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by dragonshed 4607 days ago
You gloss over the salient points in Lustig's presentation:

- A calorie is NOT a calorie.

- Fructose is a toxin; Liver hepatic fructose metabolism is completely different from glucose.

- A high-fructose diet IS a high-fat diet, due to how fructose is metabolized.

- The focus on saturated fats gave way to the low-fat diet, which is really a high-carbohydrate diet, which in fact raised incidents of cardiovascular disease, and increased the US's over all consumption of sugar.

- Lastly, the effort in the 1970s to try and control volatile food prices has yielded the cheap availability of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and that has in turn adulterated the food supply in the US and other countries, where sugar is in practically every sort of food product.

These are congruent with the points raised in the latimes article. No good, and quite a lot of harm, has come from the focus on saturated fat, and the continued assumption that a calorie is just a calorie.

The science is there, but public opinion and public policy are all still stuck in the past.

1 comments

Lustig's position is tenuous at best, and at times he either carelessly misleads people or outright fabricates points to support his little crusade. Here's (http://sweetenerstudies.com/sites/default/files/resources/fi...) a take-down of a number of issues, logical and factual, in his recent book, and here (http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...) is a critique of his underlying argument about the unique threat posed by fructose (plus some follow-up based on comments and Lustig's own response to that piece http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-...). Basically, even where Lustig is correct his points don't reflect any real-world situations.