Is This Sugar Making You Fat?

You’ve heard the claims that sugar is detrimental to your diet, but is it really to blame for your spare tire?

Canadian researchers recently looked at studies on fructose (a type of sugar found naturally in fruit that some experts have actually called a “poison”) and found that incorporating simple sugar into your diet may not lead to weight gain.

The researchers reviewed 31 studies where subjects consumed the same amount of calories, yet one group consumed extra fructose baked into breads or stirred into drinks and the other ate non-fructose carbohydrates. Their result? Neither of the groups gained any weight.

In a second analysis, the team looked at studies on how fructose affects weight maintenance and weight gain. Their findings: Simple—overeating makes you gain pounds. More specifically, overeating—no matter where those extra calories come from—causes the same amount of average weight gain.

More from MensHealth.com: The Truth About Sugar

“I think that many arguments against fructose are trying to point to one ingredient or another as the cause of obesity,” says John Sievenpiper, Ph.D., lead study author and a research fellow at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. “Yet these concepts are just distracting us from the main issue—which is overconsumption.”

Now, we’re not saying to try a Twinkie Diet like this nutrition professor did—even though he did prove it worked for weight loss. Clearly sticking to a balanced diet built on real food will keep you satiated so you’re less likely to overeat, and it’s best for your overall health. (Click here for guidelines on how much protein, fat, and carbs to consume each day from Alan Aragon, M.S., the Men's Health Weight-Loss Coach.)

But where does sugar fall in your daily diet? Aragon has a guideline for that too. He recommends limiting your daily fructose intake to no more than 50 grams per day, or about 10 percent of your total calories

However, that number varies from person to person. The research on fructose is usually conducted on sedentary people, which is where that 50 grams per day figure comes from. If you’re active, your body is better able to process sugar, so you may be able to eat more without any adverse effects, Aragon says.

What about the highly-criticized high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)? First, know that it’s not pure fructose, like you’d find in fruit—it’s half fructose, half sucrose (another type of sugar)—just like table sugar. To your body, table sugar and HFCS are exactly the same, Aragon explains. But since HFCS is added to everything from ketchup to salad dressing, it’s easy to consume massive amounts of it.

And as Americans continue to over indulge in calories, they may not even realize that HFCS is playing such a huge role in their diets (therefore, we’re going overboard on calories and sugar). So again, the real issue at hand points back to the concept of overconsumption, says Aragon.

The bottom line: We’re not fat because we eat too much sugar. We’re fat because we eat too much.

More from MensHealth.com: Is HFCS Worse Than Table Sugar?

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