You could hear Dr Lustig saying repeatedly elsewhere that sugar is a browning agent by the food industry and in the video at 29:05 minute he discussed this again.
You could also hear him saying in other videos that fructose is 7-times faster in this than glucose. I have discussed this already in one of my earlier articles. Why I have decided to bring it up again is one important thing that should be noted here: the baked stuff does not only brown just because the fructose is there. It browns because it is BAKED.
Let's get real: does fruit not contain sugar? Is this sugar (glucose and fructose) not absorbed in the body? Of course they are. Do fruits and vegetables contain different carbohydrates than the food industry adds to the baked goods? Chemically and biochemically NOT. It is still the same glucose and the same fructose, except that we do not normally bake the fruits before consumption, although we do sometimes for making cakes and similarly with the vegetables.
Try not to add sugar to the bread dough and bake it. Does it get brown? YES, it does, although a little less than when the sugar is added. Moreover, the yeasts consume large portion of the sugar, converting it to water and CO2, which basically helps the bread dough to rise. The addition of sugar in the modern bread making, however, is for the bread to remain moist and soft because the bread is no longer produced the same old fashioned way as it used to be in the past. The Chorleywood bread making process has become very popular as a cheaper and faster alternative to the traditional bread making practice.
You can apply the same comparison of browning to cakes or other baked foods like potato chips, for example. Although the sweet cake is hardly to be imagined without sugar anyway, how much sugar you have in potato chips? It still gets browned, producing acrylamides, also potentially hazardous compound when taken in large quantities. It is not the Maillard reaction Dr Lustig talks about, but the browning happens there, too. And the more golden or brown the baked food is, the more harmful compounds you can find there, even without the presence of fructose. It is the reaction of some amino acids (asparagine) with the starch at a high temperature for a prolonged time.
Similarly for well done meat. Usually no fructose is present in meat (unless some sugar was used for marinating), yet the burning of the meat at high temperature produces volatile compounds that are also associated with various forms of cancer.
Does the little addition of sugar for more browning and other properties of processed food look so bad in comparison to other effects of food processing methods? How worse does this little extra sugar make the situation in comparison to the already present sugary stuff on the market?
One thing also should be said: Once Dr Lustig said that sugar is added to the bread but on the slide it only says fructose. Sugar in the food industry represents the fructose and glucose supplied together. Go and check the ingredients as he advised you to. It is SUGAR, not fructose. Therefore it was not only fructose added, but glucose alongside it as well. Glucose also leads to browning, remember? Although at a slower rate, but it does. And it does contribute to browning and volatile compounds formation, which make the baked food of any kind so tasty.
You could also hear Dr Lustig repeatedly saying that 80% of the processed food on the market has added sugar. While this may be correct, it again says nothing about the actual amounts of sugar in the products. Do you think that adding 1g of sugar to 150g of a carbohydrate based product (bread) make such difference? I do not think so, but this product is included in the final figure of 80%, making the figure look impressive.
And yet, the sugar consumption per capita went down, let's not forget that.
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