Lunch @UCSF with Robert Lustig – The Three Myths of Chronic Disease

Lunch @UCSF with Robert Lustig – The Three Myths of Chronic Disease

Robert Lustig is known as the godfather of the sugar tax and is credited with a viral YouTube video, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which has snagged more than 6 million viewers.

His research examines the links between consumption of fructose and the development of metabolic syndrome. He argues that fructose can be consumed safely when accompanied by dietary fiber, but maintains that the liver is damaged by the fructose in table sugar and the high-fructose corn syrup added to food and drinks.

Lustig was described in the Financial Times as a “thorn in the side of soft-drinks manufacturers, as well as an irritant to the industry peddling low-fat foods.” Some industry-watchers have described Lustig’s YouTube video as “sugar’s ‘tobacco’ moment.” In a recent JAMA Pediatrics editorial, he wrote that processed food is a 50-year experiment that has failed, due to the exorbitant cost of its health consequences. Health care costs $3.2 trillion annually – of which 75 percent is attributed to diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, associated with metabolic syndrome. The solution, he says, is to eat low-sugar, high-fiber “real” food, “what the world ate for millennia without risk for chronic diseases.”

#sugar

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