SUGAR TRIGGERS A TOXIC CHAIN OF REACTIONS IN THE BODY THAT PRODUCE HARMFUL FATS, HORMONES, AND OTHER METABOLIC BY-PRODUCTS.
At first blush, this antisugar advocacy may seem alarmist. But Lustig and his University of California colleagues argue that sugar is harmful in significant amounts – not necessarily because it's high in calories but rather because it triggers a toxic chain of reactions in the body that produce harmful fats, hormones, and other metabolic by-products.
Sugar is found in nearly every food except meat, oil, and butter. But there's a big difference between the sugar that occurs naturally in raw, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, milk, and whole grains and the type added to prepared or processed foods. Added sugars include every sweetener imaginable: white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, honey, agave nectar. It's these added sugars that experts say are the root cause of our sugar problem because high amounts of them are found in almost every food we eat, most of which are also high in calories and devoid of nutrients. "Nature made sugar hard to get," Lustig and his colleagues wrote in Nature. "Man made it easy.