Sugar: More dangerous than Marijuana?

This interview with Robert Lustig, famous for his high-profile articles about sugar's toxicity (like this one), is worth a read, if only for this part:

Now, I will tell you that America doesn't trust its politicians. And we have a good reason for that: they suck. If you don't quote me, I will be upset. 

But the rest of it is equally as interesting, and it makes me want to try (yet again) to eliminate most of the added sugar from my diet. If you don't read it, I will be upset.

Do you consider sugar a drug?

Of course it's a drug. It's very simple: a drug is a substance that has effects on the body, and the effects have to be exclusive of calories.

So in order to qualify it as a drug, the negative effects of sugar have to be exclusive of its calories. Is 100 calories of sugar different from, say, 100 calories in broccoli? The answer is absolutely.

Can you name another substance of abuse for which the effect of the substance is more dangerous than the calories it harbors? Alcohol. Its calories are dangerous not because they're calories; they're dangerous because they're part of alcohol. Sugar is the same.

Sugar is the alcohol of a child. You would never let a child drink a can of Budweiser, but you would never think twice about a can of Coke. Yet what it does to the liver, what it does to the arteries, what it does to the heart is all the same. And that's why we have adolescents with type 2 diabetes.

Can you elaborate on that? Could you describe the precise negative biochemical effects sugar has on the body?

There are three.

One, fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, is not metabolized like glucose. It's metabolized in the mitochondria, and it is metabolized in the liver to liver fat. That liver fat mucks up the workings of the liver and leads to a process called insulin resistance. That raises your insulin levels because your pancreas has to make more insulin. That drives all the chronic metabolic diseases we know about, plus it burns out the pancreas, leading to diabetes.

Two, cellular aging. When bananas ripen, they brown. The sugar in the bananas binds to proteins in the bananas nonenzymatically, even in dead tissue. That's called the cellular aging or Maillard reaction. That happens to everyone all the time, so we brown inside. You don't want to brown very fast, but we're all browning because that's how we age. But sugar makes us brown seven times faster; it basically kills our organs quicker.

Three, sugar is addictive. So a little makes you want more, because of the effect of the reward center of the brain.

Mmmm, but browning on the inside is so delicious...

On a related note, I highly recommend this book.

And on another related note, there is this.