“ With lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity rising rapidly and sugar sweetened beverages the largest source of added sugars in Western diets, understanding the ‘real world’ health impact is critical in determining ‘real world’ prevention and intervention strategies,”
Professor Bronwyn Kingwell, the study’s senior author : See Baker Institute Press Release Part 1
“If you did this day in, day out, your pancreas would be under considerable stress – and this is how diabetes can develop.
Having a little can of soft drink in the morning is going to have lasting effects throughout the day.”
If your diet has too much sugar in it, forcing your body to keep your insulin high all the time, eventually your cells will grow insulin-resistant. That forces the pancreas to make even more insulin, adding to its workload. Eventually, it will burn out
Professor Bronwyn Kingwell. See SMH Article Part 2 What’s going on inside your veins after you drink a soft drink
” The 2012-13 Health Survey identified that Indigenous adults were 1.6 times as likely to be obese as non-Indigenous Australians, with the prevalence increasing more rapidly in Aboriginal school-aged children.
Overweight and obesity in childhood are important predictors of adult adiposity, increasing the risk of developing a range of medical conditions, each of which is a major cause of morbidity, mortality and health expenditure.
While it is surprisingly clear what needs to be done to improve the health of Indigenous children, recent cuts to Indigenous preventative workforce and nutrition programs throughout Australia have severely reduced the capacity to respond.
Comprehensive primary health care is a key strategy for improving the health of Indigenous Australians and is an important platform from which to address complex health and social issues associated with obesity.
Closing the Gap, including the gap attributable to obesity, requires ensuring the ACCHS sector is resourced to deliver the full range of core services required under a comprehensive and culturally safe model of primary health care.
The effectiveness of ACCHSs has long been recognised, with many able to document better health outcomes than mainstream services for the communities they serve. “
Extract from NACCHO Network Submission to the Select Committee’s Obesity Epidemic in Australia Inquiry.
Download the full 15 Page submission HERE
Obesity Epidemic in Australia – Network Submission – 6.7.18
Press Release : Study reveals the damaging metabolic effects for inactive, young, obese people who consume soft drink regularly
We know drinking soft drink is bad for the waistline, now a study by Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute researchers provides evidence of the damaging metabolic effects on overweight and obese people who regularly consume soft drink and sit for long periods.
Researchers have quantified the detrimental effects on glucose and lipid metabolism by studying young, obese adults in a ‘real-world’ setting where up to 750ml of soft drink is consumed between meals daily and where prolonged sitting with no activity is the norm.
The results, outlined by PhD candidate Pia Varsamis in the Clinical Nutrition journal, show how habitual soft drink consumption and large periods of sedentary behaviour may set these young adults on the path to serious cardiometabolic diseases such as fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Whilst most studies to date have focused on the relationship between soft drink consumption and obesity, the large amount of added sugars contained in these drinks has additional implications beyond weight control.
Senior author, Professor Bronwyn Kingwell, who heads up the Institute’s Metabolic and Vascular Physiology laboratory, says the acute metabolic effects of soft drink consumption and prolonged sitting identified in this latest study are cause for concern.
“With lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity rising rapidly and sugar sweetened beverages the largest source of added sugars in Western diets, understanding the ‘real world’ health impact is critical in determining ‘real world’ prevention and intervention strategies,” Professor Kingwell says.
She says this study quantified the effects of soft drink consumption compared to water on glucose and lipid metabolism in a context that was reflective of typical daily consumption levels, meal patterns and activity behaviours such as sitting for long periods.
The study, involved 28 overweight or obese adults aged 19–30 years who were habitual soft drink consumers. They participated in two separate experiments on different days drinking soft drink on one and water on the other both mid-morning and mid-afternoon during a 7-hour day of uninterrupted sitting.
Professor Kingwell says the combination of soft drink and prolonged sitting significantly elevated plasma glucose and plasma insulin, while reducing circulating triglycerides and fatty acids which indicates significant suppression of lipid metabolism, particularly in males.
She says the metabolic effects of a regular diet of soft drink combined with extended periods of sitting may contribute to the development of metabolic disease in young people who are overweight or obese, including predisposing men to an elevated risk of fatty liver disease.
“The acute metabolic effects outlined in this study are very worrying and suggest that young, overweight people who engage in this type of lifestyle are setting themselves on a path toward chronic cardiometabolic disease,” Professor Kingwell says. “This highlights significant health implications both for individuals and our healthcare system.”
Part 2 : Here’s what’s going on inside your veins after you drink a soft drink
Half an hour after finishing a can of soft drink, your blood sugar has spiked.
So you’re probably feeling pretty good. Your cells have plenty of energy, more than they need.
Maybe that soft drink had some caffeine as well, giving your central nervous system a kick, making you feel excitable, suppressing any tiredness you might have.
But a clever new study, published this week, nicely illustrates that while you’re feeling good, strange things are going on inside your blood vessels – and in the long run they are not good for you.
For this study, 28 obese or overweight young adults agreed to sit in a lab for a whole day while having their blood continuously sampled.
The volunteers ate a normal breakfast, lunch and dinner. At morning tea and afternoon tea, researchers from Melbourne’s Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute gave them a can of soft drink.
Their blood samples revealed exactly what happened next.
Sugar from, say, a chocolate bar is released slowly, as your digestive system breaks it down.
With a can of soft drink, almost no break-down time is needed. The drink’s sugar starts to hit your bloodstream within about 30 minutes. That’s why you get such a big spike.
Your body responds to high levels of blood sugar by producing a hormone called insulin.
Insulin pumps through the bloodstream and tells your cells to suck in as much sugar as they can. The cells then start burning it, and storing what they can’t burn.
That quickly reduces the amount of sugar in the blood, and gives you a burst of energy. So far so good.
But the sugar keeps coming. High levels of blood sugar will quickly damage your blood vessels, so the body keeps making insulin.
In fact, just having two cans of soft drink meant the volunteers’ insulin stayed significantly higher than usual – all day.
After lunch, and another soft drink for afternoon tea, their sugar and insulin levels spiked again.
And, once again, over the next few hours blood sugar dropped but insulin levels stayed stubbornly high – right through to late afternoon, when the study finished.
The study demonstrates that two cans of soft drink is all it takes to give your pancreas – the crucial organ that produces insulin – a serious workout, says Professor Bronwyn Kingwell, the study’s senior author.
We get more sugar each year from beverages than all the sweet treats you can think of combined.
“If you did this day in, day out, your pancreas would be under considerable stress – and this is how diabetes can develop,” says Professor Kingwell. “Having a little can of soft drink in the morning is going to have lasting effects throughout the day.”
If your diet has too much sugar in it, forcing your body to keep your insulin high all the time, eventually your cells will grow insulin-resistant. That forces the pancreas to make even more insulin, adding to its workload. Eventually, it will burn out.
But something else interesting is happening inside your body as well.
Insulin tells your body to burn sugar. But it also tells it to stop burning fat.
Normally, the body burns a little bit of both at once. But after a soft drink, your insulin stays high all day – so you won’t burn much fat, whether you’re on a diet or not.
One of the study’s participants, Michelle Kneipp, is now trying as hard as she can to kick her soft-drink habit.
She’s switched soft drinks for flavoured sparkling water. “It still tastes like soft drink, and it’s still got the fizz,” she says.
“But it’s hard, because sugar’s a very addictive substance.”