Regularly consuming sugary beverages can threaten your wellbeing as it is a known trigger of type 2 diabetes. However, according to researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, consuming sucrose, which is the type of sugar found in these drinks, damages your wellness in other ways, as it also increases your risk of heart disease.
For the study, which was published in the journal PLOS Genetics, the researchers wanted to see exactly how sucrose affects heart function. They used fruit flies because these are well-established as a model for human health and disease, and many of them showed classic signs of human type 2 diabetes, including high blood sugar and insulin signalling defects, when fed a high-sucrose diet. However, the team also found signs of diabetes-induced heart malfunction in these flies, such as deteriorating heart function, cardiac arrhythmia and fibrosis, and were able to block the cellular mechanism responsible for sucrose-related heart problems, and preventing them from occurring.
According to Rolf Bodmer, Ph.D., professor at Sanford-Burnham and a senior author of the study, ‘It’s remarkable that we’re able to use the fruit fly as a discovery tool for elucidating basic molecular mechanisms, not only of many types of heart disease, but also dietary influences that help us understand what happens in human hearts’. The team found that when they artificially increased sucrose-processing via the hexosamine pathway, this harmed the heart. However, when they specifically blocked this pathway, they prevented some of the potential heart defects, like cardiac arrhythmias, for example.
Karen Ocorr, PhD, research assistant professor at Sanford-Burnham and the study’s corresponding author, added ‘Our study reveals a number of specific sugar-processing enzymes that could be targeted with therapies aimed at reducing sucrose’s unhealthy effects on the heart’.
Ross Cagan, Ph.D., professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a senior author of this study, concluded with a warning that ‘diet-induced heart damage is one of our society’s most serious health issues. Our flies now give us a tool to explore the role of high dietary sugar, and the means to identify treatments in the context of the whole body’.
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