inserted into the throats of healthy geese and ducks and they
are force-fed grain (usually corn). With the animals
eventually consuming far more carbohydrates than they
ever would in a natural setting, the livers swell with fat,
growing to nearly ten times their normal size. The swelling
can be so severe that it impairs blood flow and increases
abdominal pressure, hindering the animal’s ability to
breathe. Sometimes the liver and other organs will even
rupture from the stress. Cruel and inhumane, it provides an
excellent, if extreme, illustration of exactly what we’re
doing to ourselves as a consequence of chronic sugar
consumption: developing fat-filled livers and creating foie
gras right inside of our own bodies.
Save for a dinner date with Hannibal Lecter, you are
unlikely to be poached for pâté—but harboring a
disgruntled liver can nonetheless produce many undesirable
consequences, as the organ is tasked with hundreds of
important functions in the body. NAFLD has been
associated with cognitive deficits, which increase with the
severity of the disease. In mice that are overfed to develop
NAFLD, brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease
begin to emerge, and mice that already had Alzheimer’s-
related abnormalities (not a perfect model of human
Alzheimer’s, but interesting nonetheless) exhibit
exacerbated signs of disease and greater inflammation when
fed concentrated fructose.^23
While 70 to 80 percent of obese individuals have
NAFLD, so do 10 to 15 percent of normal-weight
individuals, “fed” by the ubiquity of sugar and fructose. As
you can see, being thin does not make you impervious to