How sugar and fat affect your brain
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
> "Experts like DiFeliceantonio believe we should make the distinction between highly processed foods and those made from scratch. Being aware of those differences is the first step in avoiding a long list of diet-related health issues..."
> "Highly processed foods can qualify as clinically addictive, both Gearhardt and DiFeliceantonio argue. According to what’s known as the rate hypothesis, the faster something affects your brain, the more addictive that substance will be. Many processed foods are essentially pre-digested to maximize the speed of dopamine release..."
Flooding the body with sugars also messes up the insulin response, leading to the development of type II diabetes over time. Eating complex carbohydrates that are slowly broken down to sugar and fed to the muscles/brain cells for energy, or stored as glycogen in the liver, appears to greatly reduce the chances of that outcome.
I generally thought that neurotransmitter de-sensitization at the cellular level wasn't involved with food choices, and was limited to alcohol/drug use. Interesting to see that's not true.
Incidentally this diet, which tends to be fairly low-fat/mid-protein but higher in carbs from roots/leafy greens/fruit-veg, could use a catchy name. When people ask I call it 'the peasant diet' but maybe 'the farmer's diet' is better?
"Agricultural Diet"....
For whatever reason everything in the American diet is cut with sugar (HFCS mostly), never understood this. Maybe corn subsidies?
There's also the NOVA scale of rating the amount of processing in food products.
[1] I think it was this episode: https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restrict...
most commercial dough conditioners could be eaten entirely by themselves with no ill effect outside of tasting kinda of gross.
They're mainly small amounts of vitamin c, citric acid to lower ph, and amylase enzymes extracted from malt -- the same stuff that makes your bread or beer. In fact most liquor and beer manufactures use alpha amylase or glucoamylase in some form, extracted and powered or natural.
On first sight, this looks like optimization problem. Food is optimized as to be more pleasant than other food on shelves, so that particular food is selected more. The problem started when we had food that was so optimized to be tasty that it became irresistible for many people (like me). Cynical solution - make laws to make food more bland. Good solution - not found yet and this article also doesn't provide any solution, only states the problem.
[edit] - A little edit to add clarity that I'm not another "just do X" commenter.
When most people argue against prohibition, they're not saying that making the bad thing available is great. They're saying that we can't effectively reduce the availability of things that people want, so when we attempt to do so, we end up with all of the negative externalities associated with prohibition without any of the actual prohibiting
This may be fine enough for weed, but what if harder drugs start being used 24% more? Even if they're in more pure form than from illegal sources, that doesn't sound like a net positive.
There's a whole lot of evidence that prohibition vs legalization each have negative effects and it is up to society to decide which is more appropriate in certain situations.
I doubt that food regulations are going to result in black market Doritos barons waging deadly turf wars in the streets. But I suspect it will result in food manufactures building a much worse product in response.
Another way of writing that headline is potentially "cannabis users 24% more likely to admit to using cannabis when in a state where it's legal", or even "marijuana legalization brings cannabis users from out of state".
Even if the study you're referring to does effectively control for those two factors- I would hesitate to apply those results to a harder drug like heroine. Marijuana education and legalization are happening at the same time. The information on Marijuana is pretty promising and education may incentivize it's use for some purposes. I do not believe the same about heroine- education would probably disincentivize it's use.
Do not: Dictate or attempt to control what food consumers choose.
Exceptions: Tobacco, carcinogens, hallucinogens, narcotic substances, poisons... See "safety"
Obesity is killing a lot of folks before they grow old enough to develop Cancers.
Let's do this another way though.
What are the criteria for being added to your exceptions?
It's easy to say "Just eat better" when you're wealthy but the working poor in America don't have any great options outside of switching to base staple foods like rice and beans... and that's difficult to do when good seeming fast foods are offered in abundance.
On a societal level "evolution" seems to be pretty clearly indicating that America was wrong on this one.
Regulation is a good thing - it helps citizens save their energy for their own lives, instead of having to reserve it for navigating an increasingly complex and profit-optimized society.
Look, there are a lot of religions out there that push feelings, take advantage of people and encourage false beliefs. We should help citizens save their energy for their own lives and regulate Buddhism as the required state religion. That way citizens don't have to navigate all these religions.
If you genuinely don't think the massive power imbalance between for-profit food providers and individual citizens should be regulated to prevent the use of addictive chemistry, do you also spend your time regularly arguing for all drugs to be legalized?
When a large portion of healthcare costs are public - then you might want to ban things with huge negative externalities in the form of future healthcare costs...
It's a little unfair to eat your cake and have the public pay for it later...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18254654/ "Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."
"Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures. "
The linked article was published in PLoS Medicine, a high impact-factor journal.
0) Dying fast is clearly not an objective - if it was... Why ask people to eat unhealthy things instead of just killing them directly?
1) If you die at 17 - you never pay taxes. Dying fast != cost effective.
2) Unhealthy people that die at 17 can still have more healthcare costs than healthy people that live to 109. Age of death has little to do with healthcare costs.
I lost 80 pounds eating Johnsonville Beddar Cheddar Sausages and sauerkraut every day for six months, definitely something that’s “too fatty”.
I was CTO for a healthcare network.
Weight loss was the primary focus for population health - because the data massively supports this.
SDOH [1], falls prevention and other stuff, while important, take a far backseat as far as overall health impact.
[1] https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-deter...
I didn't.
And yes, CVD is a huge issue. Obesity directly contributes to it, independent of other factors [1].
Which is why most population health stuff is targeted at weight loss.
From a population health standpoint, it has the biggest impact with well understood interventions.
FWIW, I helped deliver CMS certified DPP programs that were funded by private payers. Their data was clear on all this.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000973
No, thank you. Please don’t tell me what tasty things I’m allowed to create or consume.
Regulation of this type is just group punishment, but advocates believe it to be some kind of altruism.
“People are getting fat!” Okay, but I’m not, and honestly I eat tons of junk. Why punish everyone who likes tasty food? If you hate obesity so much, then outlaw obesity. That’s a stupid idea too, but at least it more closely aligns the regulation with the result you want.
They, too, can be taken and handled with care and moderation, yet are outlawed (even if sometimes only at the "distribution/dealing" level)
For one thing, I seriously doubt prohibition could ever be politically viable, but increased prices or reduced visibility and availability of processed high-calorie ready-to-eat foods might be in some situations. We've already seen some of this, like New York's soda tax or banning vending machines from public schools.
Prohibition is often cited as a failure, but in terms of public health, it absolutely was not. On the whole, people did drink less and there were public health and social benefits. The organized crime was a separate issue, and so was self-control, as the will of the people to drink played a part in its downfall as well.
Our steps toward cigarette prohibition, on the other hand, seem unlikely to be walked back. There will still be illegal cigarettes and people who smoke them, but there will be less smoking, and that's a public health win.
So how can we control the food industry?
Since they are rational market participants, we can infer that self-control doesn't work at scale.
What was made worse?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038507/poland-share-of-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197501/poland-monthly-c...
According to a 2019 review of research on sugar drink taxes, the taxes successfully reduced consumption of sugar drinks and reduced adverse health consequences.
I also think it's a scale thing. Selling grandma's cookies at the grocer? Fine. Megacorp optimized junk (and nothing else) sold at every 7/11 on the continent? Perhaps not so excusable.
It's excusable because it's just tasty food, which theoretically we are supposed not to eat too much. The problem is that this food became more tasty, convenient and sometimes cheaper (at least in time-value) than normally cooked food and we as a society don't even have enough time and knowledge to cook proper healthy food.
> (and nothing else)
Because it's cheap. There are many places where you can buy healthy food but it's more expensive.
(Yes, subsidies are necessary, national food security etc.; but a LOT is just from lobbying and corruption. Never gonna reduce them because of that, but we can dream.)
Even with that in mind, it's easy to say "why do we let megacorps do it"? Well, we don't, not necessarily. They just have the financial and legal resources to impose their will. A pigouvian tax is probably the easiest tool most levels of the US government has to restrict successful vices. Look at that link again. See how much money Coke, Pepsi, etc. were spending in Philadelphia and San Francisco to fight taxes that have solid legal standing. Localities taking action need to make sure they're bulletproof legally, or else the action will be reversed.
This isn't cynical and it isn't that correct. The issue isn't taste as much as it's a desire to have ultra shelf stable foods. Fresh foods taste delicious on their own, the problem with American foods is all the preservatives and the never-ending escalation to add more sugar, salt and fat to everything that is consumed.
Preventing this devolution via regulation is the rational and reasonable solution that's been taken pretty much everywhere outside of the US - only when viewed through a hyper-libretarian lens does it make sense to allow food quality to drop to such extremes so that processed food companies could make marginally more money.
Ultra processed food is not really tasty but a combination of sugar and fats make it easy to overeat without enjoying it. French, Mediterranean and Japanese cuisines on other hand have a lot of delicious dishes but in these regions obesity is much less of a problem in the US.
Generally I don't like a nanny state but IMHO sugar tax is something to be considered.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/... and most of the other links I'm seeing all point roughly to decent results. No panacea, but that is rather unfair for any policy.
> The 25% tax increases was associated with immediate (−0·745 percentage points; 95% CI −1·378 to −0·112) and sustained reductions in prevalence (monthly trend −0·023 percentage points; −0·044 to −0·003), which were driven by reductions in the prevalence of smoking of FMC. The prevalence of smoking of RYO increased between May, 2010, and November, 2013, after the 25% tax increase. At the start of the pre-announced annual 12·5% increases, we observed an immediate reduction in smoking (−0·997 percentage points; −1·632 to −0·362), followed by decreasing overall prevalence (monthly trend −0·044 percentage points; −0·063 to −0·026) due to ongoing decreases in the prevalence of FMC smoking and a cessation of increases in the prevalence of smoking of RYO.
I’m not sure what the price is now, something like $40 a box of 20? These days you hardly see anyone smoke normal cigarettes.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
So your statement that the tax is ineffective seems at best unfounded, and at worst, entirely false. It’s possible that there are other causes for the decrease, but you simply can’t say nothing has changed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038507/poland-share-of-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197501/poland-monthly-c...
Conclusion: Highly processed foods (HPFs) can meet the criteria to be labeled as addictive substances using the standards set for tobacco products. The addictive potential of HPFs may be a key factor contributing to the high public health costs associated with a food environment dominated by cheap, accessible and heavily marketed HPFs.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/add.16...
A cake is HPV because you need to know it is made of wheat, you cannot see it from it.
Alternatively, anything that goes through more than one stage of processing (so home-made marmelade is not HPV because it is just cooked fruit, but hamburger is).
Both burgers and steaks are made from beef cattle; aren't they? I don't really understand why the prior preparation steps required to turn a steer into a cut of beef are not processing steps, whereas the relatively smaller actions required to grind a cut of meat and shape it into a patty are.
An omelette is a HPF but a boiled egg is not? It doesn't seem like a useful metric.
As for HPF, it seems to be a euphemism for hyper-palatable food, i.e. food that increases time and calories consumed before meal cessation. There's probably a threshold that captures 99% of the foods we are talking about while excluding 99% of the foods that are highly processed but not hyper-palatable.
For example, unsweetened dark chocolate (70%+ cacao) would certainly be highly processed but not something highly palatable to most people. Same with Grape Nuts cereal or bran buds. Unsalted saltine crackers also come to mind.
Palatability + calorie density seem like the best distinctions to focus on for this reason as processing is often used to increase palatability/density but not only used to increase them.
e.g. "Make you want to eat more" is still the operative difference here between a bag of potato chips and a bowl of lentils.
Please don't do this in Web sites.
Modern advice about nutrition is confusing and muddled and contradictory, and if you lose 100 pounds eating only beef and eggs and that’s what’s working, to hell with all the people who want to put some tax on that, because that is CERTAINLY not going to be what the regulations advocate for eating.
Anyway, for those so inclined, here's the ultimate lecture on dietary cholesterol not being detrimental, and on the contrary, very beneficial: https://youtu.be/r1mKC92tW0A
Here's an example of how dietary cholesterol can be beneficial: [Dietary cholesterol promotes repair of demyelinated lesions in the adult brain](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14241)
Heart Rate: 56
Cholesterol: 190
HDL: 70
LDL: 110
Triglycerides: 51
Note that very low cholesterol is associated with increased all-cause mortality -- see Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise to learn more about this.
Heart Rate: 56
Cholesterol: 190
HDL: 70
LDL: 110
Triglycerides: 51
Note that very low cholesterol is associated with increased all-cause mortality -- see Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise to learn more about this.
Are you really able to give up all desserts 100%? Or do you just do beef and eggs like 95% of your calories?
I hear fat being demonized or mentioned in the same breath as sugar and I think of all the 90s and earlier "low fat" trends which basically ignored sugar intake.
Probably is one reason why insulin resistance is becoming common.
what is needed is a good fat substitute. that is where most of the calories come from
It's easy to say "we JUST need to eat less". Everyone already knows this. I know this, but somehow it's very hard for me to actually eat less, I feel a lot of pain and can't concentrate when I try to eat less, which leads to eating more again. I've tried many times to just eat less, but it somehow doesn't work. I think that your idea is just not that easy.
My brain is absolutely addicted to sugar, though, and if I start eating it I get just insatiably ravenous. The combination of sugar/fat/salt together is a perfect storm of "put all that into my face and don't stop until there's no more left" brain chemistry triggers, and how that's most of our prepackaged food is constructed now.
I definitely do think that the best diet is the one you can stick to. I've tried a bunch, but I've learned that the thing that works the best for me is learning how to eat to manage hunger rather than managing calories. Managing calories while being gnawingly hungry is just miserable, as you've attested to.
I drink a lot of coffe, but with sugar. I've tried slowly quitting sugar in coffee, but that only made my stomach ache and drinking it was very unpleasant. Without coffee, I would have to make some other caffeine providing solution, without it it's too hard to focus on coding for me (I can live without coffee just fine, I go cold-turkey for two weeks every year, but it's holdiays and I'm away from computer, so no need for coffee).
Coffee is best with a meal; it raises the stomach acid, which improves digestion of the meal. Plus you don't get the cortisol spike when it's taken with a substantial meal.
Definitely wean yourself away from adding sugar to coffee. I have it without any sugar, but a bit of cream, and nible a pastry along side drinking the coffee. So if you can nibble on something sweet, absolutely skip the added sugar in the coffee.
But what changed for me is the following, losing weight is HARDER than gaining weight. Gaining weight typically happens for me at a maximum of 2 pounds per month, over the course of a year with no dieting.
Why would losing weight, something that is harder than gaining weight, be expected to happen faster than gaining it? I set my goals to 2 pounds a month weight loss, and I almost never hit that goal. I usually come in about 1.5 pounds lost per month. I also get WAY more nutrients and vitamins than my body needs by eating lots of liver, and taking athletic greens. That way my "hunger" is always for calories and never for nutrient deficiency.
I've kept this up for almost 5 years now making it a life changing amount of weight loss.
Before people say I'm weird and never get hungry, not true. Before IF, I used to wake up in the morning because I was hungry. Early in IF it was hard. But, the body adapts. You push through, and now I feel at my best mentally and athletically before my first feeding of the day.
Also like you, while I don't follow a strict keto diet, I cook most of my meals and stay pretty healthy including rice or potato only sometimes. If I go crazy and have a carb heavy meal, I do end up hungry the next day. Understanding one's body is the advantage of getting old I guess :D
It's very hard to adapt initially, especially if you grew up religiously starting the day with breakfast, but the difference is pretty evident once the adaptation happens!
For example, it's easy to overeat McDonalds french fries (11g of fat - 99kcal, 31g of carbohydrate - 124kcal, and 3g protein - 12kcal) but it's significantly harder to overeat just beef patties (7g fat - 63kcal, 8g protein - 32kcal). If you ingested 1000 kcal of french fries (roughly 4 small fries) vs 1000 kcal of beef patties (roughly 11 patties), I'd be willing to bet that you'd be significantly more satiated with the beef.
I was shocked when I tested myself after buying the diabetes friendly "Sugar Free Worther's Original" candy.
I've done some web searching but haven't found any results inspiring confidence.
Consuming sugar is fine.
Consuming fat and sugar is not fine.
Saturated, like what's found in breast milk?
Monounsaturated, found in avocados?
Hydrogenated, like in margarine?
Also, disable JavaScript, it's known to reduce your bodyfat by 10% and increase muscle mass by 10 kilos on average.