Training the Brain to Eat Less Sugar | Hacker News Reader

Training the Brain to Eat Less Sugar

drexel.edu

197 pointsfurcyd161 comments

For the first 3.5 months of this year I was completely off artificial sugar. That meant fruit was ok, but any kind of dessert wasn't. It was hard initially but after a couple of weeks it was easy. I didn't feel the craving to eat dessert like I always did. I also felt much better and more productive now that my insulin levels were more stable than before. On my previous diet I had regular sugar highs and lows (which of course meant more sugar), and it was great to be rid of that.

If anyone wants to try this and finds it too difficult initially, please stick to it for at least two weeks! It gets easier!

Awesome, congrats! I'm at 2.5 years of no artificial and as close to 0 "natural sugar" as possible. I don't have any fruit and I don't drink milk but have the lactose in cheese sometimes. I also have tomatoes sometimes so there is a little glucose in that. Generally, if I could, I'd have 0 -ose completely.

It's done wonders for my A1C and weight. It definitely gets easier after the original weaning. Now it doesn't even take thought or effort and I have no regrets at all.

If you want to avoid lactose, there are naturally lactose free cheeses like Italian Parmigiano and French Comté.

One interesting milk option is Fairlife. It's processed to have more protein and no lactose [0]. Some health bloggers object to the process, here's a summary [1]. Overall I think it's a solid product.

[0] https://fairlife.com/our-nutrition/

[1] https://www.stephshares.com/healthyeating/966/

Thanks! I've heard of this but never really researched it. I don't object to the process but I drink carageenan free heavy cream to achieve a similar taste/texture with no protein.

Out of curiosity, what kind of foods are your staples?

Butter, oil, bacon, pork rinds and eggs

Dang, no fruits & veggies?

No fruit. Barely any vegetables. Doctors have checked my blood quarterly for years and I'm healthier than ever before. :shrug: I'm not saying it works for everyone, please don't take this as a reason for you to do the same. If you're not T2 diabetic or extremely morbidly obese, there's no reason to cut out sugar.

I'm curious and don't know much aboutdiet sorry, are you on some sort of ketogenic diet? Without any -ose how does your brain fuel itself?

The liver converts protein and fat to glucose in small amounts as needed. look for "gluconeogenesis".

Do you eat other carbs that convert to sugar, like white bread, pasta, or pretzels?

No. I have been very close to pure carnivore for over 2 years. I hate that I have to eat some spinach and broccoli but it's way easier than liver and brain regularly.

What does a typical day of food look like for you?

At my doctor's urging, I've cut out added sugar and switched to a high fiber diet. I eased into it. First I cut out the category of things that are mostly made of sugar: dessert foods, ketchup and many salad dressings, most breakfast cereals. After about a month of that, I additionally cut out things that have sweeteners as an ingredient. This would have been impossible without adding lots of high fiber foods, because most American food has sugar high on its ingredient list. I eat a lot of fresh / frozen fruit and vegetables, rice, nuts, and steel-cut oats now. I use my spice cabinet a whole lot more than I used to. As a result, I feel much healthier and I lost ten pounds without trying and without feelings of hunger.

I'm telling this story because I find my current diet quite delicious and fulfilling, and I want people to know that eating healthier food doesn't have to be about self-denial. This is especially true if you're willing to spend some money on good foods. Nor does it have to be all-or-nothing, ostentatious asceticism. I'll eat a slice of cake at my kids' birthday parties, and I'll eat what's offered me at a friend's house. I probably won't have seconds though, because after mostly abstaining from sugar, I can't handle eating too much of it at a go.

I don't think you really mean "artificial" sugar? The vast majority of sugar comes from natural sources: cane, corn (maize), beets.

Cutting down on foods containing added processed sugar is certainly a good idea.

While you can press sugar out of sugarcane and beets yourself, you need extensive enzymatic processing to convert corn into sugar, specifically high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS): https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/modern-foods/the-... (grain of salt: link contains some GMO fearmongering)

So no, added sugars typically aren't synthesized de novo from chemical elements. But the industrial production of HFCS from corn feedstock is artificial in every sense of the word.

It was around 2-3 weeks for me, too. I went off sugar last year for 3 months and lost some weight. The problem I always have that eventually I had a little, then a little more, repeat, until I'm having it several times a week. It's insidious.

And don't overdo it.

I tried cutting out sugar several times passing on fruit, even vegetables like carrots.

I never managed to do it for more than a week. Now I try to do what you have done and don't eat desserts, chocolate, etc. And eat processed food sparingly.

Watch the Fed Up documentary, how sugar is more addictive than cocaine in mice, how 80% of food products in US supermarkets have added sugar. Its nearly impossible trying to train yourself to moderate your sugar, its better to avoid it altogether as your body sugar level (GI) spikes causes withdrawal later. Our body does not need any refined sugar. Fruits are ok, avoid fruit juices as they often either have added or sugar or miss the fibre which helps your body slow down digestion.

"how 80% of food products in US supermarkets have added sugar."

The other 20% have added artificial sweeteners that taste awful. (edited to note I hate the taste and idea of products that are heavily marketed as "no added sugar" that are dosed with megatons of suralose or similar)

You pretty much HAVE to go homemade paleo style food. Luckily that kind of food can be delicious and easy to make and cheap... A big salad with a modest side of meat, a stir fry made with a bag of frozen veggies and chopped meat, classic meat and veggies, meat and spices in a slow cooker, etc.

I have no problems with artificial sweeteners and have used them for over a decade (mostly in beverages). I believe it improved my health. Eating too much real sugar isn't even that enjoyable now, and usually makes me feel sick.

I recently reduced my pop to a friday afternoon one can treat, but before that I drank exclusively diet drinks - I got so used to it that drinking a full sugar coke was sickly sweet.

> meat and spices in a slow cooker

I cannot overstate how much of a difference it makes to season your food with delicious spices. I think packaged food has so much sugar and salt in it partly because spices are comparatively expensive. If you cook your own food, I highly recommend herbs and spices! (Also some spices, like turmeric for instance, are reputed to have health benefits of their own.)

This is really infuriating. There is a ton of sugar in almost everything. Now they advertise Coke that has an obscene amount of cane sugar instead of an obscene amount of corn syrup as a health benefit. There has been a lot of talk about a code of ethics for developers. How about one for people working in the food industry? The people working in marketing and product development do truly damaging things to whole nations. They should be ashamed.

The "code of ethics" is really committing to supplying the nutritional information and ingredients - it provides you what you need to make a decision as a consumer.

OP has a point, though: at its core, advertising is the practice of getting as close as legally possible to lying (either by omission or straight-up nonsense) without actually doing it.

That is true. It's intentionally trying to obfuscate the information.

It's hacking of the human psyche with "dark patterns".

There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you, at all. All this talk about "sugar" swings is completely off base, IMO, especially considering most starches are much higher on the GI and II scales than sugars. Fructose is low GI, and most of it is converted to glucose in the gut, anyway. Higher consumption is converted to fat, but most vilifying sugars promote fat, so what's the difference? If anyone can link me evidence that moderate sugar intake promotes worse blood sugar regulation (compared to saturated fat, especially) in healthy, non-diabetic populations, would love to see it.

FWIW, I've had anywhere from <30g total carbs in my diet, to moderate sugar/carb intake, to very high (300+g sugar [mostly from fruit], 500+ carb) diets. The very low carb diets were the worst for my energy levels (and yes, I did intake plenty of electrolytes, and was on it for 12+ weeks). Moderate carb feels best, to me, as an active, healthy body-weight male, for what anecdotal evidence is worth.

Hear, hear!

I couldn't imagine cutting sugar out completely, or anything non-processed for that matter. It just seems like a miserable way to live, but to each their own, I guess.

I personally like to enjoy everything nature has to offer, just in moderation. Portion control using non-processed ingredients is the only sustainable diet I've ever successfully implemented, and I've tried a great many.

Anecdotally, I agree that it isn't that moderate carbs is bad and low carbs is good. The one thing that I feel is not talked about enough is the human aspect. Some people can limit themselves to a small helping of carbs, others can't. For a lot of people, the only good strategy is denial. If I know I'll be tempted to eat too much pasta or drink too much orange juice, I have to just not buy it or order it at all.

I always talk about this analogy. It is really hard to eat 8 medium oranges with a meal, it is trivial to drink a 16 oz bottle of orange juice. It is also pretty easy to have a second 16 oz bottle of orange juice (but no one is likely to eat 16 medium oranges). Most people struggle because life is stressful and eating the whole bag of chips is a release. It is hard to stop after 10 chips when your day was sh!t. Just my two cents....

Yeah, sugar is pretty addicting. I used to be a cigarette smoker. Limiting myself to just a few cigarettes a day would never work. Cold turkey worked just fine though.

>If anyone can link me evidence that moderate sugar intake promotes worse blood sugar regulation (compared to saturated fat, especially) in healthy, non-diabetic populations, would love to see it.

I think you should reframe this...and ask if anyone can link evidence of a case of type 2 diabeties or non alcoholic fatty liver disease where the patient didn’t consume sugar/carbs (those cases don’t exist).

I think historically type 2 diabeties being called adult onset diabeties shows that even life long moderate consumption of carbs/sugars leads to type 2 in many individuals who were “healthy” in their younger years. Moreover, for many people type 2 was just a natural progression, it’s not like historically everyone with type 2 began over consuming carbs/sugar later in life.

The vast majority of the population eats sugar and carbs, so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them, too. Moreover, there are plenty of populations which consume very high carb diets who don't suffer from diabetes.

>so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them

No, not a majority, every single patient with T2D has consumed them, whereas a majority could reverse diabeties by cutting them.

Medically it is undisputed T2D could have been avoided in 100% of cases through diet and exercise. Do other factors contribute (obesity, genetics, etc...)? Yes, but notwithstanding those issues still 100% of T2D cases could have been avoided (unfortunately not 100% can be reversed).

Sure people can consume high carb diets live long healthy lives, no one is saying 100% of people who eat carbs/sugar get diabetes, but 100% of patients that get T2D consumed sugar/carbs.

I agree low carb diets are the healthiest. But for those like myself that cant totally commit, I just want to add:

Creatine supplementation has hugely improved my body's ability to attenuate sugar spikes. I feel amazing being able to handle high amounts of sugar by my muscles helping intake the sugar. If you have blood sugar issues or have diabetes, 2.5 mg of creatine daily is safe and has a great efficacy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20881878/

The exercise portion is important because your muscles can reach peak sugar/ATP storage. Once that occurs that muscle wont really help attenuate your blood sugar any longer.. You need to drain the muscle reservoirs often to keep them as good sugar sinks.

> Moderate carb feels best

Yeah I agree, but I think the problem is it's way too easy to eat a lot of sugar without realising it. Eat an average low fat yogurt cup and if you're not careful you just ate 30g of sugar.

I'd argue it's easier to over-consume fats (in the context of a mixed diet). 30g of sugar is less calories than a tablespoon of oil.

> Fructose is low GI, and most of it is converted to glucose in the gut, anyway.

The first half of this sentence (fructose is low GI) is factually correct. The second half (most fructose is converted to glucose in the gut) is factually incorrect. The entire sentence and comment oversimplify sugar metabolism. tl;dr: control your fructose intake.

First, nitpicky corrections: about half of ingested fructose is converted to glucose, not most of it, and this occurs in the liver, not the gut (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/).

Second, and more importantly: GI is a woefully inadequate measure of the healthfulness of a food. the glycemic index (GI) of a food is indexed to a standard amount of carbohydrate mass (usually 50 g) from that food. GI captures the impact on blood glucose per gram of carbohydrate, but it certainly misses crucial aspects of sugar metabolism. For example, carrots have a high GI (above 70), but that's not a reason to stop eating carrots. You'd need to eat a huge amount of carrots to spike your blood sugar. Glycemic load is a more useful metric (https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/glycemic-index-a...), but even that is beside the point when it comes to fructose and its deleterious health effects.

Fructose, being fructose and not glucose, of course has a low glycemic index, since GI is defined based on blood glucose.

Dr. Robert Lustig (UCSF pediatric endocrinologist) has devoted years of effort to communicating the disproportionate damage that fructose causes to human metabolism. In brief, fructose is processed along different metabolic paths than glucose, and is better than glucose at making people fat, diabetic, and metabolically unhealthy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592517/)

A top-level summary from 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructo...

A very detailed lecture (video and transcript): https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/

It takes high doses of sugar for frutose to not get converted in the small intestine.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(17)...

Lustig is a highly biased source. I would be interested in summaries of controlled studies which aren't cherry-picked comparing iso-caloric diets of sugar vs fat.

> Lustig is a highly biased source. I would be interested in summaries of controlled studies which aren't cherry-picked comparing iso-caloric diets of sugar vs fat.

The very paper you cite asserts "strong ties between fructose and disease," points out that "high fructose consumption is appreciated as a culprit in metabolic disease," and presents a supremely well-researched case against fructose. Regardless of the precise metabolic fate of low-dose fructose (whatever "low dose" ends up meaning for humans), the practical takeaway of your paper (and mountains of research) agrees with Lustig's: avoid fructose.

Also, that paper is a mouse study. Even if metabolic pathways are exactly identical between mice and humans, how much fructose constitutes a "high" dose that they show overflows from the small intestine to the liver? They address this, emphasis mine:

> The extent of passage of unmetabolized fructose through the small intestine to the liver depended on dose. Conversion of doses between mice and humans is not straightforward. Across mammals, total metabolic activity more closely mirrors body surface area than mass. For a typical adult mouse, daily intake is ~12 kcal, versus ~2,400 kcal for an adult human. One sensible way of converting doses of macronutrients is based on caloric intake: a dose of 0.5 g/kg fructose in mouse is ~0.5% of daily calorie intake, or the same as 3 g of fructose in a person (one orange or about 2 ounces of soda). Thus, the doses that we study here are in the range of typical human fructose consumption (Marriott et al., 2009; Macdonald, 2016).

That mouse dose they convert, 0.5 g/kg, is halfway to the 1 g/kg threshold they define as "high dose fructose." So if you drink more than 4 ounces of soda per day, your liver is doing the bulk of fructose metabolism.

What makes you call Lustig "highly biased"? While he is admittedly argumentative and even a bit sensationalist in his presentation, he bases all of his claims on extensively sourced physiology and epidemiology research, and his credentials and career are highly relevant, for what it's worth.

Again, the conclusion from decades of research is abundantly clear at this point: avoid fructose.

>There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you

There's plenty of evidence that foods in America are loaded with above-moderate sugar levels, so it's generally hard/expensive to receive moderate sugar levels.

I initially did a 'dirty carnivore' type diet for around 18 months. I took it up because of the fairly extreme praise that a family member for the diet, and its effects on her mental and physical well-being.

In the end, I lost a bit of weight, and I never really had to think about when to eat (skipping meals was easy on this diet if it was inconvenient, and I'd just make it up later. On a higher carb diet, I find hunger to be a more insistent sensation with worse effects (tiredness, irritability, headache). But since eating 'on time' is usually pretty easy to do, the diet had no great impact on my life. But I can't discount my family member's subjective and objective results either. Even in this thread you can find lots of folks talking about how great it is. I suspect this is just a YMMV kind of situation.

At what stage, if any, are we going to call sugar an addiction? "Craving" being the word used here is very obviously an indicator of the strength here and there are negative consequences to having too much. I don't know what other leaps need to be made to formalize the addiction category.

The problem with those criteria is we would need to ask at what stage are we going to call water an addiction? It also fufills those details. Really just because it can be classified as an addiction doesn't mean it should.

The real criteria of concern is "does it cause problems /in this case/".

Otherwise you end up with a hysterical neo-puritanism of trying to create a perfect life by excision of all vices.

if it isn't bad for you then it's not an addiction. addictive behavior is by definition always harmful. drinking water is hence not an addiction but a necessity.

Water intoxication will kill you. Almost anything can be harmful in excessive quantities.

That is pedantic. There is no realistic scenario where your brain will compel you to consume so much water you suffer long term detriment

> There is no realistic scenario

Admittedly pedantic, but apparently a contest to win a Wii is one such realistic scenario.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-14-me-water...

People _have_ consumed so much water they've died or gone into coma.

But of course it's nothing like an "addiction"

I don't agree, but I also don't know the formalisms around addiction to articulate my argument precisely.

I have never heard of water intoxication happening with growing frequency over decades. I have also not heard of water intoxication having support groups, nor of water being described as a craving.

Additionally, there are no humans that have lived without water for years of their life. I have lived without sucrose for years of my life and I expect that there are others as well.

I really wish the downvoters would comment as well. I don't know what I said here that was so wrong. I am very open to critique here. I want to learn what other people think to refine how I think about it.

Because this will likely open the floodgates. If sugar is an addiction, then maybe all food is an addiction, and from there lots of normal behavior can be considered an addiction so the term becomes meaningless.

I agree that sugar and food in general consumed in excess should probably be considered an addiction, but I can respect the argument for not watering down the term.

I get cravings for brisket as well, and there are negative consequences for having too much of that, but you can pry that out of my cold, dead, bbq covered hands.

I’ve cut sugar out of my diet almost completely(bar trace amounts and the rare cheat treat).

23kg loss sustained over 16 months on a modified keto diet.

Cutting out sugar has been a game changer for me.

Sugar is so bad for us and we eat it in such large amounts! I don't drink a lot, or consume large quantities of caffeine, but when it comes to sugar I'm certain my intake is much too high!

I eat mostly fruits, very little vegetables and cooked grains. I have lost 10+ kgs in the past 6 months. I was not obese, but could lose some weight.

Refined sugars are detrimental for health. Whole fruits and their sugars are great!

While you're right about sugars, a diet that consists mostly of fruits can't be nutrient complete and therefore is not really good for you.

I eat a huge variety - fruits, melons, berries... Just curious, what do you think I would be missing?

Protein?

Not at all. All the protein a human needs can be sourced from plants and in huge quantities. Even grass has enough protein to help an elephant grow to ~1.5 tonnes.

But from mainly fruits? I think that would be rather difficult.

Yes, but grass is not fruit and also protein from grass is useless for human nutrition (it would be quite the nutritional revolution if it was somehow made bioavailable for humans).

> it would be quite the nutritional revolution if it was somehow made bioavailable for humans

Cows do a pretty good job of this [edit - for us].

Its kind of funny to say that because Elephants can get all their protein from grass so can humans (unaided by outsourcing to cow) because there are differences in physiology and lifestyle that are more than significant.

For humans, as in, (more) directly for humans, without the (inefficient and cruel) cows step.

Inneficient and cruel is as a result of the implementation. The technology itself is perfectly fine.

The elephant thing was an example. Humans too can get whatever they need from plant sources.

The day humans start eating raw fresh or rotten meat and find enjoyment in that is the day I will accept that humans are meant to eat other animals.

Also, if you are downvoting me thinking that I am some vegan activist, you are wrong. I am from Asia where relying on fruits and vegetables is or at least was till a few decades ago quite natural.

The day humans start eating raw fresh or rotten meat and find enjoyment in that is the day I will accept that humans are meant to eat other animals.

There are people who advocate, and claim to enjoy, both those things.

This guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxvszzgYRjU who claimed he learned it from a tribe.

It is easier than you think. First, raw and/or dried meat has been in human diets longer than recorded history, so you have to count those. Also, many carnivores won't eat rotten meat. Next, look at the digestive tracks of pure carnivores and pure herbivores. One is crazy short and the other crazy long. Humans? Right in the middle. Vitamin B12 - absolutely zero natural non-animal sources and B12 anemia can be lethal. Fruit is good, vegetables probably better. Meat in moderation is probably very healthy.

> Humans too can get whatever they need from plant sources.

Maybe. But to suggest that we could all get along fine by just eating grass all day is ridiculous.

Humans can't really get B12 from plant sources.

Also, cooking and refrigeration aren't necessary to prepare and preserve meat. Ancient people would make pemmican which will keep for months.

> The day humans start eating raw fresh or rotten meat and find enjoyment in that is the day I will accept that humans are meant to eat other animals.

Sushi. Shrimp. Spanish ham and other cold meats like chorizo. Steak tartare. Jerky. Many fermented meats that I don't know the name of. My brother even loves eating raw meatballs.

We cook, not because we aren't meant to eat meat, but for the better taste and easier digestion.

I personally hate raw vegetables, they're too crunchy and taste like... cardboard (personal preference of course). Cooking is not a phenomenon exclusive to meat.

> they're too crunchy and taste like... cardboard

Whenever I read this kind of thing it makes me sad that people don't realise that actual fresh veg of the kind that you don't buy in the store is actually delicious.

Actually, I often eat fresh hand-picked vegetables (close relatives live in a small village). It's mostly a matter of personal preference. Raw tomatoes are great. Lettuce? Chard? Carrots? Meh... but cook them and I'll eat a ton.

Raw vegetables are just not my cup of tea.

Tomatoes and Lettuce are the two things most people that have only bought shop produce know nothing about. I was amazed the first time I had fragrant lettuce. There's nothing in our cultural orientation that teaches us to expect it. I guess it doesn't attract the same kind of profit margins ... but if you're wise to all this and you still don't like it well that's fair enough too!

People far wiser than you advocated against eating animal flesh. Ham (pig flesh) is especially a big no-no in many religions for a reason.

Cooking is inferior. You cannot better nature. It just is not possible.

What's nature's cure for wisdom teeth impaction?

King Tut died of an infected broken leg.

Fats and proteins (unless you also consume a huge amount of nuts and/or legumes). I think it's quite obvious when you look up the nutritional content of fruits you eat and compare that with recommended daily intake of various nutrients.

Fats and proteins are available in fruits. I eat legumes occasionally and nuts etc. very rarely.

The funniest thing is, once your system is reset, many foods that seem OK cause troubles.

I could eat a lot of onions and garlic in the past. Now, they trouble me a lot.

Which fruits in your diet are rich in fats and proteins?

https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/nutrients/report/nutrientsfrm?m...

here you go.

However, I do not like to measure these things. Like other animals, i like to eat and enjoy my food.

Thanks, but most of those are dried fruits and all are quite low in protein anyway in my opinion (with the exception of goji). But of course if that works for you, it's okay.

Also, dried fruits are quit calorific from being high in (natural) sugars.

Having problems with onions or garlic is a common sign of IBS.

It is a sign of my system being cleaner than it was before. Onion and garlic are extremely potent medicines. They are not food. They have antibiotic properties and kill bacteria. Our guts have microbes. Now, connect the dots...

Garlic and onions are high in fructans which trigger IBS in millions of people a day.

My wife enjoyed and _loved_ galic for 30+ years before her IBS kicked in. Garlic is extremely bad for IBS because bacteria gorge themselves and produce a ton of gas, which causes horrible intestinal pain.

A study [0] recommends garlic and onions as key foods to restore a healthy, balanced microbiome.

I have never heard anyone before you claim that garlic or onions will kill bacteria. Rather, they let a specific kind flourish.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5470704/

>>Rather, they let a specific kind flourish...

... at the expense of others.

Garlic is mentioned exactly once in the study. It is just included with a bunch of other things. Nothing to conclude here.

Garlic is, by no means, a food. Any study that recommends it as food is not a proper study.

Garlic is an extremely potent medicine.

Someone must let the Italians and Indians and Persians and Greeks know that they've been eating medicines for centuries...

If you're going to make a silly claim that garlic and onions aren't foods you need to back that BS up.

Indians know, or atleast knew till a few decades ago, that garlic and onion are medicines. They have known for centuries. I have no idea about Italians and Greeks.

> Onion and garlic are extremely potent medicines. They are not food.

Sorry, what? Onion is one of the oldest cultivated plant and it's consumption exists in nearly every culture, in much "cleaner" times than today. If our guts can adapt to milk, it will have adapted to onion.

Also, you're going to have to show me evidence that the extremely potent medicine has extremely potent effects - what do we currently cure with onion? And please no big pharma arguments - aspirin and penicillin are still wildly available and they come from natural elements.

More than 75% of Asian population is lactose intolerant. Milk is not good for us. Body adapts to smoking and alcoholism. Does that make cigarettes and alcohol good for us? Coffee is a potent nerve stimulant, but too much of it makes you insensitive to its effects. Does that make coffee less potent or does that make you insensitive?

Potent medicine is what Ayurveda calls it. Garlic is right at the top. Our concept of potent and the way nature works are not compatible. Hence, the diseases.

Try detoxifying your body and then consume garlic to know if it is a medicine or just another food item.

> Try detoxifying your body

Which toxins?

Get evidence from blood tests. Without knowing the details, it is hard to guess. Vitamin B12 deficiency is common.

others here are not wrong about fats, but I think what can especially hurt you is iron and vitamin B12. These deficiencies can stay hidden until they hit you. Look up symptoms. I'd therefore use suplements in your place or at least get blood checks done regularly.

Vitamin B12 for one. I'd hazard a guess that you'd get too little iron and omega 3 as well.

Red meat, eggs and green vegetables is always my goto to lose weight. It's easy, because it's just cutting out the rice, pasta, potatoes or bread from what I would eat anyway.

Fruits are actually full of sugar. Just because they are not "refined" doesn't mean those sugars are not harmful. They are essentially the same molecules (most prominent: saccharose, fructose, glucose).

Bananas are especially bad. Blackberry, Raspberry and Strawberry are OK even thou they have a sweeter taste in my opinion.

No one had ever demonstrated fruit intake as harmful. Fruit intake is strongly positively correlated with healthy outcomes.

From the actual study:

"8-week weight losses for ICT were 3.1% vs. 2.2% for sham. A marginally significant effect was observed for gamification to reduce the impact of ICT."

This seems like a small effect for eight weeks of work. And gamification backfiring makes me worry this is all noise.

1% is significant if it trains long term behaviour. Losing 2.2% in 8 weeks is useless if it is unsustainable if you will fall for the processed food trap again and regain your weight.

> 1% is significant if it trains long term behaviour.

Or maybe it can be added to other effects, or maybe the techniques can be refined from here.

You're absolutely right there are a dozen reasons small effects can still be important.

Sometimes it's just p-hacking though, or otherwise unreplicable studies. That's worth considering too.

I think we'd both welcome more research, maybe especially over longer terms.

Didn't see any mention of a control, so could just be down to the classes beforehand. Nevertheless 2%-3% weight loss without 'dieting' is surely good, it's at least additive to normal dieting, and perhaps even more effective in that it can help in overcoming craving.

Plus what rate of weight loss do you think is acceptable. Losing 25% of your bodyweight in a week may be the 'in thing', but it isn't necessarily healthy or sustainable.

Sham is the control

> Plus what rate of weight loss do you think is acceptable.

Great question, I estimated the math before the last post but let me unpack it so people can correct me.

If a man is avg US height of 5'9" with an obese BMI of 35 and weight of 240, then 0.5% to 2% each week would fit standard medical guidelines for effective dieting.

At that weight you can easily fluctuate by 1% each day.

So we have an eight week effect that is in total less than 1% over sham, a difference on par with standard daily noise and reasonable weekly goal. This is why there's a replication crisis in health research.

Also, sham is a misleading control here if we're actually interested in weight loss. Why not control for any diet at all? Even use the same time each day going for a walk, or probably even meditating on weight loss strategies, at this improvement rate the advantage will melt away. Sham is defensible if you don't actually care about weight loss, but in that case weight shouldn't be your metric. Best case is it's a horribly misleading study design.

Avoiding Sugar intake is not just about weight loss though. It’s also about controlling immediate glucose spikes. Which of course could be correlated with weight

I have a super sweet tooth and have become more and more concerned about it as I get older. One thing that I am really bad at is any kind of conscious diet or regime, I am just not regimented with anything really.

So, I tried the big-bang and did a 4 day fast - my theory being, well, treat it like a drug addiction and go 'cold turkey'. It worked. I massively cut down on my sugar intake because I didn't feel like I needed sugar (for about 3 months).

Over time as I've had sugary foods it's definitely come back, and so I'll probably try again. But I found it quite interesting how quickly I could reset myself to a state where my body didn't crave it.

Obviously, fasting isn't for everyone, and long fasts you should make sure you know what you're doing, but it was a serious eye opener.

Try satiating your "refined sugars craving" with fruits. Not juice, but whole fruits.

Taste will reset itself within a week. This has been my personal experience.

There are also a plethora of sugar free or low sugar processed foods to look into. Some of them use sugar alcohols or some artificial sweetener that might have some adverse effects, but they are fairly effective as a better substitute when you are otherwise craving a candy bar or a mocha.

Fruits, some are better than others, depending on how much fiber they have.

Please stay away from artificial sugars. We have no idea what diseases they might be causing.

That is like saying please stay away from vaping as a way of stopping smoking. Great advice if you can, horrible advice if you can’t.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Except vaping has known and unknown health risks.

Saying "I the only way to stop smoking is to vape" is also horrible advice.

When looking at vaping we're not comparing it to not smoking, we're comparing it to smoking. And vaping is very much safer than smoking.

The stuff about the minimal harms and potential unknown harms is only useful for the population who isn't currently smoking.

I didn’t say that either. Just that if you couldn’t quit cold turkey, vaping is better than just continuing with cigarettes. I was able to do the former, but can totally understand those who resort to the latter.

I use artificial sweeteners when I try to cut back on sugar. A few grams of aspartame is probably much less damaging than 40+ grams of sugar. I’m willing to take that gamble.

I use quite a bit of stevia. It has a weird taste first but you get used to it quickly.

At least for me, it's hard to control sugar intake.

So, it is easier to not eat than to eat small amounts.

Fasting is hard because of your cravings for food and social pressure. But I highly recommend at least a try.

I tried something similar and that worked too. I decided to not have ANY sugar whatsoever for a week, and I managed surprisingly well. Then I thought I could do it for another week. Weeks became months and months became a year. Over time I've started consuming a little bit of sugar here and there, including fruits, and some added sugar in food that I buy. It's hard to not have any sugar because it's added to pretty much everything these days. But reducing cutting it out for a couple of weeks and then having reduced sugar works wonders!

You don't need some crazy fasting diet to cut down sweets. Just diet for 3-4 days and boom the crave is gone. It comes back but you need to be able to handle it.

I'll say this to anyone out there wanting to look after himself and maybe lose extra weight or whatever.

I used to be overweight growing up. I mainly think is the fact that one of my parents used to be overweight and it reflected on our bad habits of eating. I've lost all the extra weight since I was 17 and maintained it now in my 30s. I still have the craves and I still wanna stuff myself with food and sweets and everything yes. What keeps me going is taming it and understanding that food for me is one of those things that I'll struggle with for the rest of my life. Its me that has to say no I won't eat anymore, I won't have that sweet I won't this or that. I do eat sweets maybe once a week. Everything in moderation though. I weight myself every single day and I am trying to maintain my weight to a healthy level. +3 -3 and don't go above or under.

Its on me! And as soon as you understand that then you'll have an easier time maintaining yourself. Food is an addiction and for me personally its very close to drinking.

The same way you'll say to yourself 'no I wont drink tonight' (and you go off and get absolutely blind :P) because I don't want to, I got work tomorrow, drinking is only for the weekend or special days cause I got a family etc. The same way you should be able to tame yourself and your needs around food and sweets. 'No I won't eat this delicious burger or sweet cause I already had my fair share this week, I'll try it in 3 days, today am gonna have some steamed veggies, some lean meat, some good carb etc'.

Some people are born with the privilege of not caring about food and not being overweight and being in perfect health. Others like me just have to struggle their whole lives for it, but its until you realise that this is what you have to do and until you realise that you have to change your habits and maintain it for the rest of your life you won't just change. Also find a sport, doesn't need to be the gym specifically just something you do 2-3 times a week and maintain yourself. You need to be active especially if you are working an office job.

I've done this as well and I second it. I did a 5 day fast and treated myself to a massive breakfast on the 5th day. It was glorious and really reminded myself of not needing so much junk. I fast whenever I feel myself slipping. It's an amazing tool!

For these longer fasts, I just drink water and electrolytes.

If I ever get fat, I would fast my way to success honestly. If you do it right it seems healthy!

>Think: Lumosity for your diet.

I am surprised that an educational institution is comparing their new program to a company who deceived consumers on scientific claims.

Glad to see more treading into using games to reinforce beneficial behaviours.

If only the resources we were pumping into making lootbox games could start being diverted into projects like this.

I phased out sugar by setting a daily goal and then progressively lowering it. I started at 40g max per day (the reccomended limit) and then treated it like a game to find other sources of sugar in my diet. I now get about 5g /day from things like oatmeal and Brussels sprouts (even some vegetables have sugar). It’s not for everyone but it’s changed my life.

How did it change your life?

So it's not just the processed / refined sugar you're reducing, it's sugar from all foods?

Just do keto-diet, and sugar addiction will dissolve pretty quickly.

+1.

Undo the 10 millenia of evil.

Or ignore 10 millenia of evolution, if you want to look at it that way.

People ignore that - we have clear evidence that you can adapt to drinking milk in that span of time, why is that people think we haven't otherwise adapted to an agrarian lifestyle that's existed just as long?

The success of agrarian diets doesn't mean they are healthier than what might be called paleo. Rather, it has a host of other side effects - a larger, more stable food supply means a larger population. A large population means specialization. Farming means staying in one place, forming permanent communities and permanent tools/storage that can't necessarily be carried by hand. Agrarian societies can develop new technologies and field dedicated military forces. They can develop writing. Etc.

But if we acknowledge we adapted to it, we can't just assume that paleo is better for us strictly because it's "more natural" - we adapted to make milk natural for us to drink as well. And if we reject that - how can we say that our adaptation to a paleo diet is then better as it's part of our evolutionary tree?

Not everyone adapted to milk. Lactose intolerance is widespread, and even more common with people whose ancestors did not have a dairy culture.

Oh absolutely, but the people who were exposed to the new diet did. We can and have adapted that quickly.

I'm not even on a keto diet, but I avoid refined sugars as much as possible. On most days my refined sugar intake is well below 10 grams.

You don't have to do go full keto to get a health benefit!

This is exactly it. There's no need to take things to extremes. Any diet that is unsustainable long term is not going to be good for you.

"Any diet that is unsustainable long term is not going to be good for you."

I hope this doesn't come across as too pedantic, but I dunno if your maxim holds.

For instance, fasting isn't necessarily bad (I think it's quite useful) but clearly it's an unsustainable beyond a certain number of days.

Similarly, keto can both be very effective, change your eating preferences, and be done over a span of months even if it's not something done forever into the future.

I say this not because I have data, but just anecdotally... I lost quite a lot of weight through fasting and ketosis, and now that I've hit a stable weight and modified my diet (no sodas, sweets, bread, dairy and mostly plant based high-fat foods) I'm not in keto but a lot healthier than I was.

You can enter ketosis long enough to lose some weight and then add back in some carbs at some point... just don't return to whatever habits led you to gain weight in the first place.

> You can enter ketosis long enough to lose some weight and then add back in some carbs at some point... just don't return to whatever habits led you to gain weight in the first place.

That's the key though. Despite using keto or fasting, you still changed your diet. However, the changes you've made are more manageable for the long run.

True.

But I don't know if I wold have made the dietary changes if I hadn't lost the 50 lbs. And I would not have lost that weight on my current diet, I don't think.

So my point that there are useful short-term diets still seems tenable to me.

There's nothing "just" about doing keto

There's no need to go hungry while doing keto. Once you realize this it becomes a lot easier. Just eat when you have cravings (but stick to low-carb things), that's it!

It doesn't mean going hungry, but it does mean taking some pretty extreme measures, because any day that exceeds keto-level carbs is going off the wagon and requires another physical reset to get back into keto.

Slow carb is a pretty good alternative if you don't want to be as strict: https://medium.com/@erinfrey/everything-you-need-to-know-abo....

I hear about keto so often that it must be the best thing ever, however I have no idea what it even is and I got curious!

Do you have some links/articles which describe what it is and what positive/negative things can come out of it?

I have done Keto myself and personally I would not recommend it. I would actually love to do keto forever as I love eating meat but it will pretty much ruin most of your social eating out habits unless you are okay with not going out for things like Sushi (not eating rolls), ice cream etc. I also do powerlifting and my calorie requirements are much higher. Strength wise, my strength took a dip initially but it mostly came back after about 1-2 weeks. But my endurance was absolutely horrible (this is due to your body having to first convert the fats to glycogen, then using the energy instead of readily available carb sourced glycogen).

Anyway, I personally did it for about 2 months and even though I enjoyed it, I would not recommend it for most people. I tried it because I don't like dissing something without trying it first, so I put myself on Keto for 2 months to see what it was all about. I would recommend the same - try it for about 2 months and then decide it for yourself. Note that you will have to bear through the first 1-2 weeks of brain fogginess and low energy as your body adapts to it. But once that's over and you are in Ketosis, you will feel much better. Another thing to be careful about is that your body will go out of ketosis very easily if you eat carbs (ice cream for example). Don't use it as a way to lose body weight as most of the weight people lose is actually water weight due to the lack of carbs based glycogen.

I would recommend this Jeff Nippard's YouTube video on Keto too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxmVsT_ZeNs

thanks for the interesting response and the link.

Usually, the diet is also high in dietary fat, at least long term. In a more short-term diet, this is not always necessary. It’s possible to instead be fueled via your own fat stores, as long as you have excess weight to lose. https://medium.com/@jovialdiets1/complete-guide-for-keto-die...

2 Months is absolutely nothing in Ketogenic diet, what you've likely experienced in those two months was mostly the transitioning side-effects from carbs to fat, it takes at least 6-12 months to be fully fat-adapted (mitochondrial changes) especially if you're an athlete.(See Ultra runner Zach Bitter)

I guess you could be right but for me, I couldn't afford 6-12 months of low endurance as I was about to start a specific workout program which also needed me to be in caloric surplus and have high endurance. Maybe I would try it out again in the future.

But another main reason as I pointed out was that Keto was severely limiting my social eating habits. I personally did not do it for losing body fat, I did it mostly to see how it is. I still loved eating out with friends - things like sushi rolls, ice cream etc. Keto wasn't allowing me those things.

I would actually love to do keto because I love eating meat (steak), butter, avocados etc but right now isn't the right time for me from a social point of view.

Given that the brain's main source of energy is sugar and the heart's main source of energy is fat, and the complexity of the body's organs, I think any type of diet that limits specific types of energy sources should carry disclaimers.

For example, if you are on a keto diet and your diet is well-defined, what are the risks? Fatigue is one thing, but organ damage or otherwise dangerous effects should be discussed frankly and clearly.

I have not really found resources that don't have inherent conflicts of interest.

People who study to become dieticians have a much more straightforward and high level approach, e.g.: "You have a iron deficiency and don't get in enough protein, and I would advise eating more red meat."

Brain uses both. There's an interesting talk [1] about how brain's ability to use glucose lowers before Alzhaimers disease and others. There seems to be some link between brain diseases and glucose metabolism.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxGiQ7YrUYE

Lately there's been some product pushing from some companies, some "facebook keto" of people only eating fat, and some pushback from mainstream low-fat selling and plant-based food groups, calling it fad, etc. So the area is kind of confusing right now.

The best resource I think think of is Keto subreddit FAW which goes over the principles and some misconceptions and so on: https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/wiki/faq

Also, Keto is often done along with intermittent fasting, which is another popular thing, lately.

EDIT: the subreddit is also full of people talking about their success with Keto (meaning mosty obese and diabetc or prediabetic reversing their condition), but that might be survivorship bias - someone who failed or someone who had adverse effects might not post there.

My personal experience is that I lost quite a bit of weight on Keto, and experienced other effects like loss of cravings, more mental clarity, etc, in comparison to typical western diet - but that might be just me. My hypothesis is that some people handle carbs better than others, and Keto is good for the group which dosn't handle carbs very well.

EDIT2: There's also a lot of misconceptions about fat being the devil.

You know, given the trans-fats debacle - for decades, people were convinced that trans-fats were the good thing and you have to be monster to give your kids evil bad butter instead of healthy nice margarine - I am convinced that as a humanity, we don't know shit about nutrition, and basically just do what works for you. For some people, Keto is much better than the standard western diet.

Elimination diets always show short-term results. If someone reduces burger consumption from 5 to 3 a day, he\she will definitely see good results. However, if we have to constantly trick our bodies (starvation) and walk a tightrope (need to avoid even the smallest amounts of carbs or else...) to just keep Keto on track, is it really natural?

Define natural please. It’s my belief that industrialized food production has created unnatural availability of foods that largely use unnatural ingredients. Unnatural as in not found readily or at all in nature.

Are you defining natural as ‘conventional 21st century Western diet’? ie what everyone is doing around you.

Since everything is sourced from nature, for argument's sake, even plastic can be called natural. However, as far as food is concerned, I have started treating foods that have been manipulated in any way by a human or a machine as unnatural.

All I am saying is that in my opinion Keto does not fit the definition of natural. I eat mostly fruits while I feed my dogs raw meat and organs only.

Ironically such a diet in itself is deeply unnatural - hunter-gatherers would have starved if they attempted such a thing - there is a reason why they were nomadic and caused mass extinctions - they ate everything and depleted capacity to fuel their large brain and relatively big bodies. There is a reason cooking caught on and was used long before agriculture.

The point being that both natrual and unnatural are terrible heuristics. Your diet may be fundamentally good or deeply flawed but naturalness isn't why - nutrient balance, satiation, metabolic factors and similiar are why.

I have seen results that are nothing less than a miracle. I know what works. I do not need a bunch of metrics to see if I am eating properly.

I have never seen an animal refusing to eat because it could not calculate the calories or nutrient balance. It is sad to see that with all the great progress we have made, we are losing touch with nature.

Have there been studies showing this for subjects that go off keto after some amount of time? Most anecdotal evidence (including my own experience) leads me to believe it’s rather simple to begin eating sugar again post-diet without any difference in cravings.

Keto is great but be aware of increased cholesterol readings at least in certain 🧬.

All of my Indian friends report that their cholesterol LDL was very high while they were doing keto.

There is little evidence LDL is bad for you.

Oh where can I get this game

Any grocery near you. Sum up the sugar content on packages and subtract that from 100, let that be your point :)

I want that in augmented reality! Can you imagine!

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