BITESIZE | The Bitter Truth About Sugar | Professor Robert Lustig #552

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite-size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 251 of the podcast with medical doctor and leading public health expert, Professor Robert Lustig. Professor Lustig's passion is in communicating how excess sugar And ultra-processed foods are fueling the chronic disease epidemic that we are all facing today. And in this clip, he explains why eating too much sugar can be so damaging for our health and shares some practical strategies that we can all use to help.

What are the key negatives when we consume too much sugar, or I guess the levels of sugar that many of us are currently consuming? Well, first of all, let's make it very clear that sugar is not the only problem in our diet. It's the big one, it's the 2,000-pound gorilla in our diet, but there's other stuff too. But sugar is a particularly egregious molecule. Once upon a time, trans fats were the worst thing we consumed.

Trans fats are the devil incarnate. Trans fats, the bacteria can't chew it up, which is why they put the trans fats in, all right, so that, you know, it would last forever, you know, the 10-year-old Twinkie. Well, the fact is our mitochondria, our little energy-burning factories inside all our cells, are really refurbished bacteria. We can't chew it up either. So the exact same reason for why they put the trans fats in the food is exactly why you shouldn't eat the food.

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