Sweet Death: How Sugar Is Making Us Sick | ENDEVR Documentary

what if you heard that sugar something we eat every day was largely responsible for the worldwide explosion and obesity and some of the most chronic diseases of our time and what have you heard that sugar is addictive and yet it's added to way more food products than you ever imagined would you think that was just alarmist bonus [Music] [Music] so the first time i heard all about the sugar being toxic stuff was an american bloke on the telly and to be honest i just rolled my eyes because it seems like everything's toxic and bad for you these days and i don't have a lot of sugar i have some of my coffee i have the occasional cronut and i figure i'm allowed because i exercise so i just thought how bad can it really be [Music] to find some answers i'm going to meet one of the world's most vocal critics against sugar he's the man i saw on the tally professor robert lustig and he's become a youtube sensation so we are being poisoned by this stuff and it's been added surreptitiously to all of our food every processed food okay and the question is why how did this happen professor lustig is now internationally sought after for his potent anti-sugar message there are three things that sugar does that these other food stuffs don't liver fat cell aging interfering with your brain's functioning to regulate how much to eat that makes it toxic sugar toxic isn't that a bit shock jock after all water will kill you if you overdo it dr luster goes even further he compares sugar with one of the most toxic substances out there it's not the nicotine that's toxic it's the tars that are toxic the whole cigarette is epoxy professor are you saying that the standard of evidence for the toxicity of sugar and the disease-causing effects of sugar are the same as for tobacco absolutely how is it that people are still lagging behind in terms of their understanding of the disease-causing effect of sugar nigel why do you think i'm sitting down talking to you because your viewers need to understand that what they've been told what they've been sold for the last 40 years is a bill of goods that has been designed specifically to make money for the food industry and to hurt them it's time to change the paradigm well something's got to change because more than 65 of kiwi adults are now obese or overweight and nearly 33 of children and as i look around i'm now wondering how much is sugar implicated in all of this so the first question is how much sugar do you need and the answer is zero there are no biological processes in the body that require dietary sugar your liver has a capacity to metabolize a finite amount a little is okay a lot is not when you overwhelm your liver's capacity to metabolize it you get in trouble and that is what we are seeing and he reckons that's because sugar is being slipped into everyday food without us knowing it so all this stuff has got me thinking about how much sugar is in the food that i would normally buy so i've come here to a typical supermarket so i can have a look [Music] right so spreads now some of the stuff is obvious you know your chocolatey nutty spread you think that tastes nice that's bound to have heaps of sugar and it does two teaspoons of sugar per serving but you wouldn't expect i mean i wouldn't expect say marmite i wouldn't expect to have to be honest any sugar in it but in fact it has 11.2 grams times 2.5 28 grams of sugar in one of these little bottles which is seven teaspoons of sugar i would not have expected seven teaspoons of sugar in a thing of marmite so you couldn't get more kiwi than this tomato sauce oh my god per serving right so per squirt of tomato sauce it's just over a teaspoon of sugar so every on the plate over a teaspoon of sugar that's a i don't know mayonnaise we'll go for the light you know got the heart foundation too okay for every of mayonnaise that you put on your whatever um that's a teaspoon and a half of sugar quail tuna almost a teaspoon of sugar per serving down here one of the old family favorites baked beans that has purse good god per serving there's almost four teaspoons of sugar i expect loads of added sugar in fizzy drinks but it's come as a surprise to find out fruit juice is packed with it as well sugar occurs naturally in fruit which is good but when it's juiced you get seriously concentrated sugars it seems there's no escaping the stuff what's becoming really clear to me as i'm wandering around and looking at the stuff all the stuff that i would normally buy it's not so much that sugar's hidden but it's kind of hidden in plain sight because it's in almost everything without knowing i've actually ended up eating quite a lot of sugar without really even thinking about it which has got me wondering why is sugar in just about everything and who decides how much so i've come along to talk to a food technologist who does that stuff for a living [Music] here they develop food products for food companies you know it could be a muesli bar it could be a dressing it could be a meal like i think why is sugar and everything i get why it's in ice creams and cakes it's cheap so often it's used to rebalance the cost of a product for example a dressing and you it was an oil-based dressing and you'd take some of the oil out because that's an expensive ingredient and bump up the sugar so we're looking for the cheaper products and to make the cheaper products you've got to put in more sugar to reach that cheap price the marketers have a view that the consumers won't go beyond a certain price point how do you decide how much sugar to put up well i guess it's a lot of trial and error so you taste the product to make sure that everything tastes just right the product would then then be taken to a panel are they qualified tasters i mean who are these who are the people on this panel well smaller companies that'll generally be like the marketing manager and um maybe even the office staff a larger company might be able to afford to run sensory panels to get feedback from their actual consumers what it costly amazes me about the modern world is that marketers who seem to have a profession built on fluff and wonder make these really important decisions like of course you would take it to a marketer to see whether the food tastes good rather than someone who's actually a professional does it but you know what i mean it's like well the market isn't meant to know what the consumers want so if they've done their job properly they've done the research but is it really about consumer demand or is it about profits the food industry has been upping and upping the dose over the past century and in particular in the past 30 years and they found that when they did that we bought more so this is their juggernaut this is how they're making money and they don't want to stop and they won't stop until they are remanded to stop the question is who's going to remand them that's a question for debate [Music] i'm discovering that sugar is in just about everything we eat but when it comes to my own food and lifestyle i like to think i choose healthy options this would pretty much be how i would start most mornings it's uh it's a coffee bit of a plunger go with the one sugar not a lot of sugar low-fat milk because that's what i've always thought you're supposed to have that's followed with muesli nice fiber and oats and all that sort of stuff in it but i kind of feel like i'm doing all of the right things um so yeah i feel like i can eat breakfast with a fairly clear conscience really i also take my exercise fairly seriously about 20 kgs of books made up with another 15 kgs of rocks and who needs a gym you just gotta get a bunch of heavy stuff and apply it to a hill crack on [Music] i know this probably seems quite mad to most people but i've always subscribed to that pretty well accepted theory that it's calories in calories out [Music] and i like sweet stuff so if i do this then i can have my treats always check let me just walk you through the nutritional goodness that is my normal friday night first off we have the grand angus diet coke so that's good this is one of i think the crowning achievements of human civilization it's the crunchy mcflurry oh look at that yeah i know but it's only on friday nights the rest of the time i think i'm pretty careful about sugar but what about us as a nation i was staggered to find out that the average kiwi adult now consumes up to a massive 50 kilograms of sugar a year depending on which study you read that's around 32 teaspoons of sugar a day way beyond the world health organization recommendations of up to nine teaspoons for men six for women and four for kids and the sugar in our diet isn't just about added or free sugars but also comes complements of refined carbohydrates which are quickly converted to blood sugar stuff like bread and muffins and cake could i have one of those lovely crayons please with the almond shavings on top all that stuff that's cheap and tastes really good maybe too good [Music] angela is your professional young life on the run aucklander she shops does an exercise and she is a sugar fiend [Music] sunday morning and i'm just having a bit of a step carbs and sugar is essentially my entire diet so because i'm i'm not very domesticated i chose the working life i usually have takeaways three times a day so three times a day you would have takeaways yeah what are you eating um a burrito but there's not enough sour cream where can i go that i don't have to cook that i don't have to do dishes that doesn't cost me that much kfc burger king mcdonald's i don't know this is sort of normal for me why mini jar so i eat pretty consistently throughout the day i'll keep lollies by my desk and i'm going to show you my stash that i keep next to my bed and it's literally within arm's length and it's actually not that much there's a lot less than what i usually have now at the risk of sounding like the crazy girl on the street that comes up on a costume about your sugar use do you ever think of yourself as perhaps being a bit of a sugar addict uh i want to say no but i think it's pretty obvious yeah yeah definitely i i don't know i think i don't drink i've never been drunk i don't smoke i've never done drugs or anything like that and i think it's i'm allowed to have one thing that i'm kind of hopelessly uh addicted to i guess yeah and sugar is it for me so she looked slim and healthy but i'm seriously worried about angela so i'm going to send her to a registered nutritionist i'm really nervous i think it's like going in to get a growling from your parents before you get the growling i have never seen a diet that bad in an adult before so nervous i'm sorry for so long i'm actually like breaking my nails okay that's not good people in your circumstances tend to feel like they're bulletproof yeah yeah and you don't think about diet and and the effects that it might have in 20 years or 25 years time if you keep going down this track in terms of your diet you're only really inviting those chronic illnesses that you keep hearing about yeah i don't know how i feel about that yeah a serious reality check because if angela keeps this diet up she could well join the estimated quarter of a million kiwis who are currently diabetic [Music] here at middlemore hospital in south auckland they're dealing with the fallout 580 people are now hooked up to have their blood cleaned and purified by dialysis machines and the rate of admission is going up by 10 a year which roughly matches the national statistics i'm meeting the clinical heat of diabetes dr brandon or walker um brendan this looks expensive yeah no this is dialysis is a very very expensive business machines the very high requirements of staff it's somewhere in the order of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars per year per person yeah and that's the dialysis costs many of these patients because of their kidney disease for those that have got diabetes and other problems have additional costs to do with the poor blood flow to their feet problems with their heart vision and so forth and so there'll be other direct health costs but even above that there is the cost that many of these people are people who could be working who are now having to interrupt their lives to be stuck on a machine so it is it has indirect costs which are far far greater it's a huge burden on the health system so like fundamentally right now there may well be millions of dollars of health costs just in this room absolutely just now maori and pacifica are most prone to this disease it's affecting young and old and is largely obesity related what's your view about the connection between sugar and obesity and diabetes and all these health problems oh there's a very clear link between sugar consumption and carbohydrate consumption and diabetes at a population level early intervention could have made the difference but instead middlemore is landed with the high cost of intensive care after the fact as a clinician as someone who works with the stuff how should we as the general public think about sugar in our diet the simplest of those really is to reduce sugary intake and the simplest to identify that adds no other nutritional value would be to reduce the consumption of sugary beverages you having much pain in your foot from the operation no no so nigel mr chan is a patient similar to those we often see in hospital who's got a lot of complications from his diabetes those complications resulted in infections and amputation of his big toe but he's also got other complications he's got some difficulty with his eyes and his kidneys and his nerves what do you think caused your diabetes uh well in fact i was taking too much sugar that's what that's what it's happened to me even though i've got a family history of diabetes you know to me was our mum's taking her pills there's taking us marilyn is 53 she's had diabetes for 20 years and has a long list of related complications my original have come away from the walls i've got cataracts forming in both eyes yeah i've had a stent put in in your house last year foreign how often are you having dialysis and how much time does it take three days a week i come and i'm on four hours four hours for each of those times what things now you know if you had your time again would have made a difference for you do you think my diet um eating all these sugary things that are shinabine what sort of things were they thinking about just [Music] i was eating a dozen apple doughnuts truly truly and eating chocolates and lollies and you know heaps of sugar in my cup of tea and how many houses ah teaspoons of sugar i'd have about four marilyn people talk about that you can get addicted to sugar that you kind of have to have it did it feel like that for you when you were having lots of sugar um i had to have my lollies you know they're really sweet like a packet of jelly beans that amount of sugar is a lot i hate to have it for me this is what happened to me with my love of sugar i love sugar too but all of this is starting to give me a few nagging doubts what about my blood sugar levels so i'm going to have my blood tested for good measure [Music] sugar is strongly implicated in the worldwide obesity explosion and obesity related diseases for my part though i reckon i'm pretty sensible about food and exercise so just quietly i'll be pretty confident that i'm doing all right in terms of the health stuff and the diet stuff but i've had a blood test and i've kept a food diary for a couple of weeks and i've come for an appointment with dr mickey williton the registered nutritionist to see how i'm doing [Music] well i've got your results nigel right yeah um i actually i don't think you're going to like what i've got to say actually really yeah um i mean it's not drastically terrible deathbed stuff that's good yeah but actually um it's not something to be taken too lightly okay yeah so the ones which i'm concerned about are in fact your triglycerides because they're bad are they they are bad yeah so just so you know triglycerides are a type of fat found in the blood triglycerides are a sign of excess sugar in the diet so it just makes the blood like a little bit stickier which increases the risk of clotting which can increase the risk of heart attacks and the bad news just keeps coming the recommended level from national heart foundation would be that you'd have them below 1.7 millimoles per liter and yours are actually at 2.4 that seems quite high it is actually quite high okay yeah you know you look fairly fit and fairly lean but that doesn't necessarily mean you're not at risk of inflammation and heart disease that was unexpected and to be honest quite shocking because i thought um this would just be the oh yep you're great you've got an outstanding diet and instead i discovered that actually i've got my diet and my blood results are actually quite concerning and it's like i'm 46 i shouldn't have concerning blood results at this point so yeah like it's suddenly become less a bit of a telly doddle and i'm thinking sure i need to really seriously change some things in my diet and look at what i'm eating it seems like everything i've been led to believe about eating may well be wrong but why is sugar suddenly the bad guy all of my life i believe that old dietary line that it's about fat so you eat low fat which means you eat less fat which means you don't get fat the low-fat revolution really took hold in the 70s and 80s as alarm grew over heart disease the family roast with its natural saturated fats was out and low-fat was in when they took the fat out of the food the food tasted like cardboard food industry knew that had to do something so would they do dump in the sugar and not just that low fat didn't make us any thinner in fact just the opposite we've got steadily fatter and unhealthier as the sugar in our diet has increased so that's it high sugars out for me refined carbohydrates are getting the heave as well [Music] at nelson hospital they directly implicate the white stuff with another incredibly serious health risk [Music] this time it's the impact soft drinks and juices are having on children's dental health i'm in the theater with dr rob beaglehole and his team what size problem we're dealing with here in terms of the number of children having their teeth extracted each year it's a huge number last year 34 000 children aged under 14 had one or multiple teeth extracted for dental reasons and we also know that this number has been increasing year after year so rob was because even even to a muppet like me that looks like this thing's gone wrong there oh that's right nigel what i can see here is that all of these front teeth here have holes or dental decay that these shadows here decay what we can also see is the permanent teeth up here so unfortunately this tooth here which has decay into the nerve and is black in the mouth is going to need to be extracted it's worse than i imagined and totally preventable that tooth's coming out we heard from the parents that they admitted that they had a diet high in sugary drinks and we know that sugary drinks is the number one source of sugar in the new zealand diet for children the mother was talking about coca-cola and her baby bottle think about people going up a nanny state but sometimes you actually need a nanny but this general anaesthetic is costing possibly five thousand dollars [Music] i guess the thing that really struck me is standing watching this the room was full of anesthetists there were dentists there were house surgeons there were theater nurses there was all the cash that was in there there was three hours worth of theater time and i just kept thinking that none of this needed to be in the end this little girl had six teeth extracted under general anesthetic which is a potentially dangerous procedure at the best of times what implications does it have if you lose six teeth well she's going to have eating problems she's going to have aesthetic problems socialising problems and also unfortunately she's going to have major orthodontic issues which is going to involve complex orthodontic treatment later down to try and move the teeth around and as i soon learned she was just one of several treated by rob and his team today how old is this child again she's just turned two just turned two on these front four teeth there's actually no tooth surface left all we can see is roots so this child has been in a lot of pain so this literally the soft drink has dissolved the tooth to the gum line to such an extent and it may have only taken about six months for this to happen but we can see that the nerve is actually believing i haven't even started yet as a parent this is excruciating to watch [Music] what really smacks you in the face about all of that is that you've got a whole operating theatre full of really qualified people that's about five grands worth of theater time let alone the fact we could be doing other stuff with it to pull teeth out of two-year-olds and three-year-olds because they're drinking too many sugary soft drinks it's utterly preventable and it's utterly wrong so just how much sugar goes into the soft drinks that are rotting a kid's teeth so the likes of this one here right you're pretty standard 1.5 liters divided by four we get 40 teaspoons 40 teaspoons of sugar out of the 33 000 items that are sold in average supermarket that is the number one selling item this is green that must be good surely it's green this one's worse it's got 12.6 grams we get 47 teaspoons of sugar so this is the better part of 50 if we're going around 50 teaspoons 47 teaspoons of sugar and this is your standard kid's birthday party fair exactly and if we have a look at this this product here this serving size is one and it has 600 mls we get 16 teaspoons of sugar and if a kid has it then they're having five days worth of sugar so this is one five days worth of sugar in the bottle exactly good god i'm genuinely surprised by this i had no idea so now i want to find out what the food industry has to say [Music] in discovering just how much sugar we all consume i've made some quite big changes to my own life i've been following my nutritionist mickey wilden's advice for the last two months and now i've come back to see whether that advice has had any impact on my previously dangerously high triglyceride levels [Music] well mickey so a couple of months in what are the blood show well night um it's you've got some really good results from it so your triglycerides last time that we spoke they were up at about 2.4 and they've dropped down to 1.5 which is great that's good really good because those previously high fat levels in my blood could lead to strokes and heart attacks and there's more good news i lost about three and a half kg in about 10 days and it's all here i've now i've gone in a belt size don't waste it big implications for me and there are potentially big implications for the world economy as well credit suisse one of the world's leading banks has also weighed into this debate directly linking the consumption of excess sugar with the worldwide increase in type 2 diabetes obesity and a thing called metabolic syndrome metabolic syndrome includes high blood pressure high blood sugar excess cholesterol and body fat all of which increase your risk of heart disease stroke and diabetes and brought on in large part credit suisse claims by too much sugar they surveyed gps in europe asia and the us and 90 of them believed that that was the case food industry doesn't want to hear this this is anathema to them so what do you think they're going to say shonky science lousy you know poorly done who's this american we don't believe it we're going to keep doing what we're doing [Music] the food industry has its own interpretation of the science i want to hear their opinion about professor lustig and his whole sugar is toxic message i think robert lustig exaggerates the role of sugar i think a lot of his comments are melodramatic some of his comments have been called hysterical and so when you look at the comments from a number of well-respected academics in new zealand and around the world they'll say look he's raising the issue about consuming too much sugar but to say sugar is toxic and sugar as a poison as a standalone statement is patently untrue maybe but sugar is heavily implicated in bad health outcomes so why not price it out of easy reach why not introduce a sugar tax nowhere in the world has a soda tax made a big difference to obesity or fat taxes made a big difference to obesity because the issue is it's not the sugar or the fat it's everything it's eating too much and not getting enough exercise i think it's interesting with regard to sugar in particular soft drinks that they are often cheaper on a per liter basis than water is delivered to the same place and i think we could redress that by having something in the cost structure and industry haven't done that themselves they've actually priced the water as being more expensive yes interesting they say they all know price won't make any difference yeah well it's interesting that price seems to be very relevant for the constituency that are that are drinking the most of this stuff and it's typically children often poorer people the food industry argues that a sugar tax would only bump up the price of food and hurt those who can least afford it but the new zealand medical journal has published research saying a 20 tax on soda drinks would not only save lives but generate millions in revenue for health programs part of learning to be an adult is navigating your work your way around all those choices because the choices you make will have an impact on your life the government can't make you go and for a walk around the block completely the government can't decide what you want to put in your supermarket trolley and i don't want i don't want to live in a country where the government has that kind of control when we're talking about people making better choices around nutrition and taking more responsibility how difficult is that in light of the very skillful focused and effective marketing campaigns that the people selling lists and stuff do let's not pretend for one second that any marketing campaign can force you to take something off the shelf and put it into your trolley still comes down to personal choice and understanding how important moderate eating is but the psychologist in me and i can't help being one says that they are very good at influencing our behaviour i mean so i guess what i'm asking is in the context i have a different view i think advertising campaigns give me the information that i need as a consumer but i'll decide what to put in my trolley it's all very well to talk about personal responsibility but how's this for a little bit of persuasion i've just been to the supermarket and bought three 1.5 liter bottles of soft drink for six dollars six dollars and a lot of the people that i've been talking to say they feel there's little or no personal choice in it because they're addicted or at the very least habituated to sugar so isn't it time the food industry stepped up and took more responsibility [Music] ultimately the food industry doesn't care what they sell you as long as they sell you as long as their profits are untouched they'll sell you anything you want and i'm not against the food industry making money i am against the food industry making money by selling things that hurt people so it has to be government level and it has to be across the board i don't see any way around it i don't see how government can stay out of it because how can the food industry work in concert without governmental leadership [Music] but while the opposing sides dig in at yandhara school in south auckland they're not waiting they're taking their own action here they've banned soft drinks and they're encouraging real lifestyle change so how entrenched was all that fast food sugary drink stuff when you first started oh incredibly entrenched it was just the the junk food was who we were here we didn't see any healthy food we didn't see fruit we didn't see bread we didn't see water so we would see the takeaways coming in for lunch we would see the takeaways coming for breakfast that was who we were at that time and there's been a marked ripple effect in terms of changing behavior at home with parents has that made a difference we've used our children to be the educators of their parents basically and it's really lovely when parents come in and tell us funny stories of when they've been to the supermarket shopping with their five-year-olds who will say no we can't have that we want to have healthy food and this is the reason why no fast food here and the principal says they're getting noticeably slimmer so what have you guys got in your lunch today you've got an enormous bag of carrots and look at that we've got the nuts in there and you've got oranges and yogurt and fruit what's better for your teeth is it better to drink water or fizzy drink water what is making it better yes it does water makes you better and you go taller yes that's true [Music] so here's the thing clearly what yandere school's achieved is remarkable they've changed the way that their kids eat and because of that they've reduced the amount of obesity in the school who likes cucumber the kids are better in class their families are changing and it's changing the wider community as well it's all very well to talk about personal responsibility and a lot of people think that's just people should sort stuff out for themselves the truth is that that's not how you change behavior the psychology of how you change behavior is you need leadership and you need focus and you need follow-up and you need people to steer the process it's what the team at yandhara school have done and it works sugar is utterly entrenched in our way of life now so is diabetes it's one of the greatest health crises we currently face every day it's estimated another 50 kiwis are becoming diabetic every country on the planet has seen an uptick in obesity but worse yet we have seen an uptick in diabetes that actually outclasses the increase in obesity [Music] can we turn that round by cutting back on sugar in para paraoumu just outside wellington marianne is living proof that we can it smells nice [Music] my mother and her sisters have all been diagnosed with late stage diabetes and mummy ended up having a kidney transplant and she was on dialysis before that she ended up in hospital and she ended up in a coma so you saw diabetes take your mom's life and then you were told that you were pre-diabetic so that must have been pretty crushing it was incredibly stressful and very very scary gary came home one day after work after we'd been looking at various diets he came home and he said we're going sugar free gary marianne's husband is a pilot he led the charge hey gary nigel nigel come around to your place to cook a curry oh i love it we went through the pantry went through the fridge we had more than five percent sure it was gone we found um dextrose or glucose was our sugar substitute and and then started eating real food how easy was it to give up sugar because did your muscle oh that first couple of weeks was uh yeah probably the first four days are the worst it smells really nice part of me thinks this is fantastic because it's really simple but where does this fit in terms of all the sugar stuff the curry pastes that we use have got less than one gram of sugar per 100 grams right and we advocate um with sugar-free cooking that it's not actually sugar-free but it's within four grams per hundred so you're not like a total zealot like you you don't treat it like it's just toxic you still have a little bit in there yes but you just keep it at that lowering that's correct [Music] that simple choice has had a profound effect on marianne's life and health what difference does it mean for you in terms of the physiology it's um made 18 kilos difference to me and what about the diabetes what's happened with that it's gone i'm not pre-diabetic now so that's excellent so i have absolutely no risk of being diabetic apparently what was your life like before you got rid of sugar what were you like then i was big really bad my pete got 106. and now 72 and a half that's quite a significant drop yeah it's 25 of my body weight it does make me angry because i shouldn't have got pre-diabetic my mother shouldn't probably have died of diabetes and it makes me mad they could have avoided it if we didn't have sugar in our lives this seems to be this really lovely looking that's it's gary's very fat bomb it's got um no no sugar at all that's really nice it feels it tastes like it should be really evil so you don't actually have to become this sort of soulless joyless nice stuff less life you can all still have really nice things the results speak for themselves here are gary and marianne enjoying good food and good health in large part by cutting right back on sugar when i started this journey i thought i was doing all right moderation and all things you know a bit of sugar to go with the exercise turns out i was far from all right my blood count was too high in the fats that caused strokes and heart attacks i discovered that a sugar-rich diet and the volumes of soft drinks we're swelling is tipping us into a crippling health crisis kids are coming into the hospital having their teeth out in record numbers what we do know is that we don't give our two-year-old kids tobacco to smoke we don't give our two-year-old kids alcohol to drink but we do give our two-year-old kids soft drinks to drink it looks pretty straightforward it's reduced sugary intake and the simplest to identify that adds no other nutritional value would be to reduce the consumption of sugary beverages question is how much proof do you need before it's time to make a change we need to turn this around this is a public health prices and there's only one way to do it get the sugar out of the food well i cut sugar and result my bloods came right and i lost weight sugar is now implicated in all sorts of diseases i've looked at the research and i'm convinced sure big portion sizes processed foods and a lack of exercise also contribute but we can't force people to exercise we can do something about reducing sugar if we don't the burden on our healthcare system doesn't bear thinking about [Music] this program was made with funding from new zealand on air

Channel: ENDEVR

Views: 1,625,165

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, sugar documentary, sugar, sugar documentary bitter truth, sugar documentary film, sugar dangers, sugar dangers to health, sugar dangers documentary

Id: b2taSMx6394

Length: 43min 55sec (2635 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Killowatt59]

In the USA it’s really hard to avoid too much sugar even without soda’s because sugar is added to almost everything. It’s crazy but read the labels and look at the sugar amounts on everything.

[u/EstroJen]

I always feel like garbage after eating gummy worms. I love them, but they don't love me.

[u/Warm-Preparation-101]

Read labels/ingredients. You may be shocked at the hidden sugars in products. It is a challenge to find food products at wall-mart that don’t have some form of sugar or sugar substitute in them. Sugar is absorbed very fast. Body will respond with insulin. Insulin decreases sugar in blood. Then you crave more sugar which raises blood sugar again cycling over and over. Now bicycling needs more calories. Blood sugar can dip quickly with heavy exercise. sometimes sugar is needed because it’s fast. It takes more time for body to respond by breaking down fats to use as energy.

[u/centstwo]

Toddler tooth extraction was horrible, shudder.

[u/TaskForceCausality]

Fun fact- even McDonalds French fries have sugar in them. It’s used to enhance the crispness of the fries, allegedly.

[u/ddrcrono]

I managed to avoid all of the typical vices growing up, drinking, drugs, smoking, but back then sugar wasn't really seen as as bad as it is now, and we were particularly unaware of how prevalent it was in basically everything. My understanding is there's a big lobby behind it too.

[u/databoy2k]

Laughs in T1 Diabetes

[u/Trixxxi]

I have psoriasis on the bottoms of my feet and when I reduce my sugar intake my psoriasis starts to clear. With I eat too much sugar, my psoriasis flares up.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]