I recently read this astonishing - and tragic - fact: Due to complications of obesity, the generation now being born will be the first generation that won't outlive its parents.
I am thus moved to repeat the publication of a video I blogged about once before by one Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.
The first time I ran across it, I wondered if I had the stamina to sit through an hour-plus lecture. However, as the lecture progressed, all other thoughts flew as Dr. Lustig brought the complex science of nutrition into sharp focus, pointing out the exact mechanisms in the body by which the processed American diet is killing us.
In particular, Dr. Lustig points an accusatory finger at fructose, and explains its domino effect on our health in simple, understandable, but undeniably frightening terms. Fructose is a particular type of sugar, derived generally from fruit. Our bodies deal with fructose differently - and in a way that creates more harm - than glucose, another common sugar. Unfortunately, because fructose is "from fruit," people tend to assume it's healthy and "natural." Not so.
I found the following brief summary by Dr. Mercola of part of Dr. Lustig's lecture, on the impact of fructose just on weight gain:
"Fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn free fatty acids (FFAs) into triglycerides that get stored as fat. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this. When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose, however, results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat!
The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.
Glucose suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain's communication with leptin, resulting in overeating." (summary by Dr. Mercola, here.)
The first time I watched the video, I passed it along to my friend Ray Jagoda, and urged him to put in the time in front of the tube. I heard back within a few days. Ray said he and his au pair spent an hour going through all the foods in their fridge and cupboards, and were astonished at how many of these contained fructose.
All I can say is, give up an hour and a few minutes to watch Dr. Lustig's lecture. This may be the lecture that prolongs your life.
Isn't this the cutest little face? I can hear my friend Stacey Mehl Hoffman say, "Give me a bite of that face!"
Obesity is an epidemic around the world, even, apparently among children as young as 6 months old, and of course, continuing through adulthood. I'm probably going to hear from the corn and cola lobbies, but I just finished watching a talk given by Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, in the Division of Endocrinology Director of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Program at University of California, San Francisco, www.chc.ucsf.edu/coast/faculty_lustig.htm, It turns out that the chubbers epidemic is not mainly about lack of exercise or fat intake. It's about carbohydrates. Specifically, fructose may be the true villain. And we've put it into so many of our foods and beverages, because it's cheaper and sweeter than regular sugar.
The funny thing is, I remember hearing people say, "fructose is not as bad as sugar because it's fruit sugar." If it's from fruit, it must be good for us. And there's an entire advertising campaign out there right now sponsored by the corn refiners association designed to make you think anything you've heard about fructose being bad for you is, well, just plain ignorant. You can see the ads in the video clip at the bottom of this post. But guess what? Fruit sugars naturally present in the fruit we eat do not have the same effect on us as eating fructose. Fructose is processed differently by your body. Here is a quote I admit that I lifted from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose, (students, do not cite Wikipedia in your papers without chasing down the original citation and verifying it; even though I did this in my blog, I will grade you down for this!):
"The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Meira Field, Ph.D., a research chemist at United States Department of Agriculture, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, allfructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic."[54] ...
"When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose instead of glucose results in lower circulating insulin and leptin levels, and higher of ghrelin levels after the meal.[55] Since leptin and insulin decrease appetite and ghrelin increases appetite, some researchers suspect that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.[56]
Excessive fructose consumption is also believed to contribute to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.[57]"
And the whole thing is made more complicated by the food industry, because it routinely combines fructose with other chemicals - salt and caffeine, for example - that leads both to weight gain through overconsumption of calories, but also something more nefarious -changes in our bodies' ability to process the calories we take in.
Dr. Lustig does a good job of making a pretty complicated scientific topic readily accessible. WARNING: This video is an hour and a half long. But put aside the time, or watch it while you're eating lunch, folding laundry or whatever. PLEASE make the time to watch this video.
While you're at it, go ahead and watch this one, created by Advertising Age, deconstructing the ads by the corn syrup producers, and showing you the vast range of processed foods containing fructose.
54. Forristal, Linda (Fall 2001). "The Murky World of High-Fructose Corn Syrup". Weston A. Price Foundation. http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/hfcs.html.
55. Teff, KL; Elliott SS, Tschöp M, Kieffer TJ, Rader D, Heiman M, Townsend RR, Keim NL, D'Alessio D, Havel PJ (June 2004). "Dietary fructose reduces circulating insulin and leptin, attenuates postprandial suppression of ghrelin, and increases triglycerides in women". J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 89 (6): 2963–72. doi:10.1210/jc.2003-031855. PMID 15181085.
56. Swan, Norman; Lustig, Robert H. "ABC Radio National, The Health Report, The Obesity Epidemic". http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-15.
57. Ouyang X, Cirillo P, Sautin Y, et al. (June 2008). "Fructose consumption as a risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease". J. Hepatol. 48 (6): 993–9. doi:10.1016/j.jhep.2008.02.011. PMID 18395287.
