Sugary beverages start to wreck your health in just two weeks.

Still drinking soft drinks or sugar sweetened beverages? It is time to stop. A new study shows us what just two weeks of drinking soda can do to your heart. And the subjects were young healthy people.

Sugary drinks have been linked to obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. What is worse, the more soda (or sweet tea, or lattes) people drink the more likely these outcomes. The sugar industry and soft drink companies argue that association isn’t proof that one actually causes the other. But you have to agree that when population studies show a link again and again, and the mechanism of harm is plausible, it is silly to deny such strong evidence.

This is exactly how how we proved smoking cigarettes caused disease. But when it comes to discovering the effects on a habit on our health there’s nothing like controlled experiments. And the best evidence to prove cause and effect comes from double blind placebo controlled studies.

And when you’re studying heart disease, all the study has to do is look at changes in markers of heart disease risk, such as LDL cholesterol, apoB, triglycerides and uric acid in the blood.

A new study did just that. The study has been published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The researchers recruited a group of 85 people aged 18-40, and divided them into 4 groups. For 2 weeks participants drank beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) making up 0 percent, 10 percent, 17.5 percent or 25 percent of their daily caloric requirement. The participants were blinded to their drink content, and in order to do that the 0-percent drink for the control group was sweetened with aspartame.

Within 2 weeks, the people who were on the HFCS drinks had higher levels of LDL, triglycerides and uric acid, and the higher the HFCS they drank, the higher the level of heart risk factors.

Although the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization recommend that people limit added sugar to no more that 5 percent of daily calories, very few people do so, and levels of added sugar in the 10-20 percent are typical of the American diet. By this study’s assessment, the average American person’s sugar intake is certainly enough to increase cardiac risk.

Would replacing HFCS with regular sugar (sucrose) make a difference? Not likely. The fructose content in table sugar is 50 percent, compared to 55 percent in HFCS – just a slight difference – and since fructose is metabolized in our body in a way that promotes fat production, raises triglycerides and affects cholesterol levels, either one of these sweeteners would probably have the same negative effects; there's no reason to assume that sugar is any more safe than HFCS.

Study: Soda and Sugar Drive Obesity

New research powerfully implicates soda and other sugary drinks as culprits in the obesity epidemic.

A huge, decades-long study involving more than 33,000 Americans has yielded the first clear proof that drinking sugary beverages interacts with genes that affect weight, amplifying a person’s risk of obesity beyond what it would be from heredity alone.

This means that such drinks are especially harmful to people with genes that predispose them to weight gain. And most of us have at least some of these genes.

In addition, two other major experiments have found that giving children and teens calorie-free alternatives to the sugary drinks they usually consume leads to less weight gain.

Collectively, the results strongly suggest that sugary drinks cause people to pack on the pounds, independent of other unhealthy behavior such as overeating and getting too little exercise, scientists say.

That adds weight to the push for taxes, portion limits like the one just adopted in New York City, and other policies to curb consumption of soda, juice drinks and sports beverages sweetened with sugar.

Soda lovers do get some good news: Sugar-free drinks did not raise the risk of obesity in these studies.

“You may be able to fool the taste” and satisfy a sweet tooth without paying a price in weight, said an obesity researcher with no role in the studies, Rudy Leibel of Columbia University.

The studies were being presented Friday at an obesity conference in San Antonio and were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The gene research in particular fills a major gap in what we know about obesity. It was a huge undertaking, involving three long-running studies that separately and collectively reached the same conclusions. It shows how behavior combines with heredity to affect how fat we become.

Having many of these genes does not guarantee people will become obese, but if they drink a lot of sugary beverages, “they fulfill that fate,” said an expert with no role in the research, Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University in New York. “The sweet drinking and the fatness are going together, and it’s more evident in the genetic predisposition people.”

Sugary drinks are the single biggest source of calories in the American diet, and they are increasingly blamed for the fact that a third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

Consumption of sugary drinks and obesity rates have risen in tandem —both have more than doubled since the 1970s in the U.S.

In one study, researchers randomly assigned 224 overweight or obese high schoolers in the Boston area to receive shipments every two weeks of either the sugary drinks they usually consumed or sugar-free alternatives, including bottled water. No efforts were made to change the youngsters’ exercise habits or give nutrition advice, and the kids knew what type of beverages they were getting.

After one year, the sugar-free group weighed more than 4 pounds less on average than those who kept drinking sugary beverages.

“I know of no other single food product whose elimination can produce this degree of weight change,” said the study’s leader, Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The weight difference between the two groups narrowed to 2 pounds in the second year of the study, when drinks were no longer being provided. That showed at least some lasting beneficial effect on kids’ habits. The study was funded mostly by government grants.

A second study involved 641 normal-weight children ages 4 to 12 in the Netherlands who regularly drank sugar-sweetened beverages. They were randomly assigned to get either a sugary drink or a sugar-free one during morning break at their schools, and were not told what kind they were given.

The studies “provide strong impetus” for policies urged by the Institute of Medicine, the American Heart Association and others to limit sugary drink consumption.

The genetic research was part of a much larger set of health studies that have gone on for decades across the U.S., led by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Researchers checked for 32 gene variants that have previously been tied to weight. Because we inherit two copies of each gene, everyone has 64 opportunities for these risk genes. The study participants had 29 on average.

Every four years, these people answered detailed surveys about their eating and drinking habits as well as things like smoking and exercise. Researchers analyzed these over several decades.

A clear pattern emerged: The more sugary drinks someone consumed, the greater the impact of the genes on the person’s weight and risk of becoming obese.

For every 10 risk genes someone had, the risk of obesity rose in proportion to how many sweet drinks the person regularly consumed. Overall calorie intake and lifestyle factors such as exercise did not account for the differences researchers saw.

This means that people with genes that predispose them to be obese are more susceptible to the harmful effects of sugary drinks on their weight, said one of the study leaders, Harvard’s Dr. Frank Hu. The opposite also was true — avoiding these drinks can minimize the effect of obesity genes.

“Two bad things can act together and their combined effects are even greater than either effect alone,” Hu said. “The flip side of this is everyone has some genetic risk of obesity, but the genetic effects can be offset by healthier beverage choices. It’s certainly not our destiny” to be fat, even if we carry genes that raise this risk.

Another reason to walk.

The millions of people whose genes make them prone to obesity aren’t at the mercy of nature. How they choose to spend their free time can make a big difference in their waistline, according to new research from the American Heart Association (AHA) meeting in San Diego.

Watching TV for two hours each day increases the effect of certain obesity-related genes by as much as 25%, the researchers estimate. If, on the other hand, people with a strong genetic predisposition to obesity spend one hour each day walking briskly or engaging in comparable exercise, they can halve the genes’ effect.

The influence of the gene variants, however, appeared to be strongest in people who watched the most TV. The variants’ effect on BMI was about four times greater in people who spent 40 hours or more per week in front of the TV than it was in those who watched an hour per week or less.

Prolonged TV watching exacerbates the effect of the gene.

By the same token, weakening the genes’ effect was as simple as switching off the television and going for a brisk walk. The average difference in BMI between a person with the highest genetic obesity risk and a person of identical height with the lowest risk would be cut in half if the high-risk person were to walk for an hour each day.

Diet Soda and weight loss? It's a scam! Don't you fall for it!

There is a trend at the beginning of each new year to make little changes hoping to curb extra weight gain. Countless unsuspecting people drink diet soda and relentless advertising has delivered billions of customers to Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. These people are presumably hoping for something to drink that does not put on the pounds. Well that something is water. Or unsweetened tea. Diet soda? A terrible habit.

Diet soda not only doesn't stop weight gain, it increases it. Yes. You read that right!

Drinking diet soda actually causes weight gain and blood sugar spikes. According to new studies presented at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions in San Diego, study subjects who drank two or more diet sodas a day had waist-size increases that were six times greater than those of people who didn’t drink diet soda. Think about that before you pop open your next can.

Cutting calories and carbs just two days a week reduces breast cancer risk.

Limiting carbohydrate intake just two days a week can mitigate some risk factors for breast cancer by burning body fat and improving insulin sensitivity.


Over three months, eating fewer carbohydrates alone or combining that reduction with severe caloric restriction two days per week was associated with significant changes in body fat and insulin resistance.

In an earlier study, the same research team demonstrated that two days per week of calorie restriction was comparable to daily calorie restriction in terms of weight loss, but it wasn't any easier for patients to follow because the choice of food was limited to fruit and vegetables on restricted days.

They randomized 115 overweight or obese patients who, based on their weight were at risk of breast cancer, to one of three diets over a three-month period:

1.             A calorie-restricted (600 kcal), low-carbohydrate (less than 40 g) diet for two days a week

2.             A low-carbohydrate diet for two days per week, plus an ad-lib Mediterranean (healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables) diet the other five days

3.             A daily calorie-restriction Mediterranean diet (1,500 kcal) all week

After three months, patients on either of the low-carbohydrate diets had significantly greater declines in insulin resistance.

Harvie M, et al "Intermittent dietary carbohydrate restriction enables weight loss and reduces breast cancer biomarkers" SABCS 2011; Abstract P3-09-02.

Suffer From Brain fatigue? Get Off of That Couch!

Scientists have long understood that regular exercise increases the number of organelles called mitochondria in muscle cells. Mitochondria produce energy, Thus one of the positive physical effects of exercise is increased strength or endurance. Exercise also works in the brain to reduce depression and boost memory. Now we may know why.
Exercise doesn’t just boost cellular powerhouses, (mitochondria) in muscles—it increases their population in brain cells too. Thus exercise increases the number of mitochondria in the brain just as it increases mitochondria in muscles. The benefits? Better exercise endurance by energizing the brain and having it be more resistant to fatigue. A boost in brain mitochondria play a supporting role for reducing the impact of mental disorders. Exercise may prove to be a potential treatment for psychiatric disorders, genetic disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases.


Jennifer L. Steiner, E. Angela Murphy, Jamie L. Mcclellan, Martin D. Carmichael, J. Mark Davis. Exercise Training Increases Mitochondrial Biogenesis in the Brain.American Journal of Physiology -- Regulatory, Integrative, and Comparative Physiology, 2011

Tangerines, Grapefruits, Diabetes and Healthy Blood Vessels.

What's the connection? Well in an animal study in Ontario a substance found in tangerines guards against obesity and offers some protection against diabetes and blood vessel disease. The substance is called nobiletin and it protected against insulin resistance and  blocked arteries in animals fed a high fat high sugar diet.


Two groups of mice were fed the Western diet but one group also got supplemental nobiletin. The mice without the tangerine compound became obese and developed signs of metabolic syndrome—high insulin and glucose levels, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, and a fatty liver—all of which increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart problems such as cardiovascular disease (CVD). The second group of mice whose diet included nobiletin didn’t experience an increase in insulin, glucose, triglycerides nor cholesterol, and gained weight normally. Researchers said nobiletin protected the mice from obesity and prevented fat buildup in the liver. 

Another citrus favorite, the grapefruit, has shown promise in weight management and diabetes; although, the research on nobiletin in tangerines is showing it’s more potent than naringenin from grapefruit. 

Read the abstract from the journal "Diabetes" here.