birth control and clothes will not be exempt from providing health insurance that covers contraceptives to their employees the lawsuit claims the change would be constitutional although news headlines the news continues on al-jazeera up a techno legend that's what. their forefathers fought the soviets. twenty five years off their independence. they too must become. defenders of lisieux way near preparing for the possibility of war. waiting for invasion but witness documentary at this time on al-jazeera supersized and. scientists around the world make a desperate plea to stop an epidemic of obesity. but now new research goes beyond

that to reveal a risk that could be even greater. techno expose the science of. this is a show about innovation and change. we're going to explore the intersection of hardware not my doing it in a way this is a show about finding i find. it's the ingredient the bring smiles to the faces of children around the world health experts agree in moderation it's an essential part of nutrition but it's also becoming the number one culprit in a global health crisis according to the world health organization consumption of free sugars especially sugary drinks is behind a large increase in cases of obesity and diabetes. in two thousand and fourteen one

in three adults worldwide were reported to be overweight. by two thousand and fifteen data showed forty two million children under the age of five overweight or obese. forty eight percent of those children living in asia and africa. in mexico the problem is even worse. according to a study by mexico's national institute of public health seventy percent of adults are overweight or obese mexicans drink more than anywhere else on the planet. one hundred sixty three liters. that's forty percent more than the average american one hundred eighteen. in two thousand and fourteen mexico imposed a tempest excise tax on those drinks. the.

mexico. calling for a global sugar tax to reduce consumption of sugary drinks. in the u.k. have. a growing body of research just behind. in two thousand and fourteen harvard university i did sugar intake. look to. not just finding quote a significantly increased risk of. research being conducted inside the davis california may be the first to show cause and effect the project under the us national institute of health put subjects' on a highly controlled sugary diet for ten weeks then measures the effects of that added sugar. time. the cutting edge research is being done at the department of molecular bias science

school at the university of california at davis professor. invited techno inside for the final phase of the trial. picks up the story behind the science of sugar. it's early in the morning for this small group of college students they're not here for a class they are subjects in one of the most advanced sugar studies to date. in just a few moments they will each undergo a magnetic resonance imaging exam doctors are most interested in what's been happening inside their bodies over the past ten weeks. guys good morning morning i guess right bright and early for your standards so really get you guys

dressed in the scanner who's who's on first. this is day seventy four work. the final day of the study and benjamin lamb angela osborne and lore are ready for their m.r.i. . dr john mcgann is one of the world's leading specialists in diagnostic radiology he is supervising the imaging part of the trial. lore is a senior at u.c. davis he's a science student who decided to volunteer for the summer study if i remember. things. like the other subjects more had a previous scan start of the trial doctors captured the before image of his abdominal region this morning they'll get. it so it's quite as fair is.

something i've never done before and i think through this two week i really don't know about myself. and this technology is being used to chart what happens to. internal organs when sugary drinks are consumed those results cannot be calculated by scales and are not visible to the naked eye that's where the m.r.i. comes in dr mcgann showed us exactly what he's looking for in the scan the key i don't know we're looking at in this study is this structure here sort of a little darker grayer structure which is the over what we're trying to do we do need different m.r.i. sequences and then later on we go ahead and we calculate the amount of fat with the livable pre and post study and why is liver fat porton here liver fatties

important because it's sorta helps and regulates a lot of different things within the body glucose metabolism it also regulates the monitor trying to list price that we have circulating within the body so it's actually sort of a clearing agent you know for a lot of different things here produces cholesterol so there's all sorts of different things the liver does and in order to really get a sense for this particular subject you'd have to look at the scans exactly and we look at that both at the libbers so we calculate well how much bad is there in the liver before we started this study and then all this and we can go back again at the end of this study and we know exactly what our bad calculations are how much fat is there at the end of this study and then we compare those two is it decreased is that the same or said increase to many of our study patients this latest sugar research should help professor stan hope and her team answer two important

questions about sugary diets dr stand up tell me about the sugar study that you have going what specifically are you looking to find out the first question is. does sugar cause undermine our health. but by that i mean increased risk factors for cardiovascular disease so such as what for example cholesterol big that's the most obvious one does cardiovascular disease increase when you consume a high sugar diet even if you don't gain weight is the sugar have a specific the fact that other foods such as bread mill rice do not have now your your current study is focusing on subjects that are relatively young and healthy why if we prove in a relatively young healthy. person that sugar increases risk

factors with. have shown that this is a problem. stan hope's team will follow a total of sixty subjects over the course of ten weeks the group techno was permitted to follow are all young mid twenty's and apparently healthy they are excited to see the finish line and exhausted from their dietary regimen this study was hard food wise because being around your family. there's always fried chicken and mashed potatoes and you have to stick with it released to be tempted to. eat other food you're not supposed to be to not supposed to so i would say the hardest part is just the discipline that it's been quite a challenge for me. because i look for. people who likes to cook.

whenever i smell their cooking i just want to eat their food. through the course of the study researchers strictly controlled the food consumed by each subject specifically the amount of sugar and calories in their diet the study is a single blind study meaning only the scientists know who is getting what one group of fifteen subjects will be giving beverages sweetened by high fructose corn syrup the sweetener commonly found in soft drinks a second group will get beverages sweetened by the artificial sweetener aspartame to other groups will get the same drinks but they will be allowed to eat as much food as they'd like the idea is to see if high fructose corn syrup causes cardiovascular problems and if weight gain is the morse high fructose corn syrup is the sweetener used in the majority of those so-called sugary drinks like soda it was invented in one thousand nine hundred seventy one by japanese scientists took a saki. the scientists from japan took corn starch and they

added. enzyme or acid to turn it into a glucose syrup the scientists in japan added another and zine and that turned a bunch of the glucose is in the glucose syrup into fructose since narrow you have a very sweet fructose are up. you can add that glucose syrup and that fructose syrup together and get any kind of combination of glucose to fructose that you want the beverage industry began using high fructose corn syrup in one thousand nine hundred eighty because it is twenty to seventy percent less expensive than sugar that's when consumption of soda began to soar according to the u.s. department of agriculture from one thousand nine hundred eighty to two thousand consumption went up by forty percent to four hundred forty cans of soda

a year per person in india sales increased ten percent a year since one thousand ninety eight now up to eleven leaders per person each year also in the one nine hundred eighty s. supersizing begin scientists say that's when obesity diabetes and heart disease rates went up. so what does it take to pull off a study like this well for starters it takes food and a lot of it now this package contains a fourth pre-prepared meals how it's divided is determined by the research team but we're talking about breakfast lunch and dinner all prepared for each and every one of the subjects that equals two hundred and ten individual meals per person over a ten week period. garlock you can post their sugar beverage. there. it is the final night of the study this is what dinner looks like in a science lab. everything from the main course to the

sugary beverage has been measured and recorded the amount of sweetener a subject is given comes in the drink the food supplies the daily intake of calories you lor will get to enjoy his meal. then like the other subjects he will be tested with a device that measures how fast his body burns fat on this diet no exercise is allowed that would burn calories and skew results. ok ok it's simply measuring oxygen consumption and c o two production through your breath yes so all's you're doing and putting a face mask on are subjects with a long list that leads from their mouth. to the analyzer.

and so it's a c o two carbon dioxide and oxygen analyzer so it's just taking the air that the subjects is exhaling and telling us ok this much oxygen this much c o two and from there then we do production and consumption values from back. fat burning it's technically called fat oxidation can be calculated this test will determine if fat burning in the liver is impaired when the liver is overloaded with the sugar creek tokes there will be one more test tonight. each of the subjects blood will be drawn to vials worth. and taken to the lab first sophisticated round of blood analysis.

some just removing the bottom layer which contains or lifted fraction dr candace price is in charge of the liquid slab lifted our fats found in the blood her work is key to the study for here in the lab your job is to look at the blood of the study subjects and determine whether or not there's fat present not blood right now show me how some of this process. the work requires a steady hand blood samples are reduced to components and separated into the different fats scientists are focusing on including cholesterol which tube in its tube is one subject from one time point there are thousands of blood samples that require meticulous care and so for example this is drop twenty five meaning at. one of the time points draw twenty five blood was taken and this will

represent that time for one person from one person each person in the study will have blood drawn two hundred twenty six times over the course of the study once the samples are prepared dr price will use what's called a capillary tube to spread the liquid across the glass plate her number these from lab right and. repeat that across the four lines here. for the final step in the process some special effects are needed ok so someone can have lights for me. ok. and this is a u.v. light which will allow us to see the fluorescent never to spray them with the force and die which is what will allow us to say that ok about the dye we can't see anything so here this bottom fraction is the free quest for all and as we move up the plate we see the dr was right fraction here. at the very top of the plate which doesn't seem to be quite as abundant in this particular so samples but here we see

the questionable mystery so those are three limits that are really important for arthrosclerosis which is exactly a risk factor yes the plates work much like a chart that allows researchers to see what kind of cardiovascular risk may be coming from the sweetener by the time the study is completed we'll have a strong database to work from but the effects of the sweetener can be detected almost immediately so how quickly do you do you see the results in people well we know for sure from our previous study our second and i age funded study it was only two weeks long our average subject their age was twenty five two weeks and you saw an increase in what. the risk factors for cardiovascular disease this study we called our dose response study because we actually fed four levels of high

fructose corn syrup zero. ten percent seventeen and a half percent and twenty five percent of energy requirement and we saw. a dose perfect stairstep response for cholesterol for triglycerides. for your acid so as you increased the intake your risk factors and right to take in in la and what was very important was that even the ten percent group showed increases. significant increases compared to their baseline level that was only a quibble and tell him be a route there are research subjects one and a half cans of soda a day so basically a half a can of breakfast a half a can lunch a half a can

a dinner was the equivalent. again a surprise i would not have expected to see significant increases in wrists factors with only a half a can per meal but in two weeks i would have believed it could have happened in six months but i didn't know we would see it so quickly the study group that drink an artificial sweetener aspartame instead of high fructose corn syrup experienced none of those risk factors what causes the increase in cardiovascular risk back in radiology dr mcginn explained how high fructose corn syrup affects the body. so the anatomy that we're really looking at is a structure here which is the liver ok and what we do we take specialized samurai through there and we're able to calibrate the exact amount of fat within the liver which is important to the study and what we see here is two different sets of

factor we call this the subcutaneous fat this would be this sort of fat that somebody could pinch on somebody if you wanted to but then inside the muscle here we have the visceral fat the visceral fat is the white structure we see here so we're trying to look at the difference between the visceral fat and the so teeniest that there are differences in. the health risks of deposition subcutaneous first as visceral yes so we found it in the study patients are proved tows diets bait and actually forming more visceral fat and so. continuous fan so that some to this study and then there's other metabolic the best that we found out of what we think of fat is fat but actually in this study that isn't all the same so your study was the first one to show that what you eat can impact where fat is deposited on the body whether it's like the fat here versus fat

elsewhere is that right and to the best of my knowledge yes we were the first and that's important because we know for sure there's a big difference between the a facts of where our fat is stored and. it's our health why why is fructose so much worse that is such an important question the enzyme for fructose is not in communication with the liver in fact it's always turned on it's always working hard therefore pretty much every single fructose molecule that goes through the liver failure of the part of a gets pulled in the liver and gets sent down the metabolic pathway the liver does the best it can using all this fructose when there's still too

much substrate around the liver band turns it into fact and our ancestors it was easy there wasn't much fructose around no problem but now we have great big thirty two ounce sodas that overloads the liver with for toast so now what happens with this fat well the first thing extra fat in the liver does is cause the liver to send it out into the blood it sends it out into with little packages that include lots and lots of triglycerides but also includes cholesterol immediately blood triglycerides go up but eventually the cholesterol levels go up too high fructose corn syrup appears to be behind these problems but dr stan hope says sucrose any sugar made from sugar cane or sugar beet may also increase liver fat she suggests limiting intake of all types of sugars and

sweeteners brown white or artificial the best advice is to stick with mother nature get your sweet fix from fresh fruit the only way you can over each sugar in nature is the eat a lot of honey that is the one naturally occurring food at super high and sugar everything. else pretty low levels even and sugar came where we get our commercial sucrose is only ten percent sucrose so if you were to rely on the sugar cane to get all your sugar you'd be naing for a long time results from the study will take time to be completed and calculated for the students who completed this leg of the research there are more immediate concerns i'm going straight home and having a child norm is pizza delivered to me fresh and hot out of the oven. i can't wait oh i think radio this just started. i was going to start with a hope piece

a large piece of the hamburger. and then just whatever i could get my hand. i'm really proud of but it's finished i have been waiting for this for two months i've been waiting for this because when you think about that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death so we're not talking about this real obscure death and it doubles and so instead you know ten people now there's twenty people dying now it's thousands and thousands and thousands of extra deaths. that can be attributed to that high level of sugar huge cardiovascular disease that's our number one killer already we have obese children now we have children with fatty liver we have children with diabetes that never used to happen but children didn't used to have access to sugar breakfast lunch and

dinner and a snack. extra added chicken isn't just found in sweetened drinks it's in much of the process for you to be consume the world health organization recommends added sugars make up less than ten percent of. daily diets but modern diets are often filled with processed foods containing high levels of. the world health organizations call to cut these products has gone out the question is who will listen to techno. time. the rain forest of the state we continue on our current way we won't have whole race within twenty thirty years from now so you're essentially trying to recreate

the ecosystem but under controlled conditions the nice thing though is so the problem still doesn't answer the wind because of the great barrier reef still sizeable but we're going to start now i mean you get everyone behind the solution. this time on hold is iraq. for years japanese have gone into countries lush course for what they call. green or forest baby thirteen years ago dr lee was one of the first to conduct research on forest bathing he concluded that the essential oils the trees produce to protect themselves from germs and bugs can boost the human immune system but the a lot of financial side or essential oil is found in the forest my research has shown that far is trying to size reduces stress hormones and relax us in the future the time may come when doctors prescribe the forest in the state of medicine. as china's rapid economic development spills over

into other asian nations. people in power investigates the consequences the neighboring laos. poverty stricken and hungry for foreign investment can this communist republic reconcile the needs of its people with the demands liberation benefactor. laos on the borders of empire at this time on al-jazeera. new yorkers are very receptive to it because it is such an international city they are very interested in that global perspective that al-jazeera who lives. down jordan doha with a quick reminder of the top stories here on al-jazeera another hurricane is battering central america as a category one system that's getting stronger.