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Forget the chocolates — go with the flowers.

Dr. David Katz, Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center, puts Valentine's Day into healthy perspective: “Just in time for Valentine’s Day, epidemiology has given “sweetheart” a whole new meaning with a study demonstrating an association between sugar intake and heart disease. In this case, “sweet” heart is not a term of endearment; it’s a bad prognosis. Sweet heart, suddenly- you suck.”

“In deference to the holiday, we might repine the dispassion of epidemiologists inclined to replace boxes of chocolates with prescriptions for statins. But epidemiologists, presumably, need love too, even if they have an odd way of showing it. So we’ll let them be, and move on to the study and its implications.”

“Like much nutritional epidemiology, the study in question was observational. There was no intervention, no randomized assignment to sugar or placebo (historically referred to as “sugar pills,” which clearly won’t do these days). This study, conducted jointly by researchers from the CDC, Emory University, and Harvard, simply used population data about dietary intake to compare variation in percent calories from added sugar, and heart disease mortality.”