Robert Lustig

The single best stimulus to make more and fresh mitochondria is exercise—but even your mitochondria can’t outrun a bad diet.

Ninety percent of the food produced in the United States is sold to you by a total of ten conglomerates—Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dole, General Mills, Hormel, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, Proctor and Gamble, and Unilever.

Fructose. Finally, we come to the Voldemort of the dietary hitlist: the sweet molecule in sugar. If it’s sweet, and it’s caloric, it’s fructose. Period. This is the one foodstuff whose consumption has increased worldwide, and with reckless abandon. And it is the one that children eat with no holds barred. We have animal and human data. We also have the golden ticket: correlation *and* causation. Every age group, including infants, has increased its consumption of fructose in the last thirty years. As far as I am concerned, this is where the action is.

As you will see, all successful diets share three precepts: low sugar, high fiber (which means high micronutrients), and fat and carbohydrate consumed together in the presence of an offsetting amount of fiber. Anything after that is window dressing.

In a nutshell, your body fat is your biggest long-term risk for infirmity. Nothing correlates with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer better than your fat.

Fructose isn’t the only cause of obesity, but it is the primary cause of chronic metabolic disease, which kills . . . slowly.

There is no fat accumulation without insulin. Insulin shunts sugar to fat. It makes your fat cells grow. The more insulin, the more fat, period. While there are many causes of obesity, excess insulin in some form is the ‘final common pathway’ for the overwhelming majority of them. Block it, and the fat cells remain empty.

If you had any residual doubt about ‘a calorie is not a calorie,’ this analysis should remove it. Every additional 150 calories per person per day barely raised diabetes prevalence. But if those 150 calories were instead from a can of soda, increase in diabetes rose sevenfold. Sugar is more dangerous than its calories. Sugar is a toxin. Plain and simple.

If obesity were just an American phenomenon it would be an epidemic, an outbreak of illness specific to a certain area. One might then blame our American culture for promoting it. Due to our slippage in education and technological superiority, we’re labeled as ‘fat and lazy’ or ‘gluttons and sloths.’ Yet obesity is now a pandemic, a worldwide problem.

There’s one lesson to conclude from these three contradictions to current dogma: A calorie is not a calorie. Rather, perhaps the dogma should be restated thus: a calorie *is* a calorie burned, but a calorie *is not* a calorie eaten. And therein lies the key to understanding the obesity pandemic.

There are only two things that are more important than food: air and water. Shelter’s a distant fourth. Food matters. Unfortunately, food now matters even more than it should. Food is beyond a necessity; it’s also a commodity, and it has been reformulated to be an addictive substance.