Study shows that serious health effects can be reversed in just 10 days
By Jake Grilley
Hammer peak performance tip: Give your health and athletic performance a dramatic boost by cutting out the sugar in your diet and sports fuels. HEED, Hammer Gel, Perpetuem, and other Hammer Nutrition fuels contain healthy complex carbohydrates and a minimum of naturally-occurring simple sugars - for steady energy, smooth digestion, and winning performance every time. Read on for details...
Need concrete evidence that sugar alone is harming your health?
Here it is: A new study funded by the National Institutes of Health confirms that reducing levels of sugar in the diet can drastically improve health in just 10 days.
The study - conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and Touro University California and recently published in Obesity - was designed to examine the effect added sugar has on overall health.
Foods containing added sugar were removed from the diets of a group of children and teenagers and replaced with starchy carbohydrates that had about the same number of calories.
Although this study focused on adolescents, sugar's devastating health consequences aren't isolated to that demographic. As we have reported regularly for decades in Endurance News and elsewhere, dietary sugar wreaks havoc on health and athletic performance.
The study results speak for themselves. After reducing dietary sugar from 28% to 10% the participants showed marked improvement in measurements of blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and overall weight . . . after just 10 days.
On average, diastolic blood pressure decreased by 5 points; LDL (bad) cholesterol dropped 10 points, triglyceride levels fell 33 points, and fasting blood sugar and insulin levels also showed marked decreases.
"Until now, there have been a lot of correlation studies linking sugar and metabolic syndrome. This is causation," study lead author Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Benioff Children's Hospital of UCSF, told Time magazine.
"The positive message is that you can very quickly reverse a bad picture (of health) in a very simple way," commented the study's senior author Jean-Marc Schwarz, a professor at Touro University California, in a news release. "I have never seen results as striking or significant."
HEED: No added simple sugars
Unlike nearly every other sports drink on the market, Hammer Nutrition's HEED contains no added simple sugars, and only 2 grams of naturally occurring simple sugar per serving. That's less than 1/2 teaspoon per serving. The complex carbohydrate maltodextrin used in HEED provides a more consistent and longer lasting energy supply than do simple sugar-based fuels, without putting your health at risk due to an excess of simple sugars.
Award-winning HEED also contains a full-spectrum of electrolytes, the healthy natural sweeteners stevia and xylitol, and L-carnosine and chromium polynicotinate to help buffer lactic acid. Among sports drinks, HEED is in a class of its own.
