Sugar and gluten: the false culprits behind modern obesity

Sugar and gluten: the false culprits behind modern obesity

Sugar is not the devil. Nor is gluten. The thesis that blames two specific ingredients for rising obesity, type 2 diabetes and half a dozen digestive disorders rests on a hard-to-sustain confusion: mistaking the identifiable ingredient for the product that contains it. Claiming that sugar is bad under any circumstances is as crude as declaring lactose harmful —a sugar, a disaccharide— when it is precisely the carbohydrate with which nature feeds a newborn through breast milk.

Some are clear about it: the problem was never sugar, it was everything that travels with it. Additives, sweeteners, preservatives, industrial production methods and, above all, excesses accumulated over years. The ingredient with a name of its own is a convenient suspect; the whole package is an uncomfortable defendant.

Why blame sugar and not ultra-processed food?

Almost all junk food contains sugar and gluten. That is why they are so easy to point at: they appear on the label, they have a name and they can be crossed off the shopping list without touching anything else. The reasoning, taken to the extreme, turns ingredients that have been in the pantry for centuries into public enemies.

What is being debated is not whether refined sugar should be abused. It is whether the culprit is the ingredient or the context. The same sugar is in an industrial soft drink and in a ripe fruit. The same gluten is in a mass-produced hybridised wheat and in a slow-fermentation bread. Putting both cases in the same bag, some argue, is the work of nutritional illiterates. And excess industrial sugar, a sedentary lifestyle or an imbalance between omega 3 and omega 6 are not corrected by crossing a word off a label.

Did our grandparents eat more bread and stay thinner?

Between the 1950s and 1980s the population stuffed itself with sugar and gluten. And there were not even half as many fat people or allergies as today. There was «one fat guy» per group, and that was it. That is one of the most repeated arguments: if sugar and gluten were the poison they are said to be, half of Spain would have keeled over half a century ago.

What has changed is the industrial processing of food. Light products began to take off from the 1990s onwards, and with them an avalanche of sweeteners and additives that did not exist before. Modern wheat, hybridised to maximise yield, is also blamed, «worse than ancient grain». Nor does the nutritional pyramid itself escape criticism, the one experts recommended until a few years ago, with cereals at the base as what should be eaten most. That advice, more than any single ingredient, is for many the origin of the mess.

Is gluten bad for everyone?

No. Gluten genuinely harms people with coeliac disease, and coeliac disease is a real illness with real consequences. The reasonable doubt begins when that condemnation is extended to everyone: eliminating gluten without being coeliac, it is argued, is the very definition of a fad with no basis.

Another school of thought apportions blame differently and points to bread and macaroni as the great invisible culprits. Not pastries, which everyone assumes are bad, but the everyday carbohydrates that many obese people eat believing they are eating well. The clash of arguments also reaches ketogenic diets, said to leave «wrecked bodies» and a rebound effect, against those who defend them as the best path to losing fat.

Giving up flour and sugar: the cases people tell

The testimonies point in the same direction. One case goes from 90 to 70 kilos for 1.80 metres in a year, without counting calories. Another drops from 105 to 75 kilos trinc the Montignac diet, with five «sinful» meals a week out of 35, and keeps it off. A third eats tripe, pork belly, nuts and mayonnaise, and those around him cannot understand how he is thin while someone who eats only plain pasta gets fat.

The full detail of these diets —timings, quantities and exactly what is eliminated— is where the substance lies, because none of them attributes the change to a single ingredient. All speak of giving up processed foods, flours and sugars, and keeping the rest without antiestéticar.

What is lost when you squeeze an orange

An example that sums up the discussion: freshly squeezed juice. Processing the fruit to turn it into juice has a measurable nutritional cost.

• 85% of carotenes are lost.
• 70% of fibre is lost.
• 75% of calcium is lost.
• 70% of iron is lost.

Those who defend this are not against the orange. They are against equating the whole fruit with the liquid that comes out of squeezing it, just as they do not equate an ancient wheat bread with a tray of industrial pastries.

The forecast, with all due caution

The next nutritional religion is already on its way. It will probably again have an ingredient with a name of its own to blame —a new one, or sugar once more— and not the whole label. Meanwhile, those who have already reached intolerance, fatty liver or a damaged gut will do the usual: point to whatever is closest to hand and not to everything that got them there.