Sugar: The Bitter Truth

of satiety. So when you add fiber to your diet, you get the satiety signal sooner, because the food goes by faster. And then finally, it also inhibits the absorption of some free fatty acids up to the colon, and then those are cut into little fragments called short-chain fatty acids, and those actually suppress insulin, unlike the long-chain ones. Fatty acids that stimulate insulin. So there are many reasons why fiber is good. Has anyone ever heard of the Paleolithic Diet? Go home and read it on the Internet. The paleolithic diet. Basically, if you cooked everything raw just as it came out of the ground, without cooking, you would cure diabetes in the blink of an eye.

It takes about a week. Because you're getting between 100 and 300 grams of fiber that I mentioned before. Therefore, because fiber is good for you. And the more, the better. - Type 2. Type 2, right, Type 2, not Type 1. I stand corrected, Type 2. Now, a little fun. That is the end of biochemistry. Phew, how did it go? (Audience applauds) I told them I would help them get through it. Now comes the fun part. The racial innuendos and all the political stuff. The fruitfulness of America and, of course, the world. Ready? Another questionnaire. Can you name the seven McDonald's foods that do not contain high fructose corn syrup or sucrose? - Mustard? - (laughs) No, it has mustard. (audience chatter) Oh, come on, see one, the big one.

French fries, but they have salt, starch and fat. So they're not that good either. Okay, what else? We will arrive at the cafe. French fries, for the same reason, salt, starch and fat. What else, Chicken McNuggets, I was surprised. I was shocked. Chicken McNuggets do not contain sucrose or high fructose corn syrup. But, as the New York Circuit Court judge called them, they are still a McFrankenstein creation. (Audience laughs) But still, there's no sucrose, it really surprised me. Sausage. Oh, they are terrible, just disastrous. But, I mean, there's nothing good in them, but there's no fructose.

Sausage, Diet Coke, Coffee, if you don't add the

sugar

, and iced tea, if you don't add the

sugar

. By the way, Chicken McNuggets, we have a disclaimer, because no one eats Chicken McNuggets without sauce. And there's a lot of high fructose corn syrup in the sauce, right? Okay, good, okay. So who is really drinking this? We talked about this before. GatoradeAM. So, this is an attempt by Pepsi to capture market share in the juice market. Do you think there are elite athletes who actually drink this? You got to be kidding. Okay, this is for kids, right?

So, this really blew me away. This was my daughter, when she was in second grade, two years ago, Miriam Lustig, she brought these two cartons of milk home to me and said, "Dad, you're not going to believe this." Second grade. So, here are the calories for Berkeley Farms 1% Lowfat Milk, 130 calories, 15 of them are sugars, because it's lactose, which is fine. And here's Berkeley Farms, 1% chocolate milk, 190 calories, 29 grams of sugar, all high fructose corn syrup. It's like a glass of milk plus half a glass of orange juice. And that is what we are giving to our children.

And do you know what the SFUSD nutrition department says? "Well, we have to get our children to drink milk somehow." Is it shiny or what? I don't know. Now what about WIC? So, we talked about the 112 pounds of orange juice the Salinas boy was drinking. What about WIC? Do you remember what we started with? We have an epidemic of obese six-month-old children. Remember? So could this be the reason? So, here's a can of formula. 43.2% corn syrup solids, 10.3% sugar. It's a baby shake. The soft drink, Coca Cola, has 10.5% sucrose. The formula is 10.3% sucrose. Any difference? And there is a large body of literature now coming of age that shows that the earlier children are exposed to sweets, the more they crave them later.

Additionally, there is new literature showing that the more sugar a pregnant woman drinks or eats during pregnancy, the more it passes through the placenta and actually causes what we call developmental programming, changing the adiposity of the child even before it is born. is born, and taking this whole epidemic even further. So, we'll close in a few minutes. But I just want to point out what the difference is. Here we have a can of Coca-Cola. Here we have a can of beer. And I'm not picking on Schlitz or anything like that. It's any beer you want, that's fine.

So 150 calories each, no difference in terms of total calories. Carb percentage, so 10.5% sucrose here, except it's high fructose corn syrup, but who cares. 3.6% alcohol, here's the breakdown. 75 fructose, 75 glucose for Coca-Cola. 90 alcohol 60 maltose for beer. Remember, the first step of gastrointestinal metabolism removes 10% of the alcohol from the table. So when you actually calculate the amount of calories that get to the liver, you remember that was the big difference between glucose and fructose, remember? 72 against 24 and all this was set in motion as a term for what happens that is bad. In short, there is no difference. So, we have something called a beer belly.

Well, welcome to Soda Belly. Because that's what the United States is suffering from. No ifs, ands, or buts. That is what it is. Now, you wouldn't think twice about not giving your child a Budweiser. But you don't think twice before giving your child a can of Coca-Cola. But they are the same, in the same dose, for the same reason, through the same mechanism. Fructose is ethanol without the hum. Fructose is a carbohydrate. Yes it is. But fructose is metabolized as a fat. And I just showed you that 30% of any fructose load ingested ends up as fat.

So when people talk about high-fat diets doing bad things, no, what they're really talking about is high-fructose diets, and that's what Ancel Keys was looking at. So the corollary of this is that, at least in the United States, and also around the world, a low-fat diet is not really a low-fat diet. Because fructose or sucrose also functions as a fat, it is actually a high-fat diet. That's why our diets don't work. And fructose, like ethanol, for the same reason, by the same mechanism and in the same dosage, is also a toxin. Now, finally, what can we do about it?

Can we do something about it? How about the FDA? You think they can do something about it. After all, aren't they supposed to regulate our diet? Aren't they supposed to regulate what they can put in food? Weren't they supposed to regulate tobacco? Now they are, in fact. So, you know, weird stuff. So, I just want to show you what the tobacco company thinks of all this. This is actually from Stan Glantz's UCSF Legacy Tobacco Document Library across the street. Stan is a good guy, he likes Stan a lot. And he showed me this. “Under regulations governing food additives,” this came from an executive at Altria or Phillip Morris, “additives are required to be safe,” defined as reasonable certainty “by competent scientists that no harm will occur” by the intended use of the additive." Now, does fructose meet that standard?

Well, the FDA says that fructose, high fructose corn syrup, has what's known as GRAS, G R A S status, generally considered safe. .Now, where did that come from? No, where? It came from nowhere. It came from the idea that "Well, fructose is natural, it's in fruit, it must be okay." Well, tobacco is also natural. But is not. Ethanol is natural, but it is not. A lot of Jamaican ackee fruit is natural, but it's also not. It kills you. Moving on. "A food will be considered adulterated" if it carries or contains any poisonous "or harmful substance that could "make it harmful to health." Fructose fits that description, right?

Uh-uh, but now with the prevention of chronic diseases. , although their own regulations explicitly postulate the connection between such products and such diseases. In other words, the FDA will only regulate acute toxins, not a chronic toxin Acute exposure to fructose did nothing, remember. fructose, the liver does. And the liver doesn't get sick after a meal with fructose. But that's how much we eat. The USDA is not touching this. Because if the USDA touched this, what would that mean? world that our food is a problem. So what do you think that would do in this country that we can still sell weapons, entertainment and food abroad. (laughs) I don't think so.

Is there anything else wrong with you that another country wants from ours? That? Tobacco, of course, tobacco. (laughs) Okay, you get the idea. So the USDA wants nothing to do with this. Because this is bad news. So who runs the food pyramid? The USDA. He is the fox in charge of the henhouse. Because their job is to sell food. And who eats it? Are. So, in summary, fructose, and I don't care what the vehicle is, it's irrelevant, sucrose or high fructose corn syrup, I don't care, fructose consumption has increased over the last 30 years, coinciding with the obesity epidemic.

A calorie is not a calorie. And the country's dietitians are actually perpetrating this on us. Because the more you think that a calorie is a calorie, the more you think, well, if you just ate less and exercised more, it would work. It is not like this. All studies show that it doesn't work. Here's why it doesn't work: because a calorie is not a calorie. Fructose is not glucose. We know that a calorie is not a calorie. Because there are good fats and bad fats. There are good proteins and bad proteins. Well, there are good carbs and bad carbs.

And glucose is a good carbohydrate. Glucose is the energy of life. Fructose is poison. You are not what you eat. You are what you do with what you eat. And what is done with fructose is particularly egregious and dangerous. Hepatic fructose metabolism leads to all manifestations of metabolic syndrome. Hypertension through that uric acid pathway, de novo lipogenesis, dyslipidemia, hepatic steatosis through that DNL pathway, those three enzymes, the new fat production pathway, inflammation through JNK1, hepatic insulin resistance due to serine phosphorylation of IRS-1, obesity due to transport of VLDL to the adipocyte and leptin resistance that promote continuous consumption, basically starving your brain, making you think you need more.

Fructose intake interferes with anti-obesity intervention, as we demonstrate in our clinic. The more sodas, the less diet and exercise worked. Fructose is a chronic hepatotoxin for the same reason that alcohol is. The only difference is that alcohol is metabolized in the brain, thus producing the effects of alcohol. Fructose is not metabolized by the brain, so these effects do not occur. But everything else he does is the same. But the FDA can't and won't regulate it. It depends on us. I am here today to recruit you. That's a famous saying here in San Francisco, right? "I'm Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you." I'm Robert Lustig and I'm here to recruit you in the war against bad food.

And this is the bad thing. With this, I want to thank my colleagues in the UCSF Department of Pediatrics in our Adolescent and Child Health Weight Assessment Clinic, the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and also the UC Berkeley Department of Nutritional Sciences, in particular to Doctor Jean-Marc Schwarz. that he's a card-carrying fructose biochemist, a PhD in biochemistry, who looked at all these pathways that I've shown you today, and he looked at this and said, "My God, it's a toxin." He worked with that substance for 15 years and didn't even realize it was a toxin until he saw this.

So with that, I'll close. Thank you. (audience applauds) (upbeat techno music)