Dental News - “The sugar wars: Rhetoric or reason?”

Dental Tribune International

Fri. 7. September 2018

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NEW YORK: U.S.: Although many dentists and health professionals would agree that reducing refined sugars is a positive step toward improving oral and overall health, there are some who do not subscribe entirly to that idea. Recently, experts have put forward arguments both for and against sugar in a debate that stemmed from a paper looking at diet centrism.

The article, titled “In defense of sugar: A critique of diet-centrism,” was published in the May/June issue of Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases and written by Dr. Edward Archer, Chief Science Officer at EvolvingFX. Speaking with Dental Tribune International, Archer explained the premise of the paper in more detail: “ ‘Health’ is a property of an individual and not an inherent property of foods or beverages. Therefore, the dichotomy of ‘healthy’ versus ‘unhealthy’ when referring to foods and beverages that are safe to consume (i.e., relatively pathogen-free) is not valid, scientific, or logical. In other words, there are no ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ foods.”

Archer also said that sugar polymers have played critical roles in both human evolution and dietary history and were the significant sources of nutrient energy for most of the global population throughout human history. He noted further that obesity and Type 2 diabetes mellitus are not diet-related diseases, but are metabolic conditions caused by a positive energy balance (i.e., overnutrition) driven by physical inactivity in past and current generations.

In a letter to the editor, cardiovascular research scientist Dr. James J. DiNicolantonio and cardiologist Dr. James H. O’Keefe, Medical Director of the Charles and Barbara Duboc Cardio Wellness Center, Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, provided strong criticisms to Archer’s contention. They argued that dietary sugar (glucose, sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup) is not necessary for life and that humans did not consume refined sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup throughout most of their evolution.

“The truth is you really can’t outrun a bad diet, especially when it comes to overconsuming refined sugar. While it’s true that exercise may reduce the risk of obesity from overconsuming refined sugar, it doesn’t prevent dental cavities, inflammation of the gums, or inflammation that occurs in the intestine, liver, and kidneys when the body processes large amounts of sugar,” they explained in the letter.

In a conversation with Dental Tribune International, DiNicolantonio said that he felt there were some nuances and misconceptions in Archer’s article that he wanted to clear up. In this regard, DiNicolantonio highlighted the misconception “that a calorie from sugar is just a calorie and no more harmful than say a calorie from broccoli. If you overconsume sugar, it can damage the body. You can’t just run off the sugar calories and leave no harm behind.”

In his rebuttal to DiNicolantonio and O’Keefe’s comments, Archer stated that obesity and metabolic diseases are caused by the confluence of physical inactivity and nongenetic evolutionary processes over many generations. He pointed out that, by the late 1940s, both life and health spans in the U.S. had increased dramatically despite half of all infants being reared on infant formula, a completely artificial product containing around 40 percent of calories from added sugars.

“The public is confused about what to eat because over the past 50 years, ‘diet-centric’ researchers produced a great deal of illiterate nonsense. Thus, one of the greatest problems in nutrition is a lack of basic scientific competence,” Archer told Dental Tribune International.

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