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Study finds sugary diets lead to heart disease risk

Category: Heart Health and Cholesterol

The dental implications of a sugary diet are well known, as is the associated weight gain. But a new study has found that eating too many sweets can also cause major harm to a person's heart.

The study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who said they ate foods high in added sugar were significantly more likely to have signs of heart disease.

Emory School of Medicine's Miriam Vos, lead researcher on the study, said in her report that sweets not only seemed to raise bad cholesterol levels of the patients in her study, but it also lowered good cholesterol levels.

Vos warned in the report, "Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids. It would be important for long-term health for people to start looking at how much added sugar they're getting and finding ways to reduce that,"

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention ranks heart disease as the number one killer in the U.S.