Archive for March 20th, 2010

• Day 21: Stopping Sugar is the New Stopping Smoking!

  Date: 2010.03.20 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 1

  ABC News’ “Nightline’ did a 8-minute segment last week on the “Sugar Wars” featuring anti-sugar crusader Dr. Robert Lustig, whose hit viral video The Bitter Truth was featured recently on a Year Without Candy.

  Connie Bennett, who has been sugar-free since 1998 and presides over an empire called Sugar Shock just wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the ABC News investigation as well as how celebrities like Ellen De Generes and Jeff Garlin are going anti-sugar.  Read the whole post here and see this excerpt below:

  Recently, both De Generes and Jeff Garlin both spoke out against sugar and declared that they were off the sweet substance, as I recently wrote about in this opinion piece for AOL News.

  Sugar and its dangers are in the news again, thanks to ABC’s popular show,Nightline, which, last night, aired a compelling story spotlighting sugar’s role in the obesity crisis.

  In his “Sugar Wars” piece, correspondent John Donovan offers a fascinating look at the views of esteemed pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig, whose YouTube video — entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” — has garnered more than a quarter of a million hits to date and clearly brought Dr. Lustig into the limelight.

  In this Nightline segment — which you can watch below — Donovan calls Dr. Lustig “a man at war with sugar,” because he argues that too much fructose and not enough fiber are to blame for our obesity crisis and metabolic syndrome.

  “Fructose is the cause of the current epidemic,” insists Dr. Lustig, director of UCSF’s Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Clinic and UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology.

  Nightline correspondent Donovan also includes quotes from the pediatric endocrinologist about how fructose confuses people’s brains into thinking they’re hungry and how low-fat foods such as SnackWells cookies and fruit-flavored yogurt are filled with sugar. Dr. Lustig even posits the controversial idea that teens should be carded when buying soda.

  In the Nightline “Sugar Wars” piece, Donovan strives to be unbiased by allowing three pro-sugar advocates to refute Dr. Lustig’s ideas — one critic from the American Beverage Association (formerly called the National Soft Drink Association) and two from the Corn Refiners Association, including a cardiologist, who has done studies funded by PepsiCo, the manufacturer of sugar-filled soft drinks.