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
When the low-fat diet craze erupted, companies started looking for a way to make low-fat foods still taste good — so they turned to sugar. Snackwells Creme Sandwich cookies, for example, contain just 3 grams of fat per serving, but a whopping 10 grams of sugar. Lustig suggests that such "low-fat" products are not low fat in reality, since sugar consumption contributes to the creation of more fat in the body than dietary fat or glucose. Lustig argues that the data show that a negligible amount of the glucose we consume is converted to fat. In contrast, 30% of the fructose we eat ends up as new fat. In fact, Lustig argues, based on the effects of fructose in the body, the molecule appears to behave more like a fat than a carbohydrate. In one study of healthy medical students who spent six days on a high-fructose diet, their triglycerides and free fatty acids doubled, which caused insulin resistance and resulted in five times more fat-cell creation than when the students were not on a high-fructose diet. Next: Fiber Is Essential