Sugar toxic? page 2

[eglue]

The Cause is a little myopic. Before we go on our holy crusade against sugar maybe we should focus on the other things that cause cancer.

There's no question that other substances including external environment factors can be cancer causing. But the article was saying that science is slowly starting to look at the overconsumption of sugar in all it's forums, as the catalyst towards cancer. If you think how when you eat sugary substances your system kicks in insulin balance your blood sugar from your liver; with a fatty and malfunctioning liver, this hormone may actually end up feeding cancers in our bodies.

What I mean by that is that we don't consume nutrients in a vacuum and our body isn't static. Different nutrients do different things under different circumstances. Too much sugar at one time causes steatosis (fat-build-up) in the liver, but if we have enough choline and methionine, and if our liver isn't inflamed from an imbalance of polyunsaturated fats, excess of omega 6 in the cells, leaky gut, abundance of endotoxins, deficiency of adiponectin, etc etc etc then it may well be that trying a can of soda every day is relatively benign. Yes it will raise triglycerides to consume too much sugar at once,
although that also depends upon liver health and other factors. Sugar is demonstrably harmful, but the extent to which it is harmful will probably depend upon other factors. It does some more bad stuff, but those things are dependent upon other things too. Some people just can't tolerate sugar for whatever reason - there is fructose intolerance and people with severely damaged livers. If you are on a very high fat diet like is what we mostly think is healthy, then fructose seems to throw people off a little more than it would with less fat (and people on a high fructose diet say that it is the fat that throws them off, but which is healthier to get most of your calories from?)

I guess what I'm rambling about is that we can't exactly take stats from the general populace and extrapolate them to everyone all of the time. But yeah sugar is a bad food and I don't recommend anyone eating it in significant quantities frequently. It's just maybe possibly not so bad, and it is anything but the sole villain.

Agreed, but at the same point, it's well within realm of possibilities now, and to me that's what matters.

Like climate change; lots of factors involved that we can't necessarily extrapolate direct causes of this is only mankind. Nevertheless it is happening and it doesn't do us any good to ignore it until proven otherwise because if we're wrong, we're not worse off than we are now, but if we're right, it can be catastrophically bad for us all if we don't start to preventatively address it.

Interesting how that analogy fits really well. We may not get cancer if we consume sugar, but might very well kill us if we do. Limiting sugar all together is thus not a bad idea until it's conclusively decided how bad it actually is.

[rayout]

Great article, and Lustig's YouTube video (YouTube - Sugar: The Bitter Truth) was also helpful to me, although there were some major issues (such as still demonizing fat by hammering home the point that "sugar is fat"). After watching the video, I can barely stand to watch my friends drink soda... I have to bite my tongue.

Well he does debunk the 7 countries study in a very interesting fashion that I did not know about (fat+sugar) and defends the consumption of fat earlier in his speech (the perversion of processed foods by cutting out fat for sugar). I think his characterization of sugar is fat was to associate sugar with something folks "know" is bad. Overall all folks would benefit the most from cutting sugars out of their diet.

Interesting how he shows glucose is also converted to fat - I would have expected him to advocate more fat consumption to reduce this further. Oh well - more reason for me to eat bacon instead of bread

[geekgrrl]

I spotted this too and shared it on Facebook. Good article, though I agree with Stabby (as I think most of us do) that it's a little simplistic to label sugar 'cause' of disease, but I guess that's the problem with mass media - it has to be simple enough for people to understand. The points about insulin feeding tumor growth were clear as day but you really do have to spell it out.

I keep hoping more of this makes it into the press, as I also saw a headline about an Asian country targetting fat because of obesity - this is worrying as of course the fats they target are probably the redeeming features of their diets, like coconut cream!

But you wait, the answer won't be to consume less sweet crap. It'll be the battle of the alternative sweeteners.

[Lewis]

Good article, though I agree with Stabby (as I think most of us do) that it's a little simplistic to label sugar 'cause' of disease ...

That's not what the Times article did. And, in fact, while the thrust of the article is (rightly) "against" sugar, the writer was careful not to make definite claims where they cannot be made:

Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. ...

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. ...

... it was possible that Yudkin was right, and Keys was wrong, or that they could both be right. The evidence has always been able to go either way. ...

I'm not familiar with the author, although He seems to be a favourite here—perhaps his stuff appears more in U.S. publications—but this was a very well-written piece.

As for the possible link to cancer ... well, notice what the quoted researchjers say:

“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

The first named is director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School; the second, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. This isn't just the writer giving opinions and those whom he quotes aren't just random people off the street. It's their job.

Cantley's also quoted as saying:

Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells.

You've already been told by the Times writer that we haven't firm proof here—"What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?"—but only a fool would not take a statement like that from someone with Cantley's credentials very seriously indeed.