Eating too much sugar can easily lead to coronary heart disease!

A study recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that eating too much sugar increases the risk of coronary heart disease, but this does not include sugar from vegetables and fruits.

Studies have shown that added sugars, total glucose equivalents, and fructose consumed from fruit juice and added sugar foods are associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, while total fructose equivalents and fructose consumed from vegetables or fruits are not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.

Specifically, the more added sugar and total sugar intake, the higher the risk of coronary heart disease, increasing the risk of coronary heart disease by 8% and 16% respectively. The total fructose equivalent from fruit juice and added sugar also increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 12%.

Fructose added to processed foods or drinks (mostly in the form of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup) can produce resistance to leptin, a key hormone that can maintain a normal body weight. This is why eating sugar makes you fat, and the increase is visceral fat.

In fact, as early as 2016, a study pointed out that sugar is more toxic than saturated fat, especially refined sugar.

Studies have found that if patients with coronary heart disease consume high-sugar foods for several weeks in a row, they will experience abnormal symptoms such as total cholesterol, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein, oxidized low-density lipoprotein, uric acid, insulin resistance and impaired glucose tolerance, low HDL, and changes in platelet function.

In addition, a high-sugar diet not only increases the risk of coronary heart disease, but has also been found to promote the progression of prediabetes and diabetes, which makes cardiovascular disease even worse.

Text/Yang Jingang (Fuwai Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences)