Sugar and Why Your Baby Should Avoid it with Robert Lustig, MD, MSL

Robert Lustig (1s):

When you look at baby food, it's all been spiked with sugar. Basically what they're doing is they're hooking these kids early. We have been feeding babies, semi solid food for millennia. Okay. And they're still here. Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor, and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning. Here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy Podcast, I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, feeding you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (41s):

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy Podcast. Today. We are talking about sugar and more specifically why your baby should avoid it. And I am so excited to have the big daddy of sugar research himself, Dr. Robert Lustig on the podcast today with me to talk specifically about your babies and sugar. I know you guys know babies shouldn't have added sugar, but Dr. Lustig is going to blow your mind about why our babies are still having sugar, even when we don't think they are and what we can do to help prevent it. Dr. Lustig, if you're not familiar, he works at UCSF in San Francisco. He's a professor of emeritus at pediatrics in the division of endocrinology.

Katie Ferraro (1m 22s):

So he specializes in this field called neuroendocrinology and he has an emphasis on how energy balance is regulated by our central nervous system. So long and short of it. He does all this research in clinical practice that focused on child obesity and diabetes, but has really honed in on the effects of sugar in the last, I would say decade or so. Dr. Lustig believes strongly that the food business is pushing processed foods that are loaded with sugar, that they've hacked our bodies and minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness. And that it's really one of the underlying causes for the fostering of some of today's epidemics of addiction and depression, but not to leave you guys depressed because it's a lot of heavy stuff. By focusing on real food, we can beat the odds, again, sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease.

Katie Ferraro (2m 7s):

I am so honored that Dr. Lustig is joining us. I know him from our roles at UCSF. I teach in the graduate school of nursing. I teach nutrition to future nurse practitioners and Dr. Lustig in the past has been grateful enough to do guest interviews and lectures for my students at UCSF. And I've had the opportunity to work with the medical students on his site at UCSF as well. So I'm so grateful that he can join us today to talk in a little bit of a different context, which is to you guys about your babies, about sugar and how and why our babies should avoid sugar. So with no further ado, here's Dr. Robert Lustig. Well hello, Dr. Lustig, thank you so much for joining me today.

Robert Lustig (2m 44s):

My pleasure, Katie. Thanks for having me.

Katie Ferraro (2m 46s):

Now, I know that sugar is confusing enough for an adult, let alone babies and your resource, sugar science, is the authoritative source for evidence-based scientific info about sugar and its impact on health. I was curious if you could tell our audience a little bit about the research and the education that you do surrounding sugar.

Robert Lustig (3m 4s):

Well, once upon a time, I thought that all calories were the same. And the reason I thought that was because that's what they taught me in medical school. However, doing research in nutrition and obesity, it became very, very clear and very obvious that in fact, calories were not the same. Different calories were metabolized different ways in the body and therefore had different effects on disease. And one of the most notorious was sugar. When I opened up my biochemistry text back in 2006, what I noticed was that sugar was metabolized just like alcohol and the two diseases that children were now getting, type two diabetes and fatty liver disease used to be the diseases of alcohol, but children don't drink alcohol.

Robert Lustig (3m 51s):

So I put together a talk for the national institutes of health, basically equating sugar that is specifically the molecule fructose and alcohol and asked the question, could it be that sugar is the alcohol of the child? To my amazement, these were toxicologists I was giving the talk to. They went, oh my God, you're absolutely right. And this makes perfect sense. You need to tell everybody about this. And so I basically started giving talks about this issue and basically altered my research program to look at this question. And I have been following the leads ever since.

Robert Lustig (4m 31s):

I've been investigating this now for about 13 years and virtually all the data has fallen into place. And it has enormous implications for policy as well, of course, as for personalized nutrition and obviously for babies, because when you look at baby food, it's all been spiked with sugar on purpose by the baby food industry, because they know that babies love sugar. In fact, babies prefer sugar for all sorts of evolutionary reasons. And basically what they're doing is they're hooking these kids early in the same way. You'd be loath to give your two year old, the key to the liquor cabinet.

Robert Lustig (5m 13s):

Well, it doesn't matter because you're giving it to them and baby food.

Katie Ferraro (5m 17s):

So when you say that about, you know, you'd be loath to give it to your babies. I always think about some of the foods that are marketed directly to kids. One of the easiest, like the low hanging fruit are these yogurts that are for kids because they have so much added sugar to a product that already has natural sugar in it, milk sugar. And I say like, would you take plain full fat yogurt and go to Starbucks and take four packets of sugar, open it up and pour it in your baby's yogurt and serve it to your baby. And every parent says no, and you're like, they call CPS on you. Like, that's exactly what you're getting when you're serving your child a product that has 12 or 16 grams of added sugar in it. So in addition to yogurts, could you just give us some insight as to what other foods that babies are prone to eating that have hidden sugars in them?

Robert Lustig (5m 56s):

Fruit loops, you know, fruit, those are finger foods for kids, you know, along with Cheerios and you know, all these other

Katie Ferraro (6m 3s):

Honey nut Cheerios. I mean, parents don't know the difference between regular Cheerios and honey nut Cheerios. And not to mention children shouldn't have, babies shouldn't have honey, but the honey nuts are not the basic Cheerios. If you look at the there's less iron, there's more sugar. And I think a lot of times there's just confusion on the part of the parents. They hear, oh, Cheerios are a good finger food, which is not even true because at six and seven months of age, when babies start solids, they don't have their pincer grasp. It can't even pick up Cheerios yet. So it's actually a food for older babies

Robert Lustig (6m 27s):

And not really a very good one either. It's sort of the prototypical first food for babies. I think that that really needs to change.

Katie Ferraro (6m 36s):

I do too. And I think it's frustrating to parents. They see the baby. If they can even get the food in their hand, they can't get it out of their fat little baby hand before they have their pincer grasp. And parents say, oh, well I guess the baby can't feed themselves. I'll just go ahead and shove this arbitrary amount of pureed baby food into their mouth.

Robert Lustig (6m 49s):

So I mean, basically virtually every baby food under the sun has been spiked with added sugar on purpose so that the baby will accept it. So a simple quiz, how often do you have to give a savory food to a six month old before they will accept it?

Katie Ferraro (7m 9s):

We generally say between 10 and 15 times a baby may need to see a food before they like are accepted.

Robert Lustig (7m 14s):

Exactly, right. 13 is the medium. That's exactly right. Good for you , Katie you do this job for a reason.

Katie Ferraro (7m 22s):

It's so nice to hear someone else say it besides myself. That's really why you're here to reinforce the message.

Robert Lustig (7m 26s):

But how often, how many times do you have to give a sweet food to a six month old before they will accept it?

Katie Ferraro (7m 33s):

Like negative times, they're going to reach out and take it from you.

Robert Lustig (7m 36s):

And the reason is because number one, there are lots of T1 CR taste receptors on the tongue that are specific for sugar. And in fact kids, the younger, the more prone they are to like it. And there are specific studies looking at this question. So the baby food industries, you know, they know. And so they're very specifically spiking their foods with added sugar specifically so the baby will accept it on the first try. So the mother goes, oh, he likes it. Let me get more of this. And you know, then the kid's branded for life.

Katie Ferraro (8m 12s):

Well, and the parents feel good. Like if they're feeding a pouch, for example, that says it has kale in it. It's essentially green colored applesauce and the parents feel empowered, oh, I'm giving my baby a health food. It's kale, but it's essentially apple sauce with some green food coloring in it.

Robert Lustig (8m 25s):

Exactly right. These are some of the industry tactics that we are trying to battle back. And I will also tell you that that pureed food is a problem in and of itself. Even if it didn't have sugar in it because it's pureed. So this is a new line of research that I am embarking on along with a long-term colleague of mine. He's the world's first periodontist. His name is Dr. Kevin Boyd and he's at Northwestern in Chicago. And what he has demonstrated is that the tongue, you know, that is say breastfeeding, the tongue is the primary stimulus to growing the palette.

Robert Lustig (9m 6s):

So there's pressure by the tongue on the hard palate during sucking, which actually expands the palette and increases therefore the, the area of the airway and thereby you work growing the airway, if you don't suck as hard, and there are many different diseases that cause decreased sucking or where you don't allow sucking, like for instance, if you have had surgical diversions of the intestine because of congenital abnormalities, etc, these kids don't grow their hard palate and they end up with malocclusion and obstructive sleep apnea later on.

Katie Ferraro (9m 45s):

And they get diagnosed as having extreme, picky eating because they can't tolerate different textures.

Robert Lustig (9m 50s):

That's exactly right. All of these things are associated together. So the question I'm asking and that Dr. Boyd is asking is how did we use to feed babies before the baby food industry entered our world? You know, the very first baby food was available in the Netherlands in 1927. Okay. And ever since then, you know, we've got Gerber and coronation and all the usual suspects, but you know, we've had babies on this planet since, you know, time and Memorial. How did babies get fed after breast milk from, you know, whenever till 1927?

Katie Ferraro (10m 32s):

Perhaps modified versions of the same foods, the rest of the family ate?

Robert Lustig (10m 36s):

Exactly. So what happened is the same thing that birds do, the mothers would preach you and, you know, sort of do some mastication and some maceration of normal table foods, and then plop it into the baby's mouth and the baby, whether the baby had teeth or not as irrelevant, they would gum it to death. And what that did was it exercised the masseter and pterygoid muscles, thereby increasing the strength of the bite. And that grew the maxilla so that you didn't end up with baby over-jet, which is a form of malocclusion. And what that also did was it increased again, the palatal vault thereby increasing the airway.

Robert Lustig (11m 19s):

So what we have been doing by feeding our kids, pureed food, ostensibly, with the notion that we're going to prevent them from choking is we have actually instead given them a new set of diseases.

Katie Ferraro (11m 32s):

Okay. Can we talk for a second about juice? I feel like most parents know the American academy of pediatrics guidelines about no juice for babies and super small amounts for toddlers. So I also think it's funny. If you look at the guidelines, four ounces max for a one to three-year-old, which if you look at your typical sized juice box, it's six or seven ounces, like what are you going to do? Take the juice box away from a toddler halfway through it. Like you can't do that. But for older kids, a lot of parents mistakenly think kids need juice. Could you please tell us why they don't need juice?

Robert Lustig (11m 60s):

They don't need juice. They need the vitamins, minerals and fiber of fruit. Now the question is what happens to fruit? When it goes from fruit to juice?

Katie Ferraro (12m 13s):

I always conjure up your orange analogy. I do it for the college students all the time. Like if you were to take five oranges and mash them down into orange juice and throw the pulp away, that's where all the fiber is. Quickly ingest approximately five times more fruit sugar than you would If you had just eaten one orange, you wouldn't sit down and gobble five oranges. So you're eating more fiber by eating the fruit and eating less sugar. Is that correct?

Robert Lustig (12m 36s):

Exactly. So my colleague and a cookbook author, Cindy Gershwin, who is a nutrition teacher in the Mount Diablo unified school district over in east bay, in Contra Costa county. Every single year, first day, she does an experiment, picks two kids out of class. She hands each kids, six oranges. And she says to the first kid, okay, kid here's six oranges make juice. And the kids squeezes the six oranges, gets 12 and a half ounces. Down's the entire glass and says, okay, what's for breakfast. Second kid. She says here kid, here's six oranges eat the six oranges. Kid eats orange number one, orange number two, orange number three, gets to orange number four and throws up.

Robert Lustig (13m 24s):

Always on orange number four. Cindy's got the vomit base and ready. And the kid goes, oh my God, Im gonna die. And then the kid doesn't eat lunch or dinner either. So what happened? The fiber happened, the fiber, and there are two kinds of fiber and fruit. Soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber is like, pectins like what holds jelly together? Insoluble is like cellulose, like the stringy stuff in celery. You need both. And the reason you need both is because what happens is when you have the two together, you form an impenetrable secondary barrier on the inside of your intestine, inside of your duodenum, the early part of your intestine, where the sugar's, the glucose, the fructose, the lactose, etc, all get absorbed in that early part of the intestine.

Robert Lustig (14m 15s):

So you might like think of it like a fishnet with kelp, you know, lining it. It's a lot harder to, you know, catch fish when you can't drag the net behind you, because it's gotten all full of seaweed. Another example, let's take a spaghetti colander, you know, metal doohickey with holes. Okay? You run the water goes right through. Okay. Now take a blob of petroleum jelly and throw it into the center of the colander. Run the water, still goes right through, bounces off the jelly. Now take your finger and rub, rub the petroleum jelly all the way around the inside of the colander.

Robert Lustig (14m 57s):

Now run the water. Now you have an impenetrable barrier. So imagine that the colander is like the insoluble fiber, the fishnet. Imagine the soluble fiber is like the petroleum jelly, like the kelp. Okay. And what you can see is that both the soluble and insoluble fiber and the geometry of these two things together actually restrict and reduce the rate of carbohydrate, particularly sugar absorption from the gut into the bloodstream so that the liver doesn't get overwhelmed.

Katie Ferraro (15m 33s):

Are we talking about fiber from naturally occurring foods or does this include like the functional fibers like inulin and the ones that are added to a lot of diet foods, the parents might inadvertently be feeding to their babies and not realize they're not good for them?

Robert Lustig (15m 46s):

So those fibers like inulin, psyllium, etc, are all soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is not necessarily bad. Metamucil is an example. But they can't set up that gel alone. They cannot make that barrier without the fishnet, without the spaghetti colander. So adding fiber to foods like fiber one bars, or like you said, adding inulin is not doing the job by itself. You need both the soluble and insoluble. The problem is that once the fiber has been stripped out of the food and it's primarily the insoluble fiber, that's stripped out of food, the pulp that goes into the wastebasket when you juice a fruit or when you smoothie it, you know, basically what you're doing is you're taking the insoluble fiber and sharing it to smithereens with the blades of the Vitamix or the Breville.

Robert Lustig (16m 37s):

So now you can't set up that gel. Now, you can't make that in secondary barrier. And so adding soluble fiber is not going to fix that problem. So in essence, those added fiber foodstuffs are somewhat disingenuous because they're not really recapitulating the fact that the fiber has been taken out of the food and you can't add insoluble fiber back to food because it's not miscible, it won't dissolve. So you really need real food. It's really about real food. And I actually new book coming out in may called Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine, which will explain that it's not what's in the food, it's what's been done to the food that matters.

Robert Lustig (17m 22s):

And that's not on any food.

Katie Ferraro (17m 23s):

And one thing I like to remind parents, like they sometimes get bogged down in the details of soluble insoluble. It's like take a half a cup of oatmeal or take an apple. They have four grams of fiber, two soluble and two insoluble, if you lead a variety of foods that are naturally occurring sources of fiber, you're going to get both the soluble and the insoluble and the benefits from both. Don't overthink it and don't go selecting foods that have more or less added to it. But I want to go back to what you said about the Vitamix, because I think that's an important concept is that a lot of parents, especially with older kids who quote unquote, don't eat vegetables, they'll it all in a blender, puree it to smithereens, put it with something like applesauce or sweetened yogurt, and then say they're feeding their babies vegetables. But is that something you would essentially advise against because they're not going to be getting the same nutrient benefits as if they had perhaps a semi-solid soft cooked butternut squash versus a pureed pasta sauce of butter.

Robert Lustig (18m 14s):

Exactly. So basically what you're doing is you are getting rid of one of the primary components of the food that is helping not feed you, but rather feed your bacteria, feed your microbiome, feed your intestinal bacteria. And what we have learned is that in order for a food to be healthy, it needs to do two things. Two things, protect the liver, feed the gut, those two. Any food that does both is healthy. Any food that does neither is poison. Any food that does one or the other, but not both is somewhere in the middle.

Robert Lustig (18m 54s):

All of these pureed and Vitamix foods are somewhere in the middle because you're feeding the gut because you still have the soluble fiber, which the gut will use to make short chain fatty acids, which are anti-inflammatory and the anti insulin, which are good, but you have destroyed the insoluble fiber. So you are not protecting the liver. And so the liver still gets the tsunami of all of that extra sugar. And we have shown that with, you know, blood glucose excursions, let's take three separate items, apples, apple sauce, and the apple juice. Okay, same number of calories. You give them to a person and you measure the blood glucose rise after each of them.

Robert Lustig (19m 39s):

So obviously with the apple juice, you get a big glucose rise .with the apples, you get a very little glucose rise. What do you get with the apple sauce?

Katie Ferraro (19m 47s):

Probably same as the juice.

Robert Lustig (19m 48s):

Same as the juice. Exactly right. Same as the juice. And that's the point of this is that you're not protecting your liver. Hyperglycemic excursion, basically the more your liver has to deal with. And that's where the chronic metabolic disease comes in because the liver is going to take that extra sugar and turn it into liver fat. And that's why all these kids are now getting fatty liver disease. And when you get fatty liver disease, you know, it's just a matter of, you know, when you're gonna get type two diabetes

Katie Ferraro (20m 19s):

And your apple analogy is very appropriate for this audience, because we talk about apples. If you look at emergency department admission data for non-fatal choking incidents in children and infants, apples are way up there. We can't feed baby six to 12 months of age, raw, intact apples, but we can show them how to parboil and cook them. So they're just soft enough. So that then from a texture standpoint, it's safer for babies to eat. And sometimes parents say, well, why don't you just blast into smithereens and do applesauce or do apple juice. But you're saying that the more cooked it is that it would essentially be less helpful for the baby. And is it okay then to do the soft cooked apples? Because obviously we need to prevent choking risk.

Robert Lustig (20m 57s):

Yeah, you know, look, no one's for choking. You know, anybody's ever seen their baby choke. It's pretty awful. I don't argue that. The fact matter is we have been feeding babies, you know, semi solid food for millennia. Okay. And they're still here. And this whole pureed pouch phase that the processed baby food industry is going through is clearly contributing to the problem. And we need to revert back because now we understand it. It's very clear in developing countries that are adopting our way of life. The data are really, really robust in China.

Robert Lustig (21m 38s):

And if you look at the incidents of malocclusion in China, back in 1990, it was virtually non-existent. And now it's like 10% of the population and obesity has gone up commensurately. I mean, they backs basically follow the exact same. And we're talking about obesity in toddlers, they're following the exact same trajectory. And, you know, we had also have now the data on obstructive sleep apnea as well. So we know that this is what's going on. The question is what are we going to do to fix it? And we have to rethink how we feed our babies.

Katie Ferraro (22m 12s):

We're pretty set on why babies definitely do not need any added sugars, but the parents and caregivers who are listening, they're adults faced with many of the same dilemmas, like the food place is confusing. And I love the subtitle of your book. It's not, you know, what's in the food, it's what we do to the food. So when parents are cruising the aisles at the grocery store and all these foods are stuff with added sugar, do you have any tips for parents as the purchasers of food in our households, what they can do to minimize that a sugar?

Robert Lustig (22m 38s):

Yeah. It's really easy. Stay out of the grocery store.

Katie Ferraro (22m 40s):

That's very easy to do during the pandemic, but what do you eat then?

Robert Lustig (22m 43s):

The fact of matter is if you go into the aisles, you've gone off the ranch. All of the food that you should be eating is at the perimeter of the grocery store. And most of it is in refrigerator aisles. So if you stick to the meats and the chickens and the pork and produce, you are in fine shape. If you start looking for canned or tinned or boxed or wrapper food, and they're all, you know, shelf stable and that's on purpose, now you've got a problem. So there's plenty to eat. About 25% of the grocery store is still edible.

Robert Lustig (23m 26s):

I haven't taken that much away. Okay. The problem of course is that's where all the added sugar is. And that's also where all the, where the lack of fiber is, is on those shelves because you can't freeze fiber, you know, and I'll prove it to you. Take an orange, put it in your freezer overnight, take it out the next day, put it on the counter, let it thaw, try to eat it. See what you get. You get mush? Why do you get mush? The ice crystals, that form masquerade the cell wall, all the water will rush in, Hey, food industry knows that. So what do they do? Squeeze it and freeze it. Not last forever. They've turned a food and orange into a commodity, frozen, concentrated orange juice.

Robert Lustig (24m 6s):

You can sell it on the commodities exchange. Anybody ever see the movie trading places. That's what it was all about at the end, the commodities exchange and the frozen concentrated orange juice along with, of course, with the pork bellies and things like that. So bottom line, the food industry makes boatloads of money, poisoning us by altering the food. Adulterating the food in such a way as to actually make us sick.

Katie Ferraro (24m 31s):

Okay. Back to the grocery store. What about legumes in the middle? I'm not playing devil's advocate. I'm just like, I know parents are going to write me like a million messages about potentially helpful foods that are not on the perimeter. How do you feel about legumes? Like we recommend them for babies once they had their pincer grasp, because good source, it is plant-based iron, but there's iron there's protein. There's fiber, they're affordable. Different textures tastes are you anti-legume?

Robert Lustig (24m 53s):

Fiber peanuts, loads of fiber. Go for it. In fact, we've now know that the earlier you introduce peanut into a baby's diet, the less likely they are to get peanut allergy

Katie Ferraro (25m 1s):

Correct. And our parents know that as well. The one thing we have to caution them about is don't go overboard on fiber because you can inadvertently do is cause the baby to be inadvertently full or artificially full from all that fiber, at which point they're then displacing other healthful foods and the ability to learn how to recognize and respond to their hunger and fullness cues. So again, don't go pushing tons and tons of fiber, but you're saying choose foods that aren't naturally occurring sources.

Robert Lustig (25m 27s):

Yeah. I mean, you know, I certainly wouldn't stick Metamucil down a kid's gullet, but if you just eat real food and you know, peanuts are fine, you know, obviously everybody's worried about kids aspirating a peanut. You could even grind them up if you want, if you're that concerned. But the fact of matter is try to stick to fiber containing foods and legumes certainly have them, you know, beans, lentils, you know, quinoa, farro, etc, are all fiber containing. They are shelf stable, but you have to cook them in order to get them to be edible, but they provide both carbohydrates and fiber. They have loads of micronutrients.

Robert Lustig (26m 9s):

They have loads of vitamins and minerals as well. So they're highly nutrient dense foods. And as long as they still have the external fiber, you know, the insoluble fiber, they are good choice because they are protecting the liver and feeding the gut.

Katie Ferraro (26m 21s):

Dr. Lustig, I can't thank you enough for sharing all of this information. Not only just about sugar, but about fiber. I think it's so important for parents and caregivers to hear and to know, you know, we need to be a little bit more discerning as customers at the store, especially when we're buying foods for our early eaters. So if you could, tell us where the audience can go to learn more about your work, your research surrounding sugar, as well as your books as well, because especially the new book sounds really interesting.

Robert Lustig (26m 44s):

Sure. Now the last thing I want to leave your audience with is just remember that real food is low sugar, high fiber. And processed food is high sugar, low fiber. Processed food is killing us. It's that simple. In fact, I've just written an article called ultra processed foods, addictive, toxic, and ready for regulation. So my website is robertlustig.com. I also am the chief medical officer of a nonprofit here in the Bay Area called Eat Real, where we are getting real food into California, a unified school district schools in the East Bay. We have removed 270,000 pounds of sugar from the Mount Diablo unified school district in one year, that's 10 pounds of sugar per kid for an entire year by getting real food into the schools.

Robert Lustig (27m 37s):

And there's a method and madness to what we do. And you can find us on eatreal.org. My new book is called Metabolical, and you can find it at metabolical.com. It's on Amazon. It's not available yet. It will be available on May 4th, but you can pre-order. And what I do is I take the medical profession to task because we screwed up big time because we let the food industry and big pharma dictate our policies. And I basically take those all apart and deconstruct them for the reader and for the politicians. There are several resources that UCSF sponsors, for instance, sugarscience.org, which is a group of 12 independent scientists at UCSF and Emory, and a few other institutions who have vetted 8,000 clinical research articles and distilled it into five messages for the general public, with infographics and posters and things that you can put up in class, etc.

Robert Lustig (28m 34s):

I was in the movie Fed Up, which was a documentary about how we got to where we are today in terms of our process food tobacco. I was in a documentary called Coated, which explains why we got to where we are today in terms of our process food, tobacco. And I'm around YouTube.

Katie Ferraro (28m 53s):

Yeah, you are. You have one of I'm sorry, but the longest, most viral videos ever, like it's so long and yet people watch it to the end. Can you tell them just a sec, I'll link to it in the show notes for this episode. Can you give us the rundown on that? To be honest, I've never made it to the end, but I know a lot of millions of people have.

Robert Lustig (29m 11s):

It's called Sugar, The bitter truth. It's an UCSF mini med school for the public lecture I gave in 2009. And it is 90 minutes of carbohydrate biochemistry. I never thought even my mother would watch it, let alone 11.2 million people and still going strong. And I gotta tell you, Katie, I have no idea why it caught on, but it did. And it's viral and you know, everything in it is still true.

Katie Ferraro (29m 39s):

I've done a few of the mini med school presentations as well. And I still get questions. Like I started doing it maybe 10 years ago and people go back and watch them. People really that content, nowhere near the views that year people have. But it's amazing that like people will find this, watch the whole thing and then send you very detailed emails to your UCSF, that email. I'm sure you get them all the time too.

Robert Lustig (29m 60s):

You know, I know that it's still out there and I know that people still care. And you know, what we're seeing is a cultural tectonic shift in food. People say, how can you change something that's so embedded and so ingrained? Well, you know, there have been four count them, four separate cultural tectonic shifts in the last 30 years in America. And here they are. Number one, bicycle helmets and seatbelts. Number two, smoking in public places. Number three, drunk driving. Number four, condoms and bathrooms 30 years ago, every single one of those was in Massimo. If a legislator stood up in a state house or Congress or parliament or anywhere in the world and proposed legislation for any of those, they had gotten left right out of town and written out on a rail.

Robert Lustig (30m 45s):

Nanny, state, Liberty interest, you know, get out of my kitchen, get out of my bathroom, get out of my car. Today, we're all facts of life. And if you don't click your seatbelt, when you pull out of your driveway, your kids will scream at you. Why is that? How'd that happen? And why did it take 30 years? And sir, we taught the children and the children grew up and they vote and the naysayers are dead. This is why these are cultural tectonic shifts. Then it also explains why it takes 30 years. Well, we are in a cultural tectonic shift around food, but we're only about seven to eight years into it.

Robert Lustig (31m 29s):

So we have a little bit more work to do, but we're doing it.

Katie Ferraro (31m 32s):

Well, thank you so much. This was amazing.

Robert Lustig (31m 33s):

My pleasure, Katie,

Katie Ferraro (31m 34s):

I know you do the points over and over, but it's, I think the visuals you do are so great too. Like the orange one that always gets parents. I literally remember, like, I knew how that story would end that the kid is going to vomit. Like, I've heard that you say that story like that really sticks with parents. And I love the infographics on the sugar science website. I think no, one's going to read 8,000 articles, but I'll look at five infographics. So thank you for making it digestible for us.

Robert Lustig (31m 57s):

Not a problem. Happy to do, you know, hope it gets out there. Hope people digest the message.

Katie Ferraro (32m 2s):

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Lustig. I really appreciate it. Well guys, I hope you loved that episode with Dr. Lustig. I know it was a little bit on the longer side, but like you cannot cut him off. Like I was just, I could listen to him all day long, like, okay, I never made it through the 90 minute YouTube video, but I'm going to link to it in the show notes for you guys. He has a lot of great resources that he mentioned today. So if you go to blwpodcast.com/68, I'll send you to his website, to his research lab at UC San Francisco. If you teach nutrition, there's some great, great infographics in there. As he said, his team has condensed 8,000 peer reviewed clinical articles like down into some really, really, really helpful infographics research briefs in summaries. And then also some of his books are there as well as like all the movies that he's been featured in.

Katie Ferraro (32m 46s):

Like he's super famous in the world of sugar. And again, I'm so grateful that he joined us today to talk in particular about babies. Also be linking to the book that he's going to be putting out a relatively soon as he mentioned, it's going to come out in May of 2021. It's called Metabolical. And again, his focus is, you know, it's not, what's in the food, it's what's been done to the food. So really pushing back against this processed food industry. And so if you walk away with nothing today, well you've made it to the end of the podcast. So thank you for listening this long. But remember he said you can't freeze fiber, that the food industry loves to squeeze it and freeze it. So he's talking about how processing of many foods that turns into, for example, we talked a lot about juice.

Katie Ferraro (33m 29s):

That that would definitely be something we don't need to feed our babies. I loved his messaging about how babies have been eating pureed, semi solid foods for millennia. And they're still here. So you guys, you're doing an awesome job by feeding your babies real food. I know it's hard. I know those pouches are convenient and they are sometimes irresistible, but no, in the long run, it's really more important for your baby to be eating real, whole, intact foods. Albeit provided that they're prepared safely. As he said, I thought it was funny. He said, nobody's for choking. I was like, yes, correct. Dr. Lustig, nobody's for choking, but we can make these real foods safe for our babies. They don't need to just have pureed foods. So thanks again, you guys so much for listening to this interview with Dr. Lustig. Go to blwpodcast.com/68 for all of the links from this episode. And I'll see you next time.