If you have an hour and a half to spare, this is an amazingly thorough presentation on sugar as a toxin by Dr. Lustig, who is a pediatric hormone disorder specialist and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine (one of the best medical schools in the country). It's been viewed over 2.5 million times and is quite the popular video on Youtube.
If you don't have an hour and a half to spare, here it is, summed up the best I could (and I also added a little extra research I've done since watching it):
The First Law of Thermodynamics has long been interpreted to apply to the human body in this way: If you eat it, you better burn it, or you're going to store it. Dr. Lustig doesn't believe this is true.
His take, or the way he says we should look at it: If you're going to store it (an obligate weight gain set up by a biochemical process) and you expect to burn it (normal energy expenditure for normal quality of life), then you're going to have to eat it. He says this changes the way we look at it. Calories in and calories out then become secondary to weight gain, or the biochemical process, which is primary. This alleviates the person who is overweight or obese from the guilt society inflicts on them for being "gluttonous." Like he says, there are obese six month olds. There is a real story here that is much more than just "people being gluttonous."
Like I touched on in my last post about sugar, Dr. Lustig explained that we're fatter than ever (and also sicker than ever) but eat less fat than ever. Now it's not a perfect science experiment, but it should at least make sense that it's probably not the fat in our diets making us fat then. At least, not as long as we're eating the right fats (which is actually my next goal and something I've already been reading and writing about).
As the quantity of fat in our food has decreased, the taste has also decreased. To make up for this, manufacturers add sugar (most likely in the form of high fructose corn syrup).
Dr. Lustig says sugar is not just an empty calorie. More than empty calories, he thinks sugar is actually a poison. He says that the extremely large amount of sugar the average American consumes is responsible not only for the obesity epidemic, but for many or most of the Western-specific diseases like heart disease, hypertension, many common cancers, etc.
High fructose corn syrup has become quite possibly one of the most targeted and vilified food additives to date that started out viewed as the healthy alternative to sugar, but in an ironic turn of fate, products now boast labels like, "Now made with real sugar!" or "No high fructose corn syrup!" as if table sugar is the healthy alternative to HFCS. It's not. Lustig argues that sugar is sugar is sugar.
Dr. Lustig says HFCS and sugar are pretty much identical - both bad, both poisonous. Sucrose is table sugar. It's made of fructose and glucose. The fructose is the sweet part and it is what distinguishes carbs like potatoes and bread (which have glucose) from sugar. Fructose in and of itself isn't a terrible thing. After all, it's what is found naturally in fruits and vegetables. If we got all of our sugar from these natural sources, we would be consuming only about 15 grams per day. Prior to World War II, the average fructose consumption was anywhere from 16 to 24 grams per day. From 1977 to 1988, it jumped to an average of 37 grams per day. In 1994, about 55 grams per day on average. And today's adolescents average about 73 grams per day.
The problem isn't that we consume fructose. The problem is that we consume massive amounts of it every day because it is now added to most processed foods and Americans eat diets very high in processed foods. If you believe what Dr. Lustig says, this is the single worst component of processed foods and the biggest reason to avoid it completely. Without processed foods, as I've discovered over the past three months, it is very easy to control the amount of sugar in your diet. With processed foods? Virtually impossible.
Now getting back to the First Law of Thermodynamics, Lustig says (and others agree) that eating an equal amount of sugar calories to any other calories won't produce an equal reaction in your body. In other words, you can eat 100 calories of something very sweet and it's going to do something totally different in your body than 100 calories of, say, chicken. All calories are not created equal. The fructose in sugar (and HFCS) is metabolized by the liver. The glucose, on the other hand, is metabolized by every cell in the body. When you eat sugar, you tax your liver much more than if you were consuming another food, like starch. To make matters even worse, if you consume that sugar in liquid form, like so many Americans do in the form of soda and juice, it hits the liver quicker which affects how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose. An interesting point to keep in mind: we know that the job of the liver is to rid the body of toxins. Is it any coincidence, then, that all the fructose goes to your liver? Perhaps it's our body's way of telling us something that we've not wanted to hear yet.
In studies done on mice, when fructose hits the liver in large quantities quickly, a large portion of it is converted to fat. This creates insulin resistance which, in turn, creates obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. There is even speculation that it could be a big component of many cancers.
And like I touched on in my post about HFCS, the brain cannot properly tell your body you are satisfied, no matter how much fructose you consume. Fructose doesn’t stimulate the release of insulin. Without insulin, there is no leptin. Without leptin, the brain can’t “hear” a signal that you are satisfied and you will just keep on eating. This is why Lustig says we need to stop blaming obese people for being obese. Sugar causes us to lose that instinctual ability to determine when we should stop eating.
Where there is obesity, diabetes and metabolic disorder, there is also increased rates of cancer. It's not controversial to suggest that being obese or having type 2 diabetes or metabolic disorder increases your risk factor for cancer. There is a definitive correlation there that has yet to be completely understood. But if sugar increases your chances of becoming obese or developing diabetes and metabolic disorder dramatically, then it stands to reason that sugar, then, increases your risk factor for getting cancer.
As for me, I have been shooting for zero added sugar at home and I don't think this is a radical way to live at all. This means I'm trying to get all of my sugar from completely natural sources like fruit. To sweeten my smoothies, I use bananas and/or dates. If I'm craving sweets, I'll grab an apple. If my sweets craving gets out of control, I make myself a juice in my juicer. While I don't completely buy that it's some health wonder to juice like some people do (because, afterall, didn't God give us the whole fruit for a reason? Eating an entire apple gives us fiber and other goodies we don't get if we juice), I believe that making a big ole' glass of juice made of an apple/several carrots/three big handfuls of spinach is still much better than unwrapping a candy bar, and since it fulfills a craving, I'm going with it. In the end, it's at least a completely natural form of sugar and I try to keep it in moderation.
It's impossible to never, ever have added sugar. Well, maybe not impossible but very unlikely if you are doing anything at all outside of your home. If I'm out and about and have a coffee or a cookie, I have to be very mindful when I get home not to take the sugar train to sugar coma (like I did this past weekend). The only way I can really do this is to have no sugar in my house. Because if there's sugar, as an addict, I'll go a little crazy. :/ The rule I've given myself, and maybe one that will work for you if this is something you're interested in, is that I can have a little added sugar here and there in social settings as long as it ends when I get home. A 90/10 philosophy is one that suits me well. I try to eat as healthy as possible 90 percent of the time so that the 10 percent of the time I indulge with friends, I can feel confident that I'm not permanently harming my body. A little sugar here and there doesn't hurt anyone. It's the quantity in which it's consumed in modern day America.
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