Supposing readership gets scared enough to eliminate these "added sugars" from their diet, like Soda and candy and cookies cease to exist. How is that harmful? Oh yeah, some companies would disappear and people would be, at least temporarily, out work. These "added sugars" didn't even exist not that long ago, so worst case we would be eating more like we did in the 1800's. Perhaps some new information I don't know about suggests that the added sugars are now indispensable for our well being?. "Downright harmful" is I think, a little exaggerated.

He explains this in his comments: "Again, one common theme here is that because sugar has gotten more or a less free pass from the federal authorities for the past forty years, little meaningful research has been done."

One might say that given a health crisis, sitting back not saying anything would be irresponsible. Ben Goldacre chronicles bad science journalism, and this is not an example of it.

(edited)

As someone that believes in accurate science and honest journalism, I would call that irresponsible.

Did I say that?

I guess the big issue I have with his advice is that obesity is really most strongly correlated with increased intake of calories, and less so with the macronutritional source of those calories.

In his books, Gary Taubes makes an argument that the causal relationship is reversed. It's not that eating too much causes your body to store the excess as fat. Rather it's that your body is storing necessary energy as fat before your body can use it, so you need to eat more to make up the deficit.

The fact that you misread me is your problem. I did not write there was conclusive evidence that sucrose is toxic. I said _conclusive evidence of a problem_ - which is different thing and is clearly true.

Responding to a comment referring to a specific lack of evidence about sugar/toxicity by saying that there is conclusive evidence of "a problem" implies relevancy, which implies that you are confusing the two issues.

Let me try a different tactic: what is your specific problem with this article? Do you object out of hand to non-peer reviewed science articles regardless of quality? Do you have specific objections to the quality of this article?

From my point of view, there has been a long standing public health problem in the US with obesity and related pathologies. The public has been understandably interested in the outcome, and so there is demand for press coverage. The scientific progress in identifying the cause of the problem has been uneven and there have been some incorrect conclusions about the root cause, even among experts in the field. As a result, the media coverage has also been incorrect. However, this article seems reasonable. It makes clear references to current scientific work, presents the subject evenly (barring the title), and the author makes efforts to explain to an educated but non-scientific audience.

In general? I find it distasteful but I don't really give that much of a shit.

Topics like nutrition or medicine have a large potential to cause bodily harm however, and I firmly believe that non-rigorous studies should not be shared with populations that don't have the capacity to understand the limitations present.

Example: Shoddy studies about vaccines and the general public mix with disastrous results.

All so this journalist can make a quick buck, instead of finding something more appropriate to "report" on.

This goes back to the rule about news articles with question headlines: The answer to the headline is "no." If it were "yes," they wouldn't couch it in a question.

Again, maybe not actionable, but definitely content. Especially for a mainstream newspaper article.

Well, yes and no. There is some good but as-yet not conclusive reasons to believe that sugar is far more dangerous than it appears. On the other hand, there is nobody I am aware of who has any argument in favor of consuming more sugars or more sugary foods. I am not aware of any argument against cutting back your sugar consumptions as a reasonable preventative step. A conventional dietitian will place much less emphasis on it than Dr. Lustig, but they won't try to talk you out of it.

This is as opposed to fats, where I have seen arguments made that cutting back on fats can be actively harmful. I'm not making it here, nor am I claiming it is true, I'm simply saying I have definitely seen that argument made.

Curious how sugar compares to artificial sweeteners in light of this data? Splenda vs sugar?

If anyone's wondering what a liberal arts degree is good for, this article is an excellent example.

It's also worth noting that it's not -only- a volume issue but a rate issue. This is why -refined- sugars are particularly bad, because they are immediately available (unlike say, eating a fruit, where it takes time for your body to tear apart the fibers to get at the sugar).

Fructose metabolism is not rate-regulated, and a cell metabolizing fructose quickly uses up all its energy (ATP) and slows down. So it's not really safe to consume -refined- fructose in general because it will shut down the liver while it is being metabolized, and this can allow compounds that should -not- be in the bloodstream (such as fructose itself) to get into the bloodstream because the liver is tied up and can't take them on.

> Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

> Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.

I found this passage particularly compelling: "During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not."

It's probably better to eat like a poor Korean farmer than like an "average" American teenager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China-Oxford-Cornell_Study_on_D...

Add to this that it has recently been demonstrated that junk food was addictive (demonstrated in rats, but it's quite obvious that it is also the case in humans) and you get the current metabolic syndrome epidemy.

FTA:

When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.

But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year.

That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it’s tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.