In his new book, Fat Chance, Dr. Robert Lustig argues that “sugar is more toxin than it ever was nutrient.” He writes that sugar is as addictive as cocaine, that it should be regulated like tobacco, and that children should be carded before having a soda. He compares the fructose component of sugar to ethanol. “Pick your poison,” he writes, arguing that fructose will “fry your liver and cause all the same diseases as does alcohol.” He also challenges energy balance (calories-in-calories-out) as the dominant paradigm of understanding obesity and and argues that sugar is harmful in ways beyond the calories it provides.
With statements as controversial as these, it’s no wonder that the media, who tend to crave sensationalism to obtain readers or viewers, eat them up like candy. And Dr. Lustig knows what he’s doing and just what to say to elicit attention. He’s no stranger to the spotlight, as Elizabeth Weil writes in her article featuring the pediatric endocrinologist. The showman-doctor also knows just how to tell a classic falling-prey-to-cruelty story. He’d have his readers believe just what they want to hear: that their weight gain is not their fault, that the great evil monster of the food industry is putting addictive “poison” in their food in the form of sugar, and that the government is standing “idly by” letting it all happen. After reading Dr. Lustig’s book, it’s easy to understand why readers are entertained and maybe even enraged enough to give up on sugary sodas, cheese cake, and apple pie. But are the arguments Dr. Lustig makes in the book right or wrong?
Sparked by my ire of journalists buying into the sensationalism without so much as offering a contrasting view, I previously wrote about how Dr. Lustig’s eyebrow-raising claims didn’t appear to hold water. For example, one need only check the evidence from systematic reviews of human intervention trials (not rodents) to find that: 1) fructose has no significant effects on body weight, blood pressure, or uric acid when compared to other carbohydrates contributing the same amount of calories in the diet; 2) fructose in high doses providing excess calories increases body weight as expected from its contribution of excess calories and not because of any unique property of fructose; 3) and fructose at the levels normally found in fruit, which equals to around 10 grams per meal, is shown to improve glycemic control long-term. Does that sound like an ingredient that is “toxic”? I didn’t think so and neither do most nutrition scientists who’ve reviewed the evidence. For these reasons, scientists lashed out against Dr. Lustig’s inflammatory rhetoric and overstatements in a symposium sponsored by the Corn Refiner’s Association at Experimental Biology last April. I wrote about the debate, which I dubbed the “Sugar Showdown“, and then followed up with an interview with Dr. John Sievenpiper, a lead author of several systematic reviews and meta-analyses evaluating fructose’s effects on health of the body, to bring more clarity to the subject.
Despite the push-back from his scientist-peers, however, it’s evident that Dr. Lustig is pressing on with his mission to demonize sugar and his published book has gained him plenty of new attention in articles and interviews. I’ve found it difficult to keep up with it all and have lagged behind, having been busy with other projects (like moving to a new house). Fortunately, exercise physiologist and sports dietitian David Driscoll took up the charge to set the record straight on fructose around the World Wide Web. I’m indebted to Driscoll for nicely summarizing my own thoughts, pushing my blog article, and bringing my attention to other articles. And I would encourage any journalist or blogger who is writing about sugar, fructose, or Dr. Lustig’s book first read Driscoll’s comment and follow each of the links. He told me over Twitter that he posted the following comment, or ones like it, on at least 50 different sites over five days:
While Dr Lustig’s theories and evidence may seem convincing to the general public and reporters, the real test is how well he performs with his fellow scientists!
He was certainly called out for overstating the evidence and poorly extrapolating rat research at a conference he spoke at earlier in the year – check out the Q and A video in the attached article by David Despain (as well as the other lectures)!
What research shows that it is fructose that causes addiction? At the Q and A at the Sugar Symposium, Dr Lustig was called out on this and one researcher showed that rats liked glucose based carbohydrates over sucrose, and another questioned the applicability of rat research to be extrapolated to humans!
The major issue with Dr Lustig’s theory is looking at US Sugar intake over history – levels were still high in the early 20th century – so saying it is sugar is either an oversimplification or there is a threshold value that we have recently crossed. Methinks that it is a perfect storm of more sugar and less burning it up with physical activity!
I hope you get a chance to review these before the interview – especially the video lectures linked to within the article by David Despain
In my own reading of Dr. Lustig’s book over the last few days, I’ve found that apart from the claims about sugar, the rest of the book is relatively tame. In fact, it reminds me of why I tend to hate popular diet books and find them boring. There is one chapter where Dr. Lustig calls out out insulin as “the bad guy,” as Gary Taubes does, and I’ve discussed why this is shortsighted in my post “Good insulin, bad insulin: Its role in obesity“. He also dismisses physical activity as having a participating role in weight management (although he does say it’s good for you for other reasons); as I’ve written before, exercise is critical because of the role of skeletal muscle in consuming energy and determining metabolic rate. Mainly, however, the book regurgitates a lot of the same arguments about what’s wrong with the food system, some controversial and some not.
Overall, many nutritionists would probably agree that Dr. Lustig’s recommendation are somewhat controversial. He summarizes them by shortening Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” to just simply “Eat food.” He argues that if you cut out all processed foods and sugar, people are bound to lose weight. He calls for completely cutting out anything with a Nutrition Facts label, which denotes that it is a “processed food”. It’s a no-brainer that people who go to this extreme would likely lose weight from lack of contributing calories from those foods. But it’s not the only approach one can take to lose weight. To say that one can’t include processed foods (even those with fructose) in one’s diet and still be healthy is just a fallacy. There are many people who include processed foods in their diet in moderation and have no problems maintaining their weight. There are also several degrees of processing and several different types of processed foods that make Dr. Lustig’s sweeping statements misleading. In some cases, processed foods (e.g. meal replacements) can be helpful in promoting weight loss.
One might ask, why all the fuss about scientific accuracy? What’s the problem with the cause of getting people to limit intake of sugar if it leads to a common good of reducing obesity? My answer to people who ask me this is the same that other scientists have voiced, which is that singling out of any ingredient and to make it the scapegoat for the obesity epidemic is just distracting. It’s not helpful to call sugar or fructose alone as “toxic” and ultimately does nothing to change people’s habits, except maybe causing them to forgo buying any food with high-fructose corn syrup for a while. In the end, people will still continue to eat too much, exercise too little, and gain weight.
Update 5-13-13: San Diego State University professor Mark Kern, Ph.D., offers a much more thorough scientific review of Dr. Lustig’s book than I ever could. I’d encourage all to read it here (ht Colby Vorland) on the CRA’s “Sweetener Studies” website (no, I have no financial relationship with CRA). From Kern’s review, here are a couple of quotes that best sum up my own thinking:
- “Dr. Lustig misinterprets the available scientific evidence by making sweeping conclusions based on studies that do not examine real-life consumption patterns.”
- “The addition of the Nutrition Facts Panel to packaged food was a major step forward in public nutrition education and transparency on behalf of food manufacturers.”
- “…inaccuracies suggest that the author is not well-versed in the sciences of foods and nutrition or is misleading readers in a way to promote their agreement with his views.”
Evolving Health 
