Towards the end of 2014, I sat down to watch the movie ‘Fed Up’, featuring Dr. Robert Lustig a UCSF practitioner who has been speaking out on obesity and the detrimental effects of sugar for many years. Dr. Lustig equates sugar (beet sugar, cane sugar, sucrose, table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup) to being a ‘toxin’ or a ‘poison’.

As the use of sugar has increased multifold in our society, so has the incidence of obesity and diabetes. Sugar can also be linked to other chronic ailments in our Western society. Dr. Lustig insists that sugar should be viewed as a toxin, much like cigarettes.

Both refined sugar (sucrose/table sugar made up of glucose and fructose) and high fructose corn syrup (combination of glucose and fructose) breakdown into glucose and fructose in our GI tracts. The physiological effects of both of these are the same. Refined sugar and HFCS do not provide our body with any vitamins, minerals and therefore are a source of empty calories. These empty calories tend to displace foods that can be sources of various other nutrients. The increased consumption of empty calories and the lack of exercise has led to America’s increasing waistline.

Carbohydrate rich foods, bread/potatoes, break down into glucose and therefore are metabolized differently in our body when compared to sugar (glucose and fructose). Fructose is metabolized in majority by the liver, whereas glucose is metabolized by every cell in our body. Increased fructose consumption leads to a higher workload on our liver. Animal studies highlight this the best, when fructose is consumed in sufficient quantity, the liver converts it to fat.

The increased production of fat from fructose can lead to insulin resistance, an underlying component of heart disease and type II diabetes. It can also be correlated to the increased incidence of fatty liver in our society that is not related to alcoholism. Dr. John Yudkin’s experiments linked sugar to type 2 diabetes and he argued that dietary fat and saturated fats were harmless. Dr. Yukdin’s theories were proposed around the same time that a Nutritionist name Ancel Keys was labeling dietary fat as the cause of heart disease. As dietary fat became the culprit, the food industry followed by increasing production of ‘low fat’ foods. These ‘low fat’ processed foods came with a higher sugar content to help retain the flavor in these items. By the start of the 70s supermarket shelves with jam packed with these new ‘low fat’ items. When the theory that sugar was linked to the rise in diabetes and heart disease was proposed by Dr. Yukin, in 1972, it was met by strong opposition by the food industry who had just rolled out new food times.

The 70s rolled into the 80s, the trend of low fat diets continued and the incidence of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease continued to rise. It’s not the increase in consumption of sugar, specifically it is the increase in consumption of high fructose corn syrup which has been contributing to fatty liver, metabolic syndrome, pancreatic dysfunction, and obesity, all precursors to heart disease and diabetes.

The Food and Drug Administration and Institute of Health do not set an upper limit on how much sugar consumption is too much and state that it is not hazardous to our health in the amounts that it is being consumed. Keep in mind that FDA administrators can be found as advisors to the Corn Refiners Association.

The Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments is set to issue new dietary guidelines and the past negative emphasis on cholesterol and fat will most likely be lifted. An advisory panel that told that that cholesterol is no longer ‘a nutrient of concern for overconsumption’.