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Comment by brandon272

9 years ago

This is one aspect of sugar and fat that I find confusing. Is sugar in and of itself bad? If I like to eat sugar but am otherwise healthy (healthy weight, plenty of fruits and vegetables, plenty of exercise, etc.), am I still damaging my cardiovascular system?

Of course not.

Is sunlight bad because it can give you cancer?

Are apples bad because they contain cyanide in seeds you can accidentally consume?

Is red meat bad because it causes cancer?

Is alcohol bad because it causes cancer?

If you feel you're living a healthy lifestyle, you can easily check that by doing some medical tests. No diet related disease is going to invisibly attack you at a random moment in life.

Atherosclerosis is fairly visible. Diabetes too. With regular checks you can be sure you're fine.

Sugar in itself is not necessarily bad in moderation. But the "normal" diet contains way too much and this makes it bad.

Sugar is poison. Search YouTube for Lustig lecture video.

  • Lustig is unfortunately a scientific crackpot. His lecture has many untruthful statements (like those about Japanese) and puts blame mostly on fructose.

    As much as fructose does cause some interesting metabolic problems, unlike glucose, it still cannot be characterized as unhealthy (because the very Japanese he praises eat a lot of fructose and the studies are done on fructose extracts which can't even be reproduced with equivalent fruits in fructose amounts).

    He makes equivalent claims to those made by Campbell in his China study that casein from milk causes cancer - of course it does if it's 20 freaking percent of your caloric intake (which is practically impossible to consume long-term).