By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Americans eat lots of extra sugar, but this doesn’t mean life is sweet.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Quanhe Yang looked at national health survey data on how much sugar we get from sweetened beverages, desserts and the like, as opposed to sugar that’s naturally in foods like fresh fruit. Yang says 71 percent of adults got 10 percent or more of their calories from added sugar – and about 10 percent got a quarter of their calories that way – in 2005 to 2010.
Yang says that’s having an effect:
“Higher consumption of added sugar was associated with significantly increased risk of death from heart disease.”
The study says the percentage of added sugar in our diets has been rising for years.
The study was in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.