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?
Is eating natural sugar found in fruits as bad as eating refined/processed sugar?
Fruits contain varying amounts of fructose. Wild berries, not so much. An apple or grape, rather a lot. Apple juice, considerably more.
Can you provide more info on this?
If consuming juices or concentrates it is very easy.
I don't think that changes "very easy" to "very very hard".
Scooby's workshop, a very popular bodybuilding & fitness website covers this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAFdWifkt0E
also made me realize why fresh oj is insanely expensive at restaurants.
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.
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.
I've tracked my weight and did blood tests consistently, and most dramatic weight loss periods coincided with the minimal insulin presence.
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.
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.
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.
pretty far from little sugar.
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
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.
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.
For fresh (not processed like hams etc), ~50ish% is usually a safe bet.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nicotine is an addictive substance which suppresses appetite and increases focus; as found in tobacco leaves, it has a pleasant smell and taste.
Often you get the opposite effect of a drug in withdrawal, e.g. caffeine reduces headache pain, causes headaches in withdrawal.
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.)
I'd describe it as being similar to caffeine, it makes you more alert. Of course there are downsides that everyone knows about.
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.