FDA approved ‘poison’

• Manufactured High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is nothing like glucose
• Government support for low fat diets led to replacement of fat with HFCS
• Nonfat yogurts have more sugar than ice cream to compensate for lost taste
• Added sweeteners hidden in ingredients through FDA approved use of 69 different sugar names
• HFCS can't get into most cells; goes to liver
• Makes people hungrier, causing obesity
• Gets broken down into uric acid, causing gaut and hypertension
• What's left gets converted into fat
• Extra fat damages liver
• Extra fat outside liver causes insulin resistance, increasing risk for diabetes
• Leads to metabolic syndrome
• FDA won't consider long-term damage in food approval

Frontline News recently covered the incredible story of how the sugar industry actually lobbied for, and won, a PR award for getting the FDA to blame fat for obesity, while providing government assurances that sugar is not hazardous to our health.

Government stamp of approval

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) even published guidelines stating, “Contrary to widespread belief, too much sugar in your diet does not cause diabetes.”

In actuality, a Journal of Diabetes Investigation study found, “. . . a greater intake of SSBs [sugar-sweetened beverages] was positively associated with a 30% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

In a viral video based on his personal experience as the director of  the children’s obesity clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also serves as Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, Robert Lustig, MD, gives a powerful lecture creatively entitled, Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

Poison

Dr. Lustig starts his lecture as he ends it, without mincing words. Describing Japan’s development of the cheap sugar alternative High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) as  “Japan's revenge for World War II,” Lustig refers to an ad campaign by the American Beverage Institute and the Corn Refiner's Association claiming HFCS to be as safe as sugar:

They are correct, there is absolutely no difference between high fructose corn syrup and sucrose. High fructose corn syrup and sucrose are exactly the same. They're both equally bad. They're both dangerous, they're both poison. 

Okay, I said it, poison. My charge before the end of tonight is to demonstrate fructose is a poison, and I will do it … [min 19-20].

Interestingly, when Lustig says that it’s poison he’s not referring to the calories or to how it led to larger serving sizes due to its low cost of production:

So they're talking about soda like it's empty calories. I'm here to tell you that it goes way beyond empty calories. The reason why this is a problem is because fructose is a poison, it's not about the calories. It has nothing to do with the calories. It's a poison by itself … [min 21].

Nonfat yogurt making us fat

In 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs published dietary guidelines calling for Americans to, “Reduce overall fat consumption from 40 to 30% of energy [caloric] intake.” Lustig says that the ensuing “low fat craze took America and the world by storm,” and created a new problem:

. . . low fat processed food tastes like cardboard … So the food companies knew that, so what'd they do? They had to make it palatable? So, how do you make something palatable that has no fat in it? You add the sugar. [min 39].

Yogurt is a classic example. Plain yogurt is 4.5% lactose, the naturally occurring milk sugar, and 3.3% fat. The FDA allows a company to label a food as "zero fat" if it contains less than 0.5 grams of fat per customary serving size. To keep such nonfat yogurts from tasting “like cardboard,” manufacturers bring up the sugar content to as much as 19%, higher than many ice cream brands! 

Sugar names

It’s not always easy to spot added sugar in the ingredients of a food item like yogurt, though, since there are at least 69 different names for sugar, including less obvious ones like treacle. Even if a food manufacturer wanted to identify treacle as a sugar, the FDA would not allow them, as only 10 types of sugar are allowed to be called sugar in the ingredient list! One thing they have in common though, is that each of the processed sweeteners added to yogurt to increase its sugar content to 19% are quite different from the lactose originally found in yogurt. 

Sweeter means less satisfied

One difference between refined sugars and natural sugars is their sweetness sweetness level. 

Sucrose (table sugar) and HFCS, both comprising about 50% fructose (when removing the extra bond in sucrose and the water in HFCS) boast high sweetness ratings. They may, therefore, be expected to reduce caloric intake, providing the same sweetness with less grams, despite having the same number of calories per gram as less sweet sugars like the glucose predominant in papaya and corn syrup. 

Unfortunately, it’s just the opposite. Fructose, unlike glucose, does not stimulate insulin secretion. Without insulin to bind with insulin receptors on the surface of cells, the “key that opens the cells” to receive sugar molecules is never turned and the cells of most tissues in the body will not absorb fructose. Those cells remain in need of energy and the body’s natural mechanism to decrease appetite after eating glucose is not activated since the hormone that turns off our appetite, leptin, is itself insulin-regulated

more fructose = less insulin = less leptin = greater appetite

As Lustig explains:

Everybody heard of leptin? It's this hormone that comes from your fat cell, tells your brain, "You know what, I've had enough. "I don't need to eat anymore. "I'm done, and I can burn energy properly." 

Well, you know what? If you're eating 187 or 335 calories more today than you were 20 years ago, your leptin ain't working. 'Cause if it were, you wouldn't be doing it. Whether the food was there or not. So, there's something wrong with our biochemical negative feedback system that normally controls energy balance. [min 8].

Sweeter means hungrier

Worse yet, ghrelin, a hormone which works in the opposite way, sending an urge to eat, is depressed by glucose but not by fructose! Even worse, fructose actually increases ghrelin levels! 

more fructose = more ghrelin = greater appetite

So more means more, as Lustig describes in the case of soda at the beginning of a meal:

So, if you preload a kid with a can of soda, and then you let him loose at the fast food restaurant, do they eat more, or do they eat less? They eat more. They just took on 150 calories, yet they eat more. Reason? 'Cause fructose doesn't suppress the hunger hormone ghrelin  [min 43].

To the liver or bust

Now that we know that fructose can’t get into most of our cells, and we get even hungrier as the fructose circulates in our blood, the next question is, “where does it go?” The “predominant site” of fructose metabolism is the liver. With glucose, on the other hand, only a fifth makes it to the liver.

. . . let's consume 120 calories in glucose. Two slices of white bread. What happens to that 120 calories? You eat the 120 calories, 96 or 80% of the total will be used by all the organs in the body. 80% off the table. Why? 

Because every cell in the body can use glucose. Every bacteria can use glucose, every living thing on the face of the earth can use glucose, because glucose is the energy of life. That's what we were supposed to eat. 24 of those calories, or 20% will hit the liver. [min 43].

Gout

What happens to all that extra sugar entering the liver? It gets metabolized at three times the rate that glucose gets metabolized in the liver, leading to three times the amount of phosphates being produced as part of that metabolic process. Those extra phosphates are themselves processed in a pathway that ends with the creation of the waste product uric acid. So the more fructose, the more uric acid. The extra uric acid, in turn, crystallizes and the crystals deposit in joints, tendons, and tissues, resulting in painful gout attacks.

Hypertension

Gout is not the only consequence of higher uric acid levels. A relatively small increase in uric acid levels in the blood increases the risk for high blood pressure by 20%. 

High sugar diet = high fat diet

Lustig points out another product of the metabolism of fructose in the liver:

acetyl-CoA, which is the way into fat, which then gets packaged to the VLDL.

VLDL (Very-low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol is then released by the liver into the bloodstream to supply body tissues with triglycerides, a type of fat. This does not occur in the metabolism of glucose. In an experiment with medical school students, with one group taking in a high load of glucose and a second group taking an equal load of fructose, each for six days, it was found that, 

. . . taking in a glucose load … almost none of it ends up as fat. Taking in a fructose load, same number of calories, 30% of it ends up as fat. So when you consume fructose, you're not consuming a carbohydrate, you're consuming fat. 

So everybody talks about a high fat diet. Well, a high sugar diet is a high fat diet. That's the point. That's exactly the point. This is a study where they gave acute administration of fructose, and you can see the triglycerides going up compared to the [glucose] control. Triglycerides doubled, de novo lipogenesis went up five times higher … So, here's the dyslipidemia [high levels of lipids or lipoproteins in the blood] of fructose consumption. [Emphases added; min 1:04-1:05]. 

Insulin resistance

The bad news about fructose gets worse. The experiment on the medical students also revealed that, in the fructose group,

free fatty acids [FFA], which then cause insulin resistance, doubled [in just] six days. [Emphases added; min 1:05].

How bad is the doubling of FFA?

FFA cause both insulin resistance and inflammation in the major insulin target tissues … and thus are an important link between obesity, insulin resistance, inflammation and the development of T2DM [Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus], hypertension, dyslipidemia, disorders of coagulation and ASVD [Arteriosclerotic Vascular Disease]. 

Diabetes

Insulin resistance means that the body’s cells do not respond appropriately to insulin, causing the body to have to release higher levels of insulin. Over time, the resistance may increase to the point that even higher levels of insulin cannot control blood glucose levels (hyperglycemia), leading to prediabetes and eventually Type 2 diabetes.

Fatty liver disease

The fructose induced high blood lipid levels mentioned above (dyslipidemia) create a risk factor for cardiovascular disease as they travel throughout the body. When they stay inside the liver, there are other consequences.

We're not done. Some of the fat won't make it out of the liver, just like with ethanol … so now you've got this nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. [Emphases added; min 1:05]. 

Steatohepatitis is excess fat as well as inflammation in the liver. If the inflammation persists it can lead to scarring of the liver (fibrosis). If the scarring becomes widespread (cirrhosis), the damage is irreversible and can be potentially life threatening in the case of liver failure.

Obesity

In addition to endangering the liver itself, fatty liver disease causes 

. . . liver insulin resistance as well. That's gonna make the pancreas work that much harder generating higher insulin levels, which raise your blood pressure even further, cause further fat making, cause more energy to go into your fat cell. There's your obesity. 

And finally, our research has shown that the higher the insulin goes, the less well your brain can see its leptin. And so there you've got continued consumption because your brain thinks it's starving … 

Also, the hyperinsulinemia stops the leptin from acting on that nucleus accumbens [brain region mediating reward and satisfaction] and so you get an increased reward signal. So that continues your appetite, continues more fructose, more carbohydrate, generating more insulin resistance and you can see- you generate a vicious cycle of consumption and disease, and no stopping.  [Emphasis added; min 1:06-1:08]. 

Metabolic Syndrome

Metabolic syndrome is a clustering of at least three medical conditions such as the very ones caused by high fructose diets: 

So, here we are, hypertension, inflammation, hepatic insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, dyslipidemia, muscle insulin resistance, obesity, and continued consumption. Looks like metabolic syndrome to me. [Emphases added; min 1:08]. 

FDA assurances

A shopper in a supermarket may be shocked to hear a parent tell her child, “put that poison back on the shelf,” only to look up and see not rat poison but a three juice cocktail. Looking at the replaced can, he may notice, though, that within just 11.5 ounces (325 grams) there are 53 grams of added sugars (HFCS and sucrose). 

That’s more than the entire day’s RDA (recommended daily allowance) of added sugars (200 calories or 50 grams) according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans published by the USDA and HHS. Nonetheless, the HHS’s FDA  approved that drink. They also post this assurance on their website:. 

The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, products that give off electronic radiation, and for regulating tobacco products. [Emphases added].

They knew

How long have the dangers of sugar been known? 

A 2005 study concluded:

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are occurring at epidemic rates in the United States and many parts of the world. The "obesity epidemic" appears to have emerged largely from changes in our diet and reduced physical activity. An important but not well-appreciated dietary change has been the substantial increase in the amount of dietary fructose consumption from high intake of sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener used in the food industry. 

FDA officials could have acted on those findings or they could have simply read the title of a book published a half-century ago by professor John Yudkin of Queen Elizabeth College in London:

Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It.

FDA’s run-around

Dr. Lustig asks,

How 'bout the FDA? You think they can do something about it. After all, aren't they supposed to regulate our food? Aren't they supposed to regulate what they can put in food? 

Under the regulations governing food additives … it is required that additives be safe, defined as a “reasonable certainty by competent scientists that no harm will result from 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 status (Generally Regarded as Safe). Now, where'd that come from? 

Nowhere. It came from nowhere. It came from the notion that, "Well, fructose is natural, it's in fruit, it must be okay." Well, tobacco's natural too. But it's not [safe]. Ethanol's natural, but it's not [safe]. Jamaican ackee fruit's natural, but it's not either. It kills you. [Emphases added; min 1:22-1:24]. 

So how does the FDA get away with it?

The FDA will only regulate acute toxins, not a chronic toxin.

Fructose is a chronic toxin. Acute fructose exposure did nothing, remember. 'Cause the brain doesn't metabolize fructose. The liver does. 

And the liver doesn't get sick after one fructose meal. It gets sick after 1,000 fructose meals. But, that's how many we eat. 

So, the FDA isn't touching this. The USDA isn't touching this. [Emphasis added; min 1:24-1:25]. 

What about fructose in fruits?

If we don't imbibe processed foods containing fructose, don't we still get fructose form eating fruit? Is that unhealthy?

The short answer is, that's not what's new. Fruits have always been around. The obesity/diabetes/heart disease epidemic coincides with the addition of processed sugar to factory food. While the liver is able to properly metabolize naturally occurring fructose, it is overwhelmed by the additional fructose reaching it from foods that have been sweetened. The studies finding the sharp rises in uric acid and triglycerides created in the liver followed high fructose diets.

Additionally, the body metabolizes fructose occurring naturally in fruit far better than processed fructose, even in the same amounts, for reasons we'll discuss in the continuation of this series.

Factory food

Is it only added sugar, or is the entire factory food industry a danger to our health?

Join us for our continuation of this series as we explore Dr. Lustig’s latest book, Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine, and take a closer look at factory food, its effect on our health and the authorities receiving our tax dollars to oversee food safety.