Of mice AND men: sugar dosage determines life and death in mice and men

SAN FRANCISCO - Aug. 13, 2013 - PRLog -- San Francisco, CA August 13, 2013 -- A growing body of research on sugar consumption is emerging that indicates that added sugar in human diet is toxic at levels that are currently being consumed, and is a leading culprit in the global pandemic of obesity and metabolic disease, such as diabetes. A new study funded by the Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and published today in Nature Communications (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html) provides new data that demonstrates the adverse effects of added sugars at human-relevant levels.

Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, remarked: “While this new study was conducted with mice, it nonetheless provides additional confirmatory evidence that added sugar in the food supply should be controlled like alcohol and tobacco in order to protect public health. The need for long-term toxicity testing for key components in our diet, such as added sugar, is imperative and inescapable.”

Alarmed by seeing increasing numbers of children come into his clinic with severe obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases, Lustig and others have responded by forming a non-profit global health organization called the Institute for Responsible Nutrition (http://www.responsiblefoods.org/), whose mission is to arrest the industrial pandemic of chronic metabolic disease by improving the human diet through education, research, advocacy and action.

According to Lustig, non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia now pose a greater burden than infectious diseases, and seventy-five percent of health care dollars in the U.S. are spent treating disease that is preventable. Worldwide consumption of sugar has tripled during the past 50 years and is viewed as a key cause of the diabetes pandemic, which is just one indicator of the damage caused by the toxic effects of gross amounts of added sugar in the human diet.

Lustig underscored the urgency of his concerns: “Forty percent of normal-weight people harbor the same metabolic dysfunction as the obese, and are breaking the health care bank. The consistent exposure across all countries and all classes is added sugar, put in the diet by the food industry for its own purposes. As long as the public thinks that sugar is just ‘empty calories,’ we have no chance in solving this. The fact that children now get these chronic metabolic diseases almost as frequently as adults highlights the urgency of this issue. How many studies like this will need to be presented before the food industry starts to take responsibility for the harm it is causing?”

The article featuring the new study can be found at Nature Communications.

Contact Information

·         Wayne Potts, University of Utah biology professor and lead researcher can be reached at potts@biology.utah.edu. Phone 801-585-9677

 

·         Dr. Robert Lustig is available for comments on the study by contacting rlustigmd@earthlink.net, or by cell phone 415-595-7225.