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Another year, another demon food. It seems every few years we switch it up, now it's sugar, before it was glutten, then it was fats, then it was carbs. It seems like nobody really has a clue what is "good" for us. The only thing that makes sense to me anymore is eating a balanced diet from a variety of food sources while also maintaining a decent exercise regimen. Not over doing it, frequently, is also an important aspect. I've found it's OK to eat junk food once in awhile, as long it's not a habit.

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This seems like false equivalence. Has refined sugar ever not been considered harmful in the last few decades? I'm not aware of any controversy here.

You'd be surprised. In general, I think sugar has been known as something that you had to consume "in moderation." But, this is akin to the false belief that moderation can fix most any problems.

My favorite example is a survey that asked people which one saved more money, turning the lights out an hour earlier every day, or switching to higher efficiency lights. The vast majority thought turning lights out earlier would have higher impact, which is incredibly wrong.

So, the same with sugar for many right now. Many think that they can get by with more "moderation" and skipping a desert.

> The vast majority thought turning lights out earlier would have higher impact, which is incredibly wrong.

Is it? Based on what timeframe and power cost? When I was last light bulb shopping it seemed to me not upgrading was more cost effective < 5 years at least.

If you add cost of bulbs, it gets a little closer. However, energy costs are laughable in the difference. From a sixty to hundred watt bulb to a nine to fourteen is a huge difference.

You're right:

60 watts x 24 hrs/day = 1440 watt hrs = 1.44 kwh/day, @ $.10/kwh = $.15 / day $5/LED bulb / $.15/day = 33 days to pay off

And to be fair on these calculations, I was really just comparing to "turning off an hour early every day." I don't think many people leave lights on 24 hours a day. But, assuming a 60w from 8 to 7 hours a day of use, saves 60w (480 down to 420) a day. Leaving a CFL on for the full 8 hours uses only 112. So, with a savings of 368, is is almost 6 times the savings of an hour's light.

Now, I also confess I have not looked into these much lately. I just find it interesting how so many of us assume that "moderation" is more effective than other factors. Even when seeing the difference in clear numbers (60 to 14) indicates a huge gulf that moderation would have to overcome.

We have a similar problem at our house, where I've now calibrated the other direction. Rather than be concerned about keeping a window closed, I'm more interested in a better heating/cooling system.

Edit: Forgot my point at the top. Converting from energy costs to actual dollars, it can be seen that the cost of early CFL/LED lightbulbs was the dominate factor.

It's also interesting that manufacturers have neglected this angle of looking at it. I'm one of those personalities that over-optimizes trivial things, so when I'm shopping for light bulbs I'm wanting to maximize my financial return even though it's a rounding error.

Every LED light bulb manufacturer seems to use the "lasts for 25 years" (or whatever) marketing approach - that completely fails on me, my immediate reaction is: "sure, but what am I paying for that?", and my reaction was strong enough that it even prevented me from doing the math it would seem.

At the end of the day I ended up buying some LED's to try them, and I liked the quality enough that I went and bought a whole bunch more, and will 100% do all future replacements.

It's interesting, if LED's truly last as long as advertised, what's the long term business model?

I love that question! I honestly have no idea. I do think that LED bulbs are a lot more fragile than they advertise. Sure, they won't break as often as old style, but neither will they last 25 years in many cases. (Specifically, they are a lot more intolerant of power fluctuations, if I recall.)

My hunch is they are mainly banking on upgrades to technology driving new purchases. Consider, your computer will probably last longer than you will keep using it. Difference is computer manufacturers don't bother with advertising how long they could last.

Also, I should confess I don't know where I was on the original survey. I probably had the wrong intuition, but seeing the question asked would tip me to it being wrong. I can't remember my answer at the time. :(

Finally, my guess on why they advertise the long life in stores may be because they are keying off emotions attached to home ownership. Home owners like to think of their house lasting a long time. So, home stores like anything that strengthens that.

I don't think the OP was implying that refined sugar might not be problematic but rather this trend of demonizing a single food substance disproportionately. By giving outsize attention to a single substance it obscures the fact that portion control, a balanced diet and regular exercise are the real fixes to recent downward health trends. These are of course much harder to implement because they require a larger commitment then just avoiding a single entity whether it be salt, sugar, carbs, red meat etc or whatever is the current single object of demonization. Making permanent lifestyle changes is hard much harder than simply avoiding a single dietary element.

Here is an actual, biochemical take on the subject of refined sugar:

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

Here is probably what happened to advertise fat as bad in the first place:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-ind...

The first link I can't argue with, the second one maybe.

We do need balanced diets, but, natural balanced diets. Throwing pure sugar into it, isn't making it balanced of any sort.

Your first link is to a video from Robert Lustig. You should probably have mentioned that his viewpoints are quite controversial, and there's hardly yet a scientific consensus on them.

You shouldn't post his videos as the gospel truth.

Bottom line: fructose (50% of ordinary sugar) is not metabolized in the same way as glucose (the other 50%). The latter is used by just about every cell in the body whereas the liver is mainly responsible for handling fructose. This organ also metabolizes other things like alcohol and paracetamol. Overloading the liver is not a good idea. Anyone can read up on what 'overloading' means for any of those or other nutrients and go figure. None of this is controversial though the definition and effects of 'excess' fructose obviously are, for any individual.

I apologize but I do not track controversies that much as I don't have the time for all that. Also, I'm a programmer, not a biochemist, so:

If I go to wikipedia, I get

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig And I see nothing about controversies there.

If I google about the term for a bit, I see no scientific rebuttals of his points in that video.

I mean, it's biochemistry, if he's that much wrong (he seems quite educated) then some of his science is also wrong; would you be so kind to provide few links of rebuttals to his research papers or whatever you are reading.

I would greatly appreciate if you stick to actual scientific papers, as I really don't have time to get dragged into the whole USA 'omg hes from <political party> and that's why he states his pro [trump/hilary] views.

TLDR: I honestly don't know about any controversies streaming from that video, but would like to read the scientific rebutals, if any, with respect to that guy's work.

The dose makes the poison with sugar as with anything else. That being said, I think most people encounter sugar at doses that are clearly poisonous to their bodies:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/is-sugar-really-bad... (see the section: Why is it a problem to have too much sugar?)

However, I get your point. I think the conflicting (and often industry driven) public health messages we've gotten at least over my lifetime and probably for decades before have made people dubious of new health/health harm claims around whole classes of foods. For me, I like to follow Michael Pollans advice of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

http://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

Could not agree w/ this comment more. Writing a New York Times article suggesting people count calories, weigh their food, and exercise 3-5 times per week is boring and doesn't sell. The public is dying for a guru w/ a new methodology or academia to emerge w/ a new "scientific breakthrough" to save them from the obesity epidemic. The answer is simple but yet so many people refuse to believe eating less calories than their body needs is the cornerstone to weight loss.

Agreed. You cannot outwork a shitty diet BUT refined sugar is the cornerstone of most shitty diets.

Honestly, I think the reason most authors tend to have so much success with the new fad diet of the week is that for the month or whatever that they run the diet, they're actually monitoring their food intake and making an effort to eat more balanced meals.

The diet itself seems almost irrelevant. Just the simple act of paying attention to what you eat (counting calories is an excellent starting point) will help more than anything, as you'll more easily recognize poor trends in your food choices, and the awareness will encourage you to diversify your diet.

A couple of years ago, in a show of solidarity with my wife, I did a Whole 30. It's a 30 day elimination diet that cuts out all sugar (except for naturally occurring in whole fruit). I'm in my thirties and very slim.

The Whole 30 lets you have as much fat, meat and calories as you want. I plowed through eggs, homemade mayo, meat, and other calorie dense food. I'm skinny enough that I don't have much weight to lose. Even so, I dropped ten pounds effortlessly.

I don't know if this generalizes to other people and their physiques, but it was enough to convince me that sugar/simple carbs really do correlate more directly to my waistline than just counting calories does. I'm sure what the right metric to pay attention to is. My hunch is that it's glycemic load.

Either way, I cut down on my sugar and carbs since then, and I've lost of a lot of the middle-aged Dad belly I was starting to develop. I don't count calories at all. It seems to work for me.

Honestly, I think it's just calories in vs calories out. There's all kinds of things to consider like glycemic load and digestion speeds and all that, but at the end of the day, you lose fat when you eat less than you burn (see: the Twinkie diet). I think way too many people focus on things like glycemic load and the "kinds" of calories they're eating as some kind of magical weight loss/gain formula, and lose track of the overall quantity. I've lost more weight just counting calories and ignoring micronutrients, glycemic load, etc than I ever did trying to micromanage glycemic load and micronutrients.

Fats are a lot more satiating than carbohydrates (ie, sugars) - I could easily put away 4000 calories of goldfish crackers in an evening, but I would be insanely full, uncomfortable, and possibly even sick if I tried to eat 4000 calories of proteins or fats. My go-to craving-killer snack is peanuts - they're high calorie on the label, but a handful of them takes the edge off my craving in a way that chips and crackers and candy don't.

I'm in my thirties and I don't want to lose weight. I also ate several hundred grams of sugar every day in December. Didn't gain a single pound. This is because my calories were still about the same, only the composition changed.

If you didn't count your calories, there's no way to tell where you were eating relative to your TDEE. People think they're eating more than they are all the time, it's an incredibly common thread on any fitness forum.

Isn't that still a point in favor of the diet, though? That it's much harder to overeat on it?

Of course, but it's pretty well accepted that fibrous and fatty foods are typically more filling that sugary foods, with fewer calories (especially for fibrous foods). It doesn't invalidate intake with respect to TDEE being the primary cause of weight gain and loss.

That's OK. I'm not claiming that I was eating equivalent or fewer calories by controlling sugar.

I'm claiming that the set of dietary rules I chose which are based around limiting sugar and simple carbs have an end result of some weight loss. Whether that's a direct property of lowering sugar, or an emergent property caused by that is a good question, but one I don't need to have an answer for if the rules happen to work.

For what it's worth, my rules are roughly:

* No sweets unless I am socializing or it is a dessert I prepared from scratch. "Sweet" means roughly candy or dessert.

* No beer unless socializing.

* Minimize carb-heavy snacks like crackers and chips.

The last rule is fuzzier than I'd like, but I'm still dialing it in.

These rules may seem a little arbitrary, but they work for me and I find they do a good job of improving my overall diet without subjecting me to the real annoyances of rigid diets that make you do things like ask a waiter to bring you a burger without a bun, or not eat a curry that has a teaspoon of sugar in it.

That's good to cut out unneeded sugars but I'd say it's risky jumping into a strictly fat, meat diet. I tried it and it definitely changed my blood cholesterol levels. Given that nobody can agree on what is actually "good" for you, I think the balanced diet is still the way to go. Of course, do whatever makes you happy, though. I'm cooking a steak now ;)

> into a strictly fat, meat diet.

Oh, I'm definitely not trying to do that. I try to have a good amount of fruits, vegetables, nuts and dairy. Basically your classic "balanced" diet, just lower on sugar and highly-processed grains.

Not sure why you're being downvoted but I agree with you.

It's definitely confusing but let me put on my conspiracy hat here for the moment and point out that it's in the interest of a lot of multinational corporations to keep people confused. The science on things like artificial sweeteners is a jumbled mess. If you happen to believe a calorie is a calorie, triscuits seem as good as brocolli, in certain amounts. But triscuits are a lot tastier and a lot more profitable because they dont spoil. I guess my point here is every article you read on this subject, you have to be careful of what their motives are.

I think the article describes a good approach because it sets you on track to improve your diet overall, by making you used to the relative lack of sugar in unprocessed (healthier) foods.

> eating a balanced diet from a variety of food sources while also maintaining a decent exercise regimen

Now you're talking crazy shit, son, how could that ever work?! /s

Celiac here, gluten, sugar, sodium nitrites, monosodium glutamate, caffeine, all these wreak havoc on my body. A lot of people are addicted to these, and a lot of people can see great health benefits by giving them up. Passing them off as demon food fads does little good and little to educate people. I used to joke on gluten free. I barely knew anything about it. Here I am now saying it changed my life. Being less dismissive might help others to find out about their health conditions sooner.

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