For the last 100 years the basic chant of nutrition science has been the same everywhere – “a calorie is a calorie.” The idea is that all foods break down into little chemicals that provide fuel for our cells. The belief was that it didn’t matter what the food started out as, because by the end of the breakdown process, it all entered the energy making process as the same chemical – acetyl CoA. Although the chemistry is right at the end of the line, the truth is different calories have very different effects on the body before they get to the end of the line. Unfortunately this truth has been ignored and denied by nutrition science resulting in the health mess we have today.
I first learned about the impact of understanding the difference between calories about 20 years ago when I read about a study done back in the 50’s with prisoners. Half the prison population was put on a diet identical to the normal prison diet with one change made – all the normal sugar was replaced with dextrose – brewer’s sugar. In terms of calories the belief was that sugar is sugar and it should not matter whether you were using cane sugar, beet sugar, or brewer’s sugar. The calories were all the same.
After a year on the slightly modified diet the health of the prisoners was measured in comparison to the normal prison population. Strangely the obesity, blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and general health of the test group was much better than the normal prison population. What is the difference? Brewer’s sugar has no fructose in it, while cane and beet sugar is half fructose.
I have tried repeatedly to find a copy of this study the last couple years without any luck. Inconvenient science seems to disappear at times, and this was a very inconvenient study. It suggested that many of the most common chronic diseases are caused by the fructose found in our sugar! There are a few industries that might find this result unappealing to their profit margin.
Well a few days ago a new study was published in the journal Obesity that is pointing out the same inconvenient truth. The study is titled “Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome” by Dr. Robert Lustig from UCSF and his co-authors. This is an amazing study. Dr. Lustig is a specialist in pediatric endocrinology, which basically means a specialist in diabetes.
The study took 43 kids between the ages of 9 and 18 who were already showing signs of metabolic syndrome – the precursor of type 2 diabetes. These were obese kids of primarily Hispanic and Black backgrounds. The researchers studied these kid’s diets and found they were getting, on average, 27% of their daily calories from sugar. They lab tested them and then replaced their sugary foods with starchy foods for 10 days and re-tested them. They traded their doughnuts for bagels, pastries for baked potato chips, and teriyaki chicken for turkey hot dogs. None of the replacement foods were health foods. Junk food was replaced with other junk food from their usual supermarket, just replacing the sugar foods for non-sugar foods. The only sugars they still got were those found naturally in fruits and vegetables. This lowered their daily intake of sugar from 27% of their daily calories to only 10% of their calories from sugar.
The result? Every kid showed dramatic improvements in their lab markers for metabolic syndrome after only 10 days! There was no reduction in their calories consumed and no shift to more healthy foods. The starchy foods they ate still broke down to the sugar dextrose in their digestive tract, so their blood streams were getting the same amount of sugar as they always did. The only difference was the elimination of the specific sugar fructose found in ordinary table sugar we all know and love. Half of table sugar is fructose and half is dextrose. The fructose half is killing us. This is the same result that prisoner study found so many years ago.
A calorie is not just a calorie. It matters what kind of food the calorie comes from. Different foods have different impacts on us. But this awareness interferes with the profits of the big corporations. Let’s take a different example. When I was growing up everyone was rightfully afraid of rancid oils. Everyone knew rancid oils were poisonous and would make you sick. I remember my mom or dad checking the smell of a food kept in the fridge before serving it. If it smelled at all rancid, into the trash it went.
About this time was the beginning of the burger joint and the drive thru restaurants. Everything was deep fried and delicious. A constant problem was the unfortunate fact that when you heat up vegetable or seed oils, they go rancid almost immediately. So restaurants all used palm and coconut oils in their deep fat fryers that were saturated fats that did not go rancid easily. Then the scare about tropical oils causing heart disease hit the media and no one wanted their French fries cooked in palm or coconut oil any more. Restaurants had to switch to the newly promoted soy and canola oils (the real reason the tropical oil scare scam was started) but these oils all went rancid very quickly. What to do?
Big business eliminated any mention of rancid anything from the media to get people off the concern about rancidity. To eliminate the bad smell from the rancid oils different chemicals were invented to add to the frying oil. This did nothing to get rid of the rancid oils. It merely got rid of the bad smell. There, problem solved. America could have their French fries without anyone thinking about rancid oils. We will just ignore the inconvenient truth that they are still poisonous and killing those who eat them. Business does not care because the death is slow and chronic and hard to prove just what caused these chronic diseases. It is much easier to create fake consumer groups to support your promotion that it is fine to cook with these oils – even though it is not.
The sugar industry has done the same thing in America with our sugar consumption. The dangers of sugar have been known for over 100 years, and that information has systematically been buried and denied for the same amount of time. Back in 2014 the Food and Drug Administration wanted food manufacturers to list the amount of added sugars to their products and recently wanted that number be listed as a percentage of total recommended calories from sugar in line with the 10% total sugars per day number. The Sugar Association and Grocery Manufacturers associations both shot this idea down as unscientific and the evidence as inadequate. Never mind that millions of people are dying from eating their products, until there is 30 years of unshakable proof showing their products are deadly, they should be free to promote their products as a healthy part of everyone’s diet.
What is the message here? Don’t wait for some government agency to protect you from predatory business practices. You will be long dead before that happens. You have to be proactive for your health. You have to do the research and make your own decisions about how you are going to care for your health. Health is not the only consideration in life. For many people other considerations are much more important than health. You have to make those decisions for yourself. My desire is that you at least make informed decisions. Know the consequences of your diet and lifestyle choices before you end up having no choice because it is too late to reverse the damage.
