The science of sugar | TechKnow

super-sized and over-served scientists around the world make a desperate plea to stop an epidemic of obesity but now new research goes beyond fat to reveal a risk that could be even greater techno explores the science of sugar this is techno a show about innovations that can change lives we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and we're doing it in a unique way this is a show about science by scientists sugar it's the ingredient that brings smiles to the faces of children around the world health experts agree in moderation it's an essential part of nutrition but it's also becoming the number one culprit in a global health crisis according to the World Health Organization consumption of free sugars especially sugary drinks is behind a large increase in cases of obesity and diabetes in 2014 one in three adults worldwide were reported to be overweight by 2015 data showed 42 million children under the age of five were overweight or obese 48% of those children were living in Asia and Africa in Mexico the problem is even worse according to a study by Mexico's National Institute of Public Health seventy percent of all adults are overweight or obese Mexicans drink more soda than anywhere else on the planet 163 liters a year per person that's 40% more than the average American who consumes at 118 litres a year in 2014 Mexico imposed a 10% excise tax on those drinks the w-h-o is hoping more countries follow Mexico's example calling for a global sugar tax to reduce consumption of sugary drinks so far France Hungary Ireland and the UK have or are considering such attacks a growing body of research is behind these nutritional concerns in 2014 a Harvard University study added sugar intake and cardiovascular diseases looked at overall dietary sugar not just in drinks finding quote a significantly increased risk of CVD mortality research being conducted inside this laboratory in Davis California may be the first to show cause and effect the project under the US National Institute of Health puts subjects on a highly controlled sugary diet for ten weeks then measures the effects of that added sugar really okay let me set my timer here to the cutting edge research has being done at the Department of Molecular bioscience school at the University of California at Davis professor Kimber Stanhope invited techno inside her lab for the final phase of the trial Technos Marita Davison picks up the story behind the science of sugar it's early in the morning for this small group of college students they're not here for a class they are subjects in one of the most advanced sugar studies to date in just a few moments they will each undergo a magnetic resonance imaging exam doctors are most interested in what's been happening inside their bodies over the past 10 weeks hey guys good morning where you guys are up the bright and early for your scan so we're gonna get you guys dressed and into the scanning room who's who's up first this is day 70 it works the final day of the study and Benjamin Lam Angela Osborne and Yi lor are ready for their MRIs you ready dr. John McGann is one of the world's leading specialists in diagnostic radiology he is supervising the imaging part of the trial lor is a senior at UC Davis he's a science student who decided to volunteer for the summer studies if I remember things out loud buzzing banging noise like the other subjects more had a previous scan start of the trial doctors captured the before image of his abdominal region this morning they'll get the after it's a quite an experience something I've never done before and I think through this 10 week I really learn a lot about myself this technology is being used to chart what happens to internal organs when sugary drinks are consumed those results cannot be calculated by scales and are not visible to the naked eye that's where the MRI comes in doctor McGann showed us exactly what he's looking for in the scan the key item that we're looking at in this study is a structure here sort of a little darker or greater structure which is the liver what we're trying to do we do different MRI sequences and then later on we go ahead and we calculate out the amount of fat within the liver both pre and post study and why is liver fat important here liver fat is important because it's sort of helps and regulates a lot of different things within the body glucose metabolism it also regulates the amount of triglycerides that we have circulating within the body so it's actually sort of a clearing agent you know for a lot of different things it produces cholesterol so there's all sorts of different things the liver does and in order to really get a sense for this particular subject you'd have to look at the scans exactly and we look at that both at the liver so we calculate well how much fat is are in the liver before we started the study and then all the sudden we can go back again at the end of the study and we know exactly what our fat calculations are how much fat is there at the end of the study then we compare those two is it decreased is it the same or is it increased in many of our study patients this latest sugar research should help professor Stanhope and her team answer two important questions about sugary diets dr. Stanhope tell me about the sugar study that you have going what specifically are you looking to find out the first question is does sugar cause undermine our health that by that I mean increased risk factors for cardiovascular disease so such as what for the cholesterol that's the most obvious one does cardiovascular disease increase when you consume a high sugar diet even if you don't gain weight is the sugar have a specific effect than other foods such as bread oatmeal rice do not have now your your current study is focusing on subjects that are relatively young and healthy why if we prove in a relatively young healthy person that sugar increases risk factors we have shown that this is a problem [Music] Stanhope's team will follow a total of sixty subjects over the course of ten weeks the group techno was permitted to follow are all young mid-20s and apparently healthy they are excited to see the finish line and exhausted from their dietary regimen this study was hard food wise because being around your family there's always fried chicken and mashed potatoes and you have to stick with it three e's to be tempted to uh eat other food you're not supposed to and drink these you're not supposed to so obviously the hardest part is just be discipline it's all been quite a challenge for me um because I live with a cover of people who likes to cook and whenever I smell their cooking I just want to eat their food through the course of the study researchers strictly control the food consumed by each subject specifically the amount of sugar and calories in their diet the study is a single blind study meaning only the scientists know who is getting what one group of 15 subjects will be giving beverages sweetened by high fructose corn syrup the sweetener commonly found in soft drinks a second group will get beverages sweetened by the artificial sweetener aspartame two other groups will get the same drinks but they will be allowed to eat as much food as they'd like the idea is to see if high fructose corn syrup causes cardiovascular problems and if weight gain makes them worse high fructose corn syrup is the sweetener used in the majority of those so-called sugary drinks like soda it was invented in 1971 by Japanese scientist Yoshiyuki Takasaki the scientists from Japan took cornstarch and they added a enzyme or acid to turn it into a glucose syrup the scientists in Japan added another enzyme and that turned a bunch of the glucoses in the glucose syrup into fructose now you have a very sweet fructose syrup you can add that glucose syrup and that fructose syrup together and get any kind of combination of glucose to fructose that you want the beverage industry began using high fructose corn syrup in 1980 because it is 20 to 70 percent less expensive than sugar that's when consumption of soda began to soar according to the US Department of Agriculture from 1980 to 2000 consumption went up by 40 percent to 440 cans of soda a year per person in India sales increased 10% year since nineteen ninety-eight now up to 11 liters per person each year also in the 1980s supersizing began scientists say that's when obesity diabetes and heart disease rates went up so what does it take to pull off a study like this well for starters it takes food and a lot of it now this package contains four pre-prepared meals how it gets divided is determined by the research team but we're talking about breakfast lunch and dinner all prepared for each and every one of the subjects that equals 210 individual meals per person over a 10-week period it's a garlic chicken pasta and their sugar beverage that's dinner dinner it is the final night of the study this is what dinner looks like in a science lab everything from the main course to the sugary beverage has been measured and recorded the amount of sweetener a subject is given comes in the drink the food supplies the daily intake of calories ye'll or we'll get to enjoy his meal then like the other subjects he will be tested with a device that measures how fast his body burns fat on this diet no exercise is allowed that would burn calories and ski results okay it's simply measuring oxygen consumption and co2 production through your breath yes so all we're doing is putting face masks on our subjects with the long hose that leads from their mouth to the analyzer and so it's a co2 carbon dioxide and oxygen analyzer so it's just taking the air that the subject is exhaling and telling us okay this much oxygen this much co2 and from there then we do production and consumption values from that fat burning it's technically called fat oxidation can be calculated this test will determine if fat burning in the liver is impaired when the liver is overloaded with the sugar fructose there will be one more test tonight each of the subjects blood will be drawn two vials worth and taken to the lab for a sophisticated round of blood analysis okay so I'm just removing this bottom layer which contains our lipid fraction dr. Candace price is in charge of the lipids lab lipids are fats found in the blood her work is key to the study we're here in the lab your job is to look at the blood of the study subjects and determine whether or not there's fat present in that blood right right now show me how some of this process the work requires a steady hand blood samples are reduced to components and separated into the different fats scientists are focusing on including cholesterol each tube is each tube is one subject from one time point there are thousands of blood samples that require meticulous care and so for example this is draw 25 meaning at one of the time points draw 25 blood was taken and this will represent that particular time line for one person for one person each person in the study will have blood drawn 226 times over the course of the study once the samples are prepared dr. price will use what's called a capillary tube to spread the liquid across the blast plate I heard my buddy's your lab right and you repeat that across the four lanes here right for the final step in the process some special effects are needed okay so someone can hit the light for me okay and this is a UV light which will allow us to see the fluorescent dye and I've already sprayed them with the fluorescent dye which is what will allow us to see that okay doubt the dial we can't see anything so here this bottom fraction is the free cholesterol and as we move up the plate we see the triglyceride fraction here and at the very top of the plate which doesn't seem to be quite as abundant in this particular set of samples but here we see the cholesterol ester so those are three lipids that are really important for arthrosclerosis which is a exactly a risk factor yes the plates work much like a chart that allows researchers to see what kind of cardiovascular risk may be coming from the sweetener by the time the study is completed they'll have a strong database to work from but the effects of the sweetener can be detected almost immediately so how quickly do you see the results in these young people well we know for sure from our previous study our second NIH funded study it was only two weeks long our average subject their age was twenty five two weeks I am saw an increase in what the risk factors for cardiovascular disease this study we called our dose response study because we actually fed four levels of high fructose corn syrup zero ten percent seventeen and a half percent and 25 percent of energy requirement and we saw a dose perfect stair-step response for cholesterol for triglyceride for uric acid so as you increased the intake your risk factors and grind in enlasa and what was very important was that even the ten percent group showed increases significant increases compared to their baseline level that was only equivalent to handing our research subjects one and a half cans of soda a day so basically a half a can at breakfast a half a can at lunch a half a can of dinner was the equivalent again a surprise I would not have expected to see significant increases in risk factors with only a half a can per meal but in two weeks I would have believed it could have happened in six months but I didn't know we would see it's so quickly the study group that drank an artificial sweetener aspartame instead of high fructose corn syrup experienced none of those risk factors what causes the increase in cardiovascular risk back in radiology dr. Magan explained how high fructose corn syrup affects the body so the anatomy that we're really looking at is this structure here which is the liver okay and what we do we take specialized MRI cuts through there and we're able to calibrate the exact amount of fat within the liver which is important to the study and what we see here is two different sets of fat and we call this the subcutaneous fat this would be this sort of fat that somebody could pinch on somebody if you wanted to but then inside the muscle here we have the visceral fat the visceral fat is the white structure we see here so we're trying to look at the difference between the visceral fat and the subcutaneous fat there are differences in the health risks of deposition subcutaneous versus visceral yeah so we found that in these study patients are fructose diets they end up Ashley forming more visceral fat than subcutaneous fat so that's important to the study and then there's other metabolic effects that we found out about that we think of VAD as fat but Ashley in this study that isn't all the same so your study was the first then to show that what you eat an impact where fat is deposited on the body whether it's like the fat here versus fat elsewhere is that right and to the best of my knowledge yes we were the first and it's important because we know for sure there's a big difference between the effects of where our fat is stored and it's our help well why why is fructose so much worse that is a such an important question the enzyme for fructose is not in communication with the liver in fact it's always turned on it's always working hard there for pretty much every single fructose molecule that goes through the liver via the portal vein it's pulled into the liver and gets sent down the metabolic pathway the liver does the best it can using up all this fructose when there's still too much substrate around the liver then turns it into fat in our ancestors it was easy there wasn't much fructose around no problem but now we have great big 32m sodas that overloads the liver with fructose so now what happens with this fad well the first thing extra fat and the liver does is cause the liver to send it out into the blood it sends it out into with little packages that'll include lots and lots of triglyceride but also includes cholesterol immediately blood triglycerides go up but eventually the cholesterol levels go up too high fructose corn syrup appears to be behind these problems but dr. Stanhope says sucrose any sugar made from sugar cane or sugar beet may also increase liver fat she suggests limiting intake of all types of sugars and sweeteners brown white or artificial the best advice is to stick with mother nature get your sweet fix from fresh fruit the only way you can over eat sugar in nature is to eat a lot of honey that is the one naturally occurring food that's super high in sugar mmm everything else pretty low levels even sugar cane where we get our commercial sucrose is only ten percent sucrose so if you were to rely on a sugar cane to get all your sugar you'd be nine for a long time results from the study will take time to be completed and calculated but for the students who've completed this leg of the research there are more immediate concerns I'm going straight home and a ginormous Peaks are delivered to me fresh and hot out of the oven I can't wait oh I think Radeon this sister started I was gonna start with the whole pizza large pizza a hamburger and then some sushi and then just whatever I could get my ana I'm really proud of I can finish it all the way I've been waiting for this for two months I've been waiting for this pizza when you think about that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death so we're not talking about this real obscure death and it doubles and so instead you know 10 people now there's 20 people dying no it's thousands and thousands and thousands of extra deaths that can be attributed to that high level of sugar huge cardiovascular disease that's our number one killer already we have obese children now we have children with fatty liver we have children with diabetes that never used to happen but children didn't used to have access to sugar breakfast lunch and dinner and s snacks extra added sugar isn't just found in sweetened drinks it's in much of the processed food we consume the World Health Organization recommends added sugars make up less than 10% of daily diets but modern diets are often filled with processed foods containing high levels of added sugar the World Health Organization's call to curb these products has gone out the question is who will listen the techno I'm dr. Shanice O'Meara see you next time you

Channel: Al Jazeera English

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Id: XXF0DAfwdtk

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017