[Graeme]

Is sugar the next tobacco?

Among the least likely viral megahits on YouTube is a 90-minute lecture by the food scold and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” He delivers it in a windowless room at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The talk is simultaneously boring and powerful, combining the gravitas of a national health crisis, the thrill of conspiracy theory, and the tedium of PowerPoint slides. Midway through the talk he scans the hall for approval. “Am I debunking?”

The UCSF extension students mutter “yeah”—most of them, at least. Lustig has a way of seeking validation and pissing off people at the same time. His combined love of showmanship and need for approval led to acting in 12 musical-theater performances during his three years as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His greatest role yet may be as the loudest, most contrarian voice in the public-health debate over why we get fat and what we should do about it.

Lustig is an imperfect frontman for abstemious eating. At age 55, his face is puffy. He looks disheveled even in a coat and tie. People love him and people love to hate him, especially after he proposed in the journal Naturethat sugar should be regulated like alcohol and that people who buy soda should be carded. Almost three million people have watched “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” Alec Baldwin publicly lost 30 pounds by following Lustig’s rules and giving up toxic foods, even trying to avoid the sugar in a dish his mother calls “Love Pie.”

Public reception of Lustig’s new book, Fat Chance, will likely be just as divided. The book repeats and expands on the main point of contention in the sugar wars: whether our bodies treat all calories the same. The old guard says yes: A calorie is a calorie; steak or soda, doesn’t matter. Eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. Lustig believes that our bodies react to some types of calories differently than others. Specifically he believes that sugar calories alter our biochemistry to make us hungry and lazy in ways that fat and protein calories do not. As a result, he says, the ubiquity of sugar in the Western diet is making Americans sick, obese, and bankrupt.

salon

[Narz]

I've seen the video. Sugar, highly-processed vegetable oil are things that should be taxed heavily, not subsidized. Also factory farms. Our food system if f-ed up in the US, it's all about profits, not health.

[Tanada]

I wathched the whole thing through and skimmed through parts I wanted to make sure I understood a second time. I think our leaders have a very confused idea of what makes healthy eating, one major problem is the excess sugar and starch in the modern diet compared to the 1960's diet.

[dissident]

The "old guard" and its calorie is a calorie mantra is clearly full of it. Genetics and the actual biochemistry in the body have to be taken into account and are not secondary factors. Metabolism types that are insulin resistant will build up fat in response to the food pyramid prescribed high carbohydrate diet because they do not convert it to heat as efficiently as normal metabolism types. So it is actually the calorie count that is of secondary importance compared to the type of food you eat and your particular metabolic characteristics.

While what pstarr says is true about fructose, at the end of the day all carbohydrates are bad for some people. Roughly 25% of the population has some degree of insulin resistance and is likely to go on to develop Type II diabetes. Type II is an insulin resistance death spiral. Low insulin receptor counts on cells require higher insulin levels to control blood sugar. But cells still have the freedom to reduce the number of receptors when insulin levels are high so that progressively higher insulin levels and lower receptor counts develop. After decades of this progression the pancreas beta cells start to die off from toxicity side effects of enormous levels of insulin production.

For some reason the routine health checks only look at blood sugar levels and do not measure insulin levels. This is rather stupid since the blood levels will be OK until the onset of Type II diabetes. But insulin levels will be very high years before.

[Tanada]

My question would be this: should sugar have been the first tobacco? No one ever advertised tobacco as healthy. But USDA contantly tells us to eat our carbohydrates and sugary fruit.

Carbs are slave food, the transition from paleolithic to the modern neolithic state. Long-term storage of wheat and corn allowed accumulations of capital/assets, formation of armies, and the subjugation of hunter/gather populations. This is turn enclosed more wild-lands into farms. Rinse and repeat. Now we have ADM and Cargill and their tools in Congress telling us to eat poison.

Be free. Demand grass-fed beef and veggies (for the omega-3's). Grass fed hamburger and offal (liver, kidneys, hearts, sweetbreads, and brains) are inexpensive, and do not concentrate toxins because the animals are not fed poisons.

You sound like a youtube video I saw a few months ago speculating that the switch from hunter-gatherer diets which were highly ketogenic adapted brain food to grain based agriculture that caused glucose dependent brain fueling lead to less intelligent responses to authority figures. The authority figures kept eating the 'ketogenic' diet high in meat and fat so they were more mentally alert and able to manipulate the 'farmer' class that lived on the grains. Not sure I buy into the theory but it does make for some interesting conversation. It could even explain why the low starch Vegan crowd think they are so smart, after all they are smarter than the average starch consuming neighbor.

[vision-master]

Yet, tobacco was and still is sacred along with sage for some peoples.

[vision-master]

SUGAR IN THE MORNING

[Tanada]

Dr. Lustig's new TED talk on sugar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmC4Rm5cpOI

[Shaved Monkey]

Fructose is the real Satan.
Comes across as all good for you, but massively addictive and full of bad health consequences.

[Tanada]

Fructose is the real Satan.
Comes across as all good for you, but massively addictive and full of bad health consequences.

Tastes great, just one problem...It Kills Your Liver! At least in the doses we consume in the westernized world. Back when you got it in small doses from fresh fruit in season it doesn't seem to have caused too many issues.

[kuidaskassikaeb]

I gonna a disagree, just so you all have somebody to argue with. Too much agreement on this thread.

First, the whole idea that the paleolithic diet was all fatty meats is silly. Women gathered most of the calories and most of those were starchy. Wild meats, except maybe in the fall, and things like seals are really lean. Sugar was first introduced into Europe about the time tobacco (1500) was, and as you recall the obesity epidemic hit only 500 years later. The reason that they came up with "fat makes you fat" was that dietary changes in 20th century diet began to include more and more meat and fat, and people got started getting fatter. The world is full of people like the asians, who live on white rice, and nobody thinks they're fat. As has been said before on this thread Vegans and Vegetarians live longer than meet eaters, and there is no way to have a low carb veggi diet.

While I have seen some data that indicates high fructose corn sugar is different from other table sugar (55% fructose rather than 50%), you guys generalize from that to potatoes, and like, you could be a little more specific.

And as far as a calorie is a calorie, the only place where that is really obviously not true is diabetics, because they piss the calories out. High fat diets can lead to spikes in blood sugar an hour later, which is supposedly the effect that causes carbohydrate "addiction," and there are mice models that clearly show high fat diets doing all the damage that high carbohydrate diets are supposed to. Drinking sugary sodas leads to bad effects, but those effects don't go away with diet sodas.

If you really want to know what I believe, I think the whole macronutrient debate is wrong and the obesity epidemic is something that was done to us by our evil corporate overlords.

[Shaved Monkey]

Drinking sugary sodas leads to bad effects, but those effects don't go away with diet sodas.

The insulin response

[davep]

The old guard says yes: A calorie is a calorie; steak or soda, doesn’t matter. Eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. Lustig believes that our bodies react to some types of calories differently than others. Specifically he believes that sugar calories alter our biochemistry to make us hungry and lazy in ways that fat and protein calories do not. As a result, he says, the ubiquity of sugar in the Western diet is making Americans sick, obese, and bankrupt.

As others have indicated, insulin plays a huge role. It is the only known hormone that makes adipose (fat) cells actively take up fat. So, if insulin levels are low and you eat fats they are not stored once the pancreatic lipase first hydrolises them to diglycerides and then to glycerol and free fatty acids and they enter the blood stream. Once the fatty acids are in the blood stream they can be converted by the liver to ketone bodies. Some of these cannot be stored and if not used are expelled in the urine and the breath. Therefore, unsurprisingly, not all calories are the same and we are not some unheard-of 100% efficient calorie-extracting and storage machine.

[Subjectivist]

http://youtu.be/OEjUGNi-Mlg

New documentary just released out of New Zealand showing how the food industry has sugared every processed food you can buy.

[dohboi]

The question is, how paleo do you want to go?

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... getarians/

We have special immune systems, special brains, even special hands, but our guts are ordinary and for tens of millions of years those ordinary guts have tended to be filled with fruit, leaves, and the occasional delicacy of a raw hummingbird..

What should you eat? The truth is that many different diets consumed by our ancestorsal insect diet, mastodon diets or whatever you please–-would be, although some perfect panacea, better than the average modern diet, one so bad that any point in the past can come to seem like the good ole days, unless you go too far back to a point when our ancestors lived more like rats and probably ate everything, including their own feces.

Sometimes what happens in paleo should really stay in paleo.