High-sucrose diets contribute to brain angiopathy and higher brain dysfunctions
science.org
science.org
This is for me the missing part of the title.
I often think reading pop science that they’re making absurd shortcuts and we should get to the actual report, but here TBH I am reading the study and don’t really understand what I’m looking at or what’s the take from this, apart that mices with specific deficiency got some specific illnesses.
I saw mentions of human brain analysis but it didn’t seem to go beyond sheer comparison.
Does anyone see more interesting stuff in this piece ?
My read on this is that we really don't know what causes things like schizophrenia, so much so that we're not even sure what to study to try to determine the cause. But the authors of this study found that a specific diet in mice with specific genes causes something that looks sort of like human psychiatric disease. They also found similar brain changes in both the mice and humans with psychiatric disease and that aspirin prevented some of the symptoms and brain changes in mice (which possibly suggests the brain changes are related to the behavioral symptoms and not just coincidental). Based on these results further study of, for example, GLO1 deficiency and/or the brain changes they found might be justified. So basically the takeaways are questions about whether/how these finding relate to human disease.
In the end, like most hypothesis-generating studies this strikes me as vaguely interesting but probably only really meaningful to other researchers in the field.
-the average breakfast cereal is just a dessert.
- even the healthiest breads contain refined sugar to mask quality inherently absent from mass production.
- sugar is used for its crispening and browning properties, it's shelf stabilizing abilities and its addictive properties in virtually every processed snack.
-most yogurt at the store is just sugar.
The industry response to this is a resounding punt. That somehow you're fat because you're irresponsible abdicates so much of the real guilt from multinational food conglomerates driven solely by profit, not nutrition.
I live in the western society you describe and enjoy a diet with no added sugar.
How?
I prepare my own food from fresh ingredients.
I think the commenter is just an unimaginative American. If you actually cook food from actual ingredients it's not difficult at all to avoid sugar.
You can even bake your own bread.
just... don't consume the mass produced food with loads of sugar in them? eg.
>average breakfast cereal is just a dessert
Is non-sweetened cereal hard to find in your supermarket or something?
>even the healthiest breads contain refined sugar to mask quality inherently absent from mass production.
I checked around on costco and it seems like their "Kirkland Signature Country French" contain 0g of added sugars per serving (I'm guessing slice?). To your point their regular "Multigrain Bread" contains 2g of added sugar per serving. In any case I doubt you're not getting diabetes from that.
>- sugar is used for its crispening and browning properties, it's shelf stabilizing abilities and its addictive properties in virtually every processed snack.
don't eat snacks then.
>-most yogurt at the store is just sugar.
just get plain yogurt? "Kirkland Signature Organic Greek Yogurt" has 0g added sugar.
I get it's hard to avoid sugar because it tastes so damn good, but let's not pretend it's "impossible to avoid".
This only goes so far. Sometimes manufacturers add lactose to dairy products, or change the balance in favor of lactose, which doesn’t count as added sugars because it occurs naturally in the food. But it’s still sweeter than a comparable plain/unsweetened product if you look at sugar content.
Anyway, lactose is not equivalent to sucrose in terms of health impact.
I tried this and after a month or two, I was burnt out and achieved much less of what I wanted to achieve outside of my diet. So yeah for me with my particular set of goals in life (ie: work, have a life, etc...) it's pretty impossible.
I know some people who eat the same healthy foods every day to simplify this, but this is a) not something a lot of people can tolerate, and b) not actually good for you in the long run.
Edit:
"7 hours???" No it's not literally 7 hours every single day. The point is that it takes a long time to find recipes, cook, clean, shop, etc. But go ahead and miss the point to fixate on a little detail if you want I guess
Edit 2:
Another thing to consider is that even 'fresh natural healthy non-GMO' ingredients are selectively bred to taste better, resulting in a higher sugar content. This has gotten to the point where it causes issues in zoos [1]
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/zoo-won-t-panda-to-taste-say...
Also what do you mean by ‘have a life’? Doesn’t that just mean diet is a lower priority than other things?
If you really don’t have much time, one approach is to improve your diet incrementally. Switch out cereal for oatmeal and fruit. Make another improvement next month. Keep doing this and in a year or so you’ll have a great diet.
Is cooking enjoyable? Sure, but spending so much time on it every single day can be a serious burden
Plenty of vegetables can be eaten raw, notably all the "standard" salad vegetables in the west like cucumber, carrot, tomato, avocado, celery, bell pepper and so on. You can eat them in a salad by themselves, or you can make some noodles (thin Asian noodles just require stirring for a few seconds in boiling water) and toss the raw veges in with some seasoning of your choice. Nuts and seeds are easy to add too, and don't require cooking. Tofu doesn't need cooking. If you don't mind eating bread, you can make a sandwich instead of a salad or a noodle bowl. If you are making a breakfast or don't mind oats for dinner, just buy quick oats and add some water, stir it up and eat. Frying an egg doesn't take long, or stir-frying some meat, if you eat those things. No need to put a pot on the stove or chuck something in the oven. Think about how people eat when they are camping, or how short order cooks make food in diners, or how street vendors cook stuff up for you on-the-spot.
I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried. It's really not that big of an investment.
And this is what I do, but it doesn't meet my caloric needs unfortunately. I really wish I could sustain myself off of just that. Same with some of your other suggestions. I know because I've tried for a while :)
> Think about how people eat when they are camping
People eat like that because they're camping
> I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried
Yeah that's just not true
If you don't like the taste of any vegetables, or noodles, or porridge/oatmeal, or bread, or fruit, or stir-fried meat, or anything that does not require being stewed or baked or smoked for several hours... then just say so. But then that's a personal preference for the type of food you choose to eat - it doesn't mean that it takes "so much time" to cook nutritional, varied and delicious food. It's fine if you only enjoy a very limited set of foods, but I suspect most people have a broader palate.
From the way you talk, it sounds like a diet full of sugar and quick to prepare processed foods is actually the optimal one for you because your body and mind simply can’t deal with anything else.
If this is the case, then maybe it’s best to enjoy convenient foods, and enjoy ‘living’, and not worry about health consequences because that will only detract from your present enjoyment.
The point is that people keep offering you suggestions because you seem to be saying there is a problem.
You’re obviously wrong that the problem can’t be solved since lots of people have solved it. That isn’t a matter of your experience not matching others.
What we are left with is that you are simply making a choice based on your own priorities and preferences.
I genuinely think that if this is true, you would be better off simply being happy with your choice. That sentiment is about respecting what is true for you and wishing you well.
I imagine there are a lot of people who have similar priorities to you and are just fine with that.
This is how I cook dinner when its my term, but that is usually just broccoli or cauliflower and pork (stir fried) over rice. My wife takes a lot long with her meal prep...and they taste better.
Restaurants/cafeterias have scale and specialization working for them, you can't compare that to making individual or family meals on your own.
Of course there are also plenty of other dishes that require a longer time to cook, but that's beside the point. The original comment was complaining that it takes "7 hours a day" and causes burnout to prepare a variety of meals that aren't packed with sugar. This is an absurd statement that at best adds nothing to the conversation and at worst discourages people from attempting to develop simple, healthy eating habits.
I have a curry recipe that takes about 3 hours to execute, however it makes about 20 portions which can then be frozen, and reheated. That’s 9 minutes per portion, and reheating it along with some rice from a rice cooker takes 5-6 minutes of attention. I.e. 15 minutes per meal.
My lunch today will be pan fried salmon with crispy skin, a baked potato, and lettuce.
The potato takes at most 2 minutes to scrub and put into a toaster oven. It takes about 2 minutes to rinse and select a few lettuce leaves. The salmon takes about 10 minutes to pin-bone, season, and cook isolaterally. Again, around 15 minutes.
I learned the salmon cooking technique from watching a 10 minute Gordon Ramsay YouTube video. This stuff isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to spend 7 hours a day cooking, but you do have to accumulate learned techniques steadily over time, just like with anything you want to do yourself.
In my neighborhood this need is served by Taquerias.
Yes, but that simply isn’t necessary.
Hate to break it to you but fruit is not far removed from sugar. Oatmeal is further but it's still carbs.
Fruit almost always has plenty of fiber in it to modulate sugar absorption long enough that your gut bacteria get most of it. So, fruit is harmless, except grapes, which apparently have had the fiber bred out of them.
I'd assume at least certain fruit would still be dangerous, like grapes, figs, maybe dates. And of course candied fruit too.
But I am assured by numerous online sources that domesticated grapes have vanishingly little fiber, however that came about.
I have encountered a claim that sugar in mango is, uniquely, mostly fructose. But I have been unable to confirm that.
> but do we have sufficient sources to back it?
It's not an assumption, it's a well known fact that adding fat or fiber[2] to a high GI food will decrease it's GI. Conversely removing fiber increases it. For example brown rice(50) has a lower GI than white rice(72). The spike/crash in blood sugar from high GI foods is likely to cause carb craving and is linked to obesity/diabetes.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/136/10/2506/4746688
[2] https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/guide/understanding-carbohydr...
Hate to break it to you, but you don’t need a lot.
Also my point is that you can incrementally improve your diet. Oatmeal and fruit is way better than most packaged cereal. If you know of something better still why not share it, so people can make another incremental improvement?
> as long as that isn't the majority of your diet, I wouldn't worry too much about it
Exactly. For me this is the only practical approach.
We barely eat any sugar at home and don't spend that much time thinking about what to eat.
Breakfast: Cortado (espresso with a bit of milk), eggs with some sauteed vegetables, maybe an avocado on the side.
Lunch: Meat or fish with vegetables.
Dinner: Quesadillas or a sandwich with low glycemic index bread (we buy one called Ezekiel but you probably can find other brands).
Perhaps this is the key point here. It's not 'We' for me. I don't have anyone else to rely on for this, like many others who can't afford the time.
Our version of ratatouille has tomato, eggplant, onion, zucchini, and carrot.
Typically we do scrambled eggs, preheat the ratatouille, and then serve it on top of the eggs with sprinkled goat cheese. It's super easy and fast to do for any number of people.
Another preparation we absolutely love is: a toast of low glycemic Ezekiel bread[1] with the pre heated ratatouille on it, some sprinkled goat cheese, and a fried egg on top of everything with sprinkled hot salsa (I guess some Sriracha would work too if you're into that). It's delicious.
We also typically add half avocado on the side of those dishes. Since we live in Mexico these are plentiful and very cheap.
We've measured our blood glucose before and after eating either of those breakfasts and it barely changes.
So you would rather eat a sugar filled diet of processed food then eat the same healthy things because you think its not good for you? not good for you based on what?
I think the only thing you might be thinking of is missing out on some nutrients if you really just eat the same things but that is pretty extreme situation. eating meat will get you almost everything you need to function.
unless you have some sources that say otherwise or explain your point better
They aren't. Cheerios is a popular option, it has 1G of sugar per serving. You go up quickly to around 5G/serving for cereals like Wheeties. But milk is where you really get killed: 12G of sugar in one cup of skim milk.
A plain bagel will run you 4G of sugar also. If you are trying to keep your sugar intake to the recommended less than 36 grams a day, it is tough. And then there are the sugar substitutes that may or may not be good for you (e.g. monk fruit in supercoffee).
None of which is sucrose, or added.
In this way, some of the plant milks can be worse, if they're sweetened with sugar. Typically oat milks tend to be sweetened with malt which is mostly glycans and glucose, no fructose.
To be clear: table sugar is half fructose. Honey is half fructose. Any fruit juice or soda is about half fructose. Both are equally harmful.
There is no problem with the sugar in any amount of whole fruit (except grapes) -- the fiber slows absorption, and your gut bacteria get it. Your gut bacteria need to be fed, or they feed on you.
But that has no effect on the massive public health crisis unfolding that (e.g.) absolutely dwarfs COVID-19. Liver disease caused directly by sugar intake is indirectly responsible for many often-fatal conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, circulatory disease, even metastatis of cancer. The only thing that can have any effect on that is massive policy changes, and a re-architecting of the public food supply.
This is not impossible: we have mostly eliminated hydrogenated fat from the US diet (although I recently found you can still buy Crisco at the grocery store!) So, artery blockage and heart disease from that will be on its way down. It took Fred Kummerow his entire career to get hydrogenated fat out of the American food system, from the '50s well into this millennium, but not substantially until 2017, even though it was known to be poison. (Europe banned it earlier.)
Try finding even a loaf of bread in the bread aisle of your supermarket that is less than 10% sugar. (You might find one or two. Good luck.) Even the multi-grain "healthy" ones are loaded. Check your sauces. Ketchup, mustard, barbeque sauce, mayonnaise, salad dressing, peanut butter, all usually have lots of sugar. So, even if you think you have cut it out, you probably haven't.
Kids have massive promotions directed at them to make them demand unlimited amounts of sugar. It works, they get it. Kids in the US are getting cirrhosis, like alcoholics.
This is not about self-discipline, it is about public policy. People will eat what is promoted to them, that they find on the shelves at the store, on the menu at the drive-through, in the snacks stock at the office. They will keep eating it while it makes them sick, and even while it kills them. (My mother-in-law died in October. She packed on sugar right to the end.)
What is meant by this? Even on the high end, standard Wonderbread isn't 10% sugar by weight. 10% sugar by calorie content, or a serving accounts for more than 10% RDA? A banana would be far worse by those metrics.
The label will say something like "Serving size: 31g ... Sugar: 3g". Bread is at the low end.
>This is not about self-discipline, it is about public policy.
it can be instructive to compare school lunches in the US vs other rich countries. Not everyone serves highly processed junk food for lunch.
Have you eaten sugar. Ever? Do you know any American, let's say over 10, that has never had any sugar, ever? Oh, perhaps it is impossible to avoid.
Don't like my semantic argument? It's at least more honest then your "oh just choose (and make your children choose) only good stuff, and avoid all the other stuff that companies spend billions marketing, problem solved!"
After watching "That Sugar Film" a few months ago I realised that all I really had to do was ignore 90% of the supermarket shelves.
Going shopping with that intent is a great way to discover just how deep your sugar addiction runs.
"Western society" as in the US and maybe the UK?
Because in most other countries people do not rely on mass produced food to feed themselves.
The public health debacle is worst in the US because the US federal government massively subsidizes production of sugar as a way to use up what of its (also massively subsidized) maize production is not forced on every kind of livestock, or exported.
Ironically, regular corn sugar, dextrose, is relatively harmless. It becomes poison only via treatment with the enzyme that turns half of it to fructose.
If you ignore common knowledge about food, then just as with ignoring advice about exercise, maintaining your teeth, and many other things, you will probably suffer. Good health was never presumed to be the baseline regardless of what one ate, it always took persistence and impulse control. The question is why people are doing such a poor job at it now.
In particular, they had no difficulty getting enough fiber: there was plenty in everything. Our problem is that our whole food-industrial complex is devoted to stripping out and discarding the fiber we need.
If 40% of Americans didn't brush their teeth or bathe, we would have a hygiene problem of a magnitude commensurate with our health problem.
The value of fiber (apart from keeping some nutrients indigistible and hence less calories for obese people who need to eat less) is still a matter of debate.
I went on a 0 added sugars diet for one year.
My breakfast was primarily toast made from Natures Own brand bread (which is available at Walmart supercenters for a very affordable price), yogurt, and eggs.
I make my own yogurt which is EXTREMELY easy to do (I hate to do any cooking and prep and even I can do it). You basically get some yogurt from an Indian store which has live culture (you can eat it or throw it out, but you just need a teaspoon as a starter). You boil milk then let it cool to lukewarm temperature. Stir in the starter yogurt. Then put the light on in your oven and put the yogurt in over night. By next morning it will be yogurt. The purpose of leaving the light on in the oven is to keep the oven warmer than room temperature. You don't need to do that if you don't have cool nights where you live.
Dinner and lunch were usually pasta, grilled, cheese, or tuna. BTW, Rao's pasta sauces have no added sugar. They are available for very cheap at Costco. Canned Tuna, ground meat, and fish are also good to get at Costco. Rice as well.
Speaking of Costco, get Raw Honey there. Great prices.
For snacks I suggest nuts and fruit. I consume a lot of bananas and oranges. Also mangoes when available.
Honestly, the only time I was effected by not eating sugar was when people invited me to dinner or restaurant. In those circumstances I often had to just eat what was offered because I could not control the inputs.
Saying it's impossible to avoid sugars is a cliche spread by lifestyle agitators. Its only true if you basically want to autopilot through your life ... then yes ... sugar free food will not fall into your open mouth. Sugared foods will fall in.
>Honey has a lower glycemic index (GI) than sugar, too. The glycemic index measures how quickly a carbohydrate raises blood sugar levels. Honey has a GI score of 58, and sugar has a GI value of 60. That means honey (like all carbohydrates) raises blood sugar quickly, but not quite as fast as sugar.
So not game changing, but if you have to make a choice one is likely a little better
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/honey-diabetes#:~:text=Honey%....
Those fruits have lots of sugar...
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
By food, he means stuff with minimal processing. A potato, not potato chips, fruit not juices, etc. Let how the food is prepared guide your choices as if you were processing it yourself. Consider the difference between you baking a potato vs making potato chips or eating an apple versus you making apple juice.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=177259...
Ate plants. A big heap. Still hungry.
That’s patently false as the garbage that’s packed with sugar isn’t even yogurt. It’s just pectin and sweetener.
Which is a shame because real yogurt is incredibly nutritious and much more delicious.
A lot of anecdotes on avoiding sugar handwave away 1) the time to plan and cook 2) the convenience of having access to healthier options.
It may also be endocrine disruptors in the environment, from stuff like shampoo making its way into drinking water. Wildlife is also getting fat, despite being no better fed than usual. That suggests some other cause of the obesity.
I mean, that's partially true and partially false. You do have the choice to not consume products that are bad for you. People change their nutrition and lose weight all the time - it's definitely doable.
There certainly is a case to be made for food companies being at least somewhat liable for the obesity epidemic. But I hate to see people promoting a defeatist attitude that puts all the blame on outside parties, if only because I think the message most people need to hear is that it is possible to lose weight if they choose to do so. It's not even very complicated (though it can be hard to implement). It only takes a bit of knowledge and a few choices to make it happen.
Being home bound during the apocalypse, I finally embraced beans, lentils, squash, etc. Pressure cooker FTW. Mostly as a labor saving measure.
Also finally started baking breads, scones, biscuits, pies, etc.
I love eating like this. I probably won't go back. Even when I biff (tbh most of the time), stuff is still pretty good fresh out or the oven.
To your point: Craving some sweets, I bought some cookies. Ugh, way too sweet. Baking for myself, I cut the sugar to 1/3 to 1/2 of what the recipe says. If I still want more, I just have some jam.
TLDR: We habituate to sugar levels.
Oats are cheaper than any of the brand name cereals. Eggs are super cheap. Beans are super cheap. Bagged spinach and kale is super cheap. Olive oil is super cheap.
The only problem with oats is they taste like shit compared to Cap'n Crunch. People could easily eat better but they don't want to because it is far less enjoyable.
The more and more we learn about it, the more and more disturbing it is how aggressively we were in denial during the war on fat.
And we’ve done a complete 180 on health and wellness. Eggs are good now. Eat all you can.
Unfortunately, we didn’t change until we poisoned 75% of the adult population.
Get subsidies out of the food supply. Unless it’s broccoli. Then, that’s probably ok
I always feel this is a gross oversimplification. There is nothing that isn't poision in sufficient quantities.
Sugar is put into everything. Cereal, sauces, drinks, bread, meat, salad dressing, mashed potatoes. If you try to eat without sugar for the first time in a while, you'll be in total shock by how bland things taste. And your body won't tolerate the change either.
We're signing ourselves up for diabetes, inflammation, brain disease, physiological and mental dysfunction, and a multitude of other disease states by continuing the status quo.
Sugar is poison by the sheer volume with which we consume it.
Source? If I'm understanding correctly you're saying that people experience physical withdraw symptoms for sugar?
Try cutting most of it for a month, been there, done that...
Only in the sense that bad things happen to you if you consume too much. I don't like that label though, because if you follow that logic nearly everything is a poison (eg. water poisoning), which makes it useless as a label. A more accurate label would be something like "substance that we're likely to overconsume and cause harm, due to human psychology/physiology", but I guess that's not as attention grabbing as comparing it to rat poison or draino.
See also, the noncentral fallacy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...
Not saying we should feed our kids endless sugar, however.
I absolutely can feel effects from large changed in sugar intake, but the tiny things parents thought were evidence of a sugar rush were ridiculous.
"Dr. Tamborlane, also from Yale, reported that children given sugar had higher levels of adrenaline."
I'm not an expert in human biology but doesn't adrenaline increase activity?
But toddlers can also be pretty wild with or without sugar. They sometimes get very excited when hungry, when tired, when woken from a nap, when lacking exercise, when frustrated, when separated from specific adults, when in conflict with other children, ...
Eggs were ever considered unhealthy?
The fat isn't inherently bad, but there are tradeoffs that some people prefer.
Even people who have learned that sugar is poison often still believe there is something wrong with fat.
Eggs have plenty of cholesterol. But there is nothing wrong with dietary cholesterol. Your liver makes it for you all day long. Blood cholesterol measurements are about markers for circulatory disease that is not caused by cholesterol.
Don’t you remember the egg whites only phase?!
I challenge you to find any study which supports this conclusion that is not funded by egg industry.
I absolutely believe that sugar is the cigarette of our time. It’s just a lot harder to point out the deleterious effects on society. With cigarettes you can point to lung cancer and that’s all you need. Sugar causes varying harms, of varying degrees, so you can’t easily point to something to scare people, especially when obesity is normalized. On a societal level however, the price is clear.
Sugar must be regulated, taxed, and zero-calorie sweeteners encouraged as the default.
What about the idea that sweeteners cause insulin resistance? Is there any proper (not funded by the sugar industry) research either way?
Avoid things which... * contains more than 3 components which you can't understand. * your grandma doesn't recognise as food. * comes in a plastic cover and doesn't degrade for a long time.
I know this pretty much eliminates the entire super market but if you go through what I have you will rethink everything you put in your mouth.
Let's try to be more moderate, lest one day there is a ban on poor dihydrogen monoxide...
The fat free craze then is what led to many more food items having added sugar then ever before. They took out the fat, and added more forms of sugar to more foods.
Demonizing one food type completely just because they've been mis-used by industry is rarely healthy. Focusing on demonizing sugar is repeating the cultural mistakes of the past. Focusing on whole foods would be a better way forward.
Who were fed diets that were > 2/3 sucrose.
But the mice were the ones that had the Earth Computer System built, so we'd want to make sure we're not killing them off.
More addicting than many illicit drugs, like cocaine.
Good luck breaking the cycle.
For example when I started doing IM (no eating from 7 pm - 11 am) I'd get cranky around breakfast time for the first few days, and then it went, and my most productive time is now 8 am - 10:30 am.
Same thing with OMAD or regular fasting, you can retrain your body into what is normal, and you do gain better focus. You do crash fairly hard around your new eating window though.
After doing one year of IF, it felt much easier to completely eliminate sugar from the diet, and sticking doesn't require tons of willpower. It's been 18 months but I know I can continue this indefinitely. I'm in that phase of sugar elimination where donuts look disgusting.
I.e., the glucose/dextrose half of the sucrose is not producing the pathology.
Let us teach our children how to cook their own food. Maybe this will allow them to eat healthier. Clearly the "food pyramid", scientific articles, or scare tactics do not seem to work.
Should we study these effects on prisoners, military personnel, government workers, or school children? Perhaps those with this 'in mice' attitude think we should raise primates for these purposes?
Mice are not the best model for humans, just like a Representative Democracy isn't the best model for a government. These things are, however, the best we have at this point in time.
This is a great study as it conclusively proves not that sugar diets are bad, but HOW they are bad, and WHY they are bad. Sucrose is shown to interrupt key systems in the brain and now we have a model of how this occurs. Now we can try to image human brains that are suffering from these psychosis and we'll know better where to start our investigations.
This is a good study with many implications for future human health studies. Great work.
I don't think you understand how scientific studies are performed.
Inducing change is what the study is accomplishing. Monitoring the changes and what changes occur is what the study sets out to document.
Both of those goals are accomplished in the study. Correlations between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients with high glucose mice brains were readily recognized.
Science isn't a god. Science is a method of study. We follow the method so that others may perform the same experiments in the future and reach similar conclusions, for proofs.
The methods we use for testing such things have been in place for decades now, and they've served us well.
If you don't understand why mice models are utilized, and why testing is done with such high percentages, then perhaps you should read more into pharmaceutical testing and development. Like I said, we've been doing this for decades now, and it serves us well.
Mouse models are imperfect, but they tell us quite a lot about humans. That's why we use them. Where they are weak, we adjust the experiment and the conclusions accordingly.
I apologize if I seem frustrated. In truth, I am. Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating.
His comment was crafted to do exactly that.
I have been guilty of this in the past, and try very hard not to do it now.
I don’t think it’s right for others to attempt to guilt trip and bully you into removing it.
Also, we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. They seem to be poor models more often than they're not.
I agree that they're valuable, but there is also extreme over-reporting of results in mice, leading laypeople to make decisions in their lives based on those very early and/or extreme studies.
Yes, that is fair. But we both know the comment went further than that.
Mice models don't attract many rights protesters, the way other animals would, even though they are just as sentient and intelligent as humans, dogs, cats, horses, and whales.
Why don't animal rights protesters stick up for mice more? This experiment sounded like a horrific experience for the participants.
For the rest of us, the horrific experiments are theoretically in the service of reducing human suffering. A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade (although the real ratio is unknowable).
What are you measuring or estimating in that calculus?
- mice don't live as long as humans (a dead human is more years of lost life than a dead mouse)
- mice don't mourn each other, and these mice couldn't anyway because they'll all be dead soon
- in nature, mice typically die violent deaths anyway, so lab mice usually aren't suffering worse than a wild mouse would
- mice don't get sick and suffer for years, becoming a burden to their family and society
- mice don't fear their premature deaths for months or years
I mean, I can go on and on. Knowledge of the past and future gives humans a significantly greater propensity for suffering than other animals.
If aliens from Tralfalmadore were to adopt the same values, they might choose to experiment on humans because
- humans don't live as long as Tralfalmadorians
- humans don't mourn each other the same way Tralfalmadorians do, and these humans couldn't anyway because they'll all be dead soon
- in nature, humans typically die violent deaths anyway, so lab humans aren't suffering worse than a wild human would
- humans don't get sick and suffer for as long as Tralfalmadorians do
- humans can't predict their expiry date like Tralfalmadorians can
Honest question: do you know the reason why they do this?
It is not done by accident.
No. The reason is to approximate long-term exposure. There are obviously (big!) problems with that, but we don't have a better way of "speeding up time".
You really should try to understand things before you attack them with tired caricatures of legitimate arguments.
When certain groups of people have a monopoly on the spread of information as well as the narrative accompanying it, then these “lower levels of discourse” are perfectly acceptable as a grassroots counter. You may be frustrated because it is a very effective counter. Mockery/jokes, even very innocent mockery (which rings very true, by the way) like the one in the comment you quoted, is one of the most effective means to fight back against authoritarianism et al.
Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” or go against establishment opinion. Sorry but we don’t haven’t take what they give without pushing back a bit. We’re not going to just roll over and take it.
Sites have always had terms of service. If you're seeing them enforced more often, it's because we've reached the end of the laissez-faire enforcement experiment for several key large sites; they attempted to maximize what was allowed, and found they had facilitated an attempted coup in their headquarters country, which would not be in their best interests.
Also, you... think this just started after January of last year? And that everyone who thinks differently than the establishment idea of what is "right" is part of that group? Interesting. You only further my point.
The truth is, it has been happening for a while, but certainly sped itself up when the establishment realized that allowing people to freely spread ideas and opinions very likely resulted in that really mean tweeter winning, rather than the person they wanted to win, and that to ensure that the only ideas considered "correct" moving forward are allowed to propogate, that comments either needed to be disabled, or heavily regulated, by the very smart, very good people in Big Tech, who cried tears of frustration and anger after the Cheeto won. [0]
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-reveal...
The end of his Presidency, though, is a different story.
Indeed, Twitter, upon being forced to decide whether their laxly-enforced TOS meant they'd have to kick a sitting President off their service or whether they would find a way to avoid that scenario, modified their TOS to allow him and his ilk to stay.
... and the consequences of that decision were that their CEO, four years later, got hauled in front of Congress to talk about what their communications service facilitated on January 6, 2021, and whether they should have done anything differently.
They tried their damnedest, they really did. They don't actually want to be some kind of benevolent dictators over what people see and hear; it's not the job they set out to have. But they've seen what happens now if they don't assume the responsibility their size has thrust upon them.
We're now at the beginnings of the experiment where they assume the role of benevolent dictators, and the results remain to be seen.
I really can't answer more precisely than that without knowing what you consider to be a "good" model, and what you are interested in modeling. Perhaps a marginally more useful answer is that they can be _excellent_ metabolic and cellular models. It's a case of "if you know what your looking for, you can pick animal models that effectively have exactly what you're looking for". The "what", here, would be a metabolic pathway, for example.
My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans?
To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
Accuracy is very high when you are studying a metabolic pathway that is (near)identical in humans and in mice.
>To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
Yes. More precisely: animal models are accurate when the metabolic machinery in humans is also found in the animal model.
While "... in mice!" can get a little jokey at times, the alternative is often a discussion that more or less assumes that the smallest of effects in any model are directly actionable information for the readers. It's not. Even with human studies, a single study is rarely enough to come to strong conclusions.
In an ideal world, sure, it's just a repetition of facts everybody knows because everybody read and understood the article before engaging in the discussion at all (even just reading). But that's unrealistic on multiple fronts.
Until that's a reasonable assumption, I'm more than happy to see some reminders of important facts in the comments. Even if it spawns the occasional joke.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...
Did YOU read the study, because it seems as if you may have skipped the very beginning reading... This is a direct quote.
> The association of glucose with survival is inverse for mice versus monkeys/humans.
That is -not at all- what the study in this post is reviewing, and is not the conclusion you're purporting. The study you linked looks at how glucose and aging work together.
The study in this post is looking to how glucose affects the brain function itself, and what inhibitors are triggered by high-sucrose in a diet.
> he high-sucrose diet induced microcapillary impairments and reduced brain glucose uptake in brains of Glo1-deficient mice. Aspirin protected against this angiopathy, enhancing brain glucose uptake and preventing abnormal behavioral phenotypes. Similar vascular damage to our model mice was found in the brains of randomly collected schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, suggesting that psychiatric disorders are associated with angiopathy in the brain caused by various environmental stresses, including metabolic stress.
That's a direct quote from this post's linked study.
These two studies are dissimilar enough to be completely different in comparison and their conclusions are not similar because the studies look at different effects of sucrose. This post's linked study looks at immediacy and how the sucrose interacts with the brain. Your post looks at the effects of aging and possible links to high-sucrose and fasting diets.