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Comment by tempsolution | Hacker News Reader

Wow, revolutionary. It's not like its been known for years already that sugar acts as an effective immune suppressant.

It's always funny to see how school medicine tracks the state of the art by 20 years into the past and then another 40 before it hits the actual doctors and their patients (for the latter part, ongoing re-education requirements might help as to avoid people like my grandma who still thinks after being 30 years out of practice that what she learned after the second world war in her studies is the state of the art of medicine).

For the first part, I have no answer. Something is utterly broken with the way school medicine "innovates".

I would love to be able to write this while drinking my extra large soda and next to it a piece of chocolate cake. Yeah, cancer here I come.

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> It's not like its been known for years already that sugar acts as an effective immune suppressant.

Interesting, any references?

AFAIK that's not true, no, sugar does not act as an immune suppressant, what acts as an immune suppressant is whatever inhibits autophagy and that's primarily protein, or calories in general. High levels of the IGF-1 hormone is also associated with higher risk of cancer and all cause mortality, it's just a weak association, but note IGF-1 seems to also be stimulated by a protein.

This isn't to say that we should restrict protein. In truth we need a lot of protein to remain healthy and these associations have confounders, in truth vilifying any single macro nutrient is just stupid and unsupported by existing evidence.

It's not the sugar in the soda or in the chocolate cake that's going to get you, but the overall caloric surplus ... since after a soda and a chocolate cake you'll still feel hungry. Everything breaks loose on a chronic caloric surplus. And interestingly any study that doesn't control the calories or the protein is flawed, as these are massive confounders.

> "Something is utterly broken with the way school medicine "innovates"."

The problem is that nutrition is a hard science, because obviously you can't dissect people or lock them in cages and feed them crap for the rest of their lives to see how they react :-)

That said the anti-establishment propaganda coming from the low carb camp is increasingly worrying. I've even seen prominent LCHF supporters being or affiliating with anti-vaxxers as well.

My understanding is that both carbohydrates and protein inhibit autophagy through different pathways.

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