Sugar, not fat, is the deadly villain in obesity epidemic, scientist says

Sugar, not fat, is the deadly villain in obesity epidemic, scientist says

TODAYonline
Daily Focus›Health

LONDON — Sugar — given to children by adults, lacing our breakfast cereals and a major part of our fizzy drinks — is the real villain in the obesity epidemic, and not fat as people used to think, according to a leading US doctor who is taking on governments and the food industry.

21 March

LONDON — Sugar — given to children by adults, lacing our breakfast cereals and a major part of our fizzy drinks — is the real villain in the obesity epidemic, and not fat as people used to think, according to a leading US doctor who is taking on governments and the food industry.

Dr Robert Lustig, who was this month in London and Oxford for a series of talks about his research, likens sugar to controlled drugs. Cocaine and heroin are deadly because they are addictive and toxic – and so is sugar, he says. “We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple,” he said.

“The food industry has made it into a diet staple because they know when they do you buy more. This is their hook. If some unscrupulous cereal manufacturer went out and laced your breakfast cereal with morphine to get you to buy more, what would you think of that? They do it with sugar instead.”

Lustig’s book, Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, has made waves in America and has now been published in the UK by 4th Estate. As a paediatrician who specialises in treating overweight children in San Francisco, he has spent 16 years studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, metabolism and disease.

His conclusion is that the rivers of Coca-Cola and Pepsi consumed by young people today have as much to do with obesity as the mountains of burgers.

Cheap sugar is endangering lives, he says It has been added to your diet, “kids have access” to it, and it is there in all sorts of foods that don’t need it, he says. When high-fat foods were blamed for making us overweight, manufacturers tumbled over each other to produce low-fat products. But to make them palatable, they added sugar, causing much greater problems.

Cutting calories is not the answer because “a calorie is not a calorie”. The effect of a calorie in sugar is different from the effect of a calorie in lean grass-fed beef. And added sugar is often disguised in food labelling under carbohydrates and myriad different names, from glucose to diastatic malt and dextrose. Fructose — contained in many different types of sugar — is the biggest problem, and high-fructose corn syrup, used extensively by food manufacturers in the US, is the main source of it.

In a recent study in the open journal Plos One, of which he was one of the authors, it found that in countries where people had greater access to sugar, there were higher levels of diabetes. Rates of diabetes went up by about 1.1 per cent for every 150 kcal of sugar available for each person each day – about the amount in a can of Coke. Critics argued sugar availability was not the same as sugar consumed, but Lustig and his colleagues say it is the closest approximation they could get.

The government is also to blame, he said. “Government has tied its wagon to the food industry because, at least in America, 6 per cent of our exports are food. That includes the legislative and executive branches. So the White House is in bed with the food industry and Congress apologises for the food industry.”

Michelle Obama appeared to be onside when she launched her Let’s Move initiative in February 2010 with a speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association of America. “She took it straight to them and said, ‘You’re the problem. You’re the solution.’ She hasn’t said it since. Now it’s all about exercise.

“Far be it from me to bad-mouth somebody who wants to do the right thing. But I’m telling you right now she’s been muzzled. No question of it.” In his book he tells of a private conversation with the White House chef, who he claims told him the administration agreed with him but did not want a fight with the food industry.

Some areas of the food industry have appeared to be willing to change. PepsiCo’s chief executive officer, Indra Nooyi, who is from India which has a serious diabetes epidemic, has been trying to steer the company towards healthier products. But it has lost money and she is said to be having problems with the board. “So here’s a woman who is trying to do the right thing and can’t,” he says.

It is not a case of eradicating sugar from the diet, just getting it down to levels that are not toxic, he says. The American Heart Association in 2009 published a statement, of which Lustig was a co-author, saying Americans consumed 22 teaspoons of it a day. That needs to come down to six for women and nine for men.

“That’s a reduction by two thirds to three quarters. Is that zero? No. But that’s a big reduction. That gets us below our toxic threshold. Our livers have a capacity to metabolise some fructose, they just can’t metabolise the glut that we’ve been exposed to by the food industry. And so the goal is to get sugar out of foods that don’t need it, like salad dressing, like bread, like barbecue sauce.” There is a simple way to do it. “Eat real food.”

Does he keep off the sweet stuff himself? “As much as I can. I don’t go out of my way. It finds me but I don’t find it. Caffeine on the other hand...”

GUARDIAN