Doctor finds what may be the secret to good health

There’s a new diet study that actually confirms what we’ve been hearing lately.

“Dr. Aseem Malhotra is author of a new study in the “British Journal of Sport Medicine,” which finds diet is much more important than exercise when it comes to good health,” CBS News reported.

I looked up Dr. Malhotra; he’s a British cardiologist who for years has been saying that what causes heart attacks isn’t fat, but the added sugar in packaged foods and soft drinks.

The sugar appears to cause inflammation &#8212 what amounts to little pimples in your arteries. It’s called Arterial Acne. It sounds fairly disgusting.

As for diabetes?

“For every 150 calories of sugar consumption above our normal quota, typical of a can of cola, that was associated with an 11-fold increase in the risk of Type 2 diabetes independent of body weight, independent of physical activity levels,” Malhotra said.

His latest study concluded that poor diet contributes to more disease than physical inactivity, smoking, and alcohol combined. So exercise does you no good unless you get the added sugar out of your diet, by which he means all added sugar, even the supposedly healthy kind.

“Including sugars that you find in fruit juice, smoothies, syrups, and honey,” Malhotra said.

The good news is that you can eat healthy forms of fat. Dr. Malhotra himself has at least four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil a day. But he doesn’t take the extra virgin thing too far because he also says that men are 45 percent less likely to develop heart disease if they have sex at least twice a week.

So bottom line &#8212 make whoopee not cookies.