Too much sugar may be common cause behind many chronic diseases, new study finds

Whatever you may think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he has brought a spotlight to the chronic health problem plaguing many Americans.

Nearly every family and friend group has someone with type 2 diabetes, auto-immune disease and/or cardiovascular disease.

Though these conditions can have multiple causes, a new study suggests that RFK Jr. is right that one underlying trigger of all of them may be our diet.

More precisely, what and how we're eating.

In a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell, biologist Richard Young shows that continuously eating too much added sugar causes traffic jams inside cells.

And these traffic jams are what leads to many chronic diseases, Young thinks.

What they found

Normally, the sugar we eat in all foods, both healthy and unhealthy, is turned into the fuel that gives the body energy.

But, if "instead of a normal healthy meal with a modest amount of nutrients, you have two Cokes along with that, you don't have this balance," said Young, who is also a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

That high level of sugar in the bloodstream causes cells to produce too much oxygen inside of them, which actually causes burning.

"If you get very very high levels of oxygen inside cells, it damages the equipment," Young said.

It's been known for decades that people with chronic diseases produce too much of these so-called reactive oxygen species inside cells. Older people naturally have more reactive oxygen species, which is why chronic diseases tend to be more common with age.

But what hasn't been known, Young said, is whether there's a single mechanism affected by all this oxidative stress.

He ? and some of his colleagues ? now think he's found it.

"None of us realized that there is actually a pretty simple mechanism," said Young, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Relatively new microscope technology that allows researchers to follow single protein molecules as they move inside cells has allowed scientists to watch as reactive oxygen builds up.

Young's team saw that when cells have a lot of reactive oxygen, half of the proteins inside them ? the workers inside the cells ? get stuck in traffic jams.

And it turns out the same proteins that are slowed down by the reactive oxygen are the ones involved in a long list of chronic diseases, Young said.

Important finding

His colleagues think he's onto something important.

"This paper is super interesting," said Leonard Zon, a professor of pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School.

It's not clear exactly which chronic diseases are most affected by these sluggish proteins, or how many of them ? all that still needs to be worked out.

But Zon, who studies the role of oxidative stress in cancer said the research also shows how the body detects high levels of reactive oxygen.

"This opens up an avenue of research to understand how oxidant damage in the body is being sensed and I think that's a really important area of research to continue and I think that will have impacts in health," he said.

Jonathon Ditlev, a molecular biologist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, said he's impressed by the findings' potential.

"This gives us a new lens through which we can look at diseased cells and diseased tissues," said "It's an incredible new lens through which to view biology and potential medical breakthroughs."

Reversing disease

The next big question researchers face is how to use this new information to reverse chronic disease.

"If we can figure out one or two practices or foods or therapeutics that can act as the traffic police to free up the network, I think that would be a very key discovery," Ditlev said.

Diet "for sure" will help correct some of these problems, Ditlev said. He thinks limiting highly processed foods and added sugars like corn syrup would help especially with problems like the neuropathies common among people with diabetes, though restoring healthy cellular function won't happen overnight.

But it's also known that once these diseases start, it's not so easy to go back to a healthy state. Someone who once had type 2 diabetes will always be "more vulnerable than someone who hasn't gone down that slope," Young said.

Still, Young said, "if we're right that this protein mobility problem underlies disease, it creates a path for drugs to address these diseases."

He and his colleagues are in talks with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies now. "Obviously, there's a strong interest to do something more for these chronic diseases that affect most of us," he said.

There may also be already-existing drugs that can have a benefit, Ditlev said. Among drugs that have received federal approval, at least 70 or 80 of them affect the "traffic jams" of proteins inside cells, he said.

Maybe some of these can help act as traffic cops, ease the congestion and make a difference for specific chronic diseases.

Considering that it costs $10 billion to $15 billion to bring a new drug to market, it would be a lot more cost effective to repurpose an existing drug, Ditlev said, than to develop a new one.

And the simple of knowledge of what goes on inside cells can be empowering. All three researchers said they've changed their behavior as a result of learning about these "traffic jams."

"I do think it makes you think about what goes into your body," Zon said.

"Now, knowing what it is that I do when I have my excess sugar, it's easier to avoid it somehow," Young added.

Karen Weintraub can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Too much sugar leads to 'traffic jams' inside cells, study shows