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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

> We live our lives eating tons of sugar and thinking that this is the right diet

I don't think most people think it's the right diet. I think most people know that sugar is potentially harmful. Nobody is espousing the idea that sugar is part of a balanced diet, or that we should be increasing the amount of added sugar in processed foods. Or that we should increase our consumption of candy.

Rather, when we think of sugar, we think of obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Maybe even fructose toxicity?

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Many actually do, just not in a direct way. Change the word "sugar" to "carbs" or even "starch", and plenty of people will tell you that you need "good carbs" or the like. That's exactly what I and many others were taught in both high school and college level courses on human health. It's bogus because, for all intents and purposes, you can treat carbs and sugar the same. Lactose and fructose being partial exceptions, of course, and not in a good way.

Speaking of fructose, absolutely there are people promoting sugar as part of a "balanced" diet. You know what's in fruit, right?

Sugar actually was for a time touted as energy you either use or excrete, and that's an idea that's been discredited to the extent that most people know that sugar is considered harmful. They believe this because sugar is indefensible, hence the agriculture industrial complex have thrown it under the bus. Yet they insist that fruits, starchy vegetables, and whole grains are part of a "balanced" diet. What is a balanced diet? A diet with all the essential nutrients despite the presence of exogenous carbohydrates and other things that reduce bio-availability?

A "balanced" diet successfully rebrands sugar as an essential nutrient. As long as it's in the form of lactose and galactose in your "healthy" yogurt, fructose in your "healthy" fruit, and glucose hydrolized from the carbs of "healthy" whole grains, few are the wiser. Even better if you can dump refined sugar into these things anyway and call it "dextrose" to confuse people.

Yes, I know I wrap a lot of things in quotes. I do so because I must emphasize how incorrect these ideas are.

Fructose in unprocessed foods like fruit isn't a problem. Show me a morbidly obese person who got that way from eating too much fruit.

While you don't require carbs to survive that doesn't mean they're harmful or should be completely cut out from your diet.

But highly processed refined carbohydrates are sugar as well. Or at least converted to glucose. We are told, however, that carbs are part of the balanced diet. While that is true the right kind of carbs are important. So people think they are being healthy while loading themselves up with poor quality carbs that are in fact quite unhealthy.

> We are told, however, that carbs are part of the balanced diet. While that is true the right kind of carbs are important. So people think they are being healthy while loading themselves up with poor quality carbs that are in fact quite unhealthy.

I have never heard anyone, even informally, claiming that sugars are a useful form of carbs in the diet. Any source that claims that carbs should be part of a balanced diet is talking about long-chain carbs like starch, not sugar.

I highly doubt many people are seeing carbs listed as an important part of a diet and then deliberately eating more sugar thinking that they are being healthy.

I think th e poster you are responding to is making the point that long-chain refined carbs, which is what you get in e.g. pasta, breakfast cereal, oatmeal, rice, etc. (even if “whole grain”, most of which just adds back fiber but has already irreversible separated that fiber from the carbs) are perceived by many people as part of a balanced diet, etc — but they are basically sugar, because they are metabolized into glucose very quickly.

Hmm, perhaps you're right. I suspect that "highly refined" is an ambiguous term. A quick Google suggests it mostly refers to sugars but also refers to things like rice cakes and white bread that are mostly starchy; maybe it depends, in part, what things it is packaged alongside rather than just the chemical composition of the carbs themselves e.g. whether it is included alongside a fair amount of fibre.

> basically sugar

I think we should be careful here about calling glucose "sugar" and talking about harmful metabolic process because most people think sucrose when talking about sugar. And the potential harm from sucrose, glucose+fructose is quite different than glucose alone. Eating 100g of pasta, what you call "basically sugar", is not at all the same as eating 100g of table sugar. There's just so much room for misinterpretation and miscommunication around food. And in addition, so much is unknown.

You are correct, I was imprecise. 100g of pasta is close to 100g of glucose, while 100g of table sugar (sucrose) is ~50/50 glucose and fructose, the latter of which has a completely separate metabolism.

But both cause a huge glucose spike (ignoring fructose metabolism for now) and in that respect they are quite similar, and very different from basically any other kind of food in terms of metabolic response.

carb != sugar

sugar is glucose + fructose.

The human digestive system metabolizes fructose differently than glucose.

Bears eat lots of fructose prior to hibernation, birds eat lots of fructose prior to migrating south for the winter.

Consuming lots of fructose, say in a large container of carbonated drink dosed with high-fructose corn syrup/sugar, sends signals to your body to stop burning fat and start storing fat.

Ever hear someone say, "I just have to look at food and I gain weight". Well, those people have probably consumed enough fructose such that their body started storing food calories as fat.

see "Peter Attia - #87—Rick Johnson, MD: Fructose—the common link in hypertension, insulin resistance, T2D, & obesity?"

at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbSic4Oo8ME

> sugar is glucose + fructose.

That's not the definition of sugar. Not even if you meant sucrose there (which is different from just a mix of glucose and fructose). Wikipedia puts it:

> Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. ... White sugar is a refined form of sucrose.

I know Wikipedia is not perfect but that matches what I've seen in the past. For example, fructose (by itself) is absolutely a sugar and it would be outrageous to claim it's not because it's not sucrose.

You are correct that that is not the scientific definition of sugar, which is generally any 5 or 6 carbon ring molecule.

However when most people talk about sugar they are referring to table sugar, which is a molecule of glucose (a six carbon ring sugar) chemically bonded to a molecule of fructose (a 5-carbon ring sugar) - otherwise known as sucrose. The first thing your body does when it sees sucrose is split them into a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose (this happens in your small intestine). Glucose can be metabolized right away, in any cell, however fructose needs a bit more processing in the liver before cells can use it to generate ATP.

> ... when most people talk about sugar they are referring to table sugar ...

What can I say? (shrug) I disagree, that's not my experience from talking to people in person (about diet; obviously it's a different matter if you're talking about cake ingredients). Anecdotal evidence from replies here on HN seems to agree with you though. Who knows what's more common in reality.

I think jjuel means bread and crackers and pasta and whatnot when they refer to low quality carbs, not sugar itself.

Many forms of carbohydrates are trivially converted to sugars such as glucose when they hit our digestive system, and so are roughly equivalent to eating sugars directly, metabolically speaking.

I’ve been told that adding a healthy dose of fat to a processed carbohydrate is a good way to prevent this instant sugarification process, and so I eat my bread with lots of olive oil or cheese or butter.

Sugars are quite useful, to aid in recovery after strenuous activity.

See: cyclists drinking coke or housing gummy bears after a race.

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