"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…
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.
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.
Humans have a problem with those sort of issues. Furthermore when surrounded by pretty much everything sugar, its kind of hard to avoid. Imagine if we were to find out tomorrow that people who use facebook are 60% likely to die of a seizure caused directly by facebook within the next 50 years. And we find out by a vague hard to prove no direct correlation study. Would be pretty hard to convince everyone you know to s…
Definitely. Imagine if sugar was the opposite: You gain weight immediately (* poomp *!), and a year later you get a pleasant sensation on your tongue.
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
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.
Humans have a problem with those sort of issues. Furthermore when surrounded by pretty much everything sugar, its kind of hard to avoid. Imagine if we were to find out tomorrow that people who use facebook are 60% likely to die of a seizure caused directly by facebook within the next 50 years. And we find out by a vague hard to prove no direct correlation study. Would be pretty hard to convince everyone you know to s…
Definitely. Imagine if sugar was the opposite: You gain weight immediately (* poomp *!), and a year later you get a pleasant sensation on your tongue.
You actually gain weight immediately, due to the conservation of mass. Eat an ounce of sugar (or anything else) and you gain an ounce, until you poop it out. You just don't feel it because the amounts involved at any given meal is small. But if you ate 10 lb of sugar at one meal... you'd definitely feel the consequences.
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.
Isn't sodium hypochlorite not particularly toxic to humans anyway? I think cyanide would have been a better example. Eat one microgram, you're fine. Eat one gram, bye bye.
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.
> 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.
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.
The thesis being true or not is beside the point - yes, America eats too much sugar. Probably. But the problem about articles like this, and other campaigns to curb "bad eating habits" (like New York City's vendetta against salt and soda) is that it promotes a negative attitude towards food and eating, which feeds the cycle of abuse towards food and towards self esteem, instead of going deeper into the root of the problem itself. Any recovering food addict will tell you that the first thing you learn in rehab is to relearn your attitude towards food. What if, on the subway, people read signs that said "Eat well! Eat what you want! Thumbs Up!" instead of "You're going to die of diabetes if you don't stop eating sugar in toxic amounts"? Of course, that's an over reductive analogy - but my point is that it's not the American Diet that needs change, it is the American Attitude Towards Food that is desperately dysfunctional.
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…
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 individua…
Incidentally there are some studies with rats showing that sugar/sweet addicted + cocaine addicted rats prefer their sugar hit over their cocaine hit, and plain sugar-addicted rats when removed from sugar/sweet had opiate-withdrawal like symptoms.
I guess I will need to get this sorted out sooner rather than later then.