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.