Robert H. Lustig
About Robert H. Lustig
“Dr. Lustig was a huge hit...I think he will be invited by others at other institutions!”
Speech topics
Growing Up With Obesity
Despite varied treatment, mitigation, and prevention efforts, the global prevalence and severity of obesity and associated chronic diseases continue to worsen. There are two current prevailing models of obesity: 1) the energy balance model (EBM), based on calories as the driver of weight gain; and 2) the carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM), based on insulin as a driver of energy storage. This lecture will explore the strengths and deficiencies of each of these models, and demonstrate that neither answer the question, neither address epigenetics, and neither provide rational prevention or treatment. Rather, 3) the oxidation-reduction model (REDOX), based on reactive oxygen species (ROS) as a driver of altered metabolic signaling; and 4) the obesogen model (OBS), which proposes that environmental chemicals interfere with hormonal signaling leading to adiposity, answer these deficiencies. We propose a combined OBS/REDOX model in which environmental chemicals (in air, food, food packaging, and household products) generate false autocrine and endocrine metabolic signals, including ROS, that subvert standard regulatory energy mechanisms, increase basal and stimulated insulin secretion, disrupt energy efficiency, and influence appetite and energy expenditure leading to weight gain. Importantly, the OBS/REDOX model provides a rationale and approach for future preventative efforts based on environmental chemical exposure reduction.
Speaking videos
Media coverage
The Sugar-Addiction Taboo - Robert H. Lustig - The Atlantic
Robert H. Lustig is a pediatric neuroendocrinologist and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. He is former chairman of the ...
Learning to Cut the Sugar - NYTimes.com
Dr. Robert Lustig became widely known as “the anti-sugar guy” after a lecture of his called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” was posted on YouTube and gained ...
Books by Robert H. Lustig
“Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine” (2021)
The New York Times bestselling author of Fat Chance explains the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic disease, documents how processed food has impacted them to ruin our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years, and proposes an urgent manifesto and strategy to cure both us and the planet. Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist who has long been on the cutting edge of medicine and science, challenges our current healthcare paradigm which has gone off the rails under the influence of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is. One of Lustig’s singular gifts as a communicator is his ability to “connect the dots” for the general reader, in order to unpack the scientific data and concepts behind his arguments, as he tells the “real story of food” and “the story of real food.”
“The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains” (2018)
The New York Times–bestselling author of Fat Chance reveals the corporate scheme to sell pleasure, driving the international epidemic of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover. Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape. With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.
“The Fat Chance Cookbook: More Than 100 Recipes Ready in Under 30 Minutes to Help You Lose the Sugar and the Weight” (2014)
The long-awaited cookbook companion to the instant New York Times bestseller Fat Chance shows you how to beat the odds—deliciously Dr. Robert Lustig’s message that a calorie is not a calorie revolutionized our understanding of weight loss and nutrition. But in order to avoid the hidden sugars that threaten our health and waistlines, Dr. Lustig warns that we must transform the way we shop, cook, and eat. Teaming up with Cindy Gershen—a chef who’s lost more than one-hundred pounds on his plan—Dr. Lustig shows readers how to: • Stock a pantry • Prepare more than 100 fast and delicious recipes • Feed a family—kids included—healthy foods they’ll love • Make entertaining easy and nutritious More timely than ever now that newest edition of The Dietary Guidelines for Americans has for the first time placed hard limits on the amount of sugar we should consume, The Fat Chance Cookbook shows you how to lose weight, find your way back to health, and still enjoy delectable, memorable meals.
“Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease” (2013)
The landmark New York Times best seller that reveals how the explosion of sugar in our diets has created an obesity epidemic, and what we can do to save ourselves. Robert Lustig is at the forefront of war against sugar — showing us that it's toxic, it's addictive, and it's everywhere because the food companies want it to be. His 90-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has been viewed more than 7 million times. Now, in this landmark book, he documents the science and the politics that have led to personal misery and public crisis — the pandemic of obesity and chronic disease--over the last thirty years. In the late 1970s, when the U.S. government declared that we needed to get the fat out of our diets, the food industry responded by pumping in more sugar to make food more palatable (and more salable), and by removing the fiber to make food last longer on the shelf. The result has been a perfect storm for our health, disastrously altering our biochemistry to make us think we're starving, drive our eating habits out of our control, and turn us into couch potatoes. If we cannot control how we eat, it's because of the catastrophic excess of sugar in our diet--the resulting hormonal imbalances have rewired our brains! To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents strategies we can each use to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, as well as societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. With scientific rigor and even a little humor, Fat Chance categorically proves that "a calorie is not a calorie," and takes that knowledge to its logical conclusion--an overhaul of the global food system.
At a glanceRobert H. Lustig
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