Calorie for calorie (Do you still believe)

Compiled by Ida Erasmus

Industrial Nutritionist

ierasmus@can.com.na

Nutrition Society #661

Windhoek

Namibia

03 April 2013

 “Still believe a “calorie is a calorie?”

So says ardent; “anti-sugarman”, Dr. Robert Lustig

 If you do, you fly in the face of mounting and incontrovertible evidence that some calories – in particular, “sugar calories”- are jeopardizing both your and your family’s health.  Physicians and politicians who cling to the dogma that “all calories should be treated equally” imperil our future…….

Dr. Robert Lustig who, in this article, explains his latest published research on sugar’s role in global diabetes.

 

A calorie is a measurement of energy (a matter of physics), not a value judgment on where that energy goes (a matter of biochemistry).  As his book Fat Chance explains, you get sick from inappropriate energy storage (in your liver and muscle), not defective energy balance (bigger love handles).

 

Nonetheless, “a calorie is a calorie” continues to be promulgated by the food industry as their defense against their culpability for the current epidemic of obesity and chronic metabolic disease.  But it is as dishonest as a three dollar bill.  Here are just four examples that refute this dogma: 

1.  Fibre 

You eat 160 calories in almonds, but you absorb only 130.  The fibre in the almonds delays absorption of calories into the bloodstream, delivering those calories to the bacteria in your intestine, which chew them up.  Because a calorie is not a calorie.

 

2.  Protein

When it comes to food, you have to put energy in to get energy out.  You have to put twice as much energy in to metabolize protein as you do carbohydrate, this is called thermic effect of food.  So protein wastes more energy in its processing.  Plus protein reduces hunger better than carbohydrate.  Because a calorie is not a calorie.

 

3.  Fat

All fats release nine calories per gram when burned.  But omega-3 fats are heart-healthy and will save your life, while trans fats, clog your arteries, leading to a heart attack.  Because a calorie is not a calorie.

4.  Sugar

This is the “big kahuna” of the “big lie”.  Sugar is not one chemical, it’s two.  Glucose is the energy of life.  Every cell in every organism on the planet can burn glucose for energy.  Glucose is mildly sweet, but not very interesting (think molasses).  Fructose is an entirely different animal.  Fructose is very sweet, the molecule we seek.  Both burn at four calories per gram.  If fructose were just like glucose, then sugar or hig-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) would be just like starch.  But fructose is not glucose.  Because a calorie is not a calorie.

 

Up until now, scientists have shown that sugar is “associated” or “correlated” with various chronic metabolic diseases.  For instance, the increase in sugar consumption over the past 30 years paralleled the increase in obesity, diabetes and heart disease.  Areas that drink more soda ( eg., the American Southeast) experience higher prevalence of these diseases.  But correlation is not causation.

 

Which direction do the data go?  Does sugar cause obesity and metabolic disease?  Or do obese people with metabolic disease drink soda?  You can’t tell, because you only have one point in time – the snapshot, not the movie. 

 

Bottom line – only changes in sugar availability explained changes in diabetes prevalence worldwide, nothing else mattered …….