Medical Is sugar a dangerous drug? This guy thinks so.

Last year, Dr. Robert Lustig and colleagues from UCSF published an essay in Nature arguing that sugar should be regulated like ethanol:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7383/full/482027a.html

 

Ah, NUTS! Now you're telling me that my addiction to Classic Coke is not only going to rot my teeth, it's going to mess with my liver? I don't want to know this

 

Eating more and doing less physical activity wouldn't have any bearing would it?

People used to do a lot of stuff outdoors. You cruise thru many neighborhoods on absolutely gorgeous days and find not a soul in sight. Everyone is inside, talking on their phones (you don't have to physically go next door, or even to the next room, to talk to someone), playing a game on the computer (same comment as about the phone), watching tube, crashed, whatever. Work, except for manual labor, is the same. You don't need to leave your office or cubicle even to deliver a memo. You can email it to the next cubicle as easy as sending it around the world.

Honestly, with all these scientist types, you think on the first day of PhD. school they have all of their common sense removed.

 

Whatever you do, do not get sugar in your DNA.

 

In my case, I think it's probably too late. I've been guzzling Classic Coke for 50+ years and I'm pretty well saturated with caffeine and sugar.

 

Bit of hyperbole, don't you think. People have been eating sugar from ages. The fructose and sucrose added to processed food is a recent invention(50 or 100 yrs). Why even alcohol is distilled from sugars.

 

ribose is a sugar - it was a joke. I liked it anyway....

 

I think the researchers are trying to control for one variable, namely sugar intake, when the mechanism for adult onset diabetes is not too clear. Is it just the frequency and amount of sugar intake? Is it the type of sugar intake? Is it a combination of the intake of different types of sugars?

The diet of the average person now is much more complex, if not more varied, than it was a century ago. There are more additives, preservatives, taste, texture, and color enhancers used in the food supply now. What sorts of interactions do these materials have with themselves, let alone body chemistry? Who knows?

 

Excessive sugar intake is bad especially when the insulin-magnesium metabolism team is dysfunctional. Not bad if that doctor interferes with survival of the fittest or natural selection to spare fellow humans.

For that matter, I would appreciate if they will convert sugar into ethanol via fermentation before they give it to me :D

 

This is a really good paper on metabolic flux and cell growth:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21982705

Wouldn't doubt it at all that 50 years from now we will have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that sugar intake is in fact more harmful to your health than fat.

The hexosamine biosynthetic pathway (HBP) behaves as a sort of biosensor that responds to intracellular metabolite concentrations. When flux starts going out of whack you get problems:

http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/290/1/E1

(in case you didn't know, 2-5% of glycolysis is diverted down the HBP).

 

Well isn't life about dying in the end, or you prefer to live forever doing the same thing over and over and over... again.

My simple argument, let people have control over their life, if they want to smoke cannabis then let them, if they want to drink apple cider let them.

Eventually everyone will die someway or another.