Clinician Confidential: How industry hacked the health professions, and how to unhack them

Mountain Dew Mouth has been the scourge of dentists for decades. But there’s a new disease which affects even more people: Mountain Dew Liver. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) wasn’t even discovered until 1980 and now up to 40% of Americans suffer from it, and it is now the leading cause of liver transplantation. (Especially children - 13% of autopsies in children show NAFLD; and 38% of obese children.) This disease belies all our other chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. And it is due to our excessive sugar consumption.

Dietary sugar is composed of one molecule each of glucose and fructose. It is the fructose that is the primary driver of both diseases. Fructose gets turned into fat in the liver mitochondria, which drives NAFLD, which is the leading cause of liver transplantation now, surpassing alcohol. And now children get the diseases of alcohol without alcohol, because they are the biggest sugar consumers.

As my colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco have shown, the Sugar Research Foundation – the industry’s trade group – even sought to persuade clinical medicine to focus on saturated fat instead of sugar, and pushed clinical dentistry to focus on a vaccine for tooth decay rather than sugar reduction.

Altering our diet is where public health prevention starts. But the dark forces of Big Sugar conspire to keep us consuming even more. They employ many tactics, similar to those of Big Tobacco. But we are now wise to their efforts, and solutions are slowly being enacted to counter their influence.

Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity & Disease

In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us recover our health, Dr. Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial and completely based in science, Dr. Lustig debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie,” and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.