Gary Taubes wrote a great article on this topic in the Wall Street Journal on April 13, 2011 and his intense scientific rigor is well worth the read. See the full article by clicking the link below.
I was especially fascinated by 3 main questions the article addressed
- Is our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years?
- Is sugar the likely dietary cause of several chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them?
- Is insulin resistance a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease? (Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth.
Robert Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. He believes sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. He published his first paper on childhood obesity 12 years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since. On May 26, 2009, he gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on You Tube the following July and has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month.
I recommend reading the full article. It is very well written
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=all
Gary Taubes is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”
