I was surprised to find out that the average glycemic index of honey is about 55, much lower than I had anticipated. Even so, I still find it counter intuitive that honey — majority sugar — can lower your fasting glucose.
I think a lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars such as what's found in fruits and honey.
This and many other studies have shown that this parity between input/output is not what happens nor is it an adequate reflection of how our body works. Treating the body as a simple machine in this manner is very naïve and has lead, in my opinion, to a huge amount of misapplied health advice or just outright wrong policies.
Of course, the factors driving this have profited handsomely from this misdirection, but that's another angle suitable for it's own thread.
Not true as explain in the first paragraph of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
To see the effect for yourself: Go to a fast food restaurant, and get the largest sized cup that would normally have HFCS soda in it. Fill the cup with sugar based soda, and drink the entire thing at a normal rate. You'll likely feel full / nauseous before you get to the bottom of it. This doesn't happen (as soon) with HFCS soda.
Unless the claim is that it takes about 10% more sucrose based soda to fill you up (which would be lost in the noise were I to try it), I'm not sure your claim holds water.
Unfortunately, the naturistic fallacy is insanely common.
sugar in nature is almost always paired with fiber, separating them makes the sugar much more harmful
Some foods are healthiest when unprocessed (other than the minimal processing involved in harvesting and shipping), but bioavailability of nutrients in others is greatly improved by cooking and/or other processing.
Certainly, the safety of most meats is greatly improved by cooking.
it's hubris really
EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.
Are you saying that a Mediterranean diet is rich in animal fat? Because that doesn't match the common definition of the word.
"These proportions are sometimes represented in the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. In a diet with roughly this composition, the fat content accounts for 25% to 35% of the total intake of calories, while the amount of saturated fat is, at most, 8% of the calorie content."[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_com...
The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.
I do see triglycerides alternately blaimed on fats or carbs. My best bloodwork came when I spentonths having 1.5lbs of grassfed beef ever day with leaves and roots. My worst was when my triglycerides spiked on a carb heavy diet after soylent swapped brown rice protein for more carbs towards the end of the Kickstarter.
Does anyone else remember "heart healthy" margarine from the 90s that was certainly worse for you cardiovascular system than lard?
Anyway, studies regarding saturated fat are contradictory and inconclusive:
From 2022:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat
From 2014:
https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-...
Statements that seem to be true:
- You should avoid trans fats
- Replacing fats with carbs + sugar is a bad idea.
- Going on a low fat diet, or a low saturated fat diet usually results in eating more carbs and sugar.
Copying from a comment I made 3 months ago[2]; Dr Paul Mason on "Saturated Fat is not Dangerous"[1] talks about the introduction of the "lower saturated fat" guidelines in Australia and how it was not based on any evidence or medical literature review. He mentions three meta-analyses on saturated fats:
"Insufficient evidence of association is present for intake of ... saturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat ... meat, eggs and milk" - Mente A, et al. A systematic review of the evidence supporting a causal link between dietary factors and coronary heart disease. Arch Intern Med. 2009 April 13.
"... no significant evidence for conclusing that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD" - Siri-Tarino PW, et al. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar.
"There were no clear effects of dietary fat changes on total mortality or cardiovascular mortality..." - Hooper L, et al. Reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2011 Jul 6.
And he says "the balance of evidence available at the time of developing our nutritional guidelines says that saturated fat in the diet is not associated with any deleterious health outcomes, that is, it's safe".
Newer research published after 2013, same results, he cites three more reviews and meta-analyses, two from the British Medical Journal.
Then he mentions the biggest most expensive study done on reducing dietary fat, $700,000,000 dollars, 50,000 people, 8 years, and the only statistically significant result from the study was that women with a history of heart disease who were randomly selected into the lower fat group, increased their risk of problems such as heart attacks by 26%.
That is, saturated fat (animal fat tends to be) hasn't been proven to do anything bad, and reduced fat (vegetarianism tends to be , but not necessarily) hasn't been proven to do anything beneficial.
In non ketogenic states, input does somewhat equals output.
Nutrition experts still try to create a caloric deficit when they create nutrition plans.
If there was some sort of magic nutrient that made you lose weight by eating mostly the same food, I'm sure most nutrition experts would have known already.
Its much worse. Active misdirection by using the same term to refer to entirely different products/processes. A is not equal to B just because A and B happen to contain the same ingredient C in majority quantity. (Chimps share 99.6% of our genes etc). Labeling glucose, sucrose & fructose with the common label sugar. Sucrose itself has 100s of varieties - https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-c... .In most tropical countries, sugarcane is consumed raw in copious quantities. I grew up in a village eating sugarcane from fields. We were poor, but we always had a few stalk of sugarcane. You just chew on it & grind it down. Nobody got diabetes or anything from that. You move to the city & then the refined white sugar comes in bottles & you see the ill-effects all around you. But you can't point out how these things don't happen in the village, because that would be unscientific, all sugar is sugar etc. So an industrial product like hfcs, something that doesn't exist in nature in any form & has to be manufactured in the factory, is also sugar, because the majority constituent has the same chemical composition as orange juice, so no drinking orange juice for breakfast because that's just sugar, which is the same sugar in coke & pepsi & maple syrup & since we're way too poor to afford actual Canadian 100% grade A maple syrup from the maple tree, we must substitute it with cheap hfcs syrup, which is also called maple syrup & sold as maple syrup ( there's a small asterisk in unreadable h6 font at the label footer that says its not the true maple syrup but who is reading that ? ). The price difference these days - true maple syrup is $20 a bottle while hfcs is $2 !!! 8 ounce of Manuka is $20. So what do we do ? Well, we fill up a drum with sweet white sugar water & place it in the open. The poor honeybee is too dumb to know the difference, its going to drink our sugar water instead of nectar, so the beekeepers actually recommend this! https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ So now we can sell this cheaper honey for a fifth of the price yay capitalism ftw.
Labeling lard, bacon, olive oils & avocados & ghee, coconut oil, butter, vegetable oil under the common "fat", compounded by the fact that we call people who are obese "fat", thus confusing dietary fat with lipose, to the extent people think if they eat eggs they become fat because the "fat" of the yolk is somehow equal to the lipose tissue of the fat person. Like every yolk you eat, the "fat" from yolk goes straight to the lipose tissues because we refer to these two very different things by the same label ! People actually point at fat people and say "it must be the butter, must be the bacon and eggs"...when its mostly the refined sugar in the cakes & cookies & dessert. Once again, look at the cost - 16oz of ghee is $10, but you can buy a few gallons of processed industrial canola oil for $10, so that's the right thing to do, because oil is oil & it is all fat anyway & hfcs is sugar & so is honey & javascript is java & python is R & everything is the same, my man, it is all turing complete, just use the cheaper one, otherwise you are fucking gatekeeping you fucking elitist what's that i can't hear you over the sound of my freedom rah rah rah.
Good post
Now I just drink black coffee but I do occasionally add honey in my tea.
It's a great thing to keep around the house and can also be used to disinfect a cut.[1]
Hey, thanks for putting out your anecdote. In the absence of good mainstream science, anecdotes end up being an important source of 'data' for me.
“The takeaway is more about replacement — if you’re using table sugar, syrup or another sweetener, switching those sugars for honey might lower cardiometabolic risks.”
But the jury is still out on potential effects of diet on the microbiome and insulin sensitivity etc, so I wouldn't go encouraging people to pick it up for no reason.
I prefer honey over everything else. It's the smoothest form of sugar I've experienced and it's way more than just a source of sugar, too.
In the invert form your body, including your digestive lining, can put it directly to work.
I do not know if this is still the case if you dissolve it in tea or another hot beverage. I believe it is not.
Are you sure about that? I came across this article in another comment: https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/
Glucose is easily and readily available for the body's use, with little processing, and can be metabolized quickly energizing the brain directly (brains feed on glucose).
The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type and those are 'better' sugars for humans.
I'm a type 2 diabetic and I utilize honey instead of sugar wherever possible. I've been doing this for several years now, and there was a definite and definitive corrolation between my A1C levels prior to switching and after switching to Honey.
Multiple sources say that honey is around 30% glucose, 40% fructose.
> Trial comparisons included the participant’s usual diet (70% of studies), sucrose (15%), high-fructose corn syrup (6%), and mixed comparators (9%).
Kind of hard to know what "the participant's usual diet" means, but I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say the intervention probably helped people who were otherwise eating a bunch of table sugar, HFCS, or both, and didn't help if you weren't eating sugar to begin with. The average diet of a person participating in studies like this is probably close to an average American diet, that is, high in added sugar.
Don't expect honey to be some kind of miracle panacea food. It's just better than table sugar and HFCS.
A beekeeper told me that the biggest indicator of real honey is that it solidifies with time. Because of that, it’s usually sold in glass containers so that you can heat it up to re-liquify it.
More obviously, honey is buffered at pH 4 (maybe due to 0.05% potassium content), which is roughly optimal for human tastes, and sweeter than sugar on a dry-weight basis (due to fructose). So, use less, etc.
Not sure about honey, but this is true for figs. Since humans co-evolved with figs and our ancestors have likely been eating them for tens of millions of years, they don't spike your blood sugar as much as their sugar content would suggest on its own. (The book Gods, Wasps and Stranglers talks extensively about how humans likely co-evolved with figs.)
I think it's mostly that somewhere along the line he missed how logarithmic scales work.
Hey, if it leads to your father consuming less unhealthy food (which milkshake and hamburger both arguably are) it works. Just for a different reason. And that different reason gives the faulty one credibility.
Unfortunately not, he just eats them at separate times!
Apples and oranges.
Unlike eating and excreting, the production (and destruction) of stomach acid doesn't change the body's overall pH.
Rather, the body produces acid by dumping alkalinity (specifically potassium bicarbonate) into the blood plasma.[0]
[0] https://teachmephysiology.com/gastrointestinal-system/stomac...
If those who ate too few acids found a way to induce the excretion of too many of them, then they'd be in trouble.
However, the mere fact that the body can remove something doesn't mean it's healthy, or that it doesn't stress the excretory system. See: ethanol, for example.