Study: Sugar is killing Americans
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
Americans consume too much sugar, and our collective sweet tooth is killing us.
So says a study published Monday by the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. It finds that 71.4 percent of U.S. adults get more than the recommended 10 percent of their daily calories from added sugars in foods and drinks – and that higher levels of sugar consumption are correlated with higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
Researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES – a large study updated each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – to measure changes in sugar consumption over time and to see its effect on health. Added sugars were defined as “all sugars used in processed or prepared foods, such as sugar-sweetened beverages, grain-based desserts, fruit drinks, dairy desserts, candy, ready-to-eat cereals, and yeast breads, but not naturally occurring sugar, such as in fruits and fruit juices.”