On Nutrition: Do we eat too much sugar?

Rain and snow and colder weather make me want to … bake something. And it usually has an ingredient list with chocolate, peanut butter, and sugar. Do I have a "sugar problem?" Only if I eat my sweets in excess, says the American Heart Association in its latest "Scientific Statement: Dietary Sugars Intake and Cardiovascular Health."

Wait. I thought fat was the menace to hearts. What does sugar have to do with cardiovascular health? "New evidence has emerged," says the ADA, that excess sugar consumption is related to excess calories which lead to excess weight and poor nutrition — all risks for heart disease. And one study — the Framingham Heart Study — found that the consumption of one or more soft drinks a day significantly increased the odds for a person to develop high blood pressure. (Other studies aren't as clear.)

Stress can also make us crave sweets, say these experts. The pleasure center in the brain is stimulated by sweet and high fat foods … chocolate brownies, anyone? Over time, we can get "hard wired" to crave these foods. Several studies on children, for example, found that stress increased kid's cravings for the "comfort" of sugared beverages and other sweet snacks.

And sweet beverages may be worse for our collective health than sweetened foods (such as brownies). That's because our bodies don't get as strong a message that they have just consumed a massive amount of calories from liquids than if we had eaten the same number of calories from solid food.

How much should I worry? Any healthful well-balanced diet includes naturally-occurring sugars, such as lactose in milk and fructose in fruits and vegetables. Beet and cane sugar, honey and corn syrup contains sucrose — a 50/50 mixture of the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

"Many consumers mistakenly believe," says the AHA, "that high-fructose corn syrup is pure fructose. High-fructose corn syrup is composed of either 42 percent or 55 percent fructose and is similar in composition to table sugar (sucrose)." Whatever the source — from regular sugar (sucrose) or high fructose corn syrup — excess fructose has been indirectly implicated in our current epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Sugars per se do not have bad health effects, say experts, unless they are eaten in large amounts. And what is truly our problem is the amount of "added sugars" we ingest above and beyond what we get in whole foods.