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Comment by kingkongreveng_ | Hacker News Reader

Yes we can digest fructose. And when people found honey (basically pure fructose) I'm sure they gorged on it. But as a few links on the front page of this site have explained in recent days, fructose is borderline toxic.

Anthropological research in conjunction with modern medical research convincingly indicate several foods cause disease. The fact that we can digest all kinds of things is irrelevant.

It pretty much all boils down to avoiding sugars, grain products, and certain oils. It's a very easy case to buy if you read into it.

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Whole grain bread is the foundation of western civilization for a reason. It contains a huge assortment of what the human body needs as a single food source. Combined with a little meat and a little fruit and a human go go from a child to live a long and healthy life eating nothing else. However, you can also make a healthy diet by completely avoiding it. A large part of a healthy diet is variety and while that can be a pain in our modern society blaming any single highly refined food as horrible while ignoring the other components of your diet is missing a large part of the story.

The less verity in a persons diet the closer to perfection what they do eat needs to be. When you consider the quantity of fructose in the average American diet of course there is a problem, but mainly because of what it replaces and not what it is. If you burned 4k calories a day and drink 1k worth of sucrose water you can still have a healthy if unusual diet. However, when you are only consuming 2k worth of calories a day 50% of which provides zero nutrition your body is probably missing out on important things.

> bread is the foundation of western civilization

Yes, and there is a panoply of diseases only people eating grain get. They're referred to as the "diseases of civilization."

Do your own reading. I did mine and concluded bread intake should be minimized, whole grain or not.

I don't think that this appellation is correct ; iirc, at a time, homosexuality too was considered a disease of civilisation.

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