Doctor Sounds The Alarm: "You May Never Eat Sugar Again After Watching This" | Robert Lustig

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   What are the key negatives when we consume the levels of sugar that many of us are currently consuming?

2. RLDr. Robert Lustig0:07

   Well, first of all, let's make it very clear that sugar's not the only problem in our diet. It's the big one, it's the 2,000-pound gorilla in our diet, but there's other stuff too. But sugar is a particularly egregious molecule. Once upon a time, trans fats were the worst thing we consumed. Trans fats are the devil incarnate. Trans fats, the bacteria can't chew it up, which is why they put the trans fats in, all right? So that, you know, it would last forever, you know, the 10-year-old Twinkie. Well, the fact is our mitochondria, our little energy-burning factories inside all our cells, are really refurbished bacteria. We can't chew it up either. So the exact same reason for why they put the trans fats in the food is exactly why you shouldn't eat the food. Now, we know that, and they've come out of our diet. So now sugar is public enemy number one. So what does sugar do? And the answer is a whole bunch of bad things. The food industry says sugar's energy. Well, they're correct if you're a bomb calorimeter. If you just blow it up, if you explode it, yeah, you get four calories per gram. But we are not bomb calorimeters. Turns out that sugar actually poisons the mitochondria. Okay? It poisons it in th- uh, three separate enzymes that are necessary for mitochondria to do their job. The first one, AMP kinase, which is the fuel gauge on the liver cell. The second one, ACADL, acyl-CoA dehydrogenase long chain, which is necessary to get fatty acids into the mitochondria to be able to oxidize them to create energy. And the third one is CPT-1, carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1, which is the, um, enzyme that regenerates carnitine, which is the shuttle mechanism that brings the fatty acids into the mitochondria in the first place. In other words, when you consume sugar, you are poisoning your mitochondria. You are generating less of the chemical energy that our p- cells get powered by, called ATP. So if you're making less ATP, is that energy? It's the opposite of energy. So when you consume sugar, you are actually inhibiting your s- body's energy production. Can you think of a chemical that inhibits your mitochondria and reduces ATP production? Cyanide.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:52

   Cyanide.

4. RLDr. Robert Lustig2:53

   Cyanide. Cyanide does that, okay? Sugar and cyanide do the same thing. Now, obviously not as severely, okay? You know, cyanide, parts per million, keel over and die on the spot. With sugar, you know, it's in the parts per thousand, and you don't keel over on the spot, but you feel lousy, and over time it's gonna take its toll. But ultimately, if you're inhibiting your mitochondria, you are poisoning your body, and we now have the data to show how that occurs. So here's my question to you and your audience. Sugar is in virtually all ultra-processed foods, and u- ultra-processed foods are now 56% of the UK diet, and the, uh, amount of sugar that Brits eat, 62% of it is found in the ultra-processed food category.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:53

   Wow.

6. RLDr. Robert Lustig3:54

   So my question to you, and your audience, is, is ultra-processed food food?

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:04

   My view is that it's not really. I w- I would say no, but I know to many people that is super controversial, um, which we're definitely gonna talk about. But yeah, on a straight answer, I would say no. Depends on your definition, I guess, 'cause it's energy.

8. RLDr. Robert Lustig4:22

   Okay.

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:22

   It's got some calories in it which we consume in our mouth, uh, enable us on one level to, to sort of... I guess you're saying it's actually, uh, reducing the energy production, the sugar within it anyway. But yeah, on one level it sustains people and they can actually get on with their days, at least in the short term anyway.

10. RLDr. Robert Lustig4:44

    Well, you have to know what the definition of food is. So if, if I, if I had my Webster's dictionary right here right now, um, you, you guys, you know, in the UK probably don't use Webster's, you probably have something else, but if I pulled it off the shelf, it would say that the definition of food is the following, and I have no problem with this definition, "Substrate that contributes to either the growth or burning of an organism." That's the definition. I have no problem with that definition. It's a fine definition. All right? "Substrate that contributes to either the growth or burning of an organism." So we've just talked about burning. Sugar does not contribute to the burning of an organism, it actually inhibits the burning of an organism. And Dr Kevin Hall at the NIH did a study where he showed that when you give people ultra-processed food, they burn less and gain more weight, when everything else is controlled for compared-

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:46

    Yeah

12. RLDr. Robert Lustig5:46

    ... to the same diet in real food. Did this in 2019. So ultra-processed food does not contribute to burning. So now let's go to growth. Does ultra-processed food contribute to growth?My colleague, Dr. Efrat Monsonigo-Ornan, who is the, uh, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Hebrew University Jerusalem, uh, just published three papers in Bone Research showing that ultra-processed food actually inhibits skeletal growth, inhibits the ability of bones to increase in length and in width. And in addition, we know from the NutriNet-Santé study and many other studies that, in fact, what sugar does is it feeds cancer cells, it hijacks growth. So sugar doesn't contribute to burning, inhibits it. Doesn't contribute to, uh, uh, growth, inhibits it or hijacks it. So I pose the question to you again, Rangan, is ultra-processed food food?

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:57

    I, I'll go with my original answer, which is no.

14. RLDr. Robert Lustig7:00

    That is right. It is no.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:02

    [laughs]

16. RLDr. Robert Lustig7:02

    Ding, ding. That's right. But the point is that the food industry, you know, refuses to go there. The populace refuses to go there. The governments refuse to go there. And you and I are both interested in mitigating chronic disease.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:23

    Yeah.

18. RLDr. Robert Lustig7:24

    And you are right. If you get people on a real food diet, you can mitigate virtually any and all of their chronic diseases. I completely agree. You gave a TEDx talk basically saying you can basically take away somebody's chronic disease. I used to do that in my clinic, you know, when I was practicing, routinely.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:44

    Yeah.

20. RLDr. Robert Lustig7:45

    But only if they changed the food. And if they didn't change the food, no amount of medicine I threw at them could make a difference.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:54

    Yeah. I mean, what strikes me as a really key message is that the majority of what we're buying to feed ourselves and our families is ultra-processed food, whether it's here in the UK or with you in America, and that is contributing to this tsunami of chronic ill health that we're seeing. It's pretty... You know, it's pretty alarming. But what, what I think is so key, Rob, for me, is that it's so normalized now.

22. RLDr. Robert Lustig8:28

    Yeah. That's the-

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:28

    Like, it's the norm everywhere, schools, hospitals. In fact, if you wanna go down the real food route, you almost feel like a bit of a... Like, you know, if you try and do it with your kids, you actually become a social outcast in, in some ways. It's-

24. RLDr. Robert Lustig8:40

    Yep. You're a pariah.

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:41

    And I think this is the problem. It's just, it's the norm. We've moved so far away from what we used to do. In fact, maybe this is a good time for you to explain what you used to do when you were eight years old, 'cause I believe you had a granddad who lived in Brooklyn.

26. RLDr. Robert Lustig8:56

    [laughs]

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:56

    And every Saturday you would do something which I think beautifully illustrates this point.

28. RLDr. Robert Lustig9:00

    Well, that's right. So yeah, um, uh, bottom line is I completely agree with you. What we've done is we've normalized it. Once upon a time, it was actually not normal to eat ultra-processed food, and today it is normal. And I remember when that happened, because it happened to me. It happened to me in two ways. So on Saturday afternoons, my family would go visit my grandparents, who lived about, oh, I don't know, eight miles away in Brooklyn. And my grandfather would walk me down to the corner, um, uh, grocery store to buy a comic book and a six-and-a-half ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, and I remem- you know, pretty much every Saturday afternoon. And that was the big treat, you know, the comic book and the Coca-Cola. That was at, on Ocean Avenue and Avenue N in Brooklyn. Um, you know, the fact is that that was once a week, and it was six and a half ounces, right? Today, you know, children are consuming about, I think, 35 ounces a day, um, you know, uh, median. So they are getting about six times the amount of sugar that I did from that one Coke, and they're doing it every day instead of once a week. In addition-

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:17

    I mean, let's just... C- can we just pause on that for a second? You're saying you had six ounces once a week, and we're assuming back then that the rest of your diet throughout the week was low in sugar, low in processed food, sort of a real food diet?

30. RLDr. Robert Lustig10:33

    Well, my mother worked three jobs, and so I ate a lot of Swanson TV dinners when they first came out.

Episode duration: 17:51