Sugar v Alcohol

Overheard in a coffee shop:

“I’ll have the yogurt parfait, but with two spoons. We’re going to split it, so it’s half the sugar.”

“Which of your alternative milks has no sugar added?”

“My mommy doesn’t like it when I eat sugar.”

“Which of your syrups are sugar free?”

“I need my latte made breve - whole milk has too much sugar.”

“Do you have any of that white poison?”

Yes, these are all direct quotes. And no, that last one wasn’t referencing Pod Save America.

These customers’ concerns aren’t just a one-off. They’re parroting a pervasive rhetoric:

“SUGARY BEVERAGES LINKED TO 180,000 DEATHS WORLDWIDE” — Time

“SUGAR IS KILLING US, AND IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH” — Salon News & Culture

“SWEET POISON: HOW SUGAR, NOT COCAINE, IS ONE OF THE MOST ADDICTIVE AND DANGEROUS SUBSTANCES” — New York Daily News

Addictive! Poisonous! Dangerous! Deadly! It sounds like hyperbole, but when each headline comes armed with an arsenal of scientific studies and professional opinions, sugar looks more and more like a genuine supervillain.

At face value, the drastic absurdity of these claims is laughable. After all, sugar is just another edible substance. All things considered, sugar, or granular sucrose, is just the result of processing liquid from sugarcane grass. Hardly the stuff of nightmares, right? Problem is, the incessant drip-feeding of mind-numbingly repetitive headlines like those above functions much like the hypnopaedia of Huxley’s Brave New World: hear a lie enough times, and it’s accepted as truth. These days, women suffer from a multitude of learned anxieties plaguing everything from our cancer-causing deodorants to the toxic off-gassing chemicals released by our pastel-colored yoga mats. And with sugar leading the charge of our most threatening enemies, it begs the question:

When did sugar become the most reviled fugitive of elite Americans?

Looking back through time, sugar remained a rarity in Europe until the sixteenth century. It was first introduced during the Crusades as a product from the Middle East. For centuries, sugar was regarded as a spice and a medicine.

The general consensus is that medical concern about sugar commenced with the 1633 publication of ‘The Diet of the Diseased,’ a book authored by Puritan British physician James Hart. In fact, Hart was one of the first physicians ever to consider diet as being related to overall health. (yay, Hart.)

Keep in mind that at the time, sugar was an unfamiliar, modern food. This made it a perfect fit for the recurring myth of modernity as evil, and past as good. Sugar was a perfect scapegoat for the intractable illnesses of the time. Instead of obesity and diabetes, the eighteenth-century public was worried about scurvy, weak nerves, and prurience. And (you guessed it) sugar was the scientifically- and medically-proclaimed cause.

At the turn of the 1970’s, our war on sugar was only just beginning to burgeon. In 1972, Dr. John Yudkin, a British physiologist and nutritionist, penned a book titled “Pure, White and Deadly.” Aside from his felonious disregard for the Oxford comma (not to mention his poor choice of title not thirty years after WWII ended), Yudkin used his book to outline the potentially addictive nature of sugar. And for the following decade, studies began cashing in on the milieu of sugar-as-cocaine.

Fast forward to 2014, and the World Health Organization issued its new guidelines on sugar consumption; based on a review of the literature, of course. They declared that no more than 5% of your calories should come from added sugar. That’s somewhere in the ballpark of 100 calories. A 12-ounce can of Coke has 140 calories, which means just one soda puts you over the WHO’s recommendation.

But here’s the thing: if sugar is an addictive toxin, then the WHO doesn’t go far enough.

If we wouldn’t give our children cocaine for their birthday, it’s probably wise not to feed them that toxic slice of cake, either. And you wouldn’t let them have just one puff from a cigarette every day, so why is the WHO allowing these immoral transgressions to be brushed under the rug when it comes to sugar? We need to rethink everything about our culinary culture in light of these shocking new scientific developments.

…Right?

One of my family members (who shall remain anonymous) believes that sugar is worse for you than alcohol. Turns out, they’d chug a beer over a Gatorade any day. At first, I was incredulous. But after further investigation (read: consulting the masses on reddit), it seems they’re not alone. Thing is: viewing alcohol as nutritionally superior to sugar is a commonly held belief.

alcohol > sugar?

Most people avoid sugar for the same reason they avoid GMOs or MSG: these scary-sounding, human-invented chemicals must be bad for you. Reason being? They’re not *natural.*

The simple fact that “chemical” is a dirty word is, in itself, testament to the fact that we are aggressively anti-modernity when it comes to food. As if something originating from a sterile environment is any less safe - or more volatile - than chemicals created by Nature. All this, barring the fact that greenhouse-grown lettuce, clear vitamins, and lab-grown meats are the new darlings of the media.

To clear the air: literally everything that exists consists of chemicals. But just as people are inclined to pay more for naturally occurring diamonds - even when lab-made rocks are of higher quality - so, too, will they shell out heaps of cash for the habitually ineffectual “natural” versions of their favorite toothpaste and deodorant products simply because they’re peddled by highbrow, natural groceries.

The majority of us operates under the impression that if something is “natural,” it’s automatically better for us. Even the way we talk about food is rife with religious overtones. Our concern for moral and physical purity is on full display in the way we call something ‘sinfully delicious,’ and in popular brands like Halo Top ice cream.

The general public’s love of all things natural, clean, and therefore, morally good, was fomented by celebrity author Michael Pollan’s popularization of Paul Rozin’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” when he wrote an entire book with that very title.

If we’re being truly honest with ourselves, our cumulative fear of impurity, and our deep-seeded desire for physical and spiritual cleanliness, will never make falsities any more correct. So the question becomes: Is modern sucrophobia based in truth, or fear alone?

Alan Levinovitz addresses this very question in his book, The Gluten Lie:

“The mythic narrative of “unnatural” modernity and a “natural” paradise past is persuasive as ever.

Religious figures like Adam and Eve are no longer plausible protagonists, so diet gurus replace them with Paleolithic, preagricultural, hard-bodied ancestors who raced playfully through the forest gathering berries and spearing wild boar, never once worrying about diabetes or autism. The story goes: the foods that belong to our culinary past are good. The products of modernity, by contrast - MSG, grains, high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified organisms, fast food - these are the toxic fruits of sin, the tempting offerings of a fearsome deity known collectively as Big Food.

My point is: scientific rhetoric (like science-washing) disguises the unscientific roots of modern food fears. Saying we aren’t evolved to eat gluten or processed sugar sounds more factual than saying that God has forbidden them. But just using the language of science doesn’t guarantee access to the insights of science.

In the case of unfounded dietary advice, this pseudoscientific sleight of hand merely provides a new vocabulary with which to rewrite unscientific myths. Because although scientific training can inoculate against the power of nutritional myths, by no means does it guarantee immunity. Science is a way of understanding reality that relies on observation and experiment instead of moral judgments and intuition. But science is practiced by humans, and humans can never fully bracket our irrational motivations.

The prospect of healing the world with dietary laws has always been awfully appealing, especially when those laws fit nicely with timeless myths or intuitive superstitions. The result is sloppy science: identify a suspicious substance, run a few studies that confirm what you set out to find, and presto, a new rule is born, sanctioned by reputable members of the scientific community.

Don’t eat too much salt.

Don’t eat too much fat.

Don’t eat sugar.

Don’t eat gluten.”

Evil corporations poisoning innocent children. Corrupt Big Sugar pitted against virtuous scientists. These aggrandized pairings make for great stories with the kind of outrage appeal social media algorithms adore. But uncomplicated tales of good and evil belong in myths and fairy tales, not science. In short: there’s always nuance to be explored.

Our faith in the supposed goodness of Nature and the inherent nefariousness of all things man-made only fuels our deep-seeded fear of modern food. We “shop the perimeter” and dub our top killers as “man-made illnesses” and “Western diseases,” but nobody stops to wonder whether our fears are founded in solid scientific evidence.

I once had an eating disorder that dragged me to the depths of which only these popularized puritanical beliefs can induce. From where I stand, the worst part of witnessing our culture’s generalized phobia of food is just how pious people are about it. Nobody’s cowering from candy shops or snubbing the ice cream man who comes jingling through the neighborhood. Rather, sucrophobes are out galavanting to and fro, clad in their Lululeggings, and armed with the sort of pomped-up, anti-sugar ethos that rivals the majority of anti-glutenites pressuring their local cafes to offer more gluten-free options. Oat milk lattes in tow, most sucrophobes are unfortunately too caught up in their anti-sugar evangelization to realize that their avoidance of the molecule isn’t scientific nor niche, but rather a confirmation of their clichéd lack of critical thinking.

One important constituent of anti-sugar extremism is something called monotonic thinking. For example, someone who thinks monotonically would fail to see that low and high doses of a particular substance can have completely opposite effects. That’s because monotonic thinking causes us to categorize food into religious categories like pure or impure, moral or immoral.

Take, for instance, an Orthodox Jew: having one bacon bit in a Cobb salad or eating an entire cuban sandwich are equally forbidden - pork’s impurity is monotonic. But nutrition isn’t monotonic, it’s nuanced. A glass of wine won’t kill you, and theories that it’s good for you go in and out of fashion; yet forty glasses of wine will most definitely kill you. The nuance being: low and high doses can have opposite effects.

This phenomenon is called dose-sensitivity; it’s a basic tenet of toxicology most famously and succinctly put by Renaissance scientist Paracelsus (and, later, hammered into me by my college microbiology professor): “The dose makes the poison.”

While dose-sensitivity isn’t universally true - exposure to any amount of a virus can infect a person - it’s true for many things, including most foods. Eat enough almonds, nutmeg, or coffee and you’ll be pushing up daisies. But nobody’s rebuking the wickedness of almonds and lattes. So why do we insist on thinking monotonically about sugar? I’d argue the reasoning behind sucrophobia has little to do with science, and nearly everything to do with moralism, superstition, and a puritanical fear of sinful pleasures.

Circling back to my main point: first off, alcohol isn’t any more “natural” than sugar. Both are the result of processing plants. But more importantly is this: the ratio of how Natural one food is in comparison to another doesn’t actually matter, like… at all. Not in terms of health, and not in terms of moralistic purity. So, if we’re to base our actions on factual evidence rather than superstitious malarkey…

Let’s take a look at the facts:

Alcohol:

• It’s psychoactive, toxic, and dependence-producing.

• It impairs digestion: your body will not digest food until alcohol is detoxed from the body by your liver.

• It causes birth defects (ever heard of fetal alcohol syndrome?), and;

• It’s even been classified as a group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. You know what else is a group 1 carcinogen? Asbestos, radiation, and tobacco.

• All this, plus the simple fact that you can literally get alcohol poisoning and die.

The LD50 is the lethal dose, or the amount of an ingested substance that kills 50 percent of a test sample. For sugar, the LD50 is 13471.71 mg per 1lb. Putting that into perspective, a 150 lb human would need to ingest 4.5 lbs of sugar to commit the sweetest suicide known to man. That’s the equivalent of drinking 59 cans (or 21 liters) of coke, as quickly as possible. Along the same thread, the LD50 of distilled alcohol is 1 liter. To recap, that’s either 1 liter of vodka, or 21 liters of coke. Which seems more toxic to you?

The bottom line is: most of what we know about the relationship between sugar, liver metabolism, obesity, and type 2 diabetes remains theoretical. In truth, nutritional research is an extremely difficult field to derive certainties from, and when it comes to sugar, the science just isn’t conclusive. Regardless, we hold steadfastly to the conviction that honey is superior to corn syrup. We believe that, if you must cave into your depraved desire for sugar, fruit is preferable to oreos. Yet, the only certain metabolic difference between fruit and candy is that it’s a lot easier to eat tons of candy than it is to eat tons of apples. We take this as Bible proof of Nature’s intentions. We see this and think: “sugar must be eaten with fiber,” and “sugar must be eaten in season,” but in actuality, if we take a step back, it’s easier to see that these notions are more a mark of superstitious hyperbole than scientific fact. Think about it: why do we buy into morally superior brands like Unreal candy bars, Justin’s cups, and Poppi sodas, but turn up our noses at Pepsi and McDonalds?

Here’s my theory: our appeal to Nature with a capital N continually thwarts our ability to objectively evaluate the world around us. Honey and high-fructose corn syrup are two common liquid sweeteners. But countless doctors, researchers, and influencers are each persuaded by the magic of “natural” origins distinguishing honey from its evil, artificial competitor,

Despite the popular push to believe in the “clear superiority” of honey, there’s a near-unanimous consensus among scientists that the biological effects of high-fructose corn syrup and honey are essentially identical. But because of its natural origin, honey enjoys irrational, superstitious praise that the sucrose derived from sugar cane could never compete with.

Point being: when asked to decide between the superiority of Manuka honey of alcohol, why is it that honey wins, when, if given the choice between sugar and alcohol, alcohol wins?

And what it boils down to is this:

If you’re opting for $14 craft beers, but passing on dessert, sorry dude, but you’re drinking the Kool Aid.

So, if “natural” is an impotent argument against sugar, what’s the real 411?

When you avoid carbs, your blood sugar lowers. This is an obvious consequence, but there are two things that happen as a result of this. First is the retardation of your cellular metabolism. Meaning: your cellular activity (or the rate at which your cells perform all of the necessary processes for a healthy life, like having nice skin, a stable heart rate, and proper digestion) slows down. That’s because your liver needs sugar to activate thyroid hormone. And second is gluconeogenesis, which is the way in which your body indiscriminately cannibalizes itself in order to create the sugar needed to keep your body functioning. Nothing is safe from the catabolism of gluconeogenesis: muscle, bone, and all are destroyed in order to keep your body alive. That’s how crucial sugar is to keeping you alive.

Speaking of sugar keeping you alive, your brain literally runs on sugar. It’s the most carbohydrate-dependent organ in your body. Unless, of course, you’re exercising, in which case sugar is used to increase endurance and athletic performance. And guess what else? Not only does sugar power your body through exercise sessions, but it also hydrates better than water alone. That’s why the WHO’s Oral Rehydration Therapy utilizes this knowledge to rehydrate sick children in their care by including sugar and salt in their treatment. It’s also why hospital IVs contain glucose. Our only hope is that these unfortunate children don’t trade in rotavirus for a lifetime of methadone-dependent remission from their IV-induced sugar addiction.

Is fear of sugar the product of rationale-based analysis, or moralistic fear?

I’ll let you decide.

XX,

Maria