Researchers recommend limiting added sugar intake to 6 teaspoons daily

Key takeaways:

• Added sugars have been shown to increase a variety of risk factors.
• Reducing intake to less than 25 g per day and having less than one sugar-sweetened beverage per week may help prevent these risks.

To prevent the adverse effects of added sugars, researchers recommend reducing intake to about 6 teaspoons per day and having less than one sugar-sweetened beverage every week.

Recent research has shown that higher intake of added sugars, also known as “free sugars,” was linked to a higher risk for CVD, and substituting them with non-free sugars was inversely associated with both total CVD and stroke incidence. Sugars have also been linked to risk factors for diabetes, obesity and more. In fact, a Healthy People 2030 goal is to limit added sugars to 11.5% of total daily calories to improve overall health.

“As an important component of the human diet, sugars have been shown to be harmfully associated with a variety of risk factors for decades, mainly including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hyperuricemia, gout, ectopic fatty accumulation, dental caries and some cancers,” Yin Huang, MD, a researcher in the department of urology at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and colleagues wrote. “Before developing detailed policies for sugar restriction, the quality of existing evidence on the associations of dietary sugar consumption with all health outcomes needs to be comprehensively evaluated.”

Therefore, the researchers conducted an umbrella review of existing meta-analyses to assess the potential biases, validity and quality of evidence in available studies on sugar intake and health outcomes. Their analysis included 73 meta-analyses from 8,601 articles that spanned more than 80 health outcomes.

Huang and colleagues found high levels of sugar intake to be generally more harmful than beneficial to one’s health, particularly when it comes to cardiometabolic disease. They recommended reducing added sugar intake to less than 25 g — about 6 teaspoons — per day and having less than one serving a week of sugar-sweetened beverages to limit the adverse effects of sugar.

The researchers specifically noted significant harmful associations between sugar intake and:

• 18 endocrine/metabolic outcomes like higher BMI and diabetes;
• 10 cardiovascular outcomes like stroke, high BP and myocardial infarction;
• seven cancer outcomes, including breast, pancreatic and prostate; and
• 10 other outcomes, including allergic, dental, hepatic, osteal and neuropsychiatric outcomes.

Huang and colleagues added that moderate-quality evidence indicated the highest vs. lowest sugar intake levels were linked to increased body weight and ectopic fatty accumulation.

Low-quality evidence suggested that every serving of sugar sweetened beverages per week was linked to a 4% higher risk for gout. Additionally, each 250 mL per day increment of sugar-sweetened beverage intake was connected to a 4% higher risk for all-cause mortality and a 17% higher risk for coronary heart disease. The researchers also noted low-quality evidence indicating that each 25 g increment of fructose consumption per day was linked to a 22% higher risk for pancreatic cancer.

“In combination with the World Health Organization and World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research recommendations and our findings, we recommend reducing the consumption of free sugars or added sugars to below 25 g/day (approximately six teaspoons a day) and limiting the consumption of sugar sweetened beverages to less than one serving a week (approximately 200 mL to 355 mL/week),” Huang and colleagues concluded. “To change sugar consumption patterns, especially for children and adolescents, a combination of widespread public health education and policies worldwide is urgently needed.”