The bitter truth about fructose alarmism
alanaragonblog.com
alanaragonblog.com
> One of Lustig’s opening assertions is that The Atkins diet and the Japanese diet share one thing in common: the absence of fructose. This is flat-out false because it implies that the Japanese don’t eat fruit. On the contrary, bananas, grapefruits, Mandarin oranges, apples, grapes, watermelons, pears, persimmons, peaches, and strawberries are significant staples of the Japanese diet [17].
Except the Japanese DON'T eat much fruit compared to Americans. It's in his own citation:
Japan fruit consumption: 41.5 kg per person per year
USA fruit consumption: 126.5 kg per person per year
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/wrs0406/wrs0406h.pdf
http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf
Americans eat over 300% more fruit than Japanese. I don't know what a "significant staple" is, but from my time in Tokyo, Osaka, the rest of Kansai, and Hokkaido, Japanese have a heck of a lot less fructose than Americans do. It's mostly rice, meat, fish, and vegetables, and the main desserts are only semi-sweet like mochi and red bean.
There's also the fact that the apple or banana have fiber and other nutrients the sodas are missing. The sodas (or often other HFCS-rich foods) don't have.
A mango is a sweet and not particularly fibrous fruit, and it's only about 15% sugar. According to nutritiondata.com, A pound of mango pulp has about 65 grams of sugar. That would probably cost about $7.00 prepared (you can get them sliced fresh at Whole Foods). According to thedailyplate, a 20oz bottle of Pepsi, which feels expensive at $1.25 as you can get liter bottles for only slightly more, has 69 grams of sugar.
And like I said, mango is not a particularly low-sugar fruit. Pineapple is 8.5% sugar and the bromelain makes your mouth hurt if you eat too much. Apples 10.5%.
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/1...
That's why a lot of the paleo diet folks avoid them.
http://www.weightlossforall.com/calories-banana.htm
Edit: To note that I still do see your point about why certain diets avoid them. I think of bananas as the 3 Musketeers Bar of fruit. :-)
Nobody dumps in eight sugar packets into plain coffee - they buy a sweetened coffee beverage instead, which is about as sugary as the Coke and costs more to boot.
Candy bars and cookies are similarly difficult to portion control, because, again, they're overconcentrated.
Lessee -- scientists argue that the Earth formed ~6 billion years ago, creationists say ~6000 years ago. Figuring both sides are biased, the middle figure between the two camps is roughly 3 billion years ago. So the Earth is 3 billion years old. QED.
See his retrospective of the original article: http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-...
It has a decent (although one-sided) summarization of the comments from the original.
Maybe we're getting "hung up on the trivial minutia of an exact gram amount", though.
"High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is nearly identical to sucrose in structure and function."
But we had this article recently on HN that shows the exact opposite:
And here's a longer article about why at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructo...
Even though I'm predisposed to agree with it's conclusions --or perhaps because I'm so predisposed to agree with it's conclusions-- I'd prefer to wait for better science before calling the race.
From the article:
"Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization"
Given that the body attempts to measure current calorie intake by calibrating past calorie consumption versus past perceived sweetness, this means that the glucose/fructose mix will prime the body to crave sweets more intensely. This is pretty much the only biologically plausible argument against HFCS.
Compare: the studies showing that diet sodas actually lead to an increased risk of diabetes (doi:10.2337/dc08-1799).
Compare: the various diets encouraging the daily consumption of nearly-flavorless olive oil (example implementation, unsuccessful: http://lesswrong.com/lw/a6/the_mysteries_of_shangrila_dietin...).
If you dig into actual dietary outcomes, "a person consistently loses weight on this diet" is a milestone hardly any diet reaches. Certainly not diets based on the idea that obesity is caused by eating too much and so the solution is to eat less; those have a terrible track record.
The way to cut through the scientific fog is not to argue about mechanisms and causation; the way is to look at who makes correct predictions, and consequently in the case of diets, what works and what doesn't. Fructose may not be evil, it may merely be strongly correlated with something else that is evil, but that's good enough for me, for today.
The tough problem: there are a million variables to control for, people's environment (work, health, happiness, etc.) confounds everything, accurate reporting is difficult, food quality varies (e.g., apple nutrients have changed over time), etc.
The market distortions: huge subsidies and entrenched interests for factory farming with a heavy emphasis on grains, cereals and legumes, particularly wheat, corn, and soybeans.
I've found that substituting lots of fat and protein for carbohydrates while emphasizing food quality (little processed foods) produces lots of satiety, and improvement in physical performance, a better lipid profile and loss of body fat. But YMMV.
Like all sensationalist issues, the fructose thing is more nuanced than the fruitcakes on either side would have you believe. But where's the fun in that?
I've been considering starting some sort of site for publishing the real truth on this stuff, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be to other people. The truth just isn't link-baity and sensationalist enough, y'know?
Can you enlighten us on these nuances? By "fruitcakes" I assume you're referring to Aragon and Lustig?
Long story short: fructose is only problematic if you are consuming it without dietary fiber (e.g. as fruit) for glycemic control, as well as all the other modulating effects fiber has.
Fructose (and HFCS) sweetened foods are really just a sideshow to the the main issue: people making bad nutrition and lifestyle choices over the long term, e.g. drinking sodas every day. There's no easy, magic bullet that takes away one's responsibility for making good choices.
Magically eliminating fructose or HFCS from our diets won't reverse the obesity trend. It'll help a bit, of course, but ultimately humans will need to find a way to adapt to over-abundance of temping, high-calorie foods. Meanwhile, a modicum of education and self-discipline are the keys.
Furthermore, while drinking sodas every day is perhaps a choice, what about the example of walking down the bread aisle and finding that something like 95% of the varieties listed HFCS as an ingredient? It's not just that sodas and juice drinks are ubiquitous, heavily-marketed, cheap, tasty, and designed to maximize consumption and therefore profit through use of diuretics and sodium and therefore people find themselves making the dietary choice to drink them with meals instead of water, but also the fact that HFCS is used in an enormous number of processed foods.
Bread, pizza dough, tomato sauce, cookies, candy bars, chocolate, yogurt, sports drinks, salad dressing, BBQ sauce, chocolate milk... HFCS is everywhere because it's cheap, because it makes food taste better, and because it doesn't fill you up so people will consume (and therefore buy) more of it.
On the one hand, fats are more calorie-dense, but sugar doesn't fill you up (and in my experience salt has a similar effect but I work out and sweat a lot so that could be why). So the combination of sugar and fat is the killer combination.
Try this experiment: for a single day, try to eat 4,000 calories of nothing but a simple starchy food (like white rice) with some fat, like olive oil. This is a low fiber, high calorie diet. My guess is that you'll feel incredibly full after all the rice and oil. You may not even be able to reach 4,000 calories in 16 hours. You'll have to force yourself to eat by the end.
Then, a few days later after you've sent some fiber through your digestive system to clear out any blockage you caused eating so much rice, try the same thing with soda and cookies. Get a couple boxes of your favorite HFCS-sweetened cookies and a couple of 2-liter bottles of your favorite soda or better yet, juice drink. See how hard it is to reach 4,000 calories now. My guess is that you'll have no trouble, although you may feel a bit ill by the end of the day.
Really? Given a particular food item/meal/diet, can we accurately predict all of the effects it will have on a particular person? As far as I can tell, our knowledge of nutrition (even the most “scientific” bits I’ve seen) are largely based on a few stabs in the dark, lots of hearsay/anecdote, and either exaggeration or lots of hedging.
Add in questions about which food items are most useful when eaten at the same time, what part of our daily schedule should have which foods, how nutrition intersects/interacts with sleep/exercise/mental activity, etc., and I’ve never read anything that leads me to believe we have even the beginnings of an “advanced” understanding.
We can make some broad suggestions: eat a varied diet; hold off on the sugar; try to get some aerobic exercise; sleep enough; get enough sunshine; etc. But human bodies seem to be pretty tolerant of many possible diets: which can we tolerate, and under which do we thrive?
Our daily diets – for example eggs and cereal for breakfast, sandwiches at midday, a piece of meat and some mixed vegetables or some pasta or whatever at night – are basically culturally specific, driven by historical accident: in different parts of the world, diets, work schedules, types of physical exercise, &c. vary substantially; which of these differences are because of legitimately different needs, and which are arbitrary?
Ok, but the Calories in/out argument is a silly oversimplification. Pregnant women gain weight because they consume more calories than they expend, but this isn't the most interesting level of causation.
Let's say that one day I drink two cans of Coke in the morning, and measure how I feel for the next few hours. The next day I eat 320 calories worth of chicken breast. To say that an increase in caloric intake can be caused by a change in the kinds of foods consumed is not a contradiction.
The author of this rant either completely misses, or tries to skate around this obvious point, as many do.
"I’m obviously not in favor of replacing anyone’s daily fluid intake with soft drinks, but I can already see a number of straw man arguments headed my way. This is because people have a tendency to think in either-or terms that strictly involve extremes."
I think the main point of his post is that fructose is being demonized. He points out that we're taking in more calories while spending less. If anything is to be taken from the article is that moderation is the way.
Doesn't Lustig propose that a change in the proportion of fructose to other sugars in the diet causes a decrease in satiety, leading to more overall caloric intake?
(edited to correct brain fart mentioned below)
You may be confusing it with sucrose (table sugar) which does consist of a fructose and glucose molecule with a glycosidic linkage.
> Likewise, if a doctor thought he knew more about software than me, he'd likely be mistaken.
Usually, but I would hope if a Con Kolivas offered an opinion on your code, you wouldn't brush him aside merely because he was a doctor :) Reminds me of this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930117