Pushing her meal cart into the hospital room, a research assistant hands out tall glasses of reddish-pink liquid, along with a gentle warning: "Remember, you guys have to finish all your Kool-Aid."
One by one, young
volunteers chug down their drinks, each carefully calibrated to contain a
mix of water, flavoring and a precisely calibrated solution of high
fructose corn syrup: 55% fructose, 45% glucose.
The participants are part
of an ongoing study run by Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at
the University of California, Davis. Volunteers agree to spend several
weeks as lab rats: their food carefully measured, their bodies subjected
to a steady dose of scans and blood tests. At first, each volunteer
receives meals with no added sugars. But then, the sweetened drinks
start showing up.
For the final two weeks
of the study, volunteers drank three of the sweet concoctions daily --
about 500 calories of added sugar, or 25% of all calories for the adult
women in the study. Within just two weeks, their blood chemistry was out
of whack. In one striking change, the volunteers had elevated levels of
LDL cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease.
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