Maybe fructose really is a problem and we should be really careful with it.
But when we look at people who are obese their problem is not that they eat fructose containing foods, or that they regularly eat a couple of hundred extra calories per day. Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories.
When you get 4,000 extra calories it doesn't matter whether it's glucose or sucrose or fructose - the person is going to gain weight and be harmed by the sugar.
The reason that Americans are fatter than Europeans is not because the US uses more fructose, it is because Americans eat a lot more than Europeans. But Europe is catching up. The UK has plenty of obesity and we don't have nearly so much fructose use as the US.
The fructose being talked about isn't the nice one in fruits. It's corn syrup or sugar in soda. Yes, obese people consume incredible amounts of it. A gallon a day. Those Texas sized doses of soda you can order with your meal actually get consumed.
It's very difficult to consume even 1000 extra calories from proper food, like potatoes. They fill you up. And I can barely get a layer of fat. With soda you won't even notice the consumption. And it screws with insulin in the blood like fruits and potatoes never could. Makes you absorb more.
Some powerlifters eat junk food precisely because it contains more calories per stomach stuffing material. Ruins bloodwork but gets results. So do steroids.
Take that soda and replace the fructose with sucrose. You still get people drinking a gallon of it.
> It's very difficult to consume even 1000 extra calories from proper food, like potatoes.
This is just not true. People find it easy to overeat. They add a little bit of butter here, some mayo there, have a drizzle of salad dressing, a nice snack. It all adds up.
Detrus is talking about proper food.
You're talking about butter and mayo.
A huge part of the problem is that people equate these things just as you have. Mayo in particular is an abomination. What we have come to accept as "food" is tragic[1].
Hey! There's only 57 calories in a tablespoon of mayo. If people are responsible and only use one or two tablespoons (to dip their fries, for example) then it is totally fine!
People need to learn to eat slower and really savour the food. Small portions of more intensely flavoured food is way better than huge, bulky meals of starch and meat and sugar. Whole grains too! I used to eat a half pound of regular pasta topped with several cups of cheap meat sauce. Now I eat 1/5 of a pound of whole grain multigrain pasta mixed with 3/4 cup of high quality marinara sauce (no meat) alongside a nice big salad (with minimal dressing). It tastes way better and is much healthier.
I think sugar based soda had less sugar per gallon. With HFCS they changed the recipe and added more, even though it's sweeter. Makes people buy more. Not sure what the case is now with back to sugar changes.
What I had in mind was intentionally consuming 1000 calories of proper food on top of a diet that covers physical activity. Often 3-5000 calories. You know you're stuffing yourself then.
And assuming the butter and mayo aren't packed with extra sweetener or leptin suppressors, they're not a big deal. They won't cause insulin spikes. A drizzle of typical salad dressing is full of HFCS though. Gotta eat your vegetables!
But note that soda doses and recipes changed around 1990. That's also when the word fat didn't quite describe the state of a growing number of people. You can get fat on greasier food. Fatter on sugary sweets. But nothing digests faster and makes your body react like liquid packed with HFCS and salt. Salt makes you thirst for more and more HFCS blocks out its taste. That's how those bucket sized cups get consumed.
It's true that eating raw things pulls on all sorts of threshold triggering a strong stop reflex, whereas one can eat processed food for long periods without even half of this 'im fed up' sensation.
If you care to do some research on the topic you will see that there is strong evidence pointing to chronic consumption of fructose damaging the metabolism in such a way that people no longer experience satiety the way a healthy person does. Over time this contributes to overconsumption as well as increased fat deposition which is a vicious cycle.
actually, could you pass a study that shows that. On pubmed, I see a lot of studies between carbs and protein.
On the fructose vs glucose side, I see most studies pointing out the bad effects of a high carb diet (where carbs = starch/glucose/fructose/sucrose), but nothing that compares fructose with glucose per se.
In fact, I see there are a few studies that show fructose is better than glucose, but they are primarily funded by the ILSI [1]
> Nowadays, we consume several times more fructose than we did 100 years ago.
Nowadays people consume very many more calories than we did 100 years ago, and people in countries where HFCS isn't used still get fat.
When someone says they stopped eating HFCS it's not stopping the fructose that helps them lose weight, it's stopping drinking all those extra empty calories that helps them lose weight.
That's not the same as several times more. If I remember correctly, it was something along the lines of 500% more. It's a crazy amount of fructose. And there usually is very little fiber (which you'd get with fruits) to slow down the absorption rate.
HFCS isn't that different from sugar. The only real problem is that it's even cheaper than sugar.
Theoretically, you could use a bit less because it's a little bit sweeter than sugar, but no one seems to do that.
HFCS is a very cheap way to make your crappy product taste like something. That's why it's everywhere.
I would guess that it gets you used to sweeter flavors, craving more and needing more to hit the same level of sensation once you'd acclimated.
I believe I've seen studies that show that even artificial sweeteners leave you with a sweet tooth that cause you to seek out more sugary foods without realizing it.
I know from personal experience, that after I had stopped drinking soda for a while, when I try it again I find it cloyingly sweet. I can't stand the stuff. But for people who have been used to drinking it for years, it tastes perfectly normal.
I agree. Since I've decided to stop drinking cola and such beverages (about 8 years ago) I'm surprised how unpleasant and over-sugared their taste seems to me now. But this goes both for sugar and fructose - once the habit is broken, you really don't need it anywhere.
Using the alcoholic analogy people are saying "alcoholism is caused by grain! Grain does X and that's really bad!" when really, while grain might be bad, it's the alcohol that's the real problem.
Fructose might be bad, but the real problem is the huge amount of over eating that people do. And people still get obese even in countries that do not use HFCS.
It's a combination of factors. There's overeating, it's true. But there are also a lot of cheap, readily available foods out there that are packed with sugar. Need to make a cheap tomato sauce tastier? Add a little HFCS. Doesn't cost much, and makes it preferable to the next one.
I'm also constantly surprised at the number of people who drink soda on a daily basis. It's carbonated sugar water, it's terrible for you, but some people just can't seem to stop drinking it. You wouldn't think to claim that someone who drank two Cokes in a day was "overeating", but that's equivalent to eating an extra hamburger per day; if someone ordered another hamburger on top of their lunch, you'd think it a bit excessive.
Diet Soda doesn't help as much as people think. It turns out that it still leaves you with a hell of a sweet tooth, and craving more sugar.
Then there are all of the food products out there that tout themselves as healthy options. Which one do you think is lower calorie, a burrito or a Caesar Salad? Well, it turns out due to all the glop they put in the dressing, a fairly loaded burrito with rice, beans, and sour cream can be lower calorie, lower saturated fat, and higher in fiber than a Caesar Salad.
So, there are a lot of things about modern diets that make it particularly prone to overeating. Between salty snacks that you compulsively eat, sugar levels in everything creeping up, food touted as healthy that's anything but, and the like, coupled with (as you mention) overeating and a sedentary lifestyle, it's no wonder people get fat.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be concerned about the HFCS. No, HFCS is not "poison" or "toxic". But it is excessively cheap and overused. If you avoid HFCS (and aren't stupid about it by simply substituting foods that have an equivalent amount of other sugars), you can avoid a lot of the foods that are bad for you that sort of sneak up on you.
I also blame a lot of this on the whole "low fat" fad. In efforts to reduce fat as much as possible, lots of food manufacturers looked to other things to enhance the flavor of their foods. Sugar is an easy way to do so.
Eh, people should take responsibility for the shit they put in their bodies. No excuses, in my opinion.
I swear half the problem is that people don't cook anymore. I cook every meal from as close to scratch as possible (I really enjoy it). Same with the rest of my family, and we are all super healthy weights. Plural of anecdote is not data, but I always wondered whether that had something to do with it.
There is both a personal and collective responsibility. Yes, people should take responsibility for what they put in their body. But to do that, they need to have good things available that are affordable and not too inconvenient.
People eat what is cheap and convenient. We would do well to try and reduce the trend to make the most cheap convenient food by making processed food that's full of stuff that's bad for you.
That I will certainly agree with, and I fully understand that as a privileged middle-class white male with parents who have always stressed the importance of eating well and educated myself (and my siblings) as to how to look after ourselves, I'm one of the lucky ones.
But, what I've found as someone who once lived on the streets and have been so poor that I had to steal tinned tomatoes to be able to eat, even when poor you can do okay (well, not on the streets, but if you've got a roof over your head it's okay) -- and in my personal experience, it was _cheaper_ to cook your own food that eschews large amounts of sugar and processed crap. That's basically what I can't seem to reconcile.
Good points though, and society does have a part to play; I just think that we can do better on a personal level as well.
Eating too much is bad, and foodstuffs like Fructose clearly do not help. Fructose also has a link to cancer, which is separate to weight issues and should be the main focus of debate
However I agree with you that simply identifying Fructose as a smoking gun / evildoer for obesity is wrong.
There seem to be combination of special interest groups focussing on making Fructose an issue:
* Anti American bile - The school of thought that: American Big Business pushes this stuff, ergo it must be evil and manipulative
* Trying to sell diet books enriching the author. This Fructose issue is the fashionable kernel of truth that such books strive for; They hang snake-oil padding around such facts.
Yeah, that's all well and good except that fructose make you really hungry which is a large part of why Americans CONSUME more. Avoid fructose unless you are building up your fat reserve for a fallow winter.
I'd tend to partially agree with you: the amount of sugar added to almost all processed food is terrifying, and there's good evidence it's extremely bad for you.
And that's something we suffer from in the UK, too. I recall one particularly eye-opening moment in Sainsburys' when I checked a chilli to find out it was 5% sugar by weight. That's a lot of sugar in a savoury dish.
Doing the Four Hour Body, paleo, troglodiet (tm), I can't eat enough. In fact, the more I eat, the more body fat I lose. It's crazy. I even managed to convince my gf, who now eats with abandon, and she's lost 30lbs so far.
Ferriss warns in an early chapter that you will eat more than you've ever eaten before. Chomping thru 3 yummy kale salads (or equiv) per day, I stop eating when I'm tired of chewing. My salads are stuffed with calories, like bacon, turkey, avocado, tahini, craisins, etc.
Back to the fructose...
All I know comes from Lustig (sorry, I'm still not a biologist), why refined foods like HFCS are bad. The different metabolic pathway for fruit juice vs fruit. The sucrose splits into fructose and glucose. Body needs glucose whereas fructose is poison (just like alcohol). The fiber found in fruit et al blocks digestion of the fructose.
I don't have any cites for how fructose is crack for cancers. I assume it's true. Diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are reason enough to avoid fructose.
(Further, I vote with my dollars. Screw the corn lobby and their market distorting subsidies.)
Lots of veggies, some fruit, nuts, meat. Four Hour Body throws in slow carbs like legumes (black beans). Ferriss also advises one "cheat day" per week, for eating treats, for both psychology and something about hormones (which I don't understand). This week it was cheesecake and croissants.
I went off paleo for a year or so, now back on for a few months and have gone from 178 to 162 lbs. without doing much else than cutting out sugar, gluten grains and plant oils. It's strange this time; when I occasionally eat these things, I feel slightly, but noticeably ill for about a day afterwards.
Anyhow if this type of diet interests you, I want you to check out his blog because it is a slightly different approach than other "paleo". You need not eat super low carb as long as it is the right type of carbs and you don't have a ton of weight to lose. He also suggests cream if you don't have leaky gut (I drink tons in coffee every day).
"Glucose is a necessary internal fuel source and metabolite and it is also a food and the building block of foods that have the longest evolutionary history of any food that mammals use. It is a fact that we do not require glucose in the diet, and that we can make it from amino acids if we don't eat it. However, rather than viewing this as evidence that glucose is not important, we should view this as evidence that glucose is so metabolically important that we have evolved way to make sure we always have it." ...
"Like glucose, there is no dietary requirement for fructose, but unlike glucose, we do not require fructose for use as an internal fuel. There is no organ like the brain that has an absolute fructose requirement. In fact, our body has mechanisms that evolved specifically to keep most cells from being exposed to too much of it." ...
"To keep fructose out of the general circulation, it must be immediately burned or stored as fat. Fructose is related to the spectrum of serious diseases known as NAFLD (non-alcoholic liver disease), including fatty liver and cirrhosis."
The advice you get there is a political consensus, not a scientific one. Have a look at http://www.choosemyplate.gov/, linked directly from health.gov: You will have a hard time finding a recommendation against any food product. The non-obvious trick used to appease the food industry is basing the recommendations on nutrients and ingredients, allowing the industry to push their "Any food product can be part of a balanced diet" myth, and reengineer the processed food so that they can put whatever nutrient or ingredient is considered healthy right now on the labels.
Yes, it's not fashionable to follow the updated HHS guidelines for healthy eating, but they are rooted in well-tested science. The USDA and HHS invest quite a bit into getting these guidelines right continuing to improve them as science advances. I have not seen a dietary platform as rigorously studied as the one provided by HHS.
Would that be the same "well-tested" science that said "fat" is "bad for you"? Because, it turns out, it's a little more complicated than that, and that products marketed as "low-fat" are, in fact, even worse for you.
It did say that, once upon a time. But if we can never forgive science for being wrong, we'd still be holding a grudge in astrophysics over the whole "sun revolves around the earth" thing.
This is the summary from the 2010 guidelines:
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, released on January 31, 2011, emphasize three major goals for Americans:
- Balance calories with physical activity to manage weight
- Consume more of certain foods and nutrients such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy products, and seafood
- Consume fewer foods with sodium (salt), saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, and refined grains
Notice they do not advise avoiding fats altogether- only full-fat dairy, and saturated & trans fats.
Also notice it specifically recommends the very things we are discussing here- omitting added sugar & refined grains.
The rise of the lipid hypothesis wasn't the general scientific consensus being wrong, it was the US government cherry picking science based on lobbyist pressure. So while I fully trust science to advance, I don't trust the US government to build science-based, non-biased dietary guidelines based on scientific findings.
Even the recommendation against full-fat dairy may be wrong. Recent research suggests that children given low-fat or skim milk tend to be obese more than children given full-fat dairy products.
That may be, but I don't think anyone is saying they are right because they are the government, I think we are saying this a reasonable compendium of the best knowledge we have. You can make choices based on recent research that suggests things if you like, but I completely understand why documents published in 2011 don't recommend breaking research from 2013.
Anyway, my key point was that they have clearly been adjusting recommendations with the times, and being wrong in the past doesn't mean they should never be trusted again- that isn't how science works. (This is food science)
I think one of the key points about food science is that you should always be skeptical of it.
In general, it is very difficult to do controlled, large population studies over a human life span. Instead, lots of studies rely on self-reported surveys, measurements of various indicators that are believed to correlate with poor heath effects over a very short period, and so on.
Mapping from "we know that if you eat X, the Y level in your blood rises over the next 24 hours, and in a separate study we have shown that Y is correlated with chronic disease Z" is actually a pretty poor argument for "X causes Z", and even more of a poor argument for "thus, you should eliminate X from your diet", and telling people to eliminate "X" from their diet doesn't necessarily always lead to simply the desired effect of eliminating "X", but may lead to them replacing it with "W" which is even worse.
Human bodies and human behavior are quite complex. The actual effects of a particular recommendation are not well understood. By making recommendations and policy from science that was not well enough understood, we may have increased the rate of growth of the obesity epidemic over the past 30 years or so. This has happened, in part, by over-emphasizing "low fat" which encouraged people to replace fat with sugars.
So, food policy recommendation are not food science. They may be influenced by science, but they are different. And I generally take them with a very large grain of salt.
Instead, we can find strategies that, at least anecdotally, seem to work better than adhering to the latest fad diet or the government recommendations. Eat real food; plants and animals that have been minimally processed before getting to you. The more processing that has been done, the more the foods have likely been optimized for something other than nutritional value and flavor (shelf life, profits, etc). Don't eat too much; whatever you do, if you want to lose weight, eating less across the board will likely achieve that. Food that is decadent is likely good to have only in small quantities; if it's sweet or greasy, it's probably good to limit to lower quantities. Get exercise daily; walk, or bike somewhere, hit the gym, do an outdoor activity, or something, don't go from bed to car to chair to car to couch to bed.
Following these kinds of recommendations may not seem as official or authoritative as the government or some author selling a new diet book. But anecdotally, they work pretty well, and they aren't likely to be skewed by various parties monetary interests or simply bad interpretation and over-generalization of good scientific data.
They have recommended a carbohydrate rich diet for years and it has gotten us what? Appeal to government authority is not compelling when it comes to dietary advice, especially when you consider the power of the food lobby and the well understood impact of lobbyists in American politics.
Well, considering they now recommend things like eating more fish & whole grains, if we are implicitly never trusting what the government says about food you better start eating more red meant, refined grains & processed sugar. Stick it to the man!
The other go-to on why the USDA guidelines are faulty is Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories which also covers the history of the so-called lipid hypothesis (that saturated fats are bad for you). I cook with only ghee, bacon grease and coconut oil. Some articles by Taubes:
A government in thrall to the "big food" lobby is the last place I'd go for dietary advice.
I'm not just talking about the US government here - but almost all western governments have got it wrong on nutrition for the last half century or so. It seems that Sweden is the first to buck the trend - I hope others catch on before they cost us more billions in health care spending trying to fix the symptoms of what they have caused.
It looks like that's all in regards to the 2015 guidelines which have not been written/finalized yet. I'm betting this works kind of like the Census, so look here for now:
in my experience contrarianism and seeking fame and attention cause as much bias as lobbying.
I particularly trust the FDA because there is no clear direction that lobbying would bias them in. All industries want their food to be called "healthy", and all of these industries are fairly organized or centralized. So I don't see any reason to think the FDA is biased toward a particular food or industry.
LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) has become popular in Sweden lately. You can read an introduction[1] and a page with references[2]. LCHF is basically a "paleo" approach.
I've had several overweight acquaintance who have tried it out and it has worked out great every single time. It is perhaps a bit extreme to disallow nearly all carbs, but on the other hand no other diet will let you eat as much (of the good stuff) you can - and still work.
Another blogger tried out what happens if you overeat calories[3], both eating carbs and eating low-fat. Quite amusing to see the results as nearly everyone is stuck in the calorie counting mindset.
By itself, that fact conveys nothing. You could've said, "Every time the "NSA is spying on everyone" comes up, it seems to be Glenn Greenwald talking about it".
When it comes to Big Food (or Big Pharma, Big Insurance etc.), I'd prefer - at the very minimum - taking any claims against them at face value instead of dismissing them outright. Of course, follow it up with your own research.
If that's the only way you can validate claims and counterclaims made by others, please go ahead.
Less resourceful people, like me, prefer a more common-sense approach of searching & reading multiple authors & articles to arrive at something they feel could be reasonably close to the truth.
>You could've said, "Every time the "NSA is spying on everyone" comes up, it seems to be Glenn Greenwald talking about it".
Because Greenwald is in possession of a secret stash of documents leaked to him and only a few other people on the planet have access to those documents. Are you saying that Lustig has some secret data about fructose that only he knows about?
It conveys that the opinion you heard a hundred times isn't a hundred people having the same opinion; it's one person having the opinion a hundred times.
Primarily because Lustig is the champion of this banner for whatever reason. You can find numerous rebuttals of his psuedoscience from people like Alan Aragon, Lyle McDonald, Leigh Peele, Martin Berkhan, etc.
Every time God plays dice with the universe, it seems to be that same scientist talking about it.
Maybe it's always Robert Lustig because he's the name people already recognize. Maybe he's the one doing most of the research in the area. Sometimes, the public need a figurehead to keep explaining something to us until we get it.
Sure. Like the guy who said smoking is bad for you, or the guys who said excessive fat and cholesterol are bad for you. They stood up to Big Agro and fought the good fight. Who were those guys again?
This is true and it also worries me. I always go, good article that agrees with my belief system, who wrote it.... Dam the person who put me onto it in the first place.
I agree that fructose (when eaten separately without the surrounding real fruit) is bad.
But people should go some steps further: The whole composition of stuff most people eat is wrong (low fat, high carb).
I recommend having a look at paleo-style diets (e.g. http://www.gnolls.org/1141/ ) which mean high fat, mid protein, low carb. They provide more satiety, no after-lunch tiredness and a lot more.
My own way was going from no fructose (thanks to Lustig's video) to now cutting grains too. Feels good.
EDIT: And forget about counting calories or thinking that (eating fat == becoming fat). That's not how digestion works. Calories were afaik defined by burning (with an actual flame) the food. That's not how your organs, enymes, stomach, ..., bacteria work.
> if you're obese, insulin resistant, well fed, and getting both fructose and glucose together (like a sizable percentage of the population), then fructose gets converted to fat at a much higher rate, approximating 30%. In other words, the toxicity of fructose depends on context.
So, just don't eat glucose or white sugar together with fructose or just stop it.
Our bodies are designed to eat until we feel sated. Most people eat foods that do not allow themselves to feel fully sated, hence they overeat.
Good proteins, healthy fats, and vegetables are the things that make us feel sated.
Sugars and carbs in particular don't have a sating effect on people, hence you are prone to overeating, if you only eat those foods.
This is why most fast food and convenience stores sell things that are comprised of sugar, carbs and fat. They're in the business of selling you more, not selling you "just enough".
I don't think we should blame these companies btw, people have free will, and an occasional soda or candy bar won't kill you. It's just that too many people see these foods as a daily ritual.
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Just an opinion from someone who has researched this space a bit due to my gluten intolerance.
"The industry points to meta-analyses of controlled isocaloric "fructose for glucose" exchange studies that demonstrate no effect from fructose on weight gain or other morbidities. Perhaps one reason for this is because crystalline fructose is incompletely absorbed."
It seems like the author is really set on rejecting the conclusions of these meta-analyses.
One thing that isocaloric studies do not show is how chronic consumption of one particular diet or another influences consumption patterns over time. This is by design and is a huge flaw IMO.
Any diet that keeps you just above the limits of starvation is going to show no change in weight gain.
A much more compelling study would be an overfeeding experiment between a high fructose diet, high glucose diet, high protein diet, high fat diet, etc.
Horribly written. It is promoting sucrose, it says sucrose is fructose and glucose, then it says "if you're ... getting both fructose and glucose together ... then fructose gets converted to fat at a much higher rate, approximating 30%." which is a bad thing.
Sucrose is a molecule made by joining a glucose and a fructose molecule together. It is not the same thing as two separate molecules, though it is broken down rather quickly into its individual components.
Additionally, the key point is that the sucrose would be replaced with just fructose, which if done by weight would mean roughly twice as much fructose in the food. With the position the article has on fructose this seems like an obviously worse position, however I would love to see sources on it.
> Horribly written.
Indeed. FTA: "It's fructose, for goodness sake. It increases blood fructose, which is way worse. Fructose causes seven times as much cell damage as does glucose, because it binds to cellular proteins seven times faster; and it releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals (such as hydrogen peroxide, which kills everything in sight)."
It at least got one thing right - fructose is terrible for you. Therefore, sucrose is also terrible for you.
"Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Series: UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public [7/2009] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 16717]"
Hmm that article seems to nitpick about the supporting data provided by Lustig (as well as some rather "rhetorical" devices) and does nothing to attack the information presented about how fructose is metabolised which, to me, was the most damning component of the talk.
The fundamental message is that the chronic effects of fructose are similar to the chronic effects of alcohol because they're metabolised almost identically in the liver.
Aragon's only argument against the biochemistry presented is that it's "all about dose and context" ... well if you chronically consume alcohol then you get pretty fucked up in the liver right? So if you're chronically consuming fructose in the same way you'll get fucked up, too.
Really, the article doesn't refute any of the core claims, it only says that we can eat some fructose just the same as we can eat some alcohol, big deal. That doesn't mean I'm going to start feeding my kids lollies, fizzy drinks, fruit juice and donuts now, does it?
This rebuttal doesn't seem to say that much about Lustig's central claim: that fructose is metabolized in a very different way from glucose, that large amounts of fructose metabolism harms the liver, and that this harm may be associated with metabolic syndrome.
What it does say is that overall calorie consumption has increased since 1970 but the fraction of calories from added sugar has not (no claim about fructose consumption specifically?), that fructose is almost always found along with glucose, so the fact that fructose does not induce an insulin response doesn't mean that foods containing fructose aren't satiating, that the Japanese do eat some fruit, that most fruits have less fiber than sugarcane, and that dosage is relevant to toxicity.
Couldn't Aragon be right about every one of these points without refuting Lustig's central claim? Can't it simultaneously be true that consuming too many total calories is harmful, and that consuming too much fructose is also harmful?
That was nearly four years ago; what's the current consensus on this issue? Has there been any new research that has come out in support of, or against, Lustig's conclusions?
Come on. He's a single-issue moralizing health crusader. I'm sure like everyone else who has focused on a single specific nutrient to blame, he's right in a few specifics, and massively overstating his case in a way that will ultimately be harmful to public health.
Remember when fat was the mortal enemy? Cholesterol? Carbs of any sort? Salt? Now it's fructose.
All of these things have, at one point or another, been singled out as one of the biggest threats to public health. And in all cases, while there has been some truth that in excess they can cause problems, it turns out that they aren't nearly as bad as some people made them out to be, and going on a crusade to eliminate them from diets has lead to either unhealthy elimination of necessary nutrients, or unhealthy substitution by something that's worse.
And yes, if you want more evidence, there have been studies that have shown that at low dosages, fructose can be beneficial:
Basically, if you see someone singling out one single nutrient that has been a central part of our diet for thousands of years as being "toxic", you know you're being sold snake oil. Yes, almost anything can be consumed to excess. No, it is not "toxic".
Any diet plan should be based on your whole diet, not eliminating a single thing. Reducing refined sugar in your diet is generally good. Avoiding a cookie now and then, or some honey on your toast, is excessive (unless you are actually diabetic).
It can help a lot to cook yourself, and only prepare food from raw ingredients rather than processed foods or mixes, as then you see how much sugar and how much salt and how much fat goes into something. If you were to mix up a can of soda from scratch, you'd find it pretty gross how much sugar went in there; but many people are willing to grab a few and drink them throughout a day without thinking about it.
Really? You eat over more than three apples a day worth of fresh fruit? You do realize that the maxim is "an apple a day", not "three apples a day", right?
Anyhow, like anything, context matters here. Fresh fruit is high in fiber, which tends to lead to less absorption of sugars and other carbohydrates. The equivalent amount of fructose in soda or fruit juice is much worse for you than in the form of whole fresh fruits.
If you take a look at that study you link to about average consumption, over half of it comes from "sugar sweetened beverages" and "grains" (which includes cakes, pies, snacks, breads, and cereals). So, the average American could cut their fructose level in half, to under that suggested limit, by merely cutting out sodas and sweetened baked goods. My personal recommendation is to never drink soda, and only have sweetened baked goods occasionally, no more often than once a week.
Sorry, didn't mean to be arguing, I was just surprised that you eat more than three apple's worth of fruit a day. I apologize if my tone came out argumentative.
My only point is that most Americans don't eat more than that amount in fruit, but rather that they go over that amount mostly due to sweetened beverages and baked goods.
I've switched to a morning smoothie for convenience. 1/2 bunch of kale, chard, or spinach as a base. Plus variety of banana, apple, ginger, frozen fruits (blueberries, mango, peach, strawberries, etc), hemp hearts, heavy coconut milk, cinnamon, sometimes others stuff (mint, turmeric, yoghurt) to add variety.
Per Dr Terry Wahls, goal is to get 9 cups of veggies per day. I usually hit 6 cups.
It's not clear that you actually watched the video. He's not saying you should never eat fructose. E.g. he points out that fructose is metabolized in a similar way to alcohol with similar bad effects, but he never said "no alcohol" either. The issue he's raising is that Americans have been consuming far too much fructose, and this consumption has been driven by government intervention going back to Nixon.
No, I haven't watched the video, but I've read several of his articles like the one that started this thread (I tend to prefer to read content than watch a video of someone speaking it; quicker to read, less disruptive of people around me, easier to quote, easier to refer back to later to make sure I got his point right, etc; if you have reference to a written description of the same content I'd take a look). Calling fructose a "poison" or "toxin" is excessive. It twists the conventional meaning of those words.
I definitely agree that people are eating too much fructose, and too much sugar in general, and that it has been driven by several government interventions (fat-free diet advice, corn subsidies, etc). I just object to calling it a "toxin" or "poison", and find his single minded obsession with fructose to be a bit of a poor way to attack the problem in the same way that single minded obsessions with "fat free" or "no carb" were. Human diet is a complex topic, with a lot of interacting factors, and over-simplifying advice can be quite harmful.
The main problem for me is the artificial bias the government has induced in our diet through subsidy and taxation. He's fighting against this government interference with our diet, that's a good thing.
I saw Prof. Stephen O'Rahilly give a talk in 2010 at TEDxCAM.
His research defines a clear link between genetics and obesity, fructose or no fructose. Obviously less intake is better, but many people cannot stop themselves if there is available food. On the other hand, there are people who will stay lean no matter how much food is available.
But when we look at people who are obese their problem is not that they eat fructose containing foods, or that they regularly eat a couple of hundred extra calories per day. Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories.
When you get 4,000 extra calories it doesn't matter whether it's glucose or sucrose or fructose - the person is going to gain weight and be harmed by the sugar.
The reason that Americans are fatter than Europeans is not because the US uses more fructose, it is because Americans eat a lot more than Europeans. But Europe is catching up. The UK has plenty of obesity and we don't have nearly so much fructose use as the US.