Is sugar toxic?
We’ve all got the idea that eating sugar maybe isn’t the healthiest thing in the world. But is sugar actually toxic? Looks that way. Here, check out this article by Gary Taubes:
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called
Sugar: The Bitter Truth,which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.
The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a
toxinor apoison,terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merelyevil.And bysugar,Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he callsthe most demonized additive known to man.It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious.
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. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them. [continue]
Related:
- Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies
- Sugar: The Bitter Truth – Robert Lustig’s video on Youtube
Filed in food 9 Comments so far
9 Responses to “Is sugar toxic?”
Laurie MacBride, Eye on Environment on 01 Nov 2012 at 1:52 pm #
A very important article. Thanks for blogging about it!
Gabriolan on 01 Nov 2012 at 3:26 pm #
You’re welcome, Laurie – glad you liked it. Anything by Gary Taubes is worth reading.
(See also: Gabriolan.ca blog posts related to Gary Taubes.)
Jane on 01 Nov 2012 at 4:26 pm #
I think using the word ‘toxin’ or ‘poison’ is very alarmist and irresponsible in relation to a substance that we all routinely eat, and give out to our precious children as treats.
Granted, eating too much sugar through pop etc may be bad for us, but drinking too much water will kill you much faster than eating too much sugar, and the leading cause of death of young people is poisonings from, among other things, drug overdoses (prescription and non-prescription) but never, in the medical literature, from overdosing on sugar.
Also, if sugar causes, for eg, Coronary Heart disease, then it does so very, very slowly, since 64% of those who die of coronary heart disease are over the age of 75. I would hardly class something as toxic if you can consume it for 75 years before it finally kills you.
pericat on 01 Nov 2012 at 9:47 pm #
I kinda have to go with Jane on this one. It is alarmist, and lecturers that use handwavy sky-is-falling terms make me grumpy.
HFCS is bad not because it is poison, but because it’s ubiquitous. You could cut granulated sugar down to nothing in your diet, but for most people in North America, that wouldn’t make a dent in your total sugar consumption. So if you actually want to cut sugar, you really have look at everything. Which is wearing.
John Hudson on 02 Nov 2012 at 4:30 pm #
If one doesn’t have a working definition of poisons that includes things that harm one slowly over a long period of time, then I suppose Lustig’s statements are shocking and provocative, but that is surely his point: to provoke. Some people will be provoked into rejecting his ideas, but plenty will be provoked into thinking about them, and the science behind his statements is pretty solid. Evolutionarily, sugar is something that humans would have consumed only through fruit and some vegetables — wild, not cultivated for sweetness –, and only at certain times of the year, conveniently, when humans in northern climes would have needed to put on some fat for the coming winter. That is sugar’s dietary function: to make humans fat, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the quantities of sugars in the modern western diet make people very fat, and that we’re not evolved to cope with anything like those amounts of sugars or the frequency and severity of the chemical and hormonal reactions that they triggers in our bodies. Given the major health problems involved — the epidemic levels of diabetes and clinical obestity, the myriad of diseases associated with metabolic syndrome –, Lustig’s provocative use of words like ‘poison’ and ‘toxic’ seem increasingly reasonable.
Pericat, yes, having to look at the ingredients of everything you eat, trying to avoid all sugars, would indeed be tiresomely wearing. The alternative is to eat simply, avoiding processed and prepackaged foods in general. I almost never have to look at a list of ingredients, because I mostly eat things that don’t have lists of ingredients.
GG on 02 Nov 2012 at 7:39 pm #
I agree 100%. I firmly believe that my previous addiction to sugar was a direct cause of my breast cancer. Since I have cut out all processed foods & sugar, I now only eat real food & I have never felt better. Thank you for posting this Gabriolan, it was a very interesting read.
Gabriolan on 02 Nov 2012 at 7:57 pm #
GG – I’m happy that you’re feeling great these days! Glad you liked Gary’s article.
You might be interested in Carbohydrates Can Kill, which is the blog of Dr Robert Su. If you plug ‘cancer’ into the search bar there, you’ll find an awful lot of information. One example: Carbohydrates and Cancer (Transcript #4 of 4).
GG on 03 Nov 2012 at 10:17 am #
Thank you Gabriolan for those links. It’s interesting as a lay person to have come to the same conclusions as some Dr’s are, about our high carb, low fat diets. I think about how my grandparents ate & they had no diseases like cancer or diabetes, nor did any of their friends. My grandmother’s favourite dinner was roast chicken & she ate all the skin, a tomato & 1/2 a cucumber. They never ate anything but real food. I hope we’re on the cusp of a food revolution.
Gabriolan on 03 Nov 2012 at 11:12 am #
GG –
What’s really interesting is to see how dietary changes have affected aboriginal peoples. The typical pattern is this: before the arrival of Europeans, maladies called the diseases of civilization (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer) were pretty much unknown. Once first nations people adopted the European diet – high in sugars and processed carbs – their disease patterns soon changed to match those of the European settlers. For more on this, see Gary Taubes book: Good Calories, Bad Calories, and Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price.
Here is a blog post I wrote about what happened when a Metis man, Dr Jay Wortman, discovered he had diabetes – and cured it through adopting a diet similar to those of his native ancestors. He later set up a study in which an entire native community switched to a traditional-style diet, and saw stunning health improvements. The DVD about that project is available in our library.
Of course Dr Wortman is yet one more physician who recommends an style diet.