Weighing Sugar: Is It Toxic?

“How long you been off the White Devil?” the barista asked me when I refused sweetener for my coffee. I’d never heard that term for sugar, but I immediately liked her more for introducing me to it.

“Just over a month,” I replied. 

“I’m 27 days now—and it’s killin’ me!” she confessed.

I nodded knowingly. Going that long without sugar can feel like a slow death.

But, in reality, it’s the White Devil itself that’s killing us slowly.

For me, the Great Sugar Ban began when I got some crazy virus that was going around my daughter’s classroom known as Fifth Disease. It’s not so bad for kids, but like chicken pox, it’s much worse in adults and can cause painful joint swelling that lasts for months. Yep, months.

This is what led both my acupuncturist as well as my primary doctor to instruct me to stay away from sugar. Both agree it feeds a virus and compromises the immune system. The acupuncturist went further, asking me to abstain from sugar for a year. I think she said a year because this particular virus can linger in the system quite a while, but I had temporarily stopped listening at that point.

Since then, I’ve done some research on the White Devil in an effort to make sense of my new world sans sweetener (I can have Stevia, but I’d rather go without, if you catch my drift). And if I have to face what it can do to us, dear readers, then so must you. Please, don’t make me go through this alone!

First, I consulted the website of my acupuncturist, Laurie Morse, whom I greatly respect for what she’s done for me and several of my friends and who has many years of experience practicing Chinese medicine. Laurie is a bit maniacal about balancing blood sugars through a proper diet, which takes one thing from each of the three macronutrients: protein, fats and carbohydrates for each meal or snack.

She advises that it’s especially important to pair carbs with proteins to keep your blood sugars even. If your system is overloaded with extra sugars, she says, it cannot metabolize them and they linger in the blood, causing a host of problems to your tissues and organs. One example of this is insulin resistance, in which the natural mechanisms that tell you that you’re full shut down.

“Balancing blood sugar is absolutely essential in adrenal recovery/health,” Laurie says, referring to the adrenal glands, which control many aspects of our vitality. In fact, I once asked her about a friend with fertility problems (a specialty of hers) and she gently reminded me that she can’t work with someone unless they’re willing to modify their diet to balance blood sugars.

OK, so making sure my blood sugar levels are even will help me get better. I’m in. But why do I have to cut out sugar, sweeteners and highly glycemic fruits entirely?

“Can’t I just have a little honey in my coffee?” I beg as I lay on Laurie’s treatment table, accepting miniscule needles to further balance my system.

“I wouldn’t right now,” she says. “That’s like saying, ‘Can’t I let a couple of terrorists loose on my plane?’ ” Hmm, back to the White Devil label again.

I remember an article I read in the New York Times about a YouTube video with over a million and a half hits. The video is called “Sugar: the Bitter Truth” and is a 90-minute long lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig at UCSF. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist and our nation’s leading expert on the childhood obesity epidemic—and he’s quite a presenter. I doubted I’d want to watch the whole lecture, or that I’d have time, but found myself drawn in by Lustig’s coherent, direct style.

As the Times points out, Lustig calls sugar “evil” or “poison” 13 times in the talk and though this sounds a bit fanatical, either over a million people on YouTube are drinking his Kool-Aid too, or the facts he lays out just seem to make sense.

I’m going with the latter. From Lustig, I learned that not all carbohydrates are the same. The worst sugars are those with a high fructose level, like fruits, juices, starchy veggies and especially sweeteners such as table sugar, honey, agave and maple syrup.

In our bodies, these kinds of foods very quickly overload the liver, where they should be metabolized, but flood our blood with sugar instead. This leads our body to do things like keep eating even when full and store much more fat than it needs to. For this reason, Lustig says, “A calorie is not a calorie, a carb is not a carb.” They are not all created equal.

Also, according to Lustig, “Insulin resistance is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in type 2 diabetes. Excess fructose is now also believed to cause hypertension, liver disease, inflammation and very possibly even many cancers.”

Now, high-fructose corn syrup and its corporate-induced takeover of our beverage and processed foods industry has received a lot of bad press of late. Lustig not only explains why, but also why all sugar is toxic to us. High-fructose corn syrup is just a very cheap, tasty way to fill our bodies with the express ride to skyrocketing blood sugar.

But given all the fructose we already take in from other sources, combined with our chronically imbalanced meals and lowering exercise levels, he sees any intake of fructose as a poison and isn’t alone among researchers tying it to unbelievable stats about rising obesity and other deadly disease levels in our nation.

He even argues that fructose’s effect on the body is the same as the effects of another sugar, ethanol, on the brain and asks the government to control it just as they do tobacco and alcohol. “The brain doesn’t get sick after fructose consumption, like ethanol [alcohol] because the brain doesn’t metabolize fructose. The liver does. And the liver doesn’t get sick after one fructose meal, it gets sick after a thousand fructose meals … which is what we eat,” he says towards the talk’s ominous ending.

All right, he had me at “calorie.” Also, just seeing how hard it’s been to eliminate sugar from my life this last month has made me realize just how addicted I truly am to it. But getting a better understanding of why I should resist it has definitely strengthened my resolve.

Last weekend I went to Ikea to pick up a shelf—and 10 other things I didn’t think I needed until I got there. But one thing I didn’t take on was all that fructose in the heavenly smelling cinnamon rolls that filled the air as I shopped.

With Lustig’s dire warnings still ringing in my ears, it wasn’t even hard. So, if nothing else, that 90 minutes of YouTube saved me the anguish of the unattainable cinnamon roll. Now I just wonder: What else will it save me from, someday?