Hypothesis: Could Excessive Fructose Intake and Uric Acid Cause Type 2 Diabetes?

And one more point, ask yourself why the science is all over the place and look at what all of those industries have to do with publishing garbage "science" and "nutrition" that continues to confuse and obfuscate the issue. These people make Big Tobacco look like the Boy Scouts of America.

It is somewhat telling that one of the major tactics used by the sugar industry (broadly defined to include companies like Coke) mimics a core Big Tobacco tactic - seizing scientific ambiguities to shut down further discussion.

As many on these pages know, Big Tobacco could push back on anti-smoking legislation for years using two arguments that seemed to stand up to objective analysis - first, that smokers were only harming themselves (so invoking personal responsibility) and second, that there was no causal link between smoking and lung cancer (which, as discussed in previous articles, is a simplistic interpretation of the fact that the link was largely based in observational studies, but one that can seem reasonable at first glance). It's been a while since I reviewed the lit on this "case", but I don't think it's coincidental that the hammer really started to fall once secondhand smoking began to knock down that first pillar.

The sugar industry has been able to push back for years on the basis of similar arguments: (1) If sugar is harmful, a person ought to be allowed to harm themselves; (2) Beyond this (they argue), sugar is just "empty calories", and so there is no reason to single out sugar specifically. If sugar is associated with metabolic disease (again, so advocates argue), it is purely a consequence of the calories sugar contains, and so the problem really is that we need to get people to eat less or move more in general. (See as evidence, Coke's widespread exercise promotion campaigns, previously in the U.S. and now in China)

Argument (1) may be seeing some pressure as cost and accessibility constraints in healthcare turn local problems into systemic problems. Diabetes costs us billions of dollars each year (see link below), and when you total the set of diseases sugar may exacerbate - heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, many cancers - you are likely talking in the trillions. Even if the direct impact is individual, the indirect impact affects us all.

And articles like this one (as well as the work of Rob Lustig and some researchers within the diabetes and liver disease fields in particular) are beginning to undermine (2). Sugar, they argue, is not just empty calories, but a uniquely harmful substance, at least when consumed in the amounts Americans consume it today.  That point is key because it’s very challenging to argue sugar consumption should be specifically deterred (whether through taxation, marketing, other regulations, etc.) or incriminated unless we can show either that a calorie of sugar is more harmful than a calorie of other foods or that sugar-containing foods are, for reasons directly tied to their sugar content, more harmful than other foods. We’re a LOT closer to answering that question than we used to be.

This is a topic we’ll see come up many times on Crossfit’s pages, I’m sure. And it should be, as sugar could be one of the most important preventable causes of metabolic disease and some of the lowest-hanging fruit to drive widespread improvements in healthcare.

http://www.diabetes.org/advocacy/news-events/cost-of-diabetes.html