Sugar-sweetened beverages may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes through several mechanisms. The first is adiposity, which is the most important risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Sugar-sweetened beverages contain ≈150 kcal per serving, which if consumed in excess of daily energy balance may promote a 6.8-kg annual weight gain. Name Tia SImpkins Nickname Ms. T Age 51 Personality Equestrian, Genius, Natural Cook, Neat, Workaholic Job Training backed four-year-olds up to their.
Dr. Ludwig is co-director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center. His research focuses on the effects of diet on hormones, metabolism and body weight. He developed a novel “low glycemic load” diet (i.e., one that decreases the surge in blood sugar after meals) for the treatment of obesity-related diseases. In addition, his group has done some of the original studies linking sugar-sweetened beverages and fast food to excessive weight gain, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Dr Ludwig founded the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) program at Children's Hospital, one of the country’s oldest and largest multidisciplinary clinics for the care of overweight children. OWL serves as a home for research into innovative approaches to treatment childhood obesity.
Dr. Ludwig is Principal Investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, has published over 150 scientific articles, and served for 10 years as Contributing Writer for JAMA.
Dr. Ludwig has written 3 books for the public, including Ending the Food fight (2007), Always Hungry? (2016) and the cookbook Always Delicious (2018)
David Ludwig received a PhD and an MD from Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed an internship and residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in pediatric endocrinology at Boston Children's Hospital.
Unfortunately, these may not be good for your brain. Katya Havok/Shutterstock
An experiment by a collaborative team of food scientists and psychologists suggests that the anecdotal 'sugar coma' – a temporary loss of higher cognitive function from eating copious amounts of processed sweets – may be grounded in fact.
The findings, published in the journal Physiology & Behavior, could someday be added to the long list of reasons why refined sugar is bad for you.
To assess the impact of sugar on mental performance, researchers from the University of Otago, New Zealand,administered a suite of cognition tests on 49 volunteers, 20 minutes after they ingested one of three types of sugar: glucose, fructose, sucrose, or an artificial sweetener (sucralose) as a control.
Glucose and fructose are single-molecule sugars called monosaccharides, whereas sucrose, also known as table sugar, is a larger molecule composed of both glucose and fructose. The tests included three well-studied tasks known to employ the brain’s prefrontal cortex – the area associated with higher thought and problem solving.
The authors found that individual subjects scored significantly lower on the tests after they ingested a drink containing glucose or sucrose compared with when they received fructose or a placebo. The detrimental effects of these two sugars were heightened if the subject had consumed the beverage after a 10-hour fast.
“Our study suggests that the ‘sugar coma’ – with regards to glucose – is indeed a real phenomenon, where levels of attention seem to decline after consumption of glucose-containing sugar,” study author Mei Peng told PsyPost.
Although fructose and glucose are both absorbed straight into the bloodstream from the small intestine, brain cells primarily use glucose to meet their high-energy demand. The body must break down sucrose into monosaccharides and convert the fructose molecules into glucose, before the fuel can pass through the blood-brain barrier.
Despite the brain's reliance on glucose, some recent data shows that rapid increases in blood levels can lead to cognitive deficits. People with diabetes, who experience a lifetime of unstable sugar levels, are known to have an elevated risk of dementia.
Fructose takes the longest of the three sugars evaluated to reach the brain. In this study, consuming a beverage with fructose led to similar results as those seen after the placebo drink, which contained zero sugar.
Though interesting, these findings are far from conclusive. For example, previous investigations have found that intake of glucose immediately prior to a test actually improved response time and memory in fasting adults. Additionally, the beverages used had differing caloric content, meaning the total energy levels were not standardized.
Future research assessing the short-term effects of different sugars on cognition is required before we know for certain whether a pre-exam diet of candy and soda is truly worth the litany of negative health consequences.