Sugar vs. added sugar [View all]

In segment on the last Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher interviewed a Dr. Robert Lustig, talking about his new book, "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease".

To the doctor's credit, he talked Maher down when Maher said, in his typical overwrought way, something like, "So basically, sugar is poison", and delivered a more measured "the poison is in the dose" kind of response.

The dose he's recommending is pretty small, however, at least compared to what we get in a typical American diet. For an adult male like myself, he called a "safe" dose 9 teaspoons a day, or only about 38 grams. I've seen plenty of things that deliver that much sugar in a single serving size.

The doctor made the distinction, however, that this is 9 teaspoons of added sugar. If you're eating an apple, apparently you either don't have to worry about the sugar content of the apple at all, or that sugar gets tallied in a separate column with an unstated limit of its own.

I can kind of, sort of, understand a basis for this distinction: The sugar in an apple comes along with other nutrients and fiber. It's probably absorbed by the body more slowly than added sugars, avoiding spiking your blood sugar level when you eat the apple vs. how the sugar hits you when you eat a twinkie.

But added sugar can be added to things that also have other nutrients and fiber, or other parts of your diet might be very rich in nutrients and fiber. How the hell would your body know or care about the difference, especially if you aren't creating significant blood sugar spikes?

Since I don't spend a lot of time reading the original scientific research that popularized health and diet reporting and rhetoric spins off from (typically in overstated, oversimplified, misunderstood, distorted, and faddish ways) I'm not sure what to make of this talk about sugar.

To put this in context for myself, I'm at a good weight now, having lost about 85 lbs. over the course of a year, and having kept it off for over a year now, maintaining a very steady and trim weight. My last blood work numbers were excellent, including blood sugar level.

I know with my dietary choices I've got to be eating a lot less sugar than most Americans, but even so, when I looked at the labels on the greek yogurt, the protein bar, and the whole grain cereal I ate this morning -- a roughly 600 calorie breakfast -- I'd easily gone over 4 teaspoons of sugar in this one meal, a small part of my typical 3000-3500 calorie daily diet. (I exercise a lot, and typically burn over a thousand calories a day doing exercise, 6 days per week.)

If the distinction between sugar and added sugar is all that important, however, there's no way looking at the label of my yogurt to know what portion of the sugar is "non-added" sugar that would naturally already be in the fruit and in the milk.

Should I discount part of the sugar on the label as non-added sugar? Assuming this 9 teaspoon number isn't just a number pulled out of somebody's ass (perhaps a big assumption), would my own personal limit go up because I exercise so much? Would my limit go up because I'm a taller than average man who weighs less than the average American male only because the average American male is overweight?

Since I'm in pretty good shape at the moment I'm not going to worry about any of this very much right now. At the same time, realizing that someone out there is recommending that I eat less sugar than I know I must be eating does put me in a state of mind to read labels more closely for sugar content and see what I can do to bring my sugar consumption down. Even if a lot of this talk is unsettled science with a liberal does of bullshit, it certainly isn't going to harm me to eat less sugar.

(I'd consider posting this in Health, and maybe I will just for fun at some point, but the signal to noise ration is guaranteed to be low, even if the possible amusement level is high.)