Eggs Don’t Cause Heart Attacks – Sugar Does | Hacker News Reader

Eggs Don’t Cause Heart Attacks – Sugar Does

huffingtonpost.com

61 pointsggregoire66 comments

Something I didn't know until recently when I started reading about Dave Asprey's Bulletproof Coffee (fully expecting it to be bogus initially) is that surprisingly cells have an alternative source of energy, ketones instead of glucose (sugar), and that in the olden days when food was not as abundant, our bodies spent a fair amount of time in ketosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis), a metabolic state where the body breaks down fats to produce ketones as fuel for cells. (Not to be confused with ketoacidosis, which is bad).

It seems plausible to me that since WW2 in developed countries where food and especially sugar became commonplace, a whole set of diseases, coronary, metabolic ones such as diabetes, obesity, possibly cancer, possibly Alzheimer's are all related to us not spending enough time in ketosis.

Dave Asprey is a bullshitter. He's trying to sell you expensive, high-calorie coffee. No matter what you eat, if you eat too many calories, that is also bad for you.

Ketosis can also raise your resting blood sugar levels to prediabetic states, I have observed it myself in my own blood tests after trying it for nearly 6 months.

Moderate carb (low GI, low GL variety), protein and fats from whole, unprocessed foods, will always win out over fad diets like paleo, keto, zone, or anything else that pops up.

What's moderate carbs for you? 30% 10% 5%?

Keto simply considers 30% of calories from carbs too high, while otherwise agreeing with your 'will always win' diet.

I don't get why you seem so angry while being fundamentally in agreement with what you call 'fad diets'.

Just because the guy knows what a ketone is doesn't mean his coffee isn't bogus...

I'd be wary of correlating the increased incidence of late onset maladies with anything but people living longer.

Sure those all have causes to be discovered but all correlate with longer lifespans and better overall health and if we follow that the obvious solution would be getting back to paleolithic life and an average life expectancy of 30 years. Sure you won't get alzhaimer that way.

Be careful with average lifespans. The majority of our change in average life expectancy has been from a reduction in infant mortality rates not from increases in lifespan

Moda was still around 60ish 70ish, while now it's 80ish 90ish

http://nfs.unipv.it/nfs/minf/dispense/patgen/lectures/files/...

and 60ish is when old age maladies really starts kicking in, plus at those times you just died of oldness, whatever the actual cause was.

> Most of us don’t know that a serving of tomato sauce has more sugar than a serving of Oreo cookies

Most store-bought jar sauce has sugar in it (and tastes gross). You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it, and some of the nicer jar sauces are that way also.

> or that fruit yogurt has more sugar than a Coke

Again, maybe if it's Dannon, but you can also buy plain yogurt and put fruit in it. Sweeten to taste.

> or that most breakfast cereals — even those made with whole grain — are 75 percent sugar

Maybe Post/General Mills sugar cereals, but again it's not that hard to find cereal with low sugar content.

This article argues that the problem is solved with regulation, but a lot of what we eat is influenced by government subsidy (i.e. corn/corn syrup), which makes many of the unhealthiest foods inexpensive. The article makes it sound like all processed food is loaded with sugar and that grocery shopping is dangerous. That may be true of "food deserts" but it isn't generally true.

The nutrition facts are already there. If somebody can't be bothered to see that whatever they are eating has 30g of sugar per serving, what can you really do about it?

>what can you really do about it?

You can write articles for popular online news sites that inform people.

The generalizations made in the article are completely valid for the audience they're targeting: specifically, the x% of Americans who are at increased risk of a heart attack because of the government subsidies you mentioned, as well as their own addiction to sugar.

Can you speak to exactly why the specific regulations mentioned -- the ones that were allegedly successful in Mexico -- won't work or are otherwise harmful?

FTA:

>The key interventions they implemented included taxing soda, banning junk food television advertising, and eliminating processed foods, junk food and sugar-sweetened beverages from schools. More than 15 countries have targeted sugar-sweetened beverages by taxing them — a strategy that’s proven successful.

All of these sound completely reasonable to me.

Can you provide some counter evidence to the NIH study cited in the article? [0]

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19759377

Is it not possible that perhaps government regulation and the elimination/reduction of corn subsidies could be reasonable steps to take?

Sugar is addictive. The availability of low-sugar products is as relevant to the sugar addict as the presence of a basketball hoop is to a heroin addict. Sure, the heroin addict could spend his time playing basketball instead of shooting up, but that doesn't make heroin intervention an unreasonable solution.

> Is it not possible that perhaps government regulation and the elimination/reduction of corn subsidies could be reasonable steps to take?

Absolutely! And that's the thrust of my comment: A huge contributor to these issues is suspiciously left out.

I'm always surprised how hard it is to get artificially sweetened yogurt. I know of only one brand at only one chain of grocery store in my area. It seems like a natural combination.

I'm always surprised how hard it is to get completely unsweetened yogurt (natural or artificial). The only brands I've seen locally are "organic" yogurts with a hefty price tag.

Making unsweetened yogurt (plain or greek style) is surprisingly easy. It takes about 1/2 hour and I leave it overnight (in a cooler) to 'develop'.

I would recommend more people try it. It's generally better than store bought plain style yogurt and super-cheap.

I can get a gallon of milk (on sale, non hormone BST stuff) for about $2 (in CO, US). That will yield the same in yogurt (4 quarts.. I use quart mason jars).

Any pointers to a good recipe?

IME most of the plain varieties lack added sugar. There's still plenty of sugar from the milk.

I've been eating whole fat greek style US yogurt lately. It tends to have less sugar than other plain yogurts and I am less inclined to add it.

I have no idea about the economics, but making your own yogurt is extremely easy. You get rather more control of the contents at that point.

Fresh yogurt is also naturally sweeter

Look for Dannon Oikos Triple Zero next time (black packaging). It's sugar free and sweetened with stevia.

But why would you want to sweeten your yoghurt? Milk has enough sugars on its own.

I agree! I wonder if there's a substantial overlap between the set of people who buy yogurt frequently and the set of people who are averse to ~artificial chemicals~ in their food (tildes denoting a bit of sarcasm at chemophobia).

> You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it

You make sauce without added sugar although tomatoes do have some natural sugar. Granted it's not really an amount to be concerned about, but it's not sugar-free.

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/much-sugar-average-tomato-80...

You're absolutely correct, but largely when someone thinks of fruit yogurt they largely think of those cone-shaped packages.

It really doesn't help that so many things are advertised as healthy-low-fat stuff either. Fat in large quantities isn't the best, but replacing all the fat with sugars is much worse.

>Fat in large quantities isn't the best, but replacing all the fat with sugars is much worse.

You're on the right track there, but there is no evidence that fat (with the exception of trans fats) are bad, as stated in the article.

Yikes! Maybe it's time I switch to using fresh tomatoes when making red sauce. It's not that hard to skin tomatoes anyways so maybe it makes sense to go in that direction, especially when they're adding that much sugar.

I happen to have 3 brands of tomato sauce in the cupboard. Each 8 ounce can appears to have less sugar in it than a serving of Oreos (14 grams for the Oreos. 5, 7.5 and 10 grams for the sauces). Only the 10 gram sauce has any added sugar.

The cans each say 2.5 servings (to be clear, above I've done the math for the entire can), and I think for many foods, it will be the case that less than 1/2 the can is a serving. So there is something iffy about the comparison in the article (and 20 or 30 calories of sugar in a meal is not a huge concern for most people).

>> Most of us don’t know that a serving of tomato sauce has more sugar than a serving of Oreo cookies

>Most store-bought jar sauce has sugar in it (and tastes gross). You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it, and some of the nicer jar sauces are that way also.

I don't think the article was necessarily talking about added-sugar sauce. It's not clear exactly how much a serving of tomato sauce is, but calorie for calorie tomato sauce (cooked tomato) does contain more sugar than Oreos.

Comparing calorie-dense food like Oreos to tomato sauce seems a bit disingenuous. Especially when the sugar in tomatoes is regular fructose and provokes no insulin response.

Everything I've seen, including my own blood testing, shows that fructose increases your blood sugar response just as much as table sugar, thus provoking a similar insulin response. I've not seen any evidence that naturally occurring fructose is any better for you than added sugars.

The fructose-to-glucose ratio of a ripe tomato is about 1.25.

A few years ago, some studies came out finding that any fructose consumption may be harmful.

I'm probably behind the times but I haven't heard it said that any amount may be harmful. Even fructose's harshest critic, Dr. Lustig, says that fructose's harm comes when an large acute volume of it overloads the ideal metabolic pathway and results in the using metabolic pathways with harmful byproducts. This is why he says whole fruit consumption is generally ok. The fiber in the fruit slows down absorption and gives your liver time to process the fructose without resorting to the harmful fallback methods.

There may be a threshold response, but from what I remember, the threshold might be low. I wonder if much of the fiber in tomato is destroyed when reducing it to a sauce?

Cooking doesn't destroy fiber, it just softens it. As opposed to pulp-free fruit juice, from which all fiber is removed, and is unhealthy. Even if tomato sauce were the equivalent of fruit juice, you'd usually have it with pasta, bread, etc. which all have fiber as well.

No breakfast cereals are 75% sugar. The USDA Nutrient Database allows you to list breakfast cereals by sugar:

https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/nutrients/report/nutrientsfrm?m...

The most sugary breakfast cereal is only 56% sugar. The database doesn't list every breakfast cereal sold, but it includes all the popular ones, and it's implausible that any could be so much more sugary than those included to be 75%.

Even a cereal where sugar is the main selling point (Kellogg's Frosted Flakes) is only 35% sugar.

Froot Loops have 25.3g of net digestible carbs (total carbs minus fiber) per 30g serving. That's 84%.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/breakfast-cereals/1532/2

I'm fairly certain your link only includes added sugars which is not the total number of digestible sugars (digestible carbs = digestible sugars). Unfortunately, most people have the misconception that carbs from "natural sources" (fruits, starches, grains, etc.) don't effect your blood sugar the same as added sugars, but that is incorrect.

Starches are digested to sugars, and they may indeed have similar effect on blood sugar in some cases, but the article did not say "75 percent carbs", it said "75 percent sugar". "Sugar" usually means HFCS or sucrose, both of which contain a high proportion of fructose, which is metabolised differently to the pure glucose you get from digesting starch. Additionally, there's some evidence that taste influences overeating, and starch does not have the sweet taste of sugar. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world and their diet includes large quantities of rice, so starch is not obviously harmful.

Does that include sugar substitutes, aka sweeteners?

Sugar substitutes are generally hundreds of times sweeter than the sugar they replace so they wouldn't even be a blip on the composition by mass. This is why cans of diet coke float in water but cans of regular coke sink.

From the documentation:

"Total sugars is the term used for the sum of the individual monosaccharides (galactose, glucose, and fructose) and disaccharides (sucrose, lactose, and maltose)."

http://www.ars.usda.gov/sp2UserFiles/Place/80400525/Data/SR/...

75% sucralose sounds horrid. I can't imagine anyone would want to eat a bowlful of Splenda for breakfast.

A bit breathless for my taste; "Just one 20-ounce soda increases your risk of a heart attack by about 30 percent."

How did that sentence survive editing? Is that per hour, per day? I assume they are trying to say '65g of added sugar to your daily intake' -- note the recommended daily intake is about 35g of added sugar.

As mentioned in TFA, this brings up an interesting bug in our nutritional labeling. Sugars are grouped under carbs for calculating the percent of recommended daily intake, and there's no differentiation between natural and added sugar. So 39g of sugar in a can of coke shows up as "13%" instead of "111%". Fixing the label would be a good first step...

It's been some years since I was in the US, so maybe it's not as bad as it was, but the hidden sugar in bread was the one that always astonished. US bread tastes, to me, more like cake and frankly ruins the chance of a good sandwich.

It depends on which bread you buy. The lightest sandwich breads that are made in regional commercial bakeries tend to have quite a bit of sugar. The bread from the store bakery might not have any. Bread from fancier bakeries will depend on what style of bread it is.

I wonder if it's a situation in which parents struggling to get kids to just eat your damn food have created market forces that have gradually pushed mainstream bread to suit the preferences of children. We parents (at least in the US) often compromise on food for the sake of our kids, and it seems plausible that collectively we've unconsciously adapted our preferences to match our children, and so lost our taste for truly wholesome bread.

It's not. I recommend watching the documentary Fed Up on Netflix, it help explains how we got to this state.

Not often I see something flagged off the front page, but given how badly written that article is, I can see why.

What always surprises me is that many obese people don't seem to actually eat that much more than me. I believe it's their addiction to sodas, microwaved meals, and basically never eating anything that's fresh.

I have an obese friend who grew up watching a lot of TV (especially sports) and when he was a kid, he believed that in order to become a famous athlete like the people on the TV screen, one should drink a lot of soda.

Growing up, I've watched a lot of cereal commercials too. They all have a memorable theme, and they try to convince the kids that it's both tasty and full of vitamins and so it's good for your body. But I was so addicted to the sugar in them -- there was a time in high school where I was sometimes eating a full box of cereal a day.

I feel sad that Mexico can ban junk-food commercials, make sodas more expensive by taxing them, and ban sugar-related goods in schools and we cannot. We should be doing the same things in the States too, and we should give the children a proper education about nutrition early on.

Eggs don't kill humans, but they kill an ungodly amount of chickens: 8 Billion of them per year, roughly. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/PoulSlauSu/Poul...

How does eating unfertilized eggs kill chickens? What am I missing?

The male chicks that are incidentally born in the egg industry are usually ground up alive or gassed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling http://youtu.be/IOZEP9AGxrw

The scale is literally 8 billion.

http://www.sciencealert.com/us-egg-farmers-say-they-ll-final...

Admittedly not holding my breath but even if I were, 32 BILLION chicks will die before 2020

Once thing I would really like to know is if it's Fructose or Glucose (or both) that causes the problem.

Studies usually look at "sugar" in general without specifying which one.

Based on some reading I've done it seems to me that sugars other than Glucose are the problem and switching to Glucose would let us have sweet food with less of a health problem.

As with most nutrition topics, it's more complex than that. There's evidence that fructose consumed as part of fresh fruits doesn't affect the body the same way as fructose added to other foods, or even the same way that fruit juice does.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-for...

Fructose is linked to liver problems, and also creates far more glycation end-products than glucose (which could very well be part of the atherosclerosis explanation).

One problem is that glucose without fructose really doesn't taste very good at all. One option might be replacing sugars entirely with sugar alcohols with low intestinal distress, like erythritol.

Of course, we could always work to become a less decadent society, but that won't happen.

Glucose without fructose tastes perfectly acceptable. It's as flavorless as any simple sugar. It's about 0.75 times as sweet as sucrose. The mouth-feel is slightly different but still pleasant.

Fructose, if this video by Lustic is anything to go by:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

One problem is that it requires about 33% more glucose to match the sweetness of sucrose and 126% more glucose to match the sweetness of fructose. Glucose has a much higher effect on insulin levels and glycemic load which makes it a harder problem for diabetics.

Fructose, on the other hand, has all the issues described in the Dr. Lustig video linked in another reply.

I just avoid anything with a lot of any type of sugar (more than a few grams per serving) as much as I can.

"In my new book, The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, which will be released on February 25, I provide an..." blah blah blah blah.

Sugar is poisonous/toxic/carcinogenic and if you buy Dr. Mark Hyman's book he will give you all of the keys to unlock 200-year life expectancy.

Also, saturated fat and cholesterol are no longer risk factors for CVD and fatty liver disease, so he will free you to eat an egg based diet!

>This study of more than 40,000 people, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, accounted for all other potential risk factors including total calories, overall diet quality, smoking, cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity and alcohol.

How can a study that ignores physical activity possibly discover anything significant about heart disease?

Perhaps the fuel matters more than running the engine.

As I sit here eating some Stroopwafels and reading this.

I would risk a heart attack for stroopwafels. I love Amsterdam, but I go back for the stroopwafels.

Why was this flagged? I see it as very relevant to people in the startup world ...

If I eat a bowl of cereal, even unsweetened, I am ravenous and unproductive 2 hours later. On the other hand if I have 4-5 eggs or tin of sardines I'm good for 4-5 hours.

Probably because it is basically an ad for a diet book...

It's still a well-cited article. If HN banned articles that end with an ad blurb, 3/4 of the content that makes the front page would violate that rule.

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