The very visible result of toxic diet is all the people with too much body fat, especially stored in their abdomens. As I discuss elsewhere, our body composition is pretty well controlled by our genetically programmed systems for running a human body. Those systems can get badly out of balance if your diet has a lot of visible or hidden sugars.
Turns out there are at two major patterns of fat deposition, one much more dangerous than the other. When we eat enough of foods high in the sugar glucose, which includes any starchy plants like potatoes, the fat tends to deposit subcutaneously–more or less uniform under your skin. You may not want too much of that fat, but it’s not dangerous to your health unless it gets pretty extreme.
The much more dangerous fat is visceral fat. When you eat food and drink containing the sugar fructose, the fat is deposited in and around your liver, tending to bulge your abdomen. That’s the deposition pattern that’s part of metabolic syndrome. It will probably make you sick to some measurable degree, and may well kill you eventually. Serious overweight conditions are a mixture of both types of fat deposition.
Kimber Stanhope’s lab at UC Davis has measured this difference by feeding subjects glucose versus fructose sweetened beverages for 10 weeks. Both groups gained fat, but the pattern was more subcutaneous fat gained by the glucose guzzlers and more visceral fat for the fructose consumers.
It gets a bit weirder. If you eat enough glucose or glucose containing foods, some of the glucose gets converted to fructose and contributes to visceral fat deposition. Rick Johnson’s lab has studied that effect. And you can look lean, but still have significant levels of visceral fat, which still puts your health at risk.