How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat | Hacker News Reader

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

nytimes.com

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RIP: British Scientist John Yudkin - The man who tried to warn us about the perils of sugar..

Source(s) : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/diet/10634081...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin

Edit: Lest we not forget his arch-enemy Ancel Keys

A story every scientist should now. For its own sake.

Another good discussion of Yudkin's work and how it was received: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...

Along with Robert Atkins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Atkins_(nutritionist)

If you ask people to this day, they'll say Atkins died of his own diet. That was actually a total lie run by Harpers magazine. They corrected the mistake in the following edition, but the damage had been done.

Although there is little evidence to support it, the running conspiracy theory is that PR people in various arms of the food industry paid for that article.

Edit: Adkins died because he slipped on a piece of ice during a snow storm and cracked his skull.

To be completely fair, he slipped on the ice likely as a complication from heart disease. His doctors swear that his arteries and heart were the healthiest they'd seen for someone that age except for the infected portion.

I don't get it: heart disease causes people to slip on ice?

No, his body was fighting the heart disease but with the slip on the ice his body was not able to recover from both at the same time. In other words, he was an old man and with the new injury his body was not able to recover.

Compromised health tends to make effective responses to hazardous environmental conditions more difficult.

Heart disease can affect strength, balance, coordination, mental function, and any number of other responses, much as a cold or flu or pnemonia can. You might care to review the recent video footage of a notable candidate visibly collapsing whilst being aided into a waiting van for transport, as a consequence of pnemonia. A condition more generally understood to affect the lungs than major skeletal muscles, but here clearly a contributing factor.

Think systemically, please. Especially if you're in tech.

> Think systemically, please. Especially if you're in tech.

Which is why I would follow Occam's Razor in this scenario instead of using a convoluted theory to explain why someone slipped on ice.

"Simple is better than complex." [1]

[1]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

I'm not claiming either that:

1. The direct cause of Robert Atkins' fallin on ice was heart disease.

2. That his falling on ice is proof of heart disease.

Rather, I'm explaining how, as one of several precipitating factors, heart disease might be a factor in the question posed: "I don't get it: heart disease causes people to slip on ice?"

I'm suggesting that a multifactor risk analysis be considered.

It's the same multi-factor logic you might follow in answering questions of other disasters. Say: What caused the disaster of the RMS Titanic? What caused the Hindenberg disaster? What cause the Fukushima or Chernobyl disasters? What lead to the Bhopal disaster.

Looking only at the precipitating or triggering cause misses many other opportunities for mitigation or avoidance. The Titanic would have been better served with more lifeboats, 24/7 manned radios, regular lifeboat drills, the originally-scheduled first officer not having (inadvertently) pocketed the key to the bridge's binoculars case, heeding ice warnings, less hubris on the part of passengers, owners, and regulatory boards.

Old, sick people are more likely to slip and fall, and the hazards of such falls can be greater than for young, fit, healthy people.

To amend to your Zen of Python list: make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

I see what you're saying now, but to be frank you could have saved some time with a shorter explanation.

Post short comment: be misread.

Post longer clarification: dismissed as too wordy.

Tough crowd.

If he had heart disease, it would make him more prone to slipping on ice. But because he slipped on ice (which perfectly healthy people do all the fucking time), does not mean he had heart disease, or was even in any other of the hundreds of conditions (some of which might speak to his health, others which might not such as being distracted by something) that might have made him more prone to slipping on ice.

So basically you've wandered into an "intro to critical thinking" level fallacy, which is especially ironic considering your last two sentences.

I'm not arguing the fall is proof of heart disease. That's a misreading of my comment.

Atkins is reported to have suffered cardiomyopathy -- a virally-induced form of heart disease -- by Dr. Stuart Trager, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/nyregion/just-what-killed-...

I'm somewhat familar with the particulars of the story and debate over Atkins' perceived or claimed health or disease, and the disagreements over both arguments. I'm not taking a particular side.

But (as I've just commented to another response to my parent remarks above): yes, sick, frail, diseased, elderly people are more prone to falls than those who are well, strong, healthly, and young. And those falls can be fatal.

Hence: heart disease can be a contributing factor to slipping on ice (or the resultant injuries and outcome).

> Think systemically, please

systemically, or systematically?

Yes.

Why are you spreading this myth?

>Atkins' widow and Dr. Stuart Trager, the spokesperson for Atkins Physicians Council, both contend Robert Atkins weighed less than 200 pounds at the time of his accident, claiming "During his coma, as he deteriorated and his major organs failed, fluid retention and bloating dramatically distorted his body and left him at 258 pounds at the time of his death, a documented weight gain of over 60 pounds."

> Thanks to his death certificate, we know Atkins was 258 pounds at the time of his death. Yet according to a copy of his medical records, as turned over to USA Today by the diet guru's widow, Atkins weighed 195 pounds upon admission to the hospital 8 April 2003 following his fall. He died on 17 April 2003 after having been in a coma for more than a week.

Source: http://www.snopes.com/medical/doctor/atkins.asp

The dude was 72 years old. 72 year old people die of things like slipping on ice and cracking their heads. When he was admitted to the hospital, he was totally healthy, except for the head injury. There was no sign of any heart problems, except for some controversial leaked reports.

The tragedy is that Atkins really wanted people to be healthy and his diet was/is very healthy. It's very similar to Keto and many other low-carb diets. It's myths that keep countries like American in a downward spiral of obesity.

> When he was admitted to the hospital, he was totally healthy, except for the head injury. There was no sign of any heart problems, except for some controversial leaked reports.

He did have cardiomyopathy for a few years before that, and a cardiac arrest the year before he died.

He didn't die of a heart attack, but it's an overcorrection to say that there was 'no sign of any heart problems'.

More likely its a complication of the fact that ice is slippery.

I had no idea - I had dismissed the Atkins diet for years because I had heard that Atkins himself was morbidly obese and died from a heart attack (neither is true according to his Wikipedia article).

Chalk one up for the idea that it's usually not worth basing decisions on vaguely-heard rumors (especially in the age of Google).

My mother (1973, Edinburgh) bought "Pure, White, and Deadly," and we all read it. I was ten or so. Yudkin attacked white flour, white (processed) fat, and above all white sugar. It made perfect sense to us all, and cutting back on sugar became a slow, yet consistent part of our lifestyle. We never ate that much anyhow. I stopped eating sugar entirely at 15. I still recall the book's cover.

Edit: it took me a lot longer to cut fruit juice from our diet. I was so convinced by that "natural" label. Until I realized my daughter, who'd drank a lot of juice growing up, was addicted to sugar. Then we cut it out. My other kids, not addicted. I was fooled for so long...

The sugar industry has a lot to answer for. It is IMO comparable to the tobacco industry's suppression of cancer studies. Yet worse, because the effects of high-sugar diets are doing more damage, to more people, and last generations.

Think of the hundreds of millions of children who have eaten high sugar diets since they were babies... lifelong damage to their health. A hundred years of damage, these executives and corrupt scientists caused.

Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.

> Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.

This statement reflects a glaring ignorance of both scale and science. First of all, sugar is a hallmark of a primate diet only in complex not in simple forms, which is not the kind being referred to here. By nutritional value do you mean has calories? So does Vodka. And what at all do the calories have to do with the scale of harm?

Does this not include sugar found in foods? Are those considered complex?

Is eating natural sugar found in fruits as bad as eating refined/processed sugar?

There are many different kinds of sugars. It's worth understanding. Fructose is what harms you. Glucose is harmless. Sucrose is fructose plus a glucose. Lactose is harmless as long as you can digest it. Maltose is harmless. Etc.

Fruits contain varying amounts of fructose. Wild berries, not so much. An apple or grape, rather a lot. Apple juice, considerably more.

> Fructose is what harms you

Can you provide more info on this?

This is Robert Lustig's well-known talk on the subject:

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

It is very very hard to reach a harmful level of fructose when eating apples or other fruit.

If consuming juices or concentrates it is very easy.

Orange flesh is about 3% fibre. 97% juice. There is no significant difference between eating an orange and drinking a small glass of juice, except the work involved.

I don't think that changes "very easy" to "very very hard".

Even time to chew it all is a big difference. It takes several oranges to make a glass of orange juice, which I can down in about a minute. It takes me quite a while to eat an entire orange. Since it also takes time for people to realize they're full, this also helps not to eat so much.

Scooby's workshop, a very popular bodybuilding & fitness website covers this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAFdWifkt0E

i stopped drinking oj when I moved to San Francisco and saw one of those novelty juicing machines with the orange hopper and exposed internals. it was like 6 or 7 oranges in a single glass!

also made me realize why fresh oj is insanely expensive at restaurants.

Except, each orange only contains about 2 fl.oz of juice. What is significantly easier - drinking 16 fl. oz of juice or eating 8 oranges?

This is reductionist thinking, the same kind of thinking that led to the low-fat fad, which unfortunately lasted decades.

Fruits don't deliver just fructose, the also deliver nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down.

And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us.

Remember though that modern fruits have been bred to be sweeter.

>As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down.

When sugar is introduced to the body the liver begins to store/process the sugar. So it doesn't matter whether the sugar is from say coke (high fructose corn syrup) or an Apple.

What happens when the liver can't store/process the amount of sugar you ingest is the body triggers insulin production, and while insulin production will be linked to obesity the insulin itself is the real harm to the body. Insulin triggers the bodies production of fat cells to store the sugars it can't process. Also, Insulin has the effect of enlarging the bodies cells (fat cells, cancer cells, etc...) this can lead to enlarged organs (liver disease, heart disease, etc...).

There is something to be said that an Apple has nutritional value that the soda is lacking (plus fiber), and this can account for some people drinking multiple sodas a day (maybe even a 2 litter) but very unlikely to be eating 12 Apples a day; nevertheless, the underlying sugar is harmful vis-a-vis insulin spikes. The real difference is the person eating the apple instead of drinking the coke is likely to stop their sugar intake at 1 Apple and is more likely to incorporate some form of exercise. Personally, I go by a rule of thumb I try not to consume anything with more than 10g of sugar (a whole apple is almost double).

>And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us.

Humans develop traits and cravings for things that have detrimental side-effects quite regularly. It used to be that Type 2 diabetes was called adult onset diabetes, in fact in the UK kids weren't diagnosed with Type 2 until the 2000's. Despite hundreds of billions a year spent managing Type 2, in most cases it can be completely prevented and even controlled to the point people can stop taking any medication through proper diet.

+1. It's all about the insulin release. After a year or so on a zerocarb diet I'd allow myself an occasional feast of fresh fruit, but in the process my body has become so sensitive to insulin, a fresh spike of it would lead to an immediate loss of energy and sleepiness regardless of the time of day.

I've tracked my weight and did blood tests consistently, and most dramatic weight loss periods coincided with the minimal insulin presence.

Lol, our big brains developed long after we left our jungle environment, and are fueled above all by protein (meat, so hunting). Our taste buds love sugar because fructose is a drug that plants evolved to get our ancestors working as seed dispersal machines. And I believe if you eat grapes or oranges or apples, the juice (and fructose) is barely wrapped in fibre if at all. Chewing an orange, you have extracted the fructose almost entirely. Do you think the "nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants" slow down the digestion process?

Our brain runs on sugar mostly.

As the sibling poster stated, brains run almost exclusively on glucose outside starvation or ketogenic diets.

No difference between fructose in fruit and the fructose which the body splits from sucrose in refined sugar. Fruit sugar is fructose. It's reported that in some people a marked increase in blood pressure is associated with high fructose intake. That is certainly so in my case after eating more fruit than I should.

That constitutes more than you should for you?

Personally I stopped buying jumbo massive apples and now usually only eat the small ones they say are for kids. I usually only est fruit with other things like in a salad or in a bowl of yoghurt nuts and seeds (tahini too) and maybe with coconut oil. I think this combo slows digestion to smooth out the sugar absorption.

I think it would be difficult to eat too much sugar from fruit in the same as from, say, soda just because it would be hard to eat that much fruit, but still possible to over do it.

When I was studying nutrition one of my lecturers was fond of telling a story about one patient he saw who, when asked what he ate, just said "apples", lecturer asked "and?" and the guy says "oh no, just apples". The guy was eating like a bucket of apples a day and nothing else. That could cause some problems.

Sugar that occurs naturally in foods are often complex. Complex sugars are larger molecules that can be broken into simple sugars (lactose, fructose, glucose).

There is actually very little sugar in fruit, and they are full of vitamins and minerals which are good for you.

If you cut artificial (added sugar) foods from your diet you will likely find that other foods taste sweeter as your taste becomes more sensitive.

> There is actually very little sugar in fruit

that's incorrect. in fact drinking a glass of orange juice is similar to drinking a coke. just because its fructose does not mean it's any better for you.

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

Yes, let me go and pick a glass of orange juice from my glass of orange juice tree.

I lol'd

http://thepaleodiet.com/fruits-and-sugars/

pretty far from little sugar.

That is largely because you need to squeeze more than one orange to get one glass of orange juice.

The word fructose comes from the word fruit, it literally means the sugar found in fruits. Most fruits have more fructose than other sugars. A banana has 14 grams of sugar, equivalent to 4 teaspoons of table sugar. If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it. You can argue that it's ok to eat fruit because it's balanced by the fiber and vitamins, but that's equivalent to saying that fructose is ok in moderation. Which seems to go against the current nutritional science understandings.

> If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it.

Actually fruits also have fiber which slows down the absorption of fructose. The way we digest fruits is different from the way we digest table sugar.

Beware reductionist thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

Yes, and no. If you drink straight apple juice, yes, that's bad for you. If, however, you eat an apple, that's good for you. The Apple has plenty of fiber that keeps the body from absorbing the fructose too quickly. Straight apple juice kicks your pancreas into high gear.

Apple flesh is 2.6% fibre.

Where does this myth come from that fruit is high in fibre? It simply is not true. Some fruits are. Wild fruits certainly are. Domesticated table fruit is not. Google "fibre content of apple" if you don't believe me.

I didn't say "high in fibre", I said plenty of fibre. Difference.

Animals are comprised of a huge amount of water and some other stuff. I think even meat is something like 80-90% water. But people don't usually say "man I'm thirsty, someone bring me a ribeye!"

When cells are made up so primarily by water saying "oh but this fiber is a trivial percentage" is very misleading. If all sugar is in the water which is contained in cells which are bound up by fiber then the fiber could make it much more difficult for your body to just absorb all the sugar wholesale.

> I think even meat is something like 80-90% water.

For fresh (not processed like hams etc), ~50ish% is usually a safe bet.

> There is actually very little sugar in fruit

Whoever told you this did you a disservice, because it's completely untrue. I think coke is a pretty good posterchild for "a shocking amount of sugar", and an 8 oz bottle of coke has about the same sugar content as an apple or a navel orange (and the orange has half the calories, making the comparison even less favorable). The difference between the two is that the coke is (nutritionally speaking) nothing but carbonated, liquid sugar while a whole apple comes with a fair amount of fiber. The difference in speed of absorption is primarily what makes one healthy and the other terrible for you.

You are mostly right. The mostly part is this:

gram for gram Apples and coke are about the same, however an 8oz coke has over twice the sugar content of an apple.

Secondly, on the disservice, you are particularly correct. I have done myself a disservice by not correctly interpreting my own research. Two years back, when switching to become a vegetarian, I calculated macros for loads of foods. For sugar I used a calculation based on the food's glycemic index.

That's was what I was getting at in general: glycemic index is far more relevant than gross sugar content[1]. But my criticism still stands: It's good that that's what you yourself use GI (as do I), but it's misleading and inaccurate to phrase a low GI as "very little sugar". It's particularly confusing for those readers of your comment who might not be familiar with GI. Instead of falsely claiming that fruit has little sugar as a roundabout way of describing it's GI, instead one can say: "Fruit has plenty of sugar, but the attendant fiber content makes the absorption of said sugar better for you than mainlining it as liquid Coke".

As an aside, where are you getting your nutritional info? It's way off what I've found. I was using the nutritional info for a regular "medium apple", and in the sources I found it has 20g vs coke's 25g, and almost the exact same amount of calories. 80% of a coke's sugar, calorie-forcalorie and serving-for-serving, hardly qualifies ad "very little sugar".

I couldn't say this more. I had to cut everything[1] except raw food (meat, carrots, tomatos, salad) and it's true that within a few days you start to feel the sugar in these even in small forms. You also recognize how sugary processed food is, and how it affect your mind.

In all honesty since I was able to eat anything again, I surrendered to a junk food from time to time. I know how to keep it small; but I have to admit how hard is it when your body allows it.

[1] my brain / heart / veins reacted wrong to any fat, sugar, too much salt.. so I was highly driven into avoiding them. That made the need for will power irrelevant at the time. A bonus.

"Natural", in this context, is a weasel word that's whose key uses include making people feel more comfortable about buying junk food, so that junk food manufacturers can sell more junk food.

Chimpanzees, for example do eat a lot of fruit. I believe it's their primary source of calories. But the wild fruits that chimps eat are a very different beast from how humans in wealthier countries consume fruit. The fruits they typically eat haven't had their sugar content dramatically increased through centuries and millennia of selective breeding. They haven't been turned into juice, which removes all the fiber and essentially renders them a nutritional equivalent of Coca-Cola. They haven't been dried, which concentrates the sugar and increases the glycemic load. They haven't had extra sugar added as a ("natural"!) preservative in order to maximize the shelf life. etc. etc.

All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating. To it, C12H22O11 is C12H22O11. There is some stuff suggesting that processing affects how much sugar is extracted by your digestive system, though. It's not able to break down the food and get at its contents quite as efficiently when the food hasn't been mechanically ground up or macerated first, and your teeth are unlikely to grind it up quite so finely. In a nutshell, sugar that's inside a plant's cells is going to be less available (and, to that extent, "have fewer calories") than sugar that's on the outside of the cells.

> All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating.

To clarify I wasn't saying that the difference was how the sucrose is produced, but the actual metabolic process it takes to obtain it. It takes significantly more time for the body to break down sugars which are bound with fibers, something like today's epidemic simply would not be possible solely with whole fruits.

> To [your body], C12H22O11 is C12H22O11.

Uh, careful. If you said "sucrose is sucrose" I would agree, but lactose and maltose also have that formula, and require different enzymes to digest.

> Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.

Nicotine is an addictive substance which suppresses appetite and increases focus; as found in tobacco leaves, it has a pleasant smell and taste.

Loss of focus is a well known symptom of nicotine withdrawal. It goes away after a few days.

I'm confused, what is your point?

Often you get the opposite effect of a drug in withdrawal, e.g. caffeine reduces headache pain, causes headaches in withdrawal.

It's worth mentioning, since most people don't know, that nicotine on it's own is not as addictive as tobacco. AFAIK the MAOIs in tobacco smoke contribute more to its addictiveness than nicotine [1]

I've been chewing nicotine gum semi-regularly for a few months to improve my focus at work, and have not found it addictive so far. (I've never smoked).

(Still, I wouldn't recommend people in general do this without carefully considering the risks.)

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Companies that produce cigarettes also optimize the tobacco blend and chemical treatment to make it as addictive as possible, which is why vaping nicotine doesn't have the same addictive effect as smoking cigarettes.

It is true that many monkeys are tree dwellers and are heavy fruit eaters. Humans and other primates are neither. They will eat fruit as part of a mixed diet that is more omnivorous than anything. And wild fruit is not as rich in sugar as you imagine. It's mostly fibre. The stuff you buy in the supermarket is not a hallmark of a primate diet. Soft drinks are not a hallmark of a primate diet. Cakes and biscuits, they are not a hallmark of a primate diet. They are fake food.

Genuinely curious as to what you mean by "other primates". What else is there apart from humans and monkeys?

Primates are monkeys. A monkeys isn't necessarily primate.

You have that backwards.

Nope.

Doh! My mistake.

Apes are not monkeys (monkeys have tails). In general primate is a very large group that includes lemurs and tarsiers.

I just had to google this. Thanks! I guess I never really questioned (learnt?) it and thought monkey/ape was interchangeable.

Apes are also primates, but not monkeys. So for example, the rest of the great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimps).

Fructose is a hallmark of primate diet. Refined fructose is not. The only refined fructose in the wild is honey and that is way too rare and too well defended to be the hallmark of anyone's diet (other than honeybees, of course).

Humans are perfectly capable of eating all the fructose they may ever want in its unrefined state as it appears in nature without any adverse effects. I.e. you can eat fruit until you are full, and nothing bad will happen. It is in fact quite healthy. But once you refine it into pure fructose, such as crystal sugar or molasses, then all hell breaks loose.

As a former smoker, you are absolutely wrong. Tobacco will give you a kick, as nicotine is a stimulant.

I'd describe it as being similar to caffeine, it makes you more alert. Of course there are downsides that everyone knows about.

well the lie has recently morphed into the laws slowing and prohibiting soda sales in schools and such all the while promoting juice which can be worse in many cases because people assume its healthy and you cannot over drink because of that

One time I was craving some juice or smoothie, so at the gas station I took one of those 'Naked' brands and glanced on the label, it had some ridiculous amount of carbs and sugar in it, more than 50g. Put it right back.

I was doing that for years on gas stations, just picked the blue ones. Now that I am more sugar aware, I look at the labels a lot. I was also shocked to see some ridiculous amount of sugar in that what used to be my favourite drink.

Not coincidentally Naked was sued in a class-action in 2012 for labeling issues ("misuse of health phrases") and of course they settled so there is no finding of liability on the claim.

Even the best juice possible (made fresh, raw, organic, and green-leafy vegetables) will be comparatively high in sugar. A 16oz juice requires somewhere in the amount of 4-6 lbs of vegetables and naturally no one would ever consume 4-6 lbs worth of vegetable sugars in one sitting much less 6x a day. With the store bought juices there are also likely fruits added which have even more sugar than green leafy veggies and they store bought juices likely aren't raw (i.e. pasteurized) killing many of the beneficial enzymes and nutrients.

>> lifelong damage to their health.

It's only lifelong damage if you don't change your diet and lifestyle. The world is filled with people who were morbidly obese and have made the changes necessary to reverse the damage and live far more healthy lives now.

The way you put it, it sounds like an irreversible course akin to a death sentence, which it most certainly is not.

Anyone who has been morbidly obese has permanent damage as a result. It is certainly better to right the ship, but some damage does not go away.

That is a myth. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.

1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)

2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)

3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)

4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.

5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)

Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.

I lost 20% 10 years ago and haven't gained it back (295->225 lbs.). On the other hand I am still overweight and would like to lose more.

I did it by just exercising an insane amount every day. (Like 6 hours of cardio+strength training every day) Most people just aren't going to do that.

No diet I ever tried had any similar effect.

It did do a complete reset of my metabolism to the new weight though. I kind of think it has to be something drastic to have the effect people want.

The only problem is that it's really easy to injure yourself being drastic (that and you have have the right confluence of factors to have the free time to pull it off).

How do you get that much exercise? How did it reset you?

I was on a remote job site where all living expenses were paid (but not entertainment) and there was just NOTHING in the town. The hotel had a nice gym. I was the only person working from my company for quite a period, so I had nothing to do with my free time (the hotel did not have internet access at the time).

So with nothing better to do I thought, time to lose weight. So that's what I did when I wasn't working.

I did not keep the exercise up after the period, but I just wasn't that hungry and the weight stayed off.

You could say my stomach shrank, or metabolism changed, or whatever theory, I just say it as a "reset" to be generic, since I really don't know.

It's really hard for me to imagine spending that much time doing cardio+strength training every day.

I went to music school and I used to practice around 6-7 hours a day, every day. And even after switching to software I still practiced 3-4 hours every day for a long time. It was just part of my routine and I enjoyed it, but even despite those things I had to reduce my daily practice time just because I didn't have time to do my job, sleep, cook/eat, drive to work, handle regular stuff that comes up in life, and then practice for 6+ hours a day. I managed to keep 3-4 hours for awhile, but then it gradually kept getting lower and lower just because I was kind of getting worn out. These days I finally stopped and don't practice daily anymore at all. I still do practice every week, but definitely not daily.

> No diet I ever tried had any similar effect.

Have you tried eating 20% less every day with no effect? I have real trouble believing that.

A diet isn't just a change in what you eat, it's also a change in the amount.

Read point 4

It's quite a bit more psychologically difficult for a heroin addict to stop doing heroin, but we don't consider that a valid excuse to continue doing heroin.

I cut out refined carbohydrates and lost 50 pounds, and have kept it off for the last four years. I eat all I, I just make sure it is reasonably healthy.

The funny thing about all your links is this:

That most people who lost weight most often times gained it back - yet you somehow think gastric surgery is the cure all when you have to make lifelong changes to your diet and lifestyles and be even more diligent in doing so?

The weight loss for gastric patients levels off after 18-24 months, far shorter than the 5 year mark you use to measure success. I'm not sure how you rate one a success in half the time, and total failure for others since they don't meet your magical 5 year mark.

The problem is, you can't legislate freewill - you have to make a choice to be healthy. Is it easy? Nope, but it can be done.

My grandmother was overweight, had high blood pressure and other ailments. She was able to reverse her Type 2 diabetes through diet and staying active by walking 5 miles a day, hiking and other low impact activities. I had a hockey buddy who was on several different medications for high blood pressure, pre-diabetes and other ailments. Within two and half years, he was off the meds and back on the ice through a combination of intense cardio workouts (P90x, Insanity, etc), weight training, and Brazillian Ju Jitsu - which he had always been into. My best friend was depressed and put on a ton of weight, and became borderline suicidal. He was put on meds and continued to put on weight. Over the course of three years he made various (permanent) changes to his diet and to his life. He started with power lifting, then went to mountain biking, then cycling, then adventure racing, then to mountain climbing. Last year I saw him and he was pushing 40; he was still ripped and finally loving life.

You can't make a switch in 6 months and hope for a five year guaranteed return. Shit doesn't happen like that - it just doesn't. You can't go on a diet for two months and hope that 15 pounds you lost will stay off for five years unless you make permanent changes which is really hard for a lot of people. Finding time and energy to start something new is not how humans function. We constantly look for the shortcut. The shortcut to happiness, the shortcut to getting rich, the shortcut to learning some new programming language. Nobody wants to put in the time to get their shit straight, they just want it to be fixed in some nonsensical time frame.

Everybody I know that went through some serious health problems and got straighten out did not do so in any short amount of time - it took years of dedication, getting up at the crack of dawn, struggling and putting the hard work to get there. No diet can do that for you. The payoff is you get 8-10 years back of your life. You can breathe after you walk up a flight of stairs, you can reduce your cholesterol levels and have a healthy heart and lungs. You can get off your medications, or reduce them from what you're taking now. The upside to being healthy so vastly outweighs the downside and here you are saying - there is no hope, you should give up. How does that even sound to someone who's facing an uphill battle?

Unreal.

Surgery works with a 5 year timeline too, for the average person. The average person does not succeed any other way. It's not impossible - 5% of people in these studies succeed - which is why you see anecdotes like yours.

I didn't think this was true, but apparently it is:

"This study of isolated gastric bypass with a 5.5-year follow-up rate of 88.6% revealed a success rate of 93% in obese or morbidly obese patients and 57% in super-obese patients. " (note that this is a specific type of gastric bypass) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/

Yep

My father decided to lose his potbelly in the early 1980s at the recommendation of his doctor, who sent him to a nutritionist. The nutritionist advised him and gave him a diet plan.

6 months later, he returned to the nutritionist having lost the pot, and the nutritionist was shocked, as nobody had ever followed her diet plan before. He maintained the weight loss for the next 30 years. At one point he was even able to squeeze into his WW2 uniform.

He said it was a constant struggle. But it clearly is possible.

> He said it was a constant struggle. But it clearly is possible.

That is just confirmation of point 4 of the parent post.

It's a struggle in the same way not biting that nail is still a struggle 15 years after one quits biting their nails. Eating poorly and being sedentary are habits like any other.

Bit more than that. Physiological changes also.

A smoker who hadn't lit up in 20 years told me he still wanted a cigarette every day and struggled with it.

This is just defeatism, and falls down here "after completing structured weight-loss programs". The problem here is thinking of weight-loss in the short term.

If you are 200kg, and drink 5L of soda every day, you don't stop drinking soda for 12 months, lose weight and then go back to drinking 5L soda a day and except to keep the weight off.

You change your diet, and keep it that way. For ever. Thats how weight loss happens.

Most people don't succesfully change diet over the long term.

I changed my diet a lot after I got married, and I think it worked mainly because I was embarrassed to buy pie and ice cream all the time. If it's not in the house, I won't eat it casually every day ("if I don't finish this pie soon, it will get all dried out and go to waste!").

Maybe the key is to make diet changes along with other life changes. But I think people do the opposite: "I just started a new job... I'll settle in first before I go on that diet".

Naturally, it would make sense that changing habits would happen all at once. When else in history have we been able to say "I just moved someplace new... Now, where is the nearest KFC?". No, you move, and everything would change, including diet.

A kfc chicken breast and thigh together comes to 580 calories, which doesn't seem bad.

Probably not the best example, but the point is that we don't change our habits because we are never forced to, even when we make fairly big changes like moving 1000 miles away.

And when we can continue with the rest of our habits, it's hard to change individual ones like diet.

Most people do successfully change their diet over the long term - they just change it too eating too much stuff thats bad for them.

Many of my extended family got sick and some died from adult-onset diabetes brought on by eating too much sugar. My father and grandfather suffered and died from low-fat diets (where sugar was never a concern because doctors were obsessed with eliminating dietary fat, period). Even if the outcome isn't obviously fatal, the accumulated damage does not go away and it carries real health risks until death.

And please don't use that weasel word "lifestyle" which the sugar industry wielded as a weapon against their victims. Oh, fatty, go and exercise some more! It's your lifestyle that's wrong, not the rubbish we've put on your table.

And we still see supermarkets with rows and rows of sugar-based junk foods. It's going to take decades to undo the cultural and educational damage let along the health damage.

>adult-onset diabetes brought on by eating too much sugar

Genetics is a much bigger component of T2 than sugar intake.

That may be true, but diabetes rates have spiked in the US (and in every country that adopted a Western diet) during the 20th century even though our genetics haven't changed.

That points to the proximate cause being the change in diet, which means we should figure out 1) what changed in our diet and 2) which change led to obesity.

If you where fat as a child, you'll have more fat cells than normal. Those cells stay with you basically forever. So while eating less food makes you lose weight, those extra fat cells will keep messing with your hormones.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18454136?otool=karolib&t...

The number of fat cells is set in childhood and stays constant throughout adulthood, according to research conveniently titled "Fat cell number is set in childhood and stays constant in adulthood" http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/05/04/fat-cell...

The size of those fat cells can be changed through diet and lifestyle, but since the number of fat cells cannot be lowered naturally, sticking to a healthier lifestyle is extremely hard for a [formerly] obese person, as there's just one thing the fat cells are programmed to do, and that is to grow in size.

I tried arguing the dangers of concentrated fruit sweeteners not so long ago.

There was some debate about whether candy prices were too low.. But the truth is folks get much more sugar from supposedly "healthy" items in the form of fruit juice and concentrates. It is in the bread most folks eat (and sometimes whole grain bread is higher to make it more palletable), they put it in savory foods, and fruit juices and people put it in their coffee and tea. Granola bars and yogurts and a myriad of other supposedly healthy things? High sugar. It would be one thing if the sugar was simply what was contained in the fruit, but often it is above that.

It is much better to eat the piece of fruit than drink some juice - and I think if folks started drinking non-sweetened drinks and quit adding it to so much food (expecially commercially prepared food) it would help quite a bit. Personally, I lost weight after doing the adjustment. My only normal, daily beverages are black coffee or water and have been for years.

The thing is that you do somewhat miss the sugar at first, but I didn't find it any worse than missing some foods after moving countries. Over time, your tastes adjust and it isn't a bad thing.

I've been suspecting that another problem is modern roller mills break up the carbohydrate granules in wheat. It means making 'whole wheat flour' by adding back the bran after milling doesn't give you the same thing as more traditional course ground wheat flour.

The difference is when the carbohydrate granules are intact it takes much longer for the carbohydrates to hydrolyze and be absorbed in the gut. Rolled four because the granules are broken up hydrolyses and is absorbed quickly and results in spikes of blood sugar and insulin which is bad news.

[serious] Is there a reasonable way to eat actual whole grain bread? Every kind I've tried is the worst thing imaginable to attempt to eat...it's a real nightmare. I choke down a half a slice and then have to cleanse my pallet with an entire pizza.

1) You get used to it. Eventually you can come to prefer cheap whole grain bread vs cheap white bread.

2) Try non-wheat breads like dark rye. Dense dark ryes like a good seeded deli rye or even a cheap pumpernickel remain moist and chewy without the added sugar, which is why wheat breads tend to have HFCS or honey added. Note that lots of mass market rye breads contain wheat flour, so be careful about making assumptions and generalizing based on a few samples here or there. With wheat flour it will become stale quicker, and there'll be a less complex flavor profile.

3) Try higher quality breads. Note that higher cost does not necessarily imply higher quality, though that's more often true than not at supermarkets. Basically, the point is to get more flavor with minimal cost in carbs and calories. So a sprouted wheat or bread with nuts might help.

4) Maybe you're just a picky eater, which is a real thing. If all you like are, e.g., pizza and french fries and similar foods from childhood, and especially if things like the _texture_ of other common foods are offensive, it might be a psychological thing. Most people have psychological barriers to eating and enjoying different foods. It took me years to learn to tolerate Japanese cuisine--I could eat sashimi, no problem, but the flavors of sushi and Japanese cuisine in general were off-putting, much more so than other cuisines, even ones that weren't to my tastes. With _effort_ I learned to enjoy some of it. A simpler example is ginger--I hated ginger until I didn't. But some people are at the extreme end of the scale and it's much more difficult to learn to enjoy something even with effort. In retrospect, I've probably known several legitimately picky eaters. It's not uncommon AFAIU and it's fair to dial back expectations if that's the case. Indeed, foods with more complex flavors and textures as I recommended above might be overstimulating for picky eaters.

" But the truth is folks get much more sugar from supposedly "healthy" items in the form of fruit juice and concentrates. "

Or, if you are here in Asia/Singapore, where T2 diabetes is starting to become a big issue- the 3-5 servings of white rice people eat each day is a front page issue on the newspapers.

What is an alternative? I eat a fair bit of rice as well.

Whole rice is not as much a problem as polished white rice. You could eat unpolished rice, like brown rice, red rice, etc., depending on what's available locally, that have all the fiber and other nutrients intact. This will also help fill your stomach with lesser quantity than polished white rice because of the fiber that's in them. If you have access to other grains, like quinoa, millets, amaranth, you could use them since they're somewhat close to rice in how you can use them (tangentially, this not a great idea for regular consumption if these items are imported from distant countries, since they'd have environmental and social impacts as well).

Rice, in general, has a pretty high glycemic index. From: http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...

Glycemic index of Brown Rice is 68, White Rice is 73, Coca Cola, in comparison, is only 63.

But, what makes white rice so really horrible, is not just the glycemic index, but the glycemic load - the net-impact on blood sugar. It's off the charts huge for a typical 150 gram serving of white rice at 43, (compared to just 16 for a coca cola).

Kind of mind blowing, that if you are worried about blood sugar, you are better off drinking 2 cans of 250 ml coke, instead of one 150 gram bowl of white rice.

That's because the Coke is 55% fructose. And most of that 500ml is water, with less than 50 grams of sugar in each can. In other words, there's less than 45 grams of glucose in two cans of Coke.

Fructose won't spike your blood sugar, but it's bad for other reasons, and so I wouldn't necessarily say that two cans of Coke is better than a cup rice.

Oh, definitely not suggesting Coke is better than rice, but if you are primarily concerned about an insulin reaction from glucose loading in the bloodstream, I am still amazed to discover that eating a bowl of rice will spike more glucose into your blood than drinking two cans of coca cola. It's so counterintuitive that I almost don't believe it.

I think eating a few bowls of rice per day (usually combined with a lot of veggies and some meat) is something that has been done in Asia for a long time, why would it be related to a recent increase in diabetes?

There is more than one kind of rice and some are more healthy than others. White rice used to be reserved for the rich, now it's mainstream all-day food for all, but it is rather poor in nutrients.

Also Asia (i assume you mean ready Asia) does know other foods than rice, think various noodles, soups, etc.

As opposed to what other kinds of rice? As far as I know, brown rice is not any worse or better for you, despite popular belief. It's like the difference between HFCS and table sugar. There's a technical difference (e.g. a little more hull with brown rice, or 5% more fructose with HFCS) but it's not really significant in the context of a normal diet.

If you mean different types of wild rice, okay, maybe. But I don't think wild rice was ever a staple in Asia. At least, not in the past few millennia.

Diabetes is likely rising for the same reason it's rising in every other wealthy region.

Asia, like most of humanity, was on the verge of starvation until recently.

I tend to be somewhat suspicious of any 'traditional' basic food getting too much bad press. Rice, bread, pasta. White rice tends to get some bad press here as well, along with white bread. Rice itself probably isn't a big deal. It is probably on par with the bread/pasta eaten in the states and Europe as far as health is concerned. There is healthier rice (brown and unpolished) and healthier bread, but we tend to eat the opposite.

But it tends to be a bigger problem if folks are also overweight - and folks aren't doing it by eating rice or bread alone. Large portions and simply eating too much and so on, adding in fast food and convenience food and all of the snacks. And it is a huge problem if you develop T2 diabetes because of the blood sugar spike.

A lot of people say that the real issue is blood sugar spike, how fast it happens, and what the glycemic index of the food you are eating is.

I always wonder about the whole glycemic index theory. Lot of counterintuitive data here: http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...

For example, where Glucose=100, Banana cake, made with sugar=47, but Banana cake, made without sugar=55, and Brown rice, average=68.

Or, Chickpeas=10, but Chickpeas canned in Brine=42.

White rice, of course, is the worst of all of these at 73. Worse than Apple Juice (41), Orange Juice (50), and even Coca Cola (63)

I agree. I survived a few years of war when food shortage was a real thing. And all we had to eat was white pasta and rice. Occasionally we would get meat/fish cans and similar and a bit of vegetable oil. Sugar was non-existent, you could have bought it on the local market for what is equivalent of $40. So it was there for special occasions only and not your daily poison. And guess what, we were all healthy, people with up to moderate blood sugar issues had no problems at all, back to their healthy selves. I was fit and healthy and feeling great. After that, the food came in and I gained 60 pounds in time span of few years. :)

I wonder if the tolerance, and then the love, of highly sweet things is acquired. And mostly probably, it is acquired when one is a child.

I have met and worked with many East Asians and Europeans who came to American in their 20's or older. Almost everyone of them thought American pastry and deserts are unbearably sweet. Most of them shun from soda drinks and other "food" containing high amounts of sugar. If they drink soda, they choose low- or zero-sugar kinds.

Related or not, a big percentage of American look overweight when compared to Europeans and East Asians.

When we bake from American recipes we often reduce the sugar by 1/2, sometimes even to 1/3.

I am of European descent, and while I had a sweet tooth in my teens, American pastries and desserts were barely edible.

Now that I'm older (and lost my desire for sweets somewhat), I wouldn't touch any of them with a 10 foot stick. They are disgustingly unfathomable to eat and whenever I tried, it upset my stomach greatly.

So are most of your soft drinks, by the way. I cut sweet teas and juices with water to 50/50 ratio and then drink it.

Same here. I love sweets (though I don't eat that much lately because you know, health reasons, I'm not 18 anymore - but from time to time I indulge) but it is not easy to find good ones in US (I wasn't born in the US). Practically all mass-produces ones are unbearable once you have shed the sugar addiction and the built tolerance (which I did, see above). Custom-produced are also hit or miss - many of them are terribly over-sugared to my taste. Finding a good dessert is not easy for me now, though in some places they still know how to do it tastefully. Hopefully as more people become aware of how careful one has to be with sugar, the situation improves.

I also used to drink a lot of soda in my 20s, but once I stopped and my taste recovered, I can't drink the stuff anymore - too sweet.

Americans saying that foods are too sweet is quickly becoming the new "I don't have a TV." It's a humblebrag to show off status.

I am East Asian and came to America in my 20's. I love pastries and deserts, always looking for local pastries to try whenever I travel, to the point to book hotels that are close to famous pastry shops.

Sorry for any misunderstanding my early comment causes.

Good? I'm not sure it's a humble-brag unless you parade around about it, but if people associate a healthier lifestyle with status, then it's bound to propagate.

Even if that's true, what's your point?

I think you got it the wrong way around.

Imitation of habits with percieved high prestige value is one of the most strongest causes of cultural shifts.

Cultural shifts are accompanied by lot of things - including bragging about ones new lifestyle - which then drives the shift in braggees network (social proof if he/she is an average member of the network, imitation of an idol figure if her status is high).

When I first came to US, I found it to be the case for chocolates as well (being a vegetarian, I stay away from pastries and cakes).

I specifically remember trying out KitKat out of craving and it was way sweeter than what I get in India. Tried switching stores before concluding the recipes are tweaked.

I don't think it's strictly a childhood thing. I moved to Australia several years ago and they cut down on the sizes of soft drinks especially compared to standard American sizing. It took some months to adjust, but now when I go back to the US on a visit the entire thing just seems to be way too much sugar. Same with alot of the pastries, although donuts and cakes are about the same level of sweetness. Maybe with less frosting and more other flavors in the Australian versions. And they're not as stingy as their neighbors down here when it comes to sweets.

My family is originally from China but have lived in the west for 30 years. We eat the sweets in the US just fine. My wife and her parents recently came to the US from China...the sweets in the US are too sweet for them and they just eat a little bit.

> And mostly probably, it is acquired when one is a child.

Most likely acquired when one is a suckling. Milk is kinda sweet and the first thing a mammalian baby tastes. All further taste preferences are then largely acculturation.

When you say you don't eat sugar, what does that mean? Do you eat fruit? Bread? Things that metabolize to sugar -- potatoes, squash, tomatoes, grapes, watermelon, barbecue sauce etc. Do you ever indulge in chocolate cake? What about wine or beer?

I just find the term "sugar" to be extremely vague when 50% of foods metabolize to sugar...

That's because you are being extremely vague about the word "metabolize".

Perhaps you want to explore how that word unpacks into many different routes and rates of absorption of the various nutrients involved. How is this altered by the different states of starch before they become glucose? How does the presence or absence of fiber impact this? Which microorganisms are active in the gut in this process?

People used to ask me this all the time when I'd given up sugar. Everyone has their own idea what it means, but no food that has been sweetened to make it taste sweet is a good start. Personally I'll eat fruit that comes as fruit, but bread is a treat-only food.

The basic principle is to avoid refined carbohydrates. If a food is unrefined, then it is ok, with the exception of potatoes, which have way too much carbohydrate.

A good book on this is The Instinct Diet by Susan Roberts, who is a well-known nutrition researcher.

The paleos say we should eat the same diet as our foraging ancestors. The problem with that is different foraging tribes had very different diets. However, one thing they all had in common is they didn't eat any refined carbohyrates. That leads to the possibility our bodies are not well adapted for them, and there is a great deal of research that is n fact the case.

Not OP, but have been ketogenic over 3 years. No bread, no fruit, no potatoes, squash, tomatoes, grapes etc.

The fact that it all ends up as "sugar" is less important than how long it takes to fully metabolize, how much energy and other resources it takes to do so, and what other byproducts the food provides. In the quantities used in many processed foods, the "sugar" that you see on the food label and that is used as an sweetener is generally undesirable for those characteristics.

The issue is fructose and sucrose, people end up getting confused with glucose, which is not the problem.

Clarification: sucrose is a molecule that quickly breaks down into one glucose and one fructose molecule, so it's basically 50/50 glucose/fructose. Fruit juice, honey, and HFCS are also about 50/50 glucose/fructose.

Almost all other carbohydrates break down into glucose and no fructose at all.

So one theory is that the fructose is especially bad. It is processed in a different pathway and might be a lot worse than the glucose pathway.

"The sugar industry has a lot to answer for."

I don't get this argument. What do you expect the sugar industry to do, argue for consuming less sugar?

It is not the industry's obligation to care for your nutritional well-being. It is the obligation of parents and teachers to be informed and teach kids what good food is. That starts with stopping to watch commercials. Avoiding processed foods in the grocery store and cheap restaurants. Not buying products that have more than 5 ingredients, and above all contain high fructose corn syrup.

Buying vegetables and fruit at farmer's markets. Learning again that there are seasons, and that there is no need to buy apples in spring or summer (when they have to be kept in coolers for half a year, or imported from the other hemisphere). Learning again that good products can often be recognized through the nose rather than the eye. Spending time on small-scale farms. Reducing meat intake to 1-2 a week. Consuming fresh water rather than salt water fish (which are harvested beyond sustainability and have led a multitude of fisheries to go extinct already). Preparing food by hand, even if it is "unhealthy" food like french fries (made from potatoes, e.g. in an oven with a bit of olive oil), pancakes (milk, egg, flour - no need to buy this as a product) or cakes (made just with flour, yeast, milk, eggs, and sugar).

Just switch off television to get back common sense.

Most people take in the information given without a second thought. If their information about sugar is biased by the sugar industry, by paying scientists to lie about their product... then yes they have so much to answer for. But, alas the entire food industry does as well. A lie is a lie, no matter which side you are on.

  "Just switch off television to get back common sense."

I'm pretty sure myths and old wives tales existed long before television. At worst television allows myths and untruths to travel faster and more pervasively. But I think generally we're better off with television, especially in a society that values not just individual responsibility but shared responsibility wherein media outlets and commercial interests don't have complete liberty to spout non-sense, like they did 100 years ago. Compared to most under-developed countries the U.S. values more of the latter than you would think. And so major media outlets generally, and television outlets in particular, are much more reliable and truthful than in many other places.

For that reason the internet is probably a net regression in advanced societies. Perhaps people need to watch more television.

Ancel Keys was certainly wrong when it came to sugars vs fats. However, he did live to be 100... so there's got to be at least some merit to his ideas, such as the Mediterranean diet, etc.

No, there doesn't

Isn't the merit of the Mediterranean mainly about increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids through increased consumption of high-fat low-carb foods such as fish, green leafy vegetables, olives, cheeses and olive oils?

Which is the complete opposite of low-fat high-carb diet recommended by Keys?

There are also heavy smokers and drinkers who live to 100 and more.

I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind.

Recently in the last 3 months I gave up sugar, hard core, it's hard but the benefits are out of this world.

I was healthy and active. I ate healthy, or so I thought. Boy was I wrong and mis informed.

I had heard theories so I decided to check them out. I went all out to avoid sugar for a couple of weeks just to see. It was amazing.

I have lost 20 pounds that I didn't think was possible, I think better, I sleep better and I eat way less. I have way more energy, like I drank 5 cups of coffee all the time. I don't fade in the afternoon.

Those of you looking for a way to get more energy and focus at work, especially those working long hours in startups. I encourage you to go all out to reduce sugar intake to as little as possible. Of course eat whole fruits those are ok.

Best thing I have ever done in my life.

There's a saying "those on high sugar diets don't know what it feels like to be sugar free." It feels amazing. Try it. At least once in your life. You won't go back .

sorry that was long :-)

I weaned myself off sugar once too. It was hard. It took about two weeks before the intense cravings subsided, and then everything tasted sweeter. I was getting a sugar high from eating carrots. It was awesome.

Later, though, I started working at tech companies that had catered food, so I didn't control my diet anymore. It's funny how much better I feel when I can choose my own diet. I think I'll make a point of avoiding sugary foods again.

So what did you actually eat? It seems like sugar is everywhere these days.

Amen to that--what is 8g of sugar doing in a serving of /pasta sauce/?

Sugar is a pretty common ingredient in red pasta sauce recipes. It cuts the acidity of the tomato

And makes up about 25% of ketchup...

Vinegar + sweetener is the or a fundamental flavor in a number of things, including barbecue sauce, ketchup, coleslaw dressing, several salad dressings, some pasta sauce and chili-type sauces, cocktail sauce, some pickles, and so on.

By that I do not mean "those evil bastards are sticking sugar everywhere", I mean that this is a standard culinary technique. It may be overused and we may consume too much of it, but it is an old technique. It is also one of the answers to the question "how can so much sugar be everywhere but not everything tastes sweet?" Vinegar is one of the bigger answers to that question. (Even ignoring the fact that we can end up very adjusted to the sugar flavor, it is still amazing to me that some things can literally be half sugar by mass and not taste sweet.)

I also mention it because if you want to cut sugar out of your life, this is definitely one of the easiest places to miss a significant quantity. It's pretty easy to make yourself a great salad and accidentally slather it in vinegared sugar.

Don't forget sushi! It's named after the sour taste of sugar-seasoned vinegar.

Sodas use other types of acid in vinegar's place.

Yes, but the "traditional" sweetener in Italian pasta sauce is usually carrot, not processed white sugar. At least that's how I've always made pasta sauce.

If you look around, there's sauce on shelves now without lots of added sugar. It's been gradual over many years, but I'm starting to find more choices of various foods that have a shorter ingredients list, less salt, less sugar, etc.

Not OP, but:

* Avoid processed anything. Most especially soft/fizzy drinks, baked goods, candy, fruit drinks, jams, jellies, syrups, most processed cereals.

* Eat fresh vegetables, some fruit, legumes. Whole grains for breakfast (rolled or steel-cut oats). Meat, eggs, and dairy if they're in your diet.

* Check breads and other products for added sugar, in all forms: sugar, molasses (often added to "rye" breads as colouring), caramel colour or flavour, honey, rice syrup, agave nectar (nearly pure fructose), corn syrup, HFCS, concentrated apple juice, etc., etc.

Generally, Michael Pollan's guidance in The Omnivor's Dilemma is good: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Many strength training books have good guidance on nutrition (contrast with cardiovascular fitness, though there are exceptions). I'll recommend The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Schuler, Cosgrove, & Forsythe) specifically as it includes a large section on nutrition and meal planning. The fitness advice is also generally applicable to men, though there is a companion title on that topic specifically -- its nutritional advice is similar though briefer.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/new-rules-of-lifting-for-women...

Good advice (similar to Pollan) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481699

What does it precisely mean for a food to be "processed"? "Processed" in general just means "went through some kind of process", which covers pretty much anything (if a local farmer collects their apples in a bin and moves them across the field that's a process) but in relation to food it has a negative connotation, so it must be specific processes the food was involved in that are unwanted? What about these processes inherently make the food more sugary or otherwise unhealthy?

I'm not sure it is a science problem, i.e., processing food makes it unhealthy. I think it is more an economics problem; food processors don't have the incentives to care about the long-term health of the food consumers.

Food processors have incentives to improve their logistics (e.g., increase shelf life) and to make the food taste better (or even, hopefully, addictive). Some brands try to make their products appear to be healthy, but consumers generally have little information about what is going into processed food, so appearance might not mean much.

Of course, even unprocessed food like fruits and vegetables has been heavily engineered by breeding, especially in the last century---and again, not to make it healthier.

I think commonly, processed doesn't mean so much "flour you didnt grind at home", but more "these meats have been ground and mixed with spices and cured" or "they made the speghetti sauce at the factory" or "artificial flavorings and lots of added sugar!".

Not all processing is bad, per se: Factories can make red sauce pretty darn healthy if they want. But what usually happens is that the sauces are filled with a good deal of fat, salt, and sugar along with other things you'd never actually put in food at home (not all of which are bad, but some are misleading - food coloring, for example). They do this because... well, they researched this and found there are 'bonus taste points' if they have the right combination of flavors and feels.

And there is a lot of politics and lobbying to keep the labels more confusing and to use special ingredient names so people don't really know what is in it. Sometimes even when you are trying to avoid something, it is really difficult to figure it all out.

And really, what would probably be needed is some sort of push for healthier processed foods without the weird ingredients. Some things will probably always be bad in excess - cured meats, for example, but we can do better with the others.

"Processing" is a continuum, not a binary. I'll let you work it out from there.

Moving apples around is not really processing them because they are still the same. A better example of processing is when you homogenize or pasteurize milk, or mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because we've been doing them for a pretty long time. It's good to bet on traditional foods because the cultures that came up with them must have survived on them somehow. However, newer processes could modify foods into more dangerous forms. Partial hydrogenation, for example, turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Also, modern processing often comes with new additives that wouldn't occur in traditional diets.

>mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because

There is actually a movement to avoid modern milling techniques. Something about how the high pressure steel mills today affect the endosperm and then the readdition of the separately ground germ and bran produces a different whole wheat flour than grinding the wheat berries as one ingredient.

What do you think about white rice? Google lists white rice (1 cup, cooked) at 0.1g. Conversely, brown rice shows 0.7g for the same portion.

Are these simple sugars? Is this bad for me?

A reputable nutritional guide (and I've listed several, though there are many others) will be far more reliable and complete than me. Please refer to them.

If you care to share your findings, report them back to the discussion.

I've found some data on the subject prior, and I find that it doesn't contain sugar, but acts like sugar, but then that's nullified if you eat it with a fiber, etc. It's more than "what does this book say".

I'm not the OP but I'd guess it's mostly vegetables, nuts/non meat proteins, and/or meat. Maybe some of the less processed grains like flax or quinoa.

The easiest way to eat healthy is to only buy things in the supermarket that have one ingredient.

Pretty soon you'll notice you're only buying fruit, vegetables, pasta, rice, beans & non-processed meat.

Disclaimer: of course you could buy pure sugar or pure lard - so don't do that :)

Do yourself the favor, buy the lard and leave the pasta for the people who believe the broken gov't recommendations.

Also, cheese and butter and possibly milk.

> I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind.

I think you're missing the word "bad" between "is in".

It can be written either way. The "bad" is implied as written. Your suggestion would be clearer.

> Of course eat whole fruits those are ok.

Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery? I just had a slice of a lovely honey dew melon. It was like drinking sugar syrup. I'm pretty sure it was bad for me. Surely the advice should be to not eat too many sugary fruits either, especially not the modern breeds that are much sweeter than more traditional varieties.

> Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery?

In principle it's not, except perhaps for a glass of water. Most sweet fruits tend to have much more moisture than celery.

An unstated assumption that may come with your question is that just like eating fruit is equivalent to eating sugar + celery, it would also be the same to eat sugar, then celery. This is not the case. The fiber and water in the fruit make for phisical barriers that slow down digestive enzimes from reaching the sugar molecules in it. This makes for a steadier release of energy over a longer period of time; the exact opposite of the well known 'sugar rush' phenomenon. [1]

Then there is the issue that most people, left to their own devices, will eat too much of sugar and too little of the other two.

[1] I don't have the appropriate literature at hand, but this was explained to me by a really close person who's been a Diabetes-I survivor for 21 years and counting. His report is that foodstuffs with identical glycemic indexes do cause different, noticeable physiologic responses based on the amount of fiber in them.

I've had type 1 diabetes since I was 12, I'm 21 now. Food with identical glycemic indexes do cause different responses. Bread and food with fibers keep the blood sugar levels sustained.

When I have to skip a meal, I've learned that it's best to eat oatmeal crackers. They keep you full and you don't experience hypoglysemia. When I eat candy-bars/chocolate as a substitute for a meal, my blood sugar drops immensely after a couple of hours. I feel exhausted, my hands start to tremble and I forget words/things.

On the other hand, fruits also have the same effect on me as candy-bars. Fructose is no different for me.

For diabetics at least, sugar is poison. But I can't seem to live without it.

Sorry about your condition. Please do take care of yourself.

I am not going to pontificate about morals, but perhaps you should address sugar as if it was a drug (legal or otherwise). It is very easy to advocate for a "just say no" position, specially for the people that do not face themselves with the problem on a day to day basis. But once you have found that this is not an option for you, it'd be a good idea to manage your habit in such a way that it minimizes associated risks. i.e. Alcohol != Driving-under-influence.

So, definitively not skipping meals. And limit your dessert indulgences to occasions where you will expect to remain in a safe environment for a reasonable time.

Best regards

>Then there is the issue that most people, left to their own devices, will eat too much of sugar and too little of the other two.

Yep. I'm pretty sure the reason low carb diets work is because they eliminate most of the processed junk that people like to binge on. It doesn't really have anything to do with carbs.

It is more nuanced than that, but you've got the right idea.

Some years ago I tried the Zone Diet(TM), and was able to loose in the ballpark of 20 lbs. For the first month, all carb-rich food was strictly banned, and that did have physiological effects. Later, once the process had been kickstarted, non-junky carbs were gradually reintroduced with little effect on my pace of weight loss.

So... I tend to agree with you. People evolved to eat carbs, but not necessarily highly concentrated, processed carbs.

I understand () about dietary fibre and glycemic indices.
Celery has more water than pretty much all fruits (www.herefordshireccg.nhs.uk/download.cfm?doc=docm93jijm4n7467.pdf)
Celery also has more fibre than honeydew melon - 1.6% vs 0.8% (the source this time was just googling "fibre celery" and "fibre honeydew melon", the data is on the results page and credited USDA).
I guess the sugars in melon are inside cells and therefore a little harder to get out and into my blood stream. However, I'm pretty sure chewing frees enough to make almost no difference by the time I swallow it (I can't find any data on that).
So, it seems that table sugar + celery is better for me than melon.

I'm sure I have a lot more to learn though.

Apparently you take longer to absorb the sugar from fruits. You don't get a blood sugar spike that triggers an insulin response like with table sugar.

The same can't be said for fruit juice. Maybe infusing the sugar into to celery somehow would be healthier than eating them separately.

Generally, the advice is that fruit is good for you primarily because of the quantity of fibre it contains. I seem to recall Robert Lustig discussing this point. Fibre keeps sugar in your gut longer, which in turn means it's broken down by bacteria there rather than having to be broken down by your liver. It was in this talk he gave, at around 1hr 13min 52sec or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

That won't work. The sugar in inside fruit is generally wrapped up inside the fiber of the fruit and has to be broken down to access it.

That's why apples, that have a relatively high amount of sugar, have a lower gly index than you might expect.

I can't find a GI for honeydew melon, but water melon is higher than table sugar, even before I eat the celery at the same time.

There's something to be said about eating whole foods rather than eating their refined components individually. Something about the reactions that occur when things are consumed in the form your body expects, together, rather than purified and separated. Some things we call "antioxidants" have the opposite effect when purified and eaten separately from the foods the occur in.

A really smart guy said to me once something like, “if you are smart and have money and you don't eat well then you are not smart”. I can't remember the exact quote but the sentiment really stuck with me.

Look I'm no expert but I'm telling you the results are outrageous. Please do your own research as I only really have a school boy understanding of how this affects the body.

My skin cleared up, my ailments all disappeared, I no longer snore, my wife says I radiate energy and my skin glows. People notice that my eyes are white and bright. My thinking is clear and alert.

I run up a big hill occasionally, a massive one, I did it yesterday, I broke a sweat but my body was working and I got to the top in record time with minimal effort. I had been training for years and never could match that performance. It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.

What do I eat? I will lose some people here, but honestly, whole fruit, salad, no dressing, chicken,steak,salmon and WATER. That's it. I said it was hard but I went 100% zero sugar. Real Food. Nothing in a box nothing processed. I now love this food more than anything.

Why is whole fruit ok? My understanding is the fibre tells your body when to stop eating. It's a natural way to tell you that you've had enough. If the grapefruit it too sweet, don't eat it. Your body is telling you something. Listen to it

Sugar inflames your body, it gives you a rush, then a crash, then it makes you hungry. Sugar makes you eat more. It makes you swing up and down.

Getting off sugar is hard, you will have withdrawals. They are not pleasant.

My appetite and palette has changed for the better, I love food now, I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable, that's a massive change for me. I eat way less I'm spending less money.

Medically all the little things I was thinking of going to the doctor about have completely gone.

3 months in, a lifetime ahead of positive changes.

sorry if this was long and ranty and a bit smug :-)

I really like this response and I do truly believe that cutting out or minimizing sugar is a truly beneficial thing.

But when I got to this:

> I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable

I had a hard time taking the rest of your comment seriously. I can understand it being too sweet to your now adjusted taste buds, but calling it the most disgusting thing imaginable is just plain wrong.

I don't know, I think it is a mental thing. Ten years or so ago I smoked. I finally quit by telling myself that they smelled and tasted disgusting (which, they do but smokers don't seem to mind while they're smoking). After a few weeks of that, one day I told myself, that's it, I'm done, this is gross and I'm not doing it anymore. So, I've not had one sense. But here's the kicker. Sometimes when I'm around smoke now, I want to vomit. I'm pretty sure it's because of the way I quit.

I don't intake much sugar and I do like the taste of orange soda. I think the difference between now and my former self is my body simply cannot process all the sugar in a can. The idea of drinking a whole can makes me feel a bit sick b/c I know by 2/3rds of the way through I'll be struggling to process it.

I can see where he is coming from. I don't avoid sugar and don't find soda particularly sweet, but I do find it to have an off-putting taste of some sort. I can down it if there is nothing else available, but it is definitely not my top choice.

Interestingly, I did love it in my childhood. I think I lost my taste for it around the time that I reached the legal drinking age. At that time I'd try some different drink choices in the circumstances where I would have previous had a soda, and then after not having it for a while it just didn't taste good to me anymore.

> I can understand it being too sweet to your now adjusted taste buds, but calling it the most disgusting thing imaginable is just plain wrong.

Try the 'ol "Grandma Test" on it:

If you had served your Grandma (or maybe great-Gramdma) with a glass of fizzy black liquid, that you poured out of a shiny metal container, do you think she would have drunk it?

I mean, honestly, that would be like putting a glass of used engine oil in front of me today and trying to convince me to drink it.

It's clearly not food, and you clearly shouldn't be eating (drinking) it. Your great-Grandma knew it, and your body does too.

People eat fermented shark meat and blue cheese neither of which 'seem like food to me'. I'm not sure the great grandma test is particularly useful other than to reinforce one's preexisting notions.

I resisted eating blue cheese for the longest time, based on the reasoning that why would anyone want to eat mold?

Then one time I actually tried some - and it was delicious! Now I love it, which was just another lesson in how stepping outside your pre-existing notions can be beneficial.

Pretty sure my grandma would have consumed a glass of Guinness had it been presented to her ;-)

My grandma drinks quite a lot of cola. .-.

Both would have and did. I never knew my great-great grandmother so who knows, but yes probably.

Or... it's an opinion?

How can you say that a statement starting with "I..." is "just plain wrong?"

You really think everyone likes soda? Most sodas besides (diet) ginger ale are sickly sweet to me now.

This happened to me - and weirdly others that have dropped sugary drinks. I completely understand where he is coming from, and the adjustment is that contrasting.

I got to drinking water most times at a call center mostly because I didn't like warm nor watered-down soda. And one day, the soda tasted weird and syrupy. It was gross. And the longer I went without sugary beverages, the worse it tasted. I can occasionally tolerate it with food. The drinks that have soda water and fruit juice are much better.

Some time later, I had a friend cut down on soda. We went to the local McDonalds on a lunch break (small town), and she ordered soda. She took it back because it tasted funny, but it turned out that it was simply her taste buds had changed. I giggled, she wasn't so happy about buying the drink, though.

I can agree entirely with this. I used to drink Snapple iced teas like they were water. After cutting back on sugar, I can't stomach the stuff now. I like sweetness: I'll add a splash of lemonade to unsweetened iced tea. But the presweetened stuff is 10x sweeter than my palate tolerates now.

Sounds like you might have an unusual sensitivity to exaggeration. It is a symptom which affects a small percentage of the population, and is treatable. Talk to your comedian or an entertainment specialist about treatment options.

(In fairness, I strongly dislike soda. I can imagine worse things, of course, but in the universe of commonly consumed beverages, bubbly sugar water is pretty close to the bottom of the list for me. Another water, coffee and almost nothing else person.)

I can't believe how long I laughed at this comment. I literally rolled around laughing uncontrollably on the floor at this comment. All my coworkers are staring at me funny now. This is one of the most amazing comments I've ever seen on HN. Well played good sir, bravo.

I used to drink soda a lot younger then. I no longer drink them aside from using a can every half a year to do cooking (for the effects, not taste), and that was in 2015.

In fact, if you quit soda (and drastically reduce sugar intake), you'll find sugar and those soda stuff very overwhelmingly. At most a sip. The claim is not hard to resonate with.

It seems like an exaggeration, but it's not. Your taste buds really do adjust over time.

I used to drink soda like water. That's just how we were raised(badly). A two liter a day of coke or mt dew. Tasted awesome to me. I loved it. In high school I decided I was tired of being sick and quit drinking soda.

I drank some of my boyfriend's coke recently just to see how it was. Just one sip. It was utterly disgusting. The weird thing is I can still clearly recall how I used to like it and think it was refreshing. In memory, it tastes good. But now that my taste buds have adjusted, ughhhh. Nasty.

>>I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable

>I had a hard time taking the rest of your comment seriously. I can understand it being too sweet to your now adjusted taste buds, but calling it the most disgusting thing imaginable is just plain wrong.

I said this in another comment, but he's just humblebragging. It's just like someone saying they don't have a TV. He's showing how cultured and refined he is compared to the rest of us who enjoy sweet foods.

He's being hyperbolic, but once you cut out sugar long enough sweet things really do taste worse. Try it for yourself and see.

Agreed. I used to really like Dr. Pepper and Cactus Cooler. I've not regularly drank soda for about a decade at this point. Every now and then, I get a hankering for Dr. Pepper. I can't finish more than 1/3rd of a can, and it is just not good. A couple times a year, I can drink a cup of Cactus Cooler still, but that is about it.

Wrong.

I also cut out most sugars. I literally cannot drink Dr Pepper or Mr Pibb (the only two I can stomache) straight. I have to dilute it with plain soda water (unflavoured, unsweetened).

My wife, who still likes sweet drinks, cannot stand the mix I make, and I cannot stand the mix she likes (as in, as the manufacturer intended).

It isn't humblebragging. It's real. Cut out sugars for a couple of years and try it yourself.

>rest of us who enjoy sweet foods

I'll wager there are more on HN, who cut down or take no sugar.

I left it about 10 months back. And recently in a movie hall, I had to take tea with sugar (as their machine could only serve with sugar, very strange!) . So I grudgingly took it. But when I tasted it, it felt yuck! I could barely finish that. So I can say that the GP was not exaggerating greatly, perhaps slightly.

I have had some pretty nasty neurological symptoms due to invasive intracellular infections of the CNS, and been whole-food paleo-like keto diet for more than 1 year now with no exceptions, and I feel damn great, compared to before that is.

And just to show that the other way works as well:

Your diet would be havok for my insides. I simply cannot digest fat from meat very well. I'm mostly vegetarian, and eat a lot of legumes and dairy and grains and bread, vegetables and the occasional fruit. I eat fish (trout, usually) once a week for health purposes. I usually only drink water or black coffee. My main mode of transportation are my feet.

I also generally skip breakfast, possibly have a small snack or two during the day, and eat most of my food late in the day when I'm most hungry. I eat candy occasionally. I cook with butter and cream.

And it is strange that I find much of the same benefits as you. I still snore (obviously not due to weight loss). My skin had no change, but I lost weight. I feel physically better. I now like more 'healthy' foods. Soda is really syrupy most of the time - I can occasionally have some when eating, but not by itself (been like that for years).

I'm years into this lifestyle. It took years to tweak it to where it is now - and each tweak had weight loss. I found you can get over cravings for certain sorts of foods (outside of hormones, that is, but even that gets changed some), and you can learn to like new ones. It is basically exposure, though I still dislike eggplant.

Much luck on your continued success :)

I'm curious, do you have a malfunctioning or removed gall bladder?

As a matter of fact, yes. It was malfunctioning (genetics, not gallstones), then it was removed.

I'm sold, it's no/low sugar from now on.

Here's a rather detailed lecture on the biochemistry (and history and everything) about sugar (and why the sugar in fruit is not problematic).

"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" by Robert H. Lustig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

>It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.

Can't say I agree with this part. If you're doing any kind of intensive cardio work sugars are essential if you want to keep doing it for any long period of time. The harder you're going the quicker you'll want to start eating carbs, be it in gels/fruit (Dates are fantastic for this).

You might actually just have got better, or maybe just might be well rested after a period of over training.

You may wanna do some more research on this, it's not as black-and-white, plenty of endurance athletes starting to push less gels: http://lc-triathlete.com/science-behind-fat-adaptation/

Even with heavy glycolytic training, exogenous carbohydrate intake needs are typically overstated.

Peter Attia (along with Volek and Phinney) has done some fantastic n=1 research in this area [1]

[1] http://eatingacademy.com/how-a-low-carb-diet-affected-my-ath...

> I can't even drink a soda

Given that you call it 'soda', you're probably American... in which case, American sodas are disgusting, because they're made with HFCS instead of sugar. :)

It's still 'sugars', but it's not 'sugar' as the public calls it. I'm someone who eats too much sweet, sweet sugar, and I can't drink an American soda.

You can buy a sugar soda here, though yes most of them are HFCS.

I still can't stand the sugar ones either.

Well, that isn't really the thing. I started the dislike after cutting them out living in the US. A few years ago, I moved to Norway. Same thing. Even if they taste differently.

Not like I could afford to drink them as often here anyway, but that is besides the point.

+1 to this. I recently just started toying with the idea of going sugar free and ketogenic... so I started trying foods without many carbs but wasn't even committed to it. All of a sudden I noticed I had lost 5-7 pounds in 3-4 weeks. So I got excited and kept it up... I'm not losing weight at the same rate but now about 2-3 months in and I'm down about 25 pounds. It's ridiculous.

I haven't noticed the energy or clarity improvements in myself and my wife hasn't seen that in me either. That may be due to sleep as I'm going to school full-time, training for the Chicago Marathon, and working full-time. Given all that maybe it's just great that I can function. :)

Either way! The changes have been amazing and dramatic. My biggest problem now is that I need to buy a whole new wardrobe but I can't yet because I think I still have another 15 pounds I'll blow through by Christmas. I finally feel in control of my weight and it's the best.

sorry...

No, man, it's important to share these ideas. My energy levels jumped when I changed my lunches from carbs&protein (pasta, potato etc) to salads with protein.

You can put vinegar, salt and a dash of olive oil as seasoning into a salads - still no sugars.

If you had 20 pounds to lose, you weren't healthy. You were fooling yourself. Healthy people aren't carrying around 20 extra pounds of fat.

He said he lost 20 pounds, not 20 pounds of fat.

The interesting thing about sugar is that it also causes your body to retain a lot of water. Same with salt.

So losing 20 pounds in a short time is totally possible for someone who is tall.

It's well known that folks who start a low-carb diet can expect to lose about 5lbs in water weight within the first week.

For an average height, the span between the lowest non-over-or-underweight weight and the highest is a lot more than 20 pounds, and being a bit into the overweight range doesn't automatically make you unhealthy either.

chart: http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/Images/body-mass-inde...

Don't forget there's a difference between weight from fat and weight from other sources (muscle, bone, water, etc).

If you lift weights, I wouldn't use body mass indexes.

That's not quite correct. The CDC recommends a body fat percentage between 18% to 25%, and it's generally acknowledged that athletes can drop down to around 5%-6% without adverse effects. So, given those numbers, most healthy adults are carrying at least 20 pounds that they could safely lose.

CDC recommends BMI of 18 to 25. Completely different from body fat percentage. 25% body fat is pretty fat. It's a noticeably protruding belly, drooping love handles, and sometimes breast tissue that could be classified as an A-cup. BMI is a pretty poor standard anyway, since it would classify anyone who does body building even recreationally as obese.

Oops, my mistake. I got confused by this table on the WebMD page below which does list 18-25% as an acceptable range for body fat percentage:

http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/body-fat-measurement#2

So my original numbers were actually correct, but instead of the CDC it's the American Council on Exercise, whatever that is. The page before has the CDC recommendations on BMI. I was surprised too that 25% is considered acceptable. I am aware of the difference between BMI and body fat percentage, and that the former is an inaccurate gauge of fitness.

Considering the American Council on Exercise pushes the "Health at Every Size(C)" bullshit I'd never take them seriously. I can't be bothered to go find real studies on the issue but I would have to guess they'd tell you there's an increased risk of health issues at 25% body fat.

Ah ok, I suppose I expected WebMD to rely on better sources of information. I stay around 7-10% body fat and feel good in that range -- the few times I've gone below that I felt lethargic and performed poorly in sports.

WebMD is the buzzfeed of medical knowledge.

I suspect you're not actually at 7-10% body fat, that is ridiculously low. Like just skin and muscle, nothing else. It is physically impossible for most people to go below 7% without some serious drug abuse or eating disorder. Google image search "7% body fat" and see for yourself.

Your numbers are good for males. Often women have issues if they drop to the 5-6% range... missed periods, decreased fertility, hormonal changes, and other such things. Weirdly, some of the same issues people have with anorexia, only to a healthier extreme. I'm pretty sure they recommend women to have at least 9-11% body fat if they are muscular.

> You were fooling yourself.

I think that's the entire point of his story.

I'm 10 pounds heavier now than I was 3 years ago and I assure you I'm much healthier. So your sweeping generalization is entirely incorrect.

What kind of sugar were you eating? Like cookies, cake, pop, ice cream? I don't have any of those foods in my home. I don't buy high sugar foods. So, I'm kind of confused what you consider to be a high sugar diet. How did you get that much sugar in?

Most likely pop. If you eat out a lot, cheap restaurants will shame you into buying huge unhealthy drinks, unless you want to drink water from a tiny dixie cup.

It's pretty easy to get a lot of sugar in your entre if you eat at Chili's or Panda Express or anywhere else that uses excessive BBQ sauce.

And then there's the fact that Snickers would like you to think it will satisfy your hunger. At least it has peanuts in it...

BBQ sauce is something that I like with chicken, but lately I've been thinking it's gross to eat it. I have switched to red sauce for my chicken now.

Dry rub is good too :D

Have you cut back on carbohydrates too? I'm just curious, since I've eliminated sugary drinks, but I find it harder to cut back on bread, pasta and so on.

Well, we do know that fructose is worse than glucose in terms of its effects on your body because it takes an extra processing step that can cause other complications.

This is anecdotal, but I personally feel better when I eat rice than when I eat wheat, though I don't have celiac disease. It would be nice if nutritionists looked into carbs as much as they've looked into fats.

I agree, especially industrial sugar is bad food, and artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes are even worse. Sugar and its derivatives are massively overused in todays cheaply processed food chains.

Do you drink beer at all? I'd be open to trying to a low sugar diet, but I homebrew and don't want to give that up right now.

I keep finding edge cases when I try this.

How do you handle sugar in yogurt? How about pizza sauce? Is 5 grams of sugar in super dark chocolate ok? It just seems like it's everywhere.

>It just seems like it's everywhere. That is precisely the problem, actually. It isn't so much that folks are eating pounds or kilos of sweets daily, it is that we find sugar in everything - even if we wouldn't guessed there was added sugar. Food companies do this for a myriad of reasons, usually backed with research on taste. It is really hard to avoid.

I'm not as low-sugar as some of the people here. I figure if I'm eating chocolate, I'm eating chocolate occasionally and damn the sugar. I know there is sugar in that. Occasionally I'll have some daily, but it doesn't make up much of my diet, and that is what I'm much more concerned about. My base diet being fairly healthy.

I simply don't eat much flavored yogurt except as an occasional snack. Many people, however, solve this by buying plain, unsugared yogurt and simply adding in fruit.

Red sauces and other such things - make what you can at home and freeze some of it for later use. Or start reading ingredients lists carefully. It would be helpful if nutrition labels specified the amount of sugar added (regardless of source), but until then, labels and a lessened reliance on pre-made foods.

It's everywhere - in the US.

Natural yogurt should be relatively easy to find. Add some real fruit if it's too dull for you (after a while it's not).

Basically try not to eat processed stuff. Sure, you're not going to die if you eat a pizza here and there, but the baseline should be to eat as much real food as possible, as opposed to processed food. Even for pizza, you could find a place which uses fresh ingredients as oppose to a big franchise where everything is heavily processed and frozen. Finally, give it a try to make your own pizza/yogurt/etc. It can be a lot of fun.

and this folks is why I have trust issues...

Scientists paid off by industry to make people look the other way, who then become head of some Governmental departments and agencies advising the world on whatever it was they were paid off for or have a conflict of interest in and the door keeps revolving...

It's a wonder we believe anything at all after the amount of lies and propaganda we're fed only to find out it's false... or are they lying now? Now we're being fed information that it's the sugar industry at fault and not the fat industry, while we have fad diets that are high fat, low carb, low sugar, because carbs and sugar are bad and fat isn't bad at all allegedly. Who is making the money from the increased fat sales and decreased sugar sales? Is it because sugar is cutting into their bottom line too much and fat is in cheap supply?

Why do we continue to believe the shit that pours out of the mouths of big agriculture and the nutrition agencies as if they haven't been feeding us bullshit for the past 50 years in aid of increasing profit. They don't give a shit about the consumer, they give a shit about whatever fuels the greatest growth in profits.

So this is why I have issue believing anything that any of them have to say about anything because it's all underhanded subterfuge and manipulation, with no end in sight.

As far as the actual food sales, most of the money winds up in the same small set of hands regardless of which fad is currently popular. They'll resist trends that switch from high-margin to low-margin foods, but only until they've figured out how to alter the low-margin food to make it high-margin.

The secondary money-grab is from the food-fad industry. All of the books, all of the websites, all of the memberships, all churning out recipes and advice and misinformation, depends on constant change in what's considered "good". Without constant change, their markets would dry up to a trickle. It's just like the fashion industry; if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed. So instead we have a constant rotation of the fashion trends. (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)

The longer I live, the more I value the lessons I learned from my Grandparents:

- Don't listen to the shit you hear in the media, it's all self serving. Do your own research, that way it serves your need, not anyone elses.

- Stay out of the centre aisles at the grocery store. Buy simple ingredients. Make it yourself. If you can't grow it yourself or kill it, you probably shouldn't be eating it.

- Do the research, buy it once, buy it right. Quality will always beat quantity in the long run. Buy something you can repair yourself over something replaceable.

> if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed

A few of us got stuck at a moment in time and never really updated... a decent pair of hard wearing jeans and an endless supply of decent t-shirts that last more than a few months of continuous wear and a decent pair of solid, dependable boots. You may be able to tell that the fashion industry doesn't make a whole ton of money out of me. Don't care, lol.

You had a good set of grandparents. Bottle that and sell it.

Not that they weren't awesome, but we pick and choose the advice we follow and I'm sure I've forgotten as much advice that they gave me as I remember - and that I do remember is really only as it slaps me upside the head with a "holy fuck were they ever right about that!" It probably would have helped more if I'd listened 30 years ago when they first told me and stuck to it, but then I didn't have the hindsight to be able to tell which were the good lessons and which were rubbish; so like all 10 year olds, I ran it through my "you have no idea what you're talking about you crazy old wo/man" filter and what came out of the other side was a kid whose lifetime epiphanies are like a list of what I would already have known had I listened to my grandparents.

Hindsight... crazy accurate.

> (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)

The Bangladeshi children working 16 hours a day sewing dresses for H&M might have a thing or two to say about that.

That's them, not us, but you're right that's a problem with the fashion industry. I don't think it's caused by the fads though; the clothing industry would still exploit the cheapest available labor, even if they were making the same garments all of the time.

The problem here is that Bangladeshi children are cheaper than machines.

It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.

Sometime I wonder if chemicals from bottled water, radiation from Cellular/Wifi/Bluetooth pose health risks and we will find it out decades later.

True. And until then if you resist such things you're labelled as a crank, luddite, anti-science, etc. etc.

Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.

I have friends who would chide me for that. And now FDA bans sale of many anti-bacterial soaps: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/fda-bans-sale-of-m...

I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.

"didn't add up" is a very different reason than the FDA reasoning. Indeed, it's not that anti bacterial is directly bad, but the second order effects of weakened immunity and "superbugs".

It's not being correct if you act suspicious about everything, then something has a negative effect you weren't aware of.

Sorry, didn't go in details of why it didn't add up for me. Agree with your point.

I was reading sometime back that our gut has good bacteria and initially when people didn't understand them there was a phase when some people were using antibiotics to kill their gut bacteria. Today, Most people agree on the benefits of good bacteria in our gut. Around 2010 I was reading an article about other good bacteria which also resides on our skin and then I decided to stop using anti-bacterial. I make sure that I was my hands thoroughly with water and use soap if required.

I never understood the point of wiping a treadmill. I only ever come in contact with it via 2 buttons (start/stop & increase speed).

If I followed that logic, I would have to wipe literally every object that my fingers touched in the gym. It would be akin to touching a door knob to the bathroom, and then wiping the entire door.

There are a lot of unknowns. Chances are it's not going to be Bluetooth, but some toothpaste additive, cellphone case sealant, or something else nobody really thought about that we are going to look back and cringe.

For instance, For a long time diesel has promoted in Europe as greener than petrol. This is soon to change, because: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum...

Diesel /is/ greener when you consider only CO2 emissions and energy efficiency, although turbocharged direct injection engines narrow that gap significantly. If this were the '70s though, I'd much rather have a fleet of diesel cars running around than ones with cabureted gasoline engines.

What about all the people who die from diesel particulates? Failing to consider that is exactly the mistake Europe is still making.

Particulates are easy to deal with using current technology--burn lean, burn hot (and inject lots of urea to get rid of all the NOx that this regime creates), and stick on a filter on the tailpipe to get rid of the stuff that does get created. The main problem is that diesel engines last forever, and a lot of old engines that don't meet requirements are still on the road.

This is partly true: You can reduce particulates, but they're still bad in areas with a lot of less-emitting vehicles. Also, the technology that reduces particulates needs to be carefully maintained to continue working as well as it did the day the vehicle left the factory... and there's plenty of incentive to cheat, in order to save money.

With 2016 diesel technology, the only "less-emitting vehicles" are EVs and possibly CNG-powered vehicles. As for cheating, as long as the manufacturer does its job (by either eliminating EGR altogether or installing a catch can in the PCV system), there is little to no incentive to cheat on the operator's part. Urea is dirt cheap as long as you don't buy from the dealership.

I was comparing modern diesels to older ones, was that unclear? It's not difficult to get enough 2016 diesels in an area small enough to violate the short-term standard for particulates. And I'd bet your confidence about cheating is misplaced; time will tell.

Try riding a bike behind a bus or truck with a poorly maintained diesel

Diesel engines produces less CO2 by being slightly more efficient.

Pretrol engines produce less nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

What's "greener" is just a matter of your definition of it.

> What's "greener" is just a matter of your definition of it.

What i means was that the "promoted" part is soon to change, because of the greater understanding of the drastic public health consequences.

Agreed! But we cannot ignore potential visible risks while worrying about unknown risks.

I use organic/natural exclusively. Try to model my life closed to simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back. I also diversify things I consume. Someone once posted on HN: His grandpa told him everything is poison, so use everything in moderation. I really liked this recommendation.

However it is very difficult to prevent all the radio waves in today's world as much as you try. Maybe it's not harmful but we won't find out for decades.

Many of the "simple ingredients" that people used 100 years ago aren't really available anymore, at least not in the US. That would somewhat true even with traditional breeding and cultivation, but over the past 100 years we've greatly improved our understanding of how breeding works, the rate that we can modify plants and animals, and with GMOs we now have a lot of direct control over the outcome. We just don't have the same plants and animals that we had 100 years ago anymore.

You say you stick to organic/natural. Well, it's all "natural", even GMOs, if you're eating plant and animal products directly. (Eg: stay away from additives and highly processed foods.) "Organic" is a bit tougher; you want it to mean that the plants and animals were raised without getting stuffed with chemicals and antibiotics, but there's a lot of wiggle room there because 'food' is made up of chemicals, and many foods and chemicals have some antibiotic properties.

In the end, if you're not growing the plants and breeding the animals yourself you don't really know if the "organic" label on them means what you want it to mean. And except for heirloom varieties, (and maybe even those) the plants and animals you're raising are still the product of the past 100 years of breeding, which usually focused on attributes other than making them healthy to eat.

"simple ingredients" ... like the coke in Coca Cola?

People downvoted you, but that's not a bad example. Cocaine is an early (modern) example of the food industry taking a natural product that's been used forever, coca leaves, and processing it to produce a much more dangerous food additive.

Agreed!

However it's still probably better to eat organic than something which doesn't even pretend to be safe. It's all relative in the end.

I hope one day I can control the sources and attributes of all the food that I eat. However till then I will try to do my best with my available time and money.

What about people that are living in more rural parts of Europe?

There are a lot of small time farmers there that still grow the same sheep/cows/animals their grandparents grew 100 years ago.

They grow the same veggies on the same rotated soil that was grown 100 years ago, the same way.

Sure it may be a niche but if I'm living around there and eating that food, I think it's pretty darn close to what our ancestors were eating a century ago.

I'm specifically talking about the US, and in particular the majority of the US population. My understanding is that the rest of the world tends to be somewhat better (not as much industrialization of farming and breeding) and of course there are still farmers all over the world who are still using traditional methods.

Organic is pretty easy to get information on. https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/organic-standards

From what I've been told, there are definitely some things you can do that would increase sustainability that would cause you to lose your organic label. E.g. substituting a biodegradable material that doesn't list its ingredients could cause you to lose the label when using plastic wouldn't.

> simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back

Back when they used (natural) lead as a sweetener? :P

Seriously though, 100 years is probably not long enough ago if you're looking for "good" food. White bread was all the rage. Jello+, mayonnaise, and marshmallows were standard ingredients in "salads". Anything which actually looked like a natural food item was pretty much shunned, unless you were poor. The Edwardian focus on efficiency and cleanliness above flavor paved the way culturally for the industrial food of the 1950s.

+ They actually used sheets of gelatin to make their "Jello" as the powdered stuff hadn't been invented yet.

100 years back life expectancy was significantly worse. There are countless things in nature that can out right kill you. Your approach seems pretty ridiculous. (I did not down vote you however).

Little of that life expectancy had to do specifically with worse nutritional quality of food. Access to food, nutritional understanding, and food spoilage, yes.

Much had to do with a lack of awareness of germ theory, with waste disposal -- both human and trash -- with pollution of water supplies, and with poor or limited public health measures against community-propogating infectious disease.

The highest mortality rates were among infants and children, which did a great deal to reduce total life expectency at birth, but had compartively far less an effect on adolescent and adult life expectency.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

At birth, in 1850, white male life expectency was 38.3 (additional years of life), but 48.0 at age 10, and 40.1 at age 20.

In 2011, the comparable values are 76.3, 66.9, and 57.2.

The increase was initially rapid -- by 1929-31, rates had reached 59.12, 54.96, and 46.02, respectively.

While there's been some improvement in later years of life, it's been far less. If you survived to age 50 in 1850, you had a life expectency less than 10 years shorter than in 2011.

I already knew all of this, yet it doesn't really affect my opinion. It provides no evidence whatsoever that going out into nature and picking random naturally occurring foods is more healthy than our food system today.

It addresses the specific criticism you'd offered of eating older rather than newer cultivars: there's little evidence your specific criticism has merits.

Neither of us have addressed the underlying question of whether or not present cultivars and crops are themselves intrinsically healthier or less healthy than older ones. There are some theoretical bases for beliving either way. The arguments against many specifically processed foods are rather stronger.

but some toothpaste additive

About 9 months ago I stopped using toothpaste (my Dentist said it was fine) because I read the canker sores I had been getting for years and years were caused by an additive in tooth paste: Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). Sure enough, I have not had a single canker sore since I stopped using tooth paste!

So, what is the alternative you are using? Water and brushing? Or some organic toothpaste alternative?

I just use water and a toothbrush. It works well.

SLS is organic.

There's plenty of organic compounds that are toxic to humans (not saying that this one is or isn't) ...

SLS isn't that toxic, its just overly an effective surfactant that strips all the natural oils from your skin/cheeks. Its why your hands free dry when you wash dishes with dish soap. Also strong enough to remove crude oil from birds.

Sure, just saying that "an organic toothpaste" doesn't rule out SLS.

So is arsenic.

I didn't know that elemental Arsenic (As) was made of chains of elemental carbons (C)...

The more you know??

Incorrect.

Arsenic is an element. Elemental arsenic, as with elemental carbon, or hydrogen, or any other element, is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Its chemical properties are defined largely by its valence electrons, and atomic mass.

There is no more carbon in arsenic than there is sound in light. They are different things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic

Your parent poster was well aware of that, and also assumed his parent was aware of that as well. His post was a subtle version of "arsenic can't be 'organic' because cannot be composed of carbon chains because it is an element which is not carbon."

The advantage of his version (especially in spoken conversation) is that you can tell someone they are wrong, and typically if they have such a gross misunderstanding, it will go completely over their heads, and they won't realize that you are telling them they are wrong.

Whoosh! </self>

Yeah, I managed to miss that.

Yeah, I was trying to be nice :)

In all honesty, I was thinking that allwein's post was an example of "Not even wrong" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong )

Water is considered an important part of organic chemistry by everyone, but pedantic chemists. Original poster may have been thinking of cyanide but As is often found in plants and animals and is not man made. Which fits the casual definition.

I still use toothpaste, but I've found that using a sonicare toothbrush made a huge improvement in preventing cavities. Also flossing is important.

The benefits of flossing are not backed by data. Seems it too is a myth manufactured by industry:

The FDA had to remove the recommendation from daily hygiene guidelines, as law requires them to be backed by legit science.

That said, I still do it. Makes my mouth "feel" cleaner".

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f7e66079d9ba4b4985d7af350619a...

The cited references studied cavities, plaque, gingivitis and gum disease. I see two other benefits in flossing: combating halitosis and comfort (meat stuck between molars for me is extremely irritating).

How have you found a sonicare toothbrush to help cavities?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481632

I use Green beaver toothpaste http://greenbeaver.com

Calcium Carbonate, Aqua/Water/Eau, Sorbitol, Glycerin, Hydrated Silica, Mentha Piperita (Peppermint) leaf Oil, Menthol, Xylitol, Citrus Medica Limonum (Lemon) Extract, Xanthan Gum, Coco-Glucoside, Calcium Ascorbate, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil.

Don't leave us hanging... what was your substitute?

Nothing. The toothpastes without SLS made me gag. My dentist said using no toothpaste was fine. My Sonicare toothbrush and flossing does the job just fine, and the floride in the water handles the rest.

Fluoride isn't exactly healthy either though, is it?

The dose makes the poison - there's a pretty dramatic correlation between low level fluoridation like the kind that's added to water and oral health, with not much at all linking it to health issues.

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluorid.htm

http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v192/n9/full/4801410a.html

I would not say that is dramatic or even meaningful. The findings are full of statements on how the the studies they considered were "of moderate quality, but of limited quantity". And they conclude with saying basically that they have no conclusion.

I think we may have read different studies. From the conclusions on the second link:

From the evidence available, it can be concluded that fluoridation of public water supplies does prevent caries and is associated with fluorosis.

Personally speaking, I'd call 15-25% reductions "dramatic".

From the summary: "The authors were surprised by the small amount of work identified. In particular, there were very few studies that followed the same individuals longitudinally, there was lack of analysis of confounding variables and there was failure to undertake appropriate statistical analysis."

The whole report has a tone of being the best they could conclude with poor data which is stressed repeatedly. Those numbers put in context of the opinions of the source data makes them not so impressive.

I'm using pressure water (with a pinch of moutwash) - really brings out the white out of teeth. also no matter how much I brush and floss, there's always stuff coming out of gums while watering. I don't do it often as it's quite intensive, but hey, it helped me a lot.

You can even use some salt, or baking soda if you feel like you need a "deeper clean" or the like.

Yep, this is in fact how the nobility did it back in the day!

IIRC, they used something like the Arabic 'miswak', a twig with a sort of shredded end. Is that about right?

Turns out the benefits of flossing are not backed by research. Largely manufactured by industry:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f7e66079d9ba4b4985d7af350619a...

I really don't believe this. The spaces between my teeth are very small, and without flossing, brushing can't clean out the food that gets wedged in there. I've actually flossed after brushing (with a Sonicare) and I still remove food with the floss.

And going right back to the original topic here, those bits of food wouldn't be as big a deal without all of the added sugars that we have now, right? Isn't tooth decay caused by sugar-eating bacteria?

It's damn near impossible to remove all carbs from your diet, even if you try. So, in the very theoretical case of having absolutely no carbs, then you're right. For the vast majority of people on earth, it's simply not true.

I picked up a pack of 10 (count them 10) interstitial toothbrushes at the 99¢ store. One of the best dollars I ever spent. Brand name: "Aim interdental brush". They work just about as well as flossing (I still keep some floss stick around for the occasional piece of stuff that gets stuck that these don't get out). Their business end looks like a tiny artificial Christmas tree, with a small plastic handle.

Heh, anecdotally, I used to get a couple cavities a year, pretty consistently, never flossed. I started flossing religiously a few years ago, and after a week of spitting blood out in the sink afterward, I got used to it. Haven't had one since.

Anecdotally, my wife has been flossing forever and has cavities all over the place. I, on the other hand, never ever flossed, rarely brush my teeth more than once a day, and have no cavities.

Just because nobody bothered to research it doesn't mean it isn't true.

A pinch of baking soda will have the same abrasives.

Chewing neem twigs

so what do you use now? Coconut oil or something similar?

https://www.quora.com/How-much-less-effective-is-brushing-yo...

I use Sensodyne for the same reason — it's a widely available toothpaste that doesn't have SLS.

Actually, most types of Sensodyne have SLS in them too. The "Extra Whitening" type doesn't, so I use that.

Once I switched to that, I stopped getting so many canker sores almost immediately.

Thanks for the tip

I used to have to use lotion on my hands constantly until I switched to castille soap instead of SLS-based detergents.

Whenever I have canker sores I stop using toothpaste and dip my toothbrush in a cup of mouthwash and that helps the sores heal much faster.

In my (limited) experience, canker sores are an allergic reaction. Raw pineapples make the inside of my mouth tingly, and then voila: canker sores. I stopped eating raw pineapple, and I've not had a canker sore since.

I always assumed it would be the opposite: something that a lot of people already recognize as being dangerous, but which lacked concrete evidence demonstrating how dangerous it is. So my candidates for a future "omg we have to stop this" are:

- bad posture at office jobs (probably mandated adjustable standing desks in the future)

- stress from a long, high-traffic commute

- insufficient sleep

- per the article, high-sugar foods. EDIT: technically, a high-sugar diet. Part of the problem is that no one unit of sugar by itself is the problem, so you can't point to any one food as the culprit.

Wasn't there some news recently that sleep deficiency is positively correlated with heart disease?

Something like this http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/tiredness-and-fatigue/Pages/lack-...

There was also some news recently that working in a place that grinds coffee causes lung cancer http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/04/15/474325037/cof...

Probably if the sabre-toothed tiger gets you before the age of 35 you won't get cancer or heart disease. But if you live long enough and the cancer doesn't kill you the chemotherapy will.

You're missing the easy one, caffeine.

and alcohol

You can count flurochemicals as one. Ubiquitous in the water supply. No good way for water treatment nor the human body to remove them. Proven harm. Not much discussion today.

Also re toothpaste additive: Colgate Total still uses triclosan, which has been removed from pretty much every other product already and declared harmful by the FDA.

Your comment sounds like the FDA declared triclosan in Colgate Total to be harmful. That is not true: http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm205999.ht...

"For some consumer products, there is evidence that triclosan provides a benefit. In 1997, FDA reviewed extensive effectiveness data on triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste. The evidence showed that triclosan in that product was effective in preventing gingivitis."

"Effective in preventing X" doesn't mean it doesn't cause harm Y.

Sure, but if that were the case one should provide evidence of these harms instead of making statements that contradict what the FDA's own site claims.

Or you could just avoid it on the basis that possible, minimal benefits that can be gotten through proper dental care aren't worth any potential risks at all.

The FDA proposed as early as 1978 to ban triclosan in consumer products.[1] The proposal was updated in 1994 but never finalized.

"At each stage of the proposed and tentative rulemaking process, the FDA has acknowledged that based on available scientific evidence, triclosan and triclocarban are not safe and effective, or there are insufficient data to evaluate safety and effectiveness."[2] (There are a number of studies you may find that show triclosan causing harm)

[1]https://www.nrdc.org/media/2013/131122

[2]http://www.hpm.com/pdf/Triclosan%20-%20NRDC%20MSJ.pdf

Thank you, I appreciate the links. So triclosan is:

  not (safe and effective) || insufficient data

From a cursory reading, I gather that it can/does cause harm during developmental years, making it unsuitable for children or pregnant/nursing mothers. However, I'm not sure how to evaluate the level of harm it introduces in something like toothpaste. Is it a similar level of harm as, say, aspirin or tea tree oil which are also known endocrine disruptors?

Note: I ask as I use Colgate Total myself and if harm >> benefits at the concentration levels found in toothpaste, then I have a vested interest in discontinuing its use. A doctor might advise a patient who has a genetic risk of heart disease to take small quantities of aspirin, just as a dentist might advise someone with a gingivitis risk to use triclosan-containing toothpaste -- in both cases, a determination of benefit:harm must be evaluated.

Wow now I'm wondering about tea tree oil which I use myself. Have any links you can share?

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/lavender-tea-t...

“The results of our laboratory studies confirm that pure lavender and tea tree oils can mimic the actions of estrogens and inhibit the effects of androgens,” said Korach. “This combinatorial activity makes them somewhat unique as endocrine disruptors.”

The referenced study: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa064725

Abstract:

"Most cases of male prepubertal gynecomastia are classified as idiopathic. We investigated possible causes of gynecomastia in three prepubertal boys who were otherwise healthy and had normal serum concentrations of endogenous steroids. In all three boys, gynecomastia coincided with the topical application of products that contained lavender and tea tree oils. Gynecomastia resolved in each patient shortly after the use of products containing these oils was discontinued. Furthermore, studies in human cell lines indicated that the two oils had estrogenic and antiandrogenic activities. We conclude that repeated topical exposure to lavender and tea tree oils probably caused prepubertal gynecomastia in these boys."

I think it's more likely that the behavioral patterns created by our constant engagement to mobile devices will carry more adverse effects to our mental and physical health than any mobile device radiation.

Not to mention the health issues caused by meat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ

If the past is any indiction, we probably interact with several things on a daily basis that people 100 years from now wouldn't go near for anything short of crazy amounts of money, or with protective gear.

Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk. You can stand inside the path of a microwave communication dish and receive many orders of magnitude more radiation, and what it'll do is make you warm. That's it. Soviet soldiers used to do that in Siberia to keep themselves warm, and the only risk is the dish outputting too much power and cooking you instead.

Didn't those Soviet soldiers have a greater incidence of cancer later in life?

I mostly agree with you. There are edge cases with microwave towers that can lead to vision loss as your eyes heat up, but don't dump heat very well. Further, modern cellphones don't operate in the same bands as old radio-waves.

However, this stuff is very likely to be safe at cellphone usage levels.

Some people wonder if one of our cells have a process to check the DNA runs an electric current through the molecule. There is a possibility that electromagnetic fields could distrupt this. This might obviously be bollocks but to say it's only heat output is also wrong...

>Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk

Your confidence and shortsightedness are astounding.

Do you not see that ~40 years ago scientists were saying exactly the same thing, with exactly the same conviction about Asbestos, Lead, DDT, etc.

We don't know what we don't know, but at least we should admit it.

All of those compounds interact via chemical pathways, and our knowledge of biochemistry is undoubtedly incomplete. However, we know the effect that EM spectrum has on molecules. At the wavelengths in question, it is not possible to break bonds. Thus the only plausible effects would be a result of different vibrational modes or the indirect effect of localized heating. That makes any risk from those technologies very low.

The first day in radar class the instructor put a piece of steel wool in front of a small dish and it instantly melted white and dropped molten metal onto the floor.

It always made me nervous when the class goofballs turned the horns on other people so you could feel the microwaves.

Goofball 1: 'accidentally' radiates goofball 2 Goofball 2: What? What are you doing? Oh, I'll show you - just watch me increase the power on this baby...

It turns out your testicles and eyes are a bad place to receive microwaves.

I submit to anyone thinking of attempting this: you are probably going to get the power calculations wrong and cooking human cells is not fun at all.

Yeah, there's definitely dangerous ways to use microwave emitters. But my point is that your instructor thought that it was relatively safe to give them out in radar class. If they were x-ray emitters, on the other hand...

Fortunately we completely understand light; if you actually wonder about radio and want to bring it out of the realm of mystery potentially hiding dark magic, learn some basic quantum mechanics. As to what you ingest, learn how its made and understand the basic chemistry of the end product. No label gives insight into that, its just alot of research.

Sure, systematic disinformation campaigns are real, but in 2016 those don't eliminate the also very real and verifiable scientific knowledge.

The most believable claim I've seen so far is that DNA might be very slightly conductive. Just barely enough to slightly increase replication errors.

I discount it without further evidence, but sounds plausible.

> Fortunately we completely understand light

So is it a wave, or a particle?

Neither: it's a packet of information that has properties of both.

I'm sure you've already heard that the subatomic world completely defies the expectations developed from having evolved to comprehend the macroscopic world. A large part of this, which is assumed but I believe needs to be explicitly mentioned in this context, is that mammal brains are shit garbage at intuiting probabilities.

Pilot waves get some backing again, so I wouldn't be surprised if another common theory changes again:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160517-pilot-wave-theory-ga...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave

I am sorry to inform you that we don't completely understand anything at all. We barely understand the world and universe around us. To say that we completely understand anything is a fallacy. Also with the scientific method, nothing is set in stone as fact. Anything can change our understand at anytime.

What behavior of light have we observed that the standard model doesn't accurately model? Where is the standard model inaccurate regarding light?

Here is one that I know of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence

I'm not saying we are inaccurate. But look at the history of physics, there will always come a time when a new theory trumps the old.

It's going to be smartphone usage itself, especially among children. We are going to look back and cringe at kids screen-holing (this is the term me and my girlfriend use to describe it, similar to k-holing, and in social settings, assholing) at will. A whole generation's minds unprotected from the screen! It's gross.

There are so many things that we already have fairly strong evidence to worry about in our foods alone: Trans fats in all of our food (finally will be banned in a couple years), BPA all over our food containers, BPA-like mystery substances in all the BPA-free food containers, BPA gets absorbed in our skin when we touch receipts, constant listeria outbreaks, constant e coli found in factory farmed beef, homogenized milk damages the fat molecules, fracking chemicals in our drinking water, artificial sweeteners and their effects on our gut bacteria, preservatives and their effect on our gut bacteria, dyes like caramel coloring, glyphosate all over our fruits and vegetables.

That's just off the top of my head.

The documentary "Fed Up" is about sugar and was the first time I was made aware there is no daily RDA % for sugar on nutrition labels. They just have the grams. They lobbied very hard to make it that way, because having "4700%" for a daily RDA wouldn't look very good!

True, but there is carb count and percentages on labels and it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.

> it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.

You are probably getting more sugar from things you don't think should be full of sugar than you think. US tastes have skewed to sweet so far that sugar is stuffed in everything.

Even in the UK, when I stopped eating candy for a while, it turned out that I found a lot of "ready-to-eat" food overly sugary.

The point isn't that it's hard to figure out. It's that it's harder than everything else that might cause health issues. They deliberately hid things that might look bad to line their own pockets.

How many people know how many carbs are recommended daily? How many know how much sodium is recommended daily? Which of those 2 can you look at a package and be reasonably informed about with no other information?

It's apparently a trick question, as the new labeling is at least partially addressing this.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-s-new-food-lab...

Sugar still remains with no % DV listed, but at least the 'added sugars' has something now.

I imagine people also get insensitivized to such labels. It can be quite hard to comprehend that a big soda can contain more than a meals worth of energy, especially given how you can drink one with lunch and still be hungry at dinner.

There is an RDA for carbohydrates, but:

1) It's way too high

2) It doesn't have a sublimit for sugar, so you can get 99% RDA of carbohydrates from sugar and the guidelines will tell you that's fine.

The only thing scientists widely agree upon about Suger is that it's unnecessary - very unusual for foodstuff. An RDA for sugar therefore doesn't make that much sense. The optimal sugar intake seems to be zero.

The WHO recommends a 50g daily limit of sugar (the FDA's RDA for total carbs is 300g). A single 16oz Coke will put you over the limit. Even as someone who eats relatively clean, it's hard for me to stay under 50g over the course of an entire day.

My wife and I rewatch the obligatory Lustig lecture about once a month to re-anger ourselves at sugar. Nothing motivates like a bit of biochemistry mixed in with political intrigue.

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

The problem is Lustig is on the far end of the spectrum on anti-sugar. No added sugars? Sure, I buy that. Labelling fructose as a poison simply because it is directly metabolized in the liver is stretch. I'm not going to worry that my kids are eating berries because of their fructose content.

Clearly you didn't fully understand what lustig is saying. Its not the fact that fructose is metabolized in the liver that is problematic - its the effects of the process that are horrible and poisonouos.

Regardless, people coming away with the conclusion that fructose is bad for you is bananas ;) Also it is not clear that he is for/against eating lots of fruits and starchy veges of which humans thrive on. Lots of evidence for this too!

Fructose is bad for you. A couple pieces of fruit every day is generally fine, because fruits are packed with fiber, but if you e.g. drink 3 glasses of fruit juice per day, that’s terrible for you.

Even eating fruits isn’t the best though. Modern fruits are bred to be as large and sweet as possible.

Fructose is bad for you in isolation, but so is almost anything, but packaged in the fruit is a different story.

Do you think eating 5 oranges is any different than drinking the juice of those 5 oranges?

"Eating fruits is not best" is something that not only goes against science but common sense. Perhaps eating high amounts of fruits could be bad and but im not aware of a study confirming this (when the fruit is eaten whole).

A large glass of OJ can contain 5 oranges and I can down it in 2 minutes and not feel full.

Eating 5 oranges would take me a while. I eat oranges a lot and usually after one it's taken a while so my body can register I'm full.

There were days in college when I drank 3 glasses of fruit juice with each meal, plus a couple cans of soda during the same day. For some reason, I was convinced that fruit juice was an entirely “natural” and “healthy” beverage. I know better now.

But I also still know people who eat large quantities of fruit continuously throughout the day, probably 8–10 servings daily. They’ve convinced themselves that as long as they avoid soda, candy, donuts, and ice cream, they can just eat as many fruits as they want with no effect. It’s true that the fruits are better than just guzzling Coca Cola. But it’s not a healthy balanced diet.

They’d be much better off replacing some of the oranges with carrots, some of the bananas with spinach, some of the mangos with broccoli.

Fruit isn’t inherently evil, but like everything, it’s best in moderation.

Eating fruit comes with fiber that triggers your body to feel full. Most juice is missing most of its fiber, so you don't get that full feeling. So, yeah, having a cup of apple juice vs eating 5 apples is different: you are more likely to go for the next glass of apple juice than another 5 apples.

Would you be that sanguine about your kids tossing back a shot of vodka every day? If you take Lustig's analysis of fructose's effect on the liver at face value, you should treat them the same.

One drink of alcohol per day is generally regarded as quite healthy.

Alcohol is a carcinogen. Every drink you have increases your chances of getting cancer.

http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/al...

In nature, fructose is almost always found in conjuction with fiber. For example, fruits and vegetables. This combination of sugar and fiber tempers the impact on the body. In contrast, many processed foods have added sugar and reduced fiber content.

It also appears phenolic compounds in plants play a role in helping too.[1][2]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23365108 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22935321

Fructose and sucrose are chemically identical (as in, the same) except that sucrose has an extra glucose attached, which breaks off in the stomach. Fructose tends to come in fruit, surrounded by fibre, which arguably reduces its cost to our bodies. Arguably, I say, because modern fruit is so extremely high in fructose, and because the sugar then hits the lower intestine where it messes up your bioflora, which affects your immune system and so on.

This lecture is amazing. I sort of put some of it in the background the first time I watched it, but now I want to delve deeper into it, so thanks for bringing this up. For people who haven't seen it, IMO, it's a real eye opener. I intend to verify a lot more of the science he explains myself as the industry--and let's face it, it's certainly not alone in this--is hardly trustworthy. Interesting how most--if not all--issues of science and technology boil down to trust.

My wife is having kidney issues which she believes is associated with her nearly daily intake of Advil, but I had no idea that fructose was also a major potential factor in kidney disease. She consumes about 24 oz of soda per day, which is about 60% fructose. So it looks like it was a double-whammy, Advil + fructose has destroyed her kidney function.

Your wife drinks 2 cans of soda and takes Advil every single day? And you let her do this?

Can I ask why you don't care about the well-being of your spouse?

She's a human being who feeds herself, not a dog.

Let me make sure I understand your logic:

If you had a girlfriend/boyfriend who drank gasoline and ate glass and small, powerful magnets every day, you would not lift a finger or speak a word attempting to stop them? Because they are "not a dog, feeding themselves"?

Might I suggest you have a critical lack of empathy if you lack the desire to help people?

> Let me make sure I understand your logic:

I'm pretty sure you have not only failed to understand your interlocutors logic, but failed to understand how your "And you let her do that?" reads, and would better (presuming the question you seem to think you asked judging from this followup is what you actually meant to ask) phrased, "And have you done anything to dissuade her from this course of action?"

What you actually asked treats the spouse as an infant or chattel to be controlled, and is the reason you got the negative response that you got.

i suspect the problem is your verbiage: "you let her do this". there is no "let" unless you're someone's master.

I agree with you. I suspect people think you're being sexist? I am a woman and if my husband drank so much soda I would lay down the law.

I find it surprising and alarming in other people's relationships (in America, anyway -- I noticed this was very different when I lived abroad) how little each partner seems involved in the other's fitness and health. I've heard "oh, but they would get offended!" or something. Like yes, that's certainly true with friends and strangers. But you have a major stake in your spouse's health. It's you who will take care of them when they are sick, you who will pay their way if they cannot work.

I exercise with my husband, I eat well with my husband. We tell each other when we are getting extra pudge. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Of course you should care about your spouse. But you're ultimately not in control of them as you would be with a dog or a child. They control their own actions. You should totally discuss it with them! Even if it hurts their feelings sometimes.

But if I'm pondering getting dessert and my SO says, "Hmm, let me think on if I'll allow it" I'd think he was an arse.

And as far as sexism, if anyone said that they'd be an arse.

I am not in control of any person. I can only advise. "letting" someone do something is not something that I can stop. If I want to drink 20 cans of soda a day, my wife can only complain about it. If she tried to force me to stop doing what I want, I would leave her and continue to do what I want. No-one should be a slave master and control another person.

Also, 2 cans of soda is very little compared to most Americans.

I think after the last few years of these kinds of things coming out, the takeaway is pretty simple: be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.

Don't eat too much food. Limit processed foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Eat a large variety of foods. Be active.

These rudimentary guidelines are clearly difficult for a lot of people to follow, but I think it's pretty easy to avoid negative diet effects by just doing what most people intuitively know as the right thing, even if we consume some of all types of food. It seems to me this is more about self-control and effort level than any scientific knowledge, at this point.

As someone who has a fairly limited and simple diet, what are some of the effects of not eating a large variety of foods?

> be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.

I agree with the latter part, but what's wrong with health institutions recommendations? they look pretty sensible to me. I'm much more skeptical of advice from 'health gurus' that seem to have increasing influence.

The massive gulf in healthiness between fruit and fruit juice is not intuitive at all.

The most important question by far is how to eat less, and the answer is very complex.

Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently. Similarly, there was never a wide range of foods available. I'm not sure we've got enough evidence to say that changing our diet to include lots of fruit and a wide variety of foods is safe. The encouragement to do this is coming from large governing bodies.

I'm off to eat nothing but turnips for a year and get scurvy :-)

Good point. Does anyone know if there have been any studies on only eating in-season fruits and vegetables and how the body reacts?

The original solution was simply preservation. Drying, canning, pickling, etc.

not to mention most fruits have been selectively bred/genetically engineered to have much higher sugar content than they did when we evolved to eat them seasonally

Indeed. And Food Unwrapped (UK TV programme) explained how the supermarkets don't need to say how much sugar is in those ultra-sweet Piccolo tomatoes because they vary and it's impractical to measure. In fact, it's worse than that because mostly they do display the sugar content in the Nutrition Information but it was found to always be a huge underestimate (like 3x lower than the real value).

Still, they're much nicer than the old tomatoes. At least I'll die happy. There are too many humans in the world anyhow.

>Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently.

Which humans? There are many tropical regions where fruit is available year round.

> But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently.

Certain groups like Europeans haven't, but humans have lived in lots of places that have year-round fresh fruit for quite a long time.

The problem with "just being sensible" is the terrible common sense my family has.

“be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible”

That's terrible advice. "Common sense" is what happens when popularly accepted ideas escape proper scientific scrutiny, and that's exactly how we wound up here.

I wonder if this has anything to do with my observation that it's ridiculously hard to find whole fat yogurt, especially whole fat Greek yogurt (!), in most grocery stores in the Boston area. Only specialist and high-end stores such as Whole Foods keep them in stock, whereas the proles get stuck with the sweetened, low-fat versions that contain up to 30 grams of sugar per serving.

Boston area? Oh, I may be about to make you very happy then, especially if you like real Greek yogurt. Sophia's Greek Pantry in Belmont makes the best yogurt I've had outside of Greece. You have to enjoy a good, tangy yogurt, and it will ruin you for all other yogurts. It's best (IMO) with a little bit of good honey drizzled on top.

I mean, this stuff is so thick that you can hardly shake it off the spoon, no sugar, and not too much fat; just a nice protein gel as the yogurt gods intended.

Counter-anecdata: I am able to find plain, whole milk yogurt pretty much at any grocery store I visit out in the Natick area (Natick + adjacent towns). Occasionally they are sold out but it's rare. I certainly don't think it is ridiculously hard.

Maybe my observation has another plausible explanation: everyone is buying the whole fat yogurt, so they're constantly sold out! If true, brings up another question though...why do Shaw's and Stop & Shop keep stocking items that don't sell?

Trader Joe's has it.

Other than the suggestions offered below: Talk to the store manager and request that they carry the foods you cannot find.

Depending on the grocery, some will hear you, some won't. But many (not all) stores are responsive.

Write (handwritten, postal mail) the CEO as well.

If they won't, at least you tried.

Greek yogurt, make it 10% or more or get out! Really the low fat stuff is disgusting.

Try making it yourself. I use a variety that ferments at room temperature (Caspian Sea): just add some left-over yogurt from the last batch to a fresh carton of milk, stir, and wait 12 hours.

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive.

Good thing there is no collusion between big industry and paid off scientists like Willie Soon to direct the narrative around things these days.</sarcasm>

You forgot your sarcasm tag, most people will miss it ;)

Done, thanks.

Your post now fails wc3 validation.

So much wealth lost so 3 people can get $50k...

This quote from the article is a great one:

"It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion"

Has the acceptance policy for prominent journals improved that we're sure this is not happening now? I have suspicions that this is likely still happening more frequently then we might expect (i.e. pharmaceutical trials, etc.).

The basic issue is that reviews are just looking for glaring problems in the presentation. To really test an article one has to replicate the experiment from the ground up. And these days thats damn hard and expensive to do.

For the typical reviewer, replication is probably downright impossible.

http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

The real issue is the reliance on authority rather than actual evaluation of the merits of the papers by everyone.

As indicated in the article, journals at the time often didn't require scientists to disclose their sources of funding, whereas they're now extremely strict about full financial disclosure. You can still get published in a prominent journal with a tricky source of funding, but it will be a matter of public record, and your results will (in theory) be more heavily scrutinized.

What if this backlash against Sugar is as extreme as the initial marketing? What if 50 years on, people come back to say, "the generation that endlessly promoted tasteless food and took away the sweetness". Is there a proper study on the effect of eating a sweet chocolate everytime you feel like it, to some kind of happiness? Everyone just sees to be treating this as a magical wand... while still irrationally giving in to a lot of other hyped up food.

Possible but unlikely. For one, you can get lots of tasty food by reintroducing more dietary fat. One of the main culprits for the over reliance on sugar for tastiness in the first place was the focus on reducing fat intake.

In my experience, tasteless food and sweet food are positively, not negatively correlated. The blandest food (lowfat yogurt) is often the sweetest while the tastiest food (ribeye steak) has no sweetness at all.=.

Aye, exactly my thinking. The French woman who lived the longest (122) has reportedly eaten a kilogram of chocolate every week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

Personally, I don't subscribe to any of these dietary fads (including 'cutting sugar'). Just eat less, and you'll do fine.

Follow the money and you will find the motive for what you're being told. There is a reason you're being told what you are and don't believe that it's for your own good. These industries and agencies don't care about what's good for you, they are self serving and only care about what's good for them. You're just the vessel supplying the cash they're after.

Follow the money and you will find the motive for what you're being told.

That is definitely true, but way beyond the scope of almost everyone that is targeted by the things that should be questioned.

> way beyond the scope of almost everyone that is targeted by the things that should be questioned

and this is both why the lobbyists are successful and shouldn't be trusted

I wonder that sometimes about seat belt laws and stop smoking campaigns. Is it the insurance companies that lobbied for and promote these ideas, or is it some altruistic group that actually cares about my well being instead of profits?

Seat belts and many other automotive safety improvements were driven by insurance companies. That's a fortunate case of incentives being aligned.

It's surprising that health insurers aren't more vocal about sugar. Diabetes and obesity are expensive for them.

Follow the money, I'll bet you dollars to donuts there's a reason for it... like executives having conflicting interests that result in either direct or indirect financial stakes in or hidden kickbacks from the sugar industry.

Companies of these sizes have departments that are aware of the entire picture and everything is scripted, choreographed and quite deliberate - except when it serves their purpose to play dumb: "Hey DOJ, <sheepishly> we're real sorry, but we weren't aware of this massive conflict of interest that we made billions off! Please, take this $50m (from our $958m profit) as our mea culpa and divide it up between to 284 million people it affected as our way of saying sorry, we fucked up."

I'm sad now.

There have been studies showing that one, roads that "Look hard" instead of the wide & straight & obstacle-free variety make drivers slow down and pay more attention. I forgot what the influence on accident rate is. Two, same without seat belts, people drive more slowly.

That said, I think overall seat belts are better to have, and we can't redo our highways in a manner that makes people drive more carefully. Instead we need to and do turn the wheel of progress faster and head towards AI drivers on even "cleaner" roads. The planet is way too crowded for idyllic driving pleasure, especially since humans gravitate towards population centers. We can't have the "free driving" of former days back in most places.

Seat belt laws are largely thanks to Ralph Nader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Unsafe_at_Any_Spee...

From the article I can't tell if the sugar industry hid or falsified data.

There are at least two ways you can look at this. Imagine if the sugar industry thinks they are getting a bad rap about heart disease, and want to get researchers to study the link and show that they aren't to blame. Conversely, maybe they knew there was a link and were paying researchers to downplay it (or worse).

I feel like this article just points out that the sugar industry funded research, but it never points to actual misinformation that resulted from it -- or did I miss it?

Of course this happened. Duh. It's still happening today. I'm not saying where because I don't know where. But if you do the simple math about how many people are working as scientists, it's not hard to figure out that there are companies who could benefit from positive scientific findings--no matter how wrong--and realize that some of what we're reading in original research was paid for and not really true.

I wish people would keep that in mind when they get all worshippy about science being self-correcting and a great system.

It's not a particularly great system if you are looking, for example, for certainty. If you want absolute certainty, a good dose of syllogist reasoning will serve you better than any inductive method.

The problem is that syllogistic methods break down very quickly in real world applications because you have to find ways of classifying all the objects that may or may not fall into your category of "all", "some", or "none".

The scientific method is not a bad method, but it's not great. And it's weak in ways like this. It is not even close to the best method. But it's the only one we've found that's generally applicable to the human endeavor.

That's all it is. Better at being more general. I wish we'd get over ourselves and be honest about that.

It doesn't help when most of the information you hear regarding nutrition has been to underwrite the profits of multi-billion dollar corporations that are only out for one thing: Your money... and they don't care what means they have to use to get it. For instance buying exclusive access to resources that you had free access to for pennies on the dollar so that you don't have access to it any more and then selling it to you for gross profits... and I don't mean that in a taxation sense of the word gross. I mean that it's quite literally disgusting.

I'm looking at you Nestle, but realistically, you're just one example of the systemic corruption and propaganda that is pervasive across the entire nutrition market.

The less political the subject, the better the science about it. That's why I love maths. Nobody bribes a set of mathematicians to incorrectly claim the Collatz Conjecture has been proven.

This is the definition of chutzpah: "The [sugar] association also questioned the motives behind the new paper.

“Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research,” the organization said. “We’re disappointed to see a journal of JAMA’s stature being drawn into this trend.”

Yes, the dubious ethics and research quality at issue here are clearly JAMA's, and not the lobbyists' who, by their own admission, paid scientists to publish a journal article to exonerate their own industry.

I thought the book "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes was a pretty interesting read in the sugar vs fat debate.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259

The bitter truth about sugar: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM

CTRL+F to see if anyone posted it, and sad to see it so far down. This is the #1 video to show anyone that thinks sugar is fine. It's literally, at a biological level in high doses, poison to our bodies. Watch the vid. It will open your eyes. Too bad the food industry fabricated their lies decades before we had the internet to share information like this. The damage is done and will take decades to undo.

The biggest problem with our health, however, is still Obesity. Just as the fat were mislead by being made to believe that "low fat == healthy" these people will be similarly think "low carb == healthy" and proceed to get obese on low-carb foods.

Face it, if you're a healthy weight, by body-fat percentage, you don't have to worry about fructose vs glucose or fat vs carbs.

Americans need to put their forks down. We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.

> We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.

Ha, that's a good one. The answer you'll get is that nobody is responsible for their expensive lifestyle choices, and everyone is a victim of the system. People are fat? Not their fault; they live in food and exercise deserts and/or are trapped in the poverty cycle where they can only afford garbage calories. What, they are middle class? Genetic, then. Their parents are fat and it takes an overwhelming amount of effort to break the cycle.

The only solution is to change the system, not people. Which, unfortunately, can have adverse effects on healthy weighted people that like the current system.

Weight should probably be taken into account for insurance premiums. But you shouldn't single them out as the only unhealthy people in the world.

Drinkers, drug users, smokers have huge impacts. People who engage in anal sex transmit a hugely disproportionate amount of STDs.

Non-obese people who eat unhealthy are also a problem.

"They cost us money" is often just an excuse to discriminate or control other people's lives.

It's cheaper to eat unhealthy than healthy foods in America. Only the rich or upper middle class can afford healthy food.

I recently am finding it really hard to find non low-fat yogurt. Not fun.

> We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.

Accountable to whom?

Here's a suggestion: Mind your own business. Don't concern yourself with things that don't concern you.

On the other hand, I think the low carb/keto people have taken the pendulum too far in the other direction. A lot of research seems to suggest that a plant based diet heavy on whole fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts is healthier than one consisting of animal fats and protein. It makes sense when you look at the diets of the healthiest people on Earth. Just because excess processed sugar is bad for you doe not mean all carbs are unhealthy.

Low carb and keto is consistent with a vergatable, plant and especially nut diet.

> Whole fruits

What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural - neither oranges nor apples have historically been as sweet as they are now.

Whole fruits are pieces of fruit from a tree, that you bit into, as opposed to fruits that have been chemically mechanically/processed to extract some molecules (sugar) and discard others (especially the pulp/fiber)

Modern meat is also unnnatural, engineered by the agriculture industry.

> Modern meat is also unnnatural, engineered by the agriculture industry.

Aren't you conflating "natural" with safe/nutritious/good for you? Or am I misreading your comment. (It seems to strongly indicate you believe that "unnatural" things are bad for you.)

> Modern meat is also unnnatural, engineered by the agriculture industry.

Doesn't matter, because we digest and absorb plant matter only extremely inefficiently compared to all true herbivores and animal omnivores --- no matter how much more palatable we engineered/bred those plants to be; and we digest meat nearly as efficiently as any of the truest carnivores in the wild --- again, no matter how far removed by now our agricultural breeds are from their original ancestor stoneage species.

Well I don't agree that modern fruit is "unnaturally" sweet. If anything, the fruits you get in supermarkets today are watery and bland compared to locally grown stuff. Compare a strawberry bought at a farmer's market to one you buy at a grocery store, for instance.

Obviously it's possible to overdo anything, but fruit gives you a whole assortment of fiber and nutrients that you don't get from processed sugar. In moderation it's extremely healthy.

There's a world of difference between something fresh off a plant and something ... not fresh out of a (chemical processing) plant, as most processed foods are.

Yes, ag breeding has created foods which are far removed from their ancestors. But get this: effectively none of the foods eaten by humans today existed in anything resembling their current form as little as 10,000 years ago.

Wheat ... was a wild grass occurring in the Mesopotamian valley. Corn was ... teosinte, a small, hard-kerneled Central American plant. Rice was a wild marsh grass found in the Yangtse river valley. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, horses (probably initially hunted for meat, only later exploited for draught), were bred from ancestors only distantly similar to today's major breeds. Apples were wild fruit tree from Turkey which didn't breed true. Etc., etc.

There's an online "tree of life" showing the evolutionary history of plants and animals, and what was shocking to me was the recency of most of humans' major ag and animal foods -- they're literally younger than our species, by far.

That's not to take away entirely from your point. But humans have been relying for much the past few thousand years, and certainly centuries, on foods far removed from their origins.

>What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural.

I am slightly skeptical. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% on the no added sugar train. But I regularly go and pick wild blackberries from a thicket that has been there for about 100 years and they are like pure sugar. Easily sweeter than any storebought berry.

A diet of animal parts (i.e. ALL of the animal, not just muscle) and leafy, non-starchy plants, is perfectly keto-compliant. Who says that a low-carb diet excludes plants?

I'm pretty sure that's why low carb/keto diets work: they force you to avoid most processed junk food. However I don't think it has to do with carbs. I'm pretty sure you could get the same results eating potatoes, corn, beans, rice, etc.

4 years ago I did a strict no-carb diet for about a year and lost 40 lbs. Then I started eating only starches I had cooked myself - potatoes, rice, beans, some pasta, etc. I gained it all back. I'm doing it again now and have lost 35 of my original 40, but I have no intention of re-introducing starches into my diet afterwards. Aside from the weight control benefits, keeping starches out of my diet makes me feel so much healthier, it's insane. I eat lots of green vegetables, nuts, meat, eggs and a small amount of full-fat dairy. Cured or salted meat doesn't seem to be any worse than fresh meat, but most of what I eat is just plain fresh grilled steak or chicken.

I'm pretty sure you can't. Potatoes, corn, and rice don't make you feel full and satisfied for long, and the surprisingly high rates of diabetes and obesity in low-income agricultural communities suggests that their high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets aren't exactly the healthiest.

This makes me remember the late Dr. Atkins of the "Atkins Diet" who was pretty much the laughing stock of dietitians then and now.

Yet people that tried the diet have found life-long positive health impacts. I'm one of these people.

I would also like to put some blame on so-called dietitians, who up until very, very recently would have warned you against a low carb diet.

Every dietician I talk to is so absolutely sure about what they recommend and believe.

False dichotomy. Both sugar and saturated fats are bad. Processed foods in particular.

Atkins died fat and with a heart problem. An extremist but not a scientist.

There seems to be increasing evidence that high blood sugar over a long period of time is very bad for you. That insulin response keeps this under control mostly... but that it was probably never meant to be active all day, every day. So eating lots of sugar (and carbs in general) at every meal is probably long term, not the best thing you can do.

The sugar industry was also the main driver of the African slave trade. When you have strong selection bias against morally principled people joining an industry (as there must have been in, say, 1850) it's hard for an industry to ever recover a moral compass.

Maybe you have a lot of information that I don't (I'm hardly an expert here), but describing it as the main driver seems like a stretch. In the Caribbean, I can see your statement being true. But in the US, as I understand it, it was more general agriculture / cotton. And so far as I know, a huge proportion of slaves were sold into the Middle East, and I assume they didn't have a huge sugar trade there.

This teaches among many lessons, one in particular: We can't take anything for granted. A lot of people use research studies in arguments as it was the absolute truth. The papers can be wrong, or even true but for a narrower sample, or even worst, faked.

The lecture "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" by Robert H. Lustig explains some details about the harmful effects of sugar:

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

I am honestly mostly scared by how cheaply those scientists were brought. I mean 50 grand?

Not even, the number is ~7,000, but the article is using inflation adjusted dollars to make the number sound bigger.

It is also unclear whether they got that amount each, or in total.

You realize the absolute number is virtually meaningless? Inflation adjusted is the best number, with the caveat that your inflation index needs to be good.

Not sure how it is better for the article to never include the actual, factual, payment amount. If you have an agenda to minimize the number you only print the original, if you have an agenda to maximize, you only print the inflation adjusted.

It would be better for the article to include both. Because what happens is people start throwing around the 50k number without the "inflation adjusted" like in the parent comment.

No, the inflation adjusted value allows a person reading it to compare it to the buying power of the time they live in to understand how much money it actually was. Having a monetary figure expressed in a time other than as an analog to the present reduces the usefulness of the figure.

I'll take facts over context, but would be happy with both. I'm fully capable of figuring out the inflation adjusted number, but now we don't actually know what they were paid.

I also guarantee you they we will see secondary reporting of this article, and the 50k number will be in it, and the inflation adjusted/today's dollars piece will get lost.

If you can convert inflation adjusted to today's money, why can't you do it backwards?

To your second point, you're probably right. Journalism is in a sad state these days.

It's not that you can't work in reverse and get an estimate, its just that you can't know if it is accurate. What if the journalist made a mistake in their inflation calculation?

They are clearly rounding to the inflation adjusted number, and we don't know what year they received payment.

That's a good point. Trusting your math of a selection of people that are typically bad at math, and that have a bad track record of accuracy in general, is probably not a good idea.

This is the kind of thing I think of when people here on HN try to convince me that glyphosate is safe. When so much money is at stake, corporations naturally try to influence the science, and unfortunately, there are plenty of poorly-paid and/or dubiously-ethical scientists in the world who will take their money.

Under such circumstances I think we have to be massively skeptical of any result that aligns with the business interests in question. When public health is at stake, the burden of proof should fall very heavily on those claiming their product is safe.

Honey is a strange alternative to sugar. For the past 2 decades, I have used honey as the sole sweetener, though the rest of the family continues to patronize sugar :( The trouble with honey is that it's seriously pricey, and the community is a something of a cult - you have to know a lot of the terminology, otherwise you'll walk out with sugar-water. I take an empty 1 gallon jar to the honey store in Sac, and pay $100 to fill her up. I have experimented a lot with the cocktail over the years. Generally, avoid anything"American" ie. sweet light colored honey. Go for the raw unfiltered darkest thickest broth you can find. They have gigantic jars of various colors, so I sample from the darkest ones. Then add a few grams of propolis and a few scoops of nectar and a few combs. Top it off with manuka and part with $100. Lasts 3 months. It tastes weird and too thick and gooey, but it's an amazing product. All the debris floating around on it is supposedly packed with enzymes etc.

There isn't a significant health benefit to using honey over refined sugars. Sugar is sugar.

Sugar is sugar, but honey is interesting in the flavors and aromas it can provide outside of your standard white sugar.

Just to add if anyone is interested in honey as a sweetener - What dxbydt was saying with honey being ~$8/lb is a good price for identifiable flower honey. Wholesale is roughly $4-5/lb, depending on varietal.

There's a significant range in flavors and aromas depending on what type of flower produced the bulk of the honey. Don't need to avoid anything on colors, it's primarily based on what type of flower is used to produce the honey. Try a sampler, most apiaries/honey specialty shops will sell you a small container of each varietal they have. Avoid heat treated honeys, heating the honey to have it pass through a filter will get rid of a lot of the aroma. You'll see a lot of "raw, unfiltered" at specialty shops.

If you're interested, you can ferment meads with a minimum of ~1.5 pounds per gallon, depending on how strong you want the resulting beverage.

1 gallon of honey lasts you three months? I have a 12 oz jar that has lasted me almost a year, and I use honey closely to exclusively.

1 gallon honey over 3 months is about 11 teaspoons of sugar equivalent.

It's about 184 calories of honey/day.

Let's not forget how WW2 propaganda shifted blame to sugar. Where the fictional notion of a "sugar high" was invented to connote an illicit character that will get your children that much closer to the reefer madness. All to manipulate the public into conserving sugar needed for the war effort.

A sugar high is not fictional. I do in fact get a sugar high. Just ask my co-workers. I sometimes use a threat of eating a candy bar, which will make me hyper before I crash.

This was a great documentary on the subject, I saw it on Netflix I don't know if it's there anymore though:

https://vimeo.com/122387548

http://sugarcoateddoc.com/

What about the fat industry? Didn't they have enough money to pay for scientists to shift the blame to sugar?

Fat based foods are pricier vs sugar based. Given limited household budget for food, margins tend to be lower on Fat based products.

And you can eat a lot more sugar based food vs fat based food on per food weight basis.

I believe there isn't a fat industry, can you imagine manufacturing fat? Paid for by the Fat for America Industry.

There actually are fat factories I know of one in New Jersie, whether it's an industry I don't know.

I guess the closest is the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers (http://www.iheartbutterytaste.com/).

What? Where do you think soybean, corn, Canola/rapeseed, peanut, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, olive, coconut, and palm oils come from?

Animal fats are rather expensive in comparison, but I can also buy pork lard, beef suet, and butter rather easily.

The problem there might just be fragmentation. Growers of cane and beets (and sorghum, too, I guess) have basically just one major homogenized end product: refined sucrose. There are a few related products, like molasses, brown sugar, and confectioners' sugar, and the stuff like bagasse, that tends not to be seen by consumers, but refined sucrose is the moneymaker. Corn growers can also side with the sugar lobby thanks to corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.

There's definitely an industry ($800M/year?), but it isn't one that has a great common marketing association around, to collect dues and pitch catchy slogans that play well on television and radio.

The soy and Canola/rapeseed growers might come together to promote B20 biodiesel, though, while simultaneously bashing palm oil plantations. I can't currently imagine anyone trying to convince me to eat more fats and oils in my diet, at the expense of sugars. Low-carb is still largely seen as an irresponsible, unhealthy, fad diet in the mainstream.

They're not as powerful as the sugar lobby, but they did manage to get out recommendations that unfairly demonized saturated fats and promoted unsaturated fats.

Probably not without the corn subsidies that make sugar so cheap.

Is there a "fat industry"? Sugar production is very industrialized, just a few companies with a strong lobby.

Fat is much more diverse. Sure, there are a few giant soybean oil producers, but it's not their only product, and individual companies don't dominate their market.

The pork industry for one.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon_mania and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-...

There are definitely meat and dairy industries.

But they are happy to remove the fat and sell you fat-free and/or low-fat versions of their products - just see American supermarket shelves (not nearly as much of that here in German, although even here the low-fat versions are more numerous and more prominently placed). This is hard with sugar-free sugar... :)

Which is why the average American store shelf is full of painfully lean pork and nonfat Greek yogurt (Seriously, WTF?).

Guess they were busy destroying the reputation of lard.

The dairy industry is backing all these sugar bad, and implicit or explicit fat good. In particular discrediting valid research warning on saturated fats. Against the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and even NHS.

I watched this documentary titled "That sugar film" [1] a year or so ago. It was quite an eye opener. Although I knew processed foods had a lot of sugar (like we expect sodas and colas to have), what was shocking was the amount of sugar added even in foods where you would never think of sugar as an ingredient. Of course, this varies across different geographies and cultures, but if people consuming processed foods spend some time reading the ingredients in whatever they buy and learn more about them and the proportions, it could help in bringing some changes (I realize this is a rather simplified view). We also need more education and awareness to be spread around to effect a change in people's habits.

[1]: http://thatsugarfilm.com/

see also the really well done movie "That Sugar Film" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/) where exactly this connection is laid out in the first part.

It is available on Amazon Prime last I checked. I've recommended it many times over to friends.

First of all, there is no daily recommended value on sugar because that value is 0.

Then, a can of regular Coca-Cola (and most sodas) has about 38g of sugar. 38g doesn't sound like a lot, but would you take a cup of coffee with 8 teaspoons of sugar? That's what 38g is, 8 teaspoons, for a single can. Many kids drink multiple cans a day, with sugary cereals, pancakes with syrup, snacks, and adding all that up they end up consuming over 100g and end up severe obesity and diabetes.

So food with sugar but also a decent amount of fiber is fine? Like vegetables, certain fruit and whole grain bread?

What should the fiber:sugar ratio be? Broccoli has 1.7g sugar and 2.6 fiber per 100g. Bananas have 12g sugar and 2.6g of fiber. I guess you should avoid food that goes below 1:1?

Glycemic index/load help a lot to answer these questions.

We're going to need another Surgeon General's warning, it seems.

pure gold comment by Eduard Fischer (in Reader's pick section):

"Last week while traveling in the US, I witnessed a mother place a cola soft drink in front of a young child. The girl began to sip on the drink, the volume of which I estimated to be about twice the size of the girl’s head. I was tempted to make a remark, but remembered that I was in a foreign country where the citizens are famously well armed and roughly half the folks eligible to vote have lost their minds..."

Sugar industry is guilty in that case, but let's not put all blame on them. It is the whole society that wanted to believe that mass consumption of sugar is OK.

I'm American and sugar doesn't taste good; I must be very lucky.

how to fat industry shifted blame to sugar in return

> One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.

This is why I'm cynical.

Obesity as the end all be all measure of health is flawed and out-dated.

The real damage is being done silently, ie. cell damage, DNA damage, telomere shortening, endocrine disruption.

Visual cues may or may not be there.

Can anyone recommend a 'healthy' alternative to sugar? Primarily for sweetening Coffee.

Nope :D

But truth be told, I only drink black coffee. Now. I used to put lots of sugar and cream in coffee. I simply started cutting back slowly. I got rid of the cream first, and when it got to the point I was wanting less than 1 package of sugar in a McDonald's large coffee, I just stopped using it, though I could have cut down a little more.

For the first week or two, the coffee seemed a bit bitter, but in the years following, it has been just fine. And much easier to order.

Agave or Honey although they do impart some taste to the coffee

I wouldn't recommend any of these either. They are rich in fructose.

This bad advice may have directly contributed to the deaths of millions of people.

Well that escalated quickly

Only saw the documentaries a few months ago. I'm glad this awareness has pushed for deeper more reputable investigation.

you sir are my hero.

please avoid making comments like this. you do not contribute to the discussion and you embarrass yourself.

please avoid making comments like this. you do not contribute to the discussion and you embarrass yourself

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481745 and marked it off-topic.

The scientific consensus is that weight gain is caused by saturated fat. Anybody who disagrees with the consensus is anti-science and a fat-denier. Any scientists who disagree with the consensus must have being paid off by Big Fat.

Even Crisco agrees that their products are the cause of Global Fattening and is working on alternatives to oil. Companies that produce saturated fat products should have to buy Fat Credits and fat skeptics should be thrown in prison!

But what about all the actual scientific evidence that a low-carbohydrate high-saturated fat diet results in weight loss? Well, I never said that weight gain causes weight gain or a Global Fattening. What I said was it causes "Body Change".

Body Change means eating saturated fat will make you become deathly skinny or morbidly obese or grow a tail or get cancer or contract herpes or go blind or a million other medical problems.

Basically, if something is wrong with your body, it's because of Body Change. Child falls off jungle gym and breaks its leg: Body Change. Man dies of heart attack in China: Body Change. Conjoined twins: Body Change. Down's Syndrome: Body Change. Hot flashes: Body Change. Wet dream: Body Change. Body change hides under your bed at night waiting to murder you with saturated fats.

Some people say that Body Change is idiotic and unscientific! I guess they believe bodies never change. What morons!

When in fact nothing can be blamed but our overconsumption of almost everything but vegetables and fruits.

I eat about 70% from my calories in carbs (some are refined), but it's just 2500kcal calories per day. I'm pretty sure the fact that average US citizen eats 3500kcal daily has more to do with anything than what particular ingredient one eats.

edit: some irrational unscientific and anegdotal statements require me to remove myself from discussion. thanks.. for the downvotes, I'm outta here boys! :wink:

Then the question is why do they eat 3500kcal? The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more. A calorie is not a calorie.

> The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more.

They still eat about 1500kcal of fat and protein - of which I eat about half the amount.

If you were really talking about feeling full, nothing makes you feel more full than a belly and guts filled with lovely starch/fiber from fruits and vegetables, which an average US eats little if not any.

Depends on the person. I can eat stupid amounts of fruit and vegetables... Low-carb is the only way I can not feel hungry.

Of course, the general population does like their carbs to be the refined type.

I can easily get full from starchy/fibrous foods, but then I feel hungry again 1 hour later. Fat/protein rich foods, in contrast, keep me full for 4-8 hours.

Yes, they make you feel full... until your blood glucose level drops 1-3 hours later, then you feel very hungry again.

By contrast, if I eat a fat and protein based meal, there is no blood sugar drop to instigate a 'fake' hunger signal, so I don't begin to feel hungry for 4-7 hours or so.

It would seem that calories don't provide any metric with respect to psychological effect, whether caused by the food or otherwise.

If only people had tried to point this out for many years...

I didn't check the science, but I'm pretty confident that "feeling full" is a matter of volume and not of calories. At least in my personal experience a really dumb and easy way to lose fat without feeling hungry was to eat food with a low calorie density.

Not just volume, but the biochemical process of digestion. For example, food that takes longer to digest has more volume for longer time in your body. There are also complex interactions of chemical secretions to regulate chemistry in digestion.

The goal isn't to "feel full", but to feel full and good for a long period of time. Otherwise, I might as well gorge myself on isotonic water.

I wasn't suggesting that feeling full is the goal. I was just trying to argue that calorie density is an important issue when it comes to obesity and overeating. Eating healthy food is, of course, important. But eating too much healthy food is not healthy ;).

If I had to choose between eating too much healthy food and eating enough unhealthy food, I would probably choose the latter. I think obesity is a bigger problem than poor nutrition.

Why would I eat too much if I eat calorie-dense foods? How full I feel in the long term has little to do with volume and more to do with how many calories I eat and how quickly they are digested.

What foods are you referring to as "low calorie density foods"? I can imagine that most vegetables fit this classification... but why would you state it this way unless you are referring to something else?

I would define caloric density as the ratio of calories to weight. Refined sugar has a caloric density of 3.87 (387 kcal per 100gr), which is quite high. Most vegetables and fruits will probably have a caloric density <= 1. But I would also classify something like chicken breast (1.65) or turkey meat (1.89) as "low" in terms of caloric density. But it's not really about setting a threshold. It's more about being aware of how many calories you actually get per gram of food. It can make quite a big difference.

Individual food components can always be "blamed" relatively to their impact.

You may be accidentaly shifting blame to overconsumption. Something the sugar industry would do :-)

I think that fruits have an issue too. The fruit we get today has been bred to contain a lot more sugar than they did originally. I'm not convinced that lots of fruit all the time is as good for you as it ought to be.

There hasn't been a study showing that calorie controlled fruit diet will cause you any harm (except potential malnutrition if fruit selection is not as varied).

Just like excessive consumption of protein (but with a calorie cap) in healthy people shows no harm, or similar studies on healthy, physically active people.

Diet is just a part of a healthy lifestyle and a huge variety of diets can be healthy. This blaming of particular ingredient or macronutrients is unscientific, I as a skeptic dislike it very much.

Fruits are rich in fiber which slows down the absorption of their more "potent" sugars, not to mention that digestion of that fiber is far more taxing than digestion of something else.

Of course, if I were to eat excessive amount of calories it's quite probable I'd get the same symptoms as those people consuming the equivalent in refined sugars.

and don't forget about vegetables, I swear every year carrots get sweeter and sweeter, it feels with some carrot cultivars they are nearly as sweet as corn used to be (now corn often just tastes like candy basically to me, some varieties I can't stomach due to them tasting way too sweet)

note I do not eat any sugar or sweeteners and haven't for years, so maybe that's why I am more sensitive to this

About a year ago I switched over to buying unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter. For about ... 2 days, I actually could tell the difference. Then it was fine. Then about 2 weeks later it tasted pretty much as I remembered peanut butter always tasting.

This gave me a serious moment of pause about how much sugar is added to manufactured foods.

I agree. People always spam the "eat fruits and veggies" meme but come on, what is in fruit? Sugar and some fiber, maybe some vitamins. You are still just eating useless sugar. Let's not delude ourselves that fruits somehow contribute to fulfilling daily macros in a significant way. I consider them a treat, not a staple.

Sugar isn't useless. It gives you energy to function.

If one overconsumes and allows for that useless sugar to circulate, or useless cholesterol, or useless anything from overconsumption, a plethora of interesting metabolic things happen in the body and some of them cause disease.

This is a very nice skeptical stance on how to observe food in this age of non-personalized medicine and nutrition:

https://atheismfaq.quora.com/Is-this-food-healthy

They're not entirely bad though, like candy for instance, though perhaps they should be treated like candy. There appears to be some evidence that fibre suppresses the insulin response required to turn sugar to fat.

The problem is that people say "eat fruits and veggies" but what they hear is "eat [sugary] fruits"

this is almost certainly wrong. (That nothing can be blamed.) I can't eat much sugar for medical reasons, so that means that entire aisles are basically unavailable to me. things like cereals, cookies, cakes, lots of delicious stuff. But there is something or someone (or some process or some state of affairs) to blame here.

Because check it out: stevia is delicious, and with splenda and all sorts of other zero-calorie artificial sweetener choices (going back to saccharine) it would be trivial to make almost all of those food choices in varieties that are artificially sweetened. what do you want to bet that the high fructose corn syrup or sugar industry has a say in directing the conversation that leads to these foods simply not existing? They literally don't exist in supermarkets: you make them at home.

why the fuck would an expensive premium food like this - https://www.specialk.com/en_US/products/protein-cereal.html have 20% by weight in sugar! Generally speaking what I've just linked is a great food, and it's premium and expensive and for those who are very health-conscious. It hardly has any calories, converting by multiplying the suggested serving by 3, it has only 360 calories in 100 grams, which contains 30g of protein (so that if you further multiply by three to get to your daily intake, you get to 90g of protein, enough for just about anyone, reaching only 1080 calories - so it seems great to me. you could literally consider this diet food.)

But it has 21 grams of sugar in those 100 grams. (I happened to find someone weighing 100 grams of cereal, though a denser one - here is what that looks like: http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/cerealpannacotta1.jp... -- * EDIT: also found someone who happened to weigh 20 grams of sugar, this is what that looks like: http://alcademics.typepad.com/.a/6a00e553b3da20883401a3fb659... (that's about 5 cubes of sugar.)).

Why does it have 21% by weight sugar! Why not use an artificial sweetener? Like, it's not even an option.

You can't really find stevia alternatives. The third ingredient in what I just linked was Sugar. Here is someone asking them to include stevia: https://community.kelloggs.com/kelloggs/topics/special-k-pro...

Like, what gives?

I realize that stevia might be expensive compared with sugar, but some people would likely pay for that. You can't get foods made that way though, unless you make it yourself.

why is that? There is someone to blame here. It's a dichotomy: you eat the 21 grams of sugar, or you don't eat the 100 grams of Special K Protein. It's not about overconsumption: it's about a lack of choice. Why doesn't the artificial-sweetener version exist, at all? There is something, or someone (or an abstract economic process, or something) to blame here. While "blaming" an economic process (or a lack of FDA mandate, or ... whatever) might sound bitter due to the phrasing, we can still ask what leads to this state of affairs. I don't usually like to play the "blame game" or put things in those terms, but in this case, I'm missing out on a lot of foods, so yes, I'll do it. If Coca Cola can do it, and get it everywhere, why can't dessert "foods" like oreos or breakfast cereal, do it? They simply don't exist in artificially sweetened versions. Why not?

Coca Cola has a stevia version that seems to be very niche. I rarely see it, nor have I tried it. But I wonder why it hasn't been pushed more, especially in a market where your product is increasingly demonized because of the 30 - 40g of sugar each serving contains.

Don't move from sugar to fake sugar. Move from sugar to other flavors.

Using fake sugar is like a diet, and diets don't last. Lifestyle changes do. Like making every thing you eat not need to be sweet.

not true. you can drink diet coke or coke zero for decades and nothing bad will happen.

why do you want to tell me not to eat dessert foods like american cereals for breakfast, or oreos, in some artificially-flavored version. you're simply wrong that this would make my change in lifestyle "not last." I'm not even overweight.

Ultimately I only care insofar as I will be in the hook for your medical bills in 20 years. It's your body.

I think it helps to visualize a soda container as filled with M&Ms or some other candy. You'd feel like a disgusting lard-ass if you had a big cup full of M&Ms with your meal and kept getting refills on it, right? In fact it'd probably seem like such an obviously-bad idea that, even if you really liked cups full of M&Ms, you'd only have them occasionally, as a treat, and you'd still feel kinda guilty about it.

Look at soda that way, and it gets way easier to turn it down. It's basically candy. When you have three glasses of it with a meal (remember when US restaurants didn't do free refills? That was probably a good thing) that's gross and obviously terrible. When you even have a little with most meals it's still gross. A rare treat? Fine, go ahead.

my Coke example was actually the fact that Diet Coke has existed for decades, and it and Coke Zero are available everywhere. They taste fine. I don't care about a stevia version. I drink lots of diet coke or coke zero (don't have a very strong preference) and want to eat lots of artificially flavored oreos the same way. I can certainly do that: if I take twelve hours to read and track down ingredients and make them myself or something. these products are not made by nabisco, and oreo is just one example. it's the best-selling cookie in america and comes in all these ridiculous flavors:

http://torispilling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/OREO-FLAV...

including literally "swedish goldfish" which is disgusting on its face, and also actually disgusting as reported here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/4x4lgz/swedish...

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4xzdml/my_dad_eats_...

So it's just disgusting.

But if you google Stevia oreos (which wouldn't be disgusting) you get...home recipes to make them.

why? Why, in all of these flavors, including abominations such as swedish goldfish, does stevia not exist?

It doesn't add up. 100%, there's something, someone, some process, some state of affairs to blame here.. . .

Thanks, now I want Oreo to come out with a salmiakki version

Edit: Never mind I see Alex already reviewed a knockoff brand http://www.salmiyuck.com/2010/02/black-domino-salmiakki-chil...

I also get headaches, fever and joint pain from taking in any sugar. It would be so nice to find cereals where I can add sweetener as needed. In theory they should be cheaper since they don't have to add sugar but in reality they don't even exist.

Steel-cut oats. Add water and salt, microwave on medium for 12 minutes. Doesn't get any easier, or cheaper.

I know. It just gets old over time. I wouldn't mind sugar free cornflakes for example. Or Ovaltine with Stevia.

I hear you. I try slicing fruits or berries into it, as well as butter or sour cream. But that gets old as well.

Getting decent carbs that are not boring has proved surprisingly difficult for me.

To make it even worse I also can't handle fruits and berries. They also give me headaches because of their sugar. Getting decent carbs is really hard.

Sorry, man.

BTW, the link in your profile is broken.

I'm a diabetic and I eat 70% of calories in carbs. I make sure they are all low GI.

My statement was mostly about average people, not sick people. I'm fairly sure diseased individuals are an exception and have to make sure to put their disease in remission (or to meet their genetic predispositions) with proper diet plans.

When cooking, sometimes the taste of the ingredients isn't everything. Have you ever forgotten to put salt to something you were cooking, and then tried to add salt after cooking to correct it? It doesn't taste the same because in addition to just tasting salty, the salt was supposed to participate in some chemical reaction while it was being cooked.

Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.

certainly. I imagine the Coca Cola company put a ton of research into formulating Coke Zero and getting it accepted as well.

I'm not saying it's a simple substitution. But it's certainly possible, since there are home recipe versions. Nobody asked for parity - it doesn't have to taste the same.

But I'm already talking about a food - Protein Special K - that I expect to already taste like crap compared with some pure sweetness like Honey Nut Cheerios or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We're talkking about why even a food that does not have to meet as high a standard, that is literally a diet food for fitness-conscious people, still includes 20% sugar by weight?

So while I get what you're saying, it's still a perplexing state of affairs. It's not as though SOME of the cereals came in stevia versions, and some didn't. None of them do. Doesn't exist.

It's possible, it's easy - you can make it at home. It's not available.

And we have an example from the Coca Cola company and its diet coke / coke zero, which are great products, of getting the marketing and other parts right. You can get it everywhere, even McDonald's.

I'm not asking why there isn't a "diet big mac" that has 0 calories -- clearly an impossible goal.

I'm asking why entire aisles, such as the cookie aisles, breakfast cereal aisles, cake aisles, have no product choices, despite this being possible, with artificial sweeteners or stevia (at any price or in limited availability).

It just doesn't make sense. There is something/someone/some state of affairs, to blame here, and the fact that it's not a simple substitution isn't it. I don't need every product to come in a stevia version. But none of them do. This is perplexing, weird, and tells me that there is something/someone/etc to blame. Because you can look up recipes and see that it's easy. When I put artificial sweetener on my oats, I'm literally doing it at home. But no oat mix comes with that. I have to mix it myself. And this is true along many product categories.

Why? There is something fishy here. There is something/someone/some economic process/some state of affairs to blame.

To be honest, I don't like the taste of stevia. It tastes a lot like other sugar substitutes (like aspartame) to me. That being said, I've had it used in cooking (without knowing it) and thought it tasted OK. Maybe in commercial foods they make it taste more like existing sugar substitutes because thats what is expected by people who already seek out sugar free foods?

You say "who already seek out sugar free foods" but even these people (such as me) are not being sold a product in any of the categories I've mentioned. Stevia and other artificial sweeteners have lots of sales (and you can find boxes of the stuff in literally any grocery store) but there is some process that prevents any of these making it into any product in the mentioned categories, period. Even if people do it themselves. It doesn't make sense to me. What prevents anyone from selling in an assembled form, what people use these things to make? Sales of sweeteners are not low. Lots of people are buying them. Obviously they're buying them to make sweet stuff. so it's not like we're talkiing about "why isn't stevia available in grocery stores." We are talking about "why isn't anyone putting it into cereals, cakes, cookies, in any one of a bunch of categories. why is it entirely missing from whole aisles of the grocery store." I am saying there's something to blame for this. It's not the fact that they don't taste as good (which I'll grant.) I mean, you have people buying plain things and buying stevia to put on it, but you don't have anyone selling the things with stevia in it. Why not?

There's something fishy here. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy by the sugar and high fructose corn syrup industry, but that would certainly have high explanatory power and is the MO mentioned in the article we're reading about....

As an experiment, I would try saturating the cereal with water and fermenting with Saccharomyces and Acetobacter to get the sugars out.

I have a hunch that it would taste absolutely horrible, though. I'm not sure there would be enough stevia in the world to bring it back to palatable.

Personally, I would probably prefer to just eat some chicken eggs if I wanted protein for breakfast. That's 160 kcal/100g, with 1g sugar and 13g of protein--as 100% complete protein. And eggs are about $5/kg or less in the US.

I'm not even certain why anybody health-conscious would ever bother with boxed cereals at all, for exactly the reason parent points out--sugar. If I wanted complex carbs in my breakfast, I'd boil a potato, cool it overnight, and heat it back up with the eggs in the morning. No flakes or nuggets are necessary. No sweeteners are necessary. If desired, ketchup is plenty sweet enough for that potato.

But crap.... why can't they make ketchup with stevia, or just unsweetened ketchup? It's back to the same problem. If you can't eat sugar, the American grocery store is mostly a colorful wasteland of foods you just can't touch.

Munchies, munchies, everywhere, and all the cupboards creak; Munchies, munchies, everywhere, nor any speck to eat.

This is one aspect of sugar and fat that I find confusing. Is sugar in and of itself bad? If I like to eat sugar but am otherwise healthy (healthy weight, plenty of fruits and vegetables, plenty of exercise, etc.), am I still damaging my cardiovascular system?

Of course not.

Is sunlight bad because it can give you cancer?

Are apples bad because they contain cyanide in seeds you can accidentally consume?

Is red meat bad because it causes cancer?

Is alcohol bad because it causes cancer?

If you feel you're living a healthy lifestyle, you can easily check that by doing some medical tests. No diet related disease is going to invisibly attack you at a random moment in life.

Atherosclerosis is fairly visible. Diabetes too. With regular checks you can be sure you're fine.

Sugar is poison. Search YouTube for Lustig lecture video.

Lustig is unfortunately a scientific crackpot. His lecture has many untruthful statements (like those about Japanese) and puts blame mostly on fructose.

As much as fructose does cause some interesting metabolic problems, unlike glucose, it still cannot be characterized as unhealthy (because the very Japanese he praises eat a lot of fructose and the studies are done on fructose extracts which can't even be reproduced with equivalent fruits in fructose amounts).

He makes equivalent claims to those made by Campbell in his China study that casein from milk causes cancer - of course it does if it's 20 freaking percent of your caloric intake (which is practically impossible to consume long-term).

http://www.stats.org/glaring-flaws-in-sugar-toxicity-study/

Sugar in itself is not necessarily bad in moderation. But the "normal" diet contains way too much and this makes it bad.

No - see studies mentioned in https://rawfoodsos.com/2015/10/06/in-defense-of-low-fat-a-ca...

Those shows that sugar on it its own is OK, what is problematic is mixing it with fat. I.e. as long as fat is less that 10%-15% of calories, sugar and carbohydrates are fine.

For the record I up-voted you for sensibly pointing out that the amount of food one eats matters (in regards to health) more than the particular ingredients. I guess it will take another 50 years before people begin to realize this.

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