“If the food comes in a wrapper, the wrapper has more health benefits than the food.”
Added sugar is everywhere. Something like 80% of all food items sold in the U.S. contain it, and Americans yearly eat about 130 pounds each. It’s a drastic change from history, when sugar was at best available only seasonally, when fruit ripened.
Lustig thinks that sugar is toxic, evil, causing the obesity epidemic, and a poison, and that’s before he really gets warmed up. Not only have food companies started adding sugar to almost everything to encourage consumption, he says, but they also remove the fiber to improve shelf life. Yet it is fiber, Lustig points out, that helps us process sugar. This is why eating a fruit is fine, but fruit juice is not (calorie for calorie, fruit juice is worse than pop): the fiber is destroyed by the juicing process.
The answer to obesity, says Lustig, is threefold. First, we must control the environment in which we live, reducing our intake of substances like sugar that destabilize our bodily hormones and lead to overeating. Second, we need to increase our consumption of fiber. Third, we need to exercise. An overweight person who exercises may well outlive a thin person who does not, and 15 minutes of exercise a day appears to add about 3 years to a lifespan.
I can’t say I found Lustig’s analysis of public policy compelling: it’s not his area. On nutrition, on the other hand, he’s an expert. That said, I must admit this may be one of those (very) rare instances it may be easier to just read the news article or watch the video interview. Unless you want to understand the biology behind it all or really want a broader perspective on the issue, saying sugar is bad doesn’t really take a full book.
What Fat Chance has done is reinforce my impression that the chief advantage of most diets, regardless of content, is that they make you think about what you’re eating. Both vegetarians and non-vegetarians can be healthy, but vegetarians have to think about what they eat, and that matters. But if I were you I’d cut out sugar too. Maybe throw in some extra fiber.
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I haven’t read the book, but I’ve heard about his arguments. The one about fibre and sugar consumption doesn’t seem to make any sense. Suppose you have a glass of apple juice, and that you incrementally add dashes of water-soluble fibre to it. At what point (i.e., at what ratio of fibre to fructose) does Lustig believe the glass apple juice would go from being unhealthy to healthy?
As I understand it, his point is that one of the major problems with sugar is that it stresses out your liver, which is what processes it. Non-water soluble fiber slows down how quickly you process the sugar, and so eases the load on your liver. I suppose if you re-added the non-soluble fiber to a glass of apple juice that would work, but I’m not sure it would taste very good…
That said, I suspect he can explain his point better than I can!
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