The sugar conspiracy: sugar—not fat—is the greatest danger to our health
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I've lost about 100lbs in 2.5 years... The only thing that I really changed was doing a Keto diet. I've learned a lot about nutrition along the way, and it's amazing how bad nutrition info was when I was growing up..
Common Misconceptions I hear/see ALL THE TIME:
1) Fruit Juice is healthy. It's not. It is sugar-water.
2) A calorie is a calorie... No. Your body does not process all foods the same. A thousand calories of broccoli will effect your body VERY differently than a thousand calories of soda. Yes the energy-intake might be the same, but the resulting effects are very different.
3) Fats are bad. They are not. Your body uses fats for all sorts of processes, and most importantly, your body understands and can use fats.
4) Sugar is part of a healthy diet. Nope, sugar is not necessary in our diets at all.
5) Salt is bad. In moderation, salt and other electrolytes are actually needed by our bodies (unlike sugar).
6) Lack of exercise is the reason people get fat. No... Most people would have to run 10 miles per day to burn off the garbage they would eat in the morning (think of a young adult having an innocent bowl of cereal and OJ for breakfast). "People aren't obese because they eat too much and are lazy. People are lazy and eat too much because they are fat." Sugar and insulin and the whole endocrine system play a huge roll in how people feel physically and mentally eating sugary foods.
So many more misconceptions out there... It's hard to find good info when you have Big Sugar, Big Food, and Big Beverage shoving bad information down the masses throats.
Cannot recommend it enough. It simply just works..
Lunch: I eat broccoli and carrots with some dip. Salads are also good (avoid sugary dressings though!).
Dinner: A meat and vegetable side. Tacos with low-carb wraps.. Pizza made of mozzarella cheese dough. Diet soda is okay on Keto. Obviously water is the best thing for you.
My favorite site for getting tasty keto-friendly recipes: http://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/
Such as eating baked cheese, adding extra butter (any fat) to meals. Avocado is a great fat-packed vege. Lots of cream cheese..
1/4 cup of guacamole (depending what you added) is about 4 grams of carbs, probably affordable.
Both are about 100 calories.
For a quick snacky lunch, I love celery and cream cheese or, depending on what mood I'm in, celery and mayo.
The result is the same for you, but that does mean there's other ways to get to the goal than the keto diet. (which is good news for everyone)
But I do go to Dunkin' Donuts quite often and get my large iced coffee with 6 cream, less ice, and no sugar.
Keto is a very tough diet.
However, scientifically speaking, keto will help pretty much anyone lose weight, it really works at the core level that our bodies work... In terms of how and why we burn body fat.
It's certainly not for everyone, and you have to keep a really close eye on your macros, nutrients, vitamins, minerals...
1. You will eat less, snack less, and eat out less.
2. Vegetables are cheap.
3. Some meats are very cheap. Pork is super cheap right now.
4. Cheese/dairy is fairly cheap.
This all depends on where you live and what kind of foods you want to eat. Steak is going to be more expensive than pork. Maybe dairy is more expensive where you live? Just depends...
But the cost of fixing up your health later down the line will definitely be more expensive than just eating healthier early on.
1) You eat way, way, way, way less food. I was intensely into keto at probably peak-appetite years (16 - 19 years old) and have since been maintaining a much lower basal carb intake (now 21 years old). A complete dinner used to be large pasta dishes with sausage, garlic bread, a few glasses of milk (I used to be a fanatic), etc., but in keto I'm totally satiated after two small salmon filets. Homefries, toast and a loaded three-egg omelet is actually less satiating for me than two fried eggs with some pepper, and I feel like crap after the former.
I do have a hard time with vegetables because I don't shop often enough for them not to go to waste, but I'll usually handle that with a salad for lunch.
2) In the event that you really do need to eat very cheaply (Ramen level cheap), you can do that too. I've had periods where I'd rely on string cheese, peanut butter, and eggs almost exclusively. Not proud of it, but better than boxes of pasta IMO.
If you put up with the initial withdrawals from sugar, "keto flu," you'll find that you'll eat less food and feel better.
Have you tried frozen vegetables? Some of the "steam in bag" kind that are meant for the microwave actually come out quite tasty and are very convenient.
I oughta get back to 'em.
One surprising expense on keto is Lite salt. Your body doesn't retain fluid in ketosis, you'll lose 5-10 pounds the first week in just that, and so you need to increase your sodium and potassium intake significantly compared to a non-ketogenic diet. Lite salt is absolutely perfect for that, being a 50/50 mix of potassium and sodium. It adds about 10 bucks to my grocery bill a month but it's definitely worth it especially when starting out, to avoid the dreaded keto flu.
The first thing paleo/keto people discover is the real world has seasons and people looking for an excuse not to change will always find the single item in the store today that's the most expensive for this current month and then Demand it be 100% of their food intake. Therefore at $11 per imported organic pound of blueberries from greenhouses in Chile, its a mathematically unaffordable diet because humans can only eat blueberries, so I'm going back to cheap hot pockets and twinkies. I admit I indulge a bit in unhealthy blueberries are in season and locally grown are selling for $1.50 per pound. Being in season only a couple weeks is kind of a natural limiter to that dietary misbehavior. Anyway that is such a stereotypical behavior that when people complain about unaffordability in social media its fun to classify them as blueberries, tenderloin steaks, bacon fiends, etc. I saw a coconut guy posting on the internet one time proving it was unaffordable compared to a diet consisting entirely of big macs, you see all kinds of weird stuff sooner or later.
One interesting point about affordability is the official government diet is pretty cheap, after all, once you die of a heart attack at age 40 and 400 pounds, your food bill tends to drop a bit. If trying to save money is the only priority, corpses don't eat much.
For general Keto conversastion: https://www.reddit.com/r/keto
For the scientifically inclined: https://www.reddit.com/r/ketoscience
For those focused on exercise while on the diet: https://www.reddit.com/r/ketogains/
For food suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ketorecipes
I hear keto bandied about a lot, but not sure a) if everyone's talking about the same thing, b) the difference between it and paleo, and c) if it's actually healthy :)
Would it be healthy to eat more fats and less carbs? Or does it only help if you are very strict with it and get all the way to ketosis?
I've been treating sugar as personal health enemy #1 for quite a few years now.
Note: I am deeply addicted to sugar. It has been absurdly and embarrassingly hard for me to abstain from high sugar foods.
I can eat a healthy, high-protein meal, and be full. Yet 30 minutes later, I will feel hungry again. But checking in with my stomach: still full.
I can eat a few grams of sugar and feel instantly full.
I'm at work and can't take time to cite properly, but I have read some relatively new science about how they have identified some physical structures in the brains of people who are unusually drawn to sugar consumption.
Like you, I have lost quite a bit of weight, and I do eat very little sugar these days.
But it's seriously a daily struggle, and it feels so damn irrational at times.
He goes into the science behind sugary diets and why they are truly so addicting.
I'm talking about, more addicting than cocaine.
Really? I'm on diet for Candida and sugars are a no-no. And the worst part was a week of headaches (that was in part caffeine induced). I haven't tried cocaine, but I imagine cocaine has more side effects than just that.
A sample: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/10/16/research-...
I think all this confusion arises because what is good to eat is different between an obese person who works a desk job, a bodybuilder, a skinny 5-miles a day runner, and everyone else. People advocate one diet without considering how it'll interact with someone's standing fat and muscle levels, cardiovascular health, and insulin sensitivity.
I've seen a video by Dr. Peter Attia, who was a triathlete, but found he carried a lot of body fat despite his training regimin. https://youtu.be/hB7aGnfLB-8
Edit: I got so many emails I guess I'll just post it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00JEKYNZA/
Probably within 24 hours I noticed the effect which makes me kind of skeptical, maybe it's some kind of placebo effect, but I've noticed it many times, and if I go off it, the sugar cravings come back within few weeks.
It seems the same simplistic weight loss observation is being applied to nutrition, two vastly different things.
To be fair, that's 3kg of broccoli ;-)
(2) unfortunately reality is complicated. Most of what you care about is the glucose curve after consumption. You are correct in that different foods cause different curves. This will change per person, and some people will spike on soda, and some (smaller group)/actually will do the opposite on broccoli. It also depends on what else you eat around the same time. Interestingly, you can often see a change over time, or if you travel (presumably different gut bacteria)
4) there is a reason it tastes good. Getting fat is good for not starving in the winter, and it is easier to get energy quickly if you need it, but point taken.
Fruit was given to us in a high-fiber package, and should be consumed that way. The fiber also ensure we don't over consume. You might be full after 1 apple, which is like 1/8th a glass of apple juice.
So eating real fruit, you'll get less sugar, and the fiber helps with digestion and getting the other nutrients that are in fruit.
Haven't most if not all of the commonly available (popular) fruits today been refined through selective breeding to be more appealing to us? What was lost vs. gained in this process?
(I have no idea, I'm not trying to be rhetorical. My guess is lots of more sweetness and perhaps less fiber, in a much larger fruit.)
Don't really know if there is a difference though.
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:320...
Whereas a cheap soft drink is inert from a nutritional perspective, it probably has a load of flavouring and colouring that's out-of-place too.
They speculate that it may be due to differences in gut bacteria, but still aren't sure why people react differently to the same food.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/health/gut-bacteria-from-t...
Surprising how complicated the whole weight loss thing can be
(2) Who is having a glucose spike from broccoli? I don't believe this is a real thing. A glucose spike implies a significant amount of absorption in a short period of time. I doubt that broccoli digests quickly enough or suddenly enough in anyone's GI tract to cause a blood sugar spike.
None of the orange juice on the shelves is even made from squeezed oranges. They add flavor packs (often made from oranges so they can get away with it being 100% juice; and yes this goes for the natural/organic brands as well).
When you consume oranges, the fiber helps your body feel full. The fiber also helps reduce the insulin response and changes the absorption process. In juice form it digests very differently.
Orange juice is not healthy (and really, neither are oranges in large quantities).
'a high intake of fructose (>20% of energy) can have a deleterious effect on lipid levels.'
[just like alcohol]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682989/
Small point: fructose is a ketose sugar so fruit juice is indeed 'sugar water' - confusing bearing in mind the different metabolic fates of glucose and fructose.
From what I've heard, what happens to your liver when you process fructose isn't so great for you. It taxes your liver in many of the same way alcohol processing taxes your liver.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/4/895.full
Also, here is the relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructolysis
Seems like the choice is between more work for the liver or more insulin tolerance.
I definitely feel way better off of sugar/carbs. Eating is a completely different ballgame now.
On keto, you get fuller quicker, and when you're full.. you actually want to stop eating.. It's not like sugar addiction where you want MORE MORE MORE. Omnomomomom!!!! YES DESSERT PLEASE.. SURE I CAN FIT THAT IN MY STOMACH.
Your stomach will literally shrink after a while too, so you will eat less.
I really wish people would stop repeating this.
2) Thermodynamics... That said, a thousand calories of soda is half a day's worth of energy in sugar form. Your body uses sugar first when available, as a general rule of thumb. If you ate any fat that day, it will use the sugar, store the fat. More efficient than turning the sugar to fat, which we are bad at. (Humans aren't great at ketogenesis.)
3) Your body also understands sugar just as well. Blood glucose is an important bodily stat for good reason. Your body also uses protein and various trace elements in your diet, and it "understands" and "uses" all of them. Sugar is just more convenient to use than fat, so it uses that first and stores the fat. On ketosis, you just end up taking some of the stored (or dietary fat) and turning it to glucose in a hugely complicated process (think of it as "inefficiency in storage/packing/unpacking" the sugars into fats and back) and then using that to feed the ATP cycle to run the furnace. You don't run on fat. You store glucose as fat because high levels of glucose in the blood are bad. And then you store the fat outside the blood because that too, is poisonous in high amounts (see ketoacidosis). Your body is a fine-tuned machine that runs on pure glucose and happens to have a set of machinery that makes all animal/plant inputs (fats, sugars, protein, minerals, vitamins) into either A) machinery bits for maintenance or B) more glucose to burn.
4) Sugar (whether it is glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, maltose, w/e) is a functional way for a lot of things in nature to feed themselves, including us. Whether it is honey, the inside of an apple, or a grapevine, lots of things are full of easily digested sugars. Sugar, as much as you'd like to claim is "not necessary", is everywhere in nature, as it is a part of most living things.
5) Salt is bad, indeed. As a general notion, equilibrium should be attained in the body fairly easily. The bigger problem people don't think about is the K/Na ratio and such. As a general rule, salt is overused in our food. That one I agree with. No idea why you tacked on anything about sugar here.
6) Energy in, energy out. You're just a fancy (REALLY fancy) way of burning food slowly (given that you exhale some carbon in your food through CO2... and you used the O2 you breathed in to combust that food.) You happen to do useful work with the fact that you can invest a small amount of energy to gain a lot of it. It's a side effect. Locomotion and keeping the food-burning oven running and clean are the main reasons you use calories. The problem with the OJ glass at breakfast is detailed in 1) and has nothing to do with sugar and everything to do with the fact there's little finer and little satiation to orange juice so you drink far more calories than you'd ever eat from the actual fruit.
We prepare foods for easy consumption, but a lot of food is made to be filling as a way to self-restrict. Our more basal impulses ("eat until you're full because there may not be more food for a while") are woefully maladapted to our world.
Yes, thermodynamics. However, if you eat five hundred calories per day, you will a) feel miserable, b) be constantly thinking of food, and c) perhaps die, even if there is fat hanging around in the body to be used up. This demonstrates that we're not idealised food-burning machines, but food-burning machines which adjust their desire to take in fuel depending on how the machine is operating. It is very, very difficult to stand a low-calorie diet for more than a few weeks, if the diet is administered in the wrong way with the result that you crave more food all the time. By contrast, some people (like me, and several others on this thread) find it day-to-day easy to eat below maintenance if carbs are cut out. (Although personally I have never been able stand no-carb for more than about a month, so no-carb doesn't really work for me if I want to lose weight.)
Severe caloric deprivation is not the point of my statement.
Also, I just can't help but notice your ironic username.
Eating an actual fruit though is healthier, because that sugar is packaged up in a wonderful fiber, nutrient-filled vessel.
Basically, the delivery mechanism of the sugar is what really counts.
The sophilistic nature of your comment is astounding.
I take issue with your condescending tone, because it doesn't fit whatsoever with your clear ignorance on the topic. I'm particularly sensitive to the topic of food, because people in your situation (who have found success but have no idea why) are immensely harmful to nutrition education.
Comments like yours are precisely why there are so many misconceptions out there.
Everything I stated in the original comment is information I have gathered and learned about over the years. Most people haven't read any books about nutrition and how the body works, where I have done a lot of independent research. So I probably know a little bit more about this stuff than the average person. I'm not saying I'm an expert by any stretch, but I'm sure a lot of people on HN could find this information useful, and a good starting point for their own independent research.
And no, I can't site the sources directly, but if you have any specific points you'd like to point as being "errors", feel free to do so, as I'm sure others would be interested.
Like any internet forum, you can always put your opinion in. However you have seemed to only attack my comment, rather than providing any real retort.
* You falsely (implicitly) assert expertise on a topic (nutrition) to which you've had no actual training.
* You believe "just a comment on HN" doesn't deserve your full effort.
* You elevate yourself above the level of an ambiguous group of "others", without any evidence or actual reason for doing so.
* Your actual content comes without any citation or reasoning. You expect others to simply "take your word for it", or worse, do their own research, which you've given zero helpful information to help guide, other than random statements about nutrition.
* You overvalue your personal experience, while simultaneously undervaluing the research/experience/knowledge of others.
My contribution to this discussion is to point out to others your distinct lack of actual knowledge, despite your insistence on passing yourself off as an "expert"-- no, sorry, you said you're not an expert, just a guy who's "done a lot of independent research" (whatever that means).
I realize this comes off as harsh, but please realize, I don't know you, and am not making a value judgement of you as a person, just on what you've written here in the last hour or so. I'd bet you're not like this all the time, this just wasn't a very well thought out conversation.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
>are immensely harmful to nutrition education.
Why don't you bestow us with that education, instead telling everyone how dangerous their opinions are?
It's simply not true that I must be able to provide the correct answer in order to identify and critique an incorrect answer.
There's obviously a lot of other potential concerns regarding "artificial sweeteners"... But I'll take my chance with those over sugar.
I have to agree with you. Over two years ago, a friend of mine got me interested in Keto. That 2nd week was kinda rough with my body going through sugar withdrawal, but after that it's been nothing but amazing. I rarely eat bread, pasta, potatoes, noodles etc.
I went from nearly 70kg down to 61~62kg in a year, and have stayed around there for well over two years (I was down ti 59kg, but I think that was more muscle loss than fat loss).
It's been life changing. I have better energy levels, am in a better mood, etc.
It's not for everyone. I work at a desk all day and only cycle on the weekends. If you use a lot of energy (play sports everyday or are a runner), your body may need more carbs, but even then it should really be in the forms of fruits (high fibre, lower GI, lower insulin response), possibly starchy vegetables like corn and potatoes. There's a huge lack of education though on how much energy is in corn/potatoes or even peas/carrots. It's a lot! Even our oranges have been bread over the past few hundred years to be much much sweeter than they use to be. Corn use to have significantly more protein, but those varieties have been mostly bread out.
How big is your bowl of cereal? 10 miles of running would be >1000 Calories burned. I don't think I've ever consumed 1000 Calories of cereal and juice in a sitting. I'm also pretty sure most people are not eating 1000 Calories for a typical breakfast.
Also a single serving of cereal is really small. Until I started using a food scale, I was routinely eating 2 servings of cereal (Multi-grain cheerios) which was about 250 calories.
This is not a normal breakfast for anyone except the hyperobese or the hyperathletic. A bagel with bacon, egg, and cheese, plus hashbrowns, plus a donut, plus a sugary coffee? Yes, some people eat that much all the time, and yes, many people will eat that much occasionally. I don't think it's a typical-sized breakfast for most people, though. Most people I know don't even eat breakfast, and when they do, a donut+coffee is more realistic for calorie count.
> Also a single serving of cereal is really small. Until I started using a food scale, I was routinely eating 2 servings of cereal (Multi-grain cheerios) which was about 250 calories.
Yeah, cereal servings are unrealistically small. But still, a realistic serving is more like 250, not 750.
Cereal wise, I would say 2 servings is pretty common, most people think its 1 bowl anyway. If you have 2 bowls, you're already close to 4-500 calories (depending on the cereal).
Also something like a DD coolatta or starbucks frapp are pushing 3-400 calories easily.
I mean, yes, it's totally possible to eat 1000 calories for breakfast. I still don't think it's typical. Why would you even want that OJ after eating 3 whole cups of cereal? Also, how do you not just end up hyperobese eating like this, assuming you're not just cutting the calories from a later meal. A 300-Calorie/day excess will put on nearly 40 pounds every year, and I'd expect anyone eating 1000 Calories for breakfast every day to either be very active or else be eating at least 300 Calories too many per day.
Also, a cup of Cheerios is 100 Calories. So 3 cups is still only 300 calories. Add milk and you're at maybe 500 Calories. Even Honey Smacks is only 133 Calories per cup. If you eat 600 Calories of Honey Smacks and milk, I hope you'd consider that enough sugar for breakfast. Or else I hope you're training for a marathon.
Today I still eat cereal but usually a cup at most, and either without milk or with almond milk. I started on a diet (the south beach diet) about 5 years ago and I lost over 100 pounds. I don't consider myself to be following any specific diet nowadays, I'm just more healthy and smart about what I eat, and I eat much smaller portions. I also exercise 3 times weekly, and need to find time to increase that even more.
I will say when I first started my diet I dropped cereal and just ate scrambled eggs almost every morning. My morning energy levels skyrocketed.
Before I started measuring quantities I ate this same mix in much larger quantities because I felt like I needed that amount to be satiated. So I was easily eating close to or more than 1000kcal for breakfast every day. And that's without OJ.
(Even now I feel like I could eat more. 60g of oatmeal fills me up much more and comes in at around 300kcal with sugar and soy milk. Muesli is not a very good breakfast.)
(Never mind that I skip breakfast 90% of the time anyway, and recent studies indicate this is just fine).
Congrats on your accomplishment; long term weight loss is incredibly hard. I found the simplest way to do it was "eat low-calorie density foods, and only when you're hungry".
Not all of us are trying to lose weight. I'm trying to maintain my weight and sometimes that involves forcing myself to eat.
Honest question: I've seen conflicting answers on this - some sources I've read saying a calorie is a calorie - others that agree with you. Does anyone have a scientific or other reference?
From Mr. Lustig himself: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lustig-md/sugar-toxic_b...
The research on this is mixed, actually. More research is needed. AFAIK, the rest of your points are misconceptions.
There was one Finnish study where the "eat all the salt you want" group had lower mortality than the salt moderation group.
I highly recommend the "Healthcare Triage" YouTube channel as a source of info/infotainment.
There's no way Coke & Pepsi will ever lighten up on the sugar short of regulation. As with smoke-free restaurants, the free markets will never deliver less sugary beverages no matter how much demand there is.
So I subscribed to this for a few years. Cut out a lot of carbs, ate lots of meat, eggs, etc.
And then watched my APO-B (and, by nature, LDL/VLDL) numbers skyrocket to worrisome levels.
Turns out I am APOE-4 (or, more specifically, 3/4) and it's just not that simple.
And it's not a rare thing either - 20%+ of people are likely to be 2/4, 3/4, or 4/4. That's a huge chunk of people to put at risk by all "modern" fad diets proudly proclaiming "fats are not bad for you".
(In truth it's saturated fats that cause issues for APOE4 carriers, but most of what is said following "fats are not bad for you" are usually something along the lines of "so eat eggs, bacon, ground beef etc. every day. It's healthy!"
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/
It should be noted that the important thing here was probably shifting away from sugar, rather than shifting toward high fat. For example...
> I've lost about 100lbs in 2.5 years... The only thing that I really changed was doing a Keto diet
I've lost 86 pounds (39 kg) in the last 217 days (594 milliyears). The only thing I really purposefully changed initially was trying to keep daily calories from carbohydrates at under 40% of my total calories. I also tried to keep fat under 50%.
As a side effect, I found myself satisfied with fewer calories, and so the weight started coming off.
I mostly did this by making sure each individual food I ate was within my overall carb and fat limits. If I wanted something that was outside the range, I'd try to balance it out with other things in the same meal so that the meal as a whole would be within the limits. For the last meal or snack of the day that was relaxed and the requirement was just that the day as a whole be within limits.
And also "2.5 servings per package", while most people would it eat it a single serving I imagine, but hey, they calorie counts look more reasonable, so they just divided whatever calories they had, by whatever they thought is acceptable to print on the nutritional label and they got some value for serving size.
> whatever they thought is acceptable to print on the nutritional label
I'm not certain, but I think that's regulated.
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
1. In terms of determining how much weight you are going to lose/gain. A calorie is a calorie. Calories in/calories out is the secret sauce to every successful weight loss diet, even keto. That is a simple fact, backed by all of the truly solid nutritional research in modern science.
2. If we are talking about lean body mass, body fat percentage goals, healthy eating habits or disease prevention, then we should have a talk about sugar. It is certainly a variable that deserves attention. However, it is not the devil...
Fat is not the devil... Meat is not the devil... Carbs are not the devil... etc.
If you don't believe me, if some pop science book has convinced you that sugar is the worst thing in the world, I ask that you look into the work of Alan Aragon. A good place to start would be the following article:
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
Living on a 3000kcal McDonalds diet will give you a different body shape compared to living on a 3000kcal diet of home cooked, organic meals.
No?
For McD's vs home cookin, calories in/calories out still holds to be true. So, if your exercise levels are the same, then you will end up weighing approximately the same after both diets. However, lean body mass, body fat percentage, your overall health and the effect McD's has on any diseases you are fighting/trying to prevent will likely be different based on the quality of your diet and it's macronutrient distribution.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connie-bennett/the-rats-who-pr...
Sugar is bad alright but more addictive than IV cocaine?
399 points | 4 days ago | 350 comments
If that's the case, doesn't it not matter what the originating molecules are as long as you avoid fast highs and lows in blood glucose levels since that is the main danger presented by sugars (fastest to be broken down)?
Amino acids, glucose and fatty acids are all ancient molecular structures known to all cellular life and thus can and do circulate in our blood at all times. If everything got converted into glucose during digestion, that would mean we could live entirely off candy fortified with vitamins and minerals, and produce all essential fatty acids and all essential amino acids from the glucose. Not so.
PROTEINS provide amino acids, basic building blocks for near everything organic about our body (or all cellular life-forms really), not just muscles but hormones neurons etc etc. The body may convert protein into glucose but this laborious process occurs to any significant degree mostly under a prolonged lo-fat-lo-carb-hi-protein regimen or plain starvation conditions (ie post-fasting, not just normal fasting with plenty of fat reserves left, which is simply ketosis, hence protein-sparing and fat+ketone-burning). If so, this doesn't occur in the digestive tract, since glucose production (or provision from glycogen) is the job of the liver.
LIPIDS aren't and cannot be converted to glucose in the digestive tract, or we wouldn't store body fat to begin with and also have essential fatty acids circulating at all times now, would we? BUT 2 triglycerides CAN donate their glycerol backbones for the production of 1 glucose molecule, and I believe this is constantly happening in ketosis when glycogen is depleted. Again, glucose production/provisioning is a liver job, not a digestive tract job.
CARBohydrates of most any kind ARE converted to glucose in the digestive tract. Exceptions: fiber travels on to the colon for excretion or to be fermented by bacterial action (into I believe short-chain fatty acids and B/K vitamins) and fructose is "metabolized" into triglycerides by the liver. Since the blood needs a certain glucose level at all times (around 5g-ish), circulating glucose in excess is immediately shuttled into first: any cells that are receptive to the concurrent insulin signaling, second: glycogen storage (liver and muscles), third as a last resort converted into body fat.
Also, the reason fruits are healthy while fruit juice is not is that fruits have sugar in them, but between all the sugars, there is fiber, cell walls, and other parts of the fruit that slow down the absorption of the sugar. Another reason is that there is simply less sugar in 1 apple than there is in 1 glass of apple juice (there is around 8 apple squeezed into 8 ounces of juice).
Here is an amazing lecture which goes into amazing detail of the chemistry of sugars, and how they affect your body (also this is where I got most of my information): "Sugar the Bitter Truth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Here is a short clip from a show called "Adam Ruins Everything" where he talks about how unnatural "natural orange juice" is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuYPdTvqitg
I asked my mom, who's had both children and kidney stones, which pain was worse, and she said the pain was about the same, but at least with childbirth you get a few months warning -- stones just show up and give you excruciating pain.
So it's great y'all are loosing weight (I did too!) but just be careful and drink a lot of water if you do it.
I can't imagine going from a sedentary, high-carb, overweight lifestyle to a radical diet(be it keto or whatever else the person chooses) is easy on the body.
Did you get any lab tests done before and after starting the diet? If you did, how did the results compare?
Only my normal annual blood test. Cholesterol was down after the diet, everything else was pretty much unchanged. We never caught the stone for analysis, but the diet was pinned as the most likely cause. To be fair, I don't have enough data to say it was the diet for certain, only correlations that people who go on Keto have a higher incidence of stones than those who don't.
High-protein diets (ie over 50% of kcals from protein) are neither healthy nor sustainable over more than 1-3 weeks.
I do agree though drink lots of water, it's good for you regardless of your diet.
I can't say for certain, I definitely don't have enough data to prove it. It was correlative at best.
As a society we have become too good at making cheap, easy to consume food that supplies far more energy than most of us need. Sugar is one of the worst culprits perhaps but it isn't the only one.
I have avoided most really sugary foods for years but with my age and activity levels eating a lot of grain based foods has pretty much the same result. Which isn't really surprising.
When I have the discipline to do it what really works for me is eating more veggies. I am sure you can get fat on a vegetable heavy diet but you probably have to work a lot harder at it.
> When, in 1957, John Yudkin first floated his hypothesis that sugar was a hazard to public health, it was taken seriously, as was its proponent. By the time Yudkin retired, 14 years later, both theory and author had been marginalised and derided.
Still admire the degree of dedication he put into his lifestyle change tho.
If we have to have a one-size fits all solution to nutrition however, my anecdotal guess is that the answer shouldn't be what we should eat but how much. Namely as long as people aren't over or under eating they should be fine.
Like anything, the problem is consumption to excess. Unfortunately, excess in this case (for the typical sedentary person) is quite a small amount.
I think it is conclusive that there are no old obese people.
From a weight loss perspective low sugar diets are good for psychological reasons, not thermodynamic ones. Sugar tends to cause quick, but short lived fullness, where fat and protein take longer to kick in but once they do they are much longer lived.
There are a few biological pathways that you can use to your advantage but they're difficult and short-term. Your body has a very hard time storing protein as fat but that just means it will store the extra calories from carbs and fat as body fat.
These discussions about "CICO only" vs. "Obviously macros matter" are always caused by people arguing two different things with each other.
I think maybe if we discussed CI and CO separately it would help:
CI:
Calories in are influenced by many things: eating habits, Macro content of food, access to good food, stress eating, satiety signals from blood sugar, leptin, ghrelin, etc.
Calories out are influenced by basal metabolic rate, exercise, enviromental temperature, fat storage (calories that do not get used up), etc.
As with all nutrition advice, I find myself wondering what to do with this information (other than kicking my diet coke habit just to be on the safe side). Good science takes time, but I want to make decisions that benefit my health right now. Any that's before you even get into the crazy amount of pseudo-science and quackery that exists around nutrition.
It would be great if anyone knowledgable about the subject could add their two cents!
Now imagine drinking 5 cans of sugar pepsi in a day. That's 800 calories of pure sugar! If you keep that up, you'll be gaining a pound every week.....or feeling the effects of malnutrition by the end of the year. Nothing subtle about that.
My anecdata: In 1992 I was 5'10" and 210lbs. I switched from caloried drinks to non-caloried drinks (coke -> diet coke) and have up sides (no more fries). No other changes. Lost 30 lbs and pretty much stayed that way. Pretty much no real physical activity. Don't know which it was, the drinks or the sides or both.
Stayed that way until I moved to Japan in 1998 where most restaurants don't have diet coke. They're only non-caloried drink was tea which got me addicted to tea.
That's probably better for me than diet-coke but tea stains my teeth :(
My anecdata: In 1992 I was 5'10" and 210lbs. I switched from caloried drinks to non-caloried drinks (coke -> diet coke) and have up sides (no more fries). No other changes. Lost 30 lbs and pretty much stayed that way. Pretty much no real physical activity. Don't know which it was, the drinks or the sides or both.
Stayed that way until I moved to Japan in 1998 where most restaurants don't have diet coke. They're only non-caloried drink was tea which got me addicted to tea.
That's probably better for me than diet-coke but tea stains my teeth :(
My wife thinks I'm weird, but I hate the taste of regular Coca-Cola. I much prefer Diet Coke.
While artificial sweeteners have a low glycemic index/load, they stimulate the release of related hormones like insulin and GLP-1. And insulin, if you recall, signals fat cells to suck up the energy and grow.
So if you drink a diet soda, it might have no calories itself, but it's more likely to convince your body to turn more of your lunch into fat than otherwise.
God damn. This is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is dangerous.
1. Artificial sweeteners do NOT cause insulin to be released. 2. On that note, insulin is a storage hormone. That is it. It is not a fat-hormone. You know what's one of the few hormones that almost all bodybuilders take? Insulin - because it makes their muscles grow.
You get fat because your intake of calories is excessive, regardless of whether its done via carbs or fats.
So is your own comment.
1. Aspartame doesn't release insulin, but it does provoke release of related hormones. Other artificial sweeteners DO stimulate insulin release. See my reply to my own comment for a quick sampling of relevant articles.
2. Yes, insulin is a generalized storage hormone, but fat is always ready to absorb, while muscle requires exercise to stimulate the absorption. Unless you're exercising heavily (which isn't most of us), my general point stands.