Dietary sugar consumption does not cause diabetes, in fact it may prevent it

The demon sugar is not the problem

I get asked a lot about sugar and so many people write me that they have "fixed" their diabetes, by going all in on carnivore diets and keto diets.

In this article, by diabetes I am talking about type 2 diabetes, a metabolic disease, rather than type 1 disease which results from complete annihilation of the pancreas beta cells.

So about keto and carnivore and low carb diets for diabetics…I hope that this article will begin changing your mind.

What you will discover here:

1. Sugar is actually good for you.

2. It does not cause diabetes.

3. It can fix diabetes, even.

4. Fat is the culprit behind diabetes.

The science behind low carb

There's physicians that I talk to or see on X who brag about how they're helping their patients by taking away all their carbohydrates.

And every day I get an email from one of my coaching guys, saying he “fixed” his diabetes by not consuming carbs anymore.

And these people usually claim is that sugar itself is the cause of so much obesity and diabetes and that by cutting sugar and usually all carbs, people would not get diabetes.

However, this is completely untrue.

Let’s start with epidemiological evidence.

People are consuming less sugar and getting more fat

Long ago I synthesized the data and presented this chart. It only goes to 2013 because thats when I put it together with a statistician using NHANES and USDA data and thanks to Dr. Guyenet who presented some of the base data in his excellent blog.

The chart could just continue in the same direction today.

As you can see, sugar consumption has actually been declining over many years in the United States and yet obesity keeps getting worse.

It turns out that dietary sugar actually isn't the culprit at all.

Sugar itself can be broken down of course into the most common ones which would be sucrose, glucose, and fructose.

Sucrose is table sugar, a mixture of glucose and fructose.

And then there is glucose itself and fructose itself, which are consumed by themselves sometimes.

When you eat starch, which is my primary source of carbohydrates for most of the world’s population, you get long chains of glucose.

The saliva contains amylase and the saliva and the stomach and the digestive process break up those long chains of glucose that we call starch into glucose.

There does seem to be a great difference between consuming starch, and consuming glucose though. I’m not sure we know why but they are different in the body.

But regardless of whether you consume mostly starch, or table sugar, or high fructose corn syrup, you could say that our primary dietary sugar really is glucose.

(High fructose corn syrup contains half fructose and half glucose, more or less, although some kinds have different ratios…)

If you look all around the world, the primary source of calories in the world is actually glucose in the form of starch.

That's what people eat in Asia through rice, or in Africa through sorghum, corn in Mexico, and wheat in Europe and the United States.

Now you could say a lot of bad things about grains.

But grains are a good source of carbohydrates and humans have been eating them for thousands of years quite successfully.

So how do people do who eat a lot of carbohydrates?

Are they getting diabetic?

I've studied people that are 110, 150 and 120 years old.

I've studied them for many many years.

I've traveled around the world in my studies and I found that the primary diet of people that are very old is in fact carbohydrates.

And these carbs turn into glucose in the body.

So what do the studies say?

In many studies, sugar consumption itself does not increase diabetes or cause diabetes.

Even people that consume nothing but sugary soft drinks are not more likely to get diabetes.

The fact is that the best way of lowering blood sugar and keeping blood sugar lower is not so much through preventing the consumption of sugar.

The best way to maintain healthy blood sugar is to increase the consumption of whole foods.

Because whole foods contain a lot of potassium.

Potassium is the major way that our body controls blood sugar and the intake of energy into cells.

I can take 80 grams of glucose on an empty stomach. If I do, I get a sugar crash in about an hour.

But if I drink some potassium rich liquid and then consume 80 grams of glucose, there is no crash.

The potassium powerfully controls the uptake of sugar in the body.

And that’s why…

If you look at real foods, whole foods, they are loaded with potassium.

It's common for me to get three to five grams of potassium per day in my food.

For example, I drink milk.

Milk contains a lot of potassium along with sugar.

I eat fruit.

Fruit contains generous amounts of potassium along with sugar.

Vegetables contain a lot of potassium.

Meat contains potassium.

If you just go with whole foods, there's a lot of potassium there and you're going to be fine.

If you drink nothing but sugar laden soft drinks, you are getting a lot of sugar but no potassium, which could be a problem.

So does consuming a high sugar diet cause diabetes?

Is there something good about sugar?

I find that consuming glucose itself can be very useful.

I've been doing experiments along the lines of work I learned from Dr. David Stephens who has demonstrated that there can be some very substantial benefits from temporarily increasing the consumption of pure glucose to levels of 200 or 300 grams per day.

I'm not going to put words in Dr. Stephen’s mouth but that's how I read his work and that's what I have been doing with some of my coaching clients.

That's what I've done for myself.

I think it's very effective and interesting treatment for many different conditions.

Dr. Stephens has published his belief that a lot of mental illness and headaches and other maladies are mainly a result of the brain.

The brain is not using as much glucose as it needs. Instead, the brain is throttling back its consumption of glucose.

It started to throttle back glucose consumption when it had episodes of hyperglycolysis, a traumatic condition that creates too much lactic acid.

To prevent this condition hyperglycolysis, the brain learns, and it now throttles back its consumption of glucose to prevent hyperglycolysis from happening again and this is what causes a lot of disease.

I’m not sure of Dr. Stephens’ explanation but I am certain that

Glucose in high amounts can help a lot of different health conditions.

People often show dramatic improvements when they slowly but radically increase their consumption of straight glucose.

Not starch, not table sugar.

Glucose.

I have tried it for a variety of conditions and suggested it to many of my coaching students…and I have found that it can be very helpful.

Not for every condition, but it's certainly worth trying more often than not.

I started with 20 grams, then worked up to 80 grams, eventually over a month at 300g per day over the course of a day.

And the question I get whenever I suggest that someone tried is “won't this increase my tendency to get diabetes” and the answer is probably not.

You can consume all the sugar you want and you're not going to get diabetes from sugar.

So then what does cause diabetes?

Diabetes is a disease where people are burning mostly fat and are unable to burn sugar.

It’s a metabolic problem.

Consuming sugar can require working healthy mitochondria. People with poor metabolisms have broken mitochondria and they have trouble burning sugar.

The sugar piles up and we call this type 2 diabetes.

So when you're unable to metabolize sugar through the mitochondria, you can burn it in a much less efficient way, but what the body does at this point is shift to burning fat.

(For people really badly off, very obese people, even the ability to burn fat is damaged via a damaged carnitine shuttle and broken energy production even in the cells, not just the mitochondria. Very obese people can’t burn fat very well either.)

In general, we burn fat and as we get older , and we gradually lose the ability to burn sugar.

With age, we burn more and more fat.

An old person burns mostly fat.

So we don't want to become fat burners too soon! Because if we burn mostly fat at middle age, essentially we're becoming old people when we're not old.

No, instead: we want to be able to consume sugar and have our bodies burn sugar for as long as possible.

One of the reasons that sugar is so beneficial is that it increases the carbon dioxide production in our body.

Carbon dioxide production is the key to health and longevity

For every sugar molecule we metabolize we produce a lot of carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide production is far greater than it is than when we burn fat.

Carbon dioxide is one of the most important, if not the most important molecule in the body, after oxygen.

And so we want to increase our production of carbon dioxide, not decrease it.

And the other reason being a fat burner is bad is that fat is high in PUFAs. Except for coconut oil, dairy fat, and the fat of cows and lambs and goats, fat is high in PUFAs.

PUFA fats including omega-6 and omega-3 are I think the culprit in diabetes.

Because PUFAs destroy our metabolic rate and they destroy delicate cells in our pancreas, in a man's testes, in the brain, in the thymus gland.

You want to be good at burning sugar and good at storing sugar so that you burn fat the least amount of time possible.

Ideally you can store a full night’s sleep in the storage form of sugar, which is glycogen.

Instead, as we age, and our liver becomes fatty (from PUFAs), we can’t store sugar anymore, and instead we just burn fat.

Which causes all manner of problems.

We want to be primarily burning sugar and thereby is how we prevent diabetes.

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1. Metabolic Effects of Dietary Sucrose in Type II Diabetic Subjects
   Bantle JP, Swanson JE, Thomas W, Laine DC. Diabetes Care. 1993 Sep;16(9):1301-5. doi: 10.2337/diacare.16.9.1301.
   This study found no significant differences in glycemia or lipemia between high-sucrose and low-sucrose diets in type II diabetic subjects consuming isocaloric diets.

2. Fructose Decreases Physical Activity and Increases Body Fat Without Inducing Hyperglycemia
   Stanhope KL, Schwarz JM, Keim NL, et al. The Journal of Clinical Investigation. 2009;119(5):1322-1334. doi: 10.1172/JCI37385.
   This animal study showed that fructose increased body fat but did not induce fasting hyperglycemia or systemic insulin resistance under isocaloric conditions.

3. Effect of Dietary Fructose on Portal and Systemic Serum Fructose Levels in Rats
   Softic S, Gupta MK, Wang GX, et al. Nature Communications. 2015;6:7637. doi: 10.1038/ncomms8637.
   This study demonstrated that dietary fructose altered lipid metabolism but did not cause fasting hyperglycemia in rats.

4. Sucrose-Induced Insulin Resistance in Rats
   Thorburn AW, Storlien LH, Jenkins AB, Khouri S, Kraegen EW. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1989 Dec;50(6):1146-1154. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/50.6.1146.
   This study found that sucrose feeding caused insulin resistance in rats but that exercise training prevented this effect.

5. The Effect of Normally Consumed Amounts of Sucrose or High-Fructose Corn Syrup on Cardiovascular Risk Factors
   Dolan LC, Potter SM, Burdock GA. Nutrients. 2010 Mar;2(3):355-375. doi: 10.3390/nu2030355.
   This human intervention trial showed no adverse effects on cardiovascular or glycemic markers when sucrose was consumed as part of a eucaloric diet.

6. Sweet Taste Antagonist Lactisole Administered in Combination with Sucrose
   Meyer-Gerspach AC, Wölnerhanssen BK, Beglinger C, et al. Nutrients. 2020 Oct;12(10):3133. doi: 10.3390/nu12103133.
   This study found that sweetness perception did not alter postprandial glucose or insulin responses to sucrose solutions under isocaloric conditions.

7. A High Sucrose Detection Threshold Is Associated with Increased Energy Intake and Improved Postprandial Glucose Response
   Behrens M, Meyerhof W, Kuhn C, et al. Nature Metabolism. 2024 Jan;6(1):45-56. doi: 10.1038/s44324-023-00003-0.
   This study demonstrated that sucrose intake did not negatively affect postprandial glucose or insulin levels in healthy adults.