Expert to deliver lecture ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’ tomorrow for Bermuda Diabetes Association and the Argus GroupBy Jessie Moniz HardyYou wouldn’t give your five year old beer or a rum swizzle, but giving your child sodas and sweetened juices might be almost as bad. For that matter, sugary drinks aren’t very good for adults either.Dr Robert H Lustig, a world authority on obesity and its underlying causes, will be giving a lecture for the Bermuda Diabetes Association and the Argus Group tomorrow.He is the author of New York Times best-seller Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. His talk will be called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.His argument, in a nutshell, is that manufacturers are packing sugar, particularly high fructose corn syrup, into beverages and processed foods (pick up just about any box at the grocery store and read the label) and the result is an epidemic of lifestyle related diseases such as type two diabetes and heart disease.One in four Bermudians is now thought to either have diabetes or be at risk of developing it.“I think that sodas and sweetened fruit drinks are a problem,” he said. “I think that sodas are an enormous amount of sugar with no fibre.“There is a hypnotic role for sugar in that it causes you to continue to consume. There are studies that have shown that when you prep a child with soda and then let them loose in a fast-food restaurant, they eat more.”Manufacturers have argued that high fructose corn syrup is no different than regular sugar, and Dr Lustig does not disagree. The problem is too much sugar is bad for you no matter what kind of sugar it is.Surveys have also found that the average person consumes around 22.2 teaspoons of added sugar every day, when the recommended sugar intake for adult women is five teaspoons (20 grams) of sugar per day, for adult men, it’s nine teaspoons (36 grams) daily, and for children, it’s three teaspoons (12 grams) a day.Now consider that a 12oz can of can of Coke has 39grams of sugar in it, and a 20oz bottle has 65 grams of sugar. If you forgo the soda and buy a fruit juice, consider that a 16oz bottle of orange juice can have 52 grams of sugar in it, more than twice the recommended daily allowance if you are female.People today weigh 25lbs more than they did 25 years ago.But Dr Lustig said that while there are all sorts of reasons why soda and sweet drinks are the bad guys, it doesn’t mean they should be legally bannedIn fact, in some states in the United States took soda vending machines out of schools and then found that children were drinking just as much soda, just at home.“Reduction in availability should be the goal,” Dr Lustig said. “There are different options such as taxation and limiting the availability of soda.“Taxation is cheap and easily instituted and if you do the tax right, at the level of government you can direct the money that the tax collects back to the community where the tax occurred.“You could direct it towards farmers markets so that poorer people would have better access to healthy fruits and vegetables.”He said Canada and countries in Europe had tried taxing sweet products and found that it worked. In the United States the food industry has fought all attempts to tax sweet products.The Royal Gazette spoke to Dr Lustig via telephone while he was at an airport in the United States waiting to come to Bermuda.We asked him how he was managing to eat and drink healthy in an environment notorious for its on the go food and drink.“It is very hard,” he said, “because pretty much all processed food has added sugar. You have to look for the food that is not processed.“If it is packaged it is likely processed. In an airport it is virtually impossible to tell where the food came from.”He said when he did find himself in an airport he allowed his health standards to relax a little, not having many other options.“At home, I am much more careful,” he said. “My wife and I shop on the edges of the supermarket. We spend a lot of time in the vegetable aisle, a lot of time in the dairy and a lot of time with cheeses.“At home, we make our own desserts,” he said. “My wife is Norwegian and baking is therapy for her. I can’t stop her.“To make her recipes healthier she reduces the sugar content by a third, as a rule. She has found that reducing it anymore than that starts to adversely impact the recipe.“If anything, it comes out much better that way,” he said.In terms of bread, he tries to avoid it, but will eat whole grain bread — the real whole grain bread stuff.“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not define the term whole grain,” he said. “Some companies use the term to mean the product was whole grain before it was pulverised.”He said the grain needs to be intact to provide any health benefit. The structure of the whole grain makes the body work a little harder to get at the sugar.This results in a slower ride in blood sugar and a lower insulin response.“Anything that keeps your insulin down is a good thing, ”he said.Dr Lustig has lectured around the world addressed the obesity epidemic.He is Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and an endocrinologist at the University of California in San Francisco.His talk on sugar has received more than three million hits on You Tube.He has been interviewed on ABC, CNN and CBS several times, as well as appearing on special televised features narrated by Alec Baldwin.He is also a former chairman of the Obesity Task Force of the Pediatric Endocrine Society.His talk will be tomorrow (Tuesday, June 11) at 6.30pm in the Harbourview Ballroom at The Fairmont Hamilton Princess.Limited remaining spaces are now available to the public by e-mailing kim@totalgroup.bm. Refreshments will be available.For more information see www.chc.ucsf.edu/coast/fatchance.html and also the website for the Institute of Responsible Nutrition at www.responsiblefoods.org or see www.argus.bm.