They say, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining…’ Now, it seems one nutritional ‘silver gleam’ has blinded us to its greater cloud. Not only does it raise your risk of obesity; your ‘sweet tooth’ makes you more prone to depression, diabetes and stroke…
The University of Surrey (UK) says a new study data-mining a huge health stats info bank has uncov-ered an link between having an otherwise innocent-sounding ‘sweet tooth’ with increased risk of developing serious conditions including depression, diabetes and stroke…
Not exactly harmless
That cutesy-sounding eating trait you’ve been discounting all your life – as long as you could control it – may not be as harmless as you assumed.
A new study from the UK indicates that having a predilection for sweets can indicate a hidden predis-position to depression, diabetes and stroke.
What they did
“Importantly, by using data-driven Artificial Intelligence methods, we were able to identify groups of people defined by their food preferences,” says study Senior Author Professor Nophar Geifman. “[T]hese groups are meaningful in that they are linked to health outcomes as well as biological markers.”
The study, published in the Journal of Translational Medicine, took anonymised information on the food preferences of 180,000 volunteers within the UK Biobank, and used artificial intelligence to group them into three general profiles:
- Health-conscious: prefer fruits and vegetables over animal-based and sweet foods.
- Omnivore: Likes most foods, including meats, fish, and some vegetables, as well as sweets and desserts.
- Sweet tooth: Prefer sweet foods and sugary drinks and is less interested in healthier options like fruit and vegetables.
The Surrey team looked at blood samples where 2,923 proteins and 168 metabolites had been measured to see how these levels changed in each group. Such a study would have been toally unfeasible without he help of powerful computers.
What they found
“The foods that you like or dislike seem to directly link to your health,” Geifman says. “If your fav-ourite foods are cakes, sweets, and sugary drinks, then our study’s results suggest that this [mere predisposition] may have negative effects on your health.”
The team found that the sweet tooth group were 31 percent more likely than average to suffer from depression. They also found that the sweet tooth group had higher rates of diabetes, as well as vas-cular heart conditions, compared to the other two groups.
The takeaway
Geifman says we all need to learn to eat more mindfully… “We should do all that we can to think before we eat.”
But he also asks that we pause for reflection before ‘shooting the messenger’. “No one wants to tell [others] what to do. Our job is just informing people.”
My take
I, too, am feeling like the messenger you want to shoot, after simply delivering the foregoing news…
Nevertheless… It’s all the more disheartening to discover that the old joke – about certain foods being so appealing, you feel as if you ‘could gain 5 pounds just looking at them’ – is much closer to the literal truth than you already thought.
Geifman’s advice about mindful eating is wise. After all, you already knew that sweet tooth of yours was literally the root of a complex of potentially deadly diseases that’s ‘entirely preventable’, as the scowling medicos like to remind us.
Which places this great, big, ugly, ball back squarely in our own court…
~ Maggie J.