What Eating 40 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day Can Do to You

[SecularMotion]

Soda has been a major target in the debate over sugar and its role in the obesity crisis. But high levels of added sugars can be found in many seemingly healthful foods, from yogurts to energy bars and even whole-grain bread.

A new movie called “That Sugar Film” seeks to educate consumers about the hazards of consuming too much added sugar, which can be found in an estimated 80 percent of all supermarket foods. The new documentary stars Australian actor-director, Damon Gameau, who modeled his movie after “Super Size Me,” the 2004 film that followed Morgan Spurlock as he consumed an all-McDonald’s diet for 30 days.

In “That Sugar Film,” which first had its debut in Australia this year, Mr. Gameau gives up his normal diet of fresh foods for two months to see what happens when he shifts to eating a diet containing 40 teaspoons of sugar daily, the amount consumed by the average Australian (and an amount not far from the 28 teaspoons consumed daily by the average American teenager). The twist is that Mr. Gameau avoids soda, ice cream, candy and other obvious sources of sugar. Instead, he consumes foods commonly perceived as “healthy” that are frequently loaded with added sugars, like low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, health bars and cereal.

Mr. Gameau finds that his health and waistline quickly spiral out of control. While the film is mostly entertainment, it tries to present the science of sugar in a consumer-friendly way, with helpful cameos from Hugh Jackman, Stephen Fry and others. It is also timely. Just last month, the federal government proposed a new rule that would require nutrition labels to carry details about added sugars, a measure that has faced resistance from the food industry.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/what-eating-40-teaspoons-of-sugar-a-day-can-do-to-you/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth

[Thor_MN]

1. "and an amount not far from the 28 teaspoons"

28 is 30% less than 40. If 30% is considered "not far" it doesn't say much about the source's views of accuracy...

[Doctor_J]

18. yeah the other way, 40 is almost 50% more than 28

The point of the movie is true though

[Thor_MN]

19. Only if one considers less than 43 to be almost 50...

If that good enough for you...

[Doctor_J]

21. 42 teaspoons would be exactly 50% more than 28

So I am willing to say that 40 is almost 50% more.

[Thor_MN]

22. Like I said, if you consider less than 43 to be almost 50, then it's close enough for you...

40 is 42.86% more than 28. If 50% is close enough to ballpark it for you, then the "science" in the description meets your standards.

I have a BA in chemistry, so maybe my expectations are too high, but when one makes the claim that 28 is not far from 40, accuracy appears to not be on the menu.

[lpbk2713]

2. I'm not far from being independently wealthy.

I guess it all depends on where you set the goal posts.

[WDIM]

3. In the US its not even real sugar we are eating its corn.

Animals fed large amounts of corn have poor health and are over weight.

High fructose corn syrup is the sugar of choice in the food industry in the US.

[Yo_Mama]

7. You know, I work with a lot of diabetics, and my experience does not bear this out

Many of mine cannot tolerate wheat, especially refined, but can eat tons of whole corn.

There do seem to be individual differences as to which starches individuals can tolerate, but I haven't found this corn theory to work. I have several who have their sugars drop when they eat corn. These are acute cases.

My impression is that on average, corn is by far the healthiest grain that human populations eat. That doesn't mean it is healthy for each individual, but rice is the worst, clearly.

[Glassunion]

8. You realize that some of these animals have a virtual 100% diet of corn.

your observation would change if they ate a primarily corn diet.

[arikara]

11. This is not whole corn

but high fructose corn syrup that is in everything now instead of cane sugar. GE corn at that.

[ladyVet]

4. Sugar, or it's cheap cousin, high fructose corn syrup, is in almost everything.

It's a killer, in my opinion. I won't touch anything with HFCS in it, if I can help it.

low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, health bars and cereal

I don't eat any of that stuff. I learned years ago, when I first started reading about low carb diets, not to eat anything "low fat", because sugar or something like it was added to boost the flavor lost by removing the fat.

I do have an occasional soda when I'm out, but I actually pick one with real sugar, because it doesn't have any artificial ingredients (or so the company says, but how sure can we really be?). It's a trade off between the chemicals or sugar, so I chose sugar. But only rarely.

[procon]

5. I'm thinking the same as you.

It concerns me high fructose corn syrup is in almost everything, and I do believe their is a link between this and the rise is obesity problems. I'm a good cook and I enjoy cooking from scratch using fresh ingredients, but most people don't and they reply on prepared food products and convenience foods that are loaded with the stuff. Its really hard to get away from that stuff, and why the hell is it even my ketchup!

In Calif we have a lot of Mexican supermarkets and I discovered fruity Mexican sodas made with real sugar. If you have one of those home soda machines there are brands of flavoring syrups available made with sugar.

[arikara]

12. Now you even need to be alert as to what type of sugar they are using

So unless the ingredients actually specify cane sugar, you are likely to get sugar derived from GE sugar beets.

[Godhumor]

6. Why would you model your work after Supersize Me?

The documentary where claims have proven to be bullshit and the conclusions are unrepeatable?

[sub.theory]

9. Wish it was indeed more scientific

I wish a film like this would be more scientific. I do believe that their conclusions are correct, but there are not a large enough sample size (n=1 is impossible to draw statistical conclusions) and there is not enough variable control. Not to mention the lack of a control group.

[PasadenaTrudy]

10. Read this..

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/08/that_sugar_film_science_debunking_links_to_mood_health_fatty_liver_disease.html

pseudoscience...no surprise.

[REP]

14. Thanks for that link

[PasadenaTrudy]

15. You are welcome! :) n/t

[Arugula Latte]

13. Australians eat more sugar than Americans? Can that be true?

I think they have considerably less obesity than we do (?).

[KittyWampus]

16. Is Sugar Toxic?

The movie is not a documentary. That said,

Is Sugar Toxic

Lustig’s argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.” This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

snip

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.

If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.

snip
The first symptom doctors are told to look for in diagnosing metabolic syndrome is an expanding waistline. This means that if you’re overweight, there’s a good chance you have metabolic syndrome, and this is why you’re more likely to have a heart attack or become diabetic (or both) than someone who’s not. Although lean individuals, too, can have metabolic syndrome, and they are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes than lean individuals without it.

Having metabolic syndrome is another way of saying that the cells in your body are actively ignoring the action of the hormone insulin — a condition known technically as being insulin-resistant. Because insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome still get remarkably little attention in the press (certainly compared with cholesterol), let me explain the basics.

snip
By the early 2000s, researchers studying fructose metabolism had established certain findings unambiguously and had well-established biochemical explanations for what was happening. Feed animals enough pure fructose or enough sugar, and their livers convert the fructose into fat — the saturated fatty acid, palmitate, to be precise, that supposedly gives us heart disease when we eat it, by raising LDL cholesterol. The fat accumulates in the liver, and insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome follow.

Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.

snip
Only one study in this country, by Havel and Stanhope at the University of California, Davis, is directly addressing the question of how much sugar is required to trigger the symptoms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Havel and Stanhope are having healthy people drink three sugar- or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages a day and then seeing what happens. The catch is that their study subjects go through this three-beverage-a-day routine for only two weeks. That doesn’t seem like a very long time — only 42 meals, not 1,000 — but Havel and Stanhope have been studying fructose since the mid-1990s, and they seem confident that two weeks is sufficient to see if these sugars cause at least some of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome.

So the answer to the question of whether sugar is as bad as Lustig claims is that it certainly could be. It very well may be true that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, because of the unique way in which we metabolize fructose and at the levels we now consume it, cause fat to accumulate in our livers followed by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so trigger the process that leads to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. They could indeed be toxic, but they take years to do their damage. It doesn’t happen overnight. Until long-term studies are done, we won’t know for sure.
snip

One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.

snip



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=0

[nomorenomore08]

17. 40 teaspoons is 168 grams...

I consider myself somewhat of a sugarholic, and even I don't reach that level on a typical day.

[Thor_MN]

20. Just knew this would draw the woo. Sugar is sugar and its souce makes no difference.

The source is irrelevant, the amount you consume is what matters.

If you think the source matters, you may want to check into homeopathic cures, that works on the same principle, namely faith.