What’s All The Fuss About Sugar?
When are Sweets Not So Sweet?
Over the past several months sugar has been all over the headlines. This started on February 2nd when Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindia published a letter in the journal Nature titled “The Truth About Sugar” where they suggested that sucrose and high fructose corn syrup should be regulated like alcohol or tobacco because of their toxic nature. Last week the television show “Sixty Minutes” aired a segment titled “Is Sugar Toxic” where Dr. Lustig was interviewed.
Dr. Lustig in a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco who runs an obesity clinic for children. For the past several years he has been lecturing on the toxic effects of sugar.
Everybody knows that too much sugar probably isn’t good for us, so why all the fuss about regulating it? After all, what’s the harm in a few empty calories as long as you don’t go overboard?
Should Sugar Be Regulated?
That’s really the essence of the problem—sucrose and high fructose corn syrup are no more “empty calories” than cigarette smoke is “empty air”. The toxic nature from these two common substances that are now found in most processed foods is derived from one of the two simple sugars they contain—fructose. Sucrose and high fructose corn syrup are made up off about equal portions of glucose and fructose. Glucose is the sugar our cells evolved to use for most of our energy needs. All carbohydrates are broken down to glucose through the process of digestion.
Throughout most of our evolutionary history, humans consumed small amounts of fructose from fruit, vegetables and honey. Most of this fructose was then converted to glucose or the stored form of glucose called glycogen. This situation gradually changed when humans learned to cultivate and process the sugar cane plant over the past 10,000 years. Over this time span sucrose from this plant gradually spread throughout the word. For most of this time period sugar was expensive and only available to those few who had enough financial resources to buy it. Over the past few centuries sugar has gradually become a widely available commodity.
But if High Fructose is Good and Cheap, How Can That be Bad?
Growing GMO corn for the cornflake factory, right next door
Things really changed when scientists in Japan figured out a way to produce high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) from corn in 1971. HFCS typically has more fructose than sucrose or table sugar, it is also cheaper and much easier to store and transport. Over the next decade HFCS replaced sucrose in most processed foods. Today, if you are into reading labels, you will find that virtually all processed foods contain either sucrose or HFCS.
For years these substances were viewed as empty calories, devoid of any beneficial nutrients. That began to change when researchers like my friend, Richard Johnson, began to study the effects of excessive fructose first in lab animals and then in humans. What they found was truly game changing.
If you consume more than 25 grams of fructose daily, your liver starts to convert it to two substances—triglycerides or fat and uric acid. As these triglycerides fill up your liver with fat, you develop a condition called insulin resistance where the cells in your body no longer respond to the insulin that your pancreas secrets when you eat carbohydrates. Because the glucose can’t easily get inside of the cells in your body, you end up with magnified glucose spikes when you eat carbohydrates. Over time these magnified glucose spikes trigger the chronic brain disease called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. This site is dedicated to educating the public about this common and potentially devastating disease. With CARB syndrome you develop up to 21 brain dysfunction symptoms that interfere with your ability to function and your brain will push your body to store excessive body fat at virtually any caloric intake.
When is Too Much of a Good Thing Too Bad? When it’s Fructose.
When you consume too much fructose, some of it is also converted to uric acid, a metabolic waste product that can cause gout. We now know that high levels of uric acid also damage your blood vessels, leading to high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes.
Excessive body fat, a brain that doesn’t work so well, heart attacks and strokes—sugar is starting to sound like a lot more than “empty calories”. If sugar and HFCS are truly toxic, then why is the Agricultural Industrial Complex putting it in all our food? The simple answer is because people with CARB syndrome crave it. One of the first symptoms you develop when you have CARB syndrome is craving for sweet or starchy foods. The food industry learned long ago that when they put sugar or HFCS in food, people tend to buy more of it.
If we are going to regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco, we need a good reason to do so. And now we have it. They are one of the primary triggers of a new disease process that is devastating all modern populations that consume this type of food. As with alcohol and tobacco, sugar and HFCS are chronic toxins—you can consume them for years will no apparent ill effects until the wheels suddenly fall off decades later. In our medical practices we are now seeing the consequences of the toxic nature of sugar and HFCS.
Make the connection. Sugar and fructose will kill you.
You Can Take Action Today To Save Your Own Health
Don’t wait for some government agency to regulate these substances. Act now and remove these from your diet before they destroy your health and ability to function. Because of the carbohydrate cravings associated with CARB syndrome, in a later post I will teach you how to suppress these dangerous cravings, making it much easier to remove them from your diet.