Is Sugar Toxic?

I think cyanide would have been a better example. Eat one microgram, you're fine. Eat one gram, bye bye.

...beside the food industry, which thrives by having people overeat?

I'm not sure about the whole paleo diet thing, but I'm pretty sure humans didn't evolve to eat large quantities of sugar.

It is informative in parts, and his style is excellent, but watch if with an open mind and a pinch of skepticism

Your link doesn't actually mention what the placebo was, though.

But you are right. The physiological effects are generally identical, not exactly identical.

We could also reengineer our taste buds to like sugar less, which would be a more optimal solution (no need for a sugar supply chain). Or we could just trick ourselves into eating less sugar for a while, and then after a few months we will find we don't crave it as much (believe me, it works).

Meanwhile, you can have an immediate impact yourself by changing your habits.

Which one is more accessible to the average person?

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.

However, he also says that sweet fruits in large quantities can still be bad for us.

That person would have to eat 11 apples every single day to match the fructose intake in soda alone.

I'm curious how much fruit are you referring to?

FWIW, I'm basing my current understanding on the book Body by Science. It has an explanation of metabolism similar to the Lustig video linked to in the NYT article. However, Body by Science wasn't as specifically anti-fructose, but more generally anti-blood sugar spikes.

Possessing approximately 40% less food energy, xylitol is a low-calorie alternative to table sugar. Absorbed more slowly than sugar, it does not contribute to high blood sugar levels or the resulting hyperglycemia caused by insufficient insulin response. This characteristic has also proven beneficial for people suffering from metabolic syndrome, a common disorder that includes insulin resistance, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and an increased risk for blood clots.

If anyone's wondering what a liberal arts degree is good for, this article is an excellent example.

Again, maybe not actionable, but definitely content. Especially for a mainstream newspaper article.

It's also worth noting that it's not -only- a volume issue but a rate issue. This is why -refined- sugars are particularly bad, because they are immediately available (unlike say, eating a fruit, where it takes time for your body to tear apart the fibers to get at the sugar).

Fructose metabolism is not rate-regulated, and a cell metabolizing fructose quickly uses up all its energy (ATP) and slows down. So it's not really safe to consume -refined- fructose in general because it will shut down the liver while it is being metabolized, and this can allow compounds that should -not- be in the bloodstream (such as fructose itself) to get into the bloodstream because the liver is tied up and can't take them on.

I found this passage particularly compelling: "During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not."

It's probably better to eat like a poor Korean farmer than like an "average" American teenager.

> 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.

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.

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.

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I think thats compelling enough to make it worth the read.