Meryl Horn

So several years ago, Jim and his team collected a bunch of these studies for a meta-analysis.

They ended up looking at 12 of them.

So now we can answer the question, right?

Yeah.

So are you ready?

Yeah.

So what they found is that sugar does not have some sort of magical power to make you gain weight.

So if you have like people eat the same amount of calories, some of them are getting sugar, some of them are getting other stuff.

They generally do not gain more weight with the sugar.

I mean, to me, I was kind of surprised because it does feel like sugar is bad for our weight.

And it is true that people who have more sugar generally will gain more weight.

And that's because in the real world, when people have a lot of sugar, they aren't like compensating by eating less of other stuff.

Maybe because sugar doesn't make us feel as full as other foods do.

I mean, you could see this in gym study and it just makes intuitive sense.

Like if you imagine having a bottle of Coke with your lunch, you're not going to be like, oh, like, I guess I won't be that hungry for a big lunch anymore because I'm having all this soda.

Like, no, you're going to have just as big of a lunch as you would have otherwise if you're having water with your lunch.

And so, like, even though it doesn't seem like sugar is magically good at making us gain weight, people do tend to just eat more overall when they have a lot of sugar in their diet.

Yeah, that too.

And so we end up gaining weight, and that could increase your risk for some types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

And there's another thing that sugar can do that's not so good for us.