Thinking outside the box and seeing the whole picture

When watching the video of Dr Lustig against sugar/fructose I was amazed by his attempts to manipulate the game towards his agenda. 

At 10:27 minute he shows a slide:

What he says was already picked up by others and made fun of it because at other time Dr Lustig even said:

"There is no foodstuff on the planet that has both fat and carbohydrate at the same time. It is one or the other..."

He used a few examples, such as coconut, avocado or olives that have fat but no carbohydrate. Well, a quick check on Wikipedia and you can see that 100g of avocado contains 14.7 g of fat and 8.5 g of carbohydrate (of which sugars are 0.7 g). Similarly for olives: 15.3 g of fat in 100 g of fruit, and some 3.8 g of carbohydrates. Sugars again form only mere 0.5 g. The rest of the carbohydrate is listed as fiber, but this does not mean that it is THE fiber, which we cannot digest. This includes all sorts of carbohydrates, including resistant starches. So the nature DOES put carbohydrate and fat together, although in different ratio and one of them usually dominates over the other. In most of fruits there is little fat but mostly carbohydrates. But saying that no food stuff on the planet has them both at the same time is a pure nonsense. 

Besides that, Dr Lustig further talks that it is the sugar that has fat and carbohydrate at the same time - now it becomes clearer - he considers a glucose as carbohydrate and fructose as fat. I am not surprised after what I have heard from him over the past five years. And this alleged properties of sugar should make it so dangerous for people. 

Only the blue sentence at the bottom of the screenshot suggests that Dr Lustig knows and admits that fructose is converted to fat under certain conditions and until these conditions are met, fructose is not converted into fat - I suppose. Or not at such a large scale to be considered dangerous. And that is exactly the real mechanism.

However, humans do not have such capacity for the de-novo lipogenesis (DNL) as some scientists promote. The lipogenic properties of fructose are much lower in humans, especially in healthy humans. So saying that fructose is fat while glucose is a carbohydrate is wrong, because glucose also can be converted to fat when consumed in large amounts, i.e. beyond the capacity of the cells to convert it to energy directly. 

Here I would like to point out at a wider picture instead of focusing on one dietary compound. That larger picture is the DIET rich in both: carbohydrates and fats as it is typical for the Western diet. You could have seen elsewhere what were the trends in the intake of sugars, fats and non-sugar carbohydrates among the U.S. population. You could also see that the sugar consumption decreased since 2000 and the consumption of fat has increased while the consumption of flours and starches leveled off. Here you have a perfect example of the both: non-sugar (glucose based) carbohydrates and fats dominating the general American diet since 2000 while the sugar consumption went down. This was all in kcal per capita, no need to convert the grams into energy. People have been consuming more energy while the technological advancements made them less and less physically active over time - in general. I know there are many people who exercise regularly. 

In my previous articles you could see that even Dr Lustig admitted that the foods causing obesity were french fries and potato crisps. Other times you could hear him saying a word DONUT, although by this example he meant something different than it actually was (sugar and fat vs. fat and starch plus some sugar). And in another article of mine you could see how the U.S. not only has a high consumption of sugars but also the fats. Dr Lustig kept showing the sugar map, I have found the fat map for you to see the whole reality, not just the cherry-picked information on which this agenda was based. 

I always prefer to see the problem in its complexity instead of fiddling with one dietary compound in the corner and trying to push the single macronutrient agenda across the whole room, ignoring the complexity of the problem. 

Which carbohydrate?

You could hear Dr Lustig repeatedly saying in his many lectures that we eat more sugar and that the fat intake has gone down. I have already debunked this claim, but I would like to return to it and demonstrate how sophistically you have been manipulated into thinking that it is only the sugar that has been behind the increasing prevalence of obesity and metabolic diseases.

At 22:56 minute you could (again) see this picture: 

SnackWells. I want you to focus on the figures at the bottom of the slide. You can see that the fat has been reduced in this product by 2 grams but the sugar has increased by 4 grams. Now, let's calculate: 1 gram of fat has 9 kcal whereas 1 gram of sugar has about 4 kcal (the metabolisable energy can differ, some sources use 3.75 kcal). So if the energy content of biscuits was lowered by 18 kcal, the sugar brought back 'only' 16 kcal. Was that all? 

How much the non-sugar carbohydrate has been added in the new 'healthier' version of the biscuits? It was additional 9 grams of substance, which was mostly starch in this case, hence a glucose based carbohydrate, contributing by additional 36 kcal. So, while the sugar substituted the fat with slightly lower amount of calories, the addition of other carbohydrate - starch largely exceeded the contribution of sugar calories and made the new product significantly more caloric than the old one. And now you can think: was it really the sugar fault or rather the starch? You were not told this detail although it was right in front of your eyes. Sugar went up while fat went down and that was behind the obesity and metabolic diseases of Americans. 

Why the starch contribution to calories has been ignored? I tell you why: because of the anti-sugar, or rather the anti-fructose agenda. You could repeatedly hear Dr Lustig saying on several occasions elsewhere that glucose is good, that every living organism needs it while fructose is a poison.

This biscuits example reminded me the general trends of the macronutrients (energy) consumption of the Americans over the decades. Look at the diagram I made for my dissertation work, based on the USDA data: 

Can you see the trends and what was really been happening? Up to year 2000, both sugar and fat consumption were on the rise, slightly, but rising. In comparison to them the calories from starch increased much more. And here comes the dual scenario: while the fat consumption has been rising in grams, its % of calories of the total energy intake decreased, because the consumption of total energy has increased MORE than the fat calories. But, from the diagram, it is apparent that the same happened for sugar.

And now tell me: did Dr Lustig keep saying that the fat consumption went up or down and what he said about the sugar? Something completely different, right? His claim was based on a selectively chosen data between two dietary surveys back to 1989/91 and 1994/5. There he either reported the increased sugar consumption in one case, or in another he compared the % of fat calories (going down) while the obesity prevalence went up. At some moment he admitted that the fat consumption went up by 5g, saying that it was nothing. But this detail was buried under his continuous focus on sugar and fructose further on. He never put the sugar and fat together like in the diagram above, except of using a single product like the SnackWells. If he did that, his anti-fructose agenda would be gone. And did he ever mention starch? No. Do you remember him saying a DONUT? He did not comment on processed starch - white flour from which it is made of. He used it as an illustration of combination of sugar (containing fructose) and fat only. Sugar and fat eaten together certainly are not healthy, but so is not the processed starch consumed along. But glucose is our friend, do you remember? WRONG.

Does this need any more comment, especially in the light of my first articles in this blog where I debunked his outdated information which he presented as current trends? 

Although Dr Lustig tried to dismiss the USDA data source in the past, saying that he preferred the NHANES data, the same trend in the consumption of sugar and fat has been confirmed by the NHANES and I have produced a detailed discussion on these in one of my other articles here. 

One more thing I would like to correct in that slide at the beginning. According to my knowledge and based on the reports freely available in databases, the HFCS-55 is mainly used in the drinks whereas the baked goods and confectionery tend to contain HFCS-42, hence containing only 42% of fructose, not 55%. The overall content of the fructose in all the examined added sugars was estimated to fluctuate around the 40%, because other sweeteners were used in the processed foods, such as dextrose, which contains no fructose. Therefore the remaining 60% was provided by glucose. So whenever the sugar/HFCS consumption has increased and the fructose within, glucose consumption also went up and this was still within the sugars. Add the even higher increase of glucose from starches, mainly the processed ones (donut, without the fibre), for which the data also exists, and you get the picture of what has been happening over the decades. 

So, now you have the true answer on the question: WHAT CARBOHYDRATE? 

- GLUCOSE.

How much? 

- TOO much. 

What happened to fat? 

- It also went UP and kept going up all the time in absolute amounts. The relative percentage of calories is not important here and it was only used to mislead the audience towards the picture it was wanted to see.