Good news for sweet tooths: Going sugar-free can mess with your gut and metabolism: study

Here’s some surprisingly sweet science.Americans consume far more sugar than experts recommend — a habit linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a host of other health problems.But while many people could benefit from scaling back their intake, a new study found that cutting sugar out entirely may backfire in unexpected ways.“Completely removing sucrose from a low-fat diet may unexpectedly disrupt gut health and promote inflammation and metabolic dysfunction,” Dr.Rasheed Ahmad, principal scientist and head of the Immunology & Microbiology Department at the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait, said in a press release.The findings, presented Saturday at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, suggest that “balanced nutrition is more important than simply eliminating sugar,” he said.To investigate the effects of a sugar-free diet, Ahmad and his colleagues compared two groups of mice over a 16-week period.One group was fed a low-fat diet that contained sucrose, a type of table sugar, while the other received a low-fat diet with no sucrose at all.

Throughout the study, researchers tracked a range of health markers, including glucose tolerance — or how well the body processed sugar — how sensitive it was to insulin, levels of metabolic hormones, gut bacteria, and signs of inflammation in the colon and liver.By the end of the 16-week study, both groups of mice weighed about the same.Notably, however, the mice on the sucrose-free, low-fat diet developed a range of health issues, including impaired glucose control, insulin resistance, imbalances in gut bacteria, intestinal inflammation, and changes associated with fatty liver disease.“The findings suggest that complete removal of sucrose from a low-fat diet may negatively affect gut microbiota and metabolic health,” Ahmad said.“The study highlights the importance of maintaining balanced dietary carbohydrates to support gut and immune homeostasis.”Before the study, the research...