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Cutting all sugar from your diet sounds like the healthy thing to do. But a recent study suggests it may do more harm than good. Instead of improving metabolic health, it appears to make it worse.

Before rewriting your shopping list, though, it is important to note that this research was conducted on rodents, tracking an extremely small sample size of just six mice per group. Mice have fundamentally different digestive systems than humans. However, the findings offer a warning about the possible hidden dangers of extreme diets.

This surprising conclusion falls squarely within the cultural obsession with “clean eating”. That’s no coincidence: decades of data link eating too much sugar to the global rise in diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. Consequently, health advice has consistently promoted the radical reduction of added sugar in order to prevent these diseases. People who rely on processed foods inadvertently take in large amounts of added sugars, increasing their risk of developing disease.

This has led to a widespread belief that if an excess of sugar is toxic, absolute zero must be perfect. But trying to “clean” your body by eliminating an entire nutrient class might end up starving the very system you want to heal.

This research offers a fresh way to look at health, moving far beyond the...

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