Feb. 14, 2023 – It’s not necessarily the amount of sugar you eat that can hurt your heart, it’s the kind of sugar you eat that can lead to heart disease, a new study suggests.
Consuming foods that have a lot of “free sugars” significantly raised the risk of heart disease and stroke, according to researchers from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. They found that the risk increased based on how much more free sugar someone ate.
Free sugars are defined as all sugar added to a food by the manufacturer, cook, or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, and unsweetened fruit juice. Free sugar does not include those naturally occurring in whole fruits or vegetables.
“Our research demonstrates the importance of considering the type and source of sugars consumed when assessing the associations between sugar and cardiovascular health,” Oxford Population Health researcher Rebecca Kelly said in a statement. “Replacing free sugars with non-free sugars, such as those naturally occurring in whole fruits and vegetables, combined with a higher fiber intake may help protect against cardiovascular disease.”
The study was published today in the journal BMC Medicine. Researchers examined data for 110,497 people from the United Kingdom to determine how diet impacted the risk of heart disease and stroke over 9 years. People in the study ranged in age from 37 to 73 years old.
The highest risk of heart disease was among people who ate around 95 grams of free sugar per day, or 18% of their daily calories, researcher Cody Watling, a University of Oxford doctoral student, told NBC News. (For context, U.S. guidelines recommend less than 10% of calories coming from added sugars per day.)
As a secondary finding, the authors said their study confirmed prior research that found that the more dietary fiber someone ate, the lower their risk of heart disease. Dietary fiber is found in fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
The researchers said their study stopped short of identifying the major sources of free sugars in people’s diets.
