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EventsToxic sugar: fantastic video on the obesity epidemic!
in Calorie counting, Dr. Robert Lustig, Failed low-fat diets, Gary Taubes, Sugar/fructose, The obesity epidemic Is sugar toxic and the cause of the obesity epidemic? Here’s a great new video called Toxic Sugar. It’s a recent segment from the major Australian science program Catalyst, on ABC.
It’s arguably the best 18-minute introduction ever made on the true causes of the obesity epidemic. The program features the #1 enemy of the sugar industry: professor Robert Lustig. Also appearing: science writer Gary Taubes and obesity expert professor Michael Crowley.
See it and then tell your friends. This needs to be seen by a lot of people.
Here’s a few comments:
Low fat, high sugar
Misguided low-fat advice is blamed for the increase in sugar intake. For example: low-fat mayo has six time more sugar than normal mayo. And let’s not even talk about sweetened low-fat yoghurt. “You might as well eat candy” says professor Crowley. The sugar is hiding everywhere today. Says Lustig:
…virtually every food item in the store that has a food label, it has some form of sugar!
By the way: did you have a glass of fruit juice this morning? If you did, you are aging seven times faster! Source: once more the quotable dr Lustig (I’ve no idea where he got that exact number).
Carbs -> insulin -> fat
What’s the problem with carbs? Too much bad carbs (like soda) easily leads to the secretion of too much of the hormone insulin, making your body store more fat.
Trying to control your weight – by just eating less and exercising more – in that situation will be a life-long uphill struggle. Eventually almost everybody loses.
The “set point” misconception
I have one objection towards the end of the show. Crowley claims that the body has a weight set point. Lose weight and the body will try to return to the original weight. This is a common misconception.
The truth is that the body tends to return to your original weight IF AND ONLY IF you return to your original lifestyle! There is no quick-fix that works forever.
To lose weight long-term you need a long-term lifestyle change. Avoiding excess sugar is a great first step.
Blaming the food industry
The program ends by laying the responsibility for the obesity crisis on the shoulders of the food industry.
While that may be partially true we can never expect them to solve this problem. It’s never going to happen. Read the excellent book “Salt, Sugar, Fat” and you’ll appreciate why: they simply can’t stop producing profitable junk food by themselves. If they try another company will quickly steal their market share.
The entire industry has to be forced to change.
Where to start
Here’s what you can do: See the video above and then spread it to your friends, so that they too understand. That’s a great start.
More
Why Calorie Counters are Confused
Yes, a Low-Carb Diet Greatly Lowers Your Insulin
What Happens If You Eat 5,800 Calories Daily on an LCHF Diet?
The Official Disease of the 2012 London Olympics!
Why Calorie Counting is an Eating Disorder
73 comments
For my own son as a teenager we had the discussion that the occasional soda as a treat was OK, but if he was thirsty, first he would drink water.
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=63857
Interestingly, the rebuttal (anonymous but possiby from the author) does not answer my objections but rather is an ad hominem attack including technical double talk ("confuses an added-variable plot with unadjusted correlations....")
I provided a link to the figure from the paper:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37202414/Fructose_Basu_RG_plot-2.png
The data were unaltered butI color coded it to show that there is essentially no correlation at all. You don't need to be a statistician. If you look at the figure, you can see that it is just as likely that when sugar goes up, diabetes goes down, or when sugar goes down, diabetes goes up, as it is for the direct correlation.
If you made a similar plot of tobacco vs. lung disease, Murray's mother would fall in the green zone but she would not have much company.
Murray, your daughter will explain it to your.
I have struggled for over 20+ years with weight and am now confident I have found what works for me. I no longer am hungry, I eat only when I feel the need, and food is no longer the center of my existence.
Yes I eat to live but I NO longer live to eat !
I have tried doing atkins (successfully I might add) loosing 50+ pounds and kept it off for over 5 years. But it was not as easy as it seems. I still had cravings and they were hard to overcome. Then life happened and unknowingly to me I gained slowly over the course of years. That's a bit of a fib I guess, I did notice but the addict (sugar) in me kept creeping in.
Well I found myself in the same place I was now for the Third time in my life. the first time I lost over 50lbs I did it with a low fat starvation diet in high school...witch landed me on a one way ticket almost to the doctors. Thankfully my body wouldn't allow it to get to that point and I finally caved and ate. We all know where that led.
Second was with Atkins and I have to give the man credit he was on the right track but it just didn't go as smoothly as I felt that it should. See I do believe that we are all just mammals, our body's are designed to process things in OUR environment and common sense states that if we are not adapt to something the chances of adverse effects are great,be it positive or negative only time will tell. I'm sure that time has told its tale just look around you.
Now here I sit writing this comment and I cant express enough how strongly I feel about this. I have no more hunger pains, I do not crave sugar and as a matter of fact it is repulsive. I cant describe it unless you are an ex smoker (3 years for me now ! another topic) If you ever smoked then quit than you will understand that even a hint of smoke will almost bring you to get sick. It makes you feel sorry for subjecting your close non smoking friends to it.
I am not at my goal weight yet witch I might add that this is the weight I was when I was in the Army, as a Tanker. Yup I got to blow stuff up everyday, man I miss it. I worked out and trained everyday of my life back then and I am confident I will be back in my uniform by next summer. I have not begun to work out, I also didn't workout till the end of my Atkins diet run. It seems that working out is not the answer to weight loss.
I personally feel that when you eat as your body, ( think about that for a second ) was/is intended that naturally things become balanced. Things start to click and fire on all cylinders. What happens to your car or truck if you mistreat It ? I may not have a plaque on my wall to justify my statements but I have something stronger life experience long term self experimentation and with personal results that are amazing.
I just hope that we can get everyone else to wake up and see that sometimes people are wrong, and they didn't know the consequences of there actions when they made them, and not only that with the knowledge they had at the time they may have just been making the decision that they felt to be right for everyone. Now on the other hand If these people did know what they were doing would that be just cause for premeditated murder ?
Maybe I'm stretching or maybe I'm flat out wrong, but I feel that the best years of my life were lost not due to anything other than miss information from our media and government offices.
Well Thank You Again if you have questions contact me
"Dr. Lustig is not for any one diet in particular."
Yes. That's what we're saying. He's all over the place.
Nobody could possibly get out of his book that
LCHF is the way to go, or that it's even good.
Nobody could possibly get anything useful out
of his book at all.
And pointing out a quote OF HIS OWN is in no
way attacking him.
What we must not forget is the forum that the Lustigs and Taubes of the world are communicating in. They get just a few minutes on TV (or write books) to convince Joe Public to seriously start thinking about and acting on their nutrition. And to start convincing their governments to diminish the influence that large food and drug companies have over them. Coming up with a few well chosen lines that do that and also convince their peers of the science world would be impossible. Lets face it even our pollies communicate their message with 3 word slogans that they repeat over and over, week after week, year after year. I am sure Lustig also meets with other professionals for hours on end and get into whats going on at a cellular and molecular level, but that is not the forum we see them in. Most often the converts to LCHF online, on dvds, in books etc have come to it one step at a time. eg hear Prof Lustig, get sugar out of their diet and in their journey learn all the other stuff and adopt those things into their lifestyle.
My unscientific explanation to people: For maybe hundreds of thousands of years we roamed around the wilderness looking for food. Think about wandering through the forest - you will find very little sugar (carbs of any description really) and polyunsaturated fat to eat and mostly your nutrition will be animal protein and fat. Don't forget you may be living in a group of 50 or more and you have to think about the months and years ahead. You certainly will not find bags of sugar and bottles of vegetable oil lying around. Our biochemistry must be perplexed at these refined foods when its trying to work out what the heck they are and what they should do with such a huge amount of them.
Back to my enlightenment. I've been quite active all my life. I'm 57 soon. Played footy and run marathons. So knowing how much hard exercise you need to do to burn not many calories it couldn't be exercise. When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s nobody was out running or walking the streets for exercise, there were no gyms or boot camps or personal trainers. The only people who exercised hard were the footy players and they never lost heaps of weight over their 8 months of training. Some jobs have changed but most are as sedentary as they always were. The other quandary was the Atkins Diet - In the short and medium term - it worked. That went against every message we had received for 20 or 30 years.
Unless you have experienced it you cannot understand breaking the addiction to sugars, or that the cravings really do disappear, what real hunger is and knowing you have eaten enough, I didn't beleive it till it happened. I don't think I had really experienced either for nearly 40 years. And how much better real food tastes.
"Nobody could possibly get out of his book that
LCHF is the way to go"
Really???? Is that why he put one of his patients on such a diet, bill? It's in the book - the book that you say you've read, but Clearly you have NOT read - or read very thoroughly.
Of course, if Dr. Lustig were completely against a lchf diet, he would also Not agree to appear on Jimmy Moore's podcast at least two times, and likely three times. Of course, he's Also done that.
Like I said, Dr. Lustig is not against any diet, really, except an unhealthy one, full of simple carbs & sugars & devoid of fiber. A lchf diet is not such a diet.
bill, you just want to attack Dr. Lustig, or, to take a more generous view of your views, you just have no idea what the book "Fat Chance" actually contains.
...he says he can't lose 40 pounds...
I have no idea what I'm talking about...
Okay...
Jimmy Moore had Ornish on and McDougall
(the starch solution) on, and that proves what?
Please cite chapter and verse in his
book where he says he placed someone
on an LCHF diet.
...waiting...
Good luck, and again, congratulations!
However, each chapter of "Fat Chance" has a small, descriptive paragraph where Dr. Lustig writes of his various patients & it is in one of those small chapters where Dr. Lustig writes that one of his patients was put on a low carb diet.
He also writes that he's Not For or AGAINST any diet in particular, as they all can work or Not work, depending. If that is not evidence enough for people like bill to be called out for stating what they don't know about the book, all I can do is just let it go, because if people want to attack, rather than understand, that is just more of the internet mindlessness that too many engage in.
The info is all in "Fat Chance" & if you missed it, that is your own fault, not mine. I know what I read. And I also know what Dr. Lustig has said to Jimmy Moore: he's not a Proponent of the low carb diet, to the Exclusion of all other diets. He thinks that each person has to be assessed for what diet they need. In his book, he Clearly States the pros & cons of all the various diets, Including low carb & which type of person, with which health issues will most benefit from each diet.
So do Your homework, bill, before you say Dr. Lustig is against low carb. You completely over simplified to the point of lying about the man & his views, especially as he put a patient on the lchf diet, so you Clearly have No Clue about this man. You need to go back to the book & re-read the whole thing if you really give a damn about what Dr. Lustig is talking about.
I Strongly suspect you do NOT.
"as if that would convince you"
Well, that would convince me that he put someone
on an LCHF diet, which he didn't.
You are confabulating a low carb diet with an LCHF
diet.
He is in no way in support of an LCHF diet.
Get over it.
Are you really saying that he'd be better off
on a "REAL whole grain" bagel?
You misunderstand the whole point of
this website.
FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTAND the carbohydrate connection to weight gain. Few people think carbohydrates are "sugar". Potatoes, Wheat, Rice these are considered "natural". In fact they are probably the main culprits of American Weight Gain. It's not sweet foods it's refined carbohydrates, yet the video barely mentions it.
A slice of bread is not sweet!
Mashed potatoes are not sweet!
French Fries are not sweet!
Pizza is not sweet!
White Rice is not sweet!
And yet they are all high-glycemic, fat producing, addictive substances. I think they could have done better at addressing a major culprit - non sweet refined carbohydrates.
My father was overweight with type 2 diabetes, but after reading pharma research papers into MSG we learned that in even tiny doses it causes a hyper-pancreatic response that dumps insulin into the system. So we went through his cupboards, 90% of the food had MSG in one form or another, sometimes 3-4 times under different chemical process names, we threw it all out. 2 months later he had lost 40 lbs, and his diabetes was basically gone. His blood sugar levels stabilized, he got more energy, and the weight has stayed off, he is 78 yrs old. We shared this information with our family members, pointed out that light products had 4-5 times more MSG and it was causing a vicious circle for those trying to diet. 1 year later my aunt, and three cousins lost a whopping 273 lbs collectively. So yes, sugars are bad, but they are not the only thing in this equation, and if I could figure this out, what is the scientific communities excuse?
In 2003 after reading Dr. Richard Bernstein's book, "Diabetes Solution" I decided to find out more about low carb. I read and continue to read everything I can find in books, online and at lectures.
I created a program for my husband that he and I could live with. In 2003 my husband went on our program. He came off of insulin within 3 months and has never looked back. He was losing weight so fast, at one point, he asked me if I thought he was ill! I told him that I didn't think so, that I thought he was getting better.
Within 9 months he lost 80 pounds and a few years later he lost 20 more for a total weight loss of 100 pounds. He has kept it off.
Within one year of starting a low carb lifestyle (it's NOT a diet), his severe and painful neuropathy was gone! He walked in 2 5K races and finished.
Low carb lifestyle has enabled my husband to come off of insulin, lose 100 pounds, eliminate painful neuropathy in his feet, eliminate diuretics, eliminate pain medications, eliminate statins. The best part of all is that he is full of energy and vitality at 75 years of age! He was older when he was 62!
We teach classes on How We Beat Diabetes to share with others what we did, what we read and how we continue to thrive on a low carb lifestyle. The results for people who attend our classes is nothing short of a miracle...but it's not a miracle it's just knowing what to do and then doing it.
Dr. Phil McGraw has a quote that I believe applies to the people who want to insist that they are right and that low carb is wrong. He tells his guests that they are "right-fighters" and asks them "Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?"
To the naysayers I would suggest this. Try the low carb lifestyle for 2 weeks. See what happens. Before you ever try it however, you must first learn about what low carb really is all about. I would suggest a great book, "Living the Low Carb Life" by Dr. Jonny Bowden. Easy to read and very informative.
Here are a few more: Gary Taubes book, "Why We Get Fat", Dr. Rob Lustig, "Fat Chance", Drs. Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra, "The Great Cholesterol Myth, Dr. Mark Hyman, "Blood Sugar Solution", Dr. David Perlmutter, "Grain Brain" or go youtube.com and put in any of these authors and hear what they have to say about how to count carbs and why.
Then live low carb for 2 weeks. You don't have to tell anyone so in case we are right and you are wrong, you don't need to even fess up. You can just tell yourself, "hey I feel so much better it's amazing."
If you are doing low carb the right way, you will NEVER EVER be hungry during the day. NEVER. Your energy levels will go through the roof (I felt like I was on amphetamine's - I had a brief experience in the 60s when my OB put me on them when I was pregnant - oh what we didn't know then), you will lose weight if you are overweight and you will lose it effortlessly.
Do you want to be a right-fighter or do you want to be happy?