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from the sweets-for-my-sweet,-sugar-for-my-honey-The-Drifters-1961 dept.
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 ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:33PM
Living on a high sugar diet is unhealthy but some sugars are worse than others. In decreasing order of health:-
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday August 28 2014, @05:31AM
If you read Lustigs stuff it's precisely fructose that does the damage (HFCS/sucrose is quickly broken down into fructose and glucose anyway). He not only has correlations, but well understood mechanisms on why this is so.
*) Fructose can only be broken down slowly in the liver (to glucose). Glucose on the other hand can be absorbed by any cell in the body. Blood glucose is regulated easily by insulin which stimulates its absorbsion by fat and muscle cells. This regulation happens surprisingly quickly - in tens of seconds.
*) Your insulin metabolism sees fructose and glucose in the same way ie. as "sugar". Too much circulating fructose therefore causes insulin to be released. Your blood glucose crashes while fructose levels remain unaffected - glucose is absorbed by fat and muscles, while fructose is only absorbed after being slowly converted to glucose by the liver. Low blood glucose causes a lack of energy and food cravings... in this case despite high fructose levels. The food cravings often causes more fructose to be added to the system. What's worse, insulin remains high causing glucose to be continually scrubbed from the blood and deposited as fat as the fructose is processed by the liver... with chronically high insulin eventually causing insulin resistance.