Not to sugar-coat things, but...
In the lecture, he suggests that fruit isn't necessarily bad, because fruit tends to come along with fiber, and fiber slows down the rate at which the sugar hits your blood. This gives your gut microflora a chance to get at it and metabolize it into less harmful compounds (though with the unfortunate but health-neutral side effect of flatulence).
Anyway, this got me wondering. Which sugars are in which fruit? Not all sugars, or fruits, are equal. So, here's a nice chart I made from some data I found somewhere on the internet.
It makes me a little sad to see apples, pears and mangos down there at the bottom, though I'm delighted to see avocados at the top. Also, I would like to remind you that not everything that is quantitative is scientific, and making a nice chart of some data you find on a random web page is certainly not scientific.
Ethanol is not a nutrient. Fructose is.
I haven't had the time to listen through his entire argument, but I'm skeptical to put it mildly. The first substantial part of evidence that he supports his argument with is that people have increased energy uptake from sugars as a percentage of diet over the past decades. What does this have to do with labeling fructose as a poison? There are other basic nutrients that the liver has to metabolize before anything else can use them, like lipid conversion and consumption of amino acids for energy.
So, maybe the problem is just that large parts of the population are effectively ODing on fructose by eating overly sweetened food, like you can get health problems by overloading the digestive system with any other nutrient.
I'll keep eating my apples. What's really neat btw is that you can feel the sugar high hit you faster with fruits with a high glucose content. When I ran an ultra, we would have fun at the aid stations eating grapes and seeing how many seconds it would take to feel the effect - in a glucose-starved bloodstream, it was on the order of ten seconds. It goes straight to work :)
The trouble is that there isn't an exact definition of "nutrient." Ethanol is calorie-positive, so you do get something useful out of consuming it. By that definition, it's as much a nutrient as olive oil, or whathaveyou. By the same token, there isn't an exact definition of what a "poison" is either.
Metabolically, fructose and ethanol are processed very similarly, and have very similar effects on the body.
This isn't simply an "everything in moderation" argument. The FDA and the USDA have treated glucose, sucrose, and fructose as interchangeable from a public health point of view. Lustig simply points out that this is a bad idea, and that people have suffered as a result of following these guidelines.
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