A new study reveals that the rise in diabetes is largely caused by people’s increasing consumption of refined sugars. This analysis is based on information concerning consumption and food composition between 1909 and 1997, collected by Simin Liu of the Harvard School of Public Health and his co-workers. They compared this information with data on disease incidence rates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and found out that the climb in diabetes particularly matches dropping fibre consumption and escalating consumption of corn syrup and other highly refined carbohydrates.
This analysis supports the idea that advice to the public to cut back only on fat has led food manufacturers simply to replace fats with carbohydrates, which ultimately contributed to increase obesity rather than combating it.
The article has been published on the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Vol. 79, No. 5, 774-779, May 2004) and an extract can be viewed at their website
