Why Fructose is NOT Like Alcohol

Where did this come from?

Beginning with his viral YouTube video (I won't link to it, every additional view is one view too many!), and continuing on, Dr. Robert Lustig has been making the claim that fructose is metabolized like alcohol by the liver.  You cannot make your misinformation more clear than to title a section in your book as Lustig did in Fat Chance --  Fructose versus Ethanol:  Pick Your Poison.

Before Lustig, I don't think I'd ever heard anyone equate sugar to alcohol on a metabolic level.  A few may have made an addiction analogy, but it was Lustig who "taught" us the "science" that the liver processes sugar just like alcohol.

It is shocking to me that his video was produced and distributed by an institution of higher learning as a "Mini Medical School for the Public" presentation.  This implies to me that the content has been somewhat vetted.  Apparently it has not been, and also, nobody within that establishment has ever seen fit to correct the record?  Again, apparently not, as there is that Skinny on Obesity series out there repeating many of the previous errors.

Read more »

De Novo Lipogenesis Again (and Science and Science Reporting)

In my last post, I just posted a graphic taken from an "FYI" inset by a scientist, Marc Hellerstein, whose work I've blogged on quite a bit here. (Anyone wanting to refresh can click on the image and enlarge.)  One good post to begin with if you are not familiar with that name is Where do Triglycerides Come From? I would say that between Marc Hellerstein's No common energy currency: de novo lipogenesis as the road less traveled and the works of Eric Jequier such as Nutrient effects: post-absorptive interactions, the case that hepatic DNL is quantitatively insignificant in human energy balance/fat accumulation is strong and has not been refuted by some newer scientific findings.    

I do hope to expand on the role of adipose DNL at some future point -- teaser: I have a paper showing that reducing WAT lipolysis upregulates adipose DNL and improves glucose homeostasis in the IGT irrespective of body weight  -- but adipose DNL had not been central to the arguments of folks from Taubes to Lustig to Eades to Naughton to a list far too long to go through here.  The claim has been that excess carbs are converted in the liver to fat and sent to the fat tissue for storage.  

Does this occur?  Yes.  Is it significant?   Only if you consider a couple grams fat synthesis per day significant at the metabolic cost "wasting" one gram carb for every four grams converted to fat ... and only if you consider a few grams of fat significant in the context of consuming 100, 200 or more grams of fat that is already fat.

Read more »

Scientific Review of Lustig's Fat Chance

Scientific Review of Lustig's Fat Chance

I don't often put blog posts up on someone else's works of this nature, but I'm going to make an exception because Mark Kern has done a thorough job of looking at some of the "science" Lustig puts forth in his book.  {I await the predictable dismissal ;-) }

More Hyperinsulinemia, Insulin-Suppressive Drugs & Obesity (and Lustig)

Building on my last post on this topic ...

So far I've spent most of the blogging on a study comparing 3 doses of octreotide, an insulin suppressing drug, vs. placebo in a subset of obese people pre-tested and determined to be insulin hypersecreters as defined by a corrected ratio for insulin to glucose levels.  This post will focus more on two other studies using this drug, perhaps just the first ... let's see how long this gets ;-)    I think it will be easiest to number the 3 studies, all bearing Lustig's name:

• Study 1: Suppression of insulin secretion is associated with weight loss and altered macronutrient intake and preference in a subset of obese adults (2003)
• Study 2: Obesity, leptin resistance, and the effects of insulin reduction  (2004)
• Study 3: A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-finding trial of a long-acting formulation of octreotide in promoting weight loss in obese adults with insulin hypersecretion.  (2006)

I've already discussed the rather unimpressive performance of octreotide in Study 3.  While the highest dose group had the highest "response" rate (20.5% losing ≥5% initial weight), the rates were similar between the placebo group (11.4%) compared to the 40mg octreotide group (12.5%), which is important as this is the dose used in Studies 1&2.   Additionally, mean losses for the entire 40 & 60 mg groups were less than 2%, and even the most promising responders, Caucasian hypersecreters with above median CIR, only lost an average of less than 4% over 6 months.

Read more »

Quotations: Lustig on Fructose and Glucose in Nature

Glucose

Despite its absolute necessity for life (see chapter 10), dietary glucose isn’t perfect. When it exists in nature without fructose, it’s called “starch,” and it truly does supply “empty calories,” energy for either storage or burning.

Fructose

Fructose is never found alone in nature. Rather, it is always partnered with its more benign sister molecule, glucose.

Robert Lustig,   Fat Chance

p.154, 156

Read more »

If you drink OJ, might it just as well be Orange Crush?

I'm sure you've heard it many times -- fruit juices, even unsweetened ones, are still just glasses of sugar, and you might as well be drinking a soda or Tang (remember that?). According to nutritiondata.com, a cup of orange juice contains 21g sugars.  They don't "itemize" in the OJ entry, but if we look at the ratios oranges we can calculate that of those 21g, roughly 11 g are sucrose, 4.5 g are glucose and 5.5 g are fructose.  Thus for each cup (8 oz) of OJ, you get around 11g of the dastardly fructose poison.  This is roughly the same as you would get in the same amount (small can!) of orange soda.

Read more »

The Sugar Twins step in it ... or almost. Part I: Lustig Eats Crap

The Rock'em Sock'em battle of the gurus in Carblandia continued last week as both Lustig and Taubes took to the media airwaves.  I'll now call them the sugar twins because ultimately both hinge their arguments on sugar/fructose.  Lustig says that because fructose is converted to fat in the liver, sucrose is the one food on the planet that is both fat and carb together and that makes it fattening.  That combo is particularly insulinogenic and insulin blinds your brain to leptin so you don't know when to stop eating cheesecake.  Taubes is making his last stand at TWICHOO Bunker Hill by saying that all the bad things he's been telling you for years about carbs -- fat cells going wild, spontaneous horizontal growth spurts, starving cells, etc. -- you may be spared of this forever and eternity so long as you never bathed your liver in fructose.  Fructose causes insulin resistance and sets the wheels in motion for fat accumulation.  Both (misguided) positions hinge on SUGAR = OBESITY.

So, first up to the plate, Lustig went on Alec Baldwin's radio show.  This excited Andreas Eenfeldt because low carb hacks see only the headline and have no interest in looking any further, so he alerted his readers to a "great interview" with Robert Lustig.  (Transcript HERE)

Read more »

Review & Critique: The Skinny on Obesity ~ Part III Hormones

Previously I've shared my thoughts on Episode I and Episode II in this series.  This third installment in the series is essentially Lustig's version of Adiposity 101.  

The video opens with an adamant Lustig declaring that weight management can't be done by eating less and moving more.  It's not doable.  Sigh.  I think at least the vast majority of NWCR members will disagree.  But in any case ...

Read more »

The Men Who Made Us Fat

Here's the YouTube playlist for the whole thing:

The Men Who Made Us Fat   Jacques Peretti

A few questions/comments:

1.  Does bread today have more sugar in it (corn syrup), than breads of yesterday?  Talking hamburger buns.  How or why would adding corn syrup to rolls make them last longer as Peretti claims?

2.  Are soft drinks the largest single source of calories in the American diet?  How do we define "source"...

3.  If HFCS (55% fructose/45% glucose vs. 50-50 for sucrose) is sweeter than sugar, is it true what Lustig claims?  If sweeter they should use less in substitute.  Lustig claims they use more.  True?

Read more »

Bad bad American Science FrUKtion

The topic of this post is a piece by the BBC in advance of blaming two American men for the obesity epidemic in the world today.  So the title comes from that.  

So Jacques Peretti weighs in with another piece on how Americans sabotaged the world with sugar  with:  What caused the obesity epidemic in the West?  Jacques is pictured at right behind a ginormous platter of food.  For a piece blaming sugar, one would think the picture would feature pastries and a Big Gulp, but no, it's bread surrounding what appears to be a bunch of dippy fatty stuffs.  Oh ... and we don't just eat too much food, right?  In this latest piece of pseudoscience journalism run amok, Peretti focuses heavily on quotes from Lustig.  I'll come back to some of the rest of that when I get to critiquing the "science" in Part III of the Skinny on Obesity series.  And let's just mention but move on from the most ridiculous statement in that article now shall we?

Read more »

Contest! Why we get fat ...

... Nah, for a change it's not Gary Taubes or Robert Lustig or any of the other usual suspects hailing from the US making sheet up and mangling facts. No, this article comes from the UK ... if you thought the state of science journalism in the US was bad, wait till you get a load of this specimen of health journalism in the UK!  This one was brought to my attention courtesy of Chris Highcock of Conditioning Research blog.

Why our food is making us fat

We are, on average, 3st heavier than we were in the 60s. And not because we're eating more or exercising less – we just unwittingly became sugar addicts

I count at least 15 glaring inaccuracies, contradictions and/or exaggerations bordering on deceit.  Can you find them?  Winners get free Gin It Up & Tonic cocktails and Bologna Roll-ups  tonight at the Asylum Bar & Grill!  And, as always, I'm happy to substitute to meet your dietary needs :D

image linkimage link

Review & Critique: The Skinny on Obesity ~ Part II Sickeningly Inaccurate

Previously:  Intro & Part I

The second installment of the University of California production, The Skinny on Obesity, featuring Dr. Robert Lustig and colleagues is entitled Sickeningly Sweet.  I've embedded the video at right.  I've entitled this installment of my Review & Critique Sickeningly Inaccurate.  That is, frankly an understatement about the information presented in this episode.  This video epitomizes what's wrong with many of the "anti-establishment" nutritional experts.  You do not counter bad science with more bad science.  This is what Lustig does here.  And it's not controversial -- at least there's some evidence supporting the lipid hypothesis -- but the "science" here is counter to known basic biochemistry and in opposition to the vast majority of the evidence of metabolism such as de novo lipogenesis.

Read more »

Review & Critique: The Skinny on Obesity ~ Intro and Part I

Staying true to one of the founding missions of the Asylum, there's a YouTube series entitled The Skinny on Obesity, from University of California, that deserves critical attention.   If you're going to put forth science to explain obesity and associated disease, especially in the affirmative sense ("fact", "we know", "is" rather than "possibly", "probably", "evidence supports"), it should be correct to the best of current knowledge.   I've made it through five of the episodes to date, and sad to say, this series falls far short of that mark.  

Thus far, there have been three contributors:  Dr. Robert Lustig, Elissa Epel, and Barbara Laraia.  Almost everyone is familiar with Lustig, the last two listed as affiliated with The Center for Obesity Assessment and Study at UC but we learn nothing about their backgrounds.   By far the major contributor to the science is Lustig and he gets some basic things so horribly wrong they must be called out.  Lustig became an instant star in LC circles with his viral fructophobic YouTube video.  YouTube fame is one thing, but this series, put out by University of California, and media appearances like on 60 Minutes (that I did not see) are evidence that this man IS mainstream, and his Nature article and recent public statements can leave no doubt he is highly agenda driven with draconian goals.  Therefore it is important to examine the evidence he puts forth before we have another Ancel Keys on our hands!

Read more »

Great Interview on Fructose ~ The "Other" Side

This one is too good just to tweet.  One of those gems I mentioned the other day is David Despain's Evolving Health blog.  He's been posting quite a bit of late on fructose.  His latest:   Fate of fructose: Interview with Dr. John Sievenpiper.

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing, but I'll excerpt a few things that address the problems with many of the fructose studies and problems with them, and some nice correcting of Lustig & Co.:

• The 50th percentile for intake in the United States is 49g per day, which is just a little less than 10 percent per day of energy from fructose. ... the 95 percentile for intake for NHANES for fructose consumes 87g of sugar or little less than 20 percent energy.

It seems to me that sugar consumption in the US is often inflated, and the inflation is done by those who seem to have an "crisis agenda" -- by that I mean looking to whip up a crisis for the purpose of enacting legislation or finding a new tax revenue stream. So related to the quote above, Sievenpiper takes issue with the "superphysiological doses" of fructose used in most studies.

Read more »