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?"

Comments

Organic vs processed (toxic) sugar.

[elucido]

I'm telling people not to eat processed sugar. Fruit is organic sugar. The sugar in fruit is not the sugar in breakfast cereal. Processed sugar is a slow acting poison. Organic sugar in small amounts is like salt in small amounts.

The problem is processed sugar has replaced organic sugar. So when we talk about sugar now, we are talking about high fructose corn syrup because that is the most common form of sugar in the American diet.