HOLEY donut, Batman! Could it be that having two sugars with your cup of tea or hoeing into that after-dinner cupcake won't make you fat? Praise the sugar gods!

Let's not get too carried away, but new research suggests sugar has been given a bad rap throughout history.

According to The Australian, food scientists claim new federal draft dietary guidelines stick to nutritional "dogma" like a sticky date pudding and lump sugar in the fattening category along with fats and salt.

Not true, says Professor Jennie Brand-Miller, author of The Low GI Diet and recipient this month of an Order of Australia.

"Unlike saturated fats, trans fats, salt and alcohol, sugar doesn't actually do any direct harm to the human body," she told The Australian.

Consultant dietitian Bill Shrapnel, deputy chairman of the Sydney University Nutrition Research Foundation, also debunks the newly-released draft Australian Dietary Guidelines prepared by a National Health & Medical Research Council working group which recommends people limit their intake of foods and drinks containing fats, salt, alcohol and sugar.

Mr Shrapnel said: "Sugar has been unfairly demonised in the national dietary guidelines."

Sugar certainly has its champions.

"Carbohydrates are the dieter's best friend. Sugar and other carbohydrates provide four calories per gram, the same as protein. Fats have more than twice the calories - nine per gram and alcohol seven calories per gram," reports the Deccan Herald in its article, "Does sugar make you fat?".

So, that's it then? We can forget worrying about our sugar intake? Well, no. It's all about moderation. Sugar in itself is not fattening in small enough doses, but take too much and you could create problems for yourself.

"Excess glucose is the first problem, and it involves a very simple concept. Any time you have filled your body with more fuel than it actually needs (and this is very easy to do when eating foods with high sugar content), your liver's sugar storage capacity is exceeded," said head trainer for Pacific Elite Fitness, Ben Greenfield.

"When the liver is maximally full, the excess sugar is converted by the liver into fatty acids (that's right - fat!) and returned to the bloodstream, where is taken throughout your body and stored (that's right - as fat!) Wherever you tend to store adipose fat cells, including, but not limited to, the popular regions of the stomach, hips, butt, and breasts," he said.

A YouTube clip demonstrates this process in "The Sugar Fat Connection" from American Freedom Radio.

So watch how much you eat, but as Sydney restaurateur Lucio Galletto tells The Australian: "A beautiful dessert with different types of sugar makes you feel good. Sugar is not why you get fat."