Robert Lustig - Frontiers of Science

November 6, 2014

“Darwin, diet, disease, and dollars: how the sugar in processed foods changed society”

The Western diet is a primary factor in the etiology of metabolic syndrome. This lecture will explain the two phenomena most closely associated with the metabolic syndrome; that is, leptin resistance, which leads to obesity; and insulin resistance, which leads to chronic metabolic disease (diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease; and likely cancer and dementia as well). In each case, we will explore the specific relation between dietary sugar and the pathogeneses of these two phenomena, in order to explain how these two processes, which in the past were adaptive, but which in our current dietary environment have become maladaptive. These maladaptations belie our current global pandemic of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens the healthcare budget of every country.

We will also investigate how the food industry has usurped these evolutionary mechanisms for their own purposes, in order to foment continued consumption and our current global health crisis.