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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?"
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.