Drinks, not food, with added sugar promote weight gain: study

PanARMENIAN.Net - The effect of added sucrose in the diet on calorie intake and body weight appears to depend on whether it is in liquid or solid form, according to a new study in mice. If the results translate to humans, they suggest that the contribution of added dietary sugar to obesity comes largely from sugar-sweetened drinks, Medical News Today.

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and China made these suggestions after giving mice added sugar in either their drink or their food for 8 weeks and then comparing them.

In both groups of mice, the added sugar represented 73% of the available dietary calories.

A recent Molecular Metabolism paper carries a full report of the study.

"The consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages," says John R. Speakman, a professor in the school of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K., "has been widely implicated as a contributing factor in obesity, and we investigated whether the mode of ingestion (solid or liquid) had different impacts on body weight regulation in mice."

Prof. Speakman, who led the research at both the University of Aberdeen and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, is the corresponding and senior author of the new study.

The researchers monitored the mice's body weight, body fat, calorie intake, and energy expenditure.

They also measured glucose and insulin response as a way to assess how close the animals might come to developing diabetes.