No, the copy editor who normally creates the headlines has not been replaced by Captain Obvious from the Hotels.com commercials. I requested such a clearly evident one because new evidence continues to solidify what you probably see as a long since established fact.

While it goes without saying that added sugars add taste, calories, and no nutritional value to processed foods and therefore should be avoided, you may not realize to what extent added sugars subtract from your health.Sugar/Diabetes link stronger than first thoughtEven though you've read the following in this column more than once, it merits repeating: Type 2 diabetes was originally called adult-onset diabetes because the disease used to need decades to damage insulin receptors enough that they refused to accept insulin. But then enough teens - and a few pre-teens - ate so much junk and did so little exercise that they developed the disease and dictated a name change.Now there's a bigger problem than an inaccurate name, and it's accurately called an epidemic.Currently, 1 in every 11 American adults suffers from type 2 diabetes. The rate in which children develop the disease, however, is accelerating so rapidly that the Centers for Disease Control expects the ratio to rise to 1 in every 3 adults by 2050.Here's where the Captain Obvious references return. A paper that appeared in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings at the beginning of 2015 states that the increase in type 2 diabetes in the U.S. is caused to a large extent by the added sugars in our diets, especially fructose.Added sugars in our diet add to the amount of sugar in our blood streams? How groundbreaking.Shouldn't a statement like that be made by a smirking Captain Obvious on a TV commercial rather than straight-laced researchers in an academic journal? But my intention is not to poke fun at the co-authors of the article. They wrote what needed to be written.Believe it or not, until they summarized a number of relatively recent studies and presented their paper, overall body weight, number of total carbohydrates consumed, and a few other factors rather than sugar consumption were considered the main causes of type 2 diabetes. The article in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal cited recent studies with both animals and humans that found replacing starchy carbohydrates with table sugar (which contains fructose but doesn't harm the body as much as high-fructose corn syrup or pure fructose) significantly increased insulin resistance.So the co-authors channeled their inner Captain Obvious and commented: "This suggests that sucrose is more harmful compared to other carbohydrates" and that "at current levels, added-sugar consumption, and added-fructose consumption in particular, are fueling a worsening epidemic of type 2 diabetes."But is that really a Captain Obvious comment?The present guidelines from the Institute of Medicine still claim ingesting 25 percent of your daily total calories from added sugars is safe. And no U.S. agency had ever suggested a lower percentage until a U.S. advisory committee recommended a maximum of 10 percent earlier this year.Shortly after that, the World Health Organization announced that added sugars should make up between 5 and 10 percent of your daily calories. Yet the new bad news about sugar consumption doesn't end there.In April, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition released results of a two-week study performed at the University of California, Davis, demonstrating a dose-related link to sugar consumption and an increased risk for heart disease.The researchers gave 85 male and female subjects between the ages of 18 and 40 beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup so that they received either 10, 17.5, or 25 percent of their daily caloric requirement from the drinks. A control group drank sugar-free beverages that contained no calories.Compared to blood samples drawn before the experiment, all those consuming the HFCS-sweetened beverage recorded increases in two indicators of increased cardiovascular risk, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides - even the 10-percent group - with the subjects consuming the highest percentage of HFCS recording the highest levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. The males in all groups recorded higher increases than females.Remember, these changes occurred in two weeks.In response, Kimber Stanhope, the study's lead author and a research scientist at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, said, "These findings clearly indicate that humans are acutely sensitive to the harmful effects of excess dietary sugar."And that acute sensitively may be responsible for a potentially negative change in young girls.Girls begin menstruation earlier than they once did, and that change has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, hypertension, heart attack, and stroke as adults. Harvard Medical School research published this year in the journal Human Reproduction found that in over 5,500 9- to-14-year old female subjects, those consuming 1.5 or more servings of sugar-sweetened beverages a day menstruated nearly 3 months earlier than those who didn't.