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What are the dangers of sugar?
Today we’re going to talk about sugar. Not the constitutional capital of Bolivia, but this addictive food for both kids and adults!
We love sugar and the food industry has certainly noticed. They add it everywhere, even to foods you’d initially think aren’t sweet, like condiments or prepared meals.
Sugar is a highly effective flavor enhancer to help sell products. Sugar consumption exploded after World War II with cookies, sweet desserts, cereals, fruit juices and sodas.
Some time ago we praised fat, proclaiming with Alexandre Astier that fat was life, and now here is our new enemy, sugar, which we will need to identify, watch for on labels, reduce and learn to replace.
And Camille will accompany us on this journey.
The guest: Camille Lassale
I’ve known Camille for over fifteen years: she was with me at agronomy school, in the nutrition specialization.
She is cheerful, she is brilliant, she came from Barcelona, she is a contralto in the choir, and she wrote the foreword for one of my cookbooks.
After a Master’s in Public Health, Camille is doing her PhD in Nutritional Epidemiology at the Sorbonne, studying the associations between diet and cardiovascular diseases, notably in the well-known NutriNet-Santé study.
She then spent 5 years as a postdoctoral researcher in London. She has been living in Barcelona since 2019, where she worked for 3 years at the research center of Hospital del Mar. She has just obtained a research position at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, where she studies, among other things, the molecular impacts of diet, notably epigenetics.
She is about to start a new project on chrono-nutrition: beyond the quality and quantity of what we eat, is it important to know when we eat it?
The questions
- Tell us briefly about your background. How do you go from the benches of an agronomy school in Paris to becoming a researcher in Barcelona?
- Before tackling sugar, what would be your general nutritional recommendations?
- Why do people say that sugar is bad for health? I recently read a study that said it’s as addictive as coke.
- So is sugar really much more harmful than fat?
- Can we add nuance by discussing the different types of sugar / the larger family of carbohydrates?
- The higher a food’s glycemic index, the more it should be considered toxic to our cells. What is the glycemic index? What is the point of measuring it?
- Name a few foods with a very high glycemic index and a few others with a very low one.
- What are the latest studies on the subject?
- Cutting down on sugar, OK. In cakes, I often halve the recommended amount. But what can I replace white sugar with?
- What about cane sugar or unrefined sugar versus white sugar? And what about honey or agave syrup that you can put in cakes?
- How much sugar should one consume each day?
- I mentioned chrono-nutrition in the introduction. When is it best to eat sugar during the day or during a meal?
- Sugar is also a cultural problem. How do we reward children? By giving them treats. However, we now know that the addictive nature of sugar sets the brain’s reward circuit in motion, like nicotine or certain drugs. The more this circuit is stimulated at a young age, the more the brain will become dependent on this addiction. How can we help children detox?
- Share a sugar-free recipe with us?
Resources to learn more
- A comprehensive article by a cardiologist on the subject
- Books by Bérangère Philippon
- Vegetables for dessert! (to replace sugar), by Louise Browaeys and Hélène Schernberg
- Low-GI cooking, by Sarah Kdouh
