New research suggests that propionate raises the risk for diabetes and obesity | Hacker News Reader

New research suggests that propionate raises the risk for diabetes and obesity

news.harvard.edu

16 pointsmhkool14 comments

This reminds me of Michael Pollan's comments about "magic ingredients", and our tendency to find some ingredient that either makes food magically healthy or magically unhealthy - see omega-3 for a positive example, or anything called a "toxin" for a negative example. Magic ingredients can then be added to or removed from factory-made foods in the interest of marketing.

Propionate isn't the proximate cause of widespread diabetes. A diet consisting primarily of refined sugar and white flour is the proximate cause.

According to Wikipedia, it was banned in Germany in 1988 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propions%C3%A4ure). In 1998 is became legal again because of EU regulation. If it was really a major contributor to diabetes and obesity, there should have been a drop in diabetes cases between 1988 and 1998.

For those avoiding clickbait, the ingredient in question is propionate

Thank you for this.

Tongue-in-cheek answer to the headline is "Obviously yes, in fact you might be startled to learn that many popular food ingredients raise the risk for diabetes and obesity. Sugar is one example." :P

FWIW at time of this comment, the title was:

Could a popular food ingredient raise the risk for diabetes and obesity?

Thanks for the /r/savedyouaclick approach!

Thanks! included above.

I was expecting sugar to be the answer

...despite the food industry having spent decades telling you it is fat you arrive at the correct expected answer!

Sugar when eaten with a certain number of hours after a high fat meal, is certainly a valid answer.

Sugar by itself is not. Fat by itself is neither.

Fat digests slowly, so for many hours the blood is "fatty" after eating a high fat meal. Fat in the blood makes the (muscle) cells less insulin sensitive, thus the sugar is not readily absorbed which leads to blood sugar spikes.

Those spikes freak out the pancreas, which will try to push even more insulin into the blood. Eventually this (also) leads to type2.

Well, that or HFCS.

HFCS is sugar for insulin purposes.

I thought it was metabolised differently and/or used in greater concentrations, making it generally "badder". It's hard to find useful info because it's been seized upon by woo vendors but a quick search turned up these links:

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ Huge and I haven't finished digesting it yet (hah) but seems to think overall that HFCS is equivalent to sucrose which would support your statement

* https://www.webmd.com/heart/metabolic-syndrome/news/20090421... suggests that fructose is worse than sucrose for promoting insulin dependence and other risk factors in obese people

* https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/895/4649668 suggests a range of differences in how they're metabolised which I guess could go either way

All up it sounds like there might be some differences but it's not as much as I thought.

Yeah, there's some differences due to different types of sugars, but for "bad for you" purposes, they're all basically alike. It's like blowing up a building with plastique instead of dynamite. Sure, plastique is technically worse, but the building is getting blown up either way.

A lot of this boils down to marketing, as Michael Pollan describes so well. HFCS is a "science word" (and worse, a science/corporate word - there's nothing attractive-sounding about "high fructose corn syrup"), and a great deal of food woo comes from culturally anti-corporate feelings rather than any strong reasoning about biology. Don't eat the science words, they'll give you the autism cancer!

It's especially absurd because HFCS is seen as an evil "agribusiness" product, yet somehow cane sugar is not, even though sugarcane is a far nastier business in many ways. Say what you will about corn, but at least it doesn't have a long history of slavery tied to it.

And food manufacturers, sensitive to these abstract feelings, latch on to "real sugar" as opposed to evil HFCS, and encourage a belief that "real sugar" is "natural", while HFCS is "artificial" - a science word, full of science cancer.

We live in a soup of marketing and nonsense. It's very hard to not be affected by omnipresent marketing campaigns that are carefully designed to manipulate our feelings rather than our reason.

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