Altermedicine.org

by Dr. Mercola

What if you were to learn that every day, 25 percent of your calories came from a poison, disguised as a food?

And what if you discovered that this chemical imposter was responsible for your insulin resistance and weight gain?

And elevated blood pressure ...

And elevated triglycerides and LDL ...

And depletion of vitamins and minerals ...

And even gout, heart disease and liver damage?

What if you were to discover that this toxic substance had been dumped into your food in gradually increasing quantities for the last thirty years, with the full knowledge and blessings of the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the USDA and the FDA?

Would you be angry?

I wish I could tell you that this is just a dramatic plot from some fiction novel, but it’s actually a shocking reality.

The substance dealing such a crushing blow to your health and responsible for many, if not most of the chronic diseases that are so rampant in our society, is sugar -- and more specifically, fructose.

We now know without a doubt that sugar in our food, in all it’s myriad of forms, is taking a devastating toll on the health of our nation.

By the end of this article, you will have a solid understanding of how and why this has happened. In order to really grasp this material, you’ll have to learn a little of the biochemistry of energy, which is rather technical. But hang in there -- the knowledge you’re about to gain and the impact it will have on your health will be well worth the effort.

I will try my best to make the more technical aspects as simple as I can for you.

Big Gulp, Meet Big Belt

We are eating more than we were 25 years ago.

On average, men are consuming 187 more calories per day, and women 335 more calories. People who were never heavy before are becoming overweight, and the obese are becoming more so. We are now a “supersized” population.

But why?

Modern science has shown that the obesity epidemic it isn’t simply about lack of self-control, but rather a phenomenon driven by biochemical changes that have altered the way our bodies regulate energy.

Something has caused our appetite regulation system to go awry. Leptin, the hormone responsible for satiety, isn’t working. It isn’t simply a matter of calories in and calories out. Six-month old babies are the latest victims of the obesity epidemic--diet and exercise cannot explain that.

So, what are we eating now that we weren’t eating thirty years ago? What are we doing to ourselves that starts the day we are born?

Studies show that all of those extra calories are coming in the form of carbohydrates.

What carbohydrates in particular?

Sugar -- specifically, sugared drinks. Soft drinks (41 percent) and fruit drinks (35 percent) make up the majority of these extra calories.

Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used in food and beverage manufacturing are made from corn, and the number one source of calories in America is soda, in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In fact, the average American drinks 60 gallons of soda every year.

HFCS was invented in 1966 in Japan and introduced to the American market in 1975. Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup when they discovered that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was far cheaper to make -- sucrose costs about three times as much as HFCS.

HFCS is also about 20 times sweeter than table sugar. So it was expected that less sweetener would be needed per product. Instead, the amount of sweeteners has steadily risen.

The switch from sugar to fructose drastically altered the average American diet. The statistics are beyond alarming:

• Corn syrup is now found in every type of processed, pre-packaged food you can think of. In fact, the use of HFCS in the U.S. diet increased by a whopping 10,673 percent between 1970 and 2005, according to a report by the USDA[i].
• The current annual consumption of sugar is 141 pounds per person, and 63 pounds of that is HFCS.
• Adolescents are taking in 73 grams per day of fructose, mostly from soft drinks and juice drinks -- and 12 percent of their total caloric intake is from fructose alone.
• In the past century, fructose consumption has increased 5-fold.
• Processed foods account for more than 90 percent of the money Americans spend on their meals.

You’ve probably heard the statistic that one soda a day is worth 15 pounds of fat per year. However, one soda today does not equal one soda of yesteryear. The original coke bottle was 6.5 ounces. Now, we have 20-ounce bottles and a 44-ounce Big Gulp.

And many infant formulas are more than 50 percent sugar -- 43 percent being corn syrup solids. You might as well be giving your baby soda pop.

No wonder we have an obesity epidemic.

Our War on Fat

Sugar’s rise to power was really an accidental by-product of three political winds, beginning with the Nixon administration:

1. In 1972, Richard Nixon wanted to reduce food costs as part of his “war on poverty.” He partnered with the USDA to do whatever means necessary to bring food costs down.
2. In 1975, HFCS was introduced, replacing sugar because it was cheap and readily available.
3. In the mid 1970s, dietary fats were blamed for heart disease (more about this later), giving rise to the “low-fat craze.” Market response was an explosion of processed convenience foods, all nonfat and low fat, most of which tasted like sawdust unless sugar was added. Fructose was used to make fat-free products more palatable.

In 1982, the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) reduced our fats from 40 percent of our diet to 30 percent. We eagerly complied, believing we were lowering our risks for both obesity and cardiovascular disease.

Yet, as the low-fat craze spread, so did rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity -- the very illnesses we thought we were preventing. Clearly, the plan wasn’t working.

But how did the war on fat start, in the first place?

It began with a study called the Seven Countries study by Ancel Keys[ii], a Minnesota epidemiologist who used multivariate regression analysis to examine diet and disease. He compared the diets of seven countries, and his main conclusion was that saturated fats were responsible for cardiovascular disease. After much heated public debate, this notion that saturated fats caused heart disease was widely adopted, especially once he made the cover of Time Magazine in 1980.

Keys’ study laid the foundation for nutrition science, education, and public policy for the next three decades.

The problem, however, was that his conclusions were wrong.

Keys’ neglected to perform the converse analysis demonstrating that the effect of saturated fat on cardiovascular disease was independent of sucrose. In other words, sucrose and saturated fat were co-mingled into his data. In retrospect, it is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of sucrose versus saturated fat on cardiovascular disease in this study because the original data is long gone and Keys has passed on.

Nevertheless, lowering fat (without regard to sugar) became the nutritional model that persists to this day, despite copious evidence that it doesn’t work.

As our fats went from 40 percent to 30 percent, our carbohydrates went from 40 percent to 55 percent. And this carbohydrate increase was of the worst possible kind: SUGAR.

Proof That Sugar Cause Obesity

The American Beverage Association claims there is “no association between high fructose corn syrup and obesity.”[iii]

However, a long lineup of scientific studies suggest otherwise:

• Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital did a study of the effects of sugar-sweetened drinks on obesity in children[iv]. He found that for each additional serving of a sugar-sweetened drink, both body mass index and odds of obesity increased in the children he studied.
• Dr. Kelly Brownell of Yale University did a systematic review and meta-analysis of 88 studies about the association between soft drink consumption and health outcomes[v]. He found clear associations between soft drink consumption and higher body weight.
• The Fizzy Drink Study in Christchurch, England explored the effects on obesity when soda machines were removed from schools for one year. In the schools where the machines were removed, obesity stayed constant. In the schools where soda machines remained, obesity rates continued to rise[vi].
• A study by Schulze in JAMA in 2004[vii] provides further evidence that sugared drinks cause type II diabetes.
• A similar study in 2008 of African American women[viii] demonstrated higher intake of both sugar-sweetened soft drinks and fruit drinks leads to higher rates of type II diabetes.
• In a very recent study[ix], sixteen volunteers were fed a controlled diet including high levels of fructose. Ten weeks later, the volunteers had produced new fat cells around their hearts, livers and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. A second group of volunteers who were fed a similar diet, but with glucose replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

But it doesn’t stop at soft drinks.

Sweetened fruit drinks are contributing to your expanding waistline as well. High fruit juice intake (sucrose) is associated with childhood obesity, especially in low-income families[x].

What is it in soft drinks and juice drinks that is damaging people’s health?

It’s the fructose. Read on to discover exactly how and why this is so.

Fructose is NOT the Same as Glucose

Glucose is the form of energy you were designed to run on. Every cell in your body, every bacterium -- and in fact, every living thing on the Earth -- uses glucose for energy.

Fructose is not the same molecule. Glucose is a 6-member ring, but fructose is a 5-member ring. Sucrose (table sugar) is 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose, and HFCS is 42-55 percent fructose.

If you got your fructose only from fruits and vegetables (where it originates) as most people did a century ago, you’d consume about 15 grams per day -- a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical adolescent gets as a bolus from sweetened drinks. In fruits and vegetables, it’s mixed in with fiber, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and beneficial phytonutrients, all which moderate the negative metabolic effects.

It isn’t that fructose itself is bad -- it is the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.

Before you can understand the differences between how your body metabolizes glucose and fructose, you have to have a basic understanding of LDL.

There are Two Types of LDL -- and Only One is Bad

In the 1970s, low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) were discovered. LDLs were found to be higher in people with cardiovascular disease, so the focus of medicine and nutrition became lowering your LDLs.

One of the crucial pieces of the puzzle that wasn’t recognized at the time was that there are two kinds of LDL: Pattern A and Pattern B.

1. Pattern A LDLs are large, light, buoyant “floating” LDLs that don’t get under your endothelial cells, and they don’t cause plaque formation. They are harmless.
2. Pattern B LDL (or VLDLs) are smaller, denser LDLs that are able to wedge themselves under your epithelial cells and therefore roughen surfaces and stimulate plaque formation. These are the bad guys.

Unfortunately, when you get a standard lipid profile at your annual check-up, the LDL measured is a combination of both types. Lab measurements lump them together unless you have a very specialized panel, which most physicians don’t order.

To decipher whether or not you have an excess of the bad type, you can look at your triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels. (HDL, or “high density lipoprotein is commonly called “good cholesterol.”)

Here is a simple way to determine if you have too much bad LDL:

1. If your triglycerides are low and your HDL is high, then the LDL you have is the good variety.
2. If your triglycerides are high and your HDL is low, then the LDL you have is the bad variety. The triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is a far better indicator of cardiovascular disease than the total cholesterol-to-HDL ratio that everyone uses.

Now, here’s the bottom line: Dietary fat raises your large, buoyant LDL -- the one that is harmless. Dietary sugar raises your small, dense LDL -- the one that correlates with heart disease!

So, what we did over the past 30 years was add sugar to our low-fat food to improve palatability -- either HFCS or sucrose -- and we created a high-carb, high-risk diet -- simply the worst thing we could have done.

And we took out the fiber.

Fiber Foregone

Fiber is an important nutrient (although not acknowledged as such by the government) and offers many health benefits, particularly if the fiber comes from vegetables.

A high fiber diet may offer some protection from colorectal cancer, although the research is unclear exactly how this works and what all the factors are. The benefits of vegetable fiber are not yet completely understood. We do know that the risk of colorectal cancer is lower among populations with high intakes of fruits and vegetables, and there is some evidence that vegetable fiber may offer some protection from prostate cancer.

Fiber has three important roles:

• It reduces the rate of intestinal carbohydrate absorption, reducing your insulin response.
• It increases the speed of transit of intestinal contents to the ileum, which speeds up release of satiety hormones.
• It inhibits absorption of some free fatty acids to the colon, which would become short chain fatty acids, which suppress insulin.

In Paleolithic times, humans consumed 100 to 300 grams of fiber every day. Now, we are lucky to get 12 grams daily. At the same time that we have saturated our processed foods with sugar, we’ve taken out all of the fiber.

Why is this?

• Fiber-less foods are cheap.
• They have a longer shelf life and are easier to ship. This makes them easier to export to other countries.
• Fiber-rich foods take too long to prepare and eat so are less appealing to the general public.

So, we took out the fat and the fiber, added in a bunch of sugar, and bingo: we created the perfect recipe for an explosion of chronic disease.

The Molecule That Makes Fat Stick to You

Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. But what regulates fat accumulation?

Fat is a metabolically active tissue. Your adipose tissue is in a perpetual state of flux with free fatty acids (FFAs) being converted into triglycerides and back again, in an ongoing cycle.

FFAs can move in and out of the cells, across cell membranes, but triglycerides (three fatty acid molecules plus one glycerol molecule) are too big to cross. Fat enters and exists a cell as FFA, but is stored as triglyceride. When fuel is needed, the triglyceride is broken down into FFAs, which can then be burned as fuel.

The glycerol molecule, which is a primary component of a triglyceride, comes from something called glycerol-3-phosphate (g-3-p), or “activated glycerol,” which originates from the metabolism of glucose. The amount of G-3-p you make determines the rate that FFAs are “esterified” into triglycerides inside your fat cells[xi].

The rate of deposition of fat into your fat cells is dependent on the presence of g-3-p. The more g-3-p that is available, the more fat is deposited.

You will understand the significance of g-3-p when we come to the mechanics of fructose metabolism in part 3 of this series.

Lounging in front of the TV may shorten your life, according to a new study.

The study found that each hour of TV-viewing was associated with an 11 percent increased risk of death from any cause, and an 18 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. These findings held true even after the researchers took into account other factors that could raise the risk of dying.

The results may apply to any sedentary activity, not just TV-watching.

Now that they are barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the even more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States.

The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains or franchises, tested at 89 percent, 86 percent and 84 percent by weight. The testing also showed that some items easily shed the heavy metal.

Cadmium is a known carcinogen. Like lead, it can hinder brain development in the very young.

Laboratory tests suggest pomegranates contain chemicals that reduce the risk that women will develop hormone-dependent breast cancers.

The key seems to be a phytochemical, ellagic acid, which is found in pomegranates. It inhibits aromatase, an enzyme linked to the development of estrogen-responsive breast cancer.

While more studies are needed, consuming pomegranates could help protect against cancer development in the breast and perhaps in other tissues and organs.