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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?"
There is no need, and it would be unscientific, to introduce some magical theory of "processed" foods versus "natural"foods: if the chemistry is identical, the biology is identical. The lecture is well grounded in the science of biochemistry.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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
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.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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.
It starts off with a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee...
Before long, you're eating tons of it, snorting it, injecting it into the blood.
Then you need harder stuff...
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.
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.
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."
the toxicity of sugar (sucrose, glucose, fructose, etc) is one of things that almost no researcher in the know dares to mention publicly because it would be career (and funding) suicide. the processed food industry is far too powerful a lobby group.
but the researchers know. check medline. almost every research article on diabetes begins with words to the effect of "fed the rats sugar until they developed diabetes". feeding rats sugar is THE consistently reproducible method of inducing diabetes.
and this is what the processed food lobby is doing to consumers every day with sugar in absofuckinglutely everything. even things you think wouldn't have sugar because they're supposed to be salty or sour or savoury or anything-else-but-sweet have sugar in them. because it's cheap, it's addictive (esp. to children and adults with poor impulse control - i.e. most of the population), and it's a preservative.
sugar in our diet isn't bad when it's rare and unrefined (as it is in fruits and vegetables etc. and in our natural pre-agriculture diet it WAS rare, but it was a huge amount of easily absorbed energy which is why we evolved the ability to taste sweetness...and why we also evolved to *like* it). even when humans first discovered processed sugar from sugar cane a few hundred years ago it wasn't a huge problem because it was very expensive (like all spices were) - only the rich could afford it.
even the improvement of refinery processes that made sugar became extremely refined and extremely cheap wasn't that bad....it was only when "food" factories started putting it in *everything* so that it became almost impossible to avoid eating far too much of the stuff that it became a problem.
and this, btw, is also why the poor (and the time-poor) suffer from diabetes more than the rich do - the rich can afford to eat well. the poor can't (money-wise AND time-wise).
tldr;
Summary:
Instead of a spoonful of sugar in your coffee, put a potato.
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.