors. “The other villain is blood lipid triglycerides and the associated protein ApoC-III. Drug companies are looking for medicines to specifically block ApoC-III. We found in our study that just reducing sugar consumption did a wonderful job in lowering these two key risk factors by 30 to 50 percent.”

The bottom line is that sugar intake can and WILL affect your risk of heart disease. Sugar is classified as an empty calorie, meaning it contributes to weight gain while offering no real nutritional value. If you have a craving for something sweet -- which is bound to happen sooner or later -- eat a piece of fruit instead of a processed sugary snack. Trust me, your heart will thank you.

This study was published in the journal Atherosclerosis/