Sugar Toxic to Mice in Small Doses

Minnie2361

This article comes from Science Daily and at the bottom is a list and link of other Science Daily Articles regarding sugar.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130813111722.htm


When mice ate a diet of 25 percent extra sugar -- the mouse equivalent of a healthy human diet plus three cans of soda daily -- females died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce, according to a toxicity test developed at the University of Utah.

Our results provide evidence that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic adverse impacts on mammalian health," the researchers say in a study set for online publication Tuesday, Aug. 13 in the journal Nature Communications.

"This demonstrates the adverse effects of added sugars at human-relevant levels," says University of Utah biology professor Wayne Potts, the study's senior author. He says previous studies using other tests fed mice large doses of sugar disproportionate to the amount people

have reduced refined sugar intake and encouraged my family to do the same," he adds, noting that the new test showed that the 25 percent "added-sugar" diet -- 12.5 percent dextrose (the industrial name for glucose) and 12.5 percent fructose -- was just as harmful to the health of mice as being the inbred offspring of first cousins.

Even though the mice didn't become obese and showed few metabolic symptoms, the sensitive test showed "they died more often and tended to have fewer babies," says the study's first author, James Ruff, who recently earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. "We have shown that levels of sugar that people typically consume -- and that are considered safe by regulatory agencies -- impair the health of mice."


The study says the need for a sensitive toxicity test exists not only for components of our diet, but "is particularly strong for both pharmaceutical science, where 73 percent of drugs that pass preclinical trials fail due to safety concerns, and for toxicology, where shockingly few compounds receive critical or long-term toxicity testing."

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

A Mouse Diet Equal to What a Quarter of Americans Eat

The experimental diet in the study provided 25 percent of calories from added sugar -- half fructose and half glucose -- no matter how many calories the mice ate. Both high-fructose corn syrup and table sugar (sucrose) are half fructose and half glucose.

Potts says the National Research Council recommends that for people, no more than 25 percent of calories should be from "added sugar," which means "they don't count what's naturally in an apple, banana, potato or other nonprocessed food. … The dose we selected is consumed by 13 percent to 25 percent of Americans."

The diet fed to the mice with the 25 percent sugar-added diet is equivalent to the diet of a person who drinks three cans daily of sweetened soda pop "plus a perfectly healthy, no-sugar-added diet," Potts says.

Ruff notes that sugar consumption in the American diet has increased 50 percent since the 1970s, accompanied by a dramatic increase in metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, fatty liver and cardiovascular disease.

"You have to ask why we didn't discover them 20 years ago," he adds. "The answer is that until now, we haven't had a functional, broad and sensitive test to screen the potential toxic substances that are being released into the environment or in our drugs or our food supply."

Potts and Ruff conducted the study with University of Utah biology lab manager Linda Morrison and undergraduates Amanda Suchy, Sara Hugentobler, Mirtha Sosa and Bradley Schwartz, and with researchers Sin Gieng and Mark Shigenaga of Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California.


Other Science Daily Articles
Moms' High-Fat, Sugary Diets May Lead to Heavy Offspring With a Taste for Alcohol, Sensitivity to Drugs
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130804080952.htm

Higher Blood Sugar Associated with Dementia
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130807204835.htm

Societal Control of Sugar Essential to Ease Public Health Burden, Experts Urge
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201135312.htm

Foods being marketed to children in UK supermarkets are less healthy than those marketed to the general population according to researchers at the University of Hertfordshire, who question whether more guidelines may be needed in regulating food marketed to children
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130507134457.htm

New Risk Factors for Bowel Cancer
July 15, 2013 — Fizzy drinks, cakes, biscuits, chips and desserts have all been identified as risk factors for bowel cancer, according to new research

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130715105427.htm

Aug. 6, 2009 — Overconsumption of fatty, sugary foods leads to changes in brain receptors, according to new animal research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The new research results are being presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB). The results have implications for understanding bulimia and other binge eating disorders.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727102024.htm


High Sugar Intake Linked to Low Dopamine Release in Insulin Resistant Patients
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130610223722.htm