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. 

Another example of biased reporting right in front of your eyes. Watch out!

When I have some free time and crave some food for thought I go on Youtube and check the suggestions based on what I used to watch in the history. This time I came across a video capturing a presentation of Ashley Gearhardt, MS Mphil from Yale university. 

The opening sounded familiar, I have seen it when watching Dr Lustig's lectures on Youtube. Also the title of the video said: 

And then this was following at the beginning:

OK. I am always open to unbiased scientific knowledge, even if that meant to change my view on the problem. So I watched the whole video. 

How surprised I was when Ms Gearhardt did not focus on sugar only. Instead, her title was: 

 

Now I wonder how the person who uploaded this video came to the title focusing on sugar? Even the title of the whole event did not suggest sugar at all: 

The world seems to go crazy about sugar, ignoring anything else, perhaps equally dangerous for us. 

And I also could see Dr Lustig in the video later on, he was preparing for his own talk after Ms Gearhardt. 

Here is a video, which will enable you to see what the whole event was about. The obesity and health inequality is a much complicated issue than sugar intake. A similar slide with a different title also suggests so: 

As I explained elsewhere, people are made to see the picture they are wanted to see and they are happy to see it and agree with it after all. If only they knew better and thought little more critically as I do. 

If they did, they must have noticed what I have noticed in Ms Gearhardt's presentation: 

Have YOU noticed? 

All first three addictive foods reported by addicts are not only sweet from sugar. They also contain FAT! Only the fourth item, candy, is usually mostly sugar. And what follows is starch based and fat laden processed food, lacking sugar or fructose whatsoever: french fries and chips. The following two items which were not as likely addictive were lacking both; sugar and fat. 

Do you get it? 

Most of the time, when there is sugar, there is also fat. Adding salt to this creates the addictive cocktail of high fat, sugar and salt foods (HFSS), which are so typical for fast food and processed food industry. This is the order the term exists: first is fat, then sugar and then salt. Even Dr Lustig finally announced french fries and chips as the most fattening foods in the world, sugar came as third. And I have already referred to another review of food cravings and addiction in my article here. If that was not enough, here I have found a short video which will give you more insight into how the food industry works hard to make you eat their products, and that is again not only about sugar. 

And this is in contrast with what Ms Marianne Szeto talked about in her speech at about 8:20 minute that only sugar has been linked with the risk of obesity in California. Well, maybe there is something specific in dietary patterns in Californians that makes only the sugar stand out. But I suspect something else. Take a typical diet of a regular fast-food customer. One day it is McDonald's with burger, fries, milkshake. The other day it is Nando's with whatever they serve, laden with fat, washed down with a soft drink. The other day it is Pizza Hut with their famous thick pizza with generous portion of cheese on top. Another day it may be again McDonald's or some Indian of Chinese takeaway, again laden with fat, finished with a can of soft drink. Then the person usually snacks on chocolate, other sweets, many times on salted crisps and other savoury snacks, washing it down with sugary drinks every single day, several times per day. Now tell me: could you expect that Pizza Hut makes people fat when they eat it only once a week? Or Nando's? Of course it will be the sugar that comes out, especially in soft drinks as these provide most of the sugar to the diet of many. Have you noticed this unequal view? The extra fat seems to mean nothing, fatty foods are not looked at the same way as sugar and sugary drinks. And they call this statistics. 

However, there is nothing wrong about statistic. But the result of statistical analysis is as good as is the data that was used for the analysis. If the data was rubbish, then is the outcome of the statistical analysis. And you should remember this when you will hear anyone, not just Dr Lustig, saying that they do not believe in common sense - they belive in data.

The truth is right in front of your eyes folks, just keep your eyes and mind open!

Sugar is the cause of diseases because it is a browning agent. What does that actually mean?

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.