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Robert Lustig: The Man Who Believes Sugar is Poison

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 27 2014, @01:11PM   
from the sweets-for-my-sweet,-sugar-for-my-honey-The-Drifters-1961 dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Lustig, the maverick scientist, has long argued that sugar is as harmful as cocaine or tobacco – and that the food industry has been adding too much of it to our meals for too long.

If you have any interest at all in diet, obesity, public health, diabetes, epidemiology, your own health or that of other people, you will probably be aware that sugar, not fat, is now considered the devil's food. Dr Robert Lustig's book, Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Obesity and Disease ( http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/25/fat-chance-robert-lustig-review ), for all that it sounds like a Dan Brown novel, is the difference between vaguely knowing something is probably true, and being told it as a fact. Lustig has spent the past 16 years treating childhood obesity. His meta-analysis of the cutting-edge research on large-cohort studies of what sugar does to populations across the world, alongside his own clinical observations, has him credited with starting the war on sugar. When it reaches the enemy status of tobacco, it will be because of Lustig.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/24/robert-lustig-sugar-poison

I think moderation is the key. What do you think ?

• Re:Are you sure fructose digestion works that way?Re:Are you sure fructose digestion works that way? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @04:04PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @04:04PM (#86316)

  I was under the impression that fructose fell under an alternative pathway that results in essentially the same products as glucose, though absorption and metabolism take longer than with glucose.

  The first step in metabolism of all 6-carbon sugars (ie, glucose and fructose) is phosphorylation by hexokinase. Most of the hexokinases work just as well on glucose as on fructose, so this is the same enzyme doing the same reaction on molecules it can't distinguish. The second step in metabolism of glucose is to isomerize it to fructose.

  All of the glucose you consume is converted to fructose before it generates any ATP

  Parent

• Re:Are you sure fructose digestion works that way?(Score: 1) by cout on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:32PM

  by cout (4526) on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:32PM (#86371)

  The second step of glycolysis is metabolism from glucose-6-phosphate to fructose-6-phospate, not fructose. When fructose is metabolized, it is phosphorylated by fructokinase to fructose-1-phosphate. So yes, glucose is metabolized to a phosphorylated to a 5-carbon-ring sugar, but the phosphate group is on a different carbon when glucose is metabolized than when fructose is metabolized. In other words, the pathways differ until the sugars are broken down into three-carbon molecules.

  (apparently hexokinase can metabolize fructose to fructose-6-P, but it is a slower reaction and is therefore a less likely reaction).

  Parent