I interviewed Doctor Robert Lustig of University of California San Francisco medical center. He is the director of the weight assessment for teen child health program as well as a professor of clinical pediatrics. Doctor Lustig received his degree from MIT and his medical degree from Cornell University Medical College. His current academic focus is perfecting a treatment and prevention of obesity. Through this study Lustig has found that obesity stems from the consumption of processed food, the key ingredient in which is fructose. The interview took place on Sunday March 21, 2010, at nine in the morning in his office in the UCSF medical center. In was given a half hour interview with him before his morning rounds.
I was received pretty well. I originally emailed Dr. Lustig on the March 20, after seeing him on Nightline the night before. After I emailed him, I had a response in a few hours, and after emailing back and forth several times we arranged an interview the next day. I met him at his office the next day and we were limited to a half hour. Although he was not amazingly welcoming, I was incredibly pleased because I was the last half hour available in his schedule for the next several months.
I learned a lot of things that expected to learn. Dr. Lustig’s primary focus is how fructose correlates with obesity so I obviously learned a lot about the affects of fructose on the body. In regard to the affects of fructose on the human body I learned a myriad of information. First I learned how fructose is found in low levels in nature, but used in vast quantities in processed goods. I also learned that in natural foods, wherever there is fructose, there is a massive quantity of fiber, such as sugar cane that has so much fiber it is literally a stick. As Dr. Lustig put it, “When God created the poison he created the antidote, wherever there is fructose in nature they is way more fiber; sugar cane is a stick. The only place that is different is with honey and that is protected by bees.” He also went into detail discussing how the food industry removes the fiber from foods to add to shelf life and make it more a more desirable good, such as juices and bread. By processing these goods, the industry removes the good nutrients and to make the fructose more prominent in food. We also discussed how fructose directly correlates to health. Lustig cited numerous diseases that have been associated with fructose consumption including some that surprised me such as Alzheimer’s disease. Lustig also explained that “the difference between just plain old obesity and metabolic syndrome is sugar consumption,” and due to the food industry’s processing of foods “the sugar consumption is ramped.”
What shocked me the most during the interview was the obesity related cases that he has treated. He discussed how he has had to do double liver transplants on four hundred pound fifteen year olds, whose obesity was linked to soda consumption. He also talked about how diseases such as adult onset diabetes actually had to be renamed because it is no longer a disease that only plagues adults. As Lustig said, the diseases that are linked to sugar consumption “are occurring younger and younger.” I was also surprised to hear his stance against Michelle Obama’s “Lets Move” campaign. Doctor Lustig said that the campaign says, “that it is up to the individual, family, and the community and not up to government and not up to food industry,” and went on to say that the campaign “ultimately will prove to be ineffective.” I was also surprised to hear that foods packed with sugar, namely processed foods, have highly addictive qualities. Lustig described this phenomenon by saying “sugar makes you want more, because it works on the reward center of the brain, so in essence it is just like tobacco or ethanol in that it promotes peripheral disease and central addictive like properties thereby causing you to eat more, it is a vicious cycle of consumption and disease.
I was incredibly impressed with my interview. It was amazing to interview such an authority on my topic. I learned a lot about how impossible it is for the individual to start a healthy diet without intervention. Lustig described this issue by saying that “if I laced your breakfast cereal with morphine and told you not to eat it, could you? Addiction means you can not stop, and that’s what we are seeing in America today.” Basically Lustig says that there is no way for personal responsibility to prevent the health related diseases. He continues to talk about this by saying, “I don’t know how we are going to expect a personal responsibility paradigm to be able to shift this without help from the government.” He said that unfortunately due to incredible lobbying by the industry and corruption in the government, there is no way that the government will intervene without a public uprising. Lustig says, “the only way to make this happen is a bottom up grassroots approach.” This is a great thing to hear because he tells it shows that our project is a great step in the right direction.
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