Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
It started with pet food. Attempts at making plant based foods for dogs and cats initially failed, becuase the animals didn't want to eat these unnatural diets. But a solution was found: the so called "palatants". When they were added to the food, animals ate it.
Naturally, somebody thought of using these in human food as well. It didn't work as expected - it turned out they don't work by making the food tastier, they work by disabling the satiety response. Once the palatants get into your bloodstream, you won't feel satisfied no matter how much you eat until your body can get rid of these these chemicals. You may feel that your stomach is completely filled and stop eating, but you won't ever feel that you ate enough.
Since adults would get suspicious if they got more hungry, it started with child menus. The idea was the same as with pet food - if children eat a lot of the food, their parents will buy it again.
Now we have at least two generations of people who believe it's perfectly normal not to feel satisfied until their stomach can't hold any more food and that staying not obese requires arduous discipline. Our perception of normal weight has changed as well, for pets and human alike. Cats, when fed unaldutered meat eat to stay very skinny, with body shape that many modern guidelines show as "very thin" or "underweight". But many people today think of them as naturally fatty animals.
Many of these chemicals are approved food aditives and are listed usually as emuglators, flour conditioners or something similarly inconspicious.
Yes, consuming high amounts of fructose on a daily basis has some serious side effects. Consuming the same amount of glucose doesn't.
This just means that the amount of fructose intake should be moderated.
Seems to be that the majority of this community believes there are concept such as healthy food, unhealthy food, superfood etc. These concepts are scientifically non-existent.
There's such a thing, scientifically, as an unhealthy diet and healthy diet.
Sugar can be a part of a healthy diet. So can hamburgers, so can everything else.
There's been bunch of evidence for UK and Australia (where fructose intake decreased over the years) but they still got fatter and fatter.
Sugar tax is idiotic.
Lustig: Sugar makes people obese.
Reality: Carbs, fat and sugar makes people obese.
American population started eating ridiculously huge amounts of food. They'll get fat no matter what they eat if the caloric intake is 3700kcal per day.
You can experiment on yourself for free! Obviously this won't prove how everyone's body works. But it will teach you something very powerful about how your own body works.
Go off sugar for 3 months, make your mind and do it, and note the changes in your organism.
Or go off carbs totally for a few weeks, and feel what happens to you.
etc...
Make up your own experiments, the only danger is that you may end up lying to yourself about what you ate, or not be sure about the composition of the stuff you ate...
If you're mostly sedentary in a first-world country, going off sugar/carbs-dominated diet brings your insulin sensitivity to its natural levels (which, very probably, it hasn't been since the moment you started eating adult food). For me this had the amazing effect of becoming more alert and productive mentally and more aware of my body physically. As an athlete, I suddenly discovered that I can be underperforming because I'm lacking fuel, and not because I'm tired, and that if I "fuel up" by eating carbs, I can expect a surge of energy that will allow me to perform well. Needless to say, the discovery was amazing, I felt like a finely tuned sports car or something.
Back when I was eating a regular western diet, my insulin sensitivity was low, and "injecting" fast carbs made me drowsy, not full of energy.
Needless to say once I experienced that new state, I got hooked, so sticking to good eating habits haven't required tremendous will power for me. Getting there, though, did.
After a few months on that diet anything rich in sugar gave me a massive short lived energy rush, I actually didn't much like the feeling so now I only eat complex carbs and hardly anything with a lot of sugar (lots of cruciferous vegetables, not a lot of high sugar fruits).
I've found that throughout the day my mood and general feeling is pretty constant rather than up and down like a yo-yo.
One major change was much higher "energy"/"alertness levels after lunch and after dinner. No more sleepy low energy "food coma" feeling after meals.
Where I would usually feel like laying on the sofa after a long day's work and dinner, now I had the urge to go out on my bicycle, even at night and in winter cold.
Although I have to admit that like most people who do drastic diet changes I had a relapse and went back to eating sugar again after the five months. This relapse happened gradually, where I naively convinced myself that I was no longer addicted to sugar, and started by having a treat once a week, which quickly became once a day ...
The mental change is still ingrained in me though, I now treat sugar like a dangerous addictive substance and I'm trying to get rid of it like any other "substance abuser".
Anyway, my approach is simple and unscientific, but it seems to work for me. I just treat any carb-rich food as fuel (there is a difference as to "slow" vs "fast" carbs, but it's not important for the purposes of this discussion :)).
So, since it's fuel, I use it as such. For example, if I'm in my sedentary/low stress mode, I eat just a token amount of them. If I'm preparing for a gruelling match or bulking up at the gym, I'll load up on carbs (ideally the day before the match). If I'm cutting, I reduce the amount considerably.
As for fat/protein/fiber, that's pretty much an invariant. I just eat a normal healthy amount. I do increase protein intake on the days I work out a lot, though.
A lot of them [us] are catching up, especially in the UK, where the diet has been Americanized.
I would have to drink 1 gram of warm saltwater and my headache would instantly go away.
So how you feel is deceptive. If I would drink a Vanilla Latte at Starbucks now, I would get a serious headache...
Well, yeah you are right. At some point you will have to read and educate yourself a bit to try and guess what is happening to your body.
But as a rule of thumb if you stick to a no sugar habit for 3 months your headaches should not last for more than a few weeks, if they don't subside and you keep feeling "unhealthy" obviously its time to get medical advice, but I argue the same would be true if you were to keep to a sugar heavy "current normal" sort of diet.
It's just amazing how the point that sugar causes obesity and other harms has been ridiculed for decades but is now starting to be widely accepted. Huge amounts of data were ignored, and now the case is pretty overwhelming.
No carbs vs. no fats might turn out to be a bad thing as well.
It makes me wonder if as humans we make generalities too often that cause us to take up sub optimal behaviors that have long term negative outcomes.
People have really weird relationships with food, often taking concepts to the extreme. Too much sugar is bad, so limit added sugar intake as much as possible and prefer artificial sweeteners to sugar.
Rather than sensibly moderating consumption we've gone from eating far too much of one thing, to trying to eat none of it, and indeed trying to replace it with something completely artificial. Not to sound like one of those "anything that's natural is better for you" people.
It's just a lateral move.
You: but he's a physicist, in biology things are harder to prove
(the point is that people have confirmation bias even when things are 'easier' to prove)
People have confirmation bias regardless of being shown evidence, it's the central feature of confirmation bias that you interpret new information in a way that supports your pre-existing view. It's a human trait not a feature of the subject matter.
You can get fat by eating too much protein. Or too much fat. Intense overeating of any macro-nutrient is a bad idea. The thing is, it's harder (though by no means difficult) to overeat fat or protein.
The dangerous thing about carbohydrates is they are by far the easiest to overeat, and may have the greatest health consequences. That's a scary combination.
This appears unlikely/citation needed. You may die from it, but not by getting fat.
For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
" If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken."
By extension of this adage, then, if you eat fat you get fat. If you eat carbs you get starchy, and if you eat protein you get muscley. We know the second two aren't true, but the first one sticks for some reason.
But also sad. Not sure how that problem will be solved...
[1] http://www.econ.upf.edu/~fonsrosen/images/planck_complete_12...
Nearly all the butter is bad is funded by the spread industry.
Either way the milk is coming from a cow pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.
Fairly recently UK was prosecuted for not checking antibiotic levels adequately.
"By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core."
In biology, there is even less certainty and established theories routinely fail to reproduce. Is Central Dogma of Molecular Biology true? How it couldn't be with such a name? Well, no, there is now a lot of evidence against it.
And don't even get me started on climate science.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33