Too much fructose can damage your liver, just like too much alcohol
sugarscience.ucsf.edu
sugarscience.ucsf.edu
People have been force feeding animals to fatten them up (gavage) for about 5,000 years, but specifically feeding them sugars/grains for the purpose of fattening their liver.
Ever hear of the French delicacy Foie Gras(1)? It literally means fat liver, and after 5,000 years of perfecting fattening liver what do we force feed the animals? Corn! The same fructose we highly concentrate and load into foods and drinks and feed to kids...which goes hand in hand, per the article, with why kids weren’t diagnosed with fatty liver disease pre 1980’s and now 13% of US children have it.
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain...
Science is looking at a problem. Stating it. Analysing it. (Setting up hypotheses, gathering data, coming up with clever ways to test those hypotheses, desigining experiments, conducting them, evaluating their results, and then iterating on this. While being vigilant at every step. Trying to falsify every step. If you can't falsify it, great, you have a useful model.)
The claim that skim milk was fed to pigs because it has some magical fattening properties is just another urban myth. Skim milk was fed to pigs because it was free/cheap and nutritional.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/food/2014/0...
http://northernplanets.blogspot.com/2007/07/milk-folklore.ht...
Anyway, they fed pigs skim milk because no human wanted it, and when you take out the fat for cream and butter than junk was suitable only for the swine. Your articles are no scientific or historical proof. Without the fat in milk, the calcium in skim milk ends up in your arteries, not your bones. So, fattening or not, skim milk is not a healthier alternative from many aspects.
The funniest thing is that skim, and whole milk in America have the same price! So, the fat is removed to sell it separately and at a high price, and, yet, both types of milk are sold at the same price because there are stupid enough people to consider it "better."
I have organic raw grass-fed whole milk, and my kids have had it for over 5 years with no issues whatsoever. Kudos to Organic Pastures [0] to keep providing a high-quality product with consistency during this time!
Your comment: > Same with skim milk, which has always been used to fatten pigs.
Also, for cats and dogs, other sugar (xylitol if I member well) can destroy their livers pretty fast. Fortunately, we come from sugar-happy monkeys (that used to eat lots of rottenfruit), so we can safely enjoy our booze in moderation :)
And for extra self-destructive power, mix fructose and fats: your liver will be too overloaded processing the fructose (that btw, also gets transformed to extra fat and collesterol if its other metabolizing pathways get saturated) to be able to handle the fats correctly, so "bad collesterol" will accumulate in you blood, and then clog your arteries (yeah, it needs some extra help from inflamation).
But, oh, wait, there's a name for that: donuts! ...or virtually every other fatty sweet stuff. Oh, and for extra-extra-damage the fats should be fried (for reason I don't have time to detail). And there's a name for that too: KFC + dessert!
Now go enjoy your deserts! Or the fois gras you had before it ;)
EDIT+: video explaining some (older) science behind it, form UCTV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
> Insulin promotes synthesis of fatty acids in the liver
> Insulin inhibits breakdown of fat in adipose tissue
...but don't take that to mean "insulin is what gets you fat". It does not... or not as in it being a bad thing. It's more like "insulin just tells your body to process away that damn extra sugar"... and your body does whatever it can with it, like converting it into stored fat. It would be much worse if it didn't! You'd have diabetes then, and that sugar standing unprocessed in you blood would do tons of damage to your body! Making you a bit fatter is kind of the best thing your body can do with the extra sugar that got dumped into your blood...
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-rea...
Eat less sugar? Sure! But don't do it because of Dr. Lustig's exaggerations and paranoia. Do it because sugar is calorie-heavy with no real benefit.
Who knows what is true any more? May be big sugar companies are fighting back using fake studies and blogs to lessen the blame like they did with fat before.
Edit: I forgot to mention 2 real examples:
1. My father is not fat. We don't eat any junk foods, everything is cooked at home. He goes to office by cycle, it's long commute. But eats too much sweets and sugar, kind of addicted. He got diabetes, glucose reading 290 without food.
2. I started eating lots of sweets/sugar after I stayed at my parent's home for four months. When I sleep on my stomach, I started to feel my heart beat. It was not like this before. It was a bit scary. Then I read all those articles about sugar, and I figured that might be the reason. I stopped eating sugar completely. I no longer feel heart beat while sleeping on stomach. My heart beat per minute came down from 67 to 61. I only stopped sugar, everything else was constant.
Okay, these are only 2 cases, it proves nothing. I know. But, I don't care what anyone says about sugar now. I know what I experienced and I believe on that.
I know people who are fit and well within normal weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and everything else, eat a very healthy diet and they still got diabetes.
One of them lives almost exclusively on home-grown and home-cooked meals (they run a small farm), he's very into working out and is one of the most fit people I know. Yet he has type-2 diabetes.
You're absolutely right that we should all eat less sugar, but there's no great mystery to it.
I bet those people who eat "healthy" it a lot of carbs, which the body just changes into sugar. So they really aren't eating that healthy.
But, lots of studies have showed sugar is highly related to diabetes, heart disease, mental health etc.. And here you are saying avoid sugar only because of calorie. Like there can't be anything more to it. Where did you get that?
Wtf does that even mean?! You mainly eat to get your calories... the calories are your main intended benefit, that's mainly why you eat, to get your fuel to burn. It's like the stupid phrase "empty calories". Also, the calories that you need to burn, will inevitably deal damage to your body in the process of being burn (free radicals -> aging, cancer etc.) and that's unavoidable.
But you can try to find the least damaging combination of source of calories (like at least don't mix high-fat with high-sugar in the same meal), and yeah, also so get your vitamins micronutrients, fibers etc. that you also need besides those calories.
And I agree with you too :) ...Lustig's paranoia is way over the top, especially when he gets to comparing fructose with alcohol (we're not cats and dogs - 'carnivores', we're 'rotten-and-occasionally-toxic-fruit eating monkeys', we can take our liquor and drugs as long as we don't overdo it :P), or calling it "toxic" or "poison".
You can even have basically pure carbs that are absorbed slowly and have a good glycemic profile (they are glucose polymers that take longer to break up into the glucose monomers they are made of). One of these is the modified starch that you can also get "naturally" by reheating some types of pasta, others are pretty weird chemical inventions that are not proven safe yet I think...
You could eat just "pure slow carbs" and throw in some vitamin pills, essential fats, essential amino acids and antioxidants (they would all amount to like a small fist of pills a day I think) and be quite healthy I guess. Not sure why would anyone want to leave such a tasteless life though :)
EDIT+: actually, scratch that, your liver might actually fail long term if you don't pass something more akin to "real food" through your gut at least occasionally, for probably complex reasons that amount to "the liver is a damn complex chemical plant that is expected to actually run continuously on all pathways, not to be left abandoned" ...I'm really looking forward for 10+ years results for the people living on that soylent thing only btw.
He also wrote a book on the topic("Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease")[2].
A somewhat old, but measured take on some of Lustig’s claims: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-rea...
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
I believe this is not "that" accurate. Generally the presence of excess carbohydrates cause the body to prioritize sucrose/fructose/glucose to glycogen conversion and storage & usage. Dietary Lipids that are ingested are stored rather than used for energy. While, De novo lipogenesis (turning carbs to lipids) does occur, it is inefficient enough that the body barely converts something around 1% of carbs to fat.
Since glycogen is stored in the liver and muscles, and insulin signals the muscles & liver to take up the glycogen in the blood, this is probably where diabetes starts when the liver and muscles are already filled with enough glycogen and there is no where for the glycogen in the bloodstream to go.
If the body could efficiently convert sugars to lipids, I don't think diabetes would be that much of an issue. People would just get obese with the diabetes.
AFAIK, the priorities for energy consumption of the body is:
1. sugars into glycogen into ATP
2. protein into glucose into glycogen (gluconeogenesis) into ATP (some limited amount)
3. lipids into ketone bodies into ATP
So as long as the body was sugars to use up, that is the priority of usage.
One of the most calorically intensive tasks the body does is growth and repair of new tissue. Excess sugars are generally used up by kids who are growing. However, once people reach adulthood, the growth rate slows so significantly that the excess caloric intake forces all the lipids ingested to be stored.
There are other sugars that either differ only slightly from glucose or are dimer, etc. AKA lactose is a disaccharide sugar composed of galactose and glucose. Compare with sucrose which is disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose.
Huh? You mention that the SUGARS the kids are eating are used for growth. But then say it's the LIPIDS (dietary fats) that are stored in adults? What about the sugar...?
I've always been skinny, and even eating loads of sugar, and loads of fat, never seem to budge in weight. Best I could do was put on 15lbs of muscle in college when I started working out... That's the only time I've ever been able to gain weight. What gives?
Point was that kids generally have a “higher metabolism” because they are in a growth stage. (Hence using up the sugars) The adolescent body is generating tons of human growth hormone and testosterone to build muscle, bone, cartilage, etc and that activity is calorically intensive.
When people get older, that activity subsides so much that eating at the same rates as an adult leads to weight gain. Plus, kids are generally more active having to walk from class to class while most adults (us office workers) are sitting all day.
The body also likes to stay at a homeostasis of sorts for weight. Listening to you body and only eating when you’re hungry and maintaing weight is a wonderful genetic trait most people have.
Body builders who have wanted to get larger but could not would actually force fed themselves the calories to the point of being mildly sick.
People usually have mentioned post-workout hunger the say of or the next day. Thats where the body lifting weights craves a lot of calories for growing.
We've "known" that unbound fructose is hard on the liver for years.
You should also have fish/meat, nuts and seeds for proteins and fat. And if you can, do have veggies instead of sugar rich whole fruits. But its hard enough eating healthy, I've found that the first thing to do is focus on eating better and not the healthiest. So fruits are the best deserts, and are better then most snacky thing people eat between meals. Yet they're easier to adopt in your diet because most people find them tastier.
For example, I see some people who when hungry and looking to snack down a whole bag of chips, or a whole box of oreos without thinking. But who'd mentally find it excessive to down a whole container of strawberries. Changing that attitude is a good place to start, and eating a whole strawberry container instead of a box of oreo is a pretty easy and simple change. Easier then just not snacking at all, or then eating coliflower instead.
But if you process fruit by removing that fiber, as say fruit juice, you're easily consuming tons of calories.
Source: Tons but the book Wheat Belly is one of the most succinct. Also, every trainer who is even half-way decent at transforming clients tells them to avoid grains, don’t discount what people are ACTUALLY doing to get results, even if a definitive study hasn’t been done on it (although many studies have been done, see Wheat Belly).
Fruit falls under the category of “healthy, if you’re healthy.” If you’re overweight and inactive, and you want to lose weight, then you should not be eating fruit, or any high-sugar, high-carb food for that matter. Once you’re lean and physically active, it’s fine.
I said source: Wheat Belly (book by Dr William Davis), but also my experience working with clients and with trainers who are experts at transforming clients from fat to fit.
Edit: hate my tone all you like, but keep in mind if this weren’t fringe bullshit I’d be met with more than downvotes and attitude.
But really, your problem is not that the GP did not cite their facts, you just don’t like the sound of their claims, so you’ll respond in a toxic way. I hardly expect the actual scientific literature to change your views.
Just bury me in good citations and we can both be happy.
Isn't it more likely that trainers tell people to avoid wheat and corn because they tend to be high-calorie, low-satiety foods? I've lost 70+ lbs over the past year on IIFYM-style caloric restriction. I still enjoy corn and wheat products, but somewhat sparingly because I'd rather have an extra half pound of chicken than a piece of bread.
Cutting out grains is a quick and easy way to help people hack their caloric intake more than anything else, IMO.
Yes that’s also true. But cutting grains also fixes your sense of satiety. Ever had a piece of bread and then next thing you knew the whole bread basket was gone? Many people feel like they can’t control themselves when eating bread. No one does that with steak. And even other high-carb foods like potatoes present less of a problem for people (in terms of whether they feel full and stop eating vs continuing to eat past the point of satiety).
IIFYM is very effective at fat loss BUT (and I know I’m going to get shit for saying this) it requires a very specific personality type that can be very mechanical about eating. Most people don’t have the time or interest to count their macros, and even if they did they still have difficulty overcoming the urges that come with consuming junk food such as modern grains in the U.S.
I actually agree with you about IIFYM needing the right personality type. http://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ is probably my favorite "how to be not fat" page in existence and it outlines that issue quite well - if you can be disciplined to stop eating, then IIFYM works great. If you can't, then full abstinence is pretty necessary. I find that I'm much more successful on an IIFYM diet than an abstinence diet, because on the latter I find myself craving the "forbidden fruit" and it eats at me until I crack, then I feel guilty, and it spirals from there. On IIFYM, I can let myself have whatever I'm craving, knowing that I just have to make up for it with the rest of my intake that day. The actual mechanical part of counting macros is pretty trivial once you've learned how to do it (MyFitnessPal learns your dietary habits quickly, and trivializes the process).
Not every approach works for everyone, but I have a lot of frustration around a lot of the diet fads that are constantly looking for the "magic bullet" - no fat! no sugar! only specific carbs! lots of carbs! 3 gallons of coconut oil daily! Only eat every 6 days! - when, IMO, the only magic bullet is self-discipline to find out how to keep yourself from overeating, and my experience has been that that can be different for each person based on their psychological tendencies.
My biggest issue with it, and all diet advice that wants to “give it to you straight, it’s all about calories” is this — YES in order to lose weight you HAVE to burn more calories than you consume, there is no question about it, it’s tautological. But it’s kind of like saying, “in order to stay sober every night, you have to drink alcohol slower than your liver can process.” It’s true...but it doesn’t really answer the question you should be asking, which is “why are you an alcoholic?” The answer to that question is more complicated, but it’s the only question that matters.
Back to diet, when it comes to being lean — why were the vast majority of Americans lean in the 1950s back when almost no one did any formal exercise, especially women, and hardly anyone was counting macros, calorie counting, etc? They just naturally ate about as many calories as their body burned off. Their bodies had a mechanism to tell them to stop eating when they were full. So what’s the difference between people and food 60 years ago and people and food today? No other mammal on earth has gotten so obese as a percentage of the population as humans have. The answer to that question, I’d argue, is the only one that matters!
I think this is why the Paleo diet has taken off so well, because frankly we shouldn’t have to count calories, macros, etc to stay lean — yes, those methods work, but we should be able to simply rely on the signals our bodies are sending us, every other lesser mammal does this, and humans did it just fine 60 years ago.
TL;DR Yes, it’s all about eating fewer calories, BUT how you eat fewer calories has a big effect on whether you can sustain it long term and feel satiated.
Avoiding omega-6-rich oils is probably a good thing for most people, since most don't get enough omega-3 to balance out, but beyond that and crap like trans-fats, fats are something to embrace not shy away from. And, what's more, getting off the beaten track of traditional oils can add a lot of interesting flavor to foods. Beyond olive oil, which is pretty common, coconut, avocado, walnut and macadamia nut oil have all become favorites of mine and I find the tastes of the food I cook/prepare so much more interesting than when I used to use corn/soybean/canola oils or tried to avoid fats all together.
Also, my wife is a registered dietitian with a PhD, not a "nutritionist".
Many people would consider a diet like this difficult, but if you approach it correctly (I end up cooking a lot of szechuan cuisine), it's quite easy—and delicious!
But if you want to know what we believe to be true about which foods are healthy, there's probably no better starting point than Harvard's Healthy Eating Plate.
- https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...
Avoiding processed foods and refined sugar is good. Avoiding dairy is good. But there's no reason in general to avoid cereal grains, legumes or potatoes unless you're sensitive/allergic.
And higher-quality meat is an improvement over the status quo but a vegetarian diet is likely to be healthier.
But all that is me talking, not my wife. I suspect she would say similar things but honestly we don't spend a lot of time discussing the random fad diet book du-jour.
Does she recommend low fat food alternatives to her patients? My nutritionist pushed them like the gospel. And she would tell us in the next sentence that most low fat foods had added sugar to increase the flavor.
It has a surprisingly healthy dose of scientific studies condensed for the layman, and some historical context as well.
I feel like carbs are unfairly vilified by a lot of people, to the point of resembling fad diets. Anecdote: I eat very carb-heavy. I also lost 35 lbs in the last couple of months. I didn't do it by cutting carbs.
Sugar I buy into vilifying a bit more... Since it's particularly evil how much sugar gets added to everyday items these days, in the "high fructose corn syrup" era which is probably responsible for a lot of the current obesity problems. But I've come to see even a "no sugar" backlash as a little unfair. My daughter loves sweet desserts, as kids do, and we often cave and give her what she wants. But I've been finding on my current weight loss kick that I can eat a lot of it with her and still lose weight every week.
For me, being mindful of portion sizes and thinking about calories holistically has done a lot better than demonizing certain foods.
In addition a fat liver sounds more curable in a thirld-world-country then diabetes. So the worser of two it is.
1) You're right, it's not that new. I'm pretty sure I've read it at least once before on _HN_ itself.
2) Nutritional science is a mess not because something weird is going on but because it's really, really hard. It's difficult enough to study the short and long term effects of substances on the body when you're taking about a drug but when you're trying to do it for something like food. Food is intimately tied to culture, habit, social settings, and mood, which makes it hard to fully regiment what your test subjects are taking. Nutrients also both appear and are metabolized in extremely complex arrangements that we still don't fully understand (even something as basic as calorie counts use a pretty ridiculous, roundabout measurement technique), which makes it hard to accurately track. It also is something that everyone has to do all the time, so (unlike drugs), we have to go with "best current understanding" recommendations, which create their own political and reputational effects on scientific study when they're contradicted.
We just this year upended decades of public health consensus on the effects of low sodium on blood pressure. This isn't "something weird" going on, it's par for the course for the field.
HFCS alarmism is just that: Alarmism.
The problem is not the composition of HFCS, it's that we in the western world are adding a hell of a lot more sugar to everything compared to 40-50 years ago.
[0]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
I try to stay away from added sugars too, but there is no reason to demonize HFCS specifically.
I wish I'd taken chemistry. I see a lot of conflicting statements about isomers of glucose.
There are of course many more processed foods that don't contain added sugars, and therefore would contain no added fructose. At least some of these could be considered relatively harmless in moderation.
I'm not a doctor, a dietician, nor am I a nutritionist, so take the following with the largest grain of salt you wish, but a diet entirely devoid of fructose doesn't seem like it would be particularly useful compared to a diet with moderate fructose intake, in the general case. On the other hand, I'm unsure whether avoiding it entirely would be particularly harmful, if you were so inclined (but again, I'll point out that I'm not a doctor and this is not to be taken as medical advice.)
Take chicken, for instance. A lot of chicken you buy is pumped full of sugar/salt-heavy brine, because water is cheaper than chicken. The salt helps the chicken bind the water, and the sugar balances out the taste. The end result is overpriced and compromised taste-wise.
Personally, I try to avoid added sugar wherever I can, and I have started thinking of sugar as a spice to be used very sparingly, if at all. The only exception is when I bake a cake, because cakes that aren't made full-butter, full-sugar full-everything are just sad. Make good cakes, just eat smaller portions of them, less often.
I wanted to know because it is probably really hard to reach without processing the sugar. IIRC dates are most fructose dense food we can find in nature. How many dates would be enough to damage my liver?
It would probably be hard to hurt your liver with alsohol as well, if you limit yourself to unprocessed alcohol (i.e.: by eating off fruits).
But your instinct is right that fructose that's bound up in real fruit isn't typically the problem. It's unbound fructose like you find in agave nectar or HFCS.
Once one sucrose is metabolized by sucrase it hits the bloodstream as glucose and fructose no different than HFSC.
Doesn't only matter in the end how much fructose you consume regardless of whether enters your body bound as sucrose or not as HFCS?
Can you point to some more information are the differences?
Sucrose is glucose and fructose with a chemical bond between. HFCS is a slurry; there's no chemical bond connecting the two.
"Broken down in the small intestine very rapidly into 50/50..." ignores the fact that it takes a while to make it down as far as the small intestine.
I can't speak more to the differences personally because I'm not the one with the PhD and I'm not going to interrupt my wife from grading papers just to correct some rando on the Internet. :)
I am still not seeing the difference?
edit
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "unbound" I thought you where referring to the chemical bond in sucrose, vs being bound up physically with fiber in fruit.
One may need to be somewhat more moderate with dates as they contain little fiber to sugar content - hinting at the importance of varying your fruit diet.
[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/if-fructose-is-bad-what-abo...
It would seem if you bound HFSC up with fiber it would have the same effect.
Fruit has loads of fiber, although less than what our ancestors gathered, and in less quantity. Fiber is what produces satiety. For the same reason fruit juice is not good for you.
Two things, people just don't eat that much fruit, usually. And whole fruits/vegetables when eaten release glucose and fructose slowly as the digestive enzymes slowly break it down. I think the idea is not to force your body to deal with a big slug of glucose and fructose all at once.
Separately, on the sugar science website they say:
> our scientific team recommends keeping all added sugars below the recommended limits of 6 teaspoons/day (25g) for women and 9 teaspoons (38g) for men.
Where is the scientific evidence supporting this?
These glasses have been replaced by much larger ones. These days a 'small' juice is 12-16 oz, or 150-200 calories, which is just as bad as pop.
Portion sizes are growing with the collective waistline of America.
Body weight, metabolism and exercise have to be big variables.
The scary part is how much sugar sneaks into your daily diet without noticing - I kept count of the sugar grams per day for a workday and I had about 98 gms of sugar & that's where it got labelled (unlike a tomato sauce pasta).
Anyway, all it taught me is that even if exercised like a madman, I won't lose the "moved to US" weight gain without minor diet changes - but what surprised me was that my diet was a good one in the meals, it is just the middle-of-meals grabbing of things that pushed that number up (like a yogurt).
> How many dates would be enough to damage my liver?
I was told that there's two ways to drink twelve glasses of alcohol a month - one's to hit six for two weekends and the other is to drink a glass on Fri, Sat and Sun.
And then said "it's like three pats on the back a week or two punches a month".
Bodies heal and repair damage - and at a varying rate as you age.
It's all about balance, possibly everyone should have a blood glucose meter and burn off that excess glucose every night.
That's folk-wisdom, which is sort of a good heuristic but is not useful when we can actually test and demonstrate. Some things are bad even in small quantities, say poison. Somethings we can't get enough of, say fresh air.
I've mostly cut out fructose (and most other forms of sugar) altogether from my diet and it's probably the single-most impactful change that I've made in my lifestyle on my well being.
Well, if you get too much air, the pressure will probably kill you, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have made some headway on dealing with it. But, I mean, I wouldn't know where to begin to explain it and I have no idea how it relates to your experience. So, I mean, I don't know what pieces to even talk about. If I know someone has, for example, diabetes, I can come up with pertinent things to say, even though that isn't my condition.
There is a lot of info out there these days. You may be able to eventually hack this and find a means to put on weight.
It's interesting that science is just figuring this out. And I say this as someone who has doctor parents.