PNTV: The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes (#387)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes. The Case Against Sugar. No subtitle necessary. Although we do have a great quote from the Economist on the front cover here. They say, compelling, perhaps at long last, sugar is getting its just desserts. The Economist happens to be my only source essentially of news these days, staying offline, reading that on a weekly basis. But that's secondary to the point of today's pntv. Gary Taubes, we featured another one of his books called why We Get Fake Fat. He's one of the leading thinkers and journalists studying health issues. He's at UC Berkeley, where I happen to drop out of law school, which happens to be right across the bay from UCSF, where the authors of the last two PNTVs we discussed are based in doing their research. Robert Lustig, Fat Chance. Elizabeth Blackburn, Alyssa Epel, the Telomere Effect, the ucsf, he's at UC Berkeley. They're all saying the same thing, which is, when we step back and look at what's going on with chronic diseases in Western society, we can find a primary suspect. And this book is written from the vantage point of kind of the prosecutor. The Case Against Sugar. It's brilliant, highly recommended if you're into this sort of thing. As always, we have a philosopher's note with a bunch of big ideas. And as always, we have five of them we're going to cover today. So, again, the case Against Sugar. It's presented from the perspective of a prosecutor bringing their case against the prime suspect. And one of the key themes of the book is a lot of people, when they look at Western diseases and chronic diseases of Western society, they see complexity. Oh, there's so much going on. We've got heart disease over here, we got diabetes, we've got cancer, we've got neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. There are all so many different things going on. And he says, well, okay, but if I'm a detective and I'm trying to find the suspect for a series of crimes, and there's a lot of commonality between the crimes, then I'm going to look for one suspect. I'm going to start with Occam's Razor and try to find the most simple, elegant solution to the given challenge. And he says, if all of these chronic Western diseases are associated with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which they tend to be right, then it's only logical to say, but okay, what causes insulin issues and Metabolic syndrome, because that might be a worthy prime suspect. Again, if western diseases are associated with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which they are, then I wonder if there's a common cause to the insulin issues and the metabolic syndrome, because that might be worth paying attention to. And in fact, that might be the Occam's Occam's Razors, prime suspect to this whole deal. And guess what that points us to. The suspect is sugar, as you might have guessed. Now, to navigate that, we need to go to the next big idea, which is two theories, which we've talked about in different contexts, two different theories of how our bodies deal with calories, right? So there's something called the energy balance approach. Then there's the metabolic or hormonal approach. Two different theories. Very important to see the vantage points that individuals have. Now, most people, the dogma is that weight issues, if you want to reach your optimal weight, that's essentially an energy balance issue. You need to make sure that you're burning more calories than you're consuming. If you get that right, then, then you'll maintain your optimal weight. Now, part of that logic, and of course there's some truth to that, the calories are not irrelevant. But individuals in that camp take it too far. And they say that a calorie is a calorie, and they make no distinction between different types of calories. And the point that we made in Fat Chance, which is huge, is that calories, where you get your calories matters. So as Robert Lustig points out in his book, if you give people an extra 150 calories in their diet, and they're just kind of not sugar calories, right, that won't have a huge impact on their risk factors for diabetes. But if those 150 calories, you give them an extra 150 calories, not that big of a deal on their risk for diabetes, but if those 150 calories come from sugar in a can of soda and their risk of getting diabetes goes up sevenfold, right? So plus 150 calories from sugar equals in a can of soda equals a seven times higher likelihood of getting diabetes. That stat is just incredible to me. And it points to the second theory, which is, you know what? A calorie isn't a calorie and that calories matter. And that sugar often is looked at by people in the traditional world as just empty calories. And the sugar industry has worked very, very hard to convince us that it's just an energy balance issue. It's not our Food, you just need to work out harder. But as we discussed in Fat Chance, when you consume too much sugar and then the associated refined flour and junk food products that go with that, but in this context, we're talking about sugar, your insulin level gets jacked. You, your leptin levels get out of whack, which means that you're eating more, but your brain isn't getting the signal that you've eaten enough. So it tells you you're still starving. So you eat more and you go. In this vicious cycle, a calorie is not a calorie, that calories have different metabolic effects on your body, they have different hormonal effects on your body. And again, the primary suspect here, the big villain in the conversation, the Darth Vader, the Voldemort, as Robert Lustig puts it, is sugar. Add 150 calories of sugar into your diet and you have a seven times more likely chance of getting diabetes. From the study that Lustig talks about. There you go. Third big idea. Is sugar a drug or is it a food? Interesting question. Worth pondering. The data shows that we want to consider the possibility that sugar is not a harmless little pleasure, it's in fact a drug. You can put people into a study, give them fast acting carbs versus slow acting carbs. This is what David Ludwig did at Harvard, Maryland, PhD, studying this stuff, gave people fast acting carbs, slow acting carbs, put them in an fmri. And what he saw was the fast acting carbs triggered the same part of our brains, the addiction center known as the nucleus accumbens. That gets triggered in things like cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin. Again, just lights up like a laser, he said, with the fast acting carbs. And Gary makes the point, Taubes makes the point that if you chew on carbs, coca leaves, not a big deal, it's mildly stimulating, not a big deal. But if you refine that into cocaine, it's extraordinarily addictive. Same thing with sugar. You have it in unrefined forms, not that big of a deal. You refine it down to its essence like we have it, lights up the nucleus accumbens. And again, this isn't theory. This is, look, in a lab, ingest it, boom, this is what happens. So the question is, is it a drug we or is it a food? The data points pretty powerfully to the fact that we may want to consider that these are not foods in bright line eating. We're going to talk about that soon as well. She says the same thing about flour, sugar and flour Consider them as drugs, not food. When you refine something down to that essential element again, in whatever form, whether it's coca leaves to cocaine or fiber rich sugar into refined sugar, you're going to have some issues. The fourth idea here is toxin. Looking at sugar as a toxin again as our prime suspect, seeing the relationship between these chronic diseases, metabolic syndrome and insulin issues, and the sugar that creates it. The problem is that the toxic effects don't happen immediately. It'd be awesome if you had sugar, then you experience the negative impact immediately. But the reality is it takes years and decades for it to accumulate. Not unlike smoking, by the way. You have one cigarette, you don't just die, right? It takes years and decades for the little micro toxins to have their cumulative effect. Unfortunately, again, we don't have the acute response. It's a chronic long term response. Dave Asprey gives a great metaphor in Head Strong talking about general toxins in our environment. He says it's like Superman and kryptonite, right? The acute kryptonite is a huge chunk of kryptonite. Superman is immediately disabled. He loses his power, right? But the trick is, and the problem is that Superman these days, it's like there's kryptonite dust spread all around his home and his office and he's getting weaker gradually. He doesn't even know that the cause of it was the kryptonite. Can't figure it out. I'm just getting tired and I'm getting weaker, right? Well, imagine sugar as the same basic kryptonite. It takes time. It's a chronic thing, literally years and decades for its effects to take place. And little aside here we recently did an episode on Atomic habits, right, by James Clear. He says if you want to break a bad habit, you need to make the negative effects of it immediate. You won't break a bad habit if the effects are way delayed. You got to make it immediate. The same way you need to make a good habits effects positive immediately you got to feel good right? After you do something good, you got to reward yourself and feel good about it. It's got to be satisfying. He says, well, a bad habit, you need to figure out how to make it immediately bad for you so you feel it. And we talk about ways to do that in that episode. But the point here is sugar is a toxin, albeit a chronic one. Which leads us to our fifth big idea, which is how little is too much. If you believe this basic idea. And I realize it's challenging a lot of ideas, the reality is Our society, as Krishnamurta says, is so sick. He says it's no measure of well being. It's one of my favorite quotes. It is no measure of well being to be well adjusted, no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Right. It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Sugar is ubiquitous. Junk food is ubiquitous. It can't be that bad for you. It's everywhere. My doctor is not saying anything about this. I can get a Coke or a soda and sugary foods in my chemotherapy room. Sugar can't be that bad for you, right? Well, unfortunately it is. We need to have the ability to step back iconoclastically, see that this part of our culture is broken and do something about it. In this context, he says, how little is too much? And he likens it to smoking. So not everyone who smokes is going to get lung cancer. So not everyone who eats sugar is going to get is going to have insulin issues or diabetes or other metabolic syndrome related chronic diseases. That's just how it is. Right, but we know that smoking is associated with and is a causal factor in lung cancer. Right? And he says, let's use the same basic parallel here with sugar being associated with these chronic diseases. Now with smoking, how much is too much? Can you smoke in moderation? Is a cigarette or two cigarettes or five cigarettes or ten cigarettes a day? Okay, at what point is it too much? Right? How little is too much smoking? Now, even saying that out loud, you realize that's absurd. That's just insane. Like, come on, I know smoking is not good for me. So even if I'm doing it, I know it's not good for me. I might be addicted to it. If I'm not doing it, I really know I'm not going to smoke any cigarettes. Why would I do that? That doesn't make any sense. Right? Yet know that at a time, at one point in time, doctors were recommending smoking advertising by the tobacco industry. Featured doctors saying, yeah, this cigarette's better than other cigarettes. We now think about that and talk about that and say, that's absurd. Well, guess what? Hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll say the exact same thing about sugar. Everyone is looking the other way. It's time to look this way at it and think about it. So, so anyway, how many cigarettes is too much? Well, none. How many cigarettes are you going to give your kid? None. You know, that's not going to do anything power beneficial for him. And he makes the question, asks the Provocative question that we each need to answer independently. How little is too much? Because you won't see the results for 20 years. And at 20 years, it's a lot harder to reverse these chronic diseases and than it is to prevent them. I'm going through this with my brother right now. His cancer. It's a lot easier to prevent pancreatic cancer than it is to treat it. The hardest one to deal with, right? We're going right in the middle of it. Not a fun experience. Now, unfortunately, most people hear this and like, yeah, whatever. It's not that big of a deal, right? It is that big of a deal. These little things matter. We've got to take action now. We got to look at this and make the decisions for ourselves. How much alcohol we're going to consume, caffeine we're going to consume, sh. Sugar we're going to consume. I feel like my job is to shine a light on this, rattle the cage a little bit, make you think about it. How's your sugar intake? How little is too much for you? That's our final idea. Toxins, acute versus chronic. Remember Superman and his kryptonite dust? And it's not just sugar, by the way. It's all the little things you do. The over consumption of the smartphone, too much blue light stimulation at night. These are tiny little kryptonites that add up in meaningful ways to your overall well being, your sedentary ness vis a vis your exercise, etc. Is sugar a drug or a food? Well, it lights up your nucleus accumbens unlike any other food. That's a good thing to keep in mind as we analyze that. Two theories, right? We have our energy balance, our metabolic, hormonal. Yes, calories are not irrelevant, but they're not the only thing to think about. And a calorie is not a calorie. Sugar is. Is more dangerous than its calories is how Robert Lustig puts it. Remember this? 150 additional calories from sugar in a can of soda increases your risk of diabetes sevenfold. It's an insane stat. Which leads us to Occam's razor and the prime suspect for all these chronic diseases we are overwhelmed with. If all these chronic diseases, I'm repeating myself deliberately, are associated with insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, then it only makes sense to think about what might be leading to that insulin resistance and the metabolic issues. Oh, I wonder if sugar could play a principal role in all of these diseases we want to avoid personally and collectively as a society. That is a quick look at the case against sugar. Hope you enjoyed and I hope you reduce your sugar intake. If you feel so inspired today, make today another awesome day. See you.