I’m gratified that a mainstream medical doctor reiterates what I have been saying for the past five years or more. Eat your way back to health.
About three quarters of the way through the video Dr. Lustig presents some macro numbers about the food and the healthcare industries. If all Americans got on the eat-right bandwagon both industries would collapse. Over the past five years or more i have spent practically nothing on healthcare or on packaged, highly processed foods. I happen to like to cook and that helps. BTW, I’m finally losing some of the weight I gained in Portugal (this morning 74.2 KG - Target 70 KG) by eating more cheeses and bacon and less lentil and buckwheat.
Take Back Your Health - with Dr. Robert H. Lustig | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 122
BTW, Dr. Lustig talks about liver transplants and fructose, ‘the bad sugar.’ Steve Jobs had a liver transplant and he was known to favor a very high fruit diet. I love fruit! There is nothing wrong with fruit eaten in moderation and whole instead of processed into juice or smoothies.
The Captain
Don’t tell me you don’t have the time to watch the video, it might add years to your life and let you spend more on fun stuff instead of on doctors and medications.
Steve Jobs had a liver transplant because of secondary spread from his pancreatic tumour, not NAFLD. Lustig has been beating the fructose drum so hard and for so long that the credulous have started to imagine fruit is a poison.
FWIW, sugar had never been seen as a vital health giving food (unless you find yourself stuck days away from base camp on Everest with nothing but a slab of Kendall Mint Cake for survival)…and for a LOT longer than 5 years. Heck, even back in the time of Elizabeth I, contemporary writers attributed her poor dental health to her fondness for “sweetmeats”
a food rich in sugar: such as a candied or crystallized fruit
'Nother dental fun fact. Thomas Jefferson was known to have an aversion to sweet things. I forget the name of it but it is an actual medical condition. I have it myself. I had to tell my mother when I was a child to stop dumping sugar on my frosted flakes and can I please just have some unsweetened shredded wheat?!
Anyway, Jefferson died at age 84 with all his normal adult teeth. Something of a trick even today but probably all but unheard of in his day.
Yep. I was a picky eater as a kid. Round about my early teens, I went off sugar. In reality, I probably picked up a cup of tea before my mum had a chance to put the regular two heaped teaspoons of sugar in and decided I preferred it. Mum had no problem with that…seeing as sugar to her had no nutritional value beyond making things sweeter. Caused something of a stir am9ng relatives etc …who presumably already thought my mum indulged me too much…and I remember at one of my aunt’s when she served us tea, she announced that she knew I didn’t take sugar so she only put half a spoon in. Then she got testy when I couldn’t drink it.
Hugely beneficial move…especially at that age…because the tastebud “rehab” that went on made.everything that was artificially sweetened unpalatable then and since. As a consequence, I have minimal caries experience/restorations…and no new cavities or recurrent caries since 1976 (when I graduated dental school.)
I also recall conversations with patients WRT avoiding a high sucrose/cariogenic diet and I’d ask the question, if sugar and candies etc could do this sort of damage to your teeth…what do you think happens to the rest of your body? Back in the 1970s. Ahead of my time, me (not!) Fortunately for me …and endocrinologists, cardiologists, hepatologists etc everywhere … no-one appears to have listened outside of my own family.
Both Mom’s and Dad’s ancestors spent decades in places where sugar was almost unobtainable except for honey. It showed in their basic habits, appetites, and customs, and in encountering the modern world of the 50’s they both pushed back, to mine and sibs enormous benefit. I remember Mom responding to requests for sugar for coffee in her kitchen as if someone was asking for dinosaur powder. “Sugar,… let me look… hmmm… oh here it is!” and perhaps producing a small dirty paper packet.
She did have a stash for baking but kept it hidden.
I stopped adding sugar to coffee around 1964 when I found that it made me dizzy. It took a long while before I could drink unsweetened black coffee but in time I got used to it.
My situation was the the exact opposite of your parents. My uncle had a bakery full of Viennese Pastry, that was the name of his store, Pastelería Vienesa. My dad’s hotel had a delicious dessert cart full of goodies. I gorged in both places.
My most memorable sugar moment happened in Paris in 1946 as we were emigrating to Venezuela at the end of the war. Everything was scarce including milk and sugar. All one found in the cafés was black coffee. Mom managed to find sugar and milk and off we went to have “tejes kávé” (Hungarian for coffee with milk). It was going to be a grand celebration! When everything was ready we started to drink the delicacy… it was horrible! Absolutely horrible. We looked at each other not understanding. Mom took out the sugar to taste it. She brought salt by mistake. We could not stop laughing!
