This is the worst kind of sugar you can consume

Recent dietary guidelines have suggested that Americans are gradually consuming more and more sugar every year. It’s probably not a coincidence that obesity and disease incidence has been rising in the US in recent years as well.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Hepatology, even moderate amounts of added fructose and sucrose can double the body’s production of fat in the liver.

Over time, fatty liver disease—clinically referred to as hepatic steatosis, increases one’s risk for inflammation, diabetes, organ scarring, and liver cancer. Although excessive sugar intake contributes to all of these outcomes, not all sugar is created equal in this regard.

The team of researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich derived their results from a sample comprised of  94 healthy young men.

The participants in the experiment group were administered a drink sweetened with different types of sugar solutions ( fructose, glucose, or sucrose) every day for seven weeks, while those in the control group did not.

“This study investigated the metabolic effects of daily sugar-sweetened beverage consumption for several weeks in healthy lean men. It revealed that beverages sweetened with the sugars fructose and sucrose (glucose and fructose combined), but not glucose, increase the ability of the liver to produce lipids. This change may pave the way for further unfavorable effects on metabolic health,” the authors wrote in the new paper.

“We hypothesize that this switch of the liver metabolism by fructose intake towards a higher lipogenic activity may pave the way to further changes affecting metabolic health.”

Sucrose proved to yield the most dramatic adverse impact. Not only does sucrose boost liver fat production the most reliably, but it’s also the most common kind of sugar consumed in the US.

Sucrose is found most commonly in fast food, puddings, milkshakes, cakes, fruit juice drinks, deep-fried meats with sweet sauce, cookies, pancakes, chocolate, and commercial cereals.

Healthy men in the fructose group evidenced liver fat production twice as high as those belonging to the glucose group.

Eighty grams of sugar a day, or roughly 0.8 liters, appeared to initiate the over production of fat in the liver. The men in the glucose and fructose group continued to overproduce fat in their liver after they were taken of the experiment regimen.

Normal fat production can be achieved with dietary changes and regular excercise.

The World Health Organization recommends otherwise healthy adults shoot for a daily sugar value between 25 and 50 grams.

“Look for added sugars in the ingredients list. The higher up added sugars are on the list, the more added sugar is in the product. Added sugars go by a lot of different names like brown sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, lactose, malt syrup, maltose, molasses, raw sugar, sucrose, trehalose, and turbinado sugar,” the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.

“Eating and drinking too many foods and beverages with added sugars makes it difficult to achieve a healthy eating pattern without taking in too many calories.”