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