Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Just 10 Days
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21371/abstrac...
PDF:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21371/pdf
Lustig, R. H., Mulligan, K., Noworolski, S. M., Tai, V. W., Wen, M. J., Erkin-Cakmak, A., Gugliucci, A. and Schwarz, J.-M. (2015), Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome. Obesity. doi: 10.1002/oby.21371
As an aside, it's very strange that the article is not cited in the NYTimes post. A journalist should at least give the DOI at the bottom if there is not a link to the article in the body of the text.
Edit: I left this same comment on the NYTimes article and the text now links to the journal (though my comment was not approved). Seems like a win! NYTimes editorial staff: thank you!
You can wish it weren't so, or call it cynical, but that IS the reason they don't add a link to the source in the article. God help us all if people clicked away from the site, learned more about the topic than the reporter, or had the piece go over their head.
I find your comment disheartening because I was kind of hoping that I was guessing wrong. Can I still hope that things are not quite as bad at the NY Times as at local weeklies?
http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe...
Where he talks about encouraging outgoing traffic.
But one of the more interesting links in that post has gone "evil-dark" (expired, taken by squatters, endless unclosable javascript "your iOS app is inf1ected!!1one! Call us to fix it! Have your credit card ready!"
So by your newspaper linking only to itself, it could be that they actually hope to avoid this dead link behavior. (Although it would be better that it was a self link that went to a vetted link repository.)
I'm really not a web guy, so I'm surprised that this problem hasn't been solved for most content management systems.
The actual reason links to studies are often left off articles (particularly in cases like this with sharp deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition) is that the software powering the editing and publishing workflow really badly needs improvement. An incredible amount of work and knowledge goes into a story like this.
Versioning rich text through many different software tools designed for writing/editing and publishing across many platforms is hard. Sometimes people copy/paste by hand and in doing so a link can go missing. The news industry needs more technologists to work on these problems. We're hiring for people to do that, by the way: http://developers.nytimes.com/careers/
(Also, the link to the study is now in.)
"I don't like [thing]" "I work at [thing], come help me fix it"
(Not claiming that NY Times is perfect. Of course. There are other good sources, too. But NYTimes isn't like the media I grew up with. At 20 I realized that all their coverage of subjects which I knew beyond the surface was garbage, at best. My specific example is DN, the largest Swedish morning paper, but could be most of the media.)
I'd be happy to be corrected of course.
I'm skeptical of this "software" explanation. Software can of course make citation management much easier, but I see lots of articles that don't even bother to mention the lead author of a cited publication; and how did the software get that way in the first place? The software reflects the priorities of the corrupt organization that produced it.
Somebody could probably sit down with the journalists for few weeks and come up with a software package that would fit their needs perfectly - if the development consisted of direct communication between the developers and journalists/editorial staff, without any management middlemen in between. Alas, that's not how software is procured in large organizations.
But I'm also skeptical. It could explain NYT's problems, but it doesn't explain the even worse problems every other news outlet has.
NOTE: Study "Effects of X on Y given XYZ" by Researcher N. Here, http://address-to-paper.org
(not the placeholder, the actual data) should help. I don't see such a line getting lost, and even if they happen to publish it by accident instead of incorporating into the text (as sometimes happens, things slip through), it would still reach the same goal anyway.
Now I don't want it to sound dismissive or personal in any way, but tell me - if say, few of great software devs now drop everything they do and come to NYT to help, sit down for months and develop the most awesome software package the world of press has ever seen, will it actually solve the quality issues articles have? And more importantly, if sold to other papers, will it suddenly solve their problems?
Will it make journalism honest and trustworthy instead of lies and clickbait bullshit?
I'm not sure how much blame to put on broken publishing workflow, a lot of this seems really to be about broken incentives - "deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition" that leads to the "many articles, as sensationalist as possible, truth be damned" mentality, especially in the management layer.
But you did give me a pause here. Only recently I had a chance to peek at internals of a tiny part of manufacturing industry, and oh boy how much money they waste on badly designed software, which is badly designed because of deadline pressure and top management pressuring to iterate over a broken software package (and then messing with the process) instead of scrapping it altogether and doing it right. Maybe software is more to blame than I thought.
This actually happened and that's how we got d3.js. It didn't fix journalism though.
You get what you pay for, which online tends toward nothing.
Still, it's better than them getting paid to tell you what someone else wants you to hear.
My objection is with the editorials. I've all but stopped reading "the news" (NYT, WSJ, Economist, my local paper, etc) as a result.
Sounds like the problem lies here and not on the technical side of writing, editing and publishing text.
I wonder what part of this decadence is imputable to ad revenu. If I were very naive, I would say all of it.
It's that the reporter is getting access without having ever paid for it. (Pirating, reading from another article, etc)
Setting aside the fact that it is a non-issue, in any case many news agencies have various DB subscriptions, most public libraries have DB access, most universities have 'reader' accounts which grant access to these DBs for like $100 a year, etc.
Any reporter who wants to access an article legitimately can easily do so. Else, they really do not belong in the profession of journalism, which relies on practitioners being resourceful and researching things in order to convey accurate information to others.
Borrowing material from the library is a "thing" as far as I know.
I don't think you have to own a copy of something to write about it. That would be insane.
Media outlets want viewership more than anything else and the way to get and keep viewership is to tell people what they want to hear. It's why media outlets always have a consistent "slant"; MSNBC people watch MSNBC because it aligns more directly with their worldview than Fox News, and vice-versa. There is minimal tolerance within the audience for a host or pundit that appears to disagree on important factors.
You'll never see Bill 'O Reilly and Rachel Maddow on the same network, because that network would not have any viewers; conservatives want their conservative beliefs reinforced, liberals want their liberal beliefs reinforced, and both will only consume media that performs that function. Most people are not open to having their beliefs challenged even slightly.
All that said, I do find such articles often do state the university and/or the professors that were involved in the study or studies. Some of it may just be convention established before hyperlinks existed, though in many cases, the actual study is not publicly accessible.
"Morning Joe" is a different type of program than the primetime "rage pundits" and Scarborough is one of MSNBC's more moderate hosts, but he still spends his day pandering to MSNBC's core audience. Bias goes much deeper than the words that do or don't come out of a host's mouth; the networks sets the agenda, frames the debate, and procures the guests that will cater to their primary viewership target, and Scarborough passively rides the gravy train. Anchors are performers more than anything, putting on the show that the network has paid them to put on.
What politician is going to turn down the opportunity to have his face in front of tens of thousands of viewers for 2 hours every day, even if it means he has to play nice with the other side?
If there were plenty of people who wanted a "diversity of viewpoints", you'd see this in the marketplace. Could you point out one place where this is actually true? Even NPR, which has a much smaller profit motive and thus should be less concerned with viewership and more concerned with integrity, panders constantly to its audience and refrains from creating a "diversity of viewpoints".
How often do you hear a fair story on NPR about what the conservatives perceive as problems with abortion or same-sex marriage (meaning, a story that doesn't reduce these, either the beliefs and or the believers, to a gross caricature)? Never, because it would make NPR's listener base really mad, because they don't agree that there are problems with those things.
Very few, if any, news outlets are neutral. They pander to their audience's beliefs and they set the dialogue by choosing the stories to give airtime and feed to the base.
Even the "neutral stories" are framed to push a specific viewpoint. They usually go like this: open up with a brief, slanted statement of events. Call someone who supports your POV and ask for their comment. Spend 2 minutes making their argument and bringing it in. About 75% through, put on a 1 or 2 sentence clip from the other side that basically amounts to "we disagree because bad reason x" (bad reason provided either by editing the clip or selecting a bad rep of opposite viewpoint), and then follow it up with another comment from the first person, the person whose argument and authority you spent the first 74% of the story establishing, that says "Well, bad reason x is just ridiculous". Then sign off.
I guarantee you 90% of TV and radio news stories that discuss a news event in a supposedly "neutral" way approximate that pattern. They do it because they're trying to reinforce the beliefs that they believe will make them more money.
The Times needs to get with the times.
Scientific research articles are very often behind a paywall. So citing them wouldn't really give the reader much more information.
The problem is that the HN title is sensationalistic without merit.
In this case, I think that just giving these children the self-reported diet would yield massive effects on their health, sugar or no sugar. I am quite sure children with obesity problems don't know their real diet - not because they are dishonest, but because we (as people) are very efficient at hiding the uncomfortable truths from ourselves.
"Substitution of starch for added sugars improves health of children suffering from obesity, metabolic syndrome, and high habitual added sugar consumption."
But then it seems slightly less groundbreaking.
This study contradicts that by showing health improvement while maintaining macronutrient breakdown, albeit in obese kids. Is this replicable in adults and/or normal weight people? Who knows? Still a pretty interesting result IMO.
Most of the people I see practicing IIFYM believe exactly this.
They routinely top off with donuts and candy to hit the high carb count needed to gain weight. It's way easier than trying to choke down a pound of brown rice every day.
IIFYM is probably not a bad diet for a teenage boy or steroid user trying to pack on weight while doing a high volume of work. Everyone else will put on a lot of unwanted fat.
That would depend on both your total calorie count and your macro breakdown. IIFYM determines what percentage of your calories should come from each of carbs, fats and proteins. So if your calorie count is suitable for your height, weight and activity level, then your macro breakdown isn't going to cause you to gain weight. If your breakdown is out of whack, then you're going to end up feeling tired, hungry or otherwise malnourished, but it shouldn't cause you excessive weight gain outside of water retention. The calorie counting needs to be more accurate than the macro breakdown.
This study should be an eye opener for that 40% who largely believe "all carbs are created equal".
But on the flip side, you have people that believe only "processed" carbs/sugars are bad. You wouldn't believe how many diabetics think they're doing themselves a huge favor by switching from Coke to apple juice, or from pasta to mashed potatoes.
I'm tempted to start a tangential rant here but I'll just say that I generally try to avoid fructose. Yes, fruits contain fructose in addition to other nutrients, but my personal opinion is that high-sugar foods (including certain fruits like cherries, grapes, and bananas as well as cookies and chocolate bars) should be considered a treat and used sparingly.
All carbs pretty much are equal, it tends to be the amount of fiber that comes with the carb that changes things. This study was about fructose, not sugar in general, and we've known for a long time that fructose behaves differently from other carbs due to the way it is metabolized in the liver.
Nobody is ever going to know what the chemical composition of a potato is, it's just a potato. Fibre, water, protein content is "carbs" when it's in a potato.
There are plenty of different molecules, such as Sucrose, Glucose, etc, which are all forms of carbohydrate molecules.
But when people refer to "carbs", they're not referring to the chemical molecule, but most likely processed carbohydrates such as bread.
Hopefully that's more clear
[1] http://www.ehow.com/about_4613535_chemical-makeup-potato.htm...
You're right though, it probably would've been more helpful for me to say carbohydrates in general.
sucrose = glucose + fructose - water
lactose = glucose + galactose - water
maltose = glucose + glucose - water
Based on this study, I would guess that replacing all HFCS with an equivalent-sweetness amount of regular corn syrup (all glucose) would immediately result in significant improvements to the public health, even though the sweetened products would have more calories per serving.
Anecdotally-empirically, a lot of Type 2's have found carbs, fiber or no fiber, are just bad news. For at least those with a specific variation of Type 2 (still as-yet not clearly understood, but there is growing consensus that there are many different "sub-types" of Type 1 and Type 2, each of which responding well to different treatment protocols), it doesn't matter how much fiber you eat with a scoop of carbs once the metabolic syndrome manifests itself with a high enough insulin resistance response.
With enough carbs (as few as 50g for some) the end result at that stage of the condition is still a highly-adverse event, a high blood sugar spike above 100 mg/dL. Even if the spike is controlled down within 1-2 hours, there is a lot of accumulating evidence that it isn't the duration or absolute value of high blood sugars, but the spikes (the occurrence of any delta in the first place) themselves that cause cellular damage.
In a few years, we will hopefully start accumulating a flood of highly-granular, anonymized biometric sampling data, ideally tagged with true/false flags of known and suspected genetic markers (but not enough DNA data to individually dox someone). Has someone solved the problem of publishing biometrics with tagged DNA data, and be able to update the DNA tags as our understanding of genetic markers improves over time, without risking doxxing an individual from the genetic marker tags?
Sure, I wasn't talking about diabetic people.
> In a few years, we will hopefully start accumulating a flood of highly-granular, anonymized biometric sampling data, ideally tagged with true/false flags of known and suspected genetic markers (but not enough DNA data to individually dox someone). Has someone solved the problem of publishing biometrics with tagged DNA data, and be able to update the DNA tags as our understanding of genetic markers improves over time, without risking doxxing an individual from the genetic marker tags?
I also hope that this is the future. Unfortunately we're probably not going to do much better than HIPAA when this technology is widely available and being used. I'm not sure how to prevent the GATTACA side effects, but it feels like the health advances might be worth it.
The "normal" threshold for an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) at 2 hours post-load (75g glucose after fasting) is 140mg/dL. Where is this research indicating that a spike above 100mg/dL is "highly-adverse"? All the research I have seen, and the position of the ADA, is that it is normal to go well above that after a heavy carb load.
I have seen claims by Dr. Richard Bernstein and his adherents that the ADA is wrong and that "normal" is much lower and flatter than they claim. I have seen no supporting research on this, and even active criticism of that idea fro various medical researchers.
Can you link to anything about that?
Polhill TS, Saad S, Poronnik S, Fulcher GR, Pollock CR. Short-term peaks in glucose promote renal fibrogenesis independently of total glucose exposure. Am J Physiol Renal Physiol. 2004 Aug;287(2):F268-73.
I don't really think these studies show that acute blood sugar level elevation is causing the damage you are talking about. The first one talks about how TII diabetics tend to have lower β-cell count and higher apoptosis frequency, but that doesn't mean they go through waves of apoptosis more frequently (ie: during blood sugar spikes), it means that they have a lower life span. The study doesn't establish causality, so it's unclear whether diabetics have lower β-cell count because they are diabetic, or whether lower β-cell causes diabetes. It is a great study though, pretty well designed and building on kind of amazing resources from the Mayo Clinic.
The second study is interesting but extremely limited due to the fact that it was does in vitro. The problem is that it's talking about kidney fibrosis, or scarring of the kidney due to inability to regenerate. But when you remove much of the kidney and the surrounding body and then attack the kidney with glucose of course there is damage. That doesn't mean that in vivo the body can't deal with it. Kidneys do have a hard time regenerating, so it's an interesting foundational study, but I'd hardly call it "a lot of accumulating evidence."
I'll readily grant this can reasonably be construed as suggestive but not "a lot of accumulating evidence", my bad for phrasing it improperly. To me this line of research is raising interesting questions warranting further digging, in a "hm, I wasn't expecting that result going by the received wisdom" way.
Following the sporadic posts of Type 2 patients in online forums self-reporting success at getting off conventional treatment protocols, what appears to come up in common among them is what is currently considered (by the ADA and similar outfits in other nations) radically aggressive methodology to blood glucose control; <100 mg/dL post-prandial is not considered out of line in that crowd, and they avoid spikes as much as possible. A very small number have been at it for 20+ years and well into their 60-70's, and are reporting no long-term disabilities commonly associated with advanced stages of the metabolic disorder. They tend to be in very low (<50 mg/day) carb or even ultra-low (<20 mg/day) carb regimens, or constant ketosis, or varying fasting cycles, with varying amounts of exercise, or a combination of all of the above, with lot of nuances thrown in by each individual. A lot of what they practice directly goes against published large institutional guidelines, but it is really difficult to argue against the end results in their comprehensive blood panels and other bio-markers, so it is a fascinating case to me of the impact of an N=1 / DIY / Quantified Self ethos that increasingly more people are embracing with the aid of increasingly better technology. I find it really exciting that increasingly more laypeople are empirically "science'ing the shit out of this" (to paraphrase "The Martian") with a continuous hypothesis-test-adjust loop upon themselves. It is definitely not science by any conventional means, but as haphazard as it is, it is yielding in a startling number of cases exceptionally better results than the average and mean Type 2 patient experience.
I want to be clear though: there is certainly evidence that very high blood sugar causes significant damage, sometimes permanent, I'm not contesting that. How high "very high" is varies, and as far as I know doesn't really happen in people who aren't diabetic. All I'm saying is I don't think blood sugar spikes are bad for non-diabetics, but they certainly are for diabetics.
See http://33bits.org/2009/12/02/the-entropy-of-a-dna-profile/
Today we hand medical researchers large databases pre-filled with the data they seek.
As we move into a world of increasingly ubiquitous biometric monitoring, asymptotically trending towards real-time, could the data gathering be flipped around instead? Individuals become the only ones who own their detailed DNA profile (the profile with billions of base pairs stored), held on either a personal device with suitable encrypted backups (ideal) or held on their behalf by a trusted service (encrypted with a key only the individual holds). Researchers send out requests for specific data ("weekly blood pressure of males between 20-60, with these genetic markers, starting now/5-years-ago"). Individuals either manually approve matching requests or set up approval "subscriptions"/rules. Requests matched with data sources get anonymized data of course.
Researchers not only can get data this way, they get a continuous, crowd-sourced data feed. Longitudinal studies might get easier to set up through this kind of channel. There isn't a way to ID someone by their feed and the researchers' requested, limited matching genetic markers alone, unless an attacker systematically breaks into multiple research databases, and starts building a Palantir-like correlation amongst all the hacked databases; that dramatically raises the detection risk to the attacker. Another attack is an overly-broad set of genetic markers in a single request, and those requests can be auto-denied before even getting into the brokering system. Short-term, we can prohibit the collection of any part of the 13-base-pair CODIS markers, though long-term we have to assume that CODIS or its future successors will eventually expand to a larger set of markers (and in the far, far future, possibly the entire sequenced genome).
This study isn't a contradiction. It just says that micronutrients matter, which is pretty uncontroversial.
That sugar vs. starches makes a difference is hardly news either if you just take a look at glycemic index/insulin response.
And that the kind of fatty acids make a difference in fats is also an aspect going beyond macronutrient breakdown. So really, "fits your macros" has never been sufficient.
Making a distinction between glucose and fructose has been more controversial and it's good to see it studied more.
Well, how do you think the unhealthy people got that way in the first place? Yes, healthy people can deal with moderate or immoderate sugar intake better than people with metabolic syndrome. But at the margin you are probably degrading your health anyway.
Eat too little carbohydrates, and you'll die. Eat too much, and you'll die. Your claim that any increase must lead to the same marginal results is absurd.
ALSO, the general effects of sugar on aging and immune system are not so good either in general.
I am much better at swimming, less tired, I eat a lot less. I lost weight the first 3 months and now my weight is very stable.
Cutting added sugar is not very hard but it requires some willingness.
The food producers put sugar everywhere: bread, red beans, smoked salmon, yogurt, etc. You just need to read the ingredients to avoid it. You will quickly learn which type of product is ok and which type is not.
Today I am more attracted to a fruit than a cup cake or an ice cream, and it feels good :)
I've had the same experience (and a few relapses, but I do know better).
Eventually I figured out it was the sugar filled ketchup that was doing it to me. Now I eat fries without ketchup and do not usually order additional portions (unless I am really hungry). Best of all, I do not feel like I am starving myself. When I do not have ketchup, I do not get the desire to eat more.
Less Salt water than you might think can kill you. Lower levels can also prove deadly when your body is stressed.
However, long term effects do seem limited.
I've been told the sugar is used to keep the fish from becoming overly salty, but I imagine it serves other purposes as well. I'd love to know what that is. We've started experimenting with using less sugar, but it seems the fish would get really salty if you cut too much sugar out.
Here's a picture of the fish drying: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151063519684708&l=...
and after it comes out of the smoker: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151064652569708&l=...
But we pay through the nose for crappy fruit and vegetables!
> Sugar is added to cured salmon because it helps prevent the growth of microorganisms. When this process was originally developed, food spoilage was a huge problem (it meant the difference between survival and death) while metabolic disorders were rare.
More importantly, since it was historically used to cure meats, it's become an important part of the flavor profile of those products. It's the same with nitrates and ham and bacon; without them, it just doesn't taste like bacon, which is why "uncured bacon" is usually a pretty deceptive product.
... none of this is to bash fruit - they are definitely a much better alternative to sugary drinks and even fruit juices, due to their low glycemic load. But still, it's important to remember that fruit, especially some fruit, are far from being sugar free.
2. If you eat fruit in its natural form (with the fiber etc), it has a much lower glycemic index than processed. Also consider the glycemic index and load of an apple is much lower than a potato.
Its worth noting that in the form of something like a smoothy, a person can consume more fruit than would be possible eating actual fruit. Imagine a counter top of fruit turning into a single large smoothy...
It's when those sugars get extracted and concentrated we run into trouble. Juices and smoothies are more dangerous because they concentrate the sugars while removing fiber. This decreases the liver's ability to process the sugar. But actual refined sugar is most dangerous.
I still doubt tho, that high quantities of fruit are good for you. One of the reasons is that current forms of fruit we eat are selected toward sweater taste.
But is stands that it is possible to become insulin resistant from eating raw fruit, and this is simply not possible from eating eggs for example.
In regards to insulin resistance there is an upper bounds of healthy fruit consumption, just there is with almost any food (although for some foods the consideration may bot be blood sugar, but rather be total calories or omega-6 poly-fat, etc)
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/577051/Birmingham-Universit...
This is true. But non carbs have a much lower insulin response.
>A steak produces as much insulin as pure sugar.
Are you saying grams of protein to grams of sugar? A steak has a smaller insulin response than a piece of bread, not only that, the shape of the spike is drastically different.
"Recent research has shown that moderate egg consumption—up to one a day—does not increase heart disease risk in healthy individuals (1, 2) and can be part of a healthy diet."
Bananas and dates are the main exceptions to this.
I think the key is to do it very strictly for a few weeks. Otherwise, you have a hard time understanding some of your feelings. When you completely stop, you can clearly see the difference.
Sometimes, I think I am too strict so I take a peace of cake, and I usually regrets eat because I have this weird feeling an hour later.
Also, I want to insist on the fact that I had a lot of junk food while I was younger, and I think the effect on my body was big.
My observation is that people who grew up eating healthy don't have the same problems.
I had a buddy who has convinced me to do this as well and says everything tastes better when you re-align your taste buds so to speak. He says all his fruit tastes sweeter, vegetables and other foods have more flavor when he stopped eating processed sugar.
Clearly, you've had the same experience.
Give me a plain yogurt and a fruit and I am as happy as I was with an Häagen-Dazs® ice cream :)
Given the amount of time wasted on diet/nutrition fads I'm starting to thing the US government should actually do some science on these issues.
“This is a fundamental flaw in the study. It is likely that the changes in metabolic outcomes observed can be explained by the experimental diet providing fewer calories than the children’s usual intake.”
What about carbohydrates, which have "added sugar" (because they ARE sugar by default?)
What about high-sugar fruits like bananas, citrus, and red apples, which often have as much sugar as processed snacks?
Or do you mean that you eat low glycemic index foods?
I eat fruits but not dry fruits or fruit juice / smoothie etc. I eat bread and pasta. I don't eat snack bar.
I try to eat food with a low glycimic index but I know bread has a high one.
Wheat Flour (with added Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Water, Yeast, Salt, Soya Flour, Fermented Wheat Flour, Emulsifiers: E472e, E481, Vegetable Fat (Rapeseed, Palm), Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid
This seems typical of all of them. The only ones with sugar are a couple of wholegrain ("brown bread") ones.
(I don't blame you for baking your own. I made good use of the German bakery when I lived in London, and I'm not German.)
[1] http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=256174499
King Arthur flour recipe: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/classic-sandwich-brea...
random blog: http://chefinyou.com/2012/08/27/white-bread/
Wonder bread etc just use high fructose corn syrup and honey. Cheaper than milk, can say lactose-free.
The sugar feeds the yeast to make the bread rise. No sugar == solid lump of rock-hard bread-rock.
Sugar is one of the key ingredients in Western-style fluffy loaves, particularly wholegrain flours which need an accelerated fermentation process so that they rise before being 'set' by cooking. Which is nicely ironic since we've been conditioned that wholegrain is the healthy choice!
Sugar also helps to prevent staling, which is critical in home-baked breads which barely last 12 hours even with that assistance.
This is well beyond the scope of "feeding the yeast".
Fiber content in foods affect how the human body absorbs glucose. High-sugar fruits generally have decent quantities of fiber which mitigates the rate at which ingested glucose enters the bloodstream. At least this is my understanding of it from my nutritional scientist, sister, but I'm no medical professional. For more details, fiber:
"Attracts water and forms a viscous gel during digestion, slowing the emptying of the stomach and intestinal transit, shielding carbohydrates from enzymes, and delaying absorption of glucose,[62] which lowers variance in blood sugar levels"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber#Effects_of_fiber...
Also, compare an orange vs orange juice:
Orange Glycemic Index = 40
Orange Juice Glycemic Index = 50
http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-eating/glycemic_index_...
Fructose that appears naturally is not bad for you. The reason is that naturally appearing fructose usually appears with fiber, and it is usually locked in plant cells. The body is perfectly capable of processing this type of sugar. There was a Japanese study where they had people eating large quantities of apples, and their blood tests did not show any of the negative effects associated with large intakes of sugar.
The only naturally occurring sugar one should be weary of is honey.
Also carbohydrates are not sugar by default. Sugar is a type of carbohydrate, but there are other types that are not sugar and should not be confused with it. There are also other sugars (other than fructose) that are perfectly fine. Glucose for example, is not bad for you in any form.
There has been a lot of confusing science done by assuming that all carbohydrates are the same. And while they do have similar molecular structures the way they are processed by the body is very different so they should not be mixed up.
Can you give some background on that? Is it because it's already been processed once (by bees), and therefore is less suitable for human consumption?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutrition_and_compositio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_syrup#Food_and_nutrition
I don't think anybody is going to take some university courses in order to find the factual inaccuracies in a comment they wrote, so to be more helpful in dispelling these inaccuracies, could you possibly list a few of them and some relevant terms/concepts that could act as stepping stones to finding the correct information?
I am genuinely curious on the topic, but don't always know where to start and what data is bought and paid for by biased parties. I have been curious since first asked strong proponents of "natural" foods to explain to me why fruit full of sugar was supposedly better for you than anything else full of the same amount of sugar and received answers that were quite unsatisfactory.
Sucrose (table sugar) breaks down into fructose and glucose (as does corn syrup). On the other hand starch breaks down, after a couple of steps, into just glucose. Glucose is your basic fuel that is used by the muscles, etc, directly. Fructose has to be metabolized by the liver first, with some bad side effects if you have too much. The study that the (currently) top post links to is specifically about "fructose restriction". So we're not talking about carbohydrates in general.
Bananas and apples do have fructose, but it's not "added" sugar. However, if you take apple juice (or as I see on labels a lot, pear juice) and use it as an ingredient, that would be added sugar.
High-sugar fruits are not "added sugar".
Added sugar = sugar which is added to a product, and shows up on the ingredient list.
The only fruits you would worry about is fruit juice, because good luck eating 10-12 apples in one session, but you can drink 10-12 apples worth of juice without any problems.
> What do you mean by "added sugar"?
I am only saying that for someone like me who was clearly addicted go suggar, the result is clearly here.
I tried to stop eating too much since I was ~17 years old and I was never able to do so until I cut added sugar.
I am only speaking for myself (and for my dad who needs to cut added sugar :))
Go to the grocery (in the US), and look at many products attractive to children. Notice the heavy prevalence of added sugar. Unfairly singled out? lmfao
Because it's delicious.
Why do people eat too much sugar? Because they like delicious things and eating delicious things makes them happy. Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.
That's not really fair. I agree with your general skepticism in this thread (there's a reason that most of these studies show small effects due to dietary modifications but most anecdotes of the same are "and now everything is amazing!"), but the human body is designed to crave things like fat and sugar and to feel good when they're acquired.
Some kind of ascetic lifestyle -- where we can remove the desire for the pleasure of eating -- may be possible, but the physical design of the body and our reward system indicates that enjoyment from eating food is built right in.
It would be like ignoring people perpetuating fraud and instead only trying to solve all the ways that the human brain is susceptible to it.
Because it's delicious
It's not though. It's only delicious for people who have high sugar intake. And besides, deliciousness is subjective and orthogonal to nutrition, while nutritional value is largely objective (we hope).
Smoking is bad for you, so it's illegal for minors to buy and it's illegal to even smoke with a minor in the car. High sugar intake is bad for you, so it's illegal to advertise sweets to children /s.
Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.
You really think for us to have any hope of changing the prevalence of obesity is to get people to change their behavior, instead of minimizing the accessibility and prevalence of the environment which reinforces said behavior? It'd be great to do both, but realistically...? Get millions of people to change their behavior and opt for the more expensive / less flavorful foods? (And I mean less flavorful in a subjective sense, since they're used to very sweet, very salty things.)
We can't convince others with an aggressive tone. Like I'm doing. But we can definitely win over an audience.
You can't possibly be this ignorant of nutrition. Do you really think sugar is somehow objectively and universally delicious (excluding the trivial definition in which almost every taste is "delicious" in that it contributes to the overall palette of flavor)?
I didn't quite cut sugar out of my diet but around college I stopped eating as much, and I now found most of the desserts or candy one would find in the supermarket to be too sweet for my tastes, as well as most "normal" sweetened drinks (by contrast to e.g. many fruits). How does that mesh with your claim that sugar is added because it's simply "delicious", as opposed to other's model of a feedback loop between amt of sugar consumed and amt of sugar desired?
Stop eating it for a few weeks and you will find food with a lot of added sugar disgusting (eg: coke).
Addictiveness has nothing to do with whether or not something is a drug. Like it or not.
EDIT: Don't want to say 'prove' but would mostly purport the argument that "sugar bad".
I'm not a nutritionist, but from my layman understanding, carbohydrates break down to glucose during digestion, so any "good" carb source (oatmeal, beans, peas, etc.) will affect blood sugar levels.
But even those carbs aren't necessary for survival. After a period of time, the body (and yes, the brain as well) will adapt to use other sources of energy, such as ketones, which are a fats/lipids by-product. Even then, with no carb intake, glucose can be generated from non-carbs via gluconeogenesis, if needed.
Low-carb high-fat diets have been a life-saver for diabetics, helping reduce or eliminate their reliance on insulin, and that's pretty much proof the human body doesn't need sugar for survival.
I ran in excess of 32 miles a week for several years and the only side effect I had from it was blisters.
I started running again a few years ago after a 5 year hiatus from any regular physical activity. I logged my Time, Avg/Max HR, and Calories burned for each run and there really wasn't much of a change in metrics over the 3 year period I tracked them. My heart rate was surprisingly stable and run times reduced gradually but only about a minute a year.
Maybe if I was incredibly unhealthy but I generally eat well and at my worst I've only been 20-30lbs over weight. I know that sounds like a lot but I'm 6'5" and my "ideal" body weight is 190lbs which is kind of ridiculous.
However, once I stopped eating a few things that continually gave me sinus problems I didn't even realize I had, I did feel less depressed :)
Then I stopped eating wheat and I stopped feeling like someone punched me in the front side of the head. It was truly bizarre. I had no idea.
Dietary studies are very hard. There is no conspiracy preventing rigorous studies, they are just really hard. You need a large enough sample, you need to control the subjects very tightly (people don't self-report accurately), and you need to do it for long enough to see if the effects are lasting or illusory.
If you want real science here, we need to change our expectations and think in terms of $10B not $10M. Probably still a good investment in health, comparable to cancer research.
Until that time, what are you using to make your dietary decisions, given there's not much real science behind any of it?
I find maintaining a high level of skepticism tends to dissipate any longterm benefits of the placebo effect. So sometimes I'll try a fad, or a lifestyle change, but hold my judgement until months later and most of the time I'm left disappointed in the overall results.
Other than that, I follow the golden rule of health and nutrition: "everything in moderation".
Actually, it almost always works out, at least initially. The problem is, the benefits go away; that's how placebo works. I'm just wary of getting my hopes up these days so I'm very careful about what drastic lifestyle changes I make now. Beyond that, I'm also tired of people guilt-tripping everyone else every time they make one of these lifestyle changes. Everyone rushes from one fad to the next and along the way we all feel a little worse about ourselves.
I would be willing to be fed slurry through a tube, if it provided good information.
Like when people start running and they have all these wonderful side effects
— more energy, better sleep, mood improvements
I think there may be an evolutionary aspect to it as we started of as nomads and the lifestyle that we live currently is the result of the industrial revolution and hence quite recent.
Though I've noticed that most of the silver bullet testimonials come from US citizens. Could be that the standard American diet is way, WAY crappier than most. Where I come from(somewhere in Africa), fast food and sugary foods are for the wealthy, while organic whole foods is for ordinary folk. So maybe I wasn't eating so badly before, that's why I didn't feel the 'magical' effects I read about from US citizens.
To be fair, the UAE has approximately the same obesity rate as the US.
I am now on a low-sugar diet and my joints are still doing well. When I eat some sugar after half an hour my wrist and elbow start to hurt again.
I have tried this a few times and the effect is totally reproducible. This experience makes me wonder how many people who have arthritis and other inflammatory diseases could reduce their symptoms with a low/no sugar diet.
Keeping weight off is also much easier with low sugar.
My advice is: Keep it a try. Stay off sugar for a month and see if you notice any changes. There is nothing to lose (besides a few pounds).
It's giving up sugar, not ingesting plutonium. Worst case scenario you don't get the 'infomercial results', but it most likely will still improve your overall health
There are probably places in the US where switching to bottled water would be a great idea, sadly. Northern Iowa, for instance, is struggling to remove nitrates from its drinking water (nitrates affect oxygen transport by blood), and in parts of Pennsylvania fracking has led to flaming tap water. If you live there, it might not be a bad idea to try your example of a silly experiment.
Maybe my body is different from anybody else's body and my results apply only to me. That's obviously a possibility.
There was a massive positive difference with 2). IMO, a person's diet is way, way more important than his/her exercise regime.
That said, I'm not trying to say sugar is 100% bad for you. I'm sure removing 100% of the sugar from the human body will cause it to fail. Just saying that if you're one of those knocking down 2 bottles of mountain dew and a candy bar everyday, you should probably stop.
Why? You can get the needed carbs in other forms. Is sugar required to be eaten? I don't think so.
I've sought out these types of experiences but never see the dramatic changes that other people do.
For a time, I cut sugar out of my diet. I didn't notice any changes other than my desire to eat sweet foods went away. I did experience the flu like symptoms for a few days, but that passed. Now, if I really binge on sugar, I get a headache, but consuming it moderation doesn't make me feel any different than when I had cut it out completely.
I've also experimented with cutting out caffeine, eating vegetarian, different sleep patterns, and different exercise routines. Only messing with my sleep had much effect (I need it, duh).
I've also lost 35 lbs since the beginning of summer as well, with few other specific changes than learning to pass up sweet stuff.
Naturally, it's calories in vs. calories out for weight loss, but there seems to be a dangerous feedback loop when it comes to me and sugar. Easiest way to exercise will power for me is to just say no altogether.
I can massively agree with this:
> It is hard to describe how my life changed.
> Cutting added sugar is not very hard but it requires
> some willingness.
At least part of the problem was that it's virtually impossible to get away from sugar; you'll eat something you thought wouldn't be sweet, but it is, and suddenly you have chocolate smeared around your mouth sitting in a field of candy wrappers...
Watching my wife try and give up sugar was also an education. Wild mood swings, bargaining, secret consumption ... it was quite something. We're both pretty athletically shaped and very active, but giving up sugar was comfortably ... impossible.
I have had excellent results recently eating 90% of my meals from a paleo food delivery service. I don't think I can get behind any of the "science" the paleo community puts forward, but eating balanced and very high quality meals had made many parts of my body much happier.
That's the tobacco industry smoke-screening evidence about the dangers of smoking all over again.
The upside is, those companies are slowly dying. Coke's sales the last three years:
$48 billion > $46.8b > $45.8b
We can add trash like McDonald's into this, their last three years of sales:
$27.5 billion > $28.1b > $27.4b
These types of companies will continue to bleed sales and struggle in the next decade as consumers seek alternatives.
For comparison, the most current recommendation I could find was for 64 oz of water a day -- about half of your prior soda intake.
>Buy put coke options
What if coke is able to change their business and provide those healthy alternatives?
A big what if, admittedly, since the dopamine hit provided by sugar is what drives excess consumption of the product. But never say never.
Note that Coke ALREADY provides "healthy alternatives" (they sell bottled water if that's your thing). And also note that the parent has no idea what part of Coke's product line the dip in sales was caused by, whether it's an industry-wide phenomenon or not, etc. etc.
That's because the parent is just some armchair financial analyst spouting nonsense.
That was the implication of the post, yes, hence the mention of sugar-free drinks they already produce.
It's crazy to start freaking out over something just because of one small study, especially if it's something that didn't seem to have any observable negative effects until then.
But I doubt those are very many or very thorough studies.
Andrew Wakefield received money from lawyers preparing a MMR lawsuit without disclosing the fact. His research was shown to be false in multiple followup studies, he was shown to have falsified data, he lost his medical license, and The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield's 1998 paper. He also had a paper retracted by the The American Journal of Gastroenterology.
The other issue was the reporting on the study.
Edit: I would just add that the name makes the result even more suspect, he seems to be the only person pushing this fructose hypothesis. I wouldn't take the results seriously until it's replicated by somebody with no connection to him.
Oh, and the "adequate scientific evidence" that they are looking for is something absurd like a study where you would give kids sugar and follow their daily lives for 40 years and then see if it has negatively impacted their health. We don't even have that strong scientific evidence against tobacco to date.
Plus at least tobacco was attractive though right guys? /s
https://36.media.tumblr.com/a31b0a77b878143a5f3b3904c2a012d9...
These are kids whose livers are already suffused with fatty tissue, not average kids.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-weight-of-a-13-yea...
http://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts/data/set1clinical/cj41c021.p...
93 kg puts them at something like 90th / 95th percentile.
From the CDC:
Overweight is defined as a BMI at or above the 85th percentile and below the 95th percentile for children and teens of the same age and sex. Obesity is defined as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for children and teens of the same age and sex.
So their overall calorie intake stayed at a similar level, their processed sugar intake dropped.
I did not read that there was a control group.
It's possible that participating in a study of high risk people has a subtle influence on eating behavior such that these biomarkers might be altered over a 10 day time course anyway. I'm pretty sure that this change wouldn't be as large as the experimental group's results, but you never know.
However, there are some limitations to our paradigm. Athough inclusion of a separate external control group would have been optimal, it would have presented novel challenges of its own, such as: 1) if subjects under- or over-estimated their baseline fructose consumption, then providing them their reported daily fructose content would be problematic; 2) altering each subject's diet while trying to maintain the baseline fructose content would require changes in liquid versus solid, which may also result in caloric change, altered absorption, and altered satiety; and 3) our participants were all patients in an obesity program. We did not believe that maintaining fructose at the same level, even within a study, is commensurate with the message that the change in macronutrient composition is important for their health, and in order to use the study as an “educational moment.” Furthermore, others have looked longitudinally at children with obesity over time without any intervention, but still within the confines of a study, and had seen no changes in metabolic outcomes [39]. Rather, each participant served as his or her own control. Our paradigm of dietary sugar and fructose restriction, which included mid-study dietary adjustments to compensate for weight loss, resulted in a 4% decrease in percentage of calories from carbohydrate, a 2% increase in percentage of calories from protein, and a small increase in dietary fiber, which could have reduced macronutrient absorption [18], flux of fructose to the liver, and also increased satiety. Recognizing that consumption data by recall is routinely underestimated [24], we made every effort to maintain our participants' baseline weight throughout the 10-day study interval, and even increased the caloric allotment partway through the cohort, yet a decline of 0.9 ± 0.2 kg was noted during the 10 days.
> We did not believe that maintaining fructose at the same level, even within a study, is commensurate with the message that the change in macronutrient composition is important for their health, and in order to use the study as an “educational moment.”
This is a very bad excuse to avoid a control group. There are many unknown factors that are difficult to estimate. For example: Did the children also change the fat consumption because a doctor was going to examine them in a few days? Did they change some habits, like walking to medical center instead of no walking? I can invent a few more, because it's very difficult to guess the baseline and the changes in the subjects.
To be sure that "the change in macronutrient composition is important for their health" you need a scientific study. And to be sure that the study is reliable you need a control group.
It does look like OGTT changes are dependent on weight change (post-hoc weight-gaining group did not see the same benefit as the total cohort).
To me, the diastolic BP, baseline fasting insulin, and OGTT AUC are the real stars here.
I did not know this. Could you share the papers you're talking about?
read the paper carefully.
I'm don't know if he's biased or just right. I'm happy to hear a refutation of his arguments.
For those unfamiliar, here's the talk the probably gave rise his noteriety: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM. It's long, but it's interesting.
For those people, I think it's very nice that you had a good experience dieting. Your story isn't science however, and the rest of us aren't going to learn anything generalizable from it. Perhaps you should be posting to a reddit support group?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4425138/
http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/054774-000/die-grosse-zuckerlueg...
http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/sugar-coated (not working)
In some ways, sugar is even harder to control than tobacco. Smoking is a choice, but sugar is essential for living. It plays a big role in our society. Remember the last birthday party/christmas/anything without sugar overdose?... Me neither.. And its hard to prove that over-consumption is unhealthy.
How can one go about learning about nutrition?
I have tried many, many times to do this, but I always run into these problems:
1: I can't find a "big picture" overview of the field, and thereby learn which areas to focus on
2: Most of what I find seems to be anecdata, or poorly constructed studies "We followed these 7 people..."
3: The rest of which I find is always biased by what the author is trying to promote - Low Carbs! No Carbs! Water! Fruit fruit fruit!!! and suffers from points 1 and 2 above...
I would really like some good recommendations for books on learning nutrition science. From the ground (coffee) up.
But I still have problem 1: A big picture view of the field.
I am looking for a kinda Cliff's Notes of the nutrition field. Then I feel a lot of the sections on that site I would be better prepared to deal with in an informed way.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/a-primer-on-nutri...
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/a-primer-on-nutri...
Then explore the rest of the site: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition
When you're ready, start reading LeanGains:
http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debun...
The human body is quite remarkable in it's ability to adapt, the only thing this article adds is the '10 days' portion (pun intended), but even that isn't too surprising!
Let's be clear, this research is specific, and all it does is add yet another point in a massive cloud of evidence pointing towards the current dietary disaster that is added sugar.
But don't take my word for it, please, do your own quick research on the subject. Look up terms like Sugar+Diet or Sugar+Nutrition on Google scholar. Go through the abstracts, the literature reviews. And stop spreading baseless opinions, especially when it's potentially very harmful to the people reading them.
When you see a comment that poorly defends a valid position, reply by defending it properly, not by pointing out the flaws and/or following up with FUD when you haven't done basic research on the subject.
I wonder if a tsp a day in my coffee is too much, how about a bubble tea, how about honey nut cheerios once a week etc etc. Without some framework to judge how much is ok we're also left with FUD about any sugar at all.
Ketosis is a multifaceted, complex, biological process that depends on many variables. However, it is potentially somewhere to start investigating a 'critical limit' to judge how much sugar can be processed by your body.
https://www.reddit.com/r/keto would disagree with you. I myself stay below 20g of carbohydrates per day, and I lose ~3lbs a week on the diet, while eating cheese, meat, and green vegetables. I feel phenomenal, still get to eat food I enjoy, and wouldn't go back to a traditional carbohydrate-heavy diet if I was paid to.
No disagreements on keto being useful for many. For those who want to maintain their weight, though, it's not often the right diet. So I'd argue it's not "general-purpose."
This line gets parroted around here constantly (its just thermodynamics! calories in calories out!), yet more evidence continues to be provided that macronutrient balance matters, as does gut bacteria.
EDIT: What if dieting turns out to be as easy as naturally selecting bacteria for the gut that can't break down carbohydrates easily, and selling it as a probiotic pill that replaces you're existing gut bacteria? Wouldn't that be a huge win for public health policy?
And before anyone comes in and says that's not possible, check out this women who became obese from a fecal transplant from an overweight donor:
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/02/04/Woman-becomes-obes...
Sure, it might be what you need if you start out in an opposite but equally unhealthy state, but in the long run consistent weight loss is fatal.
It might not feel relevant to you, but large parts of the population in the world find themselves in that very situation through no choice of their own.
Not at all. If you're carrying excessive fat around, you should be modifying your diet in order to shed that excessive fat. If your body composition is healthy, then you should be on a diet that a) is providing both a proper ratio of macronutrients and b) enough calories that you're not losing muscle mass.
No. Really, healthy and unhealthy diets aren't binary categories, diets are more are less healthy than others, and there are usually going to be more healthy options than a diet on which you maintain a pre-existing unhealthy excess of body fat.
And, what those diets will have in common, is that you'll lose body fat on them (probably also weight, though that's less certain.)
> Sure, it might be what you need if you start out in an opposite but equally unhealthy state, but in the long run consistent weight loss is fatal.
In the long run, living is fatal, with a 100% mortality rate. But a diet on which you (with your current body weight) are losing weight is not necessarily one on which you will consistently lose weight without limit; one which would maintain a lower but healthy weight will cause you to lose weight while you are above that weight. And would cause you to gain weight if you are below that weight.
> I don't eat any sweets at all (natural sugars come from the fruits I eat)
Yes, but the average apple, banana, or orange has a lot of sugar content. Many fruits are also acidic and will mess your teeth up a lot worse than a bit of coffee stain will.
Nicotine isn't that terrible, but tobacco is way more than just nicotine.
Just like most of the drinks at Starbucks are more than just caffeine, so it's actually a pretty close comparison when you factor in the sugar.
Any sources that sugar is a drug, addictive or something like that?
Obligatory link because you said "I feel great" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6rE0EakhG8
[1]: http://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/drinking-coffee... -- sorry its annoying.
I find that the added sugar=bad position is backed up with a lot of studies that don't control for total calories between groups (meaning the total calories are the culprit), or macronutrient ratios not being controlled between groups (meaning lower protein or higher carbohydrates are the culprit). There are a 'massive cloud' of studies which have both of those 2 errors present.
Aside, I realize the study in question did control for total calories, I'd have to read through the full study to be able to comment on it. However, drawing conclusions on the population at large from obese kids with metabolic syndrome and abnormally high sugar consumption isn't exactly "another point" in my books.
I don't think anybody is arguing that any level of sugar consumption is fine, but it's unfair and intellectually dishonest to say 'sugar is bad' or 'sugar is unhealthy'
I agree about my laziness (making my own literature review would be a lot of work), however, controlling for total calories as you suggest could be misleading, because sugar provides lots of calories but often does not reduce hunger:
I don't see how could it be misleading. You trade sweat treats for fullness, and you could even add low calories side meals to balance the count. That's what a lot of diet regimes do and have been proved to work.
Failure to control total calories just about damns the validity of any diet study right off the bat.
You do not simply control for an additional variable when you know there is a direct link between the two. You study it as a dependent variable.
Edit: replaced "fulfillment" with "satiation". Sorry about the vagueness, I thought the meaning was pretty clear from the context.
"fulfilment" is a vague term and you're veering off the topic into a strawman argument
It wouldn't make much sense to keep the groups isocaloric but replace the calories from sugar in one group with say, protein in another. You wouldn't be measuring the same thing any more.
The entire point of the study is comparing monosaccharides to polysaccharides and observing changes in 'health' (excuse the vague terminology). Sugar is substituted with a longer chain carbohydrate in well planned research.
that's just as vague as 'sugar is bad'. Sugar consumption, I would think, varies pretty widely.
This is the first I've heard that controlling for total calories would be misleading and your rationale doesn't make any sense. The inverse is misleading, if you don't control total calories then the conclusions drawn from the study don't represent the variables that were altered.
Hunger is a separate topic, you don't design diets so that people have 'the same level of hunger' between control groups because that's not easily quantifiable and irrelevant.
Personally I am not willing to trust my health the status quo + what I deem to be the best of science because nutrition science is still in the dark ages, and I believe market forces and human instinct are pushing are food supply in a terrible direction much faster than science can keep up with the problems. Instead I am a proponent of common sense approaches like Michael Pollan advocates because it can save us from a good many pitfalls that will befall us if we wait for the science to be settled. In particular I think there is a mindset in a certain type of science-minded hacker that believes so strongly in their own objectivity that they are willing to place all their faith in science while unwittingly being undermined by their own emotions and cravings.
The overwhelming consensus is that a caloric surplus causes obesity (surprise! eating more than you burn causes you to gain weight) and that obesity is associated with a number of negative health effects.
Nutrition is not in the 'dark ages', it's moving faster than ever. I also never brought up any weird nutrition life hacks, my statement was just that sugar is unfairly demonized when we should be pointing the finger at overconsumption.
I think it's fair to say that you don't have to 'wait for science' to be settled on this issue. Consistent overconsumption of food is definitely "not good for you"
Again, as I stated in my opening sentence, I am not pinning this on you, but it was your appeal to the old calories-in-calories-out trope that compelled me to respond.
I don't see how the knowledge that the body functions based on balancing energy is in any way useless in practice. If you're overweight, with that knowledge, you know that you are overconsuming food or under exercising and you can take appropriate steps based on that knowledge.
No one is suggesting that you get all your calories from skittles, but the notion that a portion of ice cream is going to make you obese in the presence of a well balanced diet is idiotic.
> processed snack that puts one on a glycemic rollercoaster rather than an unprocessed item which will tend not to have the same effect.
Actually there are lots of high glycemic foods that are 'unprocessed'. Additionally if you're consuming a mixed meal (p/f/c) the glycemic index of any one food is irrelevant and tends to be evened out by the presence of the other foods. There's also not a lot of evidence that high glycemic foods are inherently bad for you, couple that with the fact that glycemic index gets 'evened out' in a mixed meal and it's one of the minutia that can be largely ignored. I find it interesting that you focus on a small detail like glycemic index and yet dismiss scientific research in general and a concept as important as conservation of energy.
It just seems like you read through the thread, saw something related to total caloric intake, and felt compelled to weigh in with your personal belief on how it's an unimportant detail to be concerned about.
The point was that correlation is not necessarily causation and often study methodology is overlooked when interpreting evidence.
To be clear I am not dismissing scientific research, I'm saying that often times the people who cite the strongest belief in science are completely subverting the science by selectively using it to justify eating what they want to eat.
Even if total calories are the problem, you still have more to analyze. Depending on how it affects fullness, it could be near-harmless or horrible for you.
Do you mean that having too many carbs is detrimental to health? Because you can have an increased carbohydrate intake without increasing sugar consumption.
The result of the study changes, but it's not invalidated.
Sugar is still bad, but so are other carbs.
You still don't want products to add extra sugar.
If most people consuming a lot of added sugar also consume too many calories, and most people not consuming too many calories also don't consume a lot of added sugar, then isn't it still good advice to most people to stop eating so much sugar?
Yeah there's probably some case of some kid eating his weight in bananas and getting obese from that. Or someone that has a lot of added sugar but controls their calories just fine. So sure, the statement "obesity is caused solely by added sugar" or "all added sugar is bad" may not be totally accurate.
But unless you really think that added sugar and calories and obesity are totally unrelated, surely you can agree that the statement "if you're obese you should probably tone down the sugar" makes some sense.
The vast majority of people aren't carefully counting their calories and daily nutrient values. They aren't saying "well if I have this soda I should only have half of my entree". The information "maybe just stay away from the soda" is a net benefit to them.
If you're that guy that's counting all of your calories, sure, maybe the studies that don't control for that won't help you. They're measuring something else. But they're measuring what most people are doing.
No lol, just no. The study was investigating high sugar consumption in obese children and kids with metabolic disorders. It absolutely was not measuring what 'most people are doing'
> If most people consuming a lot of added sugar also consume too many calories, and most people not consuming too many calories also don't consume a lot of added sugar, then isn't it still good advice to most people to stop eating so much sugar?
This is what I meant by intellectual dishonesty. It's a type of informal fallacy I believe is called appeal to consequences. I'll give you an example.
If it was true that Christianity was correlated with lower incidence of homicide, is it right of me to say that everyone should be Christian? I think that statement would be dishonest and untrue.
> Yeah there's probably some case of some kid eating his weight in bananas and getting obese from that. Or someone that has a lot of added sugar but controls their calories just fine. So sure, the statement "obesity is caused solely by added sugar" or "all added sugar is bad" may not be totally accurate.
Follow that reason to it's logical conclusion. If I believed that sugar was bad and caused obesity, and as a result I decided to eat bacon at every meal instead; I would be in a big caloric surplus and be pretty 'unhealthy' and obese, even though I'm not eatin any sugar. It's pretty obvious that the truth is a lot better and more accurate than creating arbitrary untrue rules.
Personally, the truth is also simpler. Rather than avoid certain macronutrients or lengths of carbohydrate chains, the truth is that too much food is probably unhealthy, and if you are obese you should simply eat less food and exercise more (bringing down your total caloric intake or increasing the amount of energy you burn). That sounds simpler to me than saying, "avoid sugar and carbs because after you eliminate all of those foods it's much harder to be in a caloric surplus even though you still can be unhealthy and obese following those rules"
Have I explained enough why your line of reasoning is really a terrible idea?
Saying I'm advocating counting calories is a strawman argument. Additionally, studies aren't intended to 'help' anybody. They are SUPPOSED to be an research into what is true to add support for or against some argument. The problem here is that the study itself was probably very reasonably written, but it was misinterpreted by an idiotic journalist to be something that it isn't.
Not necessarily, because that may not solve the problem if they are going to eat just as many calories from other sources. I don't know if that actually would be the case; you'd need to study that.
It's the kind of topic where it's very hard to prove your point because you need to rely on external references that can always be discredited. Also, people are very passionate because it involves strong political opinions (remember when Mayor Bloomberg tried to ban big gulps of soda in NYC), and also personal feelings (overweight people addicted to sugar).
It's not unlike the discussions on climate change.
If you're an obese adult, it sucks and there are things to say, but whatever you do you. But kids don't know, kids need to be taught. And you're basically 100% responsible for any kind of extra weight on your child.
Another comment. Dr Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist. If you start looking though the literature. Doctors, nutritionists, etc are all doing research to prove low fat diets work. And high fat diets are bad. And it's all about will power. The pediatric endocrinologists started working the processed carbs, sugar (fructose) are bad angle about ten to fifteen years ago. Probably about five years ago they became absolutely convinced this is correct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyeor3z9EdQ
The first week I've been feeling odd and lethargic with the second day including flu-like symptoms. In little more than one week I've lost 1.5kg (~3 lbs). Now I start to feel more energetic and tomorrow I'll be hitting the gym for the first time since I started. If I manage to lose 10 lbs, I'll probably stick to the diet for some months more. (I needed to lose 40 lbs or so anyways)...
Edit: btw I was already in good shape. A little bit of belly fat but I can still wear slim clothes. So for me at least the effect is there despite starting in the normal weight range.
Before cutting sugar and high GI foods, I had to do 4-5 days of intensive cardio in order to drop 2 lbs in one week. Now I'm losing them almost without exercising (only walking here and there)...
My goal is to adjust my diet to a minimum of sugar (complex carbs, fruits, raw honey, etc) that allows me to stay in my BMI and 6–13% BFP (I was at 5% in my early 20s!)
After a detox period of few months I'll start to slowly reintroduce healthier complex carbs (brown rice, brown pasta, etc). In the meantime I'll just get carbs from veggies...
The bolus of blood sugar that accompanies a meal or snack of highly refined carbohydrates (white bread, white rice, French fries, sugar-laden soda, etc.) increases levels of inflammatory messengers called cytokines. Eating whole-grain bread, brown rice, and other whole grains smooths out the after-meal rise in blood sugar and insulin, and dampens cytokine production.[0]
[0] http://www.health.harvard.edu/family_health_guide/what-you-e...
You are describing carb withdrawal symptoms to a T.
One main thing we don't mention in this thread is that sugar is addictive. Cutting sugar was hard like quitting somking was hard. If you never got addicted like I was, I guess it os hard to understand the problem. But when you are addicted it is hard to just know if you are hungry or not. So I choosed to go on the other extreme which works better for me.
Circulation in these areas won't be as great by the nature of things so clogging them up has a greater impact. It prevents nutrient/waste flow to tissues. Just think about that for a bit. Accumulating waste and blocking delivery of nutrients.
Balancing sugar intake and moving around, even if it's just walking, on a regular basis will fix you up real fast.
Full disclosure: I did stop eating sugary food after reading and watching some of Lustig's presentations, and I'm generally pleased with the results.
I.e. does cutting out almost all added sugars from the diet of a normal weight kid improve health outcomes?
Also note that the lead Author is Robert Lustig - I first ran into a lecture called "The bitter truth" by him against Sugar. So it seems to be a pet crusade of his (not that that invalidates the result).
So while it is true that not all calories are created equal, the people who most often seem to go around saying that seem to be the same people who refuse to pay attention to portion size and then bitch about not losing weight because they're only eating healthy foods.
You're right. I've never seen a fit person complain about the inaccuracy of BMI in anything other than a joking manner. It isn't precise, but it's "good enough" for the majority of people. It's a heuristic.
On the other hand, people who are clearly in poor shape love to scream up and down about how inaccurate BMI is at determining fitness levels. Ironic because BMI generally puts non-active people in a positive light. If we switched to body-fat percentage something tells me a lot of these folks would be clamoring to get BMI back since it under-reports people who have low enough mass to be not considered obese, but too high body fat to be healthy (thus are at greater risk for diabetes etc).
For weight loss it is that simple though.
I'm not arguing overall health or anything like that, just fat (energy store) loss.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/the-food-figh...
I get frustrated when people complicate weight loss when explaining methods to people who are interested in losing weight, rather than just boiling it down to the fundamentals (intake less calories/energy than you burn). All the competing fad methods are based around this fundamental with their own spin (and usually tie in a product that the user becomes dependent on to maintain weightless).
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-...
The study concluded you should cut down on sugar and white flour. Use fresh locally produced food and avoid processed foods.