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.

gmNO

The New York Times magazine recently published a nice article by Michael Pollan* on why we should care about California's Proposition 37, which will require labeling on all food products containing genetically modified ingredients. Predictably, agribusiness corporations are not best pleased with the proposed California law, and would really love it if the proposition did not pass.

I found the following few paragraphs from the article particularly interesting, and I hope they will entice you to read the whole thing (it's really not that long and it's worth a perusal).

Monsanto and its allies have fought the labeling of genetically modified food so vigorously since 1992, when the industry managed to persuade the Food and Drug Administration — over the objection of its own scientists — that the new crops were “substantially equivalent” to the old and so did not need to be labeled, much less regulated. This represented a breathtaking exercise of both political power (the F.D.A. policy was co-written by a lawyer whose former firm worked for Monsanto) and product positioning: these new crops were revolutionary enough (a “new agricultural paradigm,” Monsanto said) to deserve patent protection and government support, yet at the same time the food made from them was no different than it ever was, so did not need to be labeled. It’s worth noting that ours was one of only a very few governments ever sold on this convenient reasoning: more than 60 other countries have seen fit to label genetically modified food, including those in the European Union, Japan, Russia and China.

To prevent the United States from following suit, Monsanto and DuPont, the two leading merchants of genetically modified seed, have invested more than $12 million to defeat Prop 37. They've been joined in this effort by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, whose president declared at a meeting last July that defeating Prop 37 would be the group’s top priority for 2012. Answering the call, many of America’s biggest food and beverage makers — including PepsiCo, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and General Mills — have together ponied up tens of millions of dollars to, in effect, fight transparency about their products.

Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

Now for a quick topical rant:

To all (one) of my California readers out there, my personal preference would be that you VOTE YES on this prop. I'd quite like to make those agribusiness and food companies squirm; wouldn't you? Plus, as a general rule, I'm against genetically modified food. I'm not really sure whether it's "unhealthy" (whatever that means) or not, but I do think the seed patenting process is extremely unhelpful to the sustainability of the food system (and the livelihood of farmers; go watch this and you'll see), and I'm way against the way that GM crops tend to promote the use of pesticides.

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*Stole this link from Christine's post on Facebook. Thanks, Christine!

Food advice of yore

Maybe it's not such a surprise that we're all so fat.

You laugh, but nowadays we get our vitamins in gummy bears.

Make sure you eat enough butter, plus whatever other foods you want! What could go wrong!

Other (not necessarily bad) advice:

Cottage cheese recipes?

And this one is my favorite of all:

One really cannot argue with such solid logic.

 Via.

Some things to think about this Friday

• One man's opinions on the evils of Facebook. And another's.
  
• An interesting perspective on the "debate" over good (read: organic, non-pesticidey) food. This makes me mad - why is there any kind of "debate" about whether we should be poisoning people or not? Related.
  
• At least half of Americans breathe dangerously polluted air.  Guess who's been living in one of the most polluted areas for the past five years? This girl. I've already talked about air pollution here and here, but if you want to know more awful things about it, click here!
  
• 10 billion people on earth by the end of the century? That can't end well...
  
• Chernobyl is still emitting radiation. But it's not all bad news--biodiversity has increased tremendously in the Chernobyl area ever since they bulldozed everything and moved people out.  Except oh, deformities.
• This cat is as loud as a vacuum cleaner!
• Last but not least, have we passed peak oil? A neat perspective: