By DR. BAYNE FRENCH, MD

Although much has been written in English over the years about sugar, I want to throw in my two cents. In my medical training, I was never taught about the detrimental health effects of sugar. But in defense of medical education, I was taught a lot about the human body, diseases, and medicine. What I know about health and nutrition, I learned from chiropractic school, my mother, and my own reading.

Nutritional science is tough. The crux is the difference between association and causality. As a case in point, American male meat eaters have a high rate of heart disease. But is it the meat? Or is it perhaps abdominal obesity, deconditioning, smoking, high sugar consumption, or a myriad of other influences and contributors to inflammation? Food questionnaires and other data-gathering tools are relatively easy, but a true medical experiment like randomized controlled trials is much more involved and expensive.

What about bias and outright duplicity? The Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) funded “research” and Ancel Keys’ famous “research” in the ’50s and ’60s directed outcomes to meet their conclusions—not exactly the scientific method. The detrimental effects of sugar on cardiovascular health were minimized and fat was demonized. These results dramatically changed the landscape of nutritional advice and spawned the high-carb, low-fat dietary recommendations we are still reeling from today.

Dr. John Yudkin, a British physician, warned about sugar’s effects on cardiovascular disease. He wrote Pure, White, and Deadly in 1972 and urged public health campaigns to focus on sucrose. How many of you have even heard of him? He’s not alone.

There are numerous sources and studies as early as the ’50s focused on sugar’s health detriments. The emerging evidence led the SRF to construct its research and pay Harvard researchers to shift the focus from sugar to fat. That’s enough to raise my blood pressure.

Tufts University performed research compiling a massive amount of data on sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption that many feel reflects causality between sugar and obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. These findings were published in Circulation in 2015. They report that worldwide, 184,000 deaths per year are directly attributable to SSB consumption: 133,000 from diabetes, 45,000 from cardiovascular disease, and 6,450 from cancer. They concluded the data was “indicating an urgent need for strong global prevention programs.”

I say stop buying it, stop consuming it. But what is “it”? Soda, of course, and most sports drinks, but I would include juice and milk too. Artificially sweetened beverages must certainly be better, right? Blood pressure going up. Well, maybe in a future article.

True sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide, which is 50/50 glucose and fructose. High fructose corn syrup is 75% fructose. Although all cells in the body can metabolize glucose, only the liver processes fructose, and there is no more potent driver of fat formation (lipogenesis) than fructose. What about fruit? Worry not! Just chew it, don’t drink it.

I enjoy endurance activities and have been accused of some outlandish pursuits replete with suffering and loss of sphincter tone.

Usually, I exercise on an empty stomach, but for races or longer training sessions, I fuel with a complex carb. I know of no head-to-head quality study comparing a more complex carb like maltodextrin to a refined carb like sugar in regard to performance, inflammatory markers, recovery, etc. What is known is that maltodextrin has significantly lower sugar content, and it makes intuitive sense to me that there would be less metabolic perturbation.

As a physician with a great interest in leanness, wellness, and disease prevention, I feel there is absolutely no place for sugar in the achievement of these things. So often I see wiry, lean, high-sugar-consuming outdoor savages with their first heart attack in their 50s. I also commonly see sugar-eating endurance freaks who think the rules of biochemistry don’t apply to them because of their fitness.

These individuals frequently exhibit the classic sugar-eating triad: insulin resistance/prediabetes, low HDL (an independent risk factor for heart disease), and high triglycerides. These are the same results found in obese patients with diabetes and heart disease. So I feel that sugar in all forms should be consumed next to never.