In 1974, pediatrician William Crook wrote a letter to a medical journal in which he named cane sugar “a leading cause of hyperactivity” (what we now call ADHD). This truism has been so persistent that it was immortalized on an Old Navy “Let’s Blame the Sugar” T-shirt for babies. Researchers debated Crook’s claim for decades. The scientific consensus now? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “more research discounts this idea than supports it.” They cite one study as a possible explanation for the myth’s persistence, in which “mothers who thought their children had gotten sugar rated them as more hyperactive […] compared to mothers who thought their children received aspartame.” It was belief about sugar’s ill effects that biased the mothers’ perception.
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Real science, as Ioannidis reminds us, is slow and humble. Only time will tell if the current level of sugar alarmism is warranted, or if many years from now the comparison of sugar to cocaine will look a bit ridiculous. Should that be the case, governments and policymakers will be in the unenviable position of backtracking on yet another dietary guideline, further undermining the public’s trust in science as an enterprise. The research on sugar might be right – but our history of bias shows that we have a tendency to jump the gun on sugar due to moral furor.
We need a famine.
h/t Meatriarchy
just check the contents label on ANY processed food (bottle/can/package) for sugar.
“governments and policymakers will be in the unenviable position of backtracking on yet another dietary guideline,”
Someone remind me are ANY of guidelines from the 1970 and 80’s still considered correct?
Why should we believe any of the recent ones?
What worries me most about this discussion on sugar is that governments start to get involved because of pressure from the public.
“There oughta be a law.”
No, there ought not be a law. Keep governments OUT of this kind of situation because, whatever they do, they do for their own purposes, not for the public’s.
The U.S. tried prohibiting alcohol because a good number of wives were tired of their husbands coming home drunk and causing trouble (beating them, essentially). The resulting Prohibition, even after being repealed, was the primary catalyst for the sizes and power of governments we have today. Even the income tax was instituted in the U.S. as a means of providing the revenue that would be lost because of no further alcohol sales.
The income tax was too juicy to repeal and the U.S. now has monstrosities like the AMT, FATCA, etc., etc.
Banning sugar via law will not result in banning sugar. It will only cause more government growth.
You need to a program to keep track, but the problem isn’t so much sugar as it is high fructose corn syrup. Believe it or not the factory where corn is converted to high fructose corn syrup has a dual function…its real purpose. That is to produce ethanol as a “green” fuel.
There is a terrific book out called Rats In The Grain about the corporate corruption at Archer Daniels Midland in the 80s and 90s, the fructose/ethanol bit is just an aside in the book which is mostly about price fixing and non-compete clauses, negotiated in secret by global food giants. But, the point remains that ADM was into the green fuels thing decades before their lobbyists got it mandated and the HFCS was just a bonus that seduced pop manufacturers to switching from sugar, the price of which was artificially high in the US because of Big Sugars sweet heart deals with the feds. Obesity is just an outgrowth of price fixing in food markets.
“You need to a program to keep track, but the problem isn’t so much sugar as it is high fructose corn syrup.”
I agree. Perfectly true. And the powerful U.S. Corn Lobby will guarantee that the consumption of fructose corn syrup will only be affected by legislation which promotes it, not curtails it.
Same goes for ethanol in our gasoline.
Let’s assume that an excess of sugar IS the reason why children are hyper-active (let’s pretend for a moment). Am I being made to understand that parents cannot reduce their children’s sugar intake, get them off of their tablets, ect and get them to exercise?
A double espresso & 18% real cream without a table spoon of raw cane sugar in the morning is as good as a night cap – wassa matter with you nervous d-wads?
I read some fruit jucies and drinks have more sugar in them then many soft drinks do
Poison is in the dose, and even in the concentration of the dose.
To get perspective on dose, it helps to consider hominid evolution. Hominids moved from fruit-eating in the jungle to relatively fruitless savannah, so much so that we lost the genes for the fructase enzyme to metabolize fructose directly. However, on a seasonal basis hominids would encounter a fruit source (say a fruit tree with ripe fruit). To harvest the benefit, the hominids would have to binge eat the fruit. But about half the sugar in fruit is fructose. So the liver generally metabolizes fructose into triglyceride fat (some portion of the fructose may be converted into glucose depending on what else is going on metabolically). Thus the hominid is genetically disposed to derive great pleasure in sweet (fructose is sweet and indicates fruit ripeness) and the fructose binge disturbs leptin signalling from fat cells, to override normal appetite regulation, to allow binge eating while the fruit is ripe to store more body fat to carry through the winter.
So plainly the body can withstand sugar binges. But just as plainly, the body was not adapted to have concentrated sugar hits continually, past ripe fruit seasons. Further, sugar in intact fruit is different than acellular sugar (processed sugar). the former is largely within plant cells, which means the cell walls have to be broken down in the gut before the sugar escapes. This gives time for gut bacteria to consume much of the sugar and moderate the rise in blood sugar. Further, eating acellular sugar feeds undesirable gut bacteria in the upper gut, leading over time to acid reflux and several other conditions, including nasty biofilms.
So the problem with sugar lies in the intensity, duration, frequency and form of dose. What is fairly plain is that the anti-fat fad that was launched by the McGovern Report in 1977 has resulted in substantially increased sugar consumption, leading to all sorts of chronic conditions caused by sugar that would not be caused by consumption at lower levels and in different forms.