The People Versus Sugar. The Verdict from Judge Anna 🔨

If sugar were a person standing in a courtroom, how would a jury adjudicate? 🤔

📚 Every book on food, nutrition and diets I have read (and there have been a few, covering everything from fasting to keto to plant-based) agrees on one thing: that simple sugar (sucrose) is bad for your health.

🔬 To highlight this, a recent Nature publication studied the microbiomes of patients on antibiotics and recovering from a bone marrow transplant. They found that patients who ate more sugar had greater microbiome imbalance and more Enterococcus (a gut bacterium that can cause serious infections). They didn’t go as far as to say this, but my interpretation is that more sugary foods slow your recovery if you are taking antibiotics.

This is one specific study, examining one group of people, but how wide is the “sugar effect?” Let’s look at the charges 👇

🦠 Charge 1: Grievous bodily harm to the gut

The Nature study is the star witness, but there are a trail of other witnesses, from animal studies, to solidify the charge:

🐭 Sugar silences a gene that a “lean” gut microbe needs
🐭 Sugar feeds bacteria that damage the gut’s protective mucus, worsening colitis
🐭 Sugar wipes out the bacteria that train immune cells to protect against obesity and diabetes

🔥 Charge 2: Inciting inflammation

In a Swiss trial, healthy young men drank a sugar-sweetened drink (one to two Cokes’ worth of sugar) every day for three weeks. Their C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation, went up.

💉 Charge 3: Tampering with insulin

Sugar drives up blood insulin, and a steady diet of it pushes the body towards insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. A meta-analysis of more than 300,000 people found that those who drank one to two sugary drinks a day had a 26% higher risk of type 2 diabetes than those who rarely drank them.

🏠 Charge 4: Trespassing on the liver

Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose. When overweight adults drank fructose-sweetened drinks for ten weeks, their livers made more fat, their insulin sensitivity dropped by 17%, and they gained visceral fat (the dangerous kind that wraps around your organs).

🧠 Charge 5: Messing with your mind

It’s easy to reach for a sugar pick-me-up, especially mid-afternoon when you’re in a bit of a slump 😴 A meta-analysis of 31 studies found that within an hour of eating sugar, people feel more tired and less alert.

The long-term picture is worse. A study that followed British civil servants for years showed that men eating the most sugar from sweet foods and drinks (more than 67 grams a day) had 23% higher odds of developing anxiety or depression five years later.

🔨 The verdict

I’m afraid to say, dear sugar, you are guilty on all five charges (and probably more we are still learning about). I hereby sentence you to imprisonment, effective immediately 🔒

You are a fun guy to be around (like the joker in the back of the class), but I find that you have gone too far, and I can offer you no parole, no suspended sentence and no community service. You will not be let out for good behaviour; however, you will be allowed the occasional birthday cake 🎂