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.

Not that I condone the distruction of property...

...but sometimes graffiti can make a marvelous improvement to a billboard.

Observe:

Apparently this was spotted in downtown Seattle last month (source).

Home for a week = Critical thinking faculties are on vacation

Some random stuff:

I secretly think that our children are not going to grow up in a world that is better than the one we grew up in.  Neither does Newsweek, I infer, as they recently published this article: Today's youngest Americans are likely to be worse [economically] off than their parents.

Meanwhile, while we're becoming poorer and poorer, we're also possibly harboring eyelash lice.  EYELASH. LICE. Let that sink in.

And! Even worse, our dishwashers are out to get us.

But on the upside, rising gas prices might make us skinnier.

Gratuitous picture of my nephew, with whom I spent the whole day.

And you thought this blog was all bad news

I just read two articles that I thought I'd share. Both tie into my previous post about the dangers of sitting.

1.  Are we obese because we sit all day?  Some say yes, some say no.  This guy thinks it's about 20% sitting, 80% eating.

2.  So what's the solution?  Well, you could just walk a little more.  See, a solution! Something positive! And you thought this blog was all bad news. (Tiffani, I'm looking at you.)

(Aside: Friends, I hope you're ready for me to suggest walking as every activity we ever do together. What's that? You're still washing your hair? Weren't you doing that last time I asked you to hang out with me?)

More on forks vs. feet here.

And woah, I just learned something new:

...a formerly-obese person burns 20% less calories than a never-obese person of that lower weight - or in other words a 200 lb person, who loses 40 lbs burns about 20% fewer calories than someone who is 160 lbs, but has never been obese.

My lord! That blows. I need to get up and start moving before it's too late!  My three scheduled spinning sessions next week should help.

Los Angeles, I will not miss your car-heavy culture.

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It's funny 'cause it's true.

Designer babies?

People tend to get all up in arms about "designer babies," by which I mean babies whose genomes are designed to have, or to not have (or to express or not express) certain traits. Wherever you fall on the issue, you will probably be surprised to know that in many respects, we are already genetically designing our babies, only we are doing so unwittingly and not to positive effect.  For example, babies are in a sense "designed" through the food that women consume while pregnant. Yes, the food. You likely already realize that it's a bad idea to, say, smoke crack and/or drink while pregnant, but the food eaten during pregnancy may be equally important in terms of affecting the developing embryo. Take just two studies I read about recently as examples.

1. What a mother eats while pregnant can significantly affect the likelihood of her child becoming obese. (source)

2.  A pregnant woman's exposure to pesticides can affect her child's IQ. (more)

How do effects like this occur? The answer lies in the fascinating field of epigenetics, which I learned about a few years ago via (what else) an amazing episode of Nova.  As I am not a scientist or a science writer, I'll quote this Time article to explain the epigenome:

At its most basic, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation. These patterns of gene expression are governed by the cellular material — the epigenome — that sits on top of the genome, just outside it (hence the prefix epi-, which means above). It is these epigenetic "marks" that tell your genes to switch on or off, to speak loudly or whisper. It is through epigenetic marks that environmental factors like diet, stress and prenatal nutrition can make an imprint on genes that is passed from one generation to the next.

It's the biological expression of the "nurture" part of "nature vs. nurture"! Isn't that neat?

(Side note: I really wish I had found science this fascinating while it was still early enough in my life to consider science as a career. Social science is great and all, but it's mostly made up. You can quote me on that.)

In any case, it seems that the epigenome of developing embryos can be influenced by the mother's environment, including her diet.  The University of Utah has a neat little site in which they explain how this process works, but it basically boils down to this: what a mother eats can affect whether her offspring express certain genes or not. Here is a vivid visual example of how prenatal diet can affect development (the picture comes from the University of Utah, but the experiment is also explained in the Time article I referenced earlier):

Crazy, right?

Which brings me back to my main point. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the rash of autism and obesity affecting Americans, to pick just two maladies of many, are not "random" occurrences: they are caused by something. Could we, in a sense, be designing obese autistic babies via the epigenome and the mother's diet? It's not outside the realm of possibility.  I, for one, think that it's quite likely--and I haven't even addressed other environmental horrors that might be affecting unsuspecting embryos, nor the impact of what children are exposed to after exiting the womb. But I'll leave that last bit for another day.  I've got some social science to do.

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Related: Books on my Amazon wishlist that I know I shouldn't read but want to anyway:

The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being

The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health

Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things

The Unhealthy Truth: One Mother's Shocking Investigation into the Dangers of America's Food Supply--and What Every Family Can Do to Protect Itself