One of the worst things you can do to your body is feed it sugar – not necessarily natural sugar like the kind found in fruit, but refined sugar. A team of scientists from the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) recently pored through more than 8 000 scientific papers on how sugar affects the body and came to the conclusion that it not only makes people fat but also makes them sick.

The project, which has been dubbed SugarScience, exposes sugar as a primary culprit in the formation of metabolic disease, which can lead to conditions like heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Lead author Laura Schmidt, a UCSF School of Medicine professor, says her team’s findings are comprehensible — sugar is highly toxic to the body and vital organs, including the liver.

According to their investigation, nearly three-quarters of all packaged and processed foods contain added sugar. This sugar is typically listed under 61 different names, including things like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), dextrose, evaporated cane juice and sucrose. It is often difficult to identify added sugar because of this, and current regulatory requirements don’t mandate that suggested daily values of both natural and added sugar be identified.

A full listing […]