The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Moment 212: The Dangerous Truth Behind “Sugar Free”!
Fri, 09 May 2025
“Zero sugar” doesn’t mean zero damage. Dr. Robert Lustig exposes how the food industry misleads you with health claims while quietly fuelling obesity and chronic disease. From insulin-spiking sweeteners to mislabeled packaging, this moment unpacks the deception behind so-called healthy foods - and what you should actually be eating instead. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/KhJ5MG5BcTb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/Drk2qW9BcTb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr Robert Lustig - https://robertlustig.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Is sugar really a poison?
Is sugar poison? Sugar is like alcohol. So is alcohol poison? Depends on the dose. Right? The dose determines the poison. Paracelsus 1537. We have an innate capacity to metabolize alcohol. And if we stay below that, it doesn't do too much damage. If we go above it, different story. Same thing with sugar. Same thing with this molecule, the sweet molecule, fructose.
And the reason is because fructose and alcohol are metabolized virtually identically. What's the difference between sugar and fructose? So, sugar, dietary sugar, the sweet stuff, the crystals, the stuff you put in your coffee.
The stuff I've got over here?
Yeah, like that stuff. Yeah, that stuff. The five-pound bag right there. That's called sucrose. Okay, this is sucrose. This is sucrose. Now, sucrose is two molecules bound together. One molecule called glucose, one molecule called fructose. They are not the same. Now, the food industry will tell you they are the same. They are not the same.
The reason they tell you they are the same is because that's the way they assuage their own culpability for what they've done to the food. But they are not the same. They will say a sugar is a sugar, a calorie is a calorie, a glucose and fructose both have four calories per gram. Why should you care? Oh, you care a lot. You care a whole lot. Now, glucose is the energy of life.
Every cell on the planet burns glucose for energy. Glucose is so important that if you don't consume it, your body makes it. Okay. The Inuit had no carbohydrate. They had ice. They had whale blubber. They still had a serum glucose level.
Inuits are the people that live in the North Poles and stuff.
That's right. Yeah. They're formerly known as Eskimos. Right. But they didn't have any carbohydrate. They ran off fat. but they still had a serum glucose level because your brain runs on glucose. It can also run on ketones too, but your brain runs on glucose. My brain runs on glucose. And you need glucose because certain hormones and certain proteins in the body require glycosylation.
in order to be effective. An example, LH and FSH. When you don't have glycosylation of LH and FSH, the hormones that tell your testicle and your ovary to work, you are infertile. It's that simple. So survival of the species says you need some glucose, but if you're not consuming it, you'll still get it because your body will make it. It will make it out of amino acids. It will make it out of fat.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between sugar and fructose?
Correct. All true. Now, you could say that's correlation, not causation, but we actually have the causation. We have the data. We have it in mechanistic terms. We have it in clinical interventional efforts. We have it in societal efforts. There's a method for determining proof. That doesn't need randomized control trials. It's called econometric analysis.
This is what we have for, for instance, climate change. There's no control group for climate change, but we still know it's true. This is what we have for tobacco and lung cancer. You know, you don't have naive people start smoking. That would be illegal, immoral, get you thrown in jail. But we still know that tobacco causes lung cancer.
We know that football trauma causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy. None of these have control groups, but we know it's true through econometric analysis. This is a method of using natural history data over time to be able to determine proximate cause.
And we have that for sugar and diabetes, and we have it for sugar and heart disease, and we have it for sugar and fatty liver disease, and of course we have it for sugar and tooth decay. We're working on sugar and cancer and sugar and dementia. We're not there yet.
In your book, Fat Chance, on page 120, there was something particularly curious because I think this is a... Yeah, here we go. It says, the bottom line is sugar consumption is a problem. 33% of sugar consumption comes from beverages. Yes. And the biggest abusers are the poor and underserved. Indeed. So let's talk about beverages to start with then. Mm-hmm. Diet beverages, are they fine?
And how bad are the sort of fizzy pop beverages that most of us consume every day?
So let's do the sugared soft drinks first.
Okay.
They are really bad. If you consume one sugared beverage per day, your risk for diabetes goes up by 29%. Wow. Okay. And that's if you have one. If you have two, 58%.
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