10 ms·

Is Sugar Toxic?

185 points by px 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
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pessimist 15y ago
"Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do." Wow, that was a content-free article, borderline scare-mongering, eg. "when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good". There's no information about what sort of doses are really bad at all, and so nothing useful to learn from it. I have 2 kids who will eat as much sugar as we give them, so this is a serious issue for me, and I'm disappointed by such articles.
- pg 15y ago
  Being tentative about drawing conclusions is not the same as being content free. Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong, it seems like this topic could use a little more tentativeness.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    "Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong"... ...I would argue that writing news articles about things with no conclusive evidence is worse than irresponsible journalism. It's downright harmful, in the most literal sense of the term.
    - 3am 15y ago
      There is conclusive evidence of a problem. The rise in diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all out there and free to anyone with a web browser. One might say that given a health crisis, sitting back not saying anything would be irresponsible. Ben Goldacre chronicles bad science journalism, and this is not an example of it. (edited)
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        A rise in diabetes and other ailments is not conclusive evidence that sugar is toxic, and that you think it might be does a pretty good job of demonstrating my point (that this stuff should be kept in journals, to be read by people who understand how science works, and only thrown into newspapers when we have proof).
        3am 15y ago
        I spent half my undergrad in labs, writing up formal scientific results. I wrote and was graded on plenty of scientific papers. I have a fine understanding of scientific publishing, data analysis, and experimental methods. The fact that you misread me is your problem. I did not write there was conclusive evidence that sucrose is toxic. I said _conclusive evidence of a problem_ - which is different thing and is clearly true.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        Conclusive evidence of a problem is completely irrelevant. Responding to a comment referring to a specific lack of evidence about sugar/toxicity by saying that there is conclusive evidence of "a problem" implies relevancy, which implies that you are confusing the two issues.
        3am 15y ago
        Well, I don't confuse the two issues. I'm glad that is out of the way. Let me try a different tactic: what is your specific problem with this article? Do you object out of hand to non-peer reviewed science articles regardless of quality? Do you have specific objections to the quality of this article? From my point of view, there has been a long standing public health problem in the US with obesity and related pathologies. The public has been understandably interested in the outcome, and so there is demand for press coverage. The scientific progress in identifying the cause of the problem has been uneven and there have been some incorrect conclusions about the root cause, even among experts in the field. As a result, the media coverage has also been incorrect. However, this article seems reasonable. It makes clear references to current scientific work, presents the subject evenly (barring the title), and the author makes efforts to explain to an educated but non-scientific audience.
    - fanboy123 15y ago
      Gary says explicitly there is no conclusive evidence. He is making the appeal for the studies to be done. I find little that is harmful about the attempt. He just wants something that is potentially dangerous to be studied scientifically. He explains this in his comments: "Again, one common theme here is that because sugar has gotten more or a less free pass from the federal authorities for the past forty years, little meaningful research has been done."
    - tremendo 15y ago
      It's downright harmful, in the most literal sense of the term. Supposing readership gets scared enough to eliminate these "added sugars" from their diet, like Soda and candy and cookies cease to exist. How is that harmful? Oh yeah, some companies would disappear and people would be, at least temporarily, out work. These "added sugars" didn't even exist not that long ago, so worst case we would be eating more like we did in the 1800's. Perhaps some new information I don't know about suggests that the added sugars are now indispensable for our well being?. "Downright harmful" is I think, a little exaggerated.
  - chc 15y ago
    I think he's saying that they weren't tentative enough — that is, either they have enough substance to write an article about how sugar is bad for you, or they shouldn't be writing an article about how sugar is bad for you. This goes back to the rule about news articles with question headlines: The answer to the headline is "no." If it were "yes," they wouldn't couch it in a question.
  - rmobin 15y ago
    Paul, do you see any role software could play in trying to resolve the dietary advice problem? There are lots of communities out there of diabetics and obese people improving their health through diet - in particular a low carb, medium protein, high fat diet. That's not proof on its own, but it's more compelling than looking at what people who have always been healthy eat (because it could just be good genes). Science and experiments still need to be a part of the solution, but it disturbs me how much bad science is out there.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Clearly the solution is to eat nothing and never go outside. You might damage yourself otherwise.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  These articles are important because he makes a persuasive argument that this is a very important issue that badly needs more study. You can't learn very much from it, but the studies will not be funded unless a horde of concerned parents starts pressuring the FDA, the USDA, Universities and others who could fund such studies. Also pressure is needed to counter the very influential corn growers associations who will try and kill such studies.
- sp332 15y ago
  The headline says "Is Sugar Toxic?" That's not just a hook to get you to read the article, it's a description of what the article is about. This article asks the question, "Is Sugar Toxic?". It helps you think about that question from chemical and physiological perspectives, gives an overview of research, describes political and economic interests of the major players (so you can consider how those might influence their actions), and so on. If anyone's wondering what a liberal arts degree is good for, this article is an excellent example.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I actually found it to be content dense. It was a bit unactionable, but a good amount of content. Of course he also gives you the names, so you can look up the studies, although he also pretty much tells you that its not applicable to your current diet. Again, maybe not actionable, but definitely content. Especially for a mainstream newspaper article.
  - neonscribe 15y ago
    Do you mean actionable in the legal sense? I agree, there isn't enough evidence to sue anyone at this point. If you refer to action that an individual or family can take, how about this: eliminate sweet drinks, desserts and snacks from your diet.
  - jerf 15y ago
    "It was a bit unactionable," Well, yes and no. There is some good but as-yet not conclusive reasons to believe that sugar is far more dangerous than it appears. On the other hand, there is nobody I am aware of who has any argument in favor of consuming more sugars or more sugary foods. I am not aware of any argument against cutting back your sugar consumptions as a reasonable preventative step. A conventional dietitian will place much less emphasis on it than Dr. Lustig, but they won't try to talk you out of it. This is as opposed to fats, where I have seen arguments made that cutting back on fats can be actively harmful. I'm not making it here, nor am I claiming it is true, I'm simply saying I have definitely seen that argument made.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      You're absolutely right. I was thinking more about changing the diet for different ratios of glucose/fructose/lactose for some reason vs just reducing sugar intake. Curious how sugar compares to artificial sweeteners in light of this data? Splenda vs sugar?
- 3am 15y ago
  That article wasn't content free. Read the part talking about how glucose and fructose are metabolized differently, how excessive sucrose intact overwhelms the liver (processing fructose) and leads it to produce fat, and how that ties into diabetes and heart disease.
- Saavedro 15y ago
  It'd be good to follow up on this for you then. Def. see the talk it mentions, and read around on the studies. I think the last number I heard was ~50g/day (keep consumption under this.) It's also worth noting that it's not -only- a volume issue but a rate issue. This is why -refined- sugars are particularly bad, because they are immediately available (unlike say, eating a fruit, where it takes time for your body to tear apart the fibers to get at the sugar). Fructose metabolism is not rate-regulated, and a cell metabolizing fructose quickly uses up all its energy (ATP) and slows down. So it's not really safe to consume -refined- fructose in general because it will shut down the liver while it is being metabolized, and this can allow compounds that should -not- be in the bloodstream (such as fructose itself) to get into the bloodstream because the liver is tied up and can't take them on.
- dpatru 15y ago
  The experts disagree on sugar's toxicity. The NYT is not going to come right out and say, "Don't let your kids eat sugar." But there is enough evidence presented and cited in the article to make this a reasonable conclusion. I found this passage particularly compelling: "During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not." It's probably better to eat like a poor Korean farmer than like an "average" American teenager.
  - shpxnvz 15y ago
    Or a Chinese farmer for that matter (though this one deals with protein rather than sugar): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Oxford-Cornell_Study_on_Dietary,_Lifestyle_and_Disease_Mortality_Characteristics_in_65_Rural_Chinese_Counties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Oxford-Cornell_Study_on_D...
- dasil003 15y ago
  You want a scientific conclusion to tell you unequivocally what to do, but in the absence of proof you don't want to be presented with any information? I'm not sure whether this is utopian thinking or just sticking your head in the sand, but I can tell you my course of action as a father in the face of an obesity epidemic and inconclusive evidence: I'm strongly limiting sugar and refined carbohydrate intake in my household, particularly in between meals. Some allowances for dessert after dinner, but no soda and juice ever.
- DTanner 15y ago
  Did you even read the article? > Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance. > Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.
- pygy_ 15y ago
  You didn't read it all did you? It states a probably safe dose (40 pounds per year per person == ~25g per day of sugar added to what you'd get in a non-process diet), and gives both theoretical (metabolic), practical (controlled studies in animals and to some extent in humans) and historical (see below) compelling arguments. Add to this that it has recently been demonstrated that junk food was addictive (demonstrated in rats, but it's quite obvious that it is also the case in humans) and you get the current metabolic syndrome epidemy. FTA: When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig. But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year. That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it’s tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic. This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic. In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.
- bgentry 15y ago
  "the evidence isn't conclusive" also doesn't mean "there's no evidence". Watch the video lecture on youtube (already linked in the comments and the article)
sp332 15y ago
I can't find a link now, but I remember some research being done that had runners in a lab swish a sucrose solution in their mouths and then spit it out. They ran longer than the control group who got artificial sweetener. So something happens to your metabolism before the sugar is digested, and no one has studied how tasting sucrose might be different from tasting HFCS. It's just weird and complicated :) Edit: here's a quick explanation of some of those studies: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/fitness/exercise/fitness-research/how-long-can-i-go-before-refuelling-with-carbs/article1878842/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/fitness/exercise/... Edit2 I found the research, but it's behind a paywall. http://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Abstract/2010/07000/Oral_carbohydrate_sensing_and_exercise_performance.18.aspx http://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Abstract/2010/0...
- larrik 15y ago
  Artificial sweetener doesn't strike me as solid enough for a control. How could you know the effect wasn't in fact the artificial sweetener negatively affecting the "control"? Or some combination of the two? Your link doesn't actually mention what the placebo was, though.
  - sp332 15y ago
    A different study, but I think it's similar: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683964/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683964/ "The placebo (PLA) mouth rinse solution was made from 150 ml of a commercially available non-caloric concentrate sweetened with aspartame and saccharin (Robinsons Soft Drinks Ltd, UK) diluted to 1000 ml with water. The GLU mouth rinse contained 64 g glucose (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The MALT mouth rinse contained 64 g maltodextrin (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The strong artificial sweetness reduced any sensory clues that subjects might use to consciously differentiate between the GLU, MALT and PLA mouth rinses."
wnoise 15y ago
How can one buy bulk glucose to use as a sweetener instead of fructose or sucrose?
- Saavedro 15y ago
  Karo corn syrup is mostly glucose, if you -really- want to go down that road.
- rmobin 15y ago
  Look for dextrose or corn sugar. Here's one link: http://www.nowfoods.com/Products/ProductsbyCategory/M004079.htm?cat=Sports%20Nutrition http://www.nowfoods.com/Products/ProductsbyCategory/M004079..... Personally, I just do my best to avoid anything that tastes sweet.
  - shpxnvz 15y ago
    Careful, though, the Corn Refiner's Association wants to rename HFCS to "Corn Sugar".
- stephen 15y ago
  My amateur understanding is that excess glucose still leads to high blood sugar and so the resulting insulin spikes and fat storage. So it may be a lesser evil than fructose, but is not a panacea by any means. FWIW, I'm basing my current understanding on the book Body by Science. It has an explanation of metabolism similar to the Lustig video linked to in the NYT article. However, Body by Science wasn't as specifically anti-fructose, but more generally anti-blood sugar spikes.
  - wnoise 15y ago
    Sure, but I'm still going to want to sweeten food in moderation, and it appears that tilting towards glucose in doing so is better. (Though glucose is less sweet, possibly meaning I'll use more, and that's worth watching out for.)
- travisp 15y ago
  There are online food places where you can buy pure glucose (it has value in certain gourmet foods because of its different properties from sucrose). However, if you read more of Taubes than just this, you'll see that he presents evidence that too much pure glucose would also likely cause problems if I understand it correctly. Spiking your blood glucose to consistently high levels isn't good for you either, even if you avoid all fructose.
deleted 15y ago
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JonnieCache 15y ago
Toxicity as a concept is entirely defined by dose. Bleach is not toxic if you take a small enough dose. Conversely, water is toxic if you drink too much of it. Unfortunately toxic, like so many other of our perfectly good scientific words, has been hijacked by quacks trying to deprive the credulous of their money.
- Splines 15y ago
  True enough, but people should know how much bleach and water is needed to hurt themselves; death and/or pain provides immediate feedback. The problem with sugar is that the benefits are so immediate and the drawbacks so distant that it requires a strong will to avoid.
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    The problem is that the question "Is sugar toxic?" is inherently meaningless. Bandying the word around like this in a publication like the NYT dilutes public understanding of the issue. Scientifically responsible journalists would have chosen an accurate term to discuss the issue rather than shooting for maximum emotional impact.
    - jsdalton 15y ago
      The thesis of the article is pretty obvious: Sugar is toxic in the amounts found in a typical western diet.
      - JonnieCache 15y ago
        Hmmmm. You're right. That is pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now. I tend to be on a bit of a hair trigger over the use of words like toxic by nutritionists, because so often they turn out to be graduates of degree mills, pedalling patent medicines via press release reprinting churnalists. This guy seems to check out however, even if he is a bit absolutist.
        15y ago
msluyter 15y ago
Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who runs the "Track Your Plaque" program and the Heart Scan blog (http://www.heartscanblog.org/ http://www.heartscanblog.org/) has identified sugar as one of the primary factors contributing to heart disease. He advises his patients to generally eliminate all sugars, grains (they break down into glucose in the bloodstream), and anything else raises blood glucose levels.
- fhars 15y ago
  But all the evidence presented in the article seems to point in the direction that glucose is mostly harmless (see the discussion of the Japanese diet that contained mostly rice). So Davis' recommanedation cannot be justified along these lines.
  - matthennigan 15y ago
    Davis absolutely hates wheat, on very justifiable grounds. And he strongly recommends anyone with heart problems get off it immediately. But I dont think he has anything against rice.
    - msluyter 15y ago
      Actually, if you read his blog, you'll find lots of articles that, at least indirectly, indict rice (and basically anything that spikes your blood sugar, which includes all grains). For example: http://www.heartscanblog.org/2010/07/what-increases-blood-sugar-more-than.html http://www.heartscanblog.org/2010/07/what-increases-blood-su... Generally, he advocates close postprandial monitoring of blood sugar as a sort of proxy for triglicerides/ldl and often notes that some people may have higher tolerances for certain foods than others. If rice doesn't raise your postprandial blood sugar much, then I'd imagine he'd be ok with it.
yread 15y ago
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose it is: Sucrose (table sugar) - 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)
- pak 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic and pointing out that anything is "toxic" in high quantities. In case you aren't, or for people that did not catch it, 29g/kg is about 2.4kg of sugar for the average 80kg male, which comes out to about 12.5 cups or 3 liters. It should be obvious to most people that filling a two-liter bottle with pure granulated sugar and consuming it in one sitting would have severe health consequences (if you can even manage to get it all down). What's probably toxic about it at this dosage is that it cannot be eliminated by your kidneys or stored in your liver quickly enough, so it accumulates in the blood and shifts the osmolality causing neurological symptoms, osmotic diuresis and cardiac arrhythmia.
  - yread 15y ago
    I was being sarcastic. But I also wanted to post to point to the fact that scientists believe that 50% of the people who ate this much sugar would in fact survive!
    - mirkules 15y ago
      ...and that they tested it enough to even have an average number.
      - yread 15y ago
        well they tested it on rats...
    - smhelp 15y ago
      I was severely depressed a month or two ago, and I went ahead and bought two 2 pound chocolate rich cakes in succession and ate them over a period of 24 hours. Though it didn't kill me, but it was definitely not too upsetting. I still have the urge to just eat huge quantities of sugar, and I am not sure how to control it, but yea it definitely did not kill me or make me sick. I am otherwise an extremely fit individual (can run 5k in 16 minutes)
hirenj 15y ago
So, according to the wiki, HFCS contains about 55% Fructose, 45% Glucose. Regular sucrose is at a 50-50 split. Given your stomach splits sucrose into the respective monosaccharide units anyway, you're going to end up with roughly the same amount of glucose and fructose floating around. The big issue then is just having a large amount of fructose (from whatever source) in your diet. Since excess fructose is shunted off to be stored as fat, this is what's causing all the problems. What would be kind of interesting is whether we can just go about engineering corn so that we block off the fructose pathway, and just produce glucose. This also has the nice side-effect that it's also much more delicious for bacteria to eat, meaning a greater yield of things like biofuels.
bgentry 15y ago
For those who haven't watched the video lecture referenced early in the article, I highly recommend checking it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Lustig does a fantastic job explaining the cellular processes at work, which appealed to my engineering side. I'm not usually passionate about biochemistry and this lecture is definitely long, but if you make it through the first 15 minutes you will be hooked.
- AlexC04 15y ago
  I came to say the same thing. I'm at Minute #50 of 90 - but my mind has been blown about six ways from Sunday right now. He's an excellent speaker and this stuff is phenomenally interesting.
- 100k 15y ago
  This is one of those "life changing" videos. I'm not sure about the whole paleo diet thing, but I'm pretty sure humans didn't evolve to eat large quantities of sugar.
- nikcub 15y ago
  I am one of those people who is hard to convince to watch something, so if there is anybody else out there reading this comment thread and wondering if you should watch that video - please do. It is informative in parts, and his style is excellent, but watch if with an open mind and a pinch of skepticism
  - g_lined 15y ago
    Thanks. I watched the video only after reading your comment. I found something new about fructose so it was worth it. I personally am turned off by his presentation style. He tries to hard to convince me of his conclusion, too rhetorically and indeed before he had presented his reasons. Nevertheless I feel that the theory of what he presented is pretty much right and the only question appears to be to what degree you agree with his conclusions.
tmcw 15y ago
Journalist who hasn't done any research on sugar agrees with doctor who hasn't done any research on sugar. And this happens to be great linkbait. Tell me why I should pay for the New York Times, again?
- trustfundbaby 15y ago
  I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine --------------- I think thats compelling enough to make it worth the read.
- fanboy123 15y ago
  Dr. Lustig is a nationally-recognized authority in the field of neuroendocrinology, with a specific emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. He is currently investigating the contribution of biochemical, neural, hormonal, and genetic influences in the expression of the current obesity epidemic both in children and adults. He has defined a syndrome of vagally-mediated beta-cell hyperactivity which leads to insulin hypersecretion and obesity, and which is treatable by insulin suppression. This phenomenon may occur in up to 20% of the obese population. He is interested in the hypothalamic signal transduction of insulin and leptin, and how these two systems interact. He is studying the cardiovascular morbidity associated with hyperinsulinemia, and developing methods to evaluate and prevent this phenomenon in children. He is also analyzing the contribution of the autonomic nervous system to insulin secretion and insulin resistance in obese children, and the utility of assessing insulin dynamics in targeting obesity therapy.
  - oconnor0 15y ago
    Which means?
    - deleted 15y ago
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    - Glide 15y ago
fanboy123 15y ago
Anyone who has questions has the option of posing them directly to Gary himself. The NYT has a Q&A that's open for a few days. Looks like he has already started responding. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/talk-to-gary-taubes-about-sugar/?sort=oldest&offset=1 http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com...
rflrob 15y ago
"In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us." I don't smoke, but I do drink alcohol in moderated amounts, and I'd disagree that alcohol is "killing us" [1], and feel that even if it were proved beyond a doubt that alcohol monotonically decreases lifespan, it helps make life enjoyable enough to be worth it. The same is true for processed sugar, in moderate amounts (though I'd take a ripe honeycrisp apple over a twinkie any day). [1]http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-is-good-for-you http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-i...
- bgentry 15y ago
  He's not so much saying that sugar in general is killing us. He's arguing that the way we're consuming it now (both volume and generally isolated from fiber/other nutrients) is what's killing us.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I think all addictive drugs that decrease lifespan seem worth it to the person doing it. Ask a crackhead if crack is worth dying for and he'll say "hell yes" -- then rob you.
  - jacoblyles 15y ago
    The same description applies to following a sedentary lifestyle, participating in risky sports (like skiing), living in a city, and being single. All the more reason to let adults with free will do what they want with their lives.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I'm actually curious about what this says about consuming fruits in large amounts ... since they are pretty much all fructose. Some folks I know (I did for a bit) consume fruits with gusto, erroneously thinking they don't have effects close to what refined sugars have on the body
- Sapient 15y ago
  I believe Lustig says the fiber in the fruit reduces the amount of sugar absorbed by our bodies. However, he also says that sweet fruits in large quantities can still be bad for us.
- shpxnvz 15y ago
  According to the National Soft Drink Association, average daily consumption for U.S. males age 12 to 29 is about half a gallon of soda per day. There was no data on how much of that is diet soda, but even assuming half of the consumption is sugar-free that's about 66 grams of fructose (just the fructose, not all sugars) per day. That person would have to eat 11 apples every single day to match the fructose intake in soda alone. I'm curious how much fruit are you referring to?
- rmobin 15y ago
  There is an argument to be made that modern fruits have been bred to be sweeter, which is worth examining. Also, it is well known in the "paleo" community that fruit should be avoided when trying to get lean (~10-11% body fat for men) - and this is related to fructose and/or its affect on blood sugar. Last point is a type 1 diabetic, now doctor, eats no fruit and this was a very important step for him to maintain healthy blood sugars and get healthy - Dr. Richard Bernstein (he runs a diabetes clinic in NY). I believe that modern fruit eaten is large quantities isn't so benign.
- deleted 15y ago
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- bromley 15y ago
  I wonder this as well. Lustig seems to say that fruit is fine - the sugar in fruit is nature's way of getting you to eat the healthy fibre or some such - but I've yet to see a scientific explanation of why sugar is bad but sugar in fruit is OK. Sure there are good things in fruit, but if sugar is bad then surely you'd be better off getting those good things from other sources, like vegetables.
mast 15y ago
I'm not a nutritionist, biologist, or doctor, but I have a huge sweet tooth, and I actually tried to answer this question on my humble little blog (http://foodconstrued.com/2011/02/sugar-cravings/ http://foodconstrued.com/2011/02/sugar-cravings/) back in February. My answer: It is not the sugar, but the empty calories leading to obesity and then to further health complications.
- jerf 15y ago
  So, the article addresses that point, goes into extensive detail as to why it may not be true, with scientists, biochemistry, and all sorts of other stuff, and I'm supposed to believe your "Nuh-uh"? Why is this article wrong? Why is the conventional answer right? At least cite something that directly addresses these arguments and discusses why they are wrong, this makes it looks like you're taking the metaphorical ostrich approach to the argument.
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jalada 15y ago
tl;dr?
- AlexC04 15y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Go to 57:00 and you should get to the bit where he explains why Fructose is a poison. Loses a bit in translation without the hour leading up to it, (which is absolutely fascinating). However, that should cover your TL;DR. Even shorter version: Fructose can only be processed by the liver. That means, by definition it is a poison.
  - AlexC04 15y ago
    More TL:DR for you. At 1:08:00 (ish) The effects of long term Fuctose use is virtually identical to long term alcoholism (8 out of 12 effects) (at 1:09:00 ish) Intervention: 1) Remove all sugared drinks from your diet. Water & Milk only 2) Eat carbohydrates with fibre. 3) Wait 20 minutes before a second portion. 4) "Buy" your screen time, minute for minute with physical activity. (holy crap! I've got an eight hour work day to buy back!)
  - dpatru 15y ago
    > Fructose can only be processed by the liver. That means, by definition it is a poison. Thanks for this summary. I didn't realize that if a substance can only be processed by the liver, it's a poison.
pdx 15y ago
I used to pop Rolaids for heartburn like crazy. I did this for years, until I was actually developing a toxic reaction to the Rolaids and I began trying other ways to control my heartburn. I finally discovered that sugar (and alcohol) were my biggest contributors. So for me, sugar is definitely toxic. Now that I limit my sugar, I go weeks without heartburn, and when I do get it, it's usually because I had some beer or wine the previous day. Based on this experience, I was interested that he talked about the fructose being removed by the liver (as alcohol is). I probably have some liver issue. This article has led me to a new avenue of research. In the meantime, I am a believer in limiting sugar intake.
- tygorius 15y ago
  You might be interested in Lustig's lecture on YouTube then. About 2/3 of the way through he goes into how HFCS is processed in the brain. In short, you get many of the disadvantages of alcohol, without the pleasant side-effects.
mkross 15y ago
Maybe sugar is toxic. I don't know (and there seem to be some pretty reasonable opinions both ways). However, there is a line in the article that really stands out to me: "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." I can't tell if this is the author of the article extrapolating sugar's toxicity to explain the root of all ills, or whether Lustig makes that assertion. Either way, there doesn't seem to be anything more than postulation on that front. I'm hoping the purported science behind this theory is actually sound and not just fluff so that we get into arguments about sugar based on incorrect assumptions.
Jun8 15y ago
Here's my (somewhat childish and Bioshock-ish) response along the lines of Shaw's "The reasonable man adapts ..." idea: Why are we still bound by our body mechanisms that were determined by our cavemen ancestors millions of years ago? Rather than cutting back sugar, maybe we should find a way to re-engineer our cellular structure to avoid the metabolic syndrome, mentioned in the article. Why work towards healthy, rather than bend "healthy" towards our will?
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > Rather than cutting back sugar, maybe we should find a way to re-engineer our cellular structure to avoid the metabolic syndrome We could also reengineer our taste buds to like sugar less, which would be a more optimal solution (no need for a sugar supply chain). Or we could just trick ourselves into eating less sugar for a while, and then after a few months we will find we don't crave it as much (believe me, it works).
- r00fus 15y ago
  There's a reason why bioshock is fantasy and not reality: This kind of research is hard, dangerous, and morally controversial... this takes a long time, and funding by a large organization. Meanwhile, you can have an immediate impact yourself by changing your habits. Which one is more accessible to the average person?
pradocchia 15y ago
In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers. I've seen this liver-cancer connection in other places, such as Chinese Traditional Medicine and Italian folk medicine. Interesting to see it cropping up here.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
DanielH 15y ago
I just recently stumbled upon it, so for those who wanted a more compact version of Robert Lustigs talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ZIKOQkTiM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ZIKOQkTiM
timedoctor 15y ago
This validates my diet: Zero added sugar (essentially means no processed foods) Zero deep fried food
teach 15y ago
"Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical." I find this statement, as written, to be almost willfully misleading. In sucrose, the glucose and fructose molecules are bound by an acetal bond, which must first be broken. The bond is broken with water, which donates a hydroxide to the fructose molecule (and a hydrogen to the glucose, of course). With HFCS 55, the fructose and glucose are unbound, so the fructose molecule can be absorbed without first being "broken off" and slightly changed via hydrolysis. This almost certainly affects the metabolization of the fructose. Source: my wife, who has a PhD in nutrition.
- teyc 15y ago
  The assertion was about the chemical pathways. i.e. same enzymes, same intermediate products, same end products. But you are right. The physiological effects are generally identical, not exactly identical.
- hcurtiss 15y ago
  I suspect Lustig knows that (notwithstanding the fact he says something similar in his lecture, and Taubes repeats it), but decided it's not important for his thesis. Or, at the very least, he doesn't want to wade into the sucrose/HFCS debate. Evidently, he thinks the fructose is sufficiently available in both to be problematic. I'd be super interested in your wife thought something different. I suspect Lustig would too.
  - hcurtiss 15y ago
    . . . IF your wife . . . !!
- rsheridan6 15y ago
  Does this really matter? It's going to end up being essentially totally absorbed either way, I would think. Otherwise you'd be passing sweet candy poops every time you ate sucrose.
neworbit 15y ago
I see that this article cites "fatty liver = insulin resistance" and correlates that directly to sugar ingestion. Well and good - I don't want to be foie gras. But this article also suggests that going off sugar quickly causes the fatty liver to remediate itself - or at least so in lab animals, such problem "promptly goes away". How prompt is this effect in people? Failure rates on commonplace diets seems to make me think it isn't all that swift a process. Anyone have any good stats/links/refs?

185 points by px 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

"Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do." Wow, that was a content-free article, borderline scare-mongering, eg. "when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good". There's no information about what sort of doses are really bad at all, and so nothing useful to learn from it. I have 2 kids who will eat as much sugar as we give them, so this is a serious issue for me, and I'm disappointed by such articles.

pg 15y ago
Being tentative about drawing conclusions is not the same as being content free. Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong, it seems like this topic could use a little more tentativeness.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong"... ...I would argue that writing news articles about things with no conclusive evidence is worse than irresponsible journalism. It's downright harmful, in the most literal sense of the term.
  - 3am 15y ago
    There is conclusive evidence of a problem. The rise in diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all out there and free to anyone with a web browser. One might say that given a health crisis, sitting back not saying anything would be irresponsible. Ben Goldacre chronicles bad science journalism, and this is not an example of it. (edited)
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      A rise in diabetes and other ailments is not conclusive evidence that sugar is toxic, and that you think it might be does a pretty good job of demonstrating my point (that this stuff should be kept in journals, to be read by people who understand how science works, and only thrown into newspapers when we have proof).
      - 3am 15y ago
        I spent half my undergrad in labs, writing up formal scientific results. I wrote and was graded on plenty of scientific papers. I have a fine understanding of scientific publishing, data analysis, and experimental methods. The fact that you misread me is your problem. I did not write there was conclusive evidence that sucrose is toxic. I said _conclusive evidence of a problem_ - which is different thing and is clearly true.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        Conclusive evidence of a problem is completely irrelevant. Responding to a comment referring to a specific lack of evidence about sugar/toxicity by saying that there is conclusive evidence of "a problem" implies relevancy, which implies that you are confusing the two issues.
        3am 15y ago
        Well, I don't confuse the two issues. I'm glad that is out of the way. Let me try a different tactic: what is your specific problem with this article? Do you object out of hand to non-peer reviewed science articles regardless of quality? Do you have specific objections to the quality of this article? From my point of view, there has been a long standing public health problem in the US with obesity and related pathologies. The public has been understandably interested in the outcome, and so there is demand for press coverage. The scientific progress in identifying the cause of the problem has been uneven and there have been some incorrect conclusions about the root cause, even among experts in the field. As a result, the media coverage has also been incorrect. However, this article seems reasonable. It makes clear references to current scientific work, presents the subject evenly (barring the title), and the author makes efforts to explain to an educated but non-scientific audience.
  - fanboy123 15y ago
    Gary says explicitly there is no conclusive evidence. He is making the appeal for the studies to be done. I find little that is harmful about the attempt. He just wants something that is potentially dangerous to be studied scientifically. He explains this in his comments: "Again, one common theme here is that because sugar has gotten more or a less free pass from the federal authorities for the past forty years, little meaningful research has been done."
  - tremendo 15y ago
    It's downright harmful, in the most literal sense of the term. Supposing readership gets scared enough to eliminate these "added sugars" from their diet, like Soda and candy and cookies cease to exist. How is that harmful? Oh yeah, some companies would disappear and people would be, at least temporarily, out work. These "added sugars" didn't even exist not that long ago, so worst case we would be eating more like we did in the 1800's. Perhaps some new information I don't know about suggests that the added sugars are now indispensable for our well being?. "Downright harmful" is I think, a little exaggerated.
- chc 15y ago
  I think he's saying that they weren't tentative enough — that is, either they have enough substance to write an article about how sugar is bad for you, or they shouldn't be writing an article about how sugar is bad for you. This goes back to the rule about news articles with question headlines: The answer to the headline is "no." If it were "yes," they wouldn't couch it in a question.
- rmobin 15y ago
  Paul, do you see any role software could play in trying to resolve the dietary advice problem? There are lots of communities out there of diabetics and obese people improving their health through diet - in particular a low carb, medium protein, high fat diet. That's not proof on its own, but it's more compelling than looking at what people who have always been healthy eat (because it could just be good genes). Science and experiments still need to be a part of the solution, but it disturbs me how much bad science is out there.
- jrockway 15y ago
  Clearly the solution is to eat nothing and never go outside. You might damage yourself otherwise.
bryanlarsen 15y ago
These articles are important because he makes a persuasive argument that this is a very important issue that badly needs more study. You can't learn very much from it, but the studies will not be funded unless a horde of concerned parents starts pressuring the FDA, the USDA, Universities and others who could fund such studies. Also pressure is needed to counter the very influential corn growers associations who will try and kill such studies.
sp332 15y ago
The headline says "Is Sugar Toxic?" That's not just a hook to get you to read the article, it's a description of what the article is about. This article asks the question, "Is Sugar Toxic?". It helps you think about that question from chemical and physiological perspectives, gives an overview of research, describes political and economic interests of the major players (so you can consider how those might influence their actions), and so on. If anyone's wondering what a liberal arts degree is good for, this article is an excellent example.
kenjackson 15y ago
I actually found it to be content dense. It was a bit unactionable, but a good amount of content. Of course he also gives you the names, so you can look up the studies, although he also pretty much tells you that its not applicable to your current diet. Again, maybe not actionable, but definitely content. Especially for a mainstream newspaper article.
- neonscribe 15y ago
  Do you mean actionable in the legal sense? I agree, there isn't enough evidence to sue anyone at this point. If you refer to action that an individual or family can take, how about this: eliminate sweet drinks, desserts and snacks from your diet.
- jerf 15y ago
  "It was a bit unactionable," Well, yes and no. There is some good but as-yet not conclusive reasons to believe that sugar is far more dangerous than it appears. On the other hand, there is nobody I am aware of who has any argument in favor of consuming more sugars or more sugary foods. I am not aware of any argument against cutting back your sugar consumptions as a reasonable preventative step. A conventional dietitian will place much less emphasis on it than Dr. Lustig, but they won't try to talk you out of it. This is as opposed to fats, where I have seen arguments made that cutting back on fats can be actively harmful. I'm not making it here, nor am I claiming it is true, I'm simply saying I have definitely seen that argument made.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    You're absolutely right. I was thinking more about changing the diet for different ratios of glucose/fructose/lactose for some reason vs just reducing sugar intake. Curious how sugar compares to artificial sweeteners in light of this data? Splenda vs sugar?
3am 15y ago
That article wasn't content free. Read the part talking about how glucose and fructose are metabolized differently, how excessive sucrose intact overwhelms the liver (processing fructose) and leads it to produce fat, and how that ties into diabetes and heart disease.
Saavedro 15y ago
It'd be good to follow up on this for you then. Def. see the talk it mentions, and read around on the studies. I think the last number I heard was ~50g/day (keep consumption under this.) It's also worth noting that it's not -only- a volume issue but a rate issue. This is why -refined- sugars are particularly bad, because they are immediately available (unlike say, eating a fruit, where it takes time for your body to tear apart the fibers to get at the sugar). Fructose metabolism is not rate-regulated, and a cell metabolizing fructose quickly uses up all its energy (ATP) and slows down. So it's not really safe to consume -refined- fructose in general because it will shut down the liver while it is being metabolized, and this can allow compounds that should -not- be in the bloodstream (such as fructose itself) to get into the bloodstream because the liver is tied up and can't take them on.
dpatru 15y ago
The experts disagree on sugar's toxicity. The NYT is not going to come right out and say, "Don't let your kids eat sugar." But there is enough evidence presented and cited in the article to make this a reasonable conclusion. I found this passage particularly compelling: "During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not." It's probably better to eat like a poor Korean farmer than like an "average" American teenager.
- shpxnvz 15y ago
  Or a Chinese farmer for that matter (though this one deals with protein rather than sugar): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Oxford-Cornell_Study_on_Dietary,_Lifestyle_and_Disease_Mortality_Characteristics_in_65_Rural_Chinese_Counties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Oxford-Cornell_Study_on_D...
dasil003 15y ago
You want a scientific conclusion to tell you unequivocally what to do, but in the absence of proof you don't want to be presented with any information? I'm not sure whether this is utopian thinking or just sticking your head in the sand, but I can tell you my course of action as a father in the face of an obesity epidemic and inconclusive evidence: I'm strongly limiting sugar and refined carbohydrate intake in my household, particularly in between meals. Some allowances for dessert after dinner, but no soda and juice ever.
DTanner 15y ago
Did you even read the article? > Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance. > Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.
pygy_ 15y ago
You didn't read it all did you? It states a probably safe dose (40 pounds per year per person == ~25g per day of sugar added to what you'd get in a non-process diet), and gives both theoretical (metabolic), practical (controlled studies in animals and to some extent in humans) and historical (see below) compelling arguments. Add to this that it has recently been demonstrated that junk food was addictive (demonstrated in rats, but it's quite obvious that it is also the case in humans) and you get the current metabolic syndrome epidemy. FTA: When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig. But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year. That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it’s tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic. This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic. In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.
bgentry 15y ago
"the evidence isn't conclusive" also doesn't mean "there's no evidence". Watch the video lecture on youtube (already linked in the comments and the article)

sp332 15y ago

I can't find a link now, but I remember some research being done that had runners in a lab swish a sucrose solution in their mouths and then spit it out. They ran longer than the control group who got artificial sweetener. So something happens to your metabolism before the sugar is digested, and no one has studied how tasting sucrose might be different from tasting HFCS. It's just weird and complicated :) Edit: here's a quick explanation of some of those studies: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/fitness/exercise/fitness-research/how-long-can-i-go-before-refuelling-with-carbs/article1878842/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/fitness/exercise/... Edit2 I found the research, but it's behind a paywall. http://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Abstract/2010/07000/Oral_carbohydrate_sensing_and_exercise_performance.18.aspx http://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Abstract/2010/0...

larrik 15y ago
Artificial sweetener doesn't strike me as solid enough for a control. How could you know the effect wasn't in fact the artificial sweetener negatively affecting the "control"? Or some combination of the two? Your link doesn't actually mention what the placebo was, though.
- sp332 15y ago
  A different study, but I think it's similar: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683964/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683964/ "The placebo (PLA) mouth rinse solution was made from 150 ml of a commercially available non-caloric concentrate sweetened with aspartame and saccharin (Robinsons Soft Drinks Ltd, UK) diluted to 1000 ml with water. The GLU mouth rinse contained 64 g glucose (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The MALT mouth rinse contained 64 g maltodextrin (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The strong artificial sweetness reduced any sensory clues that subjects might use to consciously differentiate between the GLU, MALT and PLA mouth rinses."

wnoise 15y ago

How can one buy bulk glucose to use as a sweetener instead of fructose or sucrose?

Saavedro 15y ago
Karo corn syrup is mostly glucose, if you -really- want to go down that road.
rmobin 15y ago
Look for dextrose or corn sugar. Here's one link: http://www.nowfoods.com/Products/ProductsbyCategory/M004079.htm?cat=Sports%20Nutrition http://www.nowfoods.com/Products/ProductsbyCategory/M004079..... Personally, I just do my best to avoid anything that tastes sweet.
- shpxnvz 15y ago
  Careful, though, the Corn Refiner's Association wants to rename HFCS to "Corn Sugar".
stephen 15y ago
My amateur understanding is that excess glucose still leads to high blood sugar and so the resulting insulin spikes and fat storage. So it may be a lesser evil than fructose, but is not a panacea by any means. FWIW, I'm basing my current understanding on the book Body by Science. It has an explanation of metabolism similar to the Lustig video linked to in the NYT article. However, Body by Science wasn't as specifically anti-fructose, but more generally anti-blood sugar spikes.
- wnoise 15y ago
  Sure, but I'm still going to want to sweeten food in moderation, and it appears that tilting towards glucose in doing so is better. (Though glucose is less sweet, possibly meaning I'll use more, and that's worth watching out for.)
travisp 15y ago
There are online food places where you can buy pure glucose (it has value in certain gourmet foods because of its different properties from sucrose). However, if you read more of Taubes than just this, you'll see that he presents evidence that too much pure glucose would also likely cause problems if I understand it correctly. Spiking your blood glucose to consistently high levels isn't good for you either, even if you avoid all fructose.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

JonnieCache 15y ago

Toxicity as a concept is entirely defined by dose. Bleach is not toxic if you take a small enough dose. Conversely, water is toxic if you drink too much of it. Unfortunately toxic, like so many other of our perfectly good scientific words, has been hijacked by quacks trying to deprive the credulous of their money.

Splines 15y ago
True enough, but people should know how much bleach and water is needed to hurt themselves; death and/or pain provides immediate feedback. The problem with sugar is that the benefits are so immediate and the drawbacks so distant that it requires a strong will to avoid.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  The problem is that the question "Is sugar toxic?" is inherently meaningless. Bandying the word around like this in a publication like the NYT dilutes public understanding of the issue. Scientifically responsible journalists would have chosen an accurate term to discuss the issue rather than shooting for maximum emotional impact.
  - jsdalton 15y ago
    The thesis of the article is pretty obvious: Sugar is toxic in the amounts found in a typical western diet.
    - JonnieCache 15y ago
      Hmmmm. You're right. That is pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now. I tend to be on a bit of a hair trigger over the use of words like toxic by nutritionists, because so often they turn out to be graduates of degree mills, pedalling patent medicines via press release reprinting churnalists. This guy seems to check out however, even if he is a bit absolutist.
      - 15y ago

msluyter 15y ago

Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who runs the "Track Your Plaque" program and the Heart Scan blog (http://www.heartscanblog.org/ http://www.heartscanblog.org/) has identified sugar as one of the primary factors contributing to heart disease. He advises his patients to generally eliminate all sugars, grains (they break down into glucose in the bloodstream), and anything else raises blood glucose levels.

fhars 15y ago
But all the evidence presented in the article seems to point in the direction that glucose is mostly harmless (see the discussion of the Japanese diet that contained mostly rice). So Davis' recommanedation cannot be justified along these lines.
- matthennigan 15y ago
  Davis absolutely hates wheat, on very justifiable grounds. And he strongly recommends anyone with heart problems get off it immediately. But I dont think he has anything against rice.
  - msluyter 15y ago
    Actually, if you read his blog, you'll find lots of articles that, at least indirectly, indict rice (and basically anything that spikes your blood sugar, which includes all grains). For example: http://www.heartscanblog.org/2010/07/what-increases-blood-sugar-more-than.html http://www.heartscanblog.org/2010/07/what-increases-blood-su... Generally, he advocates close postprandial monitoring of blood sugar as a sort of proxy for triglicerides/ldl and often notes that some people may have higher tolerances for certain foods than others. If rice doesn't raise your postprandial blood sugar much, then I'd imagine he'd be ok with it.

yread 15y ago

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose it is: Sucrose (table sugar) - 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)

pak 15y ago
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic and pointing out that anything is "toxic" in high quantities. In case you aren't, or for people that did not catch it, 29g/kg is about 2.4kg of sugar for the average 80kg male, which comes out to about 12.5 cups or 3 liters. It should be obvious to most people that filling a two-liter bottle with pure granulated sugar and consuming it in one sitting would have severe health consequences (if you can even manage to get it all down). What's probably toxic about it at this dosage is that it cannot be eliminated by your kidneys or stored in your liver quickly enough, so it accumulates in the blood and shifts the osmolality causing neurological symptoms, osmotic diuresis and cardiac arrhythmia.
- yread 15y ago
  I was being sarcastic. But I also wanted to post to point to the fact that scientists believe that 50% of the people who ate this much sugar would in fact survive!
  - mirkules 15y ago
    ...and that they tested it enough to even have an average number.
    - yread 15y ago
      well they tested it on rats...
  - smhelp 15y ago
    I was severely depressed a month or two ago, and I went ahead and bought two 2 pound chocolate rich cakes in succession and ate them over a period of 24 hours. Though it didn't kill me, but it was definitely not too upsetting. I still have the urge to just eat huge quantities of sugar, and I am not sure how to control it, but yea it definitely did not kill me or make me sick. I am otherwise an extremely fit individual (can run 5k in 16 minutes)

hirenj 15y ago

So, according to the wiki, HFCS contains about 55% Fructose, 45% Glucose. Regular sucrose is at a 50-50 split. Given your stomach splits sucrose into the respective monosaccharide units anyway, you're going to end up with roughly the same amount of glucose and fructose floating around. The big issue then is just having a large amount of fructose (from whatever source) in your diet. Since excess fructose is shunted off to be stored as fat, this is what's causing all the problems. What would be kind of interesting is whether we can just go about engineering corn so that we block off the fructose pathway, and just produce glucose. This also has the nice side-effect that it's also much more delicious for bacteria to eat, meaning a greater yield of things like biofuels.

bgentry 15y ago

For those who haven't watched the video lecture referenced early in the article, I highly recommend checking it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Lustig does a fantastic job explaining the cellular processes at work, which appealed to my engineering side. I'm not usually passionate about biochemistry and this lecture is definitely long, but if you make it through the first 15 minutes you will be hooked.

AlexC04 15y ago
I came to say the same thing. I'm at Minute #50 of 90 - but my mind has been blown about six ways from Sunday right now. He's an excellent speaker and this stuff is phenomenally interesting.
100k 15y ago
This is one of those "life changing" videos. I'm not sure about the whole paleo diet thing, but I'm pretty sure humans didn't evolve to eat large quantities of sugar.
nikcub 15y ago
I am one of those people who is hard to convince to watch something, so if there is anybody else out there reading this comment thread and wondering if you should watch that video - please do. It is informative in parts, and his style is excellent, but watch if with an open mind and a pinch of skepticism
- g_lined 15y ago
  Thanks. I watched the video only after reading your comment. I found something new about fructose so it was worth it. I personally am turned off by his presentation style. He tries to hard to convince me of his conclusion, too rhetorically and indeed before he had presented his reasons. Nevertheless I feel that the theory of what he presented is pretty much right and the only question appears to be to what degree you agree with his conclusions.

tmcw 15y ago

Journalist who hasn't done any research on sugar agrees with doctor who hasn't done any research on sugar. And this happens to be great linkbait. Tell me why I should pay for the New York Times, again?

trustfundbaby 15y ago
I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine --------------- I think thats compelling enough to make it worth the read.
fanboy123 15y ago
Dr. Lustig is a nationally-recognized authority in the field of neuroendocrinology, with a specific emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. He is currently investigating the contribution of biochemical, neural, hormonal, and genetic influences in the expression of the current obesity epidemic both in children and adults. He has defined a syndrome of vagally-mediated beta-cell hyperactivity which leads to insulin hypersecretion and obesity, and which is treatable by insulin suppression. This phenomenon may occur in up to 20% of the obese population. He is interested in the hypothalamic signal transduction of insulin and leptin, and how these two systems interact. He is studying the cardiovascular morbidity associated with hyperinsulinemia, and developing methods to evaluate and prevent this phenomenon in children. He is also analyzing the contribution of the autonomic nervous system to insulin secretion and insulin resistance in obese children, and the utility of assessing insulin dynamics in targeting obesity therapy.
- oconnor0 15y ago
  Which means?
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - Glide 15y ago

fanboy123 15y ago

Anyone who has questions has the option of posing them directly to Gary himself. The NYT has a Q&A that's open for a few days. Looks like he has already started responding. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/talk-to-gary-taubes-about-sugar/?sort=oldest&offset=1 http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com...

rflrob 15y ago

"In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us." I don't smoke, but I do drink alcohol in moderated amounts, and I'd disagree that alcohol is "killing us" [1], and feel that even if it were proved beyond a doubt that alcohol monotonically decreases lifespan, it helps make life enjoyable enough to be worth it. The same is true for processed sugar, in moderate amounts (though I'd take a ripe honeycrisp apple over a twinkie any day). [1]http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-is-good-for-you http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-i...

bgentry 15y ago
He's not so much saying that sugar in general is killing us. He's arguing that the way we're consuming it now (both volume and generally isolated from fiber/other nutrients) is what's killing us.
kenjackson 15y ago
I think all addictive drugs that decrease lifespan seem worth it to the person doing it. Ask a crackhead if crack is worth dying for and he'll say "hell yes" -- then rob you.
- jacoblyles 15y ago
  The same description applies to following a sedentary lifestyle, participating in risky sports (like skiing), living in a city, and being single. All the more reason to let adults with free will do what they want with their lives.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

I'm actually curious about what this says about consuming fruits in large amounts ... since they are pretty much all fructose. Some folks I know (I did for a bit) consume fruits with gusto, erroneously thinking they don't have effects close to what refined sugars have on the body

Sapient 15y ago
I believe Lustig says the fiber in the fruit reduces the amount of sugar absorbed by our bodies. However, he also says that sweet fruits in large quantities can still be bad for us.
shpxnvz 15y ago
According to the National Soft Drink Association, average daily consumption for U.S. males age 12 to 29 is about half a gallon of soda per day. There was no data on how much of that is diet soda, but even assuming half of the consumption is sugar-free that's about 66 grams of fructose (just the fructose, not all sugars) per day. That person would have to eat 11 apples every single day to match the fructose intake in soda alone. I'm curious how much fruit are you referring to?
rmobin 15y ago
There is an argument to be made that modern fruits have been bred to be sweeter, which is worth examining. Also, it is well known in the "paleo" community that fruit should be avoided when trying to get lean (~10-11% body fat for men) - and this is related to fructose and/or its affect on blood sugar. Last point is a type 1 diabetic, now doctor, eats no fruit and this was a very important step for him to maintain healthy blood sugars and get healthy - Dr. Richard Bernstein (he runs a diabetes clinic in NY). I believe that modern fruit eaten is large quantities isn't so benign.
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bromley 15y ago
I wonder this as well. Lustig seems to say that fruit is fine - the sugar in fruit is nature's way of getting you to eat the healthy fibre or some such - but I've yet to see a scientific explanation of why sugar is bad but sugar in fruit is OK. Sure there are good things in fruit, but if sugar is bad then surely you'd be better off getting those good things from other sources, like vegetables.

mast 15y ago

I'm not a nutritionist, biologist, or doctor, but I have a huge sweet tooth, and I actually tried to answer this question on my humble little blog (http://foodconstrued.com/2011/02/sugar-cravings/ http://foodconstrued.com/2011/02/sugar-cravings/) back in February. My answer: It is not the sugar, but the empty calories leading to obesity and then to further health complications.

jerf 15y ago
So, the article addresses that point, goes into extensive detail as to why it may not be true, with scientists, biochemistry, and all sorts of other stuff, and I'm supposed to believe your "Nuh-uh"? Why is this article wrong? Why is the conventional answer right? At least cite something that directly addresses these arguments and discusses why they are wrong, this makes it looks like you're taking the metaphorical ostrich approach to the argument.

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jalada 15y ago

tl;dr?

AlexC04 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Go to 57:00 and you should get to the bit where he explains why Fructose is a poison. Loses a bit in translation without the hour leading up to it, (which is absolutely fascinating). However, that should cover your TL;DR. Even shorter version: Fructose can only be processed by the liver. That means, by definition it is a poison.
- AlexC04 15y ago
  More TL:DR for you. At 1:08:00 (ish) The effects of long term Fuctose use is virtually identical to long term alcoholism (8 out of 12 effects) (at 1:09:00 ish) Intervention: 1) Remove all sugared drinks from your diet. Water & Milk only 2) Eat carbohydrates with fibre. 3) Wait 20 minutes before a second portion. 4) "Buy" your screen time, minute for minute with physical activity. (holy crap! I've got an eight hour work day to buy back!)
- dpatru 15y ago
  > Fructose can only be processed by the liver. That means, by definition it is a poison. Thanks for this summary. I didn't realize that if a substance can only be processed by the liver, it's a poison.

pdx 15y ago

I used to pop Rolaids for heartburn like crazy. I did this for years, until I was actually developing a toxic reaction to the Rolaids and I began trying other ways to control my heartburn. I finally discovered that sugar (and alcohol) were my biggest contributors. So for me, sugar is definitely toxic. Now that I limit my sugar, I go weeks without heartburn, and when I do get it, it's usually because I had some beer or wine the previous day. Based on this experience, I was interested that he talked about the fructose being removed by the liver (as alcohol is). I probably have some liver issue. This article has led me to a new avenue of research. In the meantime, I am a believer in limiting sugar intake.

tygorius 15y ago
You might be interested in Lustig's lecture on YouTube then. About 2/3 of the way through he goes into how HFCS is processed in the brain. In short, you get many of the disadvantages of alcohol, without the pleasant side-effects.

mkross 15y ago

Maybe sugar is toxic. I don't know (and there seem to be some pretty reasonable opinions both ways). However, there is a line in the article that really stands out to me: "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." I can't tell if this is the author of the article extrapolating sugar's toxicity to explain the root of all ills, or whether Lustig makes that assertion. Either way, there doesn't seem to be anything more than postulation on that front. I'm hoping the purported science behind this theory is actually sound and not just fluff so that we get into arguments about sugar based on incorrect assumptions.

Jun8 15y ago

Here's my (somewhat childish and Bioshock-ish) response along the lines of Shaw's "The reasonable man adapts ..." idea: Why are we still bound by our body mechanisms that were determined by our cavemen ancestors millions of years ago? Rather than cutting back sugar, maybe we should find a way to re-engineer our cellular structure to avoid the metabolic syndrome, mentioned in the article. Why work towards healthy, rather than bend "healthy" towards our will?

bluekeybox 15y ago
> Rather than cutting back sugar, maybe we should find a way to re-engineer our cellular structure to avoid the metabolic syndrome We could also reengineer our taste buds to like sugar less, which would be a more optimal solution (no need for a sugar supply chain). Or we could just trick ourselves into eating less sugar for a while, and then after a few months we will find we don't crave it as much (believe me, it works).
r00fus 15y ago
There's a reason why bioshock is fantasy and not reality: This kind of research is hard, dangerous, and morally controversial... this takes a long time, and funding by a large organization. Meanwhile, you can have an immediate impact yourself by changing your habits. Which one is more accessible to the average person?

pradocchia 15y ago

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers. I've seen this liver-cancer connection in other places, such as Chinese Traditional Medicine and Italian folk medicine. Interesting to see it cropping up here.

deleted 15y ago
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DanielH 15y ago

I just recently stumbled upon it, so for those who wanted a more compact version of Robert Lustigs talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ZIKOQkTiM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ZIKOQkTiM

timedoctor 15y ago

This validates my diet: Zero added sugar (essentially means no processed foods) Zero deep fried food

teach 15y ago

"Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical." I find this statement, as written, to be almost willfully misleading. In sucrose, the glucose and fructose molecules are bound by an acetal bond, which must first be broken. The bond is broken with water, which donates a hydroxide to the fructose molecule (and a hydrogen to the glucose, of course). With HFCS 55, the fructose and glucose are unbound, so the fructose molecule can be absorbed without first being "broken off" and slightly changed via hydrolysis. This almost certainly affects the metabolization of the fructose. Source: my wife, who has a PhD in nutrition.

teyc 15y ago
The assertion was about the chemical pathways. i.e. same enzymes, same intermediate products, same end products. But you are right. The physiological effects are generally identical, not exactly identical.
hcurtiss 15y ago
I suspect Lustig knows that (notwithstanding the fact he says something similar in his lecture, and Taubes repeats it), but decided it's not important for his thesis. Or, at the very least, he doesn't want to wade into the sucrose/HFCS debate. Evidently, he thinks the fructose is sufficiently available in both to be problematic. I'd be super interested in your wife thought something different. I suspect Lustig would too.
- hcurtiss 15y ago
  . . . IF your wife . . . !!
rsheridan6 15y ago
Does this really matter? It's going to end up being essentially totally absorbed either way, I would think. Otherwise you'd be passing sweet candy poops every time you ate sucrose.

neworbit 15y ago

I see that this article cites "fatty liver = insulin resistance" and correlates that directly to sugar ingestion. Well and good - I don't want to be foie gras. But this article also suggests that going off sugar quickly causes the fatty liver to remediate itself - or at least so in lab animals, such problem "promptly goes away". How prompt is this effect in people? Failure rates on commonplace diets seems to make me think it isn't all that swift a process. Anyone have any good stats/links/refs?