What causes obesity? Finally - he said it.

I was pleased to hear, when watching another of the repeated lectures of Dr Lustig in the video at 38:07, that sugar does contribute to the obesity but it is not THE cause of obesity. 

What it was then?

As I kept saying: french fries and potato chips are the most obesogenic food stuffs. In other words: glucose based carbohydrates accompanied with a load of fat/oil, usually cheap processed oil. 

Added sugar is just one part of the whole problem and if people have stopped eating sugar and kept eating other processed food, which is also palatable enough, they would keep gaining weight. Depletion of beneficial nutrients and consuming excess of wrong nutrients (such as omega-6) would further contribute to the metabolic issues, even without the sugar present. These metabolic issues probably would not be as prevalent as they are now but we would hardly see their complete disappearance when sugar would disappear from the diet of these people. 

However, Dr Lustig only said that sugar is not the main cause of obesity and continued with his focus on the metabolic diseases as separate issues from obesity. According his and other scientists' views, if 20% of obese people do not suffer metabolic diseases right now, obesity is not a problem, because 40% of 'normal weight' people also suffer the same metabolic issues. And you could read in another of my articles that nothing was said about the proportion of overweight within the 'normal weight' group and the the prevalence of these metabolic issues among the overweight and the truly of normal weight (up to the BMI 25). But we know today that about half of those of 'normal weight' group are actually overweight.

To keep this post short and the topic intact, I will talk more about the obesity and its consequences in the next article. But before that you may want to refer to my older article where Dr Lustig tried to dismiss the fact the obesity has been pronounced as a disease on its own by the American Medical Association. 

Apparent manipulation with peoples minds by Dr Lustig

This short article will explain to you how the presenter made you to see what he wanted you to see - not in line with the truth, however. 

Check the diagram (6:55 minute of a video) which aimed to compare the percentage of fat calories in the overall diet with the percentage of obesity prevalence among the population: 

Quite impressive, right? 

Except, as I mentioned in the previous part and Dr Lustig said it as well, between 1980s and 1990s the consumption of calories increased, as did the consumption of fat in grams. 

So, what you see here is just a ratio of fat calories decreasing in relation to the total energy intake, because the calories from carbohydrate and overall calories rose much higher, making the fat calories as a percentage going down proportionally. The fat intake in grams per capita kept increasing. 

And adding from the previous article: this percentual trend of fat intake did not continue beyond year 2000, so when Dr Lustig presented this diagram as the current trends in 2013, he was not saying the truth. At this time he must have had an access to the most current data as I had when doing research on the topic of Fructose and Metabolic Syndrome between years 2012-2013.

Let me just repeat: The sugar consumption has been decreasing since 2000 but the obesity and metabolic diseases kept rising. Got it?

I just wonder why Dr Lustig did not show the % of sugars in this diagram, to compare it with fats and the obesity trends? You will be surprised what you will find out later. For now I can tell you straight away, that if this was done, there would be no fame and all this anti-sugar agenda would be over before it even started. 

Using outdated figures to falsely claim a positive correlation between sugar intake and obesity for the past 14 years

In 2013 Dr Lusting delivered a less known lecture called Sugar Pandemic Policy vs. Politics vs. Law. 

I have written a lengthy article about the imprecise, or rather misleading, information shared by Dr Lustig about the trends of particular nutrients (sugar, non-sugar carbohydrates and fat) intake in the U.S. over the past few decades. I am not going to repeat it here. Instead I would like to focus on few points in his 2013 lecture and write my comments, split into several blog articles. Some content will be repeated though. 

At about 6:20 minute of the 2013 video time Dr Lustig said in 2013:

“We are eating more, no argument. 275 kcal more in teen boys over the past 20 years”  

Over the past 20 years? What do the years show under the diagram? Look better: 1989/91 and 1995/96.

Does this look like the past 20 years in 2013 or rather 20 years ago and more? 

At 6:34 he said that Americans were told to eat low-fat, so the fat consumption has not changed, but it was the sugar consumption that went up.  Dr Lustig precisely said:

"...we consume THE SAME AMOUNT OF FAT as before, showing only 5g increase, making it 45 kcal increase per day in children and adolescents"

That was meant to be of those 275 kcal increase among the same age group. 

The diagram following after that was of the secular trends of specific food intake from the same time period, but covering the whole U.S. population, originated from the study of Chanmugam et al. 2003 (therefore it again did not cover the past 20 years). 

Since 2000 the both sources: USDA and NHANES indicate, that sugar consumption went down, but the fat intake continued to rise. 

Moreover, if you had a chance to watch the 2009 video, you would hear Dr Lustig saying something different regarding the fat intake. That time he precisely said: 

"The fat is going down, sugar is going up and we are all getting sick."

This was in time when he already had access to the publicly available data of USDA indicating that the sugar intake per capita in grams went down, while fat intake went up. And this was not in relative ratio to the total energy intake as you will see later the attempt to use this tactics as well to mislead the audience. 

In 2011 the NHANES data analysis further proved that this trend was real. The sugar intake decreased while the fat has increased in grams per person. You can find the details of it on my own website with the corresponding references.

So how it was possible that although the consumption of sugar has been decreasing since 2000 the obesity and metabolic diseases kept rising? And why the doctor kept saying that sugar consumption was on the rise for the past 20  years when it was not? He was making sugar/fructose responsible as a sole factor for the constantly increasing metabolic diseases.

One more thing: The trends presented by Dr Lustig fall within about 5 years period 20 years ago. Would you consider this period of time as being representative of the long-term trends, up to the recent past, so that you would talk in the present continuous tense? I bet not.

I hope you have now realized the errors in the presented content of Dr Lustig and that these should be corrected. I do not need to have any vested interests to see and highlight this. These are the FACTS that should have been presented by him in the first place.