In case you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a video on YouTube of a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” delivered by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The lecture, which runs some 90 minutes and delves into the details of the professor’s clinical observations and research, has been viewed more than a million times to date, and inspired the April 17 New York Times Magazine cover story headlined “Is Sugar Toxic?” We watched it, so you didn’t have to.
5 Highlights From the ‘Toxic Sugar’ Video
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In 2007, Texas' health department reported [PDF] that 21.3% of children aged 2 to 5 who were enrolled in the Texas Women Infants and Children (WIC) Supplemental Nutrition Program were overweight or obese. A 2010 study at University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston also found that 16% of six-month-olds were overweight or obese. Indeed, the child obesity problem isn't limited to Texas: a government survey reported in January that 10% of American infants and toddlers meet the requirements for obesity. (More on TIME.com: How Stress and Sleep Conspire to Make You Fat) Lustig thinks he knows why: the common denominator is formula, which is a staple in the WIC program — and which contains sugar. Similac Isomil, for example, contains 43.2% corn syrup solids and 10.3% sucrose. "It's a baby milkshake!" Lustig said. "Coca-Cola is 10.5% sucrose." All that sugar may contribute to a long-term future of obesity, by affecting children's palates early on. "The earlier you expose kids to sweet, the more they are going to crave it later," he said.
