Sugar is cast as a fattener and a health risk, blamed for everything from weight gain and diabetes to inflammation and even feeding cancer. But in a recent interview about his book Die Zuckerrevolution (The Sugar Revolution), the biologist and cancer researcher Dr Johannes Coy calls that view far too sweeping. The problem, he argues, isn’t sugar itself, but which sugars we eat and how our cells use them.
His starting point is that sugar is more than fuel. The body also uses it as a raw material, breaking it down into the parts our cells need to build and repair their DNA. Much of this traces back to TKTL1, the gene Dr Coy discovered, an enzyme he describes as a pair of molecular scissors that cuts sugar into the pieces a cell needs to grow, renew, and repair.
From there he draws a sharp line between the sugars to limit, ordinary table sugar and especially industrial fructose, and what he calls the intelligent sugars: tagatose, trehalose, galactose, mannose, allulose, ribose and isomaltulose, each of which behaves quite differently in the body.
In the interview he goes further, explaining what this means for the brain, for the popular claim that “sugar feeds cancer,” and for the everyday choices that make the biggest difference.
Read the full interview with Dr Coy here: https://www.fr.de/wissen/ausgerechnet-zucker-warum-er-fuer-unseren-koerper-wichtiger-ist-als-gedacht-zr-94482932.html