Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine

by Robert H. Lustig

So our food’s safe, right? But what if it acts more like a slow poison, like cigarettes—one won’t kill you, but ten thousand consumed over ten years might?

Nutrition is not the same as food science. Nutrition is what happens to food between the mouth and the cell. Food science is what happens to food between the ground and the mouth.

Seed oils are high in omega-6 fatty acids, which are highly pro-inflammatory; yet omega-3s, found in fish, are anti-inflammatory. It’s not the plants that are important.

I’m not against plants—plants can be Real Food. But they can also be processed food. Just like animals can be Real Food or processed food.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries

Back in 1970 we spent 6 percent of our GDP on healthcare, and now fifty years later we spend 17.9 percent. Yet the average American’s weight is up, health is down, and wallet is underwater.

We spend 97.5 percent of our healthcare budget on individual treatment, and only 2.5 percent on prevention.

How many people work on diet AFTER they are obese

insulin resistance occurs when the cells in your muscles, fat, and liver no longer respond to the insulin signal. The glucose can’t get in—the cells are starving—so they send signals to the pancreas to crank out even more, but to no avail. The glucose builds up in your blood at the same time that your cells are starving, adding insult to injury.

low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), the ostensible villain, the “classic” biomarker of risk for a future heart attack. Clinicians are taught to treat LDL-C with statins;

And when I got my patients’ insulin down by getting them off processed food, their LDL and their triglycerides both came down as well.

Lyon Diet Heart Study.

triglycerides. The level of these particles tells you how your liver is doing. The HR ratio for triglycerides and heart disease is 1.8 (meaning that if they’re high, you have an 80 percent increased risk for heart attack) compared to LDL-C at 1.3.

and falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries in older adults.

mild hypertension (140 to 160, or 90 to 110) are taking some medication.

The reason is because the kidney is very adept at excreting excess sodium. But there’s one thing that inhibits sodium excretion by the kidney—insulin resistance. High insulin levels increase blood pressure, even with relatively low sodium intake. And many people are insulin resistant—and those people do need to lower their salt as a treatment of the disease. It isn’t just the salt—it’s also our processed food.

type 1 is due to insulin deficiency (an autoimmune destruction of the pancreas) and is usually associated with children (although some adults can get it); type 2 is due to insulin resistance (see above), the key driver of metabolic syndrome and usually associated with adults

But Schillinger added one variable—food company sponsorship. Lo and behold, of the twenty-six studies sponsored by food companies, all twenty-six showed no effect. Of the thirty-four studies that were independently funded, thirty-three showed a clear relationship between sugar consumption, obesity, and diabetes—meaning the food industry has polluted the data (see Chapter 23), and Kahn toes the same line, polluting it further.