Sugar? Yes, please . . .

THE conventional wisdom is that sugar is bad for you. The reality research has concluded that sugar is bad for no part of your body except your teeth; and good oral hygiene can take care of that, says Dr Michael Gibney, professor of Nutrition in the Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity College Dublin.

Recent research has also proven that sugar doesn't cause bad behaviour in children - and while it may sound surprising sugar doesn't make you fat. Eating a diet relatively high in sugar actually makes you thin.

Studies based on the diets of Irish women have found that diets higher in sugar are not necessarily more dilute micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), making a nonsense of the belief that sugar leads to "empty calories". This research, conducted at Trinity, the Mater and the Dublin Institute of Technology, backs up a growing body of international research, including studies on the diets of schoolchildren been told all our lives that sugar makes you fat. Yet international research has found that people Who eat more (also known as carbohyrate) in the form of fruit, vegetables, breads, cereals, milk and added table sugars, tend to be thinner than people who have diets proportionately higher in fatty foods like chips, cakes, biscuits and chocolate, which we think of as being sweet but which are in fact high fat foods.

What this all boils down to is that thin people are more likely to put sugar on their fruit, and obese people are more likely to use cream. And in sugary foods like biscuits and cakes, it is the fat and not the sugar which makes you fat.

A major Scottish heart study which was conducted on over 5,000 men and 5,000 women found that, contrary to the old fashioned perception that sugars and starchy foods like bread and potatoes are fattening, people who eat a greater proportion of sugar to fat are more likely to be thin. People who eat more fat, are more likely to be fat.

In a nutshell, the person who has sugar in their tea, but doesn't eat a biscuit, is more likely to be thin than the person who doesn't put sugar in their tea, but eats a Dr Mary Flynn, lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who conducted the recent Irish research, is concerned that health advice which tells people to cut out fat and sugar at the same time may be impossible to follow.

Jack sprat, he ate no fat, his wife she ate no lean: the latest medical research bears out the nursery rhyme and it even has a name, the sugar/fat seesaw". Anorexics tend to have high sugar, low fat diets. Obese people tend to prefer fat over sugar and have high fat, low sugar diets.

Jack and his wife may be eating precisely the same number of calories, but Jack's body metabolises the sugar more efficiently than his wife metabolises the fat.

RESEARCH at the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre in Cambridge has found that people who naturally select a fatty diet, either because of an innate preference for fat or because they were brought up to like fatty foods, have much greater difficulty in losing weight and maintaining a steady body weight. Why should this be? The same researchers believe that it is because not all calories are used by the body equally. Alcohol is the most active fuel and because there is nowhere to store it in the body, it is oxidised as quickly as possible, thus suppressing the rate at which other fuels are oxidised. Carbohydrate and protein are next in line. But the body carefully regulates carbohydrate in order to control blood glucose, so the more you eat the more you burn and vice versa. Carbohydrate can be burned so fast that your body may actually waste 25 per cent of the energy.

There is, however, no method of regulating fat balance. When extra fat is consumed, fat oxidation hardly changes at all. The body simply stores what it does not need. In lean times, that can be an advantage since the tat can be used by the body to help prevent starvation. But in Western culture where fat and food are plentiful, fat keeps on piling on and piling on. The person who is two stone overweight at 30, may be five stone overweight at 50.

To avoid being fat we need to avoid eating fat. One way to do this is to increase the proportion of carbohydrate, including sugar, thereby letting "the sugar/fat seesaw" work for us; for example, by eating jam, honey or marmalade on your bread instead of butter.

Studies have also shown that 80 per cent of our calories and 95 to 98 per cent of micronutrients come from bread, milk, potatoes, cereals, fruit, vegetables, pasta, meat, confectionery, snack foods so on. The other 20 per cent comes from two kinds of foods: pure fat/no sugar, for example, spreadable fats, oils, etc; or from pure sugar/no fat, for example, table sugar, preserves, sugary soft drinks, fat free sweets like wine gums, etc. Which type of food predominates this 20 per cent in an individual's diet, will determine whether they have a high sugar/low fit diet or a high fat/low sugar diet.

As Dr Gibney explains, if you tell someone to stop eating sugar or if they replace that sugar with aspartame they will need to find the calories somewhere else. Inevitably, they will turn to fat and thus gain weight. It is for this reason that it is not only impossible, but unwise, to try to lose weight by cutting, out fat and sugar at the same time.

Being told to lose weight according to advice which is at best arguable is one thing - but should we be told to lose weight at all? Dr Flynn believes that it is irresponsible" for the government, or anyone else, to be telling the general public to lose weight without offering everyone who needs to lose weight one to one nutrition advice. If people knew how to lose weight they wouldn't be obese. Half of adults are not overweight and don't need the advice, the other half don't know how to attain it. And those who try to follow the advice, often misinterpret what they are told to their detriment," says Dr Flynn.

One problem is that the same advice is handed out to men and women. But women, who handle cholesterol differently, may not need to cut out milk, cheese and other dairy products. Tinkering with one's diet without professional help may actually be a greater health risk than being overweight - Research has shown that people whose weights rise and fall throughout life may have a lower life expectancy than people who maintain a steady weight.

"A woman who is two stone overweight and is active and eating a varied and balanced diet giving her all the nutrients that she needs, is going to be healthier than a woman who is thin, doesn't exercise, and is lacking in nutrients," says Dr Flynn.

BEING thin isn't necessarily healthy. There are women who are thin, but who take nothing but black coffee for breakfast, eat high fat biscuits or bars when they feel hungry later on, nibble at a high fat lunch and continue to snack on high fat foods throughout the day, all the while smoking to suppress their appetite. They are not tempted to eat fruit and vegetables, which are full of protective nutrients, because they think of these as "thin" foods and they are already thin. Such a woman will definitely suffer more health problems than the two stone overweight woman who is a non smoker, who exercises and has a good diet, says Dr Flynn.

Contrary to popular belief, "you can have a healthy lifestyle and be overweight," she insists.

Losing weight is extremely difficult and may even be impossible for some people. We don't have the answers yet but we can help overweight people be healthy. There is so much prejudice over being overweight and how people look, that they feel a failure when in fact there is an awful lot they can do to enjoy a healthy life."

The reasons why so many people are obese have yet to be understood, it may be a gene, it may be that obese people have a defect in the way they break down fat that makes them fat. There is also a theory that obesity is a maladaptation to a diet high in fat. But with exercise, Dr Flynn advises, you can overcome this fault.