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Is Sugar Toxic?
a_hanso tips an article by Gary Taubes in the NYTimes Magazine that evaluates claims from Dr. Robert Lustig's virally popular lecture on the negative effects of sugar on peoples' health. (YouTube video of the lecture.) Taubes discusses the science behind the claims and the odd willingness of people to accept Lustig's arguments without further inspection. Quoting:
"When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment 'surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,' not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?"
I just posted something similar, even more, water is really toxic without involving drowning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
All sugar is Organic. It's all made of long or short chains of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Sucrose C12H22O11
Glucose C6H12O6
Fructose C6H12O6
Lactose C12H22O11
Galactose C6H12O6
Maltose C12H22O11
Can't see anything non Organic.
Everything is toxic. It depends on the dose as to when it reaches toxic levels. For sugar, the LD50 is >10,000 mg per kg of body weight. In comparison, caffeine's LD50 is 100 mg/kg and nicotine's is 1 mg/kg. "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." Paracelsus, the father of toxicology.
I'm quite certain that pediatric endocrinologist from UCSF understands the technical definition of toxin. I believe he was using it to create attention to the problem and to make a point. And it's not entirely inaccurate either. His argument is that #1 the dosage in the average American diet is too high, and #2 toxins don't always cause acute problems. LD50 is a measure of acute toxicity. As you pointed out, nictotine has an LD50 of 1 mg/kg. Does that mean taking it in at a lower dosage over a long period of time is healthy for you? Does that then make it NOT a toxin?
He also made it very clear in his lecture that fructose is a chronic toxin. Did ANYONE criticizing this theory actually listen to the entire lecture??
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Taube's article is pretty long. It's still much faster to read it than to watch Lustig's whole presentation. If you can, do both, of course. If you can't or won't WTFV, then RTFA. If you can't or won't RTFA, then here's a summary.
Yes, too much of anything is toxic. Duh. That's not what Lustig or Taube are talking about. They're also not talking about "empty calories" -- the consumption of lots of sugar without other nutrients, meaning your overall calorie intake is higher, so you get fat and have obesity-related problems.
What they're talking about is the question of whether fructose directly causes health problems of its own accord -- namely, things like fatty liver and insulin resistance, things which may in turn raise the risk of diabetes and cancer independent of whether you get fat.
What Taube will tell you, that Lustig won't, is that the research is not conclusive. It all shows very strong correlation, but that of course isn't causation. And that's caused all these disputes of what the real problem is, particularly whether it's fat or sugar that's responsible.
Taube says that we should be considering the possibility that it's both; or at least, abandoning the idea that it must be either-or. Similarly, on the question of whether it's sucrose or HFCS that's worse, he suggests that they're so similar (both are glucose-fructose mixtures in nearly equal proportions) that they're probably both just as bad as each other.
Too much of anything is toxic; but (Taube says) because the research is inconclusive, nobody can say how much fructose is "too much". It's an established fact that short-term, high-dose fructose intake causes these problems (fatty liver et al.), but it's not known what long-term intake at the levels currently typical in the US will do.
The circumstantial evidence suggests that it will cause the same problems, eventually. And of course various people (like Lustig) have seized on this circumstantial stuff as damning evidence. But just because they're overstating the case, doesn't mean they're wrong, says Taube.