Dr. Robert Lustig
speaker
405 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Jan
Dr. Robert Lustig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The recommended allowance is lower than that. Yeah. Okay, but the upper limit is about 16 spoons of added sugar per day. So we have an innate capacity to metabolize about 12 grams of fructose per day. By the way, that's for adults. For children, it's one third of that, four grams of fructose per day. Okay, four to six. So we're talking very little, talking very little.
But when you think about, for instance, kid in America, you know, 29% of kids in America consume the National School Breakfast Program breakfast in school. Okay, 29%. So what is... the National School Breakfast Program breakfast. It's a bowl of Froot Loops and a glass of orange juice. That is 41 grams of sugar. The upper limit for children in terms of their metabolism is 12 grams per day.
They got 41 grams and it's just breakfast. What do you think that's going to do? Now, if a calorie were a calorie, and if glucose and fructose were the same, then you say, well, you got to get your calorie somewhere. But because fructose is not glucose, because fructose is more like alcohol, because fructose's toxicity has nothing to do with its calories, That is a huge overdose.
And it has metabolic complications, it has systemic health complications, it has mental health complications.
Ah, well, yes, that way it is. The point is that the food industry is very powerful, and they have swept virtually every aspect of this under the rug for 40 to 50 years. They knew back in the 1960s that sugar was a problem. But they paid off scientists to say it wasn't. And we actually have the documents from the food industry. They live at the UCSF Food Industry Documents Library.
And we are doing research on corporate interference in health. What do those documents show? They show that in 1965, the sugar industry came to two Harvard School of Public Health scientists, the head of the Department of Nutrition, Fred Steyer, and his associate, Mark Hegstead, who became the head of the USDA five years later.
And paid them $50,000 in today's money to produce two articles for the New England Journal saying saturated fat was the bad guy and that sugar was exonerated. And they did it. And they did it. That's just one thing they did.
They also infiltrated the National Institute of Dental Research, NIDR, their study sections and their executive committee to take money away from nutrition research for dental health and put it toward a caries vaccine. A what? A dental cavities vaccine. How's that cavities vaccine working for you?
We have all of the data in their own words to demonstrate that they knew exactly what they were doing. This is not a hallucination. This is hardcore fact, and we've published this. And we now have a center at UCSF devoted to understanding the corporate determinants of health.
Correct. All true. Now, you could say that's correlation, not causation, but we actually have the causation. We have the data. We have it in mechanistic terms. We have it in clinical interventional efforts. We have it in societal efforts. There's a method for determining proof. That doesn't need randomized control trials. It's called econometric analysis.
This is what we have for, for instance, climate change. There's no control group for climate change, but we still know it's true. This is what we have for tobacco and lung cancer. You know, you don't have naive people start smoking. That would be illegal, immoral, get you thrown in jail. But we still know that tobacco causes lung cancer.
We know that football trauma causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy. None of these have control groups, but we know it's true through econometric analysis. This is a method of using natural history data over time to be able to determine proximate cause.
And we have that for sugar and diabetes, and we have it for sugar and heart disease, and we have it for sugar and fatty liver disease, and of course we have it for sugar and tooth decay. We're working on sugar and cancer and sugar and dementia. We're not there yet.
So let's do the sugared soft drinks first.
They are really bad. If you consume one sugared beverage per day, your risk for diabetes goes up by 29%. Wow. Okay. And that's if you have one. If you have two, 58%.
So this is a big problem. So, you know, that's demonstrating its toxicity at, you know, shall we say medium dose. You know, at low dose, you can handle it. But as soon as you go above that dose, it's a problem. And we have the data for it. And all of these are factored in. These are all econometric analyses. We've shown that sugar is a proximate cause of diabetes.
Whenever sugar availability changes in any country, diabetes prevalence changes three years later. And we've also done what's known as advanced Markov modeling where we go into the future and show that when sugar consumption goes down in any country, diabetes levels change and reduce three years later.
So it's a three-year window between the change in the diet and the change in the metabolic health consequences. We have those data. And the fact that they work both on the way up and on the way down is like, you know, take it to the bank. Now, that's for the sugared beverages. You asked me about diet beverages. I've got one here. Let's look at it. All right. I've covered up the logos.
Oh, I've never seen this before. I wonder what that is. The data now show, I mean, it took a while for these data to come in, but the data now show that the toxicity of one sugared soda equals the toxicity of two diet sodas. Half as bad. Half as bad does not mean good. Half as bad means half as bad. Well, it says zero sugar here, so how can it be bad? Well, because it's bad for a different reason.
So, yes, zero fructose, zero calories. I agree. But that doesn't make it good. It makes it better than the sugared alternative, but it doesn't make it good. Why? Why? Number one, you put something sweet on the tongue. Message goes, tongue to brain, sugar's coming. Message goes, brain to pancreas, sugar's coming, release the insulin. So I still get an insulin release?
Showing 361–380 of 405 · page 19 of 21
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