Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Robert Lustig says: Step away from the sugar

Posted By on Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 8:27 AM

click to enlarge Photo credit: Uwe Hermann
  • Photo credit: Uwe Hermann

In case you don't subscribe to The New York Times — which, each week, includes its magazine — check out this snippet from an article that was published in the magazine this past week about sugar ... it'll make you want to go sugar free.

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

Read the rest of the article, by Gary Taubes, here.

Watch Lustig's lecture here (it's actually pretty entertaining once you get past the lame intro.)

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