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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not just sugar, it's refined carbs in general.

The idea that sugar is bad in great amount seems to have gone mainstream, but many people I know who seem to be aware that sugar is bad and have lowered their intake are still just fine with pasta, rice, flour etc. This is the message we need to get out now. Not saying you need to completely drop your favorite refined carbs (pasta etc) but at least try to lower your intake like you do with sugar and prioritize unrefined carbs and green veggies instead.

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Rice is one of the main ingridients of various Asian cuisines, e.g. the Japanese one. And somehow Japan is one of the healthiest nations in the world. We've been eating bread for millenia, but, somehow, obesity has never been a major health problem until modern times. How do you explain all this?

>obesity has never been a major health problem until modern times

I would suggest a link between abundance of food and obesity. Also sedentary lifestyle

But we've had abundance of food in the 20th century long before the obesity epidemic.

The US left subsistence farming behind around 1800 and had consistent surpluses ever since. You can see this in statistics of average height, they shoot up in the 1800's.

how "long"? Several studies have indicated (sorry, no sources) out that a person's diet during childhood affects the expressed genes of its offspring. There may be a generational lag (say, 20 years) between a change in diet and how it affects the population, it doesn't have to occur instantly.

We also had factory jobs, hands-on farm jobs, and plenty of other physical labor.

I remember when talking to another tourist in Japan, he was like: this food is all crap, it is mostly carbohydrates. Nowadays I think, it probably doesnt matter what you eat, but how much.

It does matter. 1 calorie from sugar is more fattening than other calorie sources because your body metabolises sugar directly to fat.

You can see this in action with this procedure (or thought experiment):

1. Lose most of your belly fat so that you look thin.

2. Eat a tub of ice cream. Do this for two nights. You’ll see a lump on your belly. It is 4 pounds of new fat. That won’t happen if you replace ice cream with the same weight of fruit.

With how much I meant as long as you stay lean.

That's a good point. I would say it is a combination: the amount of food you eat at once vs. the amount of energy you spent (sports/working).

You can eat a lot of carbs over time when being physically active. But once you stop being as physically active, you have to adjust your carbs accordingly. So what OP says is correct for how most people live nowadays.

See "refined".

Removing the husk of wheat and rice removes the source of fiber which then speeds up the metabolic process of your body turning the carbs into sugar.

It overwhelms the glucose regulator in your body similar to eating raw sugar.

This is why consuming whole fruit instead of juice is so much healthier. It's about speed of glucose delivery.

White rice is a staple in large parts of Asia, where folks don't look like the average US citizen. Life isn't as simple as you present it here.

Can you explain how I simplified life? I simply presented a fact about refined foods.

Modern supermarket bread in the USA is some pretty awful crap. Loaded with cheap leavening agents, made from cheap low nutritional value wheat, and loaded with sugar.

Sure, it is bread, but it might as well be called bread substitute.

It is not easy to find bread that isn't made up of primarily cheap ingredients. Even so-called supermarket "artisanal" barely resembles actual quality bread.

Maybe Japan is healthier despite eating more refined carbs because they eat less, or they eat seafood, or something in the air, or genetics, or they move more, or any one of a million other possible factors. Pointing to the fact that they eat rice does NOT prove anything.

We've been eating bread for millenia but we also moved a lot more until recently. Also, lifespans and health were worse than they are now. Also, how much does the bread we get at a supermarket today resemble the bread people ate 500 years ago?

Its easy to explain ANY side you like because there are millions of factors. That's exactly why diet research is conducted by doing statistics to isolate the impact of particular variables even as 100s of things vary across any group of people.

I think people like to argue against dietary research because it tells them things they don't want to hear. Admittedly, i didn't believe in any of this or like hearing it until recently because its made to sound so difficult - cut out sugar/refined carbs/carbs completely!

Personally i was able to move to a healthier diet after just going through a simple book on sports nutrition. It drills in a few key points that tend to get lost in clickbait. For example, what you eat over a period of time (i.e a DIET) can be unhealthy or healthy, but pointing to any ONE meal/food as healthy/unheathy doesn't make a lot of sense

Japanese people take in 1000 kcal less than their American peers.[1] Daily!

That is, pardon the pun, huge. It would be nice to get some more recent data and to adjust for height.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...

> Also, how much does the bread we get at a supermarket today resemble the bread people ate 500 years ago?

I grind my own grain at home and make my own bread. 100% difference from what's available in stores vs. at home.

You'll never find any of the artisan-style almost-burn loaves that you see on pinterst using 100% whole grain. Will never poof up like that, you'll get something closer to German-style brown breads.

They pull the wheat germ -- essentially the plant embryo, but also a source of nutrients that can go bad -- out of the flour to extend shelf life. Ditto for taking out all of the bran -- fiber! -- though "whole wheat" flours will add some of that back in later. But for the most part modern breads are nothing but refined carbs with a touch of fiber.

The germ is sold separately, as a health food or feedstock for animals.

The difference in taste and shape is noticeable. It's also much, much more filling and satisfying. Not as great for avocado toast, but does pretty well with a little cream cheese and tomato (plus a pinch of salt).

Interesting stuff! I might try it sometime.

What grinder and grains do you usually use?

> We've been eating bread for millenia

According to wikipedia [0]: approximately from 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Let's take an average reproduction age of 25y and you've got roughly 1000 human generations eating bread.

But, also according to wikipedia [1], the oldest Homo Sapiens that we can date range from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. That's 70-90% of our direct ancestors' natural selection process not having been exposed to bread (widespread grains, in fact).

And, if we dare to argue that human metabolism have mainly not changed since Homo Erectus, then we are in another world in terms of comparison, because Wikipedia trace the oldest signs of Erectus as far as 2,000,000 years ago [2], which represent 80,000 generations, and that's ~1% of our ancestors having evolved exposed to grains.

So, all in all, "we've been eating bread for millenia" is clearly not all that there is to say on that matter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo

I think it has to do with desk jobs/sedentary life-style. I believe that before machines/computers came along an average person burned in excess of 3k calories/day toiling in the field or doing some other physical job.

Now I would be surprised if the average person burns more than 2k calories/day. Moreover, once you get to high fat levels your body produces more estrogen like hormones. These indirectly lower your metabolism even further. This is because those hormones impede the synthesis of testosterone, which is highly correlated with muscle-synthesis and muscle fibers are much more metabolic active tissues than fat. A feedback loop that is really hard to escape from.

An interesting observation from Japan (2009): Vinegar Intake Reduces Body Weight, Body Fat Mass, and Serum Triglyceride Levels in Obese Japanese Subjects

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1271/bbb.90231

Maybe Japanese cuisine compensates some of the negative effects by using vinegar more often than we do. My wife used to make sushi according to Japanese recipes; the rice was soaked in vinegar. But Westerners do not soak their bread or rice in vinegar.

We generally think about an element of nutrition being a cause of some disease (cholesterol, fat, sugar etc.). We spend less time thinking about the question whether an element of nutrition may have protective effect against deleterious effects of another element.

I don't think vinegar is frequently used in Japan. Sushi (or Sumeshi, vinegared rice) is tend to eaten on something special time. I tend to use vinegars on (Japanese styled) Chinese dishes rather than Japanese.

It should be noted that while Japan is one of the healthiest countries in terms of obesity rate, they have a very high diabetes rate. The article was discussing diabetes

12.1% of Japanese have diabetes (https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00249/)

For comparison, about 13% of people in the US have diabetes (https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...)

I believe it’s all the fiber that’s been stripped out in an effort to make it more palatable.

Grains are entirely different beasts from simple sugars (sucrose/corn syrup), and lumping them together (which is what the Paleo advocates) is pretty much scaremongering to me.

In practical terms, anybody who eats 100g of sugar, and 100g of pasta, will notice a huge difference.

Paleo is very fashionable, but I wonder how many people will actually follow through in the long term (years), since eating very large amounts of meat is not realistically sustainable, in different ways (I have firsthand experience on this).

>In practical terms, anybody who eats 100g of sugar, and 100g of pasta, will notice a huge difference.

I agree with you, but pasta is only 37% carbs. So 270g pasta (that's enough for 2 people!) and 100g sugar would need to be compared.

However I still think this will be unfavorable to the sugar, since you won't be satiated for long, and the insulin crash will make you eat again soon.

We can't ignore psychology on this, too. In the long run your hormones will beat your rational thinking, so you can of course theoretically lose weight on a high sugar diet, but you won't.

> I agree with you, but pasta is only 37% carbs. So 270g pasta (that's enough for 2 people!) and 100g sugar would need to be compared.

Curiously, we're mixing cooked vs. uncooked. I've always been using dry pasta weight as reference (as the pasta is weighted before), but in context, your observations are more precise :)

I looked up dry, for cooked it would be 25% from what I found. But then it depends on how long you cook it.

What happens in the refining process that turns a good carb into a bad carb? Why would cassava be good for you while cassava flour not be? Why would brown rice be good for you but not white rice?

Personally, I find it hard to cut down on carbs because it's expensive to do so. Refined carbs are the cheapest source of energy.

Wheat feeds the world, and has for millennia.

The husks of grains contain more fibre. Refined carbs are metabolised faster by your body into glucose, which goes rapidly to fat.

Have you tried fresh food eg salads? They are delicious and filling in a way that keeps you sated longer than carbs without the highs and lows of energy and mood.

It takes a bit of organisation to make a big salad every day, but once you get the hang of it, you feel better, big time.

> Have you tried fresh food eg salads?

I love fresh veggies. I just can't afford to replace carbs with them. Veggies are expensive.

That's needlessly absolute. A healthy diet consists of a good *balance* between the macronutrients carbs, fat and protein. Absolutism isn't doing anyone any good.

That said, the average American diet is imbalanced in favor of carbs, with pretty much everything sweetened. My European diet is a lot more balanced out, we eat brown bread, regular pasta and rice, etc, all part of a balanced diet (can't beat a brown bread, ham and cheese sandwich. Real butter, because margarine is shit)

The other problem the US diet has is portion sizes. American portions are big. As an occasional tourist I can appreciate it, but at the same time it's one reason behind the obesity crisis.

The UK has a similar problem. Compared to where I'm from (NL), eating 'out' is affordable, and you can load up on a full English or a carvery for around 6 pounds. Drinking a ton of beer also seems to be normalized with a big percentage of the population.

> "Real butter, because margarine is shit"

I agree with your post, I just want to add something to this.

Aside from just choosing between butter and margarine, there are also "spreadable butter" products, which mix butter with vegetable fats, for a spreadable consistency and a better saturated:unsaturated fats ratio. The one I have in my fridge right now tastes exactly like butter, but has ~500kcal per 100g instead of the ~700kcal in pure butter. The only downside is that it melts faster on warm toast.

The ingredients are butter, rapeseed oil, water and salt, so it's not some weird industrial concoction. Do avoid the types with palm oil and such, though. They're less sustainable and I find them to have a slightly garlicky off taste.

We do not need carbs. We can live without any.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ

Do you have a comprehensive study on refined carbs then? Somehow I don't think they are all quite as bad as the sugar is. Let's start with fixing the low hanging fruit before we step up the efforts.

Agreed.

What worked wonders for me is buying a steamer. Now I add to every meal some steamed broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, ... . The fibers in them keep me satiated for longer and I stopped snacking thanks to that.

Additionally, those veggies help counter the estrogen-like hormones and after 2y of doing this my physique improved considerably without any major change in my exercise schedule / routine.

Refined carbs aren't a problem, but what you do with them might be. Eating 200g of pasta with a low fat sauce is not good. But in France and Italy they eat bread and pasta a lot, but it always comes with butter or oil. 125g of pasta is enough for a man as a main meal if it's prepared the Italian way.

Why though? They specifically suspect fructose of causing this, and starchy grains contain no fructose.

The only difference between refined carbs and unrefined carbs is that the outer hull is milled off the grains. This makes refined carbs less nutritious, but it doesn't make them bad for you any more than unrefined carbs are.

for sure. i love sugar and eat entirely too much of it, but i'm not a big fan of other refined carbs like rice and pasta. a number of extended family members are the opposite, eating significant quantities of other refined carbs (but perhaps less sugar) and deal with obesity and other health issues. as bad as sugar can be, i suspect the other refined carbs are possibly even worse (other things being equal, of course).

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