"Some said we were overwhelming them with food."

October 27, 2015 7:52 AM

Reducing consumption of added sugar, even without reducing calories or losing weight, has the power to reverse a cluster of chronic metabolic diseases, including high cholesterol and blood pressure, in children in as little as 10 days, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and Touro University California. (SLScienceDaily)
posted by Huck500 (27 comments total)

Ever since I read this [from this post] , the poison nature of sugar was made so clear to me that I've shied away from many things since then. And I'm not even inclined to eat sweets or drink soda.

Sugar is poison. Not because it is in itself harmful but because it triggers responses in the body that cascade.
posted by hippybear at 8:10 AM on October 27, 2015 [11 favorites]

I don't mean to be cynical, but hasn't Lustig repeatedly overstated the harms from fructose, enough so that we should view the study (and of course the reporting about the study) with even more skepticism than usual?
posted by mittens at 8:12 AM on October 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

10 days and a handful of surrogate markers does not a conclusive study make.
posted by greatgefilte at 8:13 AM on October 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

How many times has this been said already, and how many more times will it have to be said? Not faulting the study: faulting the fact that it will probably fall on deaf ears.

I guess anything that might keep people from putting children on 1200-calorie diets is good - I was on one of those at a doctor's suggestion when I was THIRTEEN.

Repeat here: definition of insanity.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 8:18 AM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

43 kids and 9 days? This is not a study.
posted by colie at 8:22 AM on October 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Neither the time period nor the sample size are an issue, depending on what the claims are. Almost no study is ever conclusive, and that's not a reasonable standard for any research. The study is suggestive and merits further investigation.
posted by idb at 8:38 AM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

You can pry my ice cream from my cold de—

Oh.
posted by FJT at 8:40 AM on October 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

There's an interesting take on this from Yoni Freedhoff at Weighty Matters.
posted by neushoorn at 8:41 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm inclined to believe it. I cut my sugar consumption down to the bone about 3 years ago, and everything about my health has gotten better since then.
posted by ELF Radio at 8:43 AM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

depending on what the claims are

The claim: "This study definitively shows that sugar is metabolically harmful."
posted by mittens at 8:43 AM on October 27, 2015

The Weighty Matters link is good context, thanks for linking it.

Not a perfect study by any means but still increasing the message that sugar is toxic.

I live in a health concious city with fairy informed citizens yet the number of times I have gotten comments of concern at my intake of artificial sweeteners (which is actually quite small) by people who look baffled when I explain that yes there is some evidence for the risks from artificial sweeteners but compared to the mountains of proof that sugar is a killer....

So far I have convinced exactly zero people that artificial sweeteners are most likely safer than sugar.
posted by Cosine at 8:53 AM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Half the sugar, half the butter.
posted by Kikkoman at 8:59 AM on October 27, 2015

An old pharmacists' saying is: it's the dose that makes the poison, not the drug.
posted by klarck at 9:02 AM on October 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

The messaging often goes like: people are over-indulging in this thing that's going to kill them! Indulging. Excessive engagement with pleasure. Shameful to our Puritan ancestors. But if anything, I think that what we've been sold is this idea that it'll be pleasure, and then it isn't, so we keep looking for more. A healthy quantity of dietary sugar can include all kinds of indulgences, what it can't include is sugar as a routine part of every meal, snack, and beverage. I'm not sure the idea that it's some kind of addictive drug is entirely right, though. Yes, we get accustomed to it very easily and seek more when things stop tasting sweet. But who really benefits from that? Coke doesn't survive as a company if people have a single soda once a week. I actually haven't had a super hard time cutting back from the perspective of willpower and deprivation. But from the perspective of convenience, man, it's a different ball game.
posted by Sequence at 9:18 AM on October 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

43 kids and 9 days? This is not a study.

They used paired analyses, so the effective sample size (and thus the power) are much higher than a n of 43 would suggest. Did you read the study? It's actually pretty well designed.
posted by un petit cadeau at 9:20 AM on October 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

As we are about to enter Peak Sugar Season (Halloween-Easter), I would mostly like to take my kid to a desert island until after Easter, but he would object.

He's actually got a pretty healthy attitude towards sugar, I usually end up throwing out the leftover candy from various holidays, but he still gets waaay too much of it, and people get *really upset* if you suggest they maybe stop offering him more goddamn sugar treats. REALLY upset. "You are a terrible mean parent!" upset. Look, he's had six giant cookies already, stop asking him if he wants more, lady. You aren't going to have to give him Pepto later tonight.

Thankfully on one side of my family, the parents mostly conspire to not bring much dessert to family gatherings, which can lead to some mild complaining but we ignore it.
posted by emjaybee at 9:58 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

As a confirmed sugar junkie (I seriously can't keep anything but dark chocolate in the house or I will EAT. ALL. OF IT. NOW) who has mostly been off sugar for a couple of months now, yeah, sugar's not great for you. It actually scares me a little.

It seems obvious to me that we're going to look at soda in 50 years the way people now look at cigarettes.
posted by Automocar at 10:08 AM on October 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Am I still allowed to drink beer?
posted by colie at 10:18 AM on October 27, 2015

See my previous post in the diabetes thread regarding my sugar addiction (*fistbump* to automocar)...

As for added sugar in EVERYTHING. Well I think this is a big problem. Not necessarily the defacto cause of our problems, of course, but I think the low-fat craze that started companies on this trend of adding sugar to compensate for reduced fat certainly added to our problems.

I'm not one to blame all our ills on "CHEMICALS!" or believe that a little chemical here or there is problematic. In general, I do think that we can expect certain safe doses if spread through the environment that directly ingesting would be problematic.

But there's a difference between an occasional carcinogen floating around in small doses that I'm constantly exposed to (which isn't the greatest, but not terribad) vs a small amount of toxin that constantly put in everything that I eat, even if it's not necessary, just to make it tastier or... more addictive. I think the addictive nature of sugar, and it being added to food that's not even necessarily supposed to be sweet food, is problematic for both it's metabolic effects (in a cumulative effect) and it's addictive properties. How much does the role of sugar play in addictive eating when added to foods that aren't nominally "sugary"? I dunno. But I wouldn't doubt it plays at least a factor for some people.

But in general, I'm more concerned systemically - not about "oh a little sugar in this food here ain't gonna hurt" but then add it all up from ALL the foods we're eating and it's not just "a little sugar in this food" but "a little sugar in that food... and that food..." and it's more than we consciously are aware of consuming.

Anyways, yeah. I have no doubt that if we could reduce the added sugar in our foods by very small amounts, we'd see a nice reduction in health problems across the board. I'm not saying BAN ALL SUGAR, but responsible usage in food might be a good idea.

(And then we can enter into class analysis and cost of eating organic/non-sugarified food, and convenience and other such things).
posted by symbioid at 10:23 AM on October 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

Am I still allowed to drink beer?

only sours and bitters
posted by murphy slaw at 10:23 AM on October 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

It seems obvious to me that we're going to look at soda in 50 years the way people now look at cigarettes.

Probably not. There's a big difference between soda and cigarettes, namely that having one cigarette per day can still do a decent job of killing you unlike a single can of coke.

I think it'll be more like healthy use of alcohol today. You might have a few drinks at a party every couple of months, maybe have it with dinner twice or three times a week as treat as part of an otherwise balanced diet. But bingeing on it in great volume and/or consistently? You've got a problem, bro.
posted by Talez at 11:27 AM on October 27, 2015

"Hi, my name is Bill and I have a sugar problem."
posted by FJT at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Other researchers are not impressed with this study.

Controls. This is not a randomized experiment. The study included only kids given a special diet with no control group. Such a design can be extremely suggestive: it is certainly possible that the new reduced-sugar diet resulted in all of the positive effects seen by the researchers. But it is easy to see why, without controls, the results are difficult to interpret. The food choices used in the study were based on reports of what the kids normally eat—but we can’t know whether we have accurate data on what they normally eat. The kids spent 10 days thinking about what they eat (because they were provided with this special food) and weighing themselves daily. Maybe the mindfulness alone led to changes in eating habits, resulting in better biological metrics. Without knowing to what we are comparing the low-sugar diet, we cannot be confident that reduced sugar is the only difference from the original diet. ...

Weight Loss. The study grossly underestimated the number of calories required by the kids to maintain their weight—an error in calculation or through reliance on self-reported diets—but also one that reflects poor study design. ...

Some similar arguments here, plus:

To summarize: we've got an uncontrolled trial that provided food-based substitutions in an outpatient setting, that led to significant numbers of individuals losing weight, and saw accompanying metabolic improvements, with questionable statistical significance. The primary outcome was a change in liver fat, which wasn't measured by MRS, but by a biomarker that is sensitive to weight changes, and did not significantly change in the statistically-challenged sensitivity analysis.

This study is quite small, and while having some interesting metabolic effects, leaves us unable to make any strong conclusions about fructose's role in metabolic health under isocaloric conditions. I still think this is a valid question to ask - it just requires a better study design, and greater control than the others were able to provide in this publication.[My emphasis] On a clinical note, I don't really think this study tells us much - if clinicians have patients who are consuming high levels of sugar in their baseline diet, like those in this study, they're going to tell them to reduce their sugar intake regardless of whether there's some unique metabolic benefit to it - clinicians want to induce weight loss in children with obesity. It'd be nice if we had a definitive study design to say, hey, focus on reducing fructose for the best clinical outcomes, but we can't say that from this study.

posted by maudlin at 4:54 PM on October 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Those "other researchers" are Sense About Science, and while I agree with quite a lot of what they do they are not without an agenda of their own and I think they are wrong in this case.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:09 PM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Goes and looks) Surprise! stats.org is funded by the Searle Freedom Trust, who’s goal is to back “free enterprise conservative ideas”. Yeah, I think they might just have a tiny agenda when it comes to criticising a study like this one.

(Sense about Science in the UK is mostly associated with the Spiked/ex-Living Marxism crew in my mind & I’ve never trusted them. They seem to be very good at snowing the UK academic science establishment but I’ve always suspected that the whole thing is a cover for the Spiked personal freedom agenda, which mostly appears to manifest itself in arguments for the personal freedom to consume the products of capitalism. Perhaps I’m just horribly biased against ex-Trotskyite entryists, but they set my teeth on edge.)
posted by pharm at 2:12 AM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

OK, thanks for the background, guys. I found those links via various people I consider trustworthy, but didn't know about the weird agendas.
posted by maudlin at 7:22 AM on October 28, 2015

Like many of these think tank backed entities, what they actually say is probably accurate. The biases are usually to be found in the choice of editorial subject & the sins of omission within that: what is left unsaid is often more important than the actual words on the page.
posted by pharm at 9:05 AM on October 28, 2015