Sugar is Toxic

The title of this blog says essentially what Dr. Robert Lustig (a pediatric endocrinologist at University of California at San Francisco who specializes in childhood obesity) conveys in Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, (Hudson Street Press: 2013). To anyone in the least familiar with foods and nutrition, that sugar is a poison should come as no surprise, but the real value of Lustig’s book lies in the biochemical science he cites. Fat Chance contains all the latest scientific information you need (and, one would think, our regulating agencies, FDA and USDA would need as well) to convince you that America’s food industry and the resultant food consumption habits in this most “advanced” of countries are idiotic, sick, and sickening to an entire population and now, because of globalization, the world.

            To begin with, Lustig cites the statistics on obesity in America, and specifically, how the last 30 years have been a disaster in this regard. In 2001, for example, Newsweek reported that 6 million American children were seriously overweight. Those numbers tripled in a decade, and America now boasts more than 20 million obese children, including even an epidemic of obese 6-month olds! Over 40% of American deaths now list diabetes as the cause, up from only 13% two decades ago. And the epidemic has become a worldwide pandemic: the World Health Organization (WHO) says the percent of obese humans globally has “doubled in the past 28 years,” and the UN General Assembly in 2011 asserted that “non-communicative diseases (diabetes, cancer, and heart disease) are now a greater threat to world health than infectious diseases” (such as malaria, etc.). One would think these statistics would be enough to impel government agencies to rush to control the causes of obesity and its traveling companion, metabolic syndrome (a cluster of five diseases: obesity, diabetes, lipid problems, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease). But one would be wrong. Since the mega-corporations that produce foods worldwide depend on persuading consumers to eat their junk (processed foods that cause obesity), their power has crippled national and international organizations and prevented them from warning the public of the slow death lurking in the consumption of these products. Just one example: in 2002, the WHO and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) jointly produced a report (TRS 916) titled “Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases.” It called for “limiting added sugar to less than 10% of total calories in the diet.” The food industry went ballistic, pushed its lobbying into overdrive, and eventually got U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, to threaten “to withhold the $406 million annual United States contribution to WHO” unless TRS 916 was repealed. Not only was TRS 916 scuttled, but so was, ever since, even a hint of a Daily Recommended Intake for sugar. Instead, the official line of all politicians and food industry groups is that obesity is a question of personal responsibility: if you eat too much, you get fat. Not our problem. Period.  

            What Robert Lustig shows us is that this is simply a ploy to take the spotlight off the real threat: the ubiquity of processed foods, laced with sugar to cover up the horrors done to the whitened calories that have come to replace REAL FOOD. The real key to “the obesity pandemic,” in other words, is  “our altered biochemistry,” which is due to loading us up with sugar and salt and additives that literally change how our bodies respond to hunger. One key is insulin. “We’re all hyperinsulimic,” says Lustig, with most humans today releasing double the insulin that we did a mere 30 years ago. And what does insulin do? It’s the energy storage hormone: eating a carbohydrate causes blood glucose to rise, and this signals the pancreas to release insulin to deal with this rise in glucose;

Insulin then tops off the liver’s energy reserve by making liver starch (called glycogen), and shunts any amino acids from the blood into muscle cells. Excess fatty acids, or blood lipids, are cleared into fat cells for storage for a “rainy day,” where they get turned into greasy triglycerides (such as the fat surrounding your steak). p. 35.

In brief, insulin makes fat, the more insulin the more fat. Another hormone, only discovered in 1994, comes into play as well. It’s called leptin and its job is to “signal the hypothalamus that you’ve got enough energy stored up in your fat,” i.e. that you’re full. But sometimes the VMH (ventromedial hypothalamus in the brain) can’t see or is resistant to the leptin signal. The brain then interprets this as “starvation” and directs the body to both increase energy stores (eat more), and conserve energy by reducing activity. Simultaneously, more insulin and more leptin is called for as well. Though few people are leptin deficient (from a mutation), billions, according to Lustig, exhibit leptin resistance. They have plenty of leptin, but “their hypothalami can’t see their leptin, so their brains think they’re starving.” The command is then to eat more (gluttony) and conserve energy (sloth). This is the key to the obesity epidemic, says Lustig. And studies suggest that it is the increased insulin production (hyperinsulemia), acting in the brain, that is blocking normal leptin signaling.

            In sum, insulin (which most humans now produce twice as much of) produces a double whammy: in the body it causes increased energy storage in fat cells; in the brain it causes leptin resistance and the feeling of starvation. It thus drives gluttony and sloth, weight gain, and obesity worldwide. Most important, none of this is under the individual’s control. That is to say, since the biochemical process is primary and the behaviors result from the biochemistry, then the clear conclusion is: “Obesity is a biochemical alteration in the brain promoting leptin resistance with resultant weight gain.” This means that obesity is not a question of personal responsibility as corporations and the government agencies under their control would have us believe. It is a question of what has happened to human biochemistry as a result of the environmental changes caused by the types of foods we have all been inundated with in the last half century. And the correlation with “fast foods” and “processed foods” is almost perfect. For example, Lustig points out that in the U.S. in the 1950s, only 4% of the foods consumed outside the home came from fast foods (I can testify to this personally; all foods I ate growing up were cooked from scratch). In 1997, the percentage was 34%. Put another way, every day “30% of U.S. adults eat at a fast food outlet,” with McDonald’s feeding 46 million of them every day. The highly refined carbohydrates (including sugar) from such fast and/or highly processed (white bread, white rice, sodas, soy products, instant meals) foods not only cause obesity, but will also eventually make the liver sick by building up fat in the liver and other organs. This is the kind of fat, called visceral fat, that kills you.

            Sugar is a chief culprit in all of this, and much of the damage has been done in the last 30 or 40 years. That’s because in the 1970s, Ancel Keys convinced American agencies like USDA and FDA that dietary fat from red meat was responsible for our health problems, mainly heart disease. In response, food manufacturers took the fat out of most foods, but without the fat, the food tasted like cardboard. To disguise this disastrous taste, processed food manufacturers upped the carbohydrate content, especially sugar. The result is our current sugar and carbohydrate glut: compared to 100 years ago, American consumption of sugar has increased 5-fold, and doubled in the last 30 years. Of that sugar consumption, 33% comes from beverages like Coke and even orange juice (containing 1.8 grams of fructose per ounce compared to only 1.7 grams for soda). Lustig sums it up thus: “The inescapable reality is that 20-25% of all the calories we consume, a total of 22 tsp/day, comes from some variation of sugar. Some adolescents consume 40% of calories as sugar.” And how much of our food contains sugar? Nearly all of it. Barry Popkin of No. Carolina University surveyed 600,000 food items for sale in the United States, and found that “80% are laced with added sugar” (234). Moreover, fully 90% of food sold in the U.S. comes from 10 food conglomerates including Coca Cola, Con Agra, Dole, General Mills, Pepsico, Kraft and Nestle—purveyors all of fast or ‘convenience’ food. And what is the definition of fast food? “It’s fiberless food,” because fiber can’t be frozen. Freezing turns fiber to mush, so it can’t be stored forever, shipped globally, and cooked quickly. So food processors remove the fiber— precisely that which is the key to a healthy gut, and thereby to a healthy human. Foods with fiber—like whole grains, or fruits and vegetables in their whole form—not only slow digestion and increase absorption of the vital nutrients in food, but also slow “the rate of flux from the intestine crossing into the bloodstream” and into the liver. The liver then gets the time to fully metabolize what’s coming into it. But when the liver is hit quickly with heavy loads of fiberless starch or sugar, the glucose level peaks higher and faster, and that translates to a higher insulin peak demand. And more insulin means more fat, more obesity, and more of the diseases associated with it.

            There is more in this vital book, complete with charts and tables that are revelatory. The point, though, is what my title suggests: sugar is slowly killing us. And its increased use is the product of the policies of government agencies that have abdicated their historic role of protecting the consumer, and shifted to the role of protecting the profits of major corporations. Sugar, for example, got the highly-sought-after GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status from the FDA in 1958, based on no science whatever. The same status was bestowed on High Fructose Corn Syrup in 1983. This means, quite simply, that there is no limit on its use in any food. An FDA report commissioned in 1986 put the dogma in writing:

“fructose is a valuable, traditional source of food energy, and there is no basis for recommending increases or decreases in its use in the general food supply or in special dietary use products” (242).

End of story. The fact that when this report was written, average U.S. sugar consumption was 40 pounds per person per year, and now is 130 pounds/person/year, seems to make no difference. The FDA has reaffirmed its 1986 stance twice, most recently in 2004. The same holds true in Europe. Then in 2000, in response to lawsuits brought against McDonald’s for causing obesity and heart disease (which was true), our lobby-subservient Congress came up with the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act (aka the “Cheeseburger Bill”). Following the old pattern, Congress was saying—and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin said specifically—don’t blame fast foods or food companies. Blame yourself:

This bill says ‘Don’t run off and file a lawsuit if you are fat.’ It says, ‘Look in the mirror because you’re the one to blame…If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of super-sized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and could result in weight gain, it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses’” (246).

That the bill only passed the House and is not yet law doesn’t change the real message: as a consumer, you’re on your own. The fact that we (the food industry) spend billions to persuade you to eat crap, and more billions making that crap deadly to your health, and more billions lobbying your elected representatives to abdicate their responsibility to protect your health, has no bearing on the case.

            If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is: tobacco companies for years used exactly the same strategy to protect themselves from any responsibility for the illness and death of smokers. We can only hope that in time, as in the tobacco case, enough people will wake up to the dangers in their fake food to force the people’s representatives to act in their behalf. Until then, we can only watch as Americans get sicker, and the skyrocketing health bills for this pandemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome continue to ravage the world—mainly, unfortunately, in poorer communities where the choices are so reduced that people would rather drink sugar-loaded beverages than the water that in many places cannot be trusted. It’s a deadly trap whose pernicious effects differ from most of ours only in degree.

Lawrence DiStasi

One System Under God

Reading two important books lately has reinforced in me the realization that our troubles in these times do not stem from isolated problems like Republican obstructionism or the Tea Party or a few Wall Street banksters or who happens to occupy the White House, but from the integration of an entire system, an entire culture based in insatiable greed, amorality (often immorality) and a military-style, hyper-competitive notion of what life is about. Hence, in the United States, what we find in this late stage of capitalism is the most inequitable society ever built, where the top .01% controls all the wealth, and through that wealth, all the politicians and the public policy that results. These porcine deities also control the health of the planet and the health of billions of people around the world through their determination of where the U.S. goes to war, where wealth is allocated to produce whatever needs producing (with often-disastrous conseqences for the ecosystem), and thereby who succeeds in living and dying. The only time that concern for the well-being of ordinary individuals is allowed to intrude is in slick commercials and public relations campaigns designed to reassure the masses and pacify them with fake lullabies of freedom. Underneath, of course, run the real attitudes: ruthlessness in controlling the hordes who might prove dangerous, and massive contempt for their gullibility.

            I was reminded of this, as I said, by reading two unrelated books that turn out to be related: Kill Anything that Moves, by Nick Turse, and Salt, Sugar, Fat, by Michael Moss. What struck me was how the underlying ideology that animated the Pentagon during the Vietnam War closely resembled the ideology motivating the major food companies that have changed not only the way Americans eat, but their very ideas of what food should taste like. A little thought makes clear that the same ideology and attitudes also pervade the way corporations deliver health care, the way political parties and politicians operate, the way sports teams compete, in short, the way the whole mainstream culture behaves and through that behavior reveals its beliefs. Whether using sports metaphors or war metaphors, the basic idea is the same: in order to beat the hell out of your opponent, anything goes (poor Cole Porter had a song and musical with this title, but what he referred to was child’s play compared to what animates the culture today).

            Begin with Turse, because what he reports is less surprising—since he’s reporting about war—though no less disgusting. Using a term coined by sociologist James Gibson, Turse attributes much of the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians in Vietnam to “technowar”—a philosophy “combining American technical and economic prowess with sophisticated managerial capacities to create a war machine functioning as smoothly and predictably as an assembly line.” This embodied a “rational” approach to war, an approach which identified the problem in Vietnam as guerilla fighters who could strike quickly and then vanish back into the jungle villages where they lived. This made it very difficult for even high-tech troops to distinguish them from ordinary villagers who typically wore the same ‘black pajama’ uniforms. So what the American military concluded was twofold: first, that the villagers would have to be separated from the guerilla enemy; and second, that a “crossover point” had to be reached when American soldiers would be killing more enemy soldiers than the Vietnamese could replace.  Rational. Statistical. Just kill so many VC that the enemy would run out of replacements. And just destroy so many villages and so much of the jungle cover and so much of the food resources that the people left after the destruction would have to re-assemble in controllable refugee camps. For the one, it was “kill anything that moves,” which could be gauged by the “body count” (this, in turn, meant that commanders would have the incentive to count every dead body—VC or civilian, all were the same—as a dead enemy). For another, it meant that the entire countryside could be ‘carpet bombed’ by B-52s, by napalm-spewing aircraft, by artillery, by helicopters, all doing their best to kill anything that moved, or didn’t move. Oh, and for good measure, by destroying the guerillas’ cover by spraying vast areas of jungle with the pesticide known as Agent Orange to create a nice, foliage-free desert.

            As to the morality of all this, that could be taken care of by propaganda (the ‘domino theory’ which held that if one East Asian country like Vietnam were to ‘fall’ to the evil communists, then all others would) and by perversions of logic such as: “we had to destroy the village to save it,” and, more generally, “we had to save the country by destroying it.”

            The odd thing, the revealing thing, is how the metaphors applied to war (the war machine, technowar, assembly line efficiency) came from business in the same way that war metaphors showed up to animate corporate strategies. The most striking example of this appears in Michael Moss’s book, Salt, Sugar, Fat. In an interview with reformed Coca Cola executive Jeffrey Dunn, Moss let Dunn describe his early years overseeing 800 Coke salesmen, and how his aggressive attitude earned him a nickname:

            “Sales people, by definition, like to keep score. You generally don’t make it in sales unless you are good with people and you like to keep score. It’s just the nature of the beast…So I gave this speech about winning and I said, ‘It’s like we’re at war. And the way you keep score is how many body bags get carried off the field. The key is to have more of their body bags carried off the field than our body bags. I want you all to go out and ramp up our scorecard. I want to see a lot of body bags.”

Then Dunn explained how he got his nickname: “The body bags were the Pepsi sales people who were going to get fired as a result of not getting our accounts. So my nickname for the next ten years was Body Bag.” (Moss, 103)

Here was the Vietnam War writ small, though not so small, in the parallel war corporate America sees itself having with competitors (in this case, Coke vs. Pepsi). It couldn’t have been scripted better by Hollywood: business is war, and like the Vietnam War, everything is focused on the kills, the body count, the body bags of the enemy that are produced. If, as many people contend, most American wars are fought on behalf of American business (think only of the wars in Central America fought for United Fruit Co. or the wars in the Middle East fought on behalf of big oil companies), then business is war indeed. And sadly, the war goes on not just between competing corporations killing each other for market share, but between these same corporations and the American public with whom they are engaging in every tactic and subterfuge to disguise the lethal reality of what they are purveying in order to make it seem harmless, benign, or beneficial. That is, the major food corporations (one of the biggest was owned until very recently by Philip Morris, that war-making purveyor of cancer in the form of those ‘manly’ Marlboro cigarettes) do everything they can to induce consumers (especially children) to buy more of the products they lace with sugar, and everything they can to disguise and gloss over the damage that sugar does. They war on children through TV commercials aimed directly at them. They war on children by inducing harried working mothers to buy “Lunchables,”—pre-packaged , fat-and-sugar-loaded lunches that poor moms don’t have to prepare themselves, and that their children find “fun.” And this food war, like the real one, depends on the most ‘advanced’ technologies to ‘engineer’ the taste that their hired guns—chemists and psychologists and brain scientists—have assured them is irresistible to humans, especially those trained from childhood to get maximum pleasure from sugary, salty, fatty foods.

Again, one of the most revealing segments in Moss’s book is an interview with a ‘food engineer’ named Howard Moskowitz, who brags about his ability to precisely engineer foods to reach the “bliss point,” as he did with the flavor for the excruciatingly sweet soda, Dr. Pepper. Here is how Moskowitz put it:

“I mix and match ingredients by this experimental design,” he told me. “The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create, so I can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach.” (Moss, 30)

Of course, Moskowitz knows that the foods he designs and from which he has made a fortune, play a key role in the obesity/diabetes crisis that afflicts the nation and the world. But this seems not to bother him. When asked if he had any qualms about his research targeting the bliss point at which children would crave sugar most, he said flatly:

There is no moral issue for me. I did the best science I could…Would I do it again? Yes, I would do it again. Did I do the right thing? If you were in my position, what would you have done? (Moss, 30)

How very like the generals in Vietnam. What else could we have done? We applied the best science, the best management techniques, the most advanced weaponry we had to solve the problem. That it killed more than 2 million civilians and destroyed an entire country is simply what happens in the rational enterprise we call war. That the sugar, fat and salt poured into processed foods, that the inducements to drink the valueless insipid liquid called “soda” in staggering amounts, that the training of entire generations of young Americans in (and now East Indians, Mexicans, Chinese and every other emerging market on the planet) what food should taste like, to the point where, according to researcher Karen Teff, “there is absolutely no tolerance now for foods that are not sweet”—this is also justified by having applied the best science available. As to the cost in human lives and suffering, the cost in a planetary crisis in obesity, in dwindling natural resources, in a planet gasping to rid itself of the chemicals and plastics needed to produce and induce such lethal consumption—well, that is simply the price we pay to keep stockholders and Wall Street and the banksters happily rolling in their profits.  

It is, in short, the cost of war. The cost of competition. The cost of being number one. And if it requires the absolute perversion of democracy, of language, of decency, of morality, of humanity itself—which it does—then so be it.

Who, in such a system, could do any different?

Lawrence DiStasi