KERA’s Sam Baker talked about the study with Hasan Zaki, Ph.D. He's an Assistant Professor in UT-Southwestern Medical Center’s Department of Pathology.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
The Reason For The Study
It is commonly viewed that the Western diet — high-sugar and high-fat — is a trigger for colitis, but there isn’t any experimental evidence. That's how we started this study: To understand the link between the Western food, particularly the high-sugar food, and colitis.
How Can High Sugar Consumption Lead To Colitis
So that's the question that we try to address in our study. We fed mice with 10% sugar — for example, glucose, fructose and sucrose for seven days — because we know most of the sob genes contain 10 to 15% sugar.
Then we induced colitis in those mice with a chemical, and we noticed that the mice treated with sugar developed severe colitis compared to untreated mice. We also fed another group of mice which were genetically susceptible to colitis.
The data from this suggests if you take high sugar in your diet it may actually induce colitis, or it may intensify if you already have colitis in your gut.
In our study, we basically found that only consuming high-sugar alters your gut microbiota. The bad bacteria is enhanced in our gut. There is a mucus layer that protects our intestinal cells and tissue from the bacteria that lives inside our gut. This increased growth of some bad bacteria degrades this mucus layer, and that actually helps to penetrate or invade those bacteria inside the intestinal tissue and cause infection and inflammation.
What The Study On Mice Means For People
On average, American people take more than 100 grams – 125, something like that, per day. It is recommended the amount of sugar should not be more than 10 or 25 grams per day maximum. So that means we are actually taking more than five to 10 times the sugar recommended by the World Health Organization. And that's what you see in the Western country — increased incidents of non-communicable disease, like obesity, diabetes, heart disease — all are linked with sugar.
All the natural food has sugar, so those sugars are not that bad. But with a Western diet, everything contains added sugar, especially the high fructose corn syrup, which is composed of glucose and fructose. In our study, we tried to understand what is the role of this glucose and fructose in our gut as well as in our health.
As We Approach The Holidays
We cannot avoid high-sugar food. This is part of our life, but we have to be careful. We have to limit the amount of sugar we take. You just have to monitor your diet, what kind of food you're taking, and calculate the amount of sugar you're taking. And then you have to just balance.
RESOURCES:
High Sugar Diet and Colitis Study
Interview highlights were lightly edited for clarity.
Got a tip? Email Sam Baker at sbaker@kera.org. You can follow Sam on Twitter @srbkera.
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