Is Eating Sugar Really That Bad for Us?

Want to gross yourself out? Imagine eating eight teaspoons of sugar straight out of the bag. Yeek, right? That's how much sugar is in a can of Coke. A Grande Vanilla Starbucks Frappuccino has 11. A McDonald's Strawberry Triple Thick Shake has 27.

The American Heart Association's latest guidelines stipulate that a moderately active woman should eat no more than six teaspoons of sugar per day; her male counterpart no more than nine. Yet according to the AHA's latest statistics, the average American devours 22, and the average teenager devours 34.

Sugar is being blamed far and wide for the catastrophic rise in obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease -- not to mention acne and tooth decay. In his bestselling book Anticancer: A New Way of Life (Viking, 2009), Doctors Without Borders cofounder David Servan-Schreiber avows that refined sugars "directly fuel the growth of cancer." Killjoy. I gave up sweet drinks years ago, but I would live on ice cream if it wasn't so embarrassing.

It's a biblical-sounding question: Can something that tastes like heaven really be so bad? But this begs further questions: Good for whom? Bad for whom? Precisely how? Well, we know it's good for business. Soft drinks represent a $115 billion industry in this country. Candy represents a $32 billion industry. (Americans spend $2 billion on Halloween candy alone.) According to the Centers for Disease Control, the annual cost of treating obesity-related medical conditions topped $140 billion in 2008, having nearly doubled in the previous decade. Diabetes isn't simply a matter of insulin injections. Blindness and amputations, anyone?

Like any territory where our bodies and other people's profits intersect, sugar is a battlefield.

We enter that fray within hours of being born.

"When a brand-new baby is struggling to make sense of this scary world," says nutrition therapist Elyse Resch, coauthor of Intuitive Eating (St. Martin's, 2003), "the first thing it tastes is breast milk or formula." Both fluids are rich in lactose, a disaccharide containing glucose, which the human body requires for survival; it's our cells' chief energy source. "Tasting that sweetness," Resch says, "what's the baby going to think? 'Hey, every time I eat this, I'm going to get really calm and my tummy's going to feel better and I'll be happy.'"

But somewhere between the nipple and the artisanal chocolate, we transfer our affection from lactose to other sweet-tasting chemical compounds derived from other sources; mainly sugarcane, corn, beets and fruit. Although each of these sweeteners -- too often collectively called "sugar" or "sugars," which has traditionally landed sucrose, aka white sugar, with most of the bad rap -- possesses a different chemical makeup, all of them contain a certain percentage of glucose. When sugar enters the bloodstream during digestion, the pancreas releases insulin, a hormone that regulates the blood-sugar level by allowing cells throughout the body to absorb and use the glucose. Frequent deluges of glucose wreak havoc on blood-sugar levels. When an overwhelmed pancreas produces little or no insulin or the cells stop responding to whatever insulin is produced, glucose builds up in the bloodstream. That's what we call diabetes.

And because the refining process strips away all enzymes, vitamins, minerals, fiber and other nutrients, refined sweeteners comprise nothing but empty calories. The body can metabolize these sweeteners only by drawing upon its own micronutrient storehouses: in other words, by draining its reserves. This process hinders the body's ability to metabolize fatty acids; increased fatty-acid storage leads to obesity.

In which case, refined sugars aren't just not food. They're arguably antifood.