sugar

December 31, 2009 in Food, Long Attention Span, Video | 8 comments

I’ve been posting recently about food and nutrition and I feel like the information in this video was a huge piece that I was missing.

In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything we know about the US’s (and the world’s, for that matter) ever growing waistline. This talk shows why all calories are not created equal.

Like many good things in this world, it’s a long story, packed with information so you will have to put aside time to absorb it. But it’s worth your time if you ever wanted to understand why sugar makes you feel the way that it does and why it specifically results in weight gain vs. other types of carbohydrates, fats or protein.

Watch it on YouTube if you don’t see a video above. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.

  1. Verdi’s avatar

    Verdi on December 31, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    Wow. That was a really interesting talk. Also, I’m now scared of all the food in my house.

  2. Steven Garrity’s avatar

    Steven Garrity on December 31, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    You totally ruined Christmas by sharing this.

  3. Dean’s avatar

    Dean on January 1, 2010 at 11:29 am

    The instinct to shy away from processed foods is spot on. Always suspected it, but this is a good bunch of evidence to back it up.

    On a different note, it’s amazing to see this in a free/open format. It looks damn good; the only issue I had was some de-syncing of the video and audio after it played for ~25+ minutes.

  4. Christopher Blizzard’s avatar

    Christopher Blizzard on January 15, 2010 at 11:16 am

    It’s nice that it’s got a CC license so it was OK to transcode.

    But yeah, been reading about food a lot recently. I’ll post about that soon. (Read some books while I was on vacation!)

  5. Tutor’s avatar

    Tutor on February 4, 2010 at 3:58 pm

    Thanks for the heads up!
    This is serious. I informed my familiy and friends.

  7. Tomáš’s avatar

    Tomáš on February 14, 2010 at 6:53 am

    I always knew drinking anything but water (and mlilk maybe) is not really a good idea, bu finally I know why (the juice was a surprise for me though).

    The one thing I do not get though is whether fat is not bad or whether it is bad, but only as bad as sugar, the difference being everybody know fat is not good whereas sugar is GRAS.