Year of No Sugar (5 page)

Except it's worse. Because—

3. Fructose may not be used by any of the cells in our body, except the liver.
Another key indicator that our body wasn't built for lots of fructose consumption is the fact that we have no receptors for it: no cells have “Welcome, Fructose!” mats on their doorsteps…quite the contrary. Most of them have hand-lettered signs reading: “Fructose Not Welcome Here” and “We Don't Speak Fructose.” Consequently, while only 20 percent of calories from glucose end up in the liver, the rest having been absorbed and used along the way in our digestive system,
all
fructose—100 percent of its calories—must go to the liver to be processed, just like those of toxins. And just like with toxins, there in the liver, many things happen—all of them bad, as we shall see.

Lustig compares the effects of fructose to those of a toxin we know and love: ethanol (alcohol). A comparison of the symptoms of chronic alcohol consumption to those of chronic fructose consumption reveals that they share
eight out of twelve
disorders, fun things like pancreatitis and dyslipidemia. He concludes that “fructose is ethanol without the buzz” and asserts that giving your kid a soda—
or
juice—is the metabolic equivalent of giving your kid a
beer
. So, how scary is that?

4. In processing fructose, the liver produces
bad things
: uric acid and fatty acids.
As with toxins, when the liver has to process fructose, it creates some not-so-terrific things to have in your body. In great enough amounts, those not-so-terrific things cause specific, identifiable problems that get progressively worse over time. For example…

5. Too much uric acid causes:

Gout
—Characterized by attacks of acute inflammatory arthritis, gout used to be known as the “disease of kings” or “the gentleman's disease” because primarily the wealthy suffered from it. Remember: sugar was expensive up until only about one hundred years ago.

Hypertension
—Uric acid blocks an important liver enzyme that is your body's in-house blood-pressure lowerer. According to a 2010 report by the CDC,
25 percent
of the total U.S. population over age eighteen is diagnosed with hypertension.
⁵

6. Too many fatty acids cause:

Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
—Cirrhosis of the liver: it's not just for alcoholics anymore! NAFLD,
⁶
just like
the alcoholic version, results from the accumulation of fatty tissue in the liver that creates inflammation and scar tissue. Previously unheard of,
non
alcoholic fatty liver disease was identified and named in the 1980s,
⁷
yet it is estimated that
up to 24 percent
of the U.S. population now suffers from it.
⁸

Cardiovascular Disease
—Hypertension, Angina, Heart Attack, Stroke…know anyone with one of these? Unfortunately, CVD is all the rage these days, accounting for
one out of every four
American deaths in 2009.
⁹
Heart disease is the leading killer in the U.S. today.

But here's a counterintuitive news flash:
fat doesn't cause heart disease
. Sugar does. In one particularly illuminating moment in “Bitter Truth,” Lustig explains that there are not one but
two
forms of what we call “bad” cholesterol or LDLs (low-density lipoproteins): “large buoyant” and “small dense.” When your LDLs are measured, they measure both kinds together, but in fact, it is
only
the small, dense LDLs that get stuck in the walls of our blood vessels, beginning the formation of plaque and causing cardiovascular disease. Guess what raises the large buoyant LDLs, the
good
LDLs? Dietary fat.

On the other hand, the small dense LDLs? The
bad
guys? Those are raised by carbohydrates. When the low-fat craze of the 1980s hit, and food processors began coming out with low-fat versions of all their products, what carbohydrate did they use to replace the great taste of fat? Why, sugar, of course. So in addition to all the obvious sugar—the soda, the candy bars, the Hostess Fruit Pies—we also have an entire universe of hidden sugar, in things that aren't even sweet and in places you'd never suspect—sugar in our gravy, salad dressings, sauces. Sugar in our tortellini and chicken broth and baby food. The entire middle of the supermarket is an amalgamation of processed foods in packages, boxes, and bags…and most of it contains some form of sugar.
¹⁰
This is why, despite the fact that Americans' fat consumption has gone down, our rates of cardiovascular disease have continued to go
up
.

Insulin Resistance & Type II Diabetes
—But just like everywhere else in the body, fructose gets no welcome mat in the pancreas either; there are no receptors for fructose on the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. When you consume fructose, the pancreas doesn't know and doesn't care; no corresponding insulin gets released. Instead, those carbohydrate-generated fats start to accumulate in the bloodstream, getting in the way of the acceptance of good glucose by the cells of your body. Unlike fructose, or the circulating fats that fructose eventually results in, your body desperately needs that glucose to continue all its normal functions. “Energy of life,” remember?

Think of insulin as the guy with the key to glucose's new apartment (the cell)—we'll call him Fred. Glucose just
can't
get into its new place without Fred McInsulin's help. But all those circulating fats are getting in the way, jamming up all the major thoroughfares like a rush hour traffic jam, making it harder and harder for the important glucose to get through—eventually resulting in what is called
insulin resistance
. In an attempt to keep the body supplied with fuel—which is there but can't get through—the pancreas, confused, continues to manufacture more and more and
more
insulin. (What happened to Fred? Better send his sister over with another key. Also his cousin and nephew just to be sure.) But the roads are still jammed! No one is getting through—not Fred, not his relatives, not Glucose. Finally, the pancreas either wears out, or the glucose is unable to be used as fuel no matter how much insulin is produced. Voilà! Diabetes Type 2.
¹¹

This is the unfortunate magic trick fructose has been playing over and over again throughout the sugar-eating world. Whereas in 1900, diabetes was as rare as a hippo with a hernia, today the CDC and the WHO have officially characterized type 2 diabetes as a worldwide
epidemic
.
¹²

Obesity
—Ah, yes. The word that's on everyone's lips these days. “Why are we all so
fat
?” Western society wonders to itself.

Here, at long last, is the answer: yet another of the many bad things fructose does in the liver is it stimulates something called
de novo lipogenesis
, literally: New Fat Making. Woo-hoo! So, just to recap, not only do you have circulating fat
in
your
arteries
, as a free bonus, you also get to add
non
circulating fat to your
waistline
. That's two fats for the price of one!

Not coincidentally, a century ago, before sugar got cheap and our consumption went through the roof, a mere one in twenty-five people was clinically obese. Today in the U.S.,
one in three
is.
¹³
Not just fat, mind you; one third of the U.S. population is
obese
.

7. The clustering of two or more of the four conditions above is called
Metabolic Syndrome.
Virtually unheard of only a few decades ago, one in five Americans suffers from
Metabolic Syndrome
today.
¹⁴
If you've never heard of Metabolic Syndrome, get ready—by all rights, it should be one of the new buzzwords for the decade, right up there with “tornadic activity” and “fo shizzle.”
¹⁵
Although the specific criteria can vary depending who you're talking to, in order to be identified as having metabolic syndrome, one would have
more than one
of the conditions listed above…as if having one of them wasn't fun enough.

According to U.S. census data, in 2000, there were an estimated
forty-seven million Americans
living with metabolic syndrome.
¹⁶
If we believe the Cleveland Clinic's more recent
estimate of one in five, that means now there are more than
sixty-two million Americans
¹⁷
living with a condition the term for which was coined as recently as 1977.

8. Additionally, circulating fatty acids have been proven to speed the growth of cancer cells.
As if everything we've already mentioned weren't enough reason to run screaming from the sugar-added buffet at our local supermarket, we can add cancer to the mix as well. And not just
any
cancers: three out of the five most common cancers—colorectal, breast, and prostate—as well as one of the most deadly—pancreatic—all have proven correlations with increased sugar intake.
¹⁸

Simply put, cancerous cells consume more glucose than normal cells. Therefore, if you have a heightened blood-glucose level (due to all those lovely circulating fatty acids that interrupt the glucose from getting to your cells) you have a very cancer-cell-friendly environment on your hands.

Sweet Poison
author David Gillespie points out some rather startling correlations between consumption of sugar and prostate cancer deaths: when consumption of sugar has gone down, for example due to the wartime shortages of the 1940s, the rates of prostate cancer also drops—
sixty years later
. Then, when sugar became plentiful again? Prostate cancers went up again—sixty years later. The two graphs mimic one another uncannily—a six-decade shadow. Remember: sugar is a
chronic
toxin—give it some time, and it will do some very bad things.

9. Consumption of fructose has risen
341 percent
in the last century and continues to climb.
In the beginning of the 1900s, we consumed about five ounces of fructose per week, or approximately sixteen pounds per person, per year. Today we consume about 140 pounds of sugar, or
70.5 pounds of fructose per person, per year—an increase of 341 percent
. Meanwhile, we're all getting fatter and sicker at an alarming rate, with disease after disease that was virtually unheard of a century ago, each of which directly correlates to the biology of sugar consumption. Coincidence?

Often, the effects of a toxin, such as alcohol, are distressing because of their acute symptoms, the ones which appear right away. But just as detrimental, if not more so, are the things that a toxin can do over the long term. At least with alcohol, we have something of a “warning” system in the acute symptoms, to let us know when we have consumed far too much. There is no such signifier for fructose—unless you count the Pillsbury Doughboy-ification of America as a signifier. It just quietly poisons us for years and years until something gives: Liver? Pancreas? Heart? Cardiovascular system? Pick your necessary organ and fructose will, eventually, poison it to death.

Now, if you're like my mom, right about now you're saying, with some incredulity, “So you're saying everything my doctor has been telling me—everything
all the doctors
have been telling us—
is wrong
? That heart disease
isn't
caused by animal fats? That eating less and exercising
isn't
the key to losing weight? That fruit juice
isn't
health food?”

Well…yeah.

It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened, would it? After all—Einstein's Theory of Relativity upended two hundred years of scientific thought. Pretty
much everything everyone had thought about the nature of the universe before that turned out to be just…
wrong
. And remember how the world was supposed to be flat? History is full of good, logical, common-sense ideas that turned out to be completely, dramatically, spectacularly
wrong
.

It was this message—the message that sugar was the missing link, the key to the “curse of the Western diet”—that I began to understand the day I watched Dr. Robert Lustig's video on YouTube. And then I couldn't
stop
thinking about it. I thought about it while washing dishes, while picking my kids up at school, while washing my hair in the shower. I especially thought about it in the supermarket and while cooking. My brain was on fire with this idea that our food supply had been adulterated in plain sight. Had I ever considered before that sugar is not required for our body's proper functioning in any way? The fact that the number of obese Americans has not doubled or even tripled in the last hundred years but, in fact, has increased by
seven
times? What do you even
call
that? Septupled?

The facts as Lustig had cited them ran through my brain over and over. Still, could it be a case of circumstantial evidence? Even if it was, it was still pretty
compelling
circumstantial evidence, along the lines of finding the missing cat's collar in the backseat of the dog's car—it may not assure guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but it su-u-u-u-u-re didn't look good. Could it really be that we were eating poison every day, buying it in our supermarkets, sprinkling it on our cereal, and pouring it in the drinking glasses of our children? Could that be what was mysteriously making so many Americans—and the citizens of any country foolish enough to adopt the Western diet—so increasingly, incredibly, amazingly,
undeniably fat and sick? Could it be that
this
was the Occam's razor, the simplest answer, I had been waiting for?

And thus was born our family's Year of No Sugar.

 

³
With the exception of crystalline fructose, which is composed entirely of fructose.