“There is Too Much Food in Our Sugar”: Guest Opinion by FDA Chief Scientist

by Steven Brostrov, M.D., Chief Scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

With just about everybody resolving to lose weight in 2015, it’s high time to consider the single biggest reason for rampant obesity in the U.S. And it is not sugar, as misguided dieticians would have you believe. It is food.

There is too much food added to our sugar, and it is the food that makes us fat. If you don’t believe me, put some sugar in a glass of water and swirl it. Sugar disappears. But put food in there and it stays.

Magic? No, science.

That’s what happens in your digestive system and what scientists have misunderstood for decades: sugar disappears, and food stays and crawls under your skin as fat. Besides, sugar makes up a meager 17% of the American diet and it thus less likely than food to be the number one culprit.

In the coming year we should eat more sugar and less food. Any biology textbook will tell you that sugar is the purest form of energy for your body. Food, on the other hand, is useless weight used primarily as a vessel for sugar. The more food we add to our sugar, the less sugar we can consume, since we can only eat a certain amount of food.

Greedy food companies are of course to blame. For decades now they have been adding ridiculous amounts of food to all the different sugars that we know and love, from bread to pasta to condiments to meats to canned goods.

We should also consider what adding such exorbitant amount of food to our sugar does on a bigger scale. According to the Credit Suisse Report, “30% – 40% of healthcare expenditures in the USA go to help address issues that are closely tied to the […] consumption of sugar.” If the greedy food companies keep making us eat less sugar by loading it with food, the healthcare industry, among others, will suffer. Just think how many doctors, nurses, insulin pump manufacturers and distributers, and weight-loss book authors would lose their jobs for lack of demand!

Perhaps it is them, and not your precious self you should think about the next time you decide to eat something with only a couple of tablespoons of sugar in it.

And so, as the stress-free days of holiday gluttony draw to a close and the stressful months of job and school gluttony loom on the horizon, I encourage all of you to seek out only the purest forms of sugar, unadulterated by food. Be it corn-syrup-and-sugar porridge or a reduced-water carbonated beverage, there is something for every palate.