Sickeningly Sweet
news.weill.cornell.edu
news.weill.cornell.edu
I'm curious to know how people actually draw lines around sugar intake. Presumably fruit juice is not allowed? What about foods that have fruit juice as an ingredient? Do you decide based on what the ingredients are, or how much of the ingredient there is? Seems like there's a number of reasonable ways to make rules, but it isn't immediately apparent which one is most principled, or easiest to stick to.
EDIT: Any explanation on the downvotes? I'd love to know how folks draw lines around eating sugary foods. If you've got it all figured out, please share your secrets!
I keep it simple. The heuristic I use for sweets is, if a child would cry for it in a supermarket, then I can't have it.
I've been losing ~1 kg a week since I cut out sweets like this 3 weeks ago. Was at 81kg, slightly overweight for my sex/age/height, now at ~78kg.
So no candy, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, potato chips, cake, cordial, fruit juice, soda, milkshakes including "breakfast shakes" which aren't actually food, even if you want to believe they are like I did. Also dessert versions of real food, like flavored, sweetened yogurt.
I still have takeaways once or twice a week and still drink alcohol if I feel like it.
My main cravings are soda and candy, so I have some sugar-free alternatives I use to satiate that.
It is very hard to avoid sugar completely. It’s in everything especially anything marketed toward kids.
We're not sugar free, but sweets are for occasional eating, not for week days. We watch a Disney show every Friday, and my children get to make a small bag of candy (100g) for that. They rarely eat it all. Beyond that we simply load them with greens, and make sure there is always some green that they like and some they have to taste. Hungry when they get home from school? Grab a carrot. Hunger 1 hour before dinner? Take an apple. Need an late lunch snack? Eat some nuts. The battle is won if parents give their children healthy eating habits in their daily life.
You should try granny smith apples or raspberries, they are lower in sugar content. Any internet search can help you find lower sugar fruits.
Many of the modern hybrids are extremely sweet and come close to being a "processed" food.
The sugar content of bananas is highly variable with ripeness.
The resistant starch in bananas is essentially unavailable filler, but when ripened enzymes turn it into sugar.
A green banana has medicinal value; you can use it to stop (or prevent) diarreah because of the resistant starch. But when ripe the effect is gone.
Strawberries are a good fruit to eat.
Edit: The graph here is pretty helpful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit#Nutritional_value Unfortunately it doesn't show the amount of sugar in each fruit.
I have to avoid all fruits since I am on the keto diet. My mouth waters thinking about a cantaloupe drink, but if I drank even 4oz I'd be undoing a lot of work.
I wouldn't eat fruits if I needed fiber, for that I would just add some psyllium husk to a drink.
"Important note: there’s a lot of craziness out there around “keto” diets, and this does not mean that a ketogenic diet prevents cancer or is a treatment for it. No, what it means is that if you’re a cancer patient taking a PI3K inhibitor, a ketogenic diet could help the drug to work, and that’s it. In fact, in at least one rodent model (AML), putting the animals on the diet actually accelerated the cancer before the PI3K inhibitor treatment began, so be aware."
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/11/16/pi3...
The amount of sugar (and other sweeteners) we eat has actually gone down in the last 20 years, but we haven't seen a drop in obesity or other metabolic diseases at all.
My gut feeling is vegetable oils are another part of the problem. Unlike sugar, we keep eating more and more of them. And unlike sugar, we only started eating them around 100 years ago.
There are a few nutrition people talking about vegetable oils but it doesn't have the same mass consciousness as sugar. Maybe because there are still old school nutritionists telling us we should avoid saturated fats.
And it’s not all vegetable oils that contain omega-6, so using olive oil, coconut oil and a few others should be fine and healthier than cooking with animal fats.
Safflower, Sunflower, Corn, Soybean, Cottonseed and Peanut are all particularly bad. Canola (rapeseed) is about 2:1, so it’s not too bad if you need to use cheap stuff. Then there’s a bunch that have hardly any at all, so those should be fine...coconut and olive are my favorites to cook with since they withstand high temperatures better, but I’m also starting to love avocado oil in a lot of dishes, particularly ones where the oil doesn’t get cooked. And, of course, flaxseed oil has the opposite imbalance, so it should be a staple in everyone’s pantry to help us correct for oils used in restaurants and other food we don’t cook ourselves.
And it probably should be said that palm oil is killing us for a completely separate reason, so even though it’s relatively healthy to ingest, it’s a good one to stay away from.
When you take flights over Southeast Asia, it’s quite a sad sight. It’s just endless palm plantations in what used to be pristine rainforest habitats. You can understand the perspectives of these third world countries because palm oil can bring in a lot of money to places that tend to be very poor, but from an environmental standpoint, palm plantations are a disaster. They’re destroying some of our most valuable carbon sinks to produce the stuff.
Vegetable oils are not good but would not say that by itself is the issue. It’s the carbs you’re eating that is being cooked in vegetable oils.
Data is sourced from USDA, you download it from their website
There are other sources if you feel like Googling
I did get some 70% chocolate though, just enough sugar to be edible, but not sweet exactly.
Not all 100% chocolate is great, but some brands are excellent.
If you have some, send them to me. I'll dispose of them.