Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbugbag | Hacker News Reader

There's a BBC Horizon episodes with two identical twins, one goes for the low fat diet and the other for low carb diet to test which one is worse.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1amh2t_bbc-horizon-sugar-v...

View on HN

I skipped to the last few minutes of that, they seem to do a nice summary...

"avoid processed foods"

"All faddish diets are wrong and exercise is important"

"the combination of fat and sugar is bad" (not just one or the other but foods full of both like donuts are bad)

I thought eating fat with sugar was better than eating sugar alone since the fat slowed down the absorption of the sugar, thus dampening the insulin response.

"When people eat a diet that is high in calories and high in fructose, the liver gets overloaded and starts turning the fructose into fat.

Lustig and other scientists believe that excess fructose consumption may be a key driver of many of the most serious diseases of today. These include obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and even cancer."

https://authoritynutrition.com/why-is-fructose-bad-for-you/

Lustig is a paid shill of the meat and dairy industries. In reality, it's the animal products most strongly linked to disease, not sugar.

See many, many studies about this on http://nutritionfacts.org

Thanks I'll check it out!

The program goes into the why: in nature fat and sugar can not be found in combination so there is no natural inhibition.

They tested this with mice, one set would have unlimited fat, another unlimited sugar, and the third set the combination of sugar and fat. Surprisingly, the first two sets of mice would stop eating when they were full. Only the third set of mice would go on eating and eating..

> in nature fat and sugar can not be found in combination

What? What about avocados, coconuts, olives, artichokes, soybeans…

I'd more buy the argument that our body tries to maintain a certain ratio of fats to sugar (which is usually mediated by fiber), rather than that humans historically haven't "experienced" foods with both fat and sugar…

Aren't soy beans poisoness when uncooked? And I doubt people ate large volumes of those others without the fiber.

My point exactly. I think the claim that "sugar + fat is not found in nature" is incomplete without mentioning fiber.

Yeah, I'm not sure how to model the fat+sugar problem I keep hearing whispers of. I know from the research I did with my wife's gestational diabetes is that the glycemic index of a food went down if you added just about any other food volume that with a lower glycemic index. The best example I found was that toast is like the worst possible food you can eat in terms of GI, it was higher than anything but pure glucose . But toast with jam, actually had a lower GI, since sucrose has ~half the GI of glucose (makes sense since sucrose is glucose+fructose, and fructose requires time for the liver to process). Toast with butter was even better, since butter fat has 0 GI.

I still don't know how much I trust the claims that fat+sugar is particularly bad, but I suspect it may have to do with some kind of second order insulin response. Like, the presence of triglycerides in the blood cause fat cells to be more likely to respond to insulin, storing fat, instead of releasing it. I dunno.

Also keep in mind GI is falling out of fashion as a key indicator. Glycemic Load seems to be more indicative of poor health indicators. That is to say, that the area under the curve is potentially more important than the max height of the curve. I'd say limiting both is probably important as well. I also highly suspect that the slope of the curve is very important in how we perceive hunger, which is why we tend to feel hungry shortly after eating foods with fast carbs...

FWIW, at the end of the day, in order to keep my wife healthy, we ended up giving up fast carbs, and she had to keep her carb count low in general. Her basic formula for a snack was to add the grams of fat+ grams of protein, and if that was bigger than the grams of carbs it was safe to eat.

Sorry I don't have links to this stuff, this was like 5 years ago, and I'm not sure if I ever saved those bookmarks. I can say it was really hard to find credible data sets. There didn't seem to be anything from America (draw your own conclusions :) ), most of everything I found was published datasets from Australia and New Zealand. Also, don't take this for anything other than anecdata, do your own research. You'll find very quickly a lot of really bad nutrition information. I had to plow through most of it, and might have given up if it wasn't for my pregnant wife, coupled with a friend with a digital signal processing background pointing out engineering problems with most of the current thoughts on controlling diabetic blood sugar levels.

Well, whatever we go with, we have to square it with the fact that fructose is worse than glucose in terms of causing diabetes.

Not really. Common sugars begin to be broken down in the mouth by enzymes in saliva. Insulin (a hormone that promotes storage of energy!), is the last thing you want to stimulate while consuming high fat, energy dense foods.

You should eat sugar with fiber i.e. fruits.

Wrong, it's exactly the opposite: sugar keeps fat from being metabolized, hence it's incorrectly scapegoated for weight gain.

These twins also did one on Alcohol (Casual but Consistent vs Binging) which was pretty interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wdfhk

The episode isn't currently available, do you know what was the outcome of the experiment?

I found this: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569

I found this[1], which summarizes nicely. Basically, they are almost equally as bad for your liver, and that was with one of them taking 21 shots of vodka[2] once a week, which left him insensible, and actually in a dangerous medical state.

1: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569

2: I assume measured to 25ml which is the low end of single shot size, to be in line with the standard units of alcohol they mentioned.

There's always this method: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/11952358/BBC.Horizon.2015.I...

That episode is no longer available, but I remember it when it was first released.

I wasn't at all impressed with the depth of the research they did before starting their experiment, their ability to stick to their diets, and their general understanding and approach to the potential science they could have been doing.

The whole thing was a superficial puff piece that you can't take seriously when evaluating something as important as health.

Do they take cholesterol tests at the start and end? I skimmed a little but didn't see it.

That's the only thing I'd really be interested in.

Spoil it for me, I don't have time to watch at work..

Also, what kind of fat? Saturated fats are very stable and easily used by the body -- in my opinion they have very very different health effects compared to cheap, polyunsaturated fats.

Eat a balanced diet, exercise is important and the brain has a very hard time resisting or stopping eating when fat and sugar are combined, 50/50 ratio being the most effective combination. So better eat sugar and fat separated.

Do you have a quick synopsis of what happens?

http://www.drbriffa.com/2014/01/30/my-take-on-the-horizon-do...

At time mark 57:20 in the DailyMotion video they say that it is neither of them individually but the combination of fat and sugar that is the problem.

How does that follow? If you have a below-average diet and replace foods from it, you're likely to do better simply due to regression to the mean. You could replace a shitty diet with one with different foods but the same macronutrient distribution and likely end up improving things.

Finally, I have something worth watching with my soda can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com