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NY Times’ Sugar Bombshell
We may look back on this week as the moment when public opinion finally turned against the idea that fat is what makes us ill and embraced the emerging science implicating sugar as the nation’s number one threat to good health.
In Sunday’s New York Time’s Magazine, science writer Gary Taubes makes the case that sugar–not fat–is the agent behind our most pressing health problems, including obesity and the various degenerative ailments associated with “metabolic syndrome,” including diabetes, hypertension and coronary artery disease. If true, this would overturn more than 30 years of ill-conceived nutrition and health policy in this country, recognizing what a growing number of medical researchers have already concluded: fat is not the problem. The reason for America’s shocking level of obesity and related health problems lies with our addiction to processed, carbohydrate-rich foods, starches, and especially sugar.
The implications for those of us primarily concerned with children’s health are clear: kids should not be drinking sodas or sugary flavored milks. They need to stop indulging in all kinds of snack foods and desserts that now play such a prominent role in children’s eating habits. School menus should be sugar-free–and that goes for chocolate milk, too.
The most vocal of medical authorities now blaming sugar is Robert Lustig, a specialist in childhood obesity and pediatric hormone disorders at the University of California, Berkeley. We’ve written about Lustig and quoted him here before. Taubes describes his 2009 lecuture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which at last count had been viewed 973,123 times at YouTube and has been increasing viewership at a rate of some 50,000 per month.
In his 90-minute talk, Lustig described in some detail how the fructose contained in either sugar or high-fructose corn syrup is treated by the body as a toxin; how, unlike glucose, the sguar derived from other carbohydrates such as bread and potatoes, fructose is converted into fat in the liver, triggering not just “metabolic syndrome,” but, in Taubes’ view, many common cancers as well. Lustig describes a worldwide epidemic of fatty liver disease in children.
Most importantly, Lustig insists that the obesity epidemic we are so concerned about is not just about too many calories, but eating the wrong kinds of calories–specifically, too much sugar. Sugar represents not just empty calories. “It’s not about the calories,” Lustig says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.” Lustig says the reason Americans are consuming more calories is because their appetite suppression mechanisms are disrupted by eating too much sugar, especially from soda and other sugary beverages.
“In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantiry and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat,” Taubs writes. “This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance,k which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.”
How much sugar do you have to eat before it becomes toxic? That’s the $64,000 question. The last time the federal government looked at this, in a 1986 Food and Drug Administration report, it was estimated sugar did not pose a danger at what was then the current level of consumption: 40 pounds of sugar per person per year of “added sugar,” meaning in addition to what the normal person would get from eating fruits and vegetables. That’s 200 calories per day of sugar, Taubes says, or less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Colar or two cups of apple juice.
“But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time–75 pounds per person per year–and the USDA estimates are typically considere to be the most reliable,” Taubes writes. “By the early 2000s, according to the USDA, we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year.”
Obesity rates in the country correlate neatly with increasing consumption of sugar, and especially high-fructose corn syrup, which contains more fructose than table sugar as is not only sweeter but cheaper than cane sugar. Now researchers are finding that many forms of virulent cancer thrive on insulin the body produces in response to sugar. Obesity and diabetes now go hand in hand. Likewise, people who are obese or diabetic are more likely to develop some form of cancer.
That has some medical researchers swearing off sugar in their personal diets. “I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possbly can,” says researcher Craig Thompson, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.
Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center at Harvard Medical School says, simply: “Sugar scares me.”
Unfortunately, little funding on the dangers of sugar has been forthcoming from the federal government. The National Institutes of Health is funding a few small studies. Taubes suggests these need to be bigger and of longer duration. But even though the current science is not as conclusive as Robert Lustig believes it to be, Taubes says he’s convinced.
“Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do.”
That’s good enough for me.
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38 Comments so far
Show AllWhy does it have to be an 'either or' question regarding sugar and fat? They are both causes of what makes us ill.
Some fats are essential: alpha linolenic acid, eicosapentaenoic acid, docosahexaenoic acid. Essential as the human body MUST get them from food / outside sources. They have effects on various things, ranging from inflammation, metabolic function, cardivascular disease, immune function.
Some fats have beneficial effects: conjugated linoleic acid (obesity, cholesterol and triglyceride levels), oleic acid (cholesterol levels) .
Even those fats that are generally seen as bad, saturated fats, have a combination of positive and negative effects. palmitic (palm oil), lauric (coconut oil), stearic (beef), have a combination of positive and negative effects on cholesterol / inflammation. And lauric acid has antibacterial properties.
It is the synthetic trans fats, such as elaidic acid, that are poison.
And even trans fats, the natural ones, are actually beneficial. Vaccenic acid, a natural trans fat that is found in the milk and meat of cows / ruminants, is converted into conjugated linoleic acid.
I agree. Small amounts of linoleic and linolenic acid are essential to health. When it comes to nutrition, we should not be too doctrinaire, but look for balance and whole foods.
Related to this is a story of corporate influence on Congress, corporate fat and corporate sugar. I'm not the one to write those stories, but I look forward to reading them.
Mary Enig of the Weston A. Price Foundation has written about corporate influence on the fat question, at the time of the McGovern Committee on Nutrition, or something like that, (1970s?). Manufactured transfats and hydrogenated oils, never previously in the human diet, were falsely portrayed as being healthy, saturated fats like butter and lard were falsely portrayed as being unhealthy. A nutritioinist told me it took a hospital here 30 years to start serving heart patients the better alternative, (after the corps. won the spin,) in spite of the fact that the research evidence was always present.
So what's the scoop for sugar? I do know part of it. You'll surely find both HFHS and transfat manufacturers, or their predecessors, in the 1962 CED report calling for a lowering of price floors on farm commodities like corn, to lower prices. (The corps knew, as the food movement usually does not, that these were the policy changes that secretly subsidized them. They didn't call for "corn subsidies," as they don't cause the cheap corn they wanted.) The report is "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture." The idea was for low prices, for the US to export farm commodities at a loss for decades, in order to give cheap raw materials to US, multinational, and foreign farm commodity buyers, to secretly subsidize them with below fair trade priced and below cost grains.
But there's surely more to the story.
no surprise here - sugar and corn syrup are in everything we eat and we have the 6X tee shirts coast to coast to prove it
when we allow corporations the right to determine what we eat this is what we get - as the old saying goes "shit in - shit out"
the way the animals are handled in corporate food/concentration camps speak to the real lack of morality or ethics
its about making money not feeding people
the poorer the people the worse the diet - macdonald's for instance or burger king are on every other corner in the down market areas selling their 2 dollar "meals" second only to liquor stores selling cheap booze
we haven't even mentioned gmo's
or the chemicals in the food supply
its all yet another example of how corporations are ruining our lives....
I think the stuff is addictive. There should be a Sugar-Anon support group.
I sure hope that Stevia doesn't turn out to be like methadone.
Even in the early 70's the known harms of sugar were well known but ignored by many. Children's cereal was closer to candy than anything nutricious. I can still recall a mother telling her daughter not to eat a banana because it had a brown spot in it yet would that same girl eat suger-laden cereal.
A huge amount of our healthcare costs can be blamed on the American Diet.
The irony of this is that more Vietnam Veterans will die by the knife and fork than by war injuries. Many of these health problems do not manifest themselves until later in life.
It is not just obesity. Sugar is also the root for behavioral disorders in children. When we [at an alternative high school for at risk kids] eliminated candy, pop, and trash lunches from our school, the behavior improved dramatically, and many 'ADHD' kids suddenly showed vastly improved behavior. Sugar is a poison clearly linked to many problems both behavioral and medical. A secondary, major problem here, however, is the public's willingness to wait for the government to solve all problems. People do not have the guts to take charge of their own lives. Yes, there is corporate scheming for greater profits. Yes, there is television with its consistent message of buy, eat, drink. But there is also the severe lack of personal responsibility. It is EASY to take charge of your own diet and that of your children. And to take charge of your own life, for that matter ....
Ironblood,
I recall hearing about a program that was trying to change what children eat in schools specifically geared toward getting rid of sugar and in the schools that did it, the drop in behavioral problems was quite dramatic, as well as the increase in test scores. At that time, it was too soon to say anything for certain, but I wanted to stay abreast of the situation, but then I forgot the name of the progam. (It wasn't the one with Jamie Oliver, I know that.)
Was the school you're talking about part of a program or do you happen to know what I'm referring to? Any help would be appreciated. :-)
Read the artilce again. And again.
The main point is not sugar. The main point is carbohydrate rich foods, expecially those carbohydrate rich foods that raise insulin quickly. Sugar is one of them. Rice is another. Bread, another.
You begin to see the problem with "personal responsibility"? For the last 30 years or so, people have had the medical establishment drum it into their heads, that fat is EVIL (never mind that some fats are essetial, some have beneficial effects, some have a combination of positive and negative effects, obviously this refers to natural fats, not the synthetic poison such as partially hydrogenated fats) cholesterol is EVIL (never mind that for most people, dietary cholesterol does not affect serum cholesterol levels), try to cut out all fat, and replace that fat with rice, bread.
For years/decades I've been appalled at the "low fat" mantra which, instead of replacing fat with vegetables, fools with "credentials" told people to use things like low fat blueberry muffin mix.
An addendum about cholesterol: The brain is very high in cholesterol. Cholesterol is necessary to produce, among other things, vitamin D and sex hormones. Is the word for this vast misinformation campaign 'boondoggle'?
"For years/decades I've been appalled at the "low fat" mantra which, instead of replacing fat with vegetables, fools with "credentials" told people to use things like low fat blueberry muffin mix.
"
The problem with the fools with credentials is that they aren't fools. The science is there, conducted by people with credentials, published in peer reviewed academic journals. Yet, those who kept hammering the fat is evil, just eat more fast digesting carbs (ie, rice, breads, sugars) have to be dragged kicking and screaming, before they will, slowly, begrudgingly concede that they are wrong. It took the USDA ages, before they begrudgingly altered the food pyramid (and the alterations are not enough)
"An addendum about cholesterol: The brain is very high in cholesterol. Cholesterol is necessary to produce, among other things, vitamin D and sex hormones. Is the word for this vast misinformation campaign 'boondoggle'?
.."
The word is as with so many things: MONEY. IE, cholesterol reducing drugs.
Now, I'm not saying that all cholesterol lowering drugs are useless. Statins, can have their uses (in the short term), with diet modification and physical activity modification for the long term.
How can you be so wrong? Take your own advice:
"In his 90-minute talk, Lustig described in some detail how the fructose contained in either sugar or high-fructose corn syrup is treated by the body as a toxin; how, unlike glucose, the sugar derived from other carbohydrates such as bread and potatoes, fructose is converted into fat in the liver, triggering not just “metabolic syndrome,” but, in Taubes’ view, many common cancers as well. Lustig describes a worldwide epidemic of fatty liver disease in children."
The article you implore us to read again and again says THE OPPOSITE of what you assert.
How does this affect fructose from fruits? Does anyone know?
It is easy to believe that refined sugars and high fructose corn syrup are a disaster for healthy living. But chemically, fructose from fruits is still sugar, but it comes with fiber, vitamins and minerals.
The answer is "depends".
There are some studies that show fructose is (very) detrimental. There are some that show that it is not. IIRC, these studies, both the negative effect, and no negative effect ones, were conducted on rats. Actually there are some people who argue that the fructose, yes from fruits, is MORE detrimental than other types of sugar, such as sucrose.
If you are really concerned, you can of course get fibre, vitamins, minerals, from vegetables, without the fructose. But, fruits tastes nice.
rfloh (below) has it right. If someone has problems with carbohydrate metabolism (diabetes, "pre-diabetes, etc.) tropical fruit (banana, mango, etc) should be avoided.
You can search "fructose content of fruit" or go to www.drmercola/articles.com and search the site for the same. He has lists which indicate lowest to highest sugar content fruits. (Berries are at the top, as in 'low sugar')
"fructose from fruits is still sugar, but it comes with fiber, vitamins and minerals."
I finish each of three meals/day with two pieces of fruit. The meal and all fibers involved dilute the sugar load. It is about the only "sugar" I use (except some whole grains; slower carbohydrates).
"by eating too much sugar, especially from soda and other sugary beverages."
You are confusing SUGAR(sucrose) with HFCS(corn syrup that is chemically modified).
Shame on you. You know better and you do know the difference. Sugar is a food. HFCS is NOT.
You also know that soda and sweet beverages in the USA rarely contains sugar. Read the ingredients.
HFCS is the main culprit in the obesity problem and should be banned.
"You also know that soda and sweet beverages in the USA rarely contains sugar. Read the ingredients.
"
Right. HFCS is not used outside North America.
Yet, obesity is hardly solely an American problem. So, HFCS is not the main culprit.
The difference between HFCS and sucrose is not so great. HFCS is approximately 60% fructose and 40% glucose, sucrose is approximately 40% fructose and 60% glucose, based on molecular weight. All processed carb, including boxed cereal, is quickly turned into glucose and is treated in the body like a sugar. Juice produces a response similar to soda.
HFCS is indeed a horror but processed carb in general will produce the same results.
Closer to the point. It's as if readers can't read what is plainly being stated. It is the fructose in both table sugar and in HFCS (and in the hip chic marketed agave syrup too) that is metabolized by the liver. This is the key to the point the author is making.
The other refined carbs contain glucose, not sucrose or HFCS, so do not contain fructose. Yes these other refined carbs are not healthy, but they are not the "toxins" the author is outing.
Please all readers who are reflexively having an "all refined carbs are the same" reaction, go read the original NYT piece, go watch the You Tube video, stop and think about what he is saying, question your reflexive reaction.
What I've always had trouble understanding about this sugar debate is how a primate, evolved from frugavores, cannot tolerate the sugar - fructose - found in fruit.
Primates are not fruitarians. The diet includes leaves, stalk, insects and an occasional mammal.
Also, I think it's reasonable to postulate that the fruit we have today is far higher in sugar content than even Stone Age fruit, much less the fruit available 100,000 years ago, or more.
"Also, I think it's reasonable to postulate that the fruit we have today is far higher in sugar content than even Stone Age fruit, much less the fruit available 100,000 years ago, or more"
Yeah. People do not like sour fruits (hell, you will even find sugar added to pickles nowadays), they like sweetness, so sweetness is bred for.
Added sugar is not a natural component of the cucumber, so it's irrelevant to whether the sugar content of fruit was higher in the past.
Thanks, both, for not really answering my question.
"Added sugar is not a natural component of the cucumber, so it's irrelevant to whether the sugar content of fruit was higher in the past.
Thanks, both, for not really answering my question
"
The relevance is that people like sweet things, which results in fruits being bred to be sweet.
I don't get why this is so hard. rfloh is very succinct. People like sweet foods and fruits are BRED for sugar content. That's a fact.
Additionally, the comments about physical activity are right. That's the real key to chronic disease, just ahead of a whole foods diet by maybe a nose.
I'm noit getting into a herbivore/carnivore debate. While primates have a varied diet, and it mainly consists of plants and insects, rarely mammals - except for the occasional scavaging, a large part of our evolved diet is fruits.
In fact, in the 1980s the conventional wisdom was that fructose - not HFCS - was the preferred simple sugar because, since it needed to be converted in the liver to glucose, it did not spike blood sugar levels.
I once subsisted mainly on orange juice and whole wheat bread for years and have never been obese or even significanly overweight as an adult.
I think this whole sugar/fat debate is a case of baffling people with bullshit, and that if one ate a natrual, who;le food diet they were confortable with, they'd be fine.
Why do you think it is reasonable to postulate what you have? I'd postulate that since primitive humans ate RIPE fruit, rather than the underripened, chemically fertilized crap there is now - consisting mainly in unconverted starches, we ate a hell of a lot more simple sugars as fructose. And we were more physically active, needed the calorie bursts, and burnt it off a lot faster.
Also, "fruitarian" is not a word. Or do you consider yourself a herbavarian, a carnivarian or an omnivarian?
"In fact, in the 1980s the conventional wisdom was that fructose - not HFCS - was the preferred simple sugar because, since it needed to be converted in the liver to glucose, it did not spike blood sugar levels.
"
Yes, the convetional wisdom in the 80s was that fat was EVIL, eggs will kill you, eating cholesterol will kill you.
Ooops.
Fructose does not spike blood sugar levels as much as other sugar, but one issue with fructose is that it might result in the glycation of proteins more than other sugars. Fructose might have up to 10 times the glycation activiy of glucose. Blood HbA1C (glycated haemoglobin) levels are one marker for diabetes and cardivascular disease.
Also, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17763967
Is the fructose index more relevant with regards to cardiovascular disease than the glycemic index?
Segal MS, Gollub E, Johnson RJ.
Division of Nephrology, Hypertension and Transplantation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Abstract
The glycemic index (G.I.) is a means for categorizing carbohydrates based on their ability to raise blood glucose, subsequently this index has been popularized as a way for selecting foods to reduce the risk for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. We suggest that the G.I. is better aimed at identifying foods that stimulate insulin secretion rather than foods that stimulate insulin resistance. In this regard, fructose has a low G.I. but may be causally linked with the obesity and cardiovascular disease epidemic. The reported association of high G.I. with cardiovascular disease may be due to the association of sugar intake which contains fructose, but which has a high G.I. due to its glucose content. We propose the use of a fructose index to categorize foods and propose studies to determine the effect of low fructose diets as a means to prevent obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in the population.
Some others:
Teff, Karen L. Joanne Grudziak, Raymond R. Townsend, Tamara N. Dunn, Sean H. Adams, Nancy L. Keim, Bethany P. Cummings, Kimber L. Stanhope, and Peter J. Havel. Endocrine and metabolic effects of consuming fructose- and glucose-sweetened beverages with meals in obese men and women: Influence of insulin resistance on plasma triglyceride responses. J. Clin. Endocrinol. Metab., 94: 1562-1569, 2009.
Stanhope, Kimber L., Nancy L. Keim, Steven C. Griffen, Andrew A. Bremer, James L. Graham, Bonnie Hatcher, Chad Cox, John P. McGahan, Anthony Seibert, Ronald M. Krauss Sally Chiu, Ernst J. Schaefer, Masumi Ai, Seiko Otokozawa, Katsuyuki Nakajima, Takamitsu Nakano, Carine Beysen, Jean Marc Schwarz, Marc K. Hellerstein, Lars Berglund, and Peter J. Havel. Effects of consuming fructose- or glucose-sweetened beverages for 10 weeks on lipids, insulin sensitivity, and adiposity. J. Clin. Invest. 119: 1322-1344, 2009.
Cummings, Bethany P., Kimber L. Stanhope, James L. Graham, Joseph L. Evans, Denis G. Baskin, Steven C. Griffen, and Peter J. Havel. Dietary Fructose Accelerates the Development of Diabetes in UCD-T2DM Rats: Amelioration by the Antioxidant, _-Lipoic Acid. Am. J. Physiol. (Regul. Integrative Comp. Physiol.) 2010 Feb. 10 [Epub ahead of print].
"Why do you think it is reasonable to postulate what you have? I'd postulate that since primitive humans ate RIPE fruit, rather than the underripened, chemically fertilized crap there is now - consisting mainly in unconverted starches, we ate a hell of a lot more simple sugars as fructose. And we were more physically active, needed the calorie bursts, and burnt it off a lot faster.
.."
Primitve humans ate whatever they could get their hands on. Furthermore, the fruits that are sold are bred to be high in sugar content.
In addition to glycemic index, watch the glycemic load (think it is roughly the GI x amount eaten). But, fiber, fat, (and protein) can slow the "loading" into the bloodstream.
What us non / not very hairy apes can tolerate, or not tolerate, firstly, varies across different people, due to nature (ie genetic factors) and nurture (how we live our lives).
To use an extreme example, if you are an elite level endurance athlete, a Tour de France cyclist, a long distance runner, a swimmer such as Michael Phelps, you can tolerate huge amounts of sugar, the diets of high level endurance athletes tend to consist of foods that would result in "normal" people developing type 2 diabetes pretty damn quickly; not least because you need that sugar (it is extremely difficult to get > 10k calories daily by eating vegetables, and there are also issues with the body having trouble oxidising fat for fuel quickly above certain physical intensity leves); and you are adapted to handle that sugar (physical activity, especially intense physical activity, increases insulin sensitivity).
IMHO, "whole foods" are what is good for us and "processed foods" are bad for us. I was born in 1956 and grew up in a very rural area of the Deep South. The church I attended as a child/teenager averaged about 50-60 on a Sunday morning.
Anyway, we had lots of old members. One year in the early 1980's, we lost 13 members of our church and the youngest was 80-something (I forget the exact age). Most were in their 90's and a couple of the women (sisters) were over 100. I don't recall any overweight people.
Here's my point - our community thrived on fresh or home-canned/frozen fruits and vegetables. We raised our cows, pigs and chickens. We ate deer, squirrel, quail and fish from ponds and fresh-water streams/creeks/rivers. People worked outdoors, no one had AC. Unprocessed food was not in the diet. Our water came from individual wells, not a water-system as there is now.
That way of life has disappeared in my lifetime. The next generation of that community died at earlier ages, mostly from cancers and heart disease. Processed foods had come into our lives, people quit having 2-acre veggie gardens. Few eat the wildlife and fish anymore. Everyone got AC and color TV.
Whole, unprocessed food raised without chemicals, combined with hard work and lots of sweating is probably the key for a long, healthy life.
Just my opinion based on my personal experience.
Nice comment.
I urge everyone to take the hour and a half to watch Lustig's video. There are a few points when he leaps to some conclusions that may not stand up under scrutiny, but the science behind his basic assertions is compelling.
It seems the devil is in the fructose, not just for laying down fatty deposits in the liver, but in short circuiting the satiety response. By triggering false insulin surges, our cells begin to ignore the insulin message. as a result, leptin is not not produced in normal quantities which tricks the brain into believing we are hungry when we are not. . Maybe not an addiction like alcohol, but an addiction nonetheless.
But the news gets worse. It's not just high fructose corn syrup that's bad, it is also cane sugar which is roughly 50% fructose. And it is not just natural sugars, but also artificial sweeteners like sucralose that trigger insulin resistance. Sucralose is nothing but chlorinated sucrose that cannot be metabolized as food, but still triggers the same responses in the liver.
Fighting this menace will be even more difficult than fighting big tobacco. Do you think Coke & Pepsi and the rest of the agro-industrial complex will give up without a huge fight?
About 2005 or so, it was reported that for the first time our expected lifespan was decreasing (newborns would live shorter lives than their parents).
At some point as an adult, I decided that even though I remain active, it became detrimental to drink fruit juices regularly. They are too concentrated, with most of the "bulk" stripped away. Otherwise, it seems ridiculous to imagine that fruits would not be part of a balanced diet. They cover huge ranges of color, size, shape, flavor, scent, vitamin/mineral/nutrition content and require virtually no processing (or preparation). There really is no need for processed sugars.
I learned to clean prickly pears awhile back and will eat those sometimes. They supposedly have a very low glycemic index and protect against diabetes.
Canola oil is said to have a high level of Omega 3 fatty acids (the best profile); though, reports indicate big ag has been ruining this hybrid crop with gmo versions. What kind of health damage can one do with regular use of canola? Might it cause respiratory and skin allergies? How about exacerbation of motor nerve problems? Note that Olive oil is much more expensive.
Peanut oil seems OK. If you compare its composition with canola or olive oil, it is fairly similar.
Canola oil is 11% omega-3 (alpha linolenic acid), second to flaxseed oil which is 57% and ahead of soybean oil, which is 8% (somewhat old data, could be slightly different but relative numbers would be close)
You're right about Big Ag doing their best to destroy canola. Some say the erucic acid, all be itself with no help from Big Ag, is enough to negate canola. I don't know enough to know if that's a problem or not.
Empty calories is a very valid description of sugar and white starches. A body requires Vitamin B12 and perhaps other B vitamins to metabolize each molecule of carbohydrate. Whole grains deliver the B vitamins along with the carbohydrates. The metabolism of unenriched white flour and sugars uses up B vitamins without replacing them. This can lead to a form of B deficiency, which has multiple effects on the body, the skin, the mind, the mood.
That fact alone should illustrate that we should not consume foods in which sugars are dumped, such as soda and candy. Sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in everything from soup to bread to ketchup, even in some salt.
Fruits and vegetables are exceptions. They still require B vitamins for metabolism, but at the same time they deliver many valuable food factors.