Is Gary Taubes Right About Sugar?
I just finished reading Gary Taubes article “Why the Campaign to Stop America’s Obesity Crisis Keeps Failing” at http://bit.ly/JYrg8m. He contends that our obesity epidemic isn’t a “calories in – calories out” problem, where we’re eating too many calories and not burning them off with exercise and physical activity. He sides with the new “hormonal theory” of obesity where Americans are eating too much sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, which with the help of insulin can be converted to fat and preferentially deposited in the abdomen.
Does Sugar Automatically Get Turned Into Fat in the Body?
While it’s true that any calories that are more than the body needs immediately will be either converted to glycogen, the storage form of glucose or to fat, he’s wrong in saying that the eating of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup automatically gets converted to fat. Some of those calories will be used immediately once they have been converted into glucose. The brain is a glucose-junkie, running almost solely on the stuff. Muscles need glucose, as well.
It takes so many calories a minute or an hour for the heart to pump, the lungs to breathe, the muscles to work, the brain to function, etc. For discussion purposes, let’s just say that every hour it takes 100 calories for the body to run. To satisfy those needs, at the top of every hour you eat 100 calories, calories that come from all foods including sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. When you’re eating just the amount your body needs to run, there is no reason for it to store excess calories.
However, no one eats this way. We normally have three meals a day and a snack or two. Let’s say that breakfast consisted of 400 calories made up of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, an orange, a glass of lowfat milk. Now we just said that you only need 100 calories per hour for the body to run. If we wanted to get very scientific about it, we’d have to add calories burned for the digestion of the meal. But to keep things simple, let’s not worry about that at the moment.
With 100 calories of those 400 calories being used up in the first hour, what happens to the other 300 calories in that first hour? They aren’t just going to float around in your bloodstream until you need them. Your body is going to put them into storage. Some of them will be converted to glycogen and some to fat. And because the presence of any food is going to trigger an insulin response, since it’s not just sugar that does, those extra calories are going to end up in the muscles, liver, and eventually the fat cells.
You Haven’t Eaten For a Couple of Hours
Now we’re at the top of the second hour and you’re not eating anything more, where are the calories that your body needs to run going to come from? They come from those calories that have been put away into storage. The muscles will use their resident glycogen until that runs out. When it does, the liver will send some more. The calories that went into the fat cells can be called upon and converted by the liver into whatever the body needs at the moment.
So while I agree with Gary Taubes that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup can be converted into fat, it does come down to how many calories are being eaten and how many being used. Now if we start discussing the quality of the foods you’re eating, then sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are merely calories with no nutritional benefits. And they hide in some of the least conspicuous places. Without reading an ingredient label, you often don’t know that you’re eating more than you can imagine.
Of course, everyone knows about sodas and enhanced beverages being loaded with sugar. But even a savory salad dressing may contain sugar. Sugar mascarades in so many forms such as sucrose, honey, corn syrup, dextrin, maltodextrin, dextrose, levulose, molasses, fruit juice concentrates.
Since we should only be eating a certain number of calories to maintain our weight or lose weight, it’s imperative that those calories be healthy ones. Just as with your credit card having a spending limit, so does your body. We all know we can’t freely eat a ton of calories and not have it show. However, the more you eat from food sources that are as close to the way nature made them (in other words, less processed), the less sugar you’ll be eating. We still have to make good choices.
His argument isn’t actually directly that sugar becomes fat and that’s it. He argues in his books (quite convincingly) that insulin resistance is the root cause of obesity. So basically, you excrete extra insulin in order to achieve the same blood sugar level as someone with a healthy insulin sensitivity. This renders your fat cells less able to release fat, and thus those energy stores become invisible to the body and so you’ll be hungry again even though you’ve got the extra fat; it’s invisible to the body.