Is sugar more toxic than sweet?

What would you say is the biggest public health crisis in the world? Tobacco? Drug abuse? Alcohol?

What about sugar?

Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a group of progressive medical researchers that sugar doesn’t just rot your teeth and cause diabetes. It also may cause high blood pressure, heart disease, and perhaps even cancer.

“Every substance of abuse – cocaine, heroin, you name it – has required personal or social intervention,” Lustig said. “For sugar we have nothing, and my prediction is that we will need both.”

Lustig co-authored an opinion paper in Nature journal entitled “Public health: The toxic truth about sugar” in which he argues that sugar in large amounts can cause a toxic chain reaction in the body. He makes the connection to cancer because “sugar drives insulin resistance, and insulin resistance drives cancer.”

The theory isn’t shared by all medical professionals. In fact, some believe it’s nothing more than an alarmist reaction. Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, said labeling sugar as “poison” crosses the line.

“The notion that sugar is toxic is silly,” Katz told Men’s Journal. “You can show dreadful effects of a high dose, but so what?”

One alternative is to live sugar-free, as this writer did, with some immediate and impactful results. But that may be a bit extreme.

As with just about everything in the health and fitness world, consumption in moderation is the way to go.