This article shows how the fructose industry is defending itself. Mostly by confusing the issue.
The thing about fructose is that it is not by itself poisonous. The problem only comes about for refined fructose, such as that found in cane sugar and HFCS. In those cases, fructose overwhelms the liver and gets processed by wrong pathways which result in all kinds of problems. But if you eat fructose in the form of fruits and vegetables, your body has to take a while to break the fructose out of the fruit and vegetable cells. Thus, your liver only gets a steady trickle of fructose instead of a flood of it. As a result, the liver can process the fructose correctly. Furthermore, if you eat fructose with fiber, molecules from the fiber help the liver process more fructose correctly.
Knowing this, it is not difficult to construct an experiment that shows that fructose is not harmful. All you have to do is feed your subjects the correct form of fructose (i.e., fruits and vegetables). The experiment where subjects ate large numbers of apples and were perfectly ok was quite telling.
The other defense of the sugar industry is that it is not the sugar, it is the overeating. However, refined sugar causes the overeating. One of the results of processing fructose the wrong way is that the liver does not produce the hormones that are supposed to inform the brain that you are full. Thus, refined fructose causes overeating of sugar and anything else you happen to be eating with your sugar. Personally I know I eat much more fries if I eat them with ketchup and I will eat much more steak if I eat it with steak sauce.
The fat people and diabetics are being blamed for eating too much and lacking willpower. They may be partially to blame, but it is very hard to make the correct decision when your brain's own sensory mechanisms are being hijacked and tricked. It is very hard to stop eating when you are constantly hungry. But if you cut down on the sugar you will not be constantly hungry, and then you may find that you do not even need that much will power to cut down on your calories.
In one of Lustig's videos he talks about fructose from fruit juice. He says if you want fruit juice, eat fruit. The problem comes when you drink a glass of apple juice. That's the juice from about 8 apples. Now, instead of the juice, try eating 8 apples. It's just not really something someone's going to do, it's so much work to grind through all that food. But a glass of apple juice is easy.
"Personally I know I eat much more fries if I eat them with ketchup and I will eat much more steak if I eat it with steak sauce."
Not to detract from your other excellent points but:
1 - it makes it easier to eat more because it's less dry. If you eat a bunch of fries with nothing it will turn into a huge lump in your stomach and you won't want more.
2 - insoluble fiber in apples slows fructose absorption, but a hunk of fatty meat does not? Fat slows absorption through the intestine.
3 - Vinegar is supposed to suppress appetite. Eating a pickle when your hungry will 4/6 times make you feel a lot less hungry.
I think you pretty much restated the point of the article in slightly more condensed terms. Eat sugar in moderation and you'll be fine. Eat too much and you'll run into problems. The point you added is that sugar -> less full -> overeat, which is possible, but not the point being debated.
It's not merely the quantity, but the rate of assimilation, including gastric emptying, which matters.
So, yes, qualitatively there is a difference not only between eating an apple and a glass of apple juice representing 8 apples, but even when you're juicing a single apple, because that fructose hits your bloodstream immediately.
Useful if you're a bonking cyclist or a runner who's hit the wall. Not so much if you're leading a sedentary lifestyle.
You didn't specify the effect you're talking about, you were very hand-wavey and just said "matters," which is so broad and general that you could be literally anything. I'm talking about calories. Whether you drink 500 calories of apple juice or eat 500 calories of apples you're still taking in 500 calories [1]. So insofar as caloric retention is concerned, no, that does not "matter."
... might give you some interesting starting points.
What matters when you ingest those 500 calories is what they're allocated to, and there endocrine responses (as well as body store availability) does matter.
500g of carbohydrate dumped in the bloodstream of an individual with depleted skeletal muscle and hepatic glycogen stores will have a different response (glycogen uptake in these tissues) than in an individual whose glycogen stores are already saturated (conversion to triglycerides and storage as fat).
Gastric emptying and rate of release matters as you're consuming roughly 15-25g of carbohydrate hourly in your brain (and a few more grams in other tissues). So that an ingested bolus of 500g cho released over the course of 5 hours is going to _largely_ simply result in uptake to tissues with an existing demand, rather than lipogenesis.
No, you can't say fuck you to thermodynamics, but you can dance the funky chicken around it.
Your link talks about the thermic effect of food. The TEF of apples vs apple juice is definitely different. But maybe that's what your are saying -- calories aren't the important piece?
Everytime a nutrition-related article gets posted, people always submit stories regarding their own personal unscientific weight-loss successes. Most of the time I don't even think they've read the article.
That being said, I found the article interesting, but, as a biochem major, fairly unsurprising. Fructose and glucose are fundamental elements of our body's metabolism, and metabolism is a fundamental element to life. It's what gives your cells energy to do every single thing they do. That sucrose, a compound made up of a single fructose molecule bonded to a glucose molecule, is not detrimental to your health given reasonable consumption reaches "duh" levels of obviousness. Same is true of high fructose corn syrup, which actually just contains 55% fructose and 42% glucose, a negligible difference. So it seems the only detriment to your health posed by HFCS over sucrose is the anxiety you'll get by worrying about it.
Like someone else said "TL;DR: stop eating so much, fatty." In more practical terms, eat reasonably and lift weights and you'll be fine.
Edit:
Here's some science for you:
Energy in = Energy out + Change in Body Stores (fat or muscle)
Where "energy" is measured in calories. Laws of thermodynamics ain't nothin' to f with! [1]
I didn't pay attention to my weight for a couple years, ate a lot of sweets and drank a lot of beer. Before I knew it I'd gained 30 pounds, and had a minor freakout. I decided to do three things--weigh myself every morning, stop eating sugar except for from fruit, and stop drinking. I ended up shedding 30 pounds in 90 days, and have kept it off for a full year. I didn't exercise or count calories in any way, in fact I probably upped my overall calorie consumption but I replaced the sugars with more complex energy sources like nuts. I'm not sure if it was cutting the alcohol, cutting the sugar, or both that did the trick. However, I've been letting myself have some alcohol for the past few months (wine, not beer) and haven't gained a pound since doing so, so my gut tells me it was the sugar. I definitely feel a whole lot healthier.
I did something similar during my semester in France. Stopped eating all bread and processed carbs. Vegetables, fruit and meat plus Greek yogurt. I didn't cut out alcohol though, nor was my weight loss as drastic as yours.
Lost about thirty pounds over four months (which was terrific, my girlfriend of four years dumped me the night I flew home so at least I was ready for singles' life).
I won't go so far as to call sugar "toxic" but I know that cutting it out has made me much, much healthier.
Also, I had a blood test a few weeks ago. My doctor actually wrote "outstanding" on my cholesterol report.
Most of your changes could be explained just by calories. Beer is quite high calorie since it has so many carbs, and eating nuts satiates you faster so you end up eating less.
Alcohol itself doesn't affect weight much, though IIRC fat isn't metabolized well together with it. But it can improve your lifespan: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9481115
Not really. Assume he cut out 300 calories a day of beer. So a pound of fat is 3600 calories roughly. By just cutting out beer he would need 12 days to lose 1 lb. not the rate he was losing which was 1/3lb per day. Many studies have shown pure caloric deficits do not lead to rapid weight loss.
I figured the same thing--I definitely didn't feel like I was cutting calories in any way. I took up drinking lots of whole milk, eating bacon, and at my desk I'd eat a whole 12-ounce coffee cup full of mixed nuts (still do, in fact) each day at work. I didn't even cut carbs, I ate pizza and pasta pretty regularly. The only thing I did was aggressively eliminate refined sugars and beer from my diet.
Fat is pure energy so you were entering ketosis through the bacon and whole milk etc. nuts are High in fiber as well, so you may have also helped flush out the stuff faster? Pasta and bread I think have less insulin effect than sugars and alcohols so maybe that's all your body needed to avoid fat hoarding.
It is hard to say based on the limited info he posted, but you only enter ketosis if you consume under 20-50 g of carbs per day. A single slice of bread, one yogurt, a bowl of cereal, or even a few carrots can take you out of it. You can't really accidentally get into ketosis without very deliberately avoiding carbs.
I suppose you're suggesting the same calories+alcohol in some other form (shochu and lean meat?) would be better. Maybe so, but I don't know if there's any studies on that.
>I ended up shedding 30 pounds in 90 days, and have kept it off for a full year
>I probably upped my overall calorie consumption but I replaced the sugars with more complex energy sources like nuts
Unless you started exercising, these two statements are incompatible with one another (violates the first law of thermodynamics). What's more likely is you felt "fuller" from eating healthy foods and therefore consumed less calories.
The laws of thermodynamics do not preclude your body from ingesting something that has calories and shitting it out without actually doing anything with the calories. Your shit would just have more calories left in it, kind of like how a poorly made car might leak gasoline everywhere.
Your statement is only marginally correct, but mostly misleading to the point of being practically wrong. Depending on what you eat, your body absorbs 80%-97% of calories according to the following (simplified) equation:
Energy in = Energy out + Change in Body Stores [1]
Where "change in body stores" is, for all intents and purposes, either muscle or fat. So while going from eating 3000 calories of pure butter to eating 3000 calories of straight fibrous vegetables will show a modest difference in caloric retention, I guarantee you that's not the case here.
The point is, don't gloss over things by making dumb statements like "it's impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics". The laws of thermodynamics don't preclude engines that either leak fuel or are fantastically inefficient in converting them to any particular form whether it be locomotion, electricity, or adipose tissue. If your point is that the human body is fantastically efficient at producing fat in ways that don't really vary, then prove that point.
Please don't insult me like that without at least reading the article I posted, which directly supports the statement "it's impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics"
I'm not insulting you. The law of conservation of energy is insufficient to support your claim because your claim relies more on the particulars of human physiology than on the basic physics. If it were all down to physics, then my car would get fat when I put fuel in the gas tank and didn't drive it. But even though my car and my body are both governed by the same laws of physics, the details are different.
But your body doesn't do this so it's completely irrelevant. You can't fool your body into being less efficient by eating "healthier" which is the point of the parent.
Possible, but how likely is that? Is it more likely that he's eating foods that are inefficiently digested (and where are the scientific studies on that?) Or is it more likely that he's underestimating calories consumed (numerous studies showing many people doing just that)?
Unless you started exercising, these two statements are incompatible with one another (violates the first law of thermodynamics). What's more likely is you felt "fuller" from eating healthy foods and therefore consumed less calories.
Another possibility is that the food eaten affects the metabolic rate. I've known multiple people who stopped having cold extremities when they cut back on their sugar intake.
Less than ten percent of your daily energy expenditure goes towards thermogenesis. That's not going to make enough of a different to lose 30 pounds in 90 days while taking in more calories.
You need a calorie deficit of approximately half a standard daily intake to lose a third of a pound a day.
Not the full thirty pounds, but it could definitely be a contributing factor. And, if one's extremities get warmer while one's core temperature remains the same, the same amount of clothing is worn, and the ambient temperature remains the same, it's pretty much a certainty that more calories are being spent on heating the body.
You're talking about an extra 50 calories a day. It's going to be negligible against the 1100-1200 calorie deficit needed for that kind of weight loss. A half tablespoon of peanut butter.
Over the course of 90 days, you'd lose a grand total of a pound of fat or so.
I think it could be more than that. Studies have found that some people have burned off an increase of hundreds of calories a day just through an increase in fidgeting.
Despite the fact that all of the subjects spent the same amount of time in exactly the same confined space, the results showed large differences in the number of calories they burned. Some subjects burned as few as 1,300 calories in 24 hours, while others burned as much as 3,600 calories, a difference of 2,300 calories in one 24-hour period!
Keep in mind that most of what these subjects were doing would not be counted as "exercise".
You seem to be talking about some sort of very narrow non-motion definition of thermogenesis and I am not. I guess according to you, shivering because one is cold is not thermogenesis.
If you want to know more about what I'm talking about with drastic changes in calorie expenditure, do a google search on "non-exercise activity thermogenesis".
I doubt excluding sugars from your diet made a difference, or excluding alcohol alone did it. Beer in general do not have that many calories, it is usually junk food accompanied beer is what adding a lot of calories and fat.
^^^ IMHO, since there is a chance you were consuming pound of sugar and six-pack of beer daily :)
The article takes the long winded approach to point out the rational argument about how to combat obesity that's been obvious all along: moderation. Laying the blame on sugar in general is a panacea; the problem more has to do with how efficiently sugar delivery has been engineered. Processed foods have made it so that you can eat a relatively small quantity of matter and get a huge amount of sugar (and fat).
Want to get healthy and lose weight? Cut the processed foods. If it comes in a box, don't buy it. If there are ingredients you have trouble pronouncing, don't buy it. Your body has evolved to know when you've had enough food (slowing down your eating will help too). But those foods that are designed in a lab have sugar and other "bad" stuff in disproportionately high amounts, so by the time you've eaten enough to feel full, you've eaten way too much.
Willpower requires an expenditure of glucose in the brain [1]. When one is used to a high-sugar diet, the blood sugar burns off quickly, despite being slowed by insulin response, and the body craves more, with the brain being glucose-depleted to resist the impulse. This is not to absolve anyone of personal responsibility, but like gambling, it is a losing proposition over time.
The fact is, we're all wired a little differently. Some who drink too much can simple moderate; some find the need to temporarily or permanently quit drinking altogether. Anyone trapped in the "metabolic syndrome" of a sugary diet will probably be more successful doing the latter.
Or instead of not eating boxed food, just do a research how much "bad stuff" in it and divide accordingly to meet your calories and nutrients target for a day.
by "bad stuff" i meant fructose, sugars, fat, etc. (i hope proteins are not blamed)
Americans are lucky to have all of it stated on the packaging, which allows very precise control of nutrients consumption. So if you bought box of Devil Hole (which are delicious!) and read, that one hole comes with 120 calories - eat just one! That simple.
Now... if you can't stop on one, this is completely different issue.
It's as much about habit-forming as anything. If you just stop buying food that comes pre-packaged, you force yourself to make new food-buying habits that will trend towards healthier meals.
Cut the processed foods. If it comes in a box, don't buy it. If there are ingredients you have trouble pronouncing, don't buy it.
I've reduced my diet to the following: apples, canned pineapple, pork steaks, canned corn, and tap water.
The advantage is that none of those contain anything artificial (except the tap water). The disadvantage is that probably no one else would be content eating only those things. But I've been forcing myself, because the alternative is empirically worse.
It's likely I'm just fooling myself. But even still, it's a huge stress relief to not feel bad about we eat.
Personally I would be cautious of anything in a can as well. By it's nature, the act of food preservation usually requires a massive increase in either sugar or salt.
You're right you shouldn't stress about what you eat too much; what's the point of eating healthy if it makes you miserable. But it's worth thinking about why taking the time to eat healthy stresses you out. If it's a matter of not having time, consider what you could do to make time. Your entire existence subsists on the stuff you ingest. I find that fact reason enough to make time to find healthier meals.
This is all just my 2 cents based on personal experience. Certainly don't mean to be telling you exactly what to do. Just want to encourage thoughtful consideration. It's not a switch you flip, it's a journey
Corn is very starchy and low-nutrient. I'd suggest swapping them with something green, like canned peas.
Still, I applaud your approach. I've been on paleo for about a year, lost a bunch of weight, and for a while I was basically eating the same 12 foods on a loop (eggs, bacon, coffee, lamb, shrimp, fish, broccoli, spinach, carrots, raspberries, dark chocolate, almonds).
Walmart, actually. $1.99/lb. It's all I can afford.
There's plenty to feel bad about in there.
Yeah, I feel bad that an animal had to die for me to live. But genetically my body freaks out if I don't eat meat, and the animal's already dead anyway.
Regarding fat in the pork steak, I'm not so worried about it. I try not to eat the fat, but even still, it seems like there's a decent chance that it's better for you than the additives present in almost all other food. We've been eating meat for millions of years, so I'm betting on evolution to take care of me.
> But genetically my body freaks out if
> I don't eat meat
I'm not sure what you're talking about. How does one's body 'genetically' freak out?
> and the animal's already dead anyway.
You're still paying for it, which perpetuates the system.
> We've been eating meat for millions of years
Our genetic ancestors diverged from the great apes 4–8 million years ago. I'm not sure we have good analysis of their diet, but I'm not an anthro-geek, so I might be out of the loop. [Toning it back to thousands of years would be more accurate.]
Personally I think this is pretty extreme/bad advice. Plenty of over-processed foods don't come in boxes, and plenty of perfectly acceptable foods do come in boxes.
"What I find frustrating about this debate is that most people yelling and screaming don’t fully define the terms, perhaps because they don’t appreciate them (forgivable) or because they are trying to mislead others (unforgiveable). The wrong question is being asked. “Is sugar toxic?” is a silly question. Why? Because it lacks context. Is water toxic? Is oxygen toxic? These are equally silly questions, I hope you’ll appreciate. Both oxygen and water are essential for life (sugar, by the way, is not). But both oxygen and water are toxic – yes, lethal – at high enough doses."
I've even heard a university nutritionist make the claim that sugar is just glucose. Some days I feel stupid; others, I feel other people are more stupid.
That line alone cost the article much of its credibility in my book. A scientific article should not lump all sugars together as metabolically equivalent.
"Enzymes in the intestine split sucrose into fructose and glucose within seconds, so as far as the human body is concerned sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup are equivalent."
I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I recall that point is still widely contested.
Yes sugar is toxic because of the metabolic by-products of fructose, which is similar to the by-products of alcohol. Both are known to make freshmen put on weight.
He's a consulting research guy for the same people that benefit from HFCS. He has a bunch of propaganda about HFCS, so he is seriously bending the conclusions as much as possible in favor of it.
Here's the part where the article actually agrees that sugar is bad for you:
> Even if Lustig is wrong to call fructose poisonous and saddle it with all the blame for obesity and diabetes, his most fundamental directive is sound: eat less sugar.
WTF? It spent the whole article trying to show that sugar is ok, and then it concludes that?
His comment says more about the content of the article than most of the other comments. An article about sugar funded by ADM is not an objective source of information, due to the very large conflict of interest.
I have found that reduced-carb and reduced-sugar diets are the best way to lose weight. I have been on "6 small servings with lots of lean protein and yogurt" and on keto-style diets (lots of animal fats, butter, and, almost 0 carbs). Both have resulted in significant loss of weight. I find that the keto-style diet gives me a very even energy throughout the day (probably because the body is slowly burning fat and there are no insulin spikes).
I am amazed by the number of people here claiming sugar is bad. I've been eating fruits, fruit juices, milk and sodas as the main part of my diet for a few months now. I've lost weight and I feel really really good (I was in a low carb diet before and always craving carbs and feeling awful).
I've been like you in the past. But instead believing in Lustig and others, I've kept reading scientific studies and the work of Ray Peat is much more consistent.
In turn, obesity is a strong predictor of many diseases, regardless of other factors.
In individual cases unobservable "noise" can affect the rate of gain or loss vs the estimated rate given by subtracting an estimate (calories gleaned from an activities database) from another estimate (calories written on the side of the food packet).
But when you look at population BMI vs population calorie intake, it looks suspiciously like a perfect correlation:
Which is what we would expect from a basic acceptance of freshman physics. Energy and matter are conserved. No exceptions.
Singling out fructose as some kind of super-baddy doesn't work, for the simple reason that the population BMI-calories correlation appears in countries outside the USA. Only the USA has corn politics and only the USA has HFCS in the food supply in any abundance. Yet the rest of the developed world is getting fat on the same trajectory as the USA has.
The problem with refined fructose is that it contributes to you eating more because the liver cannot process it properly and does not send the "i am full" signals to the brain. Thus, it is in fact the reason why people have higher net caloric intake.
US style food is being exported all over the world. Sodas are sold all over the world. Obesity around the world is generally correlated to the level at which US style food culture is adopted.
It seems to always be acceptable to blame the US for any problem but as pointed out in the article neither sugar cane, refined sugar nor high-fructose corn syrup originated in the US. And almost every "US style food" originated somewhere else. So should we blame Italy, France, China and Mexico too?
I would say the US may be primarily responsible for the technology (agricultural, supply chain, financing, etc) that made food potentially affordable to everyone. An unfortunate consequence of having enough food to eat is being able to eat too much.
Except it takes about 5 seconds for sucrase in your small intestine to hydrolyze sugar into exactly the same substances present in HFCS. So it doesn't matter. At all.
Most HFCS in use today is a mixture of 45% glucose / 55% fructose. Sucrose is 1 glucose molecule and 1 fructose molecule bonded together. If fructose is really the 'bad' thing here, then HFCS has more of it.
Did you read the article? Cane sugar is sucrose. The sucrose molecule gets broken up into a fructose and glucose molecule by the gut. Thus, cane sugar is for all intents and purposes 50% fructose. This is very similar to HFCS, which is 55% fructose.
The correlation you want isn't BMI<->calories, it's food type<->calories. The question to be answered is whether some types of food make it easier or harder to maintain a caloric balance.
It's not just satiety, there's also the fact that fiber prevents absorption of a percentage of ingested food, and possibly other effects on appetite and digestive efficiency such as gut bacteria.
Food labels do account for all the known digestive factors, but as I noted, they're estimates. Monitoring your diet and watching the result is still the best method of weight control.
The ironic part about the hour and a half talk "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" is that all the people who it could help the most all have sugar-induced ADD and won't be able to sit through it to understand it...
Anyways I hope this recent bump from HN allows Dr. Lustig to make the talk-show rounds again.
I really hope not. I love sugar. It's also the only stimulant I can mete out in small doses that will keep me going without obliterating my concentration, as caffeine tends to do (disclaimer: I haven't tried cocaine).
I read about some research* regarding ego depletion and its relationship to blood glucose levels that was pretty interesting. Basically, they did a study with two groups of people. Both were asked to do some challenging problems requiring concentration, then both were given lemonade. One group's lemonade was sweetened with glucose, and the other with some artificial sweetener. The two groups were then asked to do more challenging problems. I can't recall the actual numbers, but the group that had glucose in their lemonade did significantly better on the second round than the other group, and the two groups were about the same on the first round.
The implication was that the brain uses glucose in its operation, and requires a certain level of glucose to function at full capacity. At least one cause of the brain fog we get after a full day's focused work is that we're low on fuel, which happens to be easy to fix. Unfortunately, it has other effects too that we might not want so much. I've been meaning to experiment on myself a bit with some glucose tabs after a long day of code, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
(*) I think that was in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" but I'm not certain now, too many similar books in between.
This test is flawed, as it doesn't have a "neutral group" - a group that had neither sugar nor artificial sweetener. How can they conclude that the sugar made people do better, rather than the artificial sweetener making people do worse?
Agreed, at least from my brief description, which was a summary of a summary out of a book. I'd say it's more likely that it's my own retelling that's flawed, though I haven't read the actual study. They also didn't have a group which was given the same number of calories from a different source (as far as I know) so it's possible that eating a chunk of meat would have the same effect. What I thought was interesting actually was that they were able to demonstrate beneficial effects from intake of calories directly on brain function.
As I wrote that, I did remember a bit of evidence that the glucose was actually beneficial - namely that they measured performance on the problems over time. At the end of the first set, both groups were showing approximately equal degraded performance. Upon resuming on the second set, the group given glucose was back up to nearly the starting level of proficiency, while the group given no glucose was at the same level they stopped at on the first group.
> I've been meaning to experiment on myself a bit with some glucose tabs after a long day of code
Anecdotal feedback - they work great for short bursts of activity. I use them when playing multiplayer games at night. Given my opponents are usually young and fuelled on caffeinated sodas I need some kind of edge after getting home from work. When I stomp a lobby on team deathmatch it's usually after popping a couple of glucose tabs. A good low-GI meal does much the same, but of course isn’t as convenient.
Glucose is not really an issue. Fructose is the problem. Unfortunately almost all sugar used as a food and drink additive today includes significant amounts of fructose. Glucose is not that sweet by itself so it is rarely used as sweetener in real life.
stimulant I can mete out in small doses that will keep me going
Consider the ''eugeroic'' ("Wakefulness Enhancer") class, described as "unproven primary mechanisms but proven efficacy". Bit scary, not something to have a habit around, but widely available through the internets.
Man. Sugar is the worst. Take it from me. I moved to the city the moment I turned 18, I didn't know much about cooking. Back in the 'burbs you'd be lucky to live within 10km of a grocery store. Downtown however, totally different story. I went NUTS with sweets and pizza.
I gained over 100 lbs in just under half a year. I was eating around 10k calories a day.
I then stuck to only these foods and have only been eating this the past couple years:
chicken
lean beef
kale + other greens
various fruit
cheese
That's it. No seasoning, nothing. I'm so much happier now. Better sleeps, better mood, better everything. My mood and days fluctuated like crazy when I didn't keep track of my diet.
I'd love to hear some opinions on the following talk from fellow HNers:
The link mentioned above is Robert Lustig MD's talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth". I found it very interesting and quite convincing, but beware that it's long (1.5 hrs) and you have to be willing to sit through a lot of biochemistry, since he goes through a bunch of cellular metabolic pathways in gory detail. If you don't care about the biochemistry, the parts about how everything we "know" about nutrition is based on shaky ground (e.g., the FDA's food pyramid, "fat in the diet is bad", etc.) is well worth watching, as is the history of how the amount of sugar in the U.S. diet has been dramatically increasing (e.g., the steady increase in the serving size of Coca Cola since 1915).
I cut out most sugar years ago, I think by not 'seasoning', you may be doing yourself a dis-service. Sugar isn't the only seasoning. There are lots you can do with herbs, oils and citrus (just stay away from vinegars which are often high in sugar).
For those who want to try restricting their diet to be more healty, a simple trick is to only shop on the outer isles of the grocery store. In more stores, you'll have the produce along one one, meats and fish along another, and then dairy and cheese along another.
Sadly, the bakery is also along a wall, so just be smart enough to avoid that one, and don't be tricked by bread, most of it has a significant amount of sugar.
The thing about fructose is that it is not by itself poisonous. The problem only comes about for refined fructose, such as that found in cane sugar and HFCS. In those cases, fructose overwhelms the liver and gets processed by wrong pathways which result in all kinds of problems. But if you eat fructose in the form of fruits and vegetables, your body has to take a while to break the fructose out of the fruit and vegetable cells. Thus, your liver only gets a steady trickle of fructose instead of a flood of it. As a result, the liver can process the fructose correctly. Furthermore, if you eat fructose with fiber, molecules from the fiber help the liver process more fructose correctly.
Knowing this, it is not difficult to construct an experiment that shows that fructose is not harmful. All you have to do is feed your subjects the correct form of fructose (i.e., fruits and vegetables). The experiment where subjects ate large numbers of apples and were perfectly ok was quite telling.
The other defense of the sugar industry is that it is not the sugar, it is the overeating. However, refined sugar causes the overeating. One of the results of processing fructose the wrong way is that the liver does not produce the hormones that are supposed to inform the brain that you are full. Thus, refined fructose causes overeating of sugar and anything else you happen to be eating with your sugar. Personally I know I eat much more fries if I eat them with ketchup and I will eat much more steak if I eat it with steak sauce.
The fat people and diabetics are being blamed for eating too much and lacking willpower. They may be partially to blame, but it is very hard to make the correct decision when your brain's own sensory mechanisms are being hijacked and tricked. It is very hard to stop eating when you are constantly hungry. But if you cut down on the sugar you will not be constantly hungry, and then you may find that you do not even need that much will power to cut down on your calories.