Is sugar actually toxic?

The New York Times just dropped this massive, sensationalist deep dive claiming that plain old sugar is actually the most toxic thing you can put in your body—apparently even worse than smoking or heavy drinking.

I wrote up a longer, more detailed breakdown of the whole mess over on my blog:

www.zdravljeinfo.blogspot.com

Of course it isn't... though, if you were to suddenly consume five pounds of pure sugar in one sitting, you’d likely face some serious medical emergencies involving your heart or stomach.
The real key to everything is moderation. If you maintain a balanced approach and simply enjoy a little something sweet each day, it shouldn't pose any real threat to your health.

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic condition characterized by an absolute or relative insulin deficiency, which leads to elevated blood glucose levels—otherwise known as hyperglycemia. It stands as the most prevalent metabolic disorder in the United States. (as noted in http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/symptoms-causes/syc-20371444)

"All things are poison; it's just a matter of dosage," as Paracelsus famously put it. Even water becomes toxic if you try to chug several liters all at once. There wasn't anything particularly groundbreaking about this article...

Here’s the deal: sugar is being shoved into basically everything we eat, even your everyday loaf of bread. But the real killers? It's the drinks. We're talking Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, all that junk loaded with high fructose corn syrup.

Look, nobody is sitting around polishing off five pounds of sugar in a single day, but over a lifetime? We are pumping massive amounts of this stuff into our systems. I'm telling you, I think Dr. Robert Lustig and The New York Times are spot on when they claim sugar is the ultimate poison for humans.

Just look at the history. Years ago, before processed sugar hit the mainstream, indigenous groups in the Americas didn't touch it. Back then, things like diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer were virtually unheard of—even if their diet wasn't exactly "perfect" by modern standards. That's what the article is driving home.

It’s hardly a secret that you shouldn't go overboard with sugar; if you can manage without it entirely, even better.

And whenever there’s an article out about how harmful sugar is, there’s usually some blatant push for artificial sweeteners lurking in the background.

Natural sugar has been part of the human diet since the beginning of time, yet we’re seeing a massive spike in cancer rates. Because of that, I find myself agreeing with Betty Foster97. There is plenty of dirty laundry in the scientific community, no matter how much certain people try to sweep it under the rug.

Look, sugar isn't inherently some kind of poison or a direct carcinogen—I mean, if you don't have a deep dive into biology or biochemistry, you might not realize that all our cells actually rely on glucose, which is just a simple sugar, to function properly.
The real villain here is refined sugar, the stuff you’re finding in almost every processed meal you pick up at the grocery store, because it’s packed with sucrose. Now, sucrose is a disaccharide made up of glucose tied together with fructose via a glycosidic bond. The real problem with sucrose is that fructose component; our bodies don't actually have a functional use for it, and unlike glucose, we can't even use it as an efficient energy source, so it basically just gets converted straight into fat deposits—you know, just pure body fat.

Look, that article in The New York Times was definitely talking about refined sugar.