All that sugar is the fastest way to put yourself at risk for heart disease — and you can see the damage in just two weeks.

Forty-eight volunteers between the ages of 18 and 40 were asked to spend five weeks limiting added sugars to a single eight-ounce cup of fruit juice a day, bringing them all down to an equal level, sugar-wise.

Then, they were divided into three groups and given 25 percent of their daily calories from one of three types of sugar: glucose, fructose, or high-fructose corn syrup.

For the HFCS group, that’s the equivalent of 3.7 cans of soda a day for women and 4.4 cans for men — a lot of soda (and a lot of sugar), but still less than what you’ll find in a “Double Gulp” at your local 7-11.

After two weeks on this government-approved sugar high, the volunteers who had been getting their calories from fructose and high-fructose corn syrup had significant bumps in their levels of deadly triglycerides as well as a rise in LDL cholesterol.

They even had more apolipoprotein-B, a protein linked to plaque in the arteries, according to the study that will appear this fall in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

If that’s what two weeks of all that sugar will do to you, imagine what’ll happen to your body in two months, two years or two decades — if you even make it that far.

The study also offers more proof that you don’t have to eat fat to send your cholesterol levels through the roof. Sugar will do that for you all by itself. Natural fats, on the other hand, can actually help keep cholesterol levels under control as well as lower your blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Yet the same government that wants you to eat more sugar is constantly urging you to avoid fat — putting you on a collision course with diabetes, heart disease, and a premature demise.

The lesson here: No matter what Uncle Sam says, no amount of added sugars are an acceptable part of the diet.

I know, you can’t always avoid them… and everyone is going to indulge here and there.

But as a daily ration? Forget it.

What marketing genius ever tagged canned beverages as "soft drinks?" Somebody softheaded. Let’s face facts. These are hard drinks. They’re hard on your gut. They’re hard on your body. And they’re real tough on your blood sugar levels, leading you down the hard road to type 2 diabetes.

A long-term study sponsored by the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University showed that women who drank more sugar-sweetened drinks were at greater risk of developing diabetes.

Women who drank two or more soft drinks per day had a 24 percent increase in diabetes risk compared with women who drank less than one soft drink per month, based on questionnaires the subjects filled out and 10 years of follow-up. The increase was even greater — 31 percent — for those who had two or more sweetened fruit drinks a day.

This isn’t surprising. The average American consumes 100 grams of fructose a day, most of this from high-fructose corn syrup that’s been added to processed foods and beverages, like soft drinks. There are only 5 grams of fructose in an apple. Plus, the fructose in an apple comes to you in a whole food package, accompanied by the numerous synergistic co-nutrients that support and balance its proper assimilation and use by your body.

Some people think they’re gaining by drinking something with a juicy piece of healthy fruit on the label. Not necessarily so. Packaged fruit drinks can have as many calories as those hard soft drinks. And they carry the same link to type 2 diabetes.

Better to go with the real thing. Fruit fresh off the vine, bush or tree. That was the prescription of another new study, from England. It showed people with higher levels of vitamin C in the blood — which is a sign they eat more vegetables and fruit — showed a decreased risk of developing diabetes over the 12 years of follow-up in this study.

There are a couple of possibilities here. The fruit-and-vegetable effect might be a result of the overall diet keeping pounds off for those people, thereby decreasing their risk of diabetes. It also helps that eating fruits and vegetables leads to a greater intake of antioxidants, which can reduce the risk of developing diabetes.

To cut down on your soft drink consumption, try this: mix real fruit juice half-and-half with seltzer water; get used to that and that other junk will taste too sweet — you might lose your appetite for it.