After reading the various posts on the potential damage of BPA, and the number of members who are avoiding it by switching to metal water bottles, I ran across an article in the New York Times with the provocative title “Is Sugar Toxic.” The article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&ref=sugar

The article talks about Dr. Robert Lustig's firmly held and data supported theory that sugar—both High Fructose Corn Syrup and Sucrose (table sugar) are toxic because of the way it is metabolized by the body. The latest numbers seem to show that we Americans consume about 141 pounds of sugar per person per year. His theory and supporting data are contained in a 2009 lecture of about 1.5 hour duration, and may be found here: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717 and on You Tube (link from the Times article). I recommend watching it and I got several more gray hairs while doing so.

OK, here is my question. If we are going to change our habits and preps because of BPA leaching into our food and water from the container(s), what about changing the food in the containers to avoid the threat of long term damage to our health caused by the sugar? What about letting our kids consume it?

I don't have the science to tell if Dr. Lustig is really on to something or not, but I respect the knowledge of the folks in this forum, some of whom I'm sure do. And this could really impact your survival and that of your family.

What do you all think?

What do I think?

Throw enough money at me and I will prove whatever you want is true/false/an urban legend/hazardous to your health/fattening/causes cancer...

I'm sorry, I'm not a lab rat with perfect genes. I think probably 85% of all studies do exactly what the financiers want them too.

And for that matter, living is the leading cause of death.

Anything is toxic - it is just a question of getting the wrong doze. Even drinking too much water will kill you.

Sugar and glocose syrup: Harmfull when consumed in abundance - absolutely. But toxic? Wrong use of the term, IMHO.

I have to get going, so I'm not going to your links. The corn industry seems to be the only place that claims that chemically-processed HFCS is just like sugar, other studies say that it's only broken down by your liver (unlike sugar).

HFCS has two things going for it: it's cheap (heavily subsidized, taxpayers pick up the real costs at both ends), and it is shelf stable, extending the shelf life of packaged foods. Just how old ARE those Twinkies, anyway? And it's in EVERYTHING! Read the labels. Trying to avoid it is really difficult.

HFCS has virtually replaced sugar in the processed food industry since the late 1970s. Sugar and fat have been around for a long time, but it's been just for the last 30 years or so that you've seen so many 300-lb young people. And the same with Type II Diabetes.

That said, too much of anything is usually a bad thing.

Sue

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

As shown in the Youtube presentation, then it depends on which sugar molecule you mean, whether is is lactose, fructose, sucrose, glucose, etc. The relationship between over consumption of fructose with the corresponding lack of dietary fibre consumption as a brake to the toxic effects of fructose would it seem make Dr Lustig's assertion that fructose is indeed a toxic substance at the quantities being consumed leading to long term health issues. The biochemical metabolic pathways for each carbohydrate were particular interesting.

What the MD failed to mention was that the same food industry corporation executives involved in this toxicological actuary time bomb are also executives for the health insurance, medical and pharmacological industries. So a win, win for these folks. These folks might not be fat, but you can't say there not happy.

I wonder if there really is a market opportunity for Glucazade port (for top endurance athletes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4c-rSmBjEw

But with Fructose (HFCS for the US market) instead of the Glucose and it should of course include some Aspartame and some Caffeine for that Buckfast double edged effect. Should be able to sell a few packets of aspirin as well on the same supermarket shelf.

Most of what you need to know about HFCS and sugar:

http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/2009/03/hfcs_the_good_the_bad_and_the.php

It certainly seems to be the fructose that is the most problematic, due to the different chemistry it is subjected to in the liver. What I had failed to get was that sucrose is half fructose and half glucose, and the body splits it apart, so you end up with some good (glucose) and some bad--fructose. So that is why Dr. Lustig said that HFCS and table sugar were equally bad--both were (round numbers) half fructose.

As for P&P (profit and politics), he touched on that also. No comment.

Art in Fl's article was interesting also, but if I read it correctly, it downplays the Fructose problems because the Fructose is consumed in combination with other things. I think the different bio-chemical pathways in the liver for Fructose seem to argue against that theory.

Somehow, I think consuming 10's of pounds of fructose every year for many years is being shown to be a really bad idea.

FWIW, there's a guy named Don Gorske who eats 2 Big Macs a day and has eaten over 25,000 so far. In his radio interview yesterday he said he never over eats, rarely eats it with fries, and only eats one or two meals a day. Apparently he's not overweight and is in relatively good health. Go figure.

A good example of the maxim; 'there is no such thing as an unhealthy meal; only unhealthy diets'. It's the overall diet that counts, not one meal.
As for the sugar article; I stopped reading at the headline; it was obviously nonsense to call anything we consume so much of as 'toxic'.
And whenever you see the words 'a study proves that' the most important word was 'a'. One study of anything proves nothing. People make mistakes, fake results, misinterpret results. Only repeated independent verification proves anything.
Look at the government approved bodies web pages to see the consensus. I've seen scores of newspaper articles saying 'a study proved chocolate (or alcohol) is good for the heart'. Then I look at the British Heart Foundation web page and it advises avoiding both.
qj


>FWIW, there's a guy named Don Gorske who eats 2 Big Macs a day and >has eaten over 25,000 so far. In his radio interview yesterday he >said he never over eats, rarely eats it with fries, and only eats >one or two meals a day. Apparently he's not overweight and is in >relatively good health. Go figure.

Best quote I've heard in a long time. Of course, one could expand "diet" to "lifestyle, genetics, economic situation, and living location" to make it even more realistic. People like sugar. Therefore they will attack something of insignificent risk while continuing to partake in activities with much larger detrimental effects such as consumption of sugar. It's because we are human.

-Blast

Blast, aren't you fairly close to Sugarland, Texas? No wonder you are sticking up for this "toxic" substance...

Yep, I spent 8 years working in a building surrounded by Sugar Land's sugar fields (not the prison!!). Twice a year they would burn those fields which drove all the copperheads living there into my building.

I have very mixed feelings about the assorted hazards of sugar.
-Blast

Personally I prefer real sugar over any sweetener no matter the negative word currently spoken about it. Is it just me or does anyone else find the diet flavored water style drinks taste like death? They all taste exactly the same to me regardless of flavor or brand, Like a bottle of chemicals. Anything that has 0 Cals and 0 Sugar I stay away from like the plague.

Also isnt it the Vehicle of HFCS thats bad for you not particularly the sugar thats in it?

Pssst, I'll let you in on a secret...government is in industry's pocket, too.

Unfortunately, any group with an agenda can co-opt the scientific process to further their agenda. Fringe groups with wacko ideas rarely have the money to sponsor big name studies, though. Large corporations do have the financial muscle. Is it any wonder that the vast majority of industry funded research tends to produce results favorable to that industry?

Or look at the BPA literature that government committees look at, like the National Toxicology Program. They'll cherry pick a handful of articles out of hundreds that are available. Obviously, it's more complicated than that, but that's basically what it boils down to and results in what is often far from the consensus of the experts in a field.

Or the latest recommendation by the--Institute of Medicine, was it?--on re-evaluating the recommended amounts of Vitamin D not long ago. The suggestions were far short of what experts in the field recommend nowadays because they took an extremely narrow view of vitamin D and restricted it solely to bone health and ignored all the more recent research on Vitamin D's role in heart disease, cancer, infectious diseases, etc.

So, "government" is often not the best place to search for the consensus understanding of any given topic.

I saw Dr. Lustig's video when it first came out and I was impressed that he would come out and criticize so near and dear a product to us as sugar. (and yes, I understood the biochemistry part of the lecture)

I think people have too narrow a view of what "toxic" means. Obviously, the statement "sugar is toxic" is partly for shock value. But it's also true that what Dr. Lustig is saying is that sugar leads to conditions which are unhealthy and can eventually kill us, such as fatty liver, insulin resistance, and advanced glycation end products (basically, the same thing as caramelizing sugar in a pot, except it's happening in your arteries).

Bottom line is that we eat TOO MUCH white sugar and HFCS. Neither table sugar nor HFCS would be much of an issue if we ate them in amounts that resemble their natural availability in whole foods, which is very little indeed. Instead, we put sugar/HFCS in EVERYTHING and we consume MASSIVE quantities of both over the course of a year, far beyond any amount that we could have evolved to deal in the short time since industrial food production rose to prominence. All of us should strive to reduce the amount of sugar we consume.

I'm also glad that Dr. Lustig pointed out the unintended consequences of the villification of saturated fats. The low fat craze created foods that were low fat, but tasted awful. So what did food companies add to make their products taste good? Sugar! Not only were we afflicted with the problems of a high sugar diet, but these new foods usually included even more calories than the "high fat" versions!

I think this view that all sugar is unhealthy in the quantities we're eating is better than the view that is popular even now that "sugar is healthier than HFCS". That lead to the Corn Refiners Association to lobby the FDA to allow them to call HFCS "corn sugar" because many consumers want to avoid HFCS and think sugar is healthier. Neither is healthy in the amounts that most of us consume them, which is really the point that Dr. Lustig was making.

YUCK! YES!

Also, you will notice that most soft drinks are sweetened with HFCS, not sugar. If you were to hijack a case of Coke that was destined for Europe, it would be sweetened with sugar, and you would likely notice the difference.

A naturopathic physician I know said, "It's not what you eat occasionally, it's what you eat every day."



Do you mean the enzymes or the mold?

Sue

IMO all "diet" flavored drinks tast nasty.. darned artifical sweeteners..

YUCK! YES!

Also, you will notice that most soft drinks are sweetened with HFCS, not sugar. If you were to hijack a case of Coke that was destined for Europe, it would be sweetened with sugar, and you would likely notice the difference.

Actually some sodas in the US market are made with sugar instead of HFCS..
for example "pepsi's" Sierra Mist natural, a "throwback" mountian dew, and a few others I can not remember offhand.
kat

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......Me? That sounds pure win....

It should also be noted where the HFCS originates from in the biochemical industrial process; Corn. That would be the industrial monoculture Monsanto GMO Corn which is slowly poisoning the natural environment that sustains all life almost on a planetary scale.

All for a fast buck and a sweet tooth. But then again most folks (those type 1 civilisation types) are so devoid from the natural environment they really couldn't give a damn.

Changing the subject a bit...

Have you noticed that, aside from olive oil, almost all the grocery store sources of vegetable-type oils are from genetically-modified sources? Corn oil, canola oil, soybean oil.

Some stores might carry a little safflower oil and peanut oil, but that's about it.

Genetically-modified sugar, genetically-modified fats, genetically-modified stock feed...

Genetically-modified people?

Sue

The problem is more deeply ingrained than just the processed industrially produced factory food from GMO plants and animals. The problem is that most folks haven't tasted a tomato, a strawberry, a banana or even a potato. They have been consuming vastly inferior products that on the outside resemble a tomato, a strawberry a banana or even a potato.

You have to go to a country like Cyprus to taste real food where they have resisted the adulteration of their own home grown island food.

I think you nailed it with that.

HFCS may be slightly more destructive than cane sugar but if we back off all forms of sugar we will be better off than just focusing on HFCS.

I don't do the soda thing. Sugar being just one of their sore points. Phosphoric and citric acids, artificial coloring and flavoring, caffeine, BPA from plastic bottles, and the exorbitant costs are all negatives. I stick to water, coffee, and tea. Cheap and effective.

Don't know how "toxic" sugar might be. At least if you take it orally. Maybe I should throw away my Gatorade. Ha! Ha!!

But an M.D. once told me that if you have a minor open wound on your skin, and no antibiotic close at hand, that you can treat it by placing excess sugar on the surface of the wound. Just pour on sugar, then apply a bandage over the top. Apparently the idea is that the sugar will create a local environment that is not balanced for microorganisms. If I understood this advice correctly, the M.D. was saying that you need quite a lot of sugar. Not just a little - in order to create anaerobic conditions.

I'll be quite honest - I have no idea if this suggestion is correct. But maybe someone here knows, or has heard of it.

Pete #2

In theory-It is the high osmolarity of the sugar, not tying to create anaerobic conditions which would be bactericidal (many bacteria love low to no oxygen conditions). The hypertonic nature of the pure sugar would basic dehydrate the bacteria. The bacterial wall acts as a semi-permeable membrane, the water contained with the bacteria will then pass through the membrane in an attempt to dilute the sugar. Bacteria that can form spores are resistant to this effect.

Pete