SUGAR: infographic and general info

I was notified by the creators of the below infographic and thought I’d take the opportunity to repost some information about sugar. Infographics are always vaguely problematic as they are by necessity largely simplified but I like the visual impact. Some people learn better that way and they also seem to really love them for whatever reason. Brain candy, perhaps. I won’t speculate about what that might mean at length, but I have included more detailed info for those of us who need more sustenance!

The New York Times a while back covered the toxicity of our favorite “food.” Diet matters and it’s about time the mainstream media starting attending to this fact. There are many things in the standard American diet that harm. Sugar is as good a place as any to start learning about this issue that we might start making moves towards improving the quality of food that we put into our bodies and thus heal our whole beings.

Sugar is not the only thing we eat that harms our well-being in numerous ways. To learn more about diet and health and mental health see: Nutrition and Gut health for total wellbeing (of note processed carbohydrates and even too many grains, in general, not just sugar are not greatly appreciated by most of our bodies most of the time)

Is Sugar Toxic?

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

The number of viewers Lustig has attracted suggests that people are paying attention to his argument. When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment “surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,” not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. read the rest