I ate 40 teaspoons of sugar a day. This is what happened (2015) | Hacker News Reader

I ate 40 teaspoons of sugar a day. This is what happened (2015)

telegraph.co.uk

55 pointsthomyorkie38 comments

"That Sugar Film" is interesting, and worth a watch. The stuff about dental health in poor parts of America is gruesome.

He's pushing his agenda pretty hard. It's good that it's an obvious bias, but it makes the film a bit exhausting to watch. The "sugar is pure evil" line is relentlessly pushed through the film. That's a shame, because he has some really good points, especially around foods perceived as healthy.

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

I didn't watch the film or do other research except for reading the article. I just wonder what the effects of a lifetime of bad eating, smoking and who knows what else... did to his body previously. He may have already built-up some medical issues.

Any problems he had previously weren't reported and analysed in the article. A "healthy" diet for 3 years doesn't miraculously erase his past. To suddenly go into a divergent new shock diet without a slow adjustment period could have the body reacting in ways that were unforeseen as a way of protecting itself.

I'm not suggesting, in the least, that 40 teaspoon of a sugar every single day is good for anyone(LOL). It just seems that lots of people in that range would have off days where they hit that high for a day or two... followed by lower sugar intakes for several days (giving the body time to heal or adjust).

It just reminds me of the "Deadly Facts about Water" meme:

https://imgur.com/gallery/hv8sL2J

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today. As for adjusting you don't need a period of adjustment to go from a sugar riddled diet to a non-sugar riddled diet. Or to ease into it. I have never read anything to suggest something like that. You need to do that with exercise because the fat built up in your arteries might break off and clog your heart. Or the arteries are too narrow as it is and exertion might cause problems in you won't get enough blood running properly in your system which could cause other cadiovascular problems.

I think hrodriguez meant that it was the shock of going from a ~3 year low-sugar diet to a 40-tablespoon-per-day diet that was responsible for the sudden influx of negative effects, one that might not have been seen if he gradually eased into the high sugar diet.

Exactly. For example, I don't consume alcohol. When I do so on the rare occasion, just a little hits me very hard. Regular drinkers don't have this issue. I would never think of going from zero alcohol to consuming a bottle of vodka every day.

I also enjoy a pretty healthy diet/lifestyle - low-salt, low-fat, fruits, veggies, plenty of fiber, regular exercise... I find that my body reacts very badly if I "treat" myself and indulge throughout the day in whatever everyone else consumes so freely. No such issue if it's just a single meal.

I need to taper in (ie, the Holidays are a good example). High salt, high-fat meals are especially hard hitting. I can counter this with lots more water, fiber for example. I also know that if I remained on these richer diets, eventually my body wouldn't react so strongly but I would also need to make other dietary changes. Damon Gameau admits he did not make other changes to his diet.

The experiment was a non-stop, high-dose, sugar binge (40 tsp is incredibly high) that went from 0-100 mph in a microsecond.

I imagine this to be a problem as well. One of the things I've been starting to hypothesize a lot about is gut biome effects on diet and nutrition. If you just up and change your overnight, your gut flora doesn't have time to evolve to the new conditions. I'm also starting to suspect, based on the popularity of month long elimination diets, that a month is the amount of time it takes for gut flora to significantly change, and that at the least you'd want at least that much ramp up time.

I made one change. I avoided any foods with high fructose corn syrup. I wasn't over weight, but doing that one thing had many positive results. I dropped unnecessary belly fat. I had better, more consistent energy throughout the day. Sharper focus. I am no longer interested in cheap desert type stuff - it tastes like crap. When I eat a desert now, I go for something that's really nice, and I really enjoy it.

It's not calories in / calories out. The bodies response to HFC is to open up the gate to converting whatever nutrients you've eaten recently into fat. Eating that little candy from the jar on your co-workers desk after lunch? That's a big deal.

Ignoring confounding variables, and a sample size of one caused me to discount this "study". While I'm sure sugar consumption is an issue, this escapade seems like more of a capitalist venture than anything else.

Nobody said it was a study... But if you want to see what effect 40 teaspoons of sugar a day have on yourself then you don't care about anybody else. It's like beeing in a plane that crashes: you don't care that a proper study says that you only have a chance of 1 in 10 milion to die when you are already in a plane that crashes.

The math does not add up.

40 grams of sugar does not have enough calories for you to gain 3 kilograms in 12 days, or 8.5 kilograms in 21 days.

Moreover, if he ate as much as the average American eats, how is it that the average American has not experienced what he has? The guy almost gained 1 pound a day.

He ate 40 teaspoons which is 160 grams of sugar. Also, perhaps the fact that he went from very little sugar to 160 grams a day caused rapid weight gain. I know for instance that your body changes over time to burn fat more efficiently if you are on a lower carb diet, perhaps the reverse is true as well.

Weight gain is impossible without the necessary amount of calories. It is the simple law of conservation of mass/energy.

160 calories * 21 days = 3360 calories. This is enough to gain about 1 pound of weight, not 19.

probably spiked his blood sugar causing him to eat more food in general. pretty poor article missing a million confounding variables

1 teaspoon is 16 calories, so you're off by a factor of 4 here though you're still in the same ballpark.

Its 160 grams of sugar which equals 619 calories which leads to 12999 calories in 21 days. Still less than 4 pounds though.

However, you're really oversimplifying weight gain. Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

Hormones, food, stress, mood, sleep, exercise, medications etc all affect your metabolism and how fat is stored.

Yes my mistake. 13k calories is roughly 4 pounds.

>Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

It doesn't matter if 100% of the calories he ate was turned into fat.

>how much your metabolism burns.

Eating sugar causes your metabolism to slow down by 4x? You'd die.

You're talking about that 13k calories of sugar as if it exists in a vacuum. That extra sugar could have caused more of the other non-sugar food he was consuming to turn to fat.

Turning to fat doesn't mean mass will come out of nothing

Its not coming from nothing. If a higher percentage of the total calories he consumes turns to fat instead of being used as energy, then he will have extra mass on his body.

A good time for you to prove that every single one out of trillions of living mammalian bodies satisfy your robotic maths to any degree of confidence!

Well, he also ate other stuff "around" those sugar calories, not?

I dont think thats the central message of the film at all. the problem with human digestive system is that it evolved for very different set of conditions & has very limited 'floating' capacity for carbs. so when you eat highly processed food with short chain carbs what you get is sudden overload in carrying capacity of blood stream. body responds by storing it away as fat. OTOH when you are short on energy body produces hunger signals before tapping into fat reserves so eat again & cycle repeats. the message IMO is about composition of what you eat (centered around sugar).

What else did he eat? Sugar will raise your insulin level, which directs more blood sugar to fat cells.

So it's not just a case of calories in calories out.

It is a matter of calories in calories out.

He didn't just increase his concentration of fat, he straight up gained 8.5 kilograms of mass.

The main part of the kind of body mass you can gain is water.

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

> promoting the absorption of, especially, glucose from the blood into fat, liver and skeletal muscle cells

> in the tissues that can carry out these reactions, glycogen and fat synthesis from glucose are stimulated

> The breakdown of triglycerides by adipose tissue into free fatty acids and glycerol is also inhibited

> Increased lipid synthesis – insulin forces fat cells to take in blood glucose, which is converted into triglycerides (aka fat)

> Increased esterification of fatty acids – forces adipose tissue to make neutral fats (i.e., triglycerides) from fatty acids

> Decreased lipolysis – forces reduction in conversion of fat cell lipid stores into blood fatty acids and glycerol

Kcals in kcals out fails practically every overweight person over 30 I know. But they won't hear about biochemistry. Poor folks aren't even eating that much, but what they do eat sufficiently inhibits liberation of the many-months-worths of energy stores they carry around all day. Don't envy them, full of energy yet out of energy!

Kcals in/out is literally the conservation of mass.

Increasing fat synthesis doesn't mean your body can magically make up mass.

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein

He was already eating more calories than he needed. The difference is that after changing his diet he was excreting less calories, since sugar (specifically fructose in the absence of fiber) is absorbed quickly and almost entirely.

The human body is a complex system, with hormones controlling how energy is stored and made available, and nutritional content continuously altering the levels of those hormones.

Your statements completely ignore variables such as:

Bioavailability of the calories - how much of it remains in the waste (urine/feces) or is being metabolized by gutteral bacteria, for example. These variables strongly depend on the types of calories consumed, particularly the presence of dietary fiber. Soluble fiber for example is especially effective at capturing sugars and preventing their absorption in the small intestine, resulting in flatulence after arrival in the large intestine.

Insulin levels - when insulin levels are high energy is stored as fat. Hormones like insulin also influence mood and activity levels. Obese people are generally lethargic and low-energy/low-activity individuals, regardless of what is obviously an excess of energy available. This is due to the hormonal dysfunction. Hormones can cause a person to be internally starving when they're ingesting excessive calories, simply because their hormones are signaling the fat stores to effectively steal all the energy in the blood stream.

Bioavailability of calories isn't relevant here. There literally is not enough energy in that amount of sugar. Why does it matter if 80% of the available calories is absorbed of 90%?

"Insulin levels - when insulin levels are high energy is stored as fat."

It doesn't matter where energy is stored. 100% of it could have gone to fat.

Was under the impression he ate food with sugar, hidden sugar as he call it. Plus, he went from no sugar to 40g so it's not not comparable to the avg person

He completely changed his diet from cooked from scratch to "foods perceived as healthy but which contain hidden sugar". He claims he controlled for fat intake.

It's likely that taking on that much sugar all of a sudden would require him to increase his fluid intake, and so some of the weight may be water.

The more sugar I eat at one meal, the hungrier I am at the next meal. It's entirely possible that his caloric intake went up by a lot more than the 619kCal per day he got of sugar.

40 grams of sugar? 40 teaspoons is closer to 160+ grams.

I thought bored journalists who did binge or denial experiments on themselves went out of style in 2015. Please don't come back.

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