Is your child overweight? One tiny little change could fix that.
Scientists have discovered that simply removing sugar from a child’s diet and replacing it with starches can result in a loss of weight, even without any change in calorie intake, according to a Washington Post report.
The obesity levels in kids in America are rising, and a lot of it is due to sugar, which not only causes them to become overweight but also hyperactive in schools. So researchers at the University of California-San Francisco and Touro University wanted to find out more about the problem and examined 44 children between the ages of 9 and 18. The children came from a number of races, and all had metabolic health issues including high blood pressure.
The researchers had the parents fill out questionnaires on their diets and tested the kids’ glucose tolerance, bone density, and cholesterol counts. They then created a new diet that would replace a lot of the sugar they consumed with starch — and the results were surprising. Even though the research team hadn’t changed the calorie intake level or increased how much exercise they were getting, all metabolic health measures showed improvements, said Robert Lustig, the study author and a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, according to the report.
Diastolic blood pressure and bad cholesterol levels dropped after just 10 days, and the kids lost two pounds over that period, even with the same calorie intake. Sometimes researchers had to increase the calorie intake to keep them from losing weight too fast.
The study was published in the journal Obesity.