When watching the TEDx talk of Dr Lustig, where he just repeated what he used to say elsewhere and other times, he finally showed this list of added sugars to the food (15:40 minute), saying that 80% of food on the supermarket shelves is spiked with sugar.
Do you remember saying that it is just fructose that is a poison and that glucose is fine? Well, dextrose, dextran, glucose, glucose solids, malt syrup, maltose, diastatic malt, barley malt, are all glucoses or polymers of glucose. Lactose and galactose also contain no fructose. Regarding the rice syrup I have only managed to find a brown rice syrup, which is again only glucose or glucose polymers. Similarly the corn syrup is not the same as high-fructose corn syrup and it again only contains glucose molecules. Ethyl maltol or maltol are not sugars as such and are related to maltose, so again, no fructose I am afraid. Caramel is rather a food coloring, not a form of sugar - to my knowledge. According to diatase (second column) I have found nothing in the Google of this name, but instead there was a diastase, which is an enzyme, not a sugar. After all, refer back to the diastatic malt above.
This impressive list of 56 names of sugar is suddenly shorter by 15 items which are not fructose related.
Moreover, as I discussed elsewhere, saying that 80% of foods on the market contain added sugar also sounds impressive, but it says nothing about the amount of consumed sugar. Adding a gram or two of some sweet flavor enhancer into a 100g of final product is something different than a pure candy or a soft drink, especially if the sweet taste is not readily detectable. Claiming that this sugar contributes to the rise in insulin and weight loss, while ignoring the remaining 98g of mainly starch is a nonsense. Yet many tend to repeat this 80% figure like a mantra, not understanding the whole concept.
It would be more practical to provide a stratified chart about the amount of foods containing different amounts of added sugars so that we could actually see how bad it is.
For now I am confident to announce that the sugar consumption in the U.S. has been on the decline since 2000 and this included all the major caloric sweeteners, not just the items called either sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. The following diagram illustrates the trends of per capita availability for various caloric sweeteners in the U.S., based on the USDA data.
Dr Lustig tried to dismiss these trends as not reliable and referred to the NHANES data instead. However, the NHANES data also support these trends in consumption of sugars. The amounts of consumed sugars vary between these two sources but they both agreed on the trends. And you know that the metabolic health does not get better in the U.S. population with the decreasing sugar consumption, does it? So is it sugar or fructose or something else contributing to ill health of America and possibly other countries worldwide?
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