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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?"
Sugar's not really food. It's a drug. The first drug of addiction for most people on the planet.
Oh please, tell me you have a source for that statement.
Calling sugar "toxic" is probably a plot to demean the word "toxic" and make tobacco less regulated.
+1 tinfoil hat award.
Nice.
protip: People are inherently addicted to stuff that their body can break down into ATP. This includes fats and sugars (including sucrose and high fructose corn syrup). We call that stuff "food".
He's only really calling fructose toxic, and only when it isn't ingested with enough fiber to blunt its absorption. (So an orange is fine, but pulp-free orange juice will slowly kill you.)
In fact, I suspect the drinking of pulp-free orange juice over a span of 80-90 years is responsible for the near 100% mortality over that time span.
Almost all that we eat is converted to sugar by our own bodies. Protein is the exception. The catch is that carmelization occurs and this end product clogs our internal organs. It is one reason why older peoples eyes don't look as clear as when they were young. So yes sugar does help to kill you and there is nothing at all that you can do about it other than a mild state of starvation all your life. Prevention may extend life but it ruins the quality of life to such a degree that one almost must be perverted to maintain that degree of hunger.
Whet we are seeing are people looking for a way to get attention and make money simply by spouting nonsense. Think about the extent of this phony evangelism. How many people have made money, one way or another, by selling diets and diet products? And every one of those diets and diet products was hot air with a liberal dose of lies melted in to the alloy. Yet simply lying and stealing money with false health claims is not enough to be put in prison these days. And the suckers keep right on lining up to lose their money. Whether it's the daily miracle cure for arthritis or the miracle weight loss method it is all nonsense.
There is no Magic. The amount of sugar, be it sucrose, fructose or glucose of dextrose in the average North American Diet is a major problem, but processed of not; fructose is fructose, sucrose is sucrose etc, the chemical does not change, nor does your bodies reaction to it.
RTFA isn't your strong suit, is it?
Sugar is a (roughly) 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose, and it's the fructose that Lustig claims is toxic.
That said, armchair nerd pundits like us have no place to try to debunk such claims
I'll admit, I'm too lazy to watch a presentation. However:
“It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years.
Yeah, no. Sorry - obesity is about the calories. You know why it's skyrocketed? Because we've become a nation of office whores, sitting behind a desk all day while still eating 2k+ calories to support an active lifestyle that we don't live.
Calories in > calories out == fat bastards.
It is that simple.
Taubes claim is that obese individuals don't consume excess calories or more calories than lean individuals, but that the percentage of carb intake is higher and that the source of calories causes fat gain. His primary support for this is studies using self-reported calorie intakes, which is utterly useless since people will typically under-estimate their calorie intake by 20-60% http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7985624 , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10745278 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9312790 combined with vastly over-estimating their energy expenditure: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21178922 Taubes' theory requires that there are magic insulin fairies that come in the night and add fat mass to innocent overweight and obese individuals who accidentally had some carbs. The alternative hypothesis - that people lie to themselves and don't know how much food they actually need or what's in the stuff they're eating is much simpler, neh?
Bad press.
People are addicted to food. The withdrawal symptoms are worse than for any other drug.
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.
...which still doesn't alter the fact that you have to EAT IT before it's added to that BIG FAT GUT of yours.
The nature of your metabolism only addresses how hard or easy it will be for you to handle a particular sort of binge.
Ultimately, it's still about nothing more than the math and your own strength of will.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Tobacco is still one of the leading causes of death in America and on Earth.
That's not strictly true. The truth is that tobacco increases the risk of contracting several of the leading causes of death. Not the same thing. Heart disease, for instance, is the leading cause of death in the US, with cancer a close 2nd. What certain statisticians do is attribute every death by these causes to tobacco, without accounting for the people that died of them without ever smoking. (You know what they say about statistics, right?)
Keep in mind, also, that it is the facts about the dangers of smoking that drive people to quit. Draconian laws restricting smokers have little if any effect, just as total bans on marijuana and other unsanctioned drugs have failed to have much impact on their consumption. In fact, it can be argued that increasing the authoritative restrictions actual encourage teens to smoke as an symbolic rebellious reaction to authority.
The federal government now also generates significant revenues from smokers, so it is in their interest to keep people smoking. That's the motivation behind their efforts to stop or slow the distribution of "vapor" nicotine delivery systems, which have only a tiny fraction of the dangerous toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke (recall that nicotine itself is not a carcinogen).
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If the sugar lobby is so powerful, why is HFCS used in everything instead? Obviously they've got nothing on the corn lobbyists.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Calories in > calories out == fat bastards.
It is that simple.
It's not that simple. Calories is the measure of how much the temperature of water is raised by burning a substance. Gasoline burns pretty hot. So does Magnesium. Eating lots of Gasoline and Magnesium will not make your fat even though they are high calorie. Similarly many foods are high in calories when burnt to test their calorie content but the body can't digest them easily therefore they don't make you fat.
I would be nice if we could find some other way of measuring how fat a food is likely to make you than this only slightly correlated measurement of heat called calories.
They banned smoking in bars and restaurants around here, and maybe all those people are smoking other places, but my shirt doesn't smell like smoke any longer. I find it very hard to believe that consumption hasn't gone down, and maybe some people have quit/not started who otherwise would be smoking today. I'm sure not getting any second hand anymore and I love it.
Why were you going into bars and restaurants where people smoked, if you found it so unpleasant? There are more restaurants that do not allow smoking pretty much everywhere you go in the country. Before they banned restaurant/bar smoking here in Virginia, about 65% of all restaurants were already smoke-free. But good on you that the government has forced restaurant owners to provide an environment preferable to you, even if you didn't patronize them.
I've noticed several things that have happened as a result. One of my favorite restaurants (Milepost 5) went under entirely. They had a pretty regular clientele of smokers that would sit at the bar all night drinking (and eating), and they stopped coming. Another place nearby ignored the law for a while, separating the smokers from non, but eventually they sicked the cops on them, and they had to kick out their regulars.
There are a few places still ignoring the law and letting people smoke, mostly small bars and "dives" with loyal customers that like the way things are. I imagine they'll eventually get to all these places, and I'm sure I'll see more places shut down. A few of the larger ones (that have the space) have started putting up patio tents right off the bar, so patrons can bring their drinks "outside" to the tent to smoke. It's not ideal, but maybe it will keep a few of these innovative places in business.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
As a scientist, I like to base my opinions on evidence wherever possible.
Lustig makes strong points which are backed up by studies (cited in his lecture) and are consistent with known biochemical pathways (which he explains).
The vast majority of responses here are complete bunkum: anecdotal evidence, true facts which sound like they are relevant ("you can drown in water!"), and misrepresentation of his central point ("our bodies *need* glucose! He's crazy!")
If you disagree with his position and have evidence to back that up, I'll listen to what you have to say.
Everyone else - you're going to get really frustrated when I don't change my opinion because of what you say.
Let's let evidence and logic have it's moment here.
And heroin is "just" purified and crystallized extract of a poppy plant.
Are you saying that just because something "just" comes from a plant that it's got to be good for you?
When you eat fruit, you're getting a lot more than "just" sugar. When you eat "just" sugar, you're not.
Tell you what, I'll eat a balanced diet and you live on high fructose corn syrup and water. Let's see if one is "just" the same as the other. Let's see just how "toxic" sugar can be.
You'll say, "well of course. Everyone should eat a balanced diet." But what's passing in the industrialized groceries of 2011 as a "balanced" diet is creating a society of people who are so fat that before middle age they have to drive around on little scooters just to fill their basket with foods that have a higher concentration of "just" sugar than any civilization that ever walked the earth. And there are entire sections of town where there are absolutely no places to buy produce or simple grains and staples. None. Yet McDonalds and other purveyors of industrial food are on every other corner in those same neighborhoods. How healthy do you think the people in those neighborhoods are going to be?
Of course sugar isn't "toxic". But in the concentrations that it's currently showing up on our grocery shelves it is a major contributor to most of the diseases that are killing people (the ones that are obesity-related).
You are welcome on my lawn.
It isn't slightly correlated; it's directly causal. Citing the supposed caloric value of gasoline is just doublespeak. No legitimate biologist would consider the heat value of gasoline to be its dietary caloric value.
The dietary caloric value is the heat value of the digestible components of a substance; that's why the caloric value of celery is so low, even though it's total heat value is much higher - i.e., human beings cannot digest cellulose.
The dietary caloric value of the same celery is much higher for ruminants whose symbiotic digestive systems can derive energy from cellulose.
The big picture is this: no doubt overconsumption of sugar can have negative metabolic effects (e.g., elevated triglycerides). But the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, causing the 300 lb. american, is a simple thermodynamic imbalance; contemporary americans eat much more food than they need for their increasingly sedentary lifestyle. We need, as a nation, to eat less and do more.
Forget all the junk food you mention. How about plain old bread? When I bake bread at home, the ingredients are flour, water, yeast. I might use a pinch of sugar to start the yeast (so it doesn't go into the bread as sugar). Why is it, then, that when I go to the grocery store, every loaf of sliced sandwich bread has been flavored with "a touch of honey" or "a hint of molasses" -- all of which, if you read the ingredients, means HFCS plus some flavorings? Who on Earth decided that we wouldn't eat bread unless it was sweet? And bear in mind, I'm shopping for whole wheat bread -- including all the varieties of nine-grain, oat encrusted bread you can muster -- which is supposedly "the healthy kind." The unhealthy kind? Turns out that when you do eat a Big Mac, some 1/3 of the calories are in the bun.
Breakfast served all day!
Why is everyone parroting the trope that "everything is toxic in large quantities" without asking whether the modern Western diet is above the threshold of excess? Isn't that what we're talking about here?
I feel like the libertarians in the crowd are trying to dismiss a valid question before it's answered.
Consider Richard Dawkins: He is very popular, and considered a good speaker. Why? Because he has one issue, and he's willing to talk about it all day long. This speaker, too, is sensationalist and myopic. But he is making well-justified points, backed up by good data, and so he's worth listening to. The criticisms and "debunking" of his work on the various blogs are not refuting his claims; rather, they are arguing that fructose is one of many contributors to obesity. If the worst criticism of the 90-minute video is that it's not broad enough, then it was a worthwhile video indeed.
"with forcing bars & restaurants no smoking" I have two words for you. Passive Smoking. Not of other patrons, but the staff. An employer has a duty of care to provide a safe workplace, and can't if they allow smoking.
People buy into these claims because it's nice and simple.
That way they can go on a diet that cuts that one single ingredient and replace it by doubling all other ingredients and not feel bad about being fat.
In about half a year they'll start noticing the lower-your-suger-double-everything-else diet doesn't really work and find another scapegoat ingredient.
Repeat ad nauseam.
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