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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

I recall reading an article saying that doctors were nearly ready to begin calling Alzheimer's disease Type III diabetes. This result would lend credence to that notion.

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I predict that in 5-10 years the evidence will be overwhelming that sugar/carbohydrates for some subset of the population are essentially poison. Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s - I think we will start to see more and more mainstream connections of all three with carbohydrate intake.

Unless you're talking about an extremely small subset of the population, like 5% or less, I think that would be a pretty bad prediction. Whole fruits, vegetables, legumes, leafy greens are all recommended by virtually all doctors and official dietary guidelines. And each of those are all high in carbohydrates.

I'm so jaded by expert opinion these days. For decades doctors have been recommending a low-fat, high carb diet and saying things like saturated fats are bad for you. It's becoming very clear that there's no evidence this is considered healthy. If anything, the demonization of fats around the 80s coincides with increasing obesity rates in the US.

The American Heart Association literally has an infographic on their website that tells people to eat more polyunsaturated fats (i.e. vegetable oils) and completely avoid coconut oil (https://healthyforgood.heart.org/eat-smart/infographics/the-...). Anyone who has studied the science behind ketosis knows this is completely bonkers.

Leafy greens have a high percentage of their calories in carbohydrates, but they are not high in carbohydrates (they are recommended because they have a high ratio of valuable vitamins, etc., to calories, and recommended for weight loss because they have very low calorie density. They are typically recommended even on specifically low-carb diets.)

Also important to note the different between carbs and net carbs. Leafy greens are high in fiber, which is a carb, but you need to subtract that value from the total carbs per serving to get to a net carb count (i.e. total carbs your body can actually turn into energy)

I do not think that carbohydrates all together are the problem. Its just that our capabilities in understanding (poly-) saccharides are 20 to 30 years delayed compared to other important biomolecules like nucleobases or aminoacids while playing a very important role (like the polysaccharide modifications of proteins). The problem is not that we cannot detect whether there is any sugar molecule present, its just hard to say which one (of the thousands of possible combinations of e.g C6H12O6). We do not know how much is decoded in there.

Hopefully, but probably not. For some reason, the subset of the population that will have the negative effects, more often gets forgotten.

This sounds interesting. Do you remember why they were making this allusion to diabetes?

I read an article just a few days ago that discussed how sleep is important for cleaning out plaques from the brain like those associated with Alzheimer's. Unfortunately I flush my browser history frequently or I would post it.

1. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/bittman-is-...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/

3. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/24/why-lac...

I bought and read Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep (which is referred to in PP's thirs reference) and would thoroughly recommend it to all humans. I now take some solace in my grumpiness when tired having a biological explanation.

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