http://www.npr.org/2012/02/17/147047545/should-sugar-be-regulated-like-alcohol

Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics in the Division of
Endocrinology, University of California, San Francisco, also head of the Weight
Assessment for Teen and Child Health Program there.

What I'm saying is that our current food supply is so glutted with fructose,
that is added sugar, sugar that was put there very specifically for the food
industry's purposes, both for palatability and for shelf life, that it has now
created a toxic - basically a toxic side effect in our livers, driving all of
these chronic metabolic diseases.

And the only thing that can reverse this is reduction in consumption.

Numerous studies, both in animals and humans, show that the area of the brain,
the reward center, is affected by sugar the same way it is by tobacco, alcohol,
nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and therefore it fosters continued consumption.

It's the added sugars that we care about because the sugar that's in fruit is
not a problem. You don't see a nutrition label on a pineapple. It's got plenty
of sugar, but we don't need one because all food is inherently good. It's what
you do to the food afterward that's the problem.

Look, we've had a reduction in percent consumption of fat from 40 to 30 percent
over the past 30 years. And in the process, our obesity and metabolic syndrome
prevalence has gone through the absolute roof. Now, in 1977, the McGovern
commission dietary guidelines for Americans basically told us that we needed to
reduce our consumption of fat. The question is: Where did that come from? Where
did that directive come from? Very simple, in the early 1970s, we learned about
this thing in our blood called LDL, low-density lipoproteins.

In the mid-1970s, we learned that dietary fat raised our LDL, which is true. And
we also then learned in the late 1970s that LDL levels in populations correlated
with cardiovascular disease. So the thought was if dietary fat raises your LDL
and LDL raises your risk for cardiovascular disease, let's get rid of dietary
fat, therefore cardiovascular disease would go down. That was the thought
process. And the AHA, the AMA and the USDA all bought into this, and that is
what was done, and the food industry went along with it.

They retooled. They reengineered all their recipes. That's how we got
Entenmann's fat-free cakes. That's how we got Snackwell's. They're still with
us. Bottom line, not only has it not worked, but it's actually made things way
worse. Now, the question is: Was that logic rational? And I would pose to you
that that logic was completely off base. Why? Well, number one, dietary fat does
raise your LDL - that's true - but there are two LDLs, not one. There's one
called large buoyant, and there's one called small dense.

When you measure your LDL levels in your blood, you measure both at the same
time. It turns out the large buoyant has nothing to do with cardiovascular
disease. They float. They go along inside your blood vessels. They're too large
to get under the surface of the cells that line the arterial wall. They don't
cause anything. The small dense ones, though, those are the ones that are driven
up by carbohydrate, and they are small enough to get under the surface of
endothelial cells.

They're the ones that start the foam cell process. They're the ones that start
atherogenesis, and they're the ones that have gone through the roof, because
when we took the fat out, the food tasted like cardboard. We had to substitute
something. We substituted carbohydrate. So, yes, our percent fat went down, and
our percent carbohydrate went up astronomically, and that drove hyperinsulinemia,
drove liver fat, drove all the processes I've mentioned before, and that's how
we got into this mess. We have to get out of it.

It's refined carbohydrate, the processed carbohydrate that's the problem. The
fat that occurs naturally, even saturated fat, does - it raises your LDL, but it
raises the LDL that doesn't matter. It's the trans fat that causes significant
cardiovascular disease. That's synthetic. That's added. In other words, if you
ate what came out of the ground or you ate the animals that ate what came out of
the ground, you would be fine. It's when you deviate from that, which is what
our entire food industry has done for profitability and also for shelf life,
that's where we get into trouble.