The excellent monthly FAB Research newsletter has devoted its August issue to the evils of sugar – especially the evils of fructose. Fructose is to be found, often in the guise of high fructose corn syrup, in the majority of processed foods and virtually all fizzy drinks. Obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, gout and cancer are among the illnesses for which it is blamed. New research is even linking sugar with aging via its effect on the gut bacteria.
Other items this month cover the ever growing body of research into the gut bacteria, how it influences our health and how medication influences it.
As always, FAB Research gives you the link to the original article, study or report (I get so cross when reviews fail to do this) along with a short but enlightening overview of their own.
I will say no more. Just log into their newsletter here to discover ‘the bitter truth about sugar’.
Environmental triggers ignored, again
Thanks for sharing this Michelle. Too much sugar definitely affects my skin and exacerbates eczema so I’m not surprised.
I recently read ‘Metabolical’ by the endocrinologist Prof Robert Lustig who gave the seminal lecture on sugar in 2009 which went viral – it now has had nearly 14m views! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM The book is mainly concerned with getting people to ditch processed food and eat Real Food, but there is a lot of detail in the book and it is insulin resistance that he is primarily concerned with. He feels he can write freely as he is now retired, and can draw on his 40 years of experience. The book is referenced in the FAB article.
In the book he has in passing lobbed one or two other thoughts into the discussion. He talks about LDL and the two different types of LDL of which it is composed. He says that statins are targeting the wrong pathology, as they reduce type A, the large buoyant LDL, but type B, the small dense LDL, is unaffected. Apparently the large buoyant LDL is cardiovascularly neutral but the small dense LDL is predictive of risk for a heart attack. The implication is that if you take statins your overall LDL and cholesterol will go down, but to what end?
And he says that until the recent past people would eat over 15 g of salt a day. But the reason this did not cause severe problems is because “the kidney is very adept at excreting excess sodium. But there’s one thing that inhibits sodium excretion by the kidney – insulin resistance. High insulin levels increase blood pressure, even with relatively low sodium intake. And many people are insulin resistant – and those people do need to lower their salt as a treatment of the disease.” But what about the rest of us? It seems that we are included in the general dictums issued by the government.
An excellent book and so many fascinating insights. I remember reporting some years ago on the cholesterol issue – lowering cholesterol actaually made no difference to the incidence of heart attacks – so why bother…. I hadn’t remembered his comments about salt but that makes total sense. When the only way to preserve food was by salting it our consumption must have been enormously much higher – yet heart issues seem to be far more prevalent now than they were 100 or 150 years ago.
That is really interesting Ruth – it makes total sense but I ahd never actaully heard anyone mention it before.
And my rosacea will flush up with sugar
After being diagnosed with diabetes type 2 way back in 2005 I later found out about fructose. MacDonalds at that time, fructose in the bun, in the burger and in the mayonaise, it is addictive. It is nasty substance and is used as makes food taste nice and be addictive and is CHEAP as chips, ah yes and chips coated in fructose too. It isn’t all about carbs.