Study finds a link between ‘free sugar’ intake and cardiovascular disease

Eating high amounts of free or added sugars could increase the risk for cardiovascular disease, a new study has found. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), free sugars are those added during the processing of foods; packaged as table sugar and other sweeteners; and naturally occurring in syrups, honey fruit juice, vegetable juice, purees, pastes, and similar products in which the cellular structure of the food has been broken down.–excluding sugars naturally occurring in dairy or structurally whole fruits and vegetables. According to a new study published Monday in the journal BMC Medicine, previous studies have found links between carbohydrate consumption and cardiovascular disease might depend on the quality, rather than quantity, of carbohydrates consumed. To test the previous theory of a reported link between carbohydrate consumption and cardiovascular disease, researchers assessed diet and health data from adult participants from the UK Biobank cohort study that collected over 503,000 United Kingdom adult data between 2006 and 2010. People in the study participated in two to five 24-hour online dietary assessments, logging their food and beverage intake multiple times within each 24-hour period. After over in years of follow-up, the researchers found total carbohydrate intake wasn’t associated with cardiovascular disease. But when analyzing how outcomes differed depending on the types of sources of carbohydrates eaten, they found higher free sugar intake was associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and greater waist circumference.

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