Empiric Role of Sugar in Chronic Metabolic Disease August 12, 2014 Public Health, San Francisco Medicine, UCSF Chronic Metabolic Disease, Robert Lustig, San Francisco Medicine, Sugar 0 By Robert H. Lustig, MD, MSL Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 2014 issue of San Francisco Medicine. It has been assumed by many physicians that obesity is the underlying cause of the diseases of metabolic syndrome. While it’s true that 80 percent of the obese have metabolic dysfunction, so do 40 percent of the normal weight population, and these people harbor the same biochemical defects. Indeed, 33 percent of Americans now have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and 8.3 percent have diabetes, and they’re not all obese. In other words, it’s not about obesity; rather, obesity is a marker for the metabolic dysfunction, not the cause. It has also been assumed that the negative effects of sugar were mediated through its caloric content and its role in fomenting obesity. In the last two years, several peer-reviewed studies have provided causative evidence for sugar’s effects on fatty liver disease, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease death; apart from its calories, and apart from its effects on obesity, and in doses commonly used. These data argue that sugar is an independent risk factor for chronic metabolic disease. In other words, sugar is a dose-dependent, chronic hepatotoxin, similar to alcohol. Sugar is the “alcohol of the child.” And similar to alcohol, the only treatment is reduction of consumption. Since one-half of the sugar in our diet is in foods that we didn’t know had it (e.g., tomato sauce, yogurt, salad dressing), this means changing the food supply. Change is always hard, and often appears most impossible right before it is seen in hindsight as having been inevitable. It’s time to extricate ourselves from the ditch of American health care, before the wheels fall off. Click here to read part 1 - Sugar: The Ditch of American Health Care. Robert H. Lustig, MD, MSL, is professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also the president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the global food supply and eradicating type II diabetes and chronic metabolic disease in children. He is the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, Sugar Has 56 Names: A Shopper's Guide, and The Fat Chance Cookbook. Comments are closed.
