By Marie Ellis, MedicalNewsToday.com for SouthFloridaReporter.com, Dec. 4, 2015 – Now that December is upon us and we are sliding comfortably into the holiday season, sweets tend to become more present in our diet. But a new paper published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology looks at the global diet and concludes that, overall, it is getting sweeter, posing health risks.
The paper is led by Prof. Barry M. Popkin, from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Dr. Corinna Hawkes, from City University London in the UK.
Previously, Medical News Today investigated how much sugar is in our food and drink, noting that added sugar intake can cause obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
The authors from this latest paper add stroke to that list. They say that 68% of packaged foods and drinks in the US contain caloric sweeteners, 74% contain both caloric and low-calorie sweeteners, and only 5% are made with just low-calorie sweeteners.
Although the general population has increasingly become aware of the negative health outcomes linked to added sugars, Prof. Popkin notes that added sugar can come from hundreds of “different versions” of sugar.
He and Dr. Hawkes analyzed global nutritional datasets and discovered that patterns of sales of sugar-sweetened drinks are rising in terms of calories sold per person per day, as well as volume sold per person per day.
They say their results suggest that without a public health intervention, the rest of the world will move toward consuming similar amounts of added sugars in their packaged foods and drinks as is currently the case in the US.
