Sweet and lowdown

Why our love for sugar is killing us

By Caroline Cummins

February 12, 2007

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David Vanadia’s apartment in Portland, Oregon, is spartan: futon bed, yoga ball, plants trailing along the windowsill. At the foot of the futon is a little mound of brightly colored packaged candy: Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Twizzlers. Across the room, a paper shopping bag overflows with candy wrappers.

It’s early November, and Vanadia — a trim, bearded man in his late 30s who works variously as a tai chi teacher, guitarist, and anti-sugar activist — is two days into what he hopes is his final sugar binge.

Since Halloween, when he accumulated the candy strewn around his apartment, Vanadia has eaten nothing but candy. “I really don’t feel so good right now,” he admits. In another 36 hours or so, he’ll throw away whatever’s left and return to refusing sugar in all forms, except, occasionally, honey.

“No sugar for me means no refined sugars, no corn syrup,” he says. “But it’s virtually impossible to avoid eating anything that’s been sweetened — ketchup, for example.”

Vanadia may seem obsessive about sugar, but he’s not alone in shunning the stuff. Although statistics are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that many of us — who, like Vanadia, often overindulge come Halloween or Valentine’s Day — are taking a hard look at sugar.

Why avoid sugar? Well, the refined sugars Vanadia eschews are, like your mother always told you, “empty calories” that provide energy without nutrients. Yeah, yeah, you knew that already. But Vanadia, who keeps a blog called Stop Being Sweet, thinks that processed sugar isn’t just unhealthy but downright addictive.

Candy from David Vanadia’s Halloween haul.

“I have cravings,” he says. “I have trigger foods: chocolate, ice cream. If I eat it, I start to crave it. Then I eat too much, and I feel sick. People in America are eating these foods and feeling bad every day. And it takes a long time to start feeling better; you need to quit for a while, not just a few days. That’s when you really start to notice how much it affects you.”

Americans adore their soda pop and breakfast cereal and ice cream; estimates vary, but the average American supposedly swallows between 20 and 40 teaspoons of added sugar every day. The Sugar Association has stated that a healthy diet can include up to 25 percent of daily calories from added sugar. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the World Health Organization have asserted that added sugar shouldn’t account for more than 10 percent of our daily calories. Ten percent of a 2,000-calories-a-day diet is 200 calories. Drink a 20-ounce bottle of soda, and you’re done for the day.

“America has one heck of a sweet tooth,” James Surowiecki declared in the New Yorker. “We consume more sweeteners per capita than any other country, and close to 10 million tons of sugar every year.” And we sweeten our lives more now than we used to; as Craig Lambert pointed out in Harvard Magazine, “Sugars added to foods made up 11 percent of the calories in American diets in the late 1970s; today they are 16 percent.”

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Per person, per year, we now eat 30 more pounds of sugar than we did in the 1970s, Gary Taubes reported in the New York Times magazine. We also eat up to 400 more calories each day than we did 30 years ago, Taubes added. Little wonder, then, that two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. Sugar isn’t the only thing that’s killing us. But as Nina Planck proclaimed in her 2006 book Real Food, “Of all the industrial foods, sugar is the most villainous.”

The unhappy complexity of refined sugar

Those dozens of teaspoons of sugar that we eat every day aren’t always, of course, literal spoons of crystals that we knock back; as Lambert pointed out, they’re added sugar, or sugar added to food and drink that we usually consume without realizing it.

An apple or a glass of milk has natural sugars in it; these are OK, because you’re eating a combination of minerals, vitamins, fiber, and protein along with the naturally occurring sweet stuff. The refined sugars, however, turn up in snacks, desserts, and processed foodstuffs that don’t typically offer much beyond fat, salt, and calories.

While stopping short of calling sugar a drug, many experts agree with Vanadia that refined sugar — exaltingly delicious though it might be — has a complex effect on the human psyche and body. “Too many people are consuming huge amounts of sugar, especially from soda pop,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. “That pushes healthier foods, like skim milk or water, out of the diet and promotes weight gain and obesity.”

The alternative-medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil, writing in the New York Times, asserted, “We are constantly told to cut back on fat and sugar, but to my mind the greater problem is the processed food that, over the past 50 years, has increasingly displaced whole, natural food in the American diet. … Modern food technology has transformed slow-digesting grains into snack foods made of pulverized, refined starches that, once eaten, quickly raise blood sugar, promoting insulin resistance and weight gain in genetically susceptible individuals — most of us, unfortunately.”

The fine print.

The feedback cycle

The research collated by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, reinforces Jacobson and Weil’s statements. “The problem is not specifically with sugar, but with things that make your insulin go up,” says Lustig.

Normally, when we eat, our bodies produce insulin, a hormone that takes excess sugar from our blood and stashes it away in our fat. It’s a neat little hedge against starvation — except, of course, that few people in the First World run the risk of starving. Rather, we have too many food options, and too many of those options aren’t good for us. Our troubles with insulin are the main reason that rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity are on the rise.

“Under normal circumstances,” says Lustig, “as you gain weight, leptin levels start to rise.” Leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells, tells your brain when you’ve had enough to eat. It’s supposed to help keep your appetite, and thus weight gain, under control. “Food makes insulin, which makes fat, which makes leptin, which makes you stop eating,” Lustig says. “That’s a nice circle, what we call a ‘negative feedback cycle.’”

But, adds Lustig, this feedback cycle isn’t happening. Not in the First World, and no longer in the rest of the world, either; as countries such as China and India modernize and adopt Western eating habits, they’re acquiring such Western lifestyle diseases as Type 2 diabetes as well.

“What we’ve determined,” says Lustig, “is that the cycle is not a negative cycle anymore; it’s a positive cycle.”

Insulin, it turns out, not only converts sugar into fat; it blocks the leptin signal. Sugars — which we consume most frequently in the form of fast-digesting simple carbohydrates, such as soda, instead of slower-digesting complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains — boost our insulin the quickest.

The fatter you get, as Taubes wrote, “the more insulin your pancreas will pump out per meal, and the more likely you’ll develop what’s called ‘insulin resistance.’” This “positive feedback cycle” is a plus only for your insulin levels, not for you.