Sugar intake key to obesity

It may not sound like a discovery to stop the presses, but scientists say the finding that eating more sugar is associated with obesity is an important one.

Surprise surprise – sugar intake is an important factor in obesity

Although this may seem obvious, previous studies - which relied on self-reporting of diet - had not shown that this was the case. But researchers from the Medical Research Council and University of Cambridge looking into the links between diet and cancer have developed a new way of objectively measuring sugar consumption.  

Professor Bingham, from the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, said: “These results show what many have suspected for some time: obese people are not able to tell us what they actually eat. If we are to tackle the scourge of obesity, both exercise and diet need to be taken into account.”

The team has developed a new urine test allowing them to work out how much sugar large numbers of people are eating for the first time. They measure the levels of urinary sucrose and fructose (two types of sugar) in spot urine samples.

Using data from hundreds of volunteers from the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC) study, the researchers have combined information from diet self-reporting with data from the urine and blood samples. They found that obese people underestimated the amount of sugar they consumed, while overestimating the amount of vitamin C they took in each day.

Professor Sheila Bingham, who led the study said: “The spot urine and blood tests established that obese people consume more sugar and less vitamin C than their thinner counterparts, but this did not show up when asked. Although obese people may have a less active lifestyle than people of normal weight, reports about what they ate were less accurate than those from their normal weight counterparts.”

The results are published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.