

Is sugar toxic? - stfu
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407128/is-sugar-toxic/

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swang
Here is a video from Dr. Robert Lustig about sugars. It is an hour and a half
long but very informative.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

After watching it, I've considerably reduced my sugar intake. I still drink
soft drinks during lunch/dinner, but I am slowly weaning myself off them and
onto water/tea and other better alternatives.

~~~
jeffdavis
I watched that a while ago and I remember him talking about the amount of salt
in a Coke, as though it were a conspiracy of some kind.

But Coke has very little salt -- about 45 mg.

So the rest of the talk seemed to be colored with a conspiratorial tone, from
my perspective. Am I wrong to be so dismissive?

~~~
Hinrik
>But Coke has very little salt -- about 45 mg.

This tells me nothing. 45mg per 100ml? Or per serving (usually 250ml)?

~~~
jeffdavis
It's about 40mg of sodium (which is about 100mg of salt) per 12-oz can, which
is 355ml.

It doesn't really make much difference. It's a small amount of salt for any
reasonable level of consumption unless you are really watching your salt
intake.

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latch
I found Dr Lustig's talk enlightening because I always thought of it simply as
input -> output (sucrose -> glucose). In retrospect, it's obvious that the
bio-checmial process your body uses to convert that is pretty darn important.

However, as cool as it is to get re-introduced to things like ATP and Krebs
Cycle, the driving message we get from experts has been a constant for a long
time: avoid processed foods.

It's incredibly simple advice to understand and to follow. It's also an
excessively easy lifestyle to adopt. There is no lack of unprocessed foods and
it isn't more expensive. I just don't understand why people don't eat better.
I'd be pretty depressed if I was a health-care professional...decades of
messaging and things are only getting worse.

~~~
lhnn
What is considered "unprocessed" foods at the grocer? Raw beans, rice, whole
grain wheat? Is the ground beef/deli meat "unprocessed" by your definition?

Serious question. My impression is that anything not cut from an animal myself
is processed by some harmful additive, so I've given up.

~~~
latch
I understand that you could take this to an extreme: if it doesn't grow in my
garden or die by my hand...

But let's just focus on low hanging stuff for now. There are food products
that are more chemical than anything. Oreos, Poptarts, CheezWhiz, pops, frozen
meals, Juices "now with 10% real juice"...The list is extensive. Then you have
overly refined products (white bread, white pastas).

Fruits and vegetables (fresh, canned or frozen), lentiles and legumes,
grains/careals (including breads and pastas), raw meat
(fish/chicken/beef/pork/...) are all ok. I'm sure there's more.

I don't think there's much room for confusion between eating Captin' Crunch vs
oatmeal, cheetos vs a bowl of plain yogurt with strawberries.

~~~
mbell
> There are food products that are more chemical than anything

The problem is that even this statement is ambiguous. All foods, processed or
not, are almost all chemical by any proper definition of the word chemical I
know of.

Of course the point your trying to make is that they contain large amount of
"human added chemicals" some synthesized, some not. If you look at the
ingredient list of a rockstar energy drink you'll find almost everything in it
is "natural", that is a chemical that exists in nature and is part of a diet
that would be considered healthy (in some amount / combination).

The argument should really be based on healthy amounts and combinations of
chemicals and just because it exists in nature, doesn't make it healthy (see
red meat and recent studies regarding it).

I find this discussion to be fascinating in regards to evolutionary
development. Humans 'like' sugars and meats for strong evolutionary reasons.
They were rare when the average age of death was like 30. Getting cheap
calories was very beneficial to successful life and hence child bearing in the
era.

Whats really interesting is that I don't see those traits going away.
Evolution requires selective pressure. There would have to be a selective
mechanism that resulted in those who "eat well" to contribute more to the gene
pool than those who do not. While I have no studies at hand to back this up,
my personal observation doesn't indicate that this pressure exists. As a
result I don't think we'll see the enjoyment of such food disappear any time
soon.

~~~
mc32
>They were rare when the average age of death was like 30.

When lots of people died before their first birthday‡, the average age being
thirty meant that lots of people who made it past their first birthday would
live longer than thirty.

‡Estimates vary from 30 to 50% rate, in the old world.

~~~
mbell
I really wasn't trying to throw a stick in the mud in terms of a hard
scientific date which is why I phrased it how I did. That said my reference
wasn't so much toward "the old world" which I take to mean in the last few
thousand years but rather on more of an evolutionary scale, that is millions
of years ago.

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meric
Title can be improved.

What is toxicity? "A central concept of toxicology is that effects are dose-
dependent; even water can lead to water intoxication when taken in too many
doses, whereas for even a very toxic substance such as snake venom there is a
dose below which there is no detectable toxic effect. Toxicity is species-
specific, lending cross-species analysis problematic. Newer paradigms and
metrics are evolving to bypass animal-testing, while maintaining the concept
of toxicity endpoints."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicity>

~~~
aaronblohowiak
The dose makes the poison - Paracelsus

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guard-of-terra
Life is toxic. You'll eventually die of it.

Really, if you remove everything harmful to health from you life (including
everything related to a computer), you'd probably die of boredom, depression
and frustration real fast.

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driverdan
Dr Lustig has been promoting this idea for many years. The problem is that
he's doing it very unscientifically. He vastly overstates his evidence and
makes claims of certainty that the science doesn't support.

I'm interested to see what replies his recent Nature publication receives.

~~~
droithomme
Yes, here's an article promoting this from last year:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html)

And from earlier this year:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2094812/Sugar-
cont...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2094812/Sugar-controlled-
like-tobacco-alcohol.html)

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revolvingiris
Good message: "don't over consume and stick to unprocessed sources".

It bothers me though that the word sugar is in the title since they really
mean sucrose. Both fructose and glucose occur naturally (fruit, veggies,
starches) and are not harmful.

~~~
hristov
Fructose is harmful, unfortunately. Sucrose gets split by the body into one
fructose and one glucose molecule. And it is the fructose that is harmful
because it cannot be properly processed by the liver in large quantities.
Sucrose is only harmful in as much as it produces fructose.

It is true that fructose appears naturally all over the place. And that is the
tricky part. The liver can actually process fructose fine if it gets a little
at a time and simultaneously receives fiber. Almost everywhere fructose occurs
naturally it occurs with fiber. Thus, the human body is perfectly capable of
processing fructose in its natural state, but once you start concentrating it
and removing the fiber the problems come about.

This is why fruits and veggies are perfectly healthy but refined sugars are
bad for you.

~~~
DanBC
> _The liver can actually process fructose fine if it gets a little at a time
> and simultaneously receives fiber._

Dietary fibre gets to the liver?

~~~
hristov
The liver gets nutrients from dietary fiber which help it process fructose. I
believe the nutrient in question was phosphorus, but am not absolutely sure.

~~~
anthonyb
Fibre doesn't have any nutrients - it's essentially indigestible. The reason
it helps with sugars is that it slows their absorption down and helps to
reduce blood sugar spikes.

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nazgulnarsil
I do a ton of review of nutrition studies and here's the conclusion I've come
to:

The primary concerns are the biggest killers: cancer and CVD. The main causal
pathway by which carbohydrates (of which simple sugars have the largest
effect) affect CVD incidence is via the simultaneous lowering of HDL and
raising of blood serum triglycerides. This is much more important for
predicting CVD episodes than the 'low LDL' you hear touted a lot. The
connection between sugar and cancer is less well established.

~~~
ams6110
Refined sugar has only been a big part of our diet for the past couple of
hundred years (not even a blink of an eye on an evolutionary time scale).
Breads and grain-based foods have been part of our diet for somewhat longer,
but highly refined white flour is also comparatively novel in our diet.

I cut all added sugar and all flour (bread, pasta, pizza, etc) and most other
grains and processed food from my diet about 18 months ago. I basically went
on the paleolithic diet, though I'm not really fanatical about it except for
the sugar and flour. I mainly eat unprocessed meat, eggs, leafy vegetables,
nuts, some fruit (try to stick to berries) and minimal dairy. I went from 215
lbs to 165 without any real effort (exercise, etc). I'm convinced that the
obesity "epidemic" and the need for so many people go on Lipitor and similar
drugs as they get older is directly attributable to our sugar- and flour-laden
diets.

I do miss freshly baked bread but on balance I think it's worth it. Will I
live longer? Who knows, but I feel better eating what my body is evolved to
consume.

~~~
baddox
I don't think that something being "comparatively novel in our diet" is a
sufficient or even useful argument.

~~~
barry-cotter
It is sufficient to make it much more probable that we can't process it very
well assuming one believes in evolution.

~~~
chc
You seem to have an odd idea of how evolution works. If it were the way you
seem to think, we'd have a harder time picking up water bottles (which are
very recent) than water outside of a bottle (which has existed for millions of
years). In fact the opposite is true.

~~~
barry-cotter
Water bottles were designed[0] to be easy to use. Our digestive system (and
everything else about us) are a series of hacks on top of hacks on top of
hacks that happened to make their carriers more likely to have descendants.

That an abundance of simple sugars is novel in our diets is at least weakly
suggestive that we will be poorly adapted to them. There's even evidence for
this; in general the shorter a time a population has had agriculture the
higher the prevalence of (Type 2) diabetes. Aboriginies, Pacific Islanders,
Native Americans all have way, way higher rates than Asians or Europeans. The
Arab world has had agriculture for at least as long as anyone else and they
have diabetes out the wazoo though in the more developed parts, perhaps a side
effect of really, really liking sweet tea and incredibly sweet treats.

[0] Designed things and evolved things are not even remotely equivalent in an
argument about evolutionary changes. Minds can make things better ludicrously
faster than the Blind Idiot God.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/>

~~~
chc
You seem to have found a weird comparison that I didn't intend in my comment.
The point I was trying to make is that the man-made thing, water bottles, is
better suited to our evolved hands than the natural thing, free-flowing water.
Similarly, there is no reason why any food we made ourselves is likely to be
worse for our evolved body than any food that was around when the digestive
system evolved. That idea, that "paleo" foods are inherently better for us,
_feels_ right, but is ultimately fallacious. (I mean, some might turn out to
actually be ideal, but it isn't deductively true in the way that many
advocates want it to be.)

~~~
anthonyb
> there is no reason why any food we made ourselves is likely to be worse for
> our evolved body than any food that was around when the digestive system
> evolved

Of course there is. Take an organism, throw it into a random environment.
Chances are that it's not going to do as well as it would in the one that it's
evolved for.

That's essentially what we're doing when we eat a modern diet - sugar, starch,
wheat, beans, etc. are not what we ate when we were hunter-gatherers. It's not
particularly surprising that it causes lots of weird and/or bad side-effects.

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cottonseed
> Americans are now consuming nearly 130 pounds of added sugars per person,
> per year.

I have always found this statistic utterly astounding, esp. considering that
sugar is a new world product. In 1500 England, say, the average person
consumed 0 pounds of added sugar per year.

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derleth
OK, let's try this: Is honey toxic?

~~~
anthonyb
Honey has a lot more nutrients in it than sugar, so generally it's better for
you, and doesn't spike your insulin so hard. Here's a round up which has some
links to further research: <http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-honey-a-safer-
sweetener/>

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1010011010
Yes.

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Alex3917
Is there seriously anyone left at this point who doesn't think sugar is toxic?

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pbreit
I think "toxic" is a strong word. Sugar occurs naturally in fruit which is
relatively healthy and sugar in moderation (ie, not added) is completely fine.

~~~
pbreit
Not sure why the downvotes.

I looked around a bit further and it's even clearer that sugar, sucrose,
fructose, etc, by themselves are not poisons.

~~~
Alex3917
Nothing by itself is a poison. But it's pretty clear that what they are saying
is that refined sugars are toxic in the level that they're being consumed by
Americans today. You can try to pretend they're talking about bananas all they
want, but as soon as you stop willfully misrepresenting what they're saying
your argument falls apart.

