Published 5:11 pm, Monday, November 10, 2014
UCSF on Monday unveiled a repository of sugar science, designed to collect the evidence against sweetened foods and disseminate that information to the public - and persuade people to boot fructose and most other refined sugars out of their diets to protect their health - and not just their waistlines.
The SugarScience Initiative, at SugarScience.org, is the result of 11 researchers, mostly from UCSF, spending a year poring over thousands of published scientific articles on sugar and its health effects. The group removed articles that didn't hold up to certain scientific standards, including industry-funded papers.
The results are a variety of public health messages, from sound bites and simple graphics demonstrating how much sugar most people eat and drink daily to more in-depth essays on the connection between sugar consumption and liver damage. Consumers who want even more information can follow links back to the original scientific works.
The idea behind the initiative is to help consumers - along with doctors, politicians and other policy-makers - make sense of the sometimes confusing, and often overwhelming, messages about sugar, and specifically sodas, that have hit the public over the past few years, said Laura Schmidt, a UCSF health policy professor and lead investigator of the project.
'There's a lot of confusion and misperception and conflicting information out there around sugar and health,' Schmidt said. 'We wanted to develop an authoritative, go-to place where people can get truthful information, and we wanted to package it in a way that's accessible to the average person.'
Policy implications
The initiative is clearly connected to recent efforts to effect policy change related to sugar consumption - most recently, Berkeley's successful and San Francisco's failed soda-tax measures. But the scientists said their intention isn't to create, or even endorse, specific public health initiatives.
'The purpose is to bring science into the discussion,' said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital, who is also part of the SugarScience project. 'The discussions will, I'm sure, lead to an entire range of policy outcomes. But mostly we just want to get the information out there.'
That said, Bibbins-Domingo and other scientists said they'll be closely watching Berkeley's soda tax, as they have a similar tax that took effect in Mexico earlier this year, to determine whether it has any measurable impact on behaviors and long-term health.
Americans eat and drink roughly 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, about a third of it from sodas, and much of the rest from processed foods where it's often not obvious. The American Heart Association and other health organizations recommend that adults consume no more than 6 to 9 teaspoons of sugar a day.
In recent years, amid a torrent of conversations around sugar and its health effects, it's hard to imagine that the public could be under-informed about the topic, public health experts said. The problem is that people are getting conflicting information and often don't know which sources to trust.
Plus, so much of the emphasis on sugar has been on how it relates to obesity and weight gain. But that's an incomplete message, and not even the most important piece of it, said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children 's Hospital who is part of the SugarScience group.
'People still think it's just about the calories. That's what the mantra has always been,' Lustig said.
Lustig published a book, 'Fat Chance,' in 2012 that attacked sugar as a major enemy in American diets. But for a long time he said he was a small voice calling out sugar as more than just a weight-loss villain. Sugar, Lustig has said, is a toxin. And he's pleased to see a broader campaign backing that up.
'That's part of the power of the initiative,' Lustig said. 'People will look at this website and go, 'Oh my gosh, it's not just Lustig going off again.''
For any given topic, the group had to agree that the data was robust enough to deliver a strong message to the public, which resulted in lessons about overconsumption of sugar, the connection between sugar and Type 2 diabetes and comparisons between the effect of sugar and alcohol on liver function, for example. One section of the initiative is devoted to exploring the idea of sugar as a natural toxin to the body that should be consumed only in very limited amounts to be safe.
Meanwhile, areas where the science is less definitive - connecting sugar consumption to cognitive decline or cancer, for example - are included in the repository, but with caution that the data is incomplete.
'We're now just beginning to understand the impact that sugar has, beyond that you're just drinking empty calories,' said Dr. Tomás Aragon, a health officer with the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Encouraging change
The SugarScience repository, he hoped, would help the public at large better understand what overconsumption of sugar may be doing to their bodies - and hopefully persuade them to do something to change that, either as individuals or as part of communities.
'I don't think people really understand it. They don't really know what's going on,' Aragon said. 'But sugar is having a huge impact on society, and we're all paying for it.'
The American Beverage Association declined to comment on the SugarScience project, saying the issue goes beyond just sodas.
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
Entities 0 Name: Lustig Count: 4 1 Name: UCSF Count: 3 2 Name: Berkeley Count: 2 3 Name: Erin Allday Count: 1 4 Name: UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations Count: 1 5 Name: American Heart Association Count: 1 6 Name: Mexico Count: 1 7 Name: Laura Schmidt Count: 1 8 Name: Dr. Robert Lustig Count: 1 9 Name: San Francisco Department of Public Health Count: 1 10 Name: UCSF Benioff Children 's Hospital Count: 1 11 Name: Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo Count: 1 12 Name: American Count: 1 13 Name: San Francisco Chronicle Count: 1 14 Name: San Francisco General Hospital Count: 1 15 Name: San Francisco Count: 1 16 Name: Dr. Tomás Aragon Count: 1 17 Name: Schmidt Count: 1 18 Name: Aragon Count: 1 19 Name: American Beverage Association Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1wceXff Title: How Much Sugar Is Too Much? A New Tool Sheds Some Light Description: These days, sugar is pretty much everywhere in the American diet. A new initiative from the University of California, San Francisco spells out the health dangers of this glut of sugar in clear terms. For the project, called SugarScience, a team of researchers distilled 8,000 studies and research papers and found strong evidence that overconsumption of added sugar contributes to three major chronic illnesses: heart disease, type 2 diabetes and liver disease.
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