All Calories are Not Created Equally:  There’s Sugar

“All calories are not created equally.” So says Dr. Robert Lustig, pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, and lead investigator of a study released today in Obesity Magazine online. Sugar is the culprit.

Dr. Robert Lustig

In this study, Dr. Lustig and his team, which included Jean-Marc Schwarz, a professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Vallejo’s Touro University and senior author of the paper, worked with 43 children and teens on a nine-day diet that severely restricted sugar without reducing calories. The level of caloric intake was maintained so as to isolate the effect of sugar on metabolic function.

The result: restricting sugar, not calories, was found to improve the metabolic health of all of these youths. The kids improved in blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides (fat in the blood) & glucose levels.

“What this is saying is that sugar is toxic because it’s sugar; not because it’s calories,” said Dr. Robert Lustig, and lead author of the study. “This proves conclusively, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a calorie is not a calorie.”

Most Americans consume roughly 22 teaspoons of sugar daily, mostly from processed foods and sugary sodas.

Dr. Lustig is on a quest to get the FDA to remove sugar from the safe list of foods, known as the GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) list. The first success was the recent addition of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages by the City of Berkeley.

The full text of the results of this study appeared today on Obesity online and will appear in the print version in February.

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