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Comment by lexhaynes | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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