How can one buy bulk glucose to use as a sweetener instead of fructose or sucrose?
Is Sugar Toxic?
31–40 of 144 posts
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#32Lustig 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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#33"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…
> 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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#34"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…
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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)
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#37According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose it is: Sucrose (table sugar) - 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#38According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose it is: Sucrose (table sugar) - 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)
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 cons…
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#39"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…
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.
Re: Is Sugar Toxic?
#40"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…