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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Hmmmm. You're right. That is pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now.

I tend to be on a bit of a hair trigger over the use of words like toxic by nutritionists, because so often they turn out to be graduates of degree mills, pedalling patent medicines via press release reprinting churnalists.

This guy seems to check out however, even if he is a bit absolutist.

Technically, you don't even need a degree in anything relevant to nutrition to call yourself a nutritionist. Dietitian on the other hand comes with more accreditation. For that reason, dietitians often refer to themselves as dietitians rather than nutritionists because it's more distinguished. I err towards suspicion when someone refers to himself/herself as simply a "nutritionist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist

That's cool; I actually appreciated your insight in the top comment. It is meaningless to say sugar is toxic or not toxic. The important question is at what level does it become toxic, which is almost certainly less than what we consume now but surely greater than zero (I hope so anyway -- zero strikes me as both impractical and not very tasty).

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.

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 stop using facebook. What if it's too late? Etc.

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.

It's "until you breathe it out" actually, isn't it?

The term we're looking for here is "excrete"

The dose is discussed in the article. The hypothesis is that 90 pounds of added sugars per person per year is toxic (current levels of consumption). 40 pounds per person per year is supposed to be ok.

It does not say that 40 pounds per year is OK. It says that there is no evidence that 40 pounds per year is not OK.

Who wants to extort money from whom?..

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

Quacks selling books certainly want to take money from people wishing they could be thinner (but who are unwilling to eat less and exercise more).

(Another variant is selling books telling you "it's not your fault you are fat." I haven't read it, but the impression I get from people who have is that Gary Taubes book falls into this category.)

It's time you give in and read the primary materials. As someone who has read both the major Taubes books, I am yet to see you successfully characterize his arguments. Please note I did not say "successfully attack his arguments", because that is something else; characterizing them correctly is a necessary first step. You think you understand them, but when you try to explain them to someone else you are wrong about them. Again, I am not saying that the arguments Taubes makes are right or wrong, I am saying I have not yet seen you correctly explain them.

That is not an adequate summary of the latest Gary Taubes book, which is, well, exactly what the title says. If there is something you can "do" about it it's hardly "not your fault" now, is it?

He's not a quack. There are a lot of people who want you to think he's a quack, but he's not. He may not be right but he is certainly not a quack. For that matter if he's a quack in his latest book for suggesting that the science of endocrinology should be taken seriously on the topic of how fat works, then the entire science of endocrinology is quackery. (Incidentally, I mean literally "how fat works"; not "how one becomes obese" but the actual workings of what fat cells take for input, what they give as output, and what affects the two, all of it coming from endocrinology.)

I don't claim to know much about Taubes, nor did I claim to characterize his arguments. Perhaps you noticed that I explicitly disclaimed any direct knowledge of his book?

My only direct knowledge of him is reading one of his blog posts and finding it very misleading, attempting to make a reducto ad absurdum against the standard calories in/calories out theory while ignoring about 90% of the calories in. Not exactly a compelling reason to shell out $11 and hours of my time on his book.

Here's a reason: Based on reading your other posts, I think you may be very surprised and end up liking his writing. Taubes' science writing is the best I've ever encountered. (And no, that's not because it's the only science writing I've ever encountered, not by a long shot.) Whether he ends up right or wrong in the end, you can not accuse him of not having done his homework, especially in GCBC. I won't guarantee it will convince you, but I am asserting to you that you have misjudged him very badly and I have only rarely seen people show their work more thoroughly, and that only in PhD theses. (That said about the depth of GCBC, start with the latest one. It's shorter and sharper.)

This does not say "its not your fault" its more of "its not your fault for being ignorant to the harm of sugar, but its still up to you to watch what you eat".

Its like saying "its not your fault, smoking is addictive"... thats right, its addictive, and now that you know its killing you and has no benefit, you as a rational human being need to put yourself in a position where you can quit by destroying your cigs and forcing everyone you know to never permit you of smoking, and ensure you are not even if you try to hide it, and give you shit if they smell it, etc. there are ways, there is help, but its still the responsibility of the person no matter who's fault it is.

Good Calories, Bad Calories (by Taubes) is none of those things. It is not a diet book, it is a book about diet. Any layman who picks it up to read it will almost immediately put it down due to the very dense text full of medical jargon. I thought it was a very thought provoking book. I really don't know how one is going to become insanely rich by pedaling a book like that.

I'm guessing the gp was referring to the many "detox" programs, which claim to remove unnamed "toxins" from the body through fasting, eating raw food, lots of pooping, etc.

I was amused when I realized that any substance with nonzero mass is "toxic" in sufficiently large amounts (even if, say, it gets removed from your body as fast as you ingest it): enough of it will collapse into a black hole that swallows you up.

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.

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