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Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar.

Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced.

His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight management outcomes.

While sugar consumption has increased over time, so have added fats and oils [0]. Which are much more calorically dense. It’s unlikely that any one food source is leading to the increases in obesity that we are seeing.

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166....

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I really, really recommend watching this lecture:

The Human Microbiome: A New Frontier in Health by Susan Lynch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCaTQzjX2rQ

What food you eat certainly influences conditions in your gut, which influences your gut microbiome. On the other hand, your gut microbiome is highly persistent and even efforts to diet may not have the direct impact you'd think it would. Also, other factors (like conditions at birth) have strong effects that are highly persistent.

If you're not familiar with this research you really owe it to yourself to learn about it.

Indeed, this was very interesting. However, I missed a bit what changes to my diet I could do to improve myicrobiome. I would be glad to hear a scientist like her discussing this.

This may not directly answer your question, but the Huberman Lab podcast [1] is done by a Stanford professor and generally includes very high quality summaries of recent research. He also provides actionable suggestions (though sometimes, the research is so new that they're still in the process of figuring this out). You can scroll through the home page and see the variety of topics he covers, there are a number on gut health.

[1]: https://hubermanlab.com

Consensus is not a necessary condition for truth. An idea can have no one believing it and be correct, and another idea can have everyone believing it and be wrong.

Absolutely.

That said, it does beg the question: why, 12 years after that video was published, has the field not come to an agreement, if it is “pretty clearly” the truth?

One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.

At the end of the day, there are only a few things that are clear: junk food is bad, Americans eat too many calories, and could stand to eat more fruits and vegetables.

The first person to suggest fossil fuels would leaf to global warming was in 1896. How long until the field came to an agreement?

I don’t think I ever disputed that it can take a long time to reach consensus.

It’s quite clear that there isn’t a consensus on what the truth is, ergo the truth is out there on what causes obesity and it isn’t to be found within the current consensus.

However, do we take that to mean that sugar is the cause of obesity? I don’t see overwhelming evidence to that fact, so I personally don’t.

What we can take is that whatever the truth is, it is not “clear” nor obvious at this point.

I don't understand this statement:

> One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.

Are you saying that the sugar industry would be lobbying against larger industries with opposing goals? Or are you saying the sugar industry is just one of several industries who would like to use their money to push the blame around?

I am not well versed in the agricultural industry, but doesn't the majority of our mass produced sugar come from the corn industry which is absolutely massive and will obviously do anything it can to protect its sources of income (sugar, ethanol, alcohol, oil, etc.)?

I can’t say I have any special insider knowledge of food industry lobby.

My statement was to preempt the common argument that somehow the sugar industry is so powerful that it was and is able to divert all of our collective attention from it, when it is the real culprit.

The corn industry is a large industry, but so is the meat industry, dairy industry, processed food manufacturers, soy beans, etc. many of them, possibly even including corn, benefit from diverting attention away from their products towards sugar as the main villain. Even if sugar is a revenue source for corn, it pales in comparison for its main product: animal feed.

None of that is to say that I think any of the above industries I listed is “the culprit” I only list them to illustrate my point. Big sugar has lobbying power, but it is all too common that the simplest story gets repeated, “it’s all because of powerful lobbying group X”

How many things did one guy say in 1896 that turned out to be wrong?

are you making the argument that BECAUSE his ideas are not widely accepted they must be true? Come on.

No they are making the argument that people have been right in the past and it took forever for the community to find "consensus" on that position if ever.

So to doubt something is true just because "it's been 12 years and there's no consensus" is not necessarily a good rebuttal to something being true or not.

Sure, simply cutting out sugar but otherwise making poor dietary choices isn't going to lead to weight loss. Cutting out sugar tends to make it easier to eat healthy, though. Long term weight loss requires lifestyle changes.

In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my count. When I've done low carb high fat and protein diets, I've found it difficult to eat too much, to the point of coming up several hundred calories short per day.

I mean yes, that’s something of a tautology though.

Cutting down on calories necessarily means cutting down on fat, carbs, or both (technically protein as well, but protein doesn’t generally seem to be the issue.)

If you were to follow an explicitly low fat diet, it would be very difficult to eat junk food as well. Almost all junk foods are high in both fat and carbs at the same time.

You are right about refined carbs. Most public health organizations advise limiting one’s consumption of those.

I don't think "refined carbs are bad for you" is correct. Consider that many of the healthiest, least obese, longest lived societies on earth (e.g. Japan) have diets heavy in refined carbs (e.g. white rice).

Can you give an example of what a typical high calorie / high carb day looked like for you?

I eat lots of carbs, always have... yet I don't seem to gain weight. I generally feel like, and am regarded by people who know me, as someone who "eats a ton" yet I have never struggled to lose weight.

The X food causes obesity theory is just too simple IMO, that or I have a tape worm or some kind of undiagnosed disorder that results in me maintaining a pretty consistent BMI despite eating whatever and whenever I want.

Have you ever tried tracking calories, not necessarily with the intention of hitting a goal? If not, the data can be rather informative, and doesn't necessarily match intuition. There's free apps like MyFitnessPal that makes it pretty easy. When I have done it, I've been able to correlate weight gain and loss to caloric intake. There are a few pounds of fluctuation from things like water retention and amount of food in your gut of course, but it's visible over the timespan of a week. If you eat a very consistent diet, you can measure differences on a scale across a few days.

I learned a while back but don't have time to dig up sources now that eating simple carbs and fats together encourages your body to take the fast calories and store them as fat, moreso than eating simple carbs alone (fast energy, relatively clean-burning) or fats alone. These kinds of interactions are historically very important for explaining particular quirks of the effects of diets and I wouldn't be surprised at all if microplastics had some sort of catalytic effect, e.g. by being nucleation points for buildup of something (arterial plaque or whatever else).

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