Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who runs the "Track Your Plaque" program and the Heart Scan blog (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.
Is Sugar Toxic?
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#22Toxicity 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.
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.
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#23According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose
it is:
Sucrose (table sugar) - 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#24"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 w…
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#25"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 w…
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
The thesis of the article is pretty obvious: Sugar is toxic in the amounts found in a typical western diet.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#27How can one buy bulk glucose to use as a sweetener instead of fructose or sucrose?
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#28So, 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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#29I 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'…
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.
A different study, but I think it's similar: 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."
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#30"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 w…
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.