These research findings are consistent with what I heard from Dr. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at University of California - San Francisco.

Darya Pino at her Summer Tomatoe blog posted a video lecture by him about a week ago.

-Steve

Sugar: The Bitter Truth In this 90minute you tube lecture Robert Lustig explains the biochemistry behind fructose metabolism.

Richard J. Johnson explains how Fructose causes damage in this Hypothesis: Could Excessive Fructose Intake and Uric Acid Cause Type 2 Diabetes?

One newly discovered dangerous aspect of fructose is that fructose inhibits calcium uptake and induces Vitamin D Insufficiency.

POPKIN has done a lot of work on obesity.
Recent dynamics suggest selected countries catching up to US obesity.
ABSTRACT
Background: The United States has been the country with the
highest body mass indexes (BMIs; in kg/m2) at higher centiles, but research that compares the United States with other nations is lacking.
Objective:
To present a picture of global obesity and examine the shifts in BMI in children, I examined BMI data for men and women at the upper ends of the BMI distributions in Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Design:
As representative data, I used directly measured weight and height for children aged 6–18 y and for men and women aged
19 y.
Quantile regression analysis with BMI was used to determine the outcome, and the coefficients of age, age squared, and age cubed represented the explanatory variables plotted to determine mean BMI at the 95th centile for each age group. Overweight and obesity measures across all selected countries, with the use of nationally representative surveys and the 95th centile mean BMI, were determined.
Results:
Among women, much larger increases were found in mean BMI at the 95th percentile in Australia (+5.7 BMI units) and the United Kingdom (+3.7 BMI units) than in the United States (+2.7BMI units) in one-half the time.
In contrast, among children, younger Chinese children experienced the largest increase.
For example, the mean BMI at the 95th centile for 6-y-old Chinese children is
24.8 (a 5.0 increase), which is 2.6 BMI units more than the BMI at the 95th centile for children in the United States.
Conclusions:
Among children, BMIs for US children at the 95th centile are below those in China, whereas among women, Australian and UK women are rapidly approaching BMIs found in US women.
Am J Clin Nutr doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.28473C.

Snacking Increased among United States Adults between 1977 and 2006.


I think from this you can see why he is blaming fructose.

I've just found the actual paper that this article was based on.
You can read the full text here
Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans

Ok, I'm probably going to reveal what a nut I am by saying this, but snacking has become a major pet peeve of mine. When did we get to the point that we couldn't survive without shoving "food" into our mouths all day long?

I work in an academic law library. I've worked in libraries since I was about 20, and have been a frequent user of libraries my whole life. I have a college degree and several advanced degrees. When I was an undergrad (1980-1984), we didn't eat/drink in class or the library. And somehow no one starved to death, or even passed out from hunger.

Now there's the constant sound of crumpling wrappers and chomping of chips in class - I'm still a student. And despite the fact that the library prohibits food, the students bring snacks in all the time. There they sit, staring at their computer screens with their hands moving automatically from chip bag to mouth and back. It angers me that they're so disrespectful of the library and its rules - I'd love to see one of them pull out a bag of chips and a big gulp in some judge's courtroom, they wouldn't dare! But lately I've actually found myself feeling revulsion and contempt. It isn't necessary to eat all the time, and there are some places and times when it should be inappropriate to eat.

I think it was a proposal of Michael Pollan's that we need to develop a food culture. My addition would be that food doesn't belong in libraries, classrooms, or church services.

Once upon a time it wasn't socially acceptable, except for children, to snack. You certainly didn't eat in front of others unless they were eating and you didn't walk down the street eating.

This is one of the points David Kessler makes in his book, about high calorie food being so easy to get and the social barriers having dropped to eating willy-nilly.

The cinema really gets me.
We know its a 100minute film.

To survive through the 50minutes before the interval people need to stack up on a bucket of popcorn before it starts, the then need to top up during the interval with an ice cream and buy a box of sweets so they can get to the end of the film without passing out.

Am I the only person who can have my normal evening meal, go to town, watch a film then drive home all without the need for further sustenance.

Wouldn't it be nice to watch a film without the constant rustling of sweet papers and popcorn scoffing.

I agree! Even in my bad carby days I never bought anything to eat at the movies - mainly because it irked me to have to pay the outrageous prices they charge, not because I was necessarily anti-snacking in those days. But even in those bad old days I was able to make it through an entire film, even a really long one of upwards of three hours, without feeling deprived because I had not eaten anything.

Yes! But well said, you even type with an British accent. I love it.

1977 was about the time low-fat high-carb eating of 5-6 mini-meals a day became widely promoted by ''health professionals'' as ideal. In 1980 bringing water bottles to class became acceptable and soon after that food was too. Luckily food is banned from the library and many labs on my campus, but the filth left behind in lecture halls is disgusting. Not only do the slobs eat during class, but most are too lazy to put the wrappers and cups in one of the several waste baskets in the classroom. By late in the afternoon there is always the remains of some sticky HFCS-laden drink dripping down the tiers of the big lecture halls. In my univerity teaching lab I've resorted to putting up a sign that says "throw out your own garbage, your mother doesn't work here".

We had crackers & juice in kindergarten in 1959-60, but I don't remember snacks in first grade or thereafter - we just went outside or to the gym for recess. Neither did we celebrate birthdays or holidays with food in the classroom, though if some other kid mentioned it you might have to run the gauntlet of spankings on your birthday during recess (but if you ran fast you barely felt it; dodgeball was gym-teacher sanctioned and much more painful). We only ate & drank at home, in the cafeteria or at the water fountain. In highschool we may have had a bake sale or two per year, at the end of the day, but we never ate or drank anything during classes and never even considered doing so as we ate satisfying breakfasts & lunches and there were no vending machines in my highschool, same with University & grad school (we had a few vending machines, including ones with fruit, but ate between classes). Everything began to go downhill when I started teaching university students in 1980.

your're not a nut, you just said what I've thought my whole life.

Yes, I often think that soon my job will require a hairnet, plastic gloves, and a rag. Instead of answering reference questions and assisting in locating books, I'll be wiping down the tables. We're not a library anymore; we're an extension of the cafeteria. As is the rest of the world.



Ah, so now we know where to lay the blame. Deirdra entered the classroom, and everything changed for the worse.

Glad I'm not the only nut here.

I'm just a couple years ahead of you. 1957-58 were my kindergarten years. We didn't have snacks even in kindergarten (which was all day for me, and did include lunch). But we did have a mid-morning milk break and we all got our little half-pints of milk to drink every day.

We had the milk breaks for several years, at least through second grade and possibly third grade too, as those were considered the "lower elementary" grades. When we moved into the rarified air of the "upper elementary" school in 4th grade the mid-morning milk stopped also.

But we *always* celebrated birthdays in the classroom with mom-provided cupcakes, and boy did I look forward madly to those birthday celebrations. A latent carb addict in the making.

Perhaps, what you're seeing is not "snacking", but "lunch". You can eat alone in your dorm room, or you can eat with others in class.