In any business, it only makes sense to cater to your hard core clientele. That’s why, for instance, the health club industry pays pollsters to find out about those who use their facilities 100 days or more out of the year.

As a result, health club owners know that their most committed members tend to be male rather than female, but only slightly so; have a bachelor’s degree, or even more education; and are smack in the middle of middle age, about 43 years old.

That they know such specifics makes me a bit envious. If I possessed similar stats about you, creating this column would be less of a crap shoot.

Today’s title, for instance, makes an appeal to the healthy, the group I assume to be my “hard core clientele.” I can only hope that such a title does not cause the less than healthy or hard core to cease reading.

I can only hope that for a really good reason: while the results of a recent study create a new concern for the healthy, they confirm an old one for others.

Published last October in the journal Clinical Science and performed at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, the research studied the effect of sugar on 25 subjects for 24 weeks.

For 12 of those weeks, the subjects, 14 of which were deemed to be healthy, ate the same number of calories every day, 6 percent of which came from sugar. For the other 12 weeks, the subjects, 11 of which were deemed to be “less than healthy” because they suffered from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), chowed down on the same number of calories, but now 26 percent of the cals came from sugar.

After 12 weeks on the high-sugar diet, the subjects with NAFLD showed the negative changes in fat metabolism that you might expect, which increased their risk of heart disease. But the same negative changes also occurred in the originally “healthy” subjects.

In only 12 weeks!

Such a bombshell begets review: In one quarter of a year eating a diet about one quarter sugar changed the livers of the healthy subjects to such a degree that their livers now resembled the livers of those subjects previously diagnosed with NAFLD.

In an article about their research for Medical News Today, the researchers explain that a daily diet of 26 percent sugar is “unlikely” for most adults.

I read that and want to scream, “So what?”

Here’s what I worry about: Highly processed grains — such as the ones found in most cookies, crackers, white breads, and standard pastas — can wreak the same sort of havoc on your blood sugar as added sugars. Because of that, it is likely — probably highly likely — that most adults consume far more than 26 percent of their daily calories through a combination of sugars, highly processed grains, and other carbohydrates that really are the metabolic equivalent to sugar.

In fact, a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and published in 2015 by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition assessed the shopping patterns of more than 150,000 households and found that 63 percent of the total calories purchased come from such highly processed foods.

Equally unsettling is the admission of University of Surrey researchers that children and teens can often consume upward of 26 percent daily calories as sugar because they generally ingest more sugar-sweetened beverages and candy than adults. And children and teens eating like this are just as likely to do so for 12 years as 12 weeks.

This situation “raises concern for the future health of the younger population, especially in view of the alarmingly high prevalence of NAFLD in children and teenagers, and [the]exponential rise of fatal liver disease in adults,” according to Bruce Griffin, a professor of nutritional metabolism at the University of Surrey who took part in the research.

In short, no specific age or specific amount of exercise or otherwise clean eating makes you immune to the adverse effects of too much sugar.

But if you do tend to eat too much sugar, take heart. Its bad effects can be reversed rather quickly.

For instance, in a study published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association last August the elimination of fructose from the diets of obese children not only reduced overall body fat levels but also the amount of fat in the liver. Furthermore, the researchers feel the elimination of fructose would effect adults the same way.

Another cause for encouragement from the study: The reduction in the fat levels of the obese children occurred in only nine days.