The Deadly Effects of Fructose

Why Fructose is so toxic

In 2009, Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco delivered a ninety minute lecture entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”. It was posted on YouTube as part of the university’s medical education series. Then a funny thing happened. It went viral.

It was not a humorous cat video. It was not a video of a toddler throwing a baseball into Dad’s groin. It was a nutrition lecture filled with biochemistry and complicated graphs. But there was something about this particular lecture that grabbed the world’s attention and refused to let go. It has now been viewed more than six million times. What was this attention-grabbing message? Sugar is toxic.

Sucrose, against all logic and common sense, had not always been considered unhealthy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration undertook a comprehensive review in 1986, eventually declaring “there is no conclusive evidence on sugars that demonstrates a hazard.” Even as recently as 2014, the American Diabetes Association website stated “experts agree that you can substitute small amounts of sugar for other carbohydrate-containing foods into your meal plan.”

The tide began to turn in 2004 when Dr. George Bray from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center of Louisiana State University showed…