Rhonda Patrick on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1054
SUBJECT: HEALTH
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
if you look at refined sugar, also refined sugar is associated with heart disease risk. In fact, it's like one of the, you know, there was a big, big study, like 400,000 different individuals looked at refined sugar, people that had the highest refined sugar intake... Had like a four times higher risk of having a heart attack.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The best-known peer-reviewed study on this topic is Yang et al., published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2014, which followed 11,733 U.S. adults from the NHANES III cohort (not 400,000) for a median of 14.6 years. It found that adults in the highest quintile of added-sugar consumption had roughly 2 to 3 times the risk of cardiovascular disease mortality compared with the lowest quintile, depending on the level of statistical adjustment, not the fourfold heart-attack risk described. The study measured added-sugar intake as a share of daily calories and used a composite cardiovascular-death outcome, not incident heart attacks, and the authors noted the association held after adjusting for many but not all potential confounders. No published study of roughly 400,000 people examining refined sugar and a fourfold heart attack risk was found in the searched literature. Overall, the underlying science does support a positive association between high added-sugar intake and cardiovascular mortality risk, but the specific sample size, outcome (heart attack vs. cardiovascular death), and magnitude (4x vs. roughly 2-3x) cited in the claim do not match the best-known study on this subject.