Sugar: How Bad Is It Really?

Sugar is getting tons of hate these days, from TikTok influencers telling us to cut added sugar out of our diets to RFK Jr. declaring that sugar is “poison.” But is sugar really that bad? And are certain kinds worse — or better — than others? We’ll find out by diving into the wild world of cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, honey and maple syrup. We talk to nutritionist Professor Jim Mann and research nutritional biologist Dr. Kimber Stanhope. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsSugar In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Sugar: The villain in our diets (02:22) The good side of sugar (04:51) How sugar is bad for us (12:19) Is high fructose corn syrup that bad? (23:44) Agave Syrup, Maple Syrup, and Honey (30:15) How much sugar is too much? This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Our executive producer is Wendy Zukerman. Fact checking by Sam Lemonick. Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including Professor Barry Popkin, Dr. John White, Dr. Nick Fuller, Professor Paul Breslin, Dr. Richard Johnson, and Dr. Vasanti Malik. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Meryl Horn, filling in for Wendy Zukerman, and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  This is the show that pits facts against fructose.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Today, we're looking at sugar. Is it really that bad? Sugar has always been the villain in our diets, that thing calling out to us that we know we should resist. And recently, it feels like everyone's piling on to tell us, "Don't do it."

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Sugar is one of the deadliest things you can eat.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Our bodies are not able to adapt to the amount of sugar that we're consuming, and it's making us so sick.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Every time you eat sugar, every time, it does permanent damage to your body.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  Sugar is poison, and Americans need to know that. It is poisoning us.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  That last voice you heard was RFK Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary in the US. And he's recommended that Americans have zero added sugar in their food. Zero! And things get even more heated when the topic of high-fructose corn syrup comes up. We hear that this one is way worse for us than other types of sugar.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  High-fructose corn syrup. Where do I [bleep] start?

• 1:12Speaker 05

  Literally cheap garbage with zero nutritional value.

• 1:17Speaker 06

  Ah, high-fructose corn syrup actually has a similar effect to obesity as fuel to a fire.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  But then, at the same time, influencers are telling us that there's a loophole here. Just eat natural sugars. Those are way healthier.

• 1:32Speaker 07

  So the best alternative is agave. I love good honey. I love maple syrup. The thicker, the darker color, the better. Raw honey has been shown to have a ton of health benefits in many studies.

• 1:44Speaker 08

  Real maple syrup and why you should be chugging it.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  We're gonna be chugging the research on all of this. We'll find out whether sugar really does such terrible things to our bodies, and if we really can go to town on stuff like honey and maple syrup. Because when it comes to sugar...

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Where do I [bleep] start?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Duh, with the science.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Science vs. Sugar is coming up after the break.

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• 4:52Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today on the show, we're looking at sugar. How bad is it really? This is Meryl Horn, and with me is senior producer Rose Rimler.

• 5:00Speaker 11

  Hi, Meryl.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Hey, Rose. So you're often the one that covers nutrition topics on our show. Are you a little mad at me for getting in your lane?

• 5:11Speaker 11

  No, I don't want to do this.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  I know.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Why don't you want to find out about the science of sugar? Do you have a sweet tooth?

• 5:18Speaker 11

  I do. I, let's see. Every morning, pretty much, most mornings, I put honey on my yogurt. That's what I have for breakfast. And also throughout the day, I eat a lot of fruit. Like, I eat fruit at breakfast. I usually have some fruit after lunch.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Well, I have some good news for you right off the bat.

• 5:38Speaker 11

  Can I keep my fruit?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Yes, fruit is totally OK.

• 5:41Speaker 11

  Yay!

• 5:42Speaker 00

  That's one thing that some of the sugar haters get wrong, is that sugar overall is not poison, because we know fruit does have a lot of sugar in it, but it's also one of the healthiest foods you can eat.

• 5:52Speaker 11

  Is that because of the fiber and the nutrients?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, the fiber especially. There's a lot of good stuff in fruit, which makes it healthy to eat overall. So one huge review found that eating more fruit is linked to a lower risk of getting heart disease, some types of cancer, types of diabetes. So that's one reason why sugar is not just terrible for us overall. And another one is that we know that whenever we eat stuff with sugar in it, our bodies do use some of that for energy, right? It's this quick source of energy. And that's why you see marathon runners having that sugar goo stuff. It can be converted really quickly into energy, unlike other things like fat.

• 6:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, if I was cycling the Tour de France, I would be like, they could have all the syrup I wanted, I assume.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So yeah, there is, there is some good here. But for the, the sugar haters, are they not really coming for your like fruit? They're more worried about the sugar that gets added to stuff like soda, cakes, your ice cream.

• 6:56Speaker 11

  Meryl, I think you're underestimating the kookiness of people on the internet. They, they come for the fruit too.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Well, they're wrong. Don't let them do that.

• 7:06Speaker 11

  But, but, but this concept of like added sugars being the thing you have to worry about, that's familiar to me. And I think that I've seen that for sure online. The whole like no added sugars is, yeah, that's definitely like a thing that's out there.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  That's the big concern, right? So that's what we're really gonna dive into. Um, let's look at whether it does make us gain weight first. Since there's this idea that when we eat sugar, it really like packs on the pounds compared to eating other stuff.

• 7:31Speaker 11

  Oh, like sugar is like gram for gram, like more fattening than other nutrients.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And so one of the first studies that shed light on this was done by Professor Jim Mann at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He did it like 50 years ago, actually, back in the seventies.

• 7:48Speaker 12

  But funnily enough, I can remember that study very clearly.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 7:51Speaker 12

  Because of the way it turned out.

• 7:53Speaker 11

  Ooh.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, it really stuck with him. Um, like a tootsie roll that you left in your pocket too long. Because something totally unexpected ended up happening. So here's how it went down.

• 8:06Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  The goal of the study was to see what happens when people replace sugar for other types of calories, like starch, the, the stuff that's in bread. So they could see like, is sugar particularly unhealthy for us? So here's what they told the volunteers.

• 8:23Speaker 12

  We said, look, we want you to replace, give up X amount of sugar and replace that with starch to see the effect.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  So ditch the dessert and have some pasta instead?

• 8:33Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, we, and we had a dietitian, excellent dietitian who worked with these people on a regular basis.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 8:41Speaker 12

  And highly motivated people. And they said, yeah, we'll do everything you say.

• 8:46Speaker 11

  So my dream of having extra mashed potatoes at the end of the meal.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It doesn't sound that bad, actually, right? Like, instead of having sugar, you're supposed to basically have everything else. You can have starch, you can have protein. And they wanted them to do it pretty precisely, like substitute out one for one. Like, the calories that you're gonna have for sugar, have the pasta instead.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  But what ended up happening is that instead of doing that one-for-one replacement, they ended up eating less overall. So like, so yeah, instead of having like the exact amount of calories that they're gonna have in sugar, in pasta, they ended up having less pasta.

• 9:30Speaker 11

  They just couldn't get that much starch down their gullets.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And so they ended up losing weight. And so Jim couldn't do the thing he was trying to do, which was see like which is worse, calorie for calorie. Here's what they'd need to do instead.

• 9:46Speaker 12

  You've actually got to do it in a controlled environment, where you actually give people all their meals and you virtually lock them up to make sure that they are actually not going to change their calorie intake.

• 9:58Speaker 11

  Right, one of these studies, nutrition studies, where you get people to live in the lab and you give them all their meals.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically.

• 10:04Speaker 11

  My favorite.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  So yeah, he had to wait for these more careful studies to come along. And they have.

• 10:10Speaker 11

  Oh, so wait, so other researchers have done that since Jim?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 10:15Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Other researchers will do what he was trying to do kind of properly. So like, make sure people aren't actually changing the total amount of calories that they're eating to find out if sugar itself causes more weight gain than other stuff.

• 10:28Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  So several years ago, Jim and his team collected a bunch of these studies for a meta-analysis. They ended up looking at 12 of them. So now we can answer the question, right? So are you ready?

• 10:40Speaker 11

  Uh, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  So what they found is that sugar does not have some sort of magical power to make you gain weight. So if you have like, people eat the same amount of calories, some of them are getting sugar, some of them are getting other stuff. They generally do not gain more weight with the sugar.

• 10:58Speaker 11

  Hmm hmm.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, to me, I was kind of surprised because it does feel like sugar is, is bad for our weight. And it, it is true that people who have more sugar generally will gain more weight. And that's because in the real world, when people have a lot of sugar, they aren't like compensating by eating less of other stuff. Maybe because sugar doesn't make us feel as full as other foods do. I mean, you could see this in gym study and it just makes intuitive sense. Like, if you imagine having a bottle of Coke with your lunch, you're not going to be like, ugh, like, I guess I won't be that hungry for a big lunch anymore because I'm having all this soda. Like, no, you're going to have just as big of a lunch as you would have otherwise, if you're having water with your lunch.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And so like, even though it doesn't seem like sugar is magically good at making us gain weight, people do tend to just eat more overall when they have a lot of sugar in their diet.

• 11:57Speaker 11

  It's magically good at being delicious and making you want to eat more and more of it.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that too. And so we end up gaining weight and that could increase your risk for some types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. And there's another thing that sugar can do that's not so good for us. It's bad for our cardiovascular system. And that actually is true even if you're not eating more calories overall. Sugar seems to be bad for our blood, basically. It's not a huge effect, but it's still like a tick against sugar.

• 12:32Speaker 11

  And why is it bad for our cardiovascular system?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  It's because of the way that sugar can get converted into fat. That ends up being bad for us. We'll actually come back to that a little later. But first, to complete our roundup of why sugar is bad. So number one, if we eat more sugar, we tend to gain weight. Number two, it's bad for our cardiovascular system. And number three, can you guess, Rose, the other main reason why sugar is bad for us?

• 13:03Speaker 11

  Uh, it's bad for your teeth.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Sugar gives us cavities. We've known this since the 1950s when there was a really terrible experiment Jim told me about. It was done in Sweden.

• 13:15Speaker 12

  Most unethical by modern standards, where they gave people who lived in mental institutions, they gave them, I think they're sort of toffee kind of things to chew and other sweet things. Showed that those people in the mental institution who were given these disgusting sugary sweet things, they got terrible dental cavities.

• 13:35Speaker 11

  Uh, yes, you can't just give people diseases. Uh, but, but yes, okay. So sugar really does lead to cavities. It's not an old, an old myth.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  No, yeah. Now we know it's because sugar feeds bacteria that are in our mouths and that creates cavities or at least little holes in our teeth. Okay, so here's where we are. Sugar is not looking great. You know, so far lots of the studies we've been talking about are just using basic table sugar. But there are these claims that some sugars are better for you than that or worse for you than that. And so this opens up a whole can of gummy worms. Um, that's what we'll look into next.

• 14:14Speaker 11

  Oh, did you bring gummy worms?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Check your mail.

• 14:22Speaker 11

  Look under your seat.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  So next up, we're going to tell you whether high fructose corn syrup really is the big bad wolf, whether honey or maple syrup is the way to go. And the answers might surprise you. That's after the break.

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• 17:13Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today is Sugar Day at Science Versus. With me is Rose Rimler. Hi, Meryl. Next up, we're going to talk about the favorite punching bag in the sugar world: high-fructose corn syrup, and the idea that it is way worse for us than other sugar. So, this was in the news recently when President Trump praised Coca-Cola for using cane sugar. In some of their sodas in the US. And the company confirmed that they're gonna do that soon. So of course, all the talking heads weighed in on high fructose corn syrup.

• 17:44Speaker 16

  A lot of folks, I personally agree with this, find high fructose corn syrup kinda creepy.

• 17:49Speaker 17

  I like cane sugar better because it's more natural. High fructose corn syrup, it comes from corn, but I don't think it remembers what a corn looks like.

• 17:57Speaker 11

  This is kind of an old one, too, right? I mean, this was big in the 90s. I remember this being an issue when I was a little kid.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that high fructose corn syrup is like particularly bad for us.

• 18:09Speaker 11

  Yeah, maybe it's a California thing, I don't know. Did it just reach the East Coast? Because California, we've been talking about this since like 1975.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  So do you get bad vibes from high fructose corn syrup?

• 18:21Speaker 11

  Everybody in California knows that the vibes are really bad of high fructose corn syrup.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  But to find out if it's more than just bad vibes, I called up Dr. Kimber Stanhope. She's a research nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis. And her specialty is sugar. So she's been very popular this past news cycle. Have you been getting flooded by requests from reporters to talk about this right now? Definitely a lot. You're late.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  So there actually is a legit reason why high fructose corn syrup might be bad for us. It's because of the fructose. That's one of the basic sugar building blocks, along with glucose. And at one point, like in the 80s, scientists were thinking that fructose might actually be better for us than other stuff like glucose. Because fructose doesn't raise our blood sugar like glucose does.

• 19:15Speaker 11

  Oh, okay.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  So maybe good, especially if you have diabetes. But those glory days of fructose didn't last long. Because pretty quickly, studies started coming out, finding that fructose has its own set of problems. So one big one is that it often gets turned into something called triglycerides. And triglycerides are what fat is made of. So Kimber told me, imagine you got someone who was willing to donate some of their body to science. And then... You took a big chunk of their fat, most of that fat is triglyceride. Oh, so it's like the currency of fat in the body. Right, exactly. Does it look like anything, like under a microscope?

• 19:59Speaker 18

  Uh, pure oil. Um, so most of, okay, your oils at home that you cook with, that is nearly pure triglyceride.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Oh. So like in the blood, it, it forms these droplets. And over time, though, these droplets can start like stacking up in our blood vessels.

• 20:25Speaker 18

  They almost sort of round out the edges and look like a layer, you know, bricks, but free-form bricks.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  You like squishy bricks?

• 20:34Speaker 18

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  And that layer of squishy bricks narrows the blood vessels and that can raise your blood pressure and up the chance of you getting a stroke.

• 20:43Speaker 11

  Okay, so the, the reason fructose is a bad guy is that it gets turned into triglycerides. Triglycerides are these, cause these like fat bricks that can cause all these heart disease issues. That makes sense, but wouldn't that happen with any type of sugar that you eat? Like, why are we blaming fructose here? Like, would that also happen with glucose or something like that?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  It can't. So it can happen with glucose under like certain conditions, but fructose basically gets converted into triglycerides more easily. It's sort of fructose's evil superpower. And so now some scientists think that fructose is worse for us than glucose.

• 21:21Speaker 11

  But earlier you said that fruit is okay? And like, doesn't fruit have a lot of fructose in it?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  It does, but the fructose in fruit is okay because it's bound up inside the fruit. It's like alongside all that fiber we talked about.

• 21:35Speaker 11

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  But with something like high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose there is just kind of free-floating. And so there's this concern that that's particularly bad for our bodies. But is it? So Kimber wanted to know like, what actually happens when you give people this stuff and just compare it to table sugar? So let me tell you about one of the clinical trials she's done. She got 52 adults and they actually had them move into the wing of a hospital for three days in the beginning of the experiment, where they could run a battery of tests on them.

• 22:10Speaker 18

  We collect blood all day long. We start at 8 o'clock in the morning and we go all the way to 8 o'clock the next day, at least every hour.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Wow. And this was to check for stuff like triglycerides and cholesterol. They also got liver MRIs done since some of those triglycerides can build up in the liver too, which is not good. And they basically wanted to get a really good baseline of where people are at before they started giving them any sugar. Like, everyone had to eat the same food while they were there, like salad.

• 22:45Speaker 18

  The complaints I got about that salad went on and on. I got so tired of people saying, "Oh, I can't eat all this salad." Like, this much? I mean, it was not an enormous salad.

• 23:05Speaker 11

  Was it like iceberg lettuce and really bad bland tomatoes, though?

• 23:09Speaker 00

  She defended it. She was like, "No, this was like a tossed salad, so it had tomatoes, cucumbers."

• 23:15Speaker 11

  Oh.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  But people did seem to like the next part of the experiment more. They get to go home now and they get to drink lots and lots of Kool-Aid. Now, what was the Kool-Aid flavor? Was it the fruit punch one?

• 23:28Speaker 18

  They got to choose. I actually many times stunned the cashiers coming through with easily 1,000 packets of Kool-Aid.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 23:41Speaker 18

  Oh, my gosh, you really like Kool-Aid, don't you? But I usually waited for it to be on sale, but...

• 23:50Speaker 00

  And the Kool-Aid they got was sweetened with either table sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

• 23:55Speaker 11

  So that was the big difference between the two groups once they went home, was they either drank a lot of table sugar sugary Kool-Aid or high fructose corn syrup Kool-Aid?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 24:06Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, they had to have it three times a day and they didn't know which one they were getting. So now, after 12 days of that, they go back to the hospital again so they can redo all those tests. And now we can finally see how bad the high fructose corn syrup is. So I asked Kimber, was high fructose corn syrup any worse for people than normal table sugar?

• 24:28Speaker 18

  No.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 24:29Speaker 18

  There was never a difference, a significant difference between the two.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Wow. So what would they have seen if there was a difference? So they're looking for at the triglycerides and like fat in the liver and, you know, you'd expect that if high fructose corn syrup was worse, you would see more triglycerides, more liver fat in that group. But instead, you know, they saw a rise in both groups, but there wasn't a difference between the two. So yeah, I asked if Kimber was surprised.

• 24:57Speaker 18

  Um, no. I wasn't surprised at all. The results were actually pretty much exactly what I would have expected.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  She didn't drink the Kool-Aid about high fructose corn syrup? No. Are you? Because I'm surprised. I don't know, I guess, I mean, I guess I'm, I mean, I am and I'm not. Like, I know that so much of what we are told about nutrition is BS. So like, I'm not surprised this thing is BS. But I am like, I do have this in, like this internal feeling that like, high fructose corn syrup has got to be pretty bad, right? And that's interesting that at least on these measures, it was the same as just plain old sugar. Yeah, yeah, I was surprised too. I mean, but the reason, once you find out like what high fructose corn syrup is, it makes a lot of sense.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Um, so I've been kind of holding back on you for dramatic effects, but, Okay. Basically, high fructose corn syrup does not actually have that much more fructose in it than normal table sugar. Really? Yeah. Despite the name? But it's just the name, yeah. So basically, both are made out of two things, fructose and glucose. High fructose corn syrup is often 55% fructose. Do you want to guess how much fructose is in table sugar? Well, you told me it's, it's not that much of a difference. So 50%? Yep. It's half and half. So yeah, they're pretty much on par.

• 26:28Speaker 11

  So it's slightly high fructose corn syrup.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's in this case, it was slightly higher. Um, and so that's why Kimber also wasn't surprised.

• 26:37Speaker 18

  That difference is not enough to show up at least in a two week study.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  So it's actually, it's not like it doesn't deserve its stigma, high fructose corn syrup.

• 26:47Speaker 18

  No.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Hmm. And others that I used to have backed this up.

• 26:50Speaker 11

  It's funny, you'd think that if this is the case, the, the people behind high fructose corn syrup would have rebranded ages ago.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 11

  Because if they could just be like, if we just call it something else, then they wouldn't have had this, this whole mess, maybe.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  They actually tried to, yeah, for, there was like a campaign where they tried to change it to just corn sugar.

• 27:10Speaker 11

  Oh, okay.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  But the problem is when they first invented it, you know, they called it high fructose corn syrup because the thing that came around first was just corn syrup and that didn't have any fructose in it at all.

• 27:24Speaker 11

  So that was low fructose syrup?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  That was no fructose. Um, and then they started adding fructose to it to make it sweeter. And that's why they called it high fructose corn syrup, it's higher than nothing. So it's sort of a misnomer.

• 27:38Speaker 11

  Hmm.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  And sometimes it actually has less fructose in it than table sugar. So.

• 27:42Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  But I bet, yeah, I think they're probably regretting their decision pretty strongly now to call it that. Cause now it's kind of stuck.

• 27:50Speaker 11

  So maybe this is ignorant, but table sugar, that's from beets, cane, sugar cane, or?

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Both, yeah. It's, those are the two main sources are either beets or sugar cane. And that in both cases, it's half and half. So 50% fructose, 50% glucose. Which by the way, means that there's like no real reason to think that cane sugar is like especially healthy for us. When it's basically the same thing as high fructose corn syrup, when you look at what makes it up. But so does this change your mind after all your, you know, brainwashing, growing up in California about how terrible high fructose corn syrup was? Are you gonna go put some of that now on your yogurt?

• 28:31Speaker 11

  Hmm. Corns, you know, it's very hard to undo brainwashing, but I do genuinely now my question is like, maybe high fructose corn syrup isn't worse than other types of sources of sugar, but.

• 28:47Speaker 11

  Does that mean they're all bad? Because like, I think some, you know, hippies like me, we get a little bit of a squeeze of pleasure when we use agave or honey or something instead of like high fructose corn syrup. So does that mean like the natural sugars are, they're just as bad as high fructose corn syrup?

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Well, that's what we're going to look at next. So let's start with agave syrup. You know, you'll see this in fancy coffee shops. You can get it in your smoothie. But I couldn't find that much research backing up this idea that agave deserves this like wellness glow up. So there's barely any research on it in humans at all. And when you look at what's in it, it's mostly fructose. Around 85% of agave syrup is fructose.

• 29:34Speaker 11

  Oh, huh, okay. That's, agave is more fructose than high fructose corn syrup?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 11

  Interesting.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, some scientists argue that fructose might not be that much worse than glucose. But a lot of studies say that it is. So like, I don't see any good reasons to like go for agave specifically.

• 29:53Speaker 11

  Oh, okay, all right. Unless it's been turned into a tequila.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  All right, so let's look at maple syrup next. There's some buzz online about how that one's healthier. And there was a particular trial that comes up a lot. And at first glance, it looks like maple syrup is healthier. Like, you know, when you kind of skim the paper, it looked like they saw a difference between people who were eating maple syrup and people who were having table sugar. Like, the maple syrup group had less fat around their bellies. So I asked Kimber about that study. I can't tell you how unimpressed I was by that study. Huh. So the reason she's unimpressed is that these researchers did dozens and dozens of tests looking for differences

• 30:46Speaker 00

  in like health markers between the group which got the maple syrup and the group that got the normal table sugar. And out of those dozens of tests, only three showed a difference. And they turned that into, wow, maple syrup is healthier.

• 31:04Speaker 18

  But any statistician will tell you, no, wait, that's within the odds of random chance.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Right. You do that many of many study and some of them will happen to turn up positive, especially when their p-values are like 0.047 for one of them.

• 31:23Speaker 18

  Good for you. Oh, my God, Meryl, I'm so impressed you said that. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, exactly.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, OK, that's classic. If you run a lot of tests, some of them could come up showing a positive effect, even if it's just by chance. Yeah, and like they could have done some, some work to like correct for the fact that they were running so many tests, but you don't see them do that in the paper. And on top of that, the study was also funded by a maple syrup group in Canada. Oh, I was gonna say, yeah. I was gonna say, is like the, the Canadian mafia was like behind this? The Canadian maple syrup mafia? I mean, it's basically a group of maple syrup producers. I did reach out to the authors of the study about these criticisms and didn't hear back. But yeah, this was the most impressive study I could find on maple syrup.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  So I think it's delicious, but I don't think we have good evidence that it's healthier. And then you mentioned honey? Yes, my go-to sugar. OK, well. Uh-oh. Don't ruin my breakfast. No, it does seem more promising to me, actually. So like there is a big review that came out recently that looked at all the trials that have been done on honey. And overall, it looked like there was a benefit with the honey. Like multiple studies saying that people's cholesterol looked better than in the sugar, like the table sugar group, for example. And some of the studies found a benefit specifically when they were giving people so-called raw honey or like unprocessed honey. Oh, OK.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  But when I talked to Kimber about this, she was like more positive than she was with the maple syrup, but she did see some flaws in those studies, too. Like, most of them didn't blind the people in them. So they, they knew that they're getting honey. And she thought, you know, maybe if people knew that they were getting this like supposedly healthy, you know, raw honey, then they'll do other healthy stuff, too. And the review pointed this out, too, saying that at least a dozen of the studies in their review had this issue. So overall, I asked Kimber.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Bottom line, if you're trying to decide what to put on your yogurt, should you pick honey over maple syrup or brown sugar?

• 33:39Speaker 18

  Possibly, yeah, but I would forego it completely.

• 33:46Speaker 18

  And learn to put fruit on.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  But is it, do you think, because there's a little bit of evidence that maybe it's better for certain things? It's worth substituting it in?

• 33:58Speaker 18

  It is questionable enough that if I was forced to make the decision between natural unprocessed honey versus sucrose or any other form of sugar, I would pick the honey.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  If someone had a gun to your head and was like, Kimber, you must add one of these things to your yogurt.

• 34:20Speaker 18

  Exactly. That's how you'll have to phrase it.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  So, Rose, how does that make you feel about your honey?

• 34:31Speaker 11

  Well, here's what I would say. By adding some honey to this slop that I make, the honey makes me more likely to eat these other things that definitely have a lot of nutritive value. Like, I have the plain Greek yogurt. Lots of protein in there. And I do put fruit on it, Kimber.

• 34:53Speaker 11

  It's still kind of sour, depending on the fruit. And I'll put some nuts or nut butter. I feel like she'd give me a gold star for all of that. And if adding a tablespoon of honey on that gets me to chow down on that every morning, I feel like it's probably OK. But maybe not, I don't know.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that brings us to this bigger question of like, overall, should we be feeling guilty about having some sugar in our lives? Kimber's sort of a stickler when she says, you know, you really shouldn't have any added sugar. But other scientists are like, oh, no, a little is OK. So, let's look at what the World Health Organization says. They focus on something called free sugar. This is basically the sugar that's added to stuff. And so, they recommend that you don't have more than 10% of your total calories be made up of this sugar. And research backs this up. Like, one big study I found looked at how much sugar people ate and then their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  And you can see the risk of death starting to creep up around this 10% mark.

• 35:56Speaker 11

  Oh, risk of death, OK. So, 10% of your... Daily calories is not like that intuitive. Can you give me some, uh, something I can really sneak my teeth into?

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for someone who has 2,000 calories a day, that 10% comes out to 50 grams of sugar. So, for example, a can of Coke has about 40 grams of sugar in it. So that would be most of your sugar budget, right there, if you had a can of Coke. Or you could have, like, three chocolate croissants. That's roughly 50 grams of sugar.

• 36:30Speaker 11

  Well, because you only put that little nugget of chocolate in there.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not actually that much, but that still made me feel better.

• 36:38Speaker 11

  You're saying three croissants. Some other issues there.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  So to me, I was like, oh, that's not too bad. So I talked about this with Jim Mann, since he actually helps the World Health Organization come up with that 10% recommendation. Does that mean I can have, like, a cupcake? Like, what does that mean?

• 36:58Speaker 12

  Can you have a cupcake, Shaw? You can have a cupcake, but if you have a cupcake, then don't have something else. I mean, I had, this morning, with my coffee, I had some cheesecake. Because there's a certain bakery in this time that makes very good cheesecake. And my daughter happened to produce some cheesecake from this bakery. And I absolutely enjoyed it. But I would, I mean, I've made a mental note before we had this conversation, without even thinking, well, that's my dose for the day. And I enjoyed it, and it was really good, and it enhanced my well-being.

• 37:39Speaker 12

  But I certainly would not have a dessert tonight.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  But you didn't feel guilty about having that slice?

• 37:46Speaker 12

  No, I didn't feel, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

• 37:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's reasonable. I mean, full disclosure, I had a piece of cake before jumping on this call. I made a cake over the weekend.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Before I told you the science of how bad sugar is?

• 38:01Speaker 11

  Gobbled it down. Then I had honey on my yogurt. So I'm actually probably over budget today. But I'm definitely not going to have any more sweets the rest of the day. So I like his approach, yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thanks, Rose.

• 38:11Speaker 11

  Thanks, Mel.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  So we have 60 citations in this episode. If you want to look at any of those, read more about sugar science, then check out our transcripts. The link is in the show notes. And the last citation is a special treat, a link to an episode of Science Versus that was made 10 years ago. That was also on sugar. This episode was produced by me, Merrill Horn, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Deng, and Aketi Foster Keys. We're edited by Blythe Sorrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Our executive producer is Wendy Zukerman. Fact checking by Sam Lemonick. Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, So Wiley, Emma Munger, and Boomi Hadaka.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to, including Professor Barry Popkin, Dr. John White, Dr. Nick Fuller, Professor Paul Breslin, Dr. Richard Johnson, and Dr. Vasanti Malik. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you do listen on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. We'll fact you soon.

• 39:33Speaker 10

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