Though Mark Bittman clearly disagrees, Robert Lustig’s new study supposedly “proving” that sugar intake increases diabetes risk, is as credible as Ancel Keys’ debunked 1953 ecological study of the diet-heart hypothesis.
4 thoughts on “NYTimes Food Nanny: ‘Sugar is indeed toxic’”
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This is a good study to highlight that all calories may not be created equal. The USDA has over-emphasized calories and not focused enough on the types of foods being consumed. Eating 2,000 calories per day of sugar will have a much different affect than eating a diet low in sugar, full of healthy meats and vegetables.
The study is epidemiological, so it doesn’t show that sugar actually causes diabetes but with these results, I’m sure we’ll see future studies looking for causation rather than simply correlation.
http://www.understandnutrition.com
I believe newsprint is toxic and should not be used to mulch plants. I wonder what newsprint is doing to the earth especially since it contains so much figurative feces.
Two questions: 1) Why would those conducting this study ignore risk factors previously identified by the NIH and others? 2) Have any (credible) studies attempted to discover causality between sugar consumption and diabetes? If so, what did they report?
Bittman doesn’t understand that a correlation doesn’t make a causation — no matter how much he stamps his foot. Interestingly, the NY Times didn’t link to the actual full paper, perhaps the graphics would have made it more apparent that it was much ado about nothing.
We could spend all day debunking this poorly done nonclinical “study” — use of flawed economic food supply data rather than dietary intakes; population data from widely varying countries in terms of socio-economics and countless other confounders; multiple estimations and assumptions made by the authors; and in the end it was only computer modeling.
According to NIDDK of the NIH, genetics and age are the greatest risk factors for type 2 diabetes, with greater risks among certain ethnic groups, those with family histories, older people, and certain medical conditions associated with insulin resistance, which these authors didn’t control.
The old wives tale, “sugar causes sugar diabetes,” has been around for ages and debunked endless times. Countless better-conducted studies have even negated a correlation between sugar intake and diabetes, even an epidemiological study of 8 similar European countries published just last year. When a belief has been disproved, it’s time to move on and put resources toward conducting real research.