Sugar 50x more potent than total calories in explaining diabetes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Sugar 50x more potent than total calories in explaining diabetes [video]

uctv.tv

102 pointsfhoxh79 comments

Lustig's premise (from this and other sources) is essentially: (translated for a techie audience)

1. There is a clean pathway and dirty pathway for converting fructose to glycogen in the liver. The clean pathway is easily overloaded by consuming a lot of fructose at once. ("A lot" being more than 12 oz of soda, roughly.) The key bit is that the bad effects are non-linear.

2. The dirty pathway produces metabolites that cause the body's metabolism to switch to an imbalanced state, which if not corrected, leads to metabolic syndrome and type-II diabetes.

3. The dirty pathway is similar to alcohol consumption, with similar long-term effects. This is why he calls fructose a poison.

4. Dietary fiber slows down absorbtion of fructose, thus giving the liver more time to process fructose using the clean pathway. So an apple (fiber!) causes less of a fructose overload problem than a similar quantity of apple juice.

From this, Lustig hypothesises that metabolic syndrome is primarily caused by overconsumption of fructose, and that a diet that has low or zero fructose and high in fiber will correct metabolic syndrome. This is a testable hypothesis, and should be relatively easy to test, even by individuals.

My added notes:

1. There's lots of talk about "sugar", which is dumb, because "sugar" means different things to different people. Lustig means "fructose", which is present in sugar, HFCS, agave nectar, honey, all sweet fruits, fruit juices, etc.

2. Everyone's body, lifestyle, eating habits, exercise habits, and metabolic syndrome level is different, thus everyone will respond to fructose (and indeed any food) differently. If you care, learn how food works in your body and create a diet that fits your needs. And especially, don't extrapolate from your own experience to all people.

3. Several fad diets of recent years fit rather neatly into Lustig's recommendation, including Atkins, South Beach, mediterranean, raw vegan. If you care, find one that works for you.

> should be relatively easy to test, even by individuals.

I did this. I cut my fructose consumption to the equivalent of two pieces of fruit a day and easily lost weight after years of struggling. My cholesterol fell from 255 to 160 mg/dl with an inprovement in the good/bad cholesterol ratios and a fall in triglycerides and uric acid. Also my inflammatory markers fell dramatically in some cases to unmeasurably low levels.

Lustig is spot on. A lot of people are heavily invested in the old orthodoxy and react accordingly. Fructose is a carbohydrate, but in any but small quantities it is metabolically a fat.

Can you tell me how you reduced your fructose consumption? What foods did you eliminate and what did you replace them with?

There's lots of good stuff here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-to-the-prima...

In addition to codergirl's link:

http://www.reddit.com/r/paleo

http://www.arthurdevany.com/

http://primalblueprint.com/pages/Introduction.html

Good review:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/04/new-evoluti...

> Can you tell me how you reduced your fructose consumption? What foods did you eliminate and what did you replace them with?

Basically I stopped adding honey to my coffee (sad - it's delicious) and cut my fruit intake from 10-15 pieces to 2 per day. Also I eliminated all other sources of sugar such as cake, though these had been pretty minor in my case anyway.

I agree with Lustig that fruit is less toxic than concentrated sucrose or HFCS, but I am living proof that in sufficient quantities it is still bad news.

I added some extra fats (nuts, flax oil) and some extra protein (beans, peas, fish, red meat, chicken).

The best thing about the weight loss is that I lost weight in the bad places (ie my stomach) which previously had been impossible to move.

My wife and I did the same and she lost 40 pounds in nine months. I happen to notice that our appetite grew smaller during the period possibly explaining the weight loss. I have good data on this because we eat pancakes every sunday. I always cook the same amount since i use the whole buttermilk carton. Over time we went from eating 9 pancakes to eating 6 of the twelve I make. Also I cook 250g of pasta for us (including our two year old). We used to often eat it up. Now we always have leftovers. My daughters food intake has increased from one to two years old increasing the effect.

It's easy to miss, but if you care to watch the video, you also want to read the comment on that same page by Professor Richard Feinman.

In summary, he concludes that while it's a nicely presented video, it is factually incorrect.

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=23591&fb_c...

The actual quote: "This is incorrect. Increase in diabetes and obesity correlate not just with sugar but with all carbohydrates. Fructose is metabolized through pathways that are most similar to the way glucose is processed, notwithstanding the important differences. Alcohol is metabolized by a completely different pathway. At high levels, alcohol is metabolized through a different pathway, the cytochrome P450 -- in other words, detoxification. Whereas part 1 emphasized how fructose does not turn to glycogen, I am flattered the Lustig has learned that it does in fact lead to glycogen, sometimes preferentially. The presentation is terrific (I wish I could speak as well) but the content is the kind of thing that makes professors shake their head at lunch over how screwy student presentations are. The very detrimental effects of fructose occur at high levels of total carbohydrate intake and whereas it is good to point out that low fat has been bad advice, the label from the low-fat food was on screen long enough to see that flour was the second ingredient. Frequently, it is the first. Reducing carbohydrate is the best strategy for improving diabetes and obesity -- you can do it by emphasizing sugar but if you keep those healthy high starch fibers high, you will still have a problem. Lustig is nice guy and we try hard to avoid personal things, but the CONTENT of this talk is dishonest, biased, inaccurate and, again has the danger that it will continue to encourage high consumption of starch with or without grains. On the other hand, I have elsewhere suggested that it would be great to hear some sugar-eater jokes, like drunk jokes. Two sugar-eaters go into a Dunkin' Donuts...."

This boggles my mind. I understand that much of our knowledge around nutrition (both at a micro and macro level) is still vague..but...

Surely he's either right or he's wrong. Either the ingestion of fructose leads to 3x the number of calories that must be phosphorylated or it doesn't (versus glucose). The need for this extra phosphor either leads to more uric acid, or it doesn't. So on and so forth.

It's like watching 1 politician argue "This budget will save $X billion over 5 years", while the opposition argues that "No, it will COST $X Billion over 5 years".

Isn't this shit basic chemistry for these professional?

They are technically both correct, but in different situations. If you drink a glass of orange juice, you get Feinman's case and no problems. If you drink a 72 oz soda, you get Lustig's case. Lustig goes into details about the differences in other videos, and makes the point that the 72-oz soda case is very common in America.

Thanks, and if that's true (which I believe you), then I'd argue that Feinman is out of touch with reality. It seems like Lustig is both a researcher and an actual MD, while Feinman is pure research. This is possibly what is keeping Lustig in better touch with the realities of western nutrition.

Quickly going Feinman's blog, he seems like a bit of an ass too..

"Avoiding ad hominem is tough. Lustig’s Nature paper contains the single stupidest line in the history of the journal..."

Meh. I generally assume people have good motives, unless proven otherwise. Lustig is screaming "the sky is falling!" Feinman is responding in a perfectly natural fashion, "If they sky were falling, we would have noticed by now."

Uhm.. But the sky IS falling. You can't argue that there's not an obesity epidemic.

Watch out, you can't easily assume that it's not caused by general bad nutrition and lifestyle. Assuming that you're probably from the USA, where obesity is ramping up, from a (especially southern) European perspective, the eating culture of USA is very, very bad.

Please stop using the word epidemic in this way. Especially for a medical condition which is not contagious. I know what you mean but the wording makes it sound you can get obese by being around obese people. Thats tabloid vocabulary at best.

But it's not an incorrect usage of the term. Epidemic is not exclusive to contagious conditions.

I know. That's why I mentioned clearly "especially for a medical condition" - because then you use a figurative word associated with a medical term, while you would expect in that context the other meaning of "epidemic". If you were talking about "epidemic unemployment" there would be no ambiguity, but "epidemic obesity" is a very improper use of the word, ambiguous in this context.

Anyway, most of the time if you use the figurative sense of the word, just replacing it with "growth/increase/spread" is good enough. Why use an overly dramatic word ?

But it's not incorrect or even unusual in a medical context. Epidemic has often been used for non contagious conditions including diabetes, ADHD and obesity. It's a dramatic word, but the obesity rate in the US is dramatic.

It certainly is contagious. You can find it occurring in the same patterns of groups of people as other contagious diseases.

The method of contagion is peer influence on lifestyle and peer acceptance of the symptoms.

People do indeed tend to "get fat by being around fat people". Obesity can be called "socially contagious".

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-3097001.html

I have been reading a study arguing that people are more predisposed to obesity if they have fat friends, being a factor more important than genetic predisposition. I can't find the link right now.

Also, more and more people are getting fatter / obese every day. Clearly genetic predisposition can't explain this problem for such a large scale in such a small amount of time ... so this is in fact a social problem that grows by network effects.

So whether it is our lifestyle, or our diet, it's clearly spreading. Therefore I don't think it's a stretch to call it an epidemic.

>Especially for a medical condition which is not contagious.

But the fact is, obesity is contagious. Habit and culture are huge factors in obesity, both of which are contagious to those who you share extended proximity with.

Lustig is screaming "the sky is falling!"

Are you on a sugar high?

The sky's fat ass is falling! Dude, never in my life did I see fat people like the ones I've seen in US, and bear in mind, I'm in California. The median is pretty fit, but there are some heavy, heavy tails on that bell curve.

There's seldom such a thing as basic chemistry in complex biological systems. It's like conflating programming with arithmetic.

So that's the alternative to scholarly journals Harvard's been looking for! Youtube comments!

Someone else posted this guy's comment (real guy, apparently, funny coincidence he's called Richard Feinman), so here's the reply:

"Hi Richard, Maybe you could update the Wikipedia entry on Fructose then? It's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose . I know it says glucose can be metabolized anywhere in the body, but fructose needs to be trapped in the liver first. So it is handled by the liver, just like alcohol. Also mentioned is how it doesn't trigger insulin, like glucose, nor leptin, and doesn't decrease ghrelin - this means it is sort of invisible calories to the body, it doesn't make you feel full like glucose. Surely you agree that a sugar that makes you feel full is different from a sugar that doesn't when it comes to people living healthy lives? There are a lot of links to studies on weight gain, fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, and insulin resistance there as well."

My father used to tell me that I shouldn't eat so much sugar as it causes diabetes. This was happening 20 years ago. My grandmother also used to tell me that, above all else, sugar and starch makes people fat.

My country also has lots of traditional recipes for food that are rich in meats and fats. We eat more pork than beef or fish combined and some dishes would make anyone that's concerned about high cholesterol scream. On every national holiday, we celebrate by preparing lots of food and eating like pigs. That didn't stop my grandfather from dying at 99 years old, even though he was a total raw bacon junkie (when I say raw, I actually mean it, as in not smoked, not cured).

It seems to me that when it comes to nutrition, you're better off listening to the wisdom of older people.

On sugar ... a friend works for a local tobacco factory and he was describing to me how they add sugar in the mix, because when it comes to dependency, sugar is even better than nicotine.

I'm from Europe and while visiting the U.S. there's one thing I immediately noticed straight from the airport at arrival ... I have never seen so many fat people in one place. In fact this was the first time I ever saw people that are so fat they needed a wheelchair to move around.

I hope I don't offend anyone by this, but seriously consider eating real food, instead of sweetened junk or diet bars or low-fat milk. Also drink water or herbal tea, instead of soda.

>instead of sweetened junk or diet bars or low-fat milk

Likening milk to the other two seems odd. What's wrong with milk?

Milk is good. The problem with low-fat milk is that the process for pulling the fat out leaves this liquid without taste.

Therefore, for regaining the right texture and taste, companies producing low-fat milk actually add milk powder and other chemicals. Also the process doesn't just remove fat, so just like with refined carbohydrates, low-fat milk or yogurt loses nutritional value.

Do a test sometimes with your favorite yogurt for instance. Leave it on the table for a few days. If it doesn't grow mold, then it has no nutritional value in it. It can also happen to have the same taste after a week (I don't know if ever noticed this, but I did, especially with products from Danone).

Few people these days drink real milk straight from a cow. The difference in taste is huge. And do you know what happens when you leave such natural milk on the table for a few days? It goes sour and turns to yogurt ... has a great taste and is really healthy. Really, you don't have to do anything else, other than just leaving it there. Cheese is also easy to make from such milk and you won't find such great-tasting cheese in the supermarket ;-)

Try doing that with bottled milk, especially the low-fat variety. You'll have a surprise.

What's worrying me is that a lot of mothers are giving their toddlers low-fat milk these days, without considering the process of producing it, taking it as a given that it's healthier than normal milk because it has less fat. Well actually, giving low-fat milk to children is just as irresponsible as exposing them to passive smoking.

Our stomach and metabolism is used to digesting normal high-fat milk. If you're concerned with the high-fat, just drink less of it and concentrate on quality, not quantity.

My point was that people shouldn't put processed crap in their mouth. The more natural it is, the better.

>And do you know what happens when you leave such natural milk on the table for a few days? It goes sour and turns to yogurt ... has a great taste and is really healthy

First, your post was very interesting -- thanks for taking the time to respond. However, I make yogurt from nonfat milk every week, so I'm not entirely sure how much to believe.

Not growing mold doesn't imply lack of nutritional value. Anything pickled or dried would fail that test. Lots of fruit too - I have apples and oranges that have survived for weeks.

Many of us love sugary drinks, and sit inordinate amounts of time[1].

Things aren't looking up if we don't change attitude. We all feel indestructible in our 20s, but soon enough, we'll have to pay the Pied Piper.

I hope the next generation of startups will offer healthier perks than redbulls, soft drinks, and sugary snacks.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874024

My startup (WellnessFX) is one of those with healthier perks. Granted, we're a health company, so it'd be a little hypocritical if we were snacking on Doritos all day...

Most of our snack cabinet consists of bulk nuts and dried fruits - probably not much more expensive (if at all) than the usual junk. We've also replaced the soda with coconut water, kombucha, and a water filter on the sink.

Coming from a previous job with weekly Mountain Dew and Costco snack pack shipments, the transition was a bit jarring. I still hate kombucha. But I've found most of the snacking I do while working is fairly mindless, anyway - might as well snack on pistachios instead of popcorn.

Anyways, enough shilling from me - just wanted to let people know there are alternatives!

Kudos on the filtered water over bottled water. It's both economical and environmentally friendly.

I agree. I would of been very interested in a startup that offered ketogenic meal options and treadmill desks. Right now a treadmill desk would be too disturbing to my coworkers, and I got to do the meals myself since they're so specific.

Instead of sugary drinks, you can try creamy drinks and butter coffee/tea (it sounds gross, but is actually very tasty). That and a sparkling water dispenser would satisfy most my desire for drinks to be honest.

http://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-make-your-coffee-bulle... http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2011/12/brilliantly-si...

I'm a big fan of lemon water. I personally use a lemon press to squeeze half a lemon into a tall glass of water. It tastes great and is quite refreshing, and often does the trick when fighting a sweet tooth craving.

Wouldn't this result in the dentin on your teeth being eroded all day?

I think anything in excess (lemon water included) is probably going to have unpleasant side effects. I personally don't drink more than 1-2 glasses a day.

I certainly wouldn't encourage that anyone replace water with lemon water - but it's really just lemonade without the added sugar.

Lemonade is of course not particularly great for your teeth in excess - but no worse than gatorade. Sugar is also famously not great for teeth, and therefore lemon water is less damaging - in equal volume - than lemonade.

What's also particularly important with regards to dental health is how long a given substance lingers in the mouth. Drinking a glass of lemon juice isn't the same as swishing it around for 20 seconds.

TLDR; No.

Carbonated water is still acidic and not that great for your teeth.

What does this mean exactly? How can you say something is (n)x more potent than something else in "explaining a disease"?

I find this quote to be very confusing.

Pretty sure he's talking about the correlation between increase intake in fructose to increase rates in diabetes.

The popularized view is that high rates of diabetes (and various other health issues) are broadly caused by an increase in overall calories. This research breaks down caloric-intake into what those calories are and correlates these individual components to diabetes. That's how I understand it anyways.

I haven't read the article and I have no experience in the relevant field, but I think it's a simple idea: P(disease|sugar) = 50 * P(disease|calories from sugar).

That is, if all you know is that you've consumed n calories, we think you probably you have probability p of getting the disease; if you've consumed n calories' worth of sugar, we think you have probability 50p of getting the disease.

The problem is that you can't just multiply probabilities like that...

How about:

P(disease|calories) = P(disease|calories from sugar) + P(disease|calories not from sugar)

So it might mean:

P(disease|calories from sugar) =0.05 P(disease|calories not from sugar)=0.01

The professor specifically meant the statistical inference, e.g. that accounting for all other factors that some factor X1 (in this case sugar) is Y times more correlated with Z observation (diabetes) than X2 (total calories).

The main issue I would have would this video is the excessive focus on sugar the product and its direct sweetness associates rather than blood sugar levels which is far more directly relevant to diabetes and obesity in general. For example, common wheat bread and many sodas have a higher glycemic index than granulated table sugar! Therefore, they are converted into higher levels of blood sugar while at the same time being incredibly easy to over-consume (compared to trying to eat sugar directly).

There is an excellent documentary created three years ago which explained in simple terms a huge amount to laymen about current scientific understanding and the unbelievable lengths to which industry and governments have gone to "encourage" a specific type of modern agriculture and associated food industry regardless of its health effects or consistent scientific evidence, especially in the US. It also covers why the Lipid Hypothesis is completely unvalidated, if not provably wrong.

It is called "Fat Head (2009)" and it was available in full on Youtube until copyright notices removed it. It starts a little slowly and actually begins with a deep criticism of the logical fallacies in "Supersize Me" the movie, uses at one point slightly silly comic imagery, but by the second half there is excellent up-to-date food science and historical explanation as to why society is at is now. I am very grateful to another HN user that referred it to me about a year go.

Anther superb and complementary programme was a Feb 2009 BBC Horizon episode called "Why Are Thin People Not Fat?" which is available on iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hbsk2). It is almost two programmes side-by-side. One sub-programme is a loose experiment to attempt to make a random group of young adults fat and why in some cases it effectively failed. The other sub-programme covers the summary results and science behind a deep, long and published study of a large number of obese people at a specialist clinic which profoundly contributed to scientific understanding of how obesity develops and what makes it so difficult to reverse beyond a certain point.

I highly recommend both programmes. They will change they way you think, even if you have absolutely no interest in changing your food or lifestyle, and in some cases are surprisingly uncommon "common sense". But the kind of common sense only your grandparents and all those who were born before the 1970s would implicitly understand.

I've seen "Fat Head," but I found it focused too much on bashing "Supersize Me" rather than explaining/advocating the right thing to do, and why. One book I've read recently that talks a lot about this is "Why We Get Fat" which is a sort of abridged version of "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health" both by Taubes. Definitely check them out if you're interested. I've applied the reasoning in these books personally with great success, so there's my anecdotal evidence :)

I think oddly enough Taubes' earlier book is briefly mentioned in Fat Head :)

Thanks for the recommendation!

I'd also recommend "The perfect health diet" [1]. Awful title but the book is superb, easily as good as Taubes, practically every paragraph has references to studies.

[1] http://perfecthealthdiet.com/

Fat Head has some excellent content, but it is far from a superb documentary.

Regardless of the controversy issued herein, I firmly assert that one has nothing to gain by consuming fructose, the sole exception being if that fructose just so happens to come bundled with some other necessary nutrient.

Exactly. It is especially odd considering that not adding extra sugar to ones diet quickly makes lots of things taste sweet that one formerly hasn't thought of sweet. Fruit is now about as sweet to me as cake used to be and candy or cake I cannot eat anymore. Fast food also tastes more disgusting since the added sugar is too prominent for me.

If anyone is interested in a more informative video from Lustig, I'd recommend this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSu6U8OzPk

Its long, but it covers a lot more information and history of this fine mess we're in..

I don't get it: he claims that sugar is bad because the fructose in sugar is bad leading to dozen disease including diabetes. But fructose is is the core of many fruits which are considered as healthy.

Nutrition/metabolism is still a black box and this video confuses more than it clarifies.

Fructose in five oranges: 16g

Fructose in one can of Coke: 39g

Also, fiber in five oranges: 15g

Fiber in a can of coke: 0g

Plus the coke has salt and caffeine in it, so shortly afterwards you'll want to drink more: Another can of coke perhaps?

The sodium (not actually salt – or at least, not sodium chloride) in a coke might make you thirstier, but the caffeine probably won't. While caffeine is a diuretic, studies have not supported the idea that it causes dehydration, and it's generally accepted that the amount of water in coffee (which has a far higher caffeine density than coke) is enough to offset what you lose to its diuretic effects.

You're right. Scratch that evil influence then :)

And there's a lot of stuff to digest in those oranges. I'm full up after one. That's maybe a tsp of sugar.

Well, it is important to note that society has often been incorrect about what things are healthy or not; so I think one should always be careful about the way things are 'considered' (not that I am arguing against fruit). If you check out some of Dr. Lustig's other work you will see he states fiber is the main reason fruit is not as 'dangerous' as fructose outside of fruit. Obviously all fruits are not the same either (in terms of amount of fructose and other characteristics).

He's talked about fructose in fruits before. It's the presence of fiber which makes the difference. Fiber alters the chemical process some way (he does explain it though). It's also why he's dead against fruit juice, even if they are made from 100% real juice. It's fructose without the fiber.

Also worth mentioning that, in addition fiber, fruits have other nutrients. fructose+fiber+vitamins+anti-oxidants+minerals vs fructose+fat+salt .

edit:

Sorry, just to be clear, he explains it in other papers/talks. I know it's at least briefly mentioned in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Ok thanks, where did he say this about fruit juices? In the same video?

I haven't watched this particular video, but that information is in another of his talks, "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Where was the part about fiber? I didn't see it in this video.

The world isn't black and white. Just because fruit has some healthy aspects, doesn't mean it can't have bad aspects as well. In fact, different fruits have different ratios of fructose to glucose. So you can't even generalize to just fruits. Unfortunately, evolution seems to have chosen glucose as the sugar that makes us feel full and that can be used directly by the body. Fructose has to be metabolized in the liver and doesn't make us feel full as directly. This was a good bet before we started custom making all our food, because most sugar is sucrose anyway, which is a combination of glucose and fructose. Unfortunately, man can now add only fructose to things and the body hasn't evolved to understand that signal. You are still way better off eating fruit than empty calories, of couorse, that is manufactured food with little nutrients or fiber and lots of calories.

"But fructose is is the core of many fruits which are considered as healthy."

No, the core of many fruits considered healthy is FIBER(mainly cellulose) . We do not metabolize fiber but fiber has three important effects on us:

1) It is "in between" the sugar, lowering the effective concentration of sugar on blood. When you drink sodas all the sugar goes to the blood in a very short amount of time, this creates emergency responses on the blood control systems:

Biological control systems are very similar to PID controllers(we copied them from nature), with things like overshooting happening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_%28signal%29

This is the reason a lot of tennis players eat bananas now in between the game.

2) Fiber creates an environment to bacteria on our intestines to live. This bacteria flora helps us a lot in a lot of ways.

3)Fiber makes easier to transport waste as it hydrates.

This of course is an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

Lots of fruits and vegetables have been bred to change their nutritional content (wild strawberries are 1/3 inch long, etc)

So fruit really isn't 'natural', and it being natural wouldn't mean it was good for you, anyway - fruit evolved as a tempation to animals to get them to help plants distribute seeds - that's it. Plants were selected based on how well their seeds were spread, so they came up with fruits which attracted animals. If they could have come up with versions which hurt the animals a bit, they wouldn't have even known or cared.

I think he could have simply said "overeating fructose is bad for you, just like overeating practically anything else is". The lengths he went to vilify fructose as a poison, despite it naturally occurring in a very likely primate food source(fruit), just makes him seem to come off as an anti-fructose zealot - an anti-fructite.

Edit: Looking at other materials from him, it sounds like he's against the over consumption of fructose rather than fructose itself. This video does a pretty poor job expressing that though.

The first words spoken in the video: "Now I am not against sugar when it's appropriate and rare."

It might have been nice for him to spend a little more time focusing on appropriate sugar intake scenarios and what makes them appropriate. In previous videos he discussed the importance of fiber in more depth.

>Now I am not against sugar when it's appropriate and rare.

Yes and later goes on to say it's a poison, unless you just finished a race or exercised. I don't think that's how poisons work. Sugar is not rare either, as pointed out by the video itself our bodies run on sugars. We require it. I am not sure you can say that about real poisons. Carbs we eat breakdown to sugars. Given how he classifies fructose as a poison, anything we eat could be classified as a poison, if we ate too much of it.

He did refer to it as a poison and a dose-dependent toxin. There's room to quibble over their definitions and whether he's exaggerating a bit for effect, but he's very clear on his message that it's a substance which requires serious moderation that can lead to death in various ways.

Sure, if you don't take water in moderation it can kill you, but in this case the dosage required in order to produce negative effects is low enough that its side effects have become commonplace.

You are confusing all sugar as meaning "glucose", but there are a number of sugars. Fructose is the sugar he takes issue with, because it's much more common in products than it should be due to the body's limited ability to cope with it. When he just calls it sugar, he's making it easier for people to relate with.

And yes, with him calling fructose a poison a large number of products available could be a serious issue if you eat too much of them. Unfortunately, what constitutes "too much" is very little and fluctuates a bit depending on your rate of digestion which can be slowed by taking in more soluble fiber at the same time.

It's been added to products as a flavor compensation too liberally, because it's cheap, addictive, legal and increases sales. This is used as the basis for why the issue is widespread, it's been put into so many products.

You are confusing all sugar as meaning "glucose", but there are a number of sugars.

No I am not confusing them. I know there is a difference.

When he just calls it sugar, he's making it easier for people to relate with.

He goes back and forth between calling it sugar and fructose. His advocates are often anti-sugar zealots espousing zero sugar diets & parrot his "sugar is poison" line. I also doubt if we changed all the fructose in products to glucose, that would really make him happy nor do I think that is a real solution. You still need to burn the calories if you're eating them.

You're right, I probably phrased that wrong. It's apparent you are aware of there being multiple sugars. What I should say is that you're not giving him enough credit by assuming that he's somehow unaware that glucose is not rare. I attempted to show you that he is referring to fructose, not glucose.

I should have realized you are not at all familiar with his actual research and what he is saying.

A quick and simple overview is that fiber is critically important here and was not given proper emphasis in the posted video compared to his previous videos. It is not just "fructose is bad, the end", it is the combination of the lack of fiber and excessive amounts of fructose that leads to a situation not found abundantly in nature.

Go eat an orange, an apple, some grapes, etc. These are all pretty much fine and yet have fructose in them. So why shouldn't an equal amount of fructose in canned soda not be the same? The complete absence of fiber. This carries on even outside of the liquid/direct forms, in fast food or other processed foods.

Yes, this does mean if you drink nice wholesome orange juice or apple juice without eating the actual fruit, you could potentially be doing more harm than good depending on the rest of your diet.

Why is fiber almost entirely removed from so much food you'll buy at the grocery store or in drive-thrus? High fiber stuff doesn't preserve/freeze well in many situations for distribution and long term storage. Why is so much extra fructose added to these foods? The things they do to increase the shelf life on some types of food can result in some bitterness, which they compensate for with things like fructose.

If fructose is indeed a problem in this scenario and fiber cannot be reasonably added to the products, you get people saying the fructose should be removed, replaced or severely limited. Even if fiber did make it back as a larger part of the diet, fructose would probably still need to be toned down a bit considering how widespread it has become.

Does that make more sense? If you need more information and actually have a legitimate interest in this topic outside of the entertainment value of criticism, look up some of his other videos that go much more in depth. He goes into how he got into this, how it actually works, what studies he has run and what the results were that lead him to this conclusion. Then for future conversations you can have more well-formed thoughts on the topic.

Some people will make the claim that alcohol is treated "just like fat" in the body, and that this is why people have beer bellies. While at the same time studies show that people with high-alcohol diets and low carb intake actually weigh less than their non-drinking counterparts. The metabolism of alcohol is quite complex, so it becomes silly to make over-generalizations like "alcohol metabolizes to fat" (ex. http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/images/642alcoholmeta...). I think a lot of people end up taking this as gospel, such as the people who parrot that "alcohol kills braincells." Well yes it does, but not much more than will die naturally or due to other causes, more studies have shown. The real danger lies in permanently damaging or killing your liver from which there is no coming back.

When I see television pieces done telling me there is a single simple culprit for a huge problem like obesity, my brain tells me that this is probably not the case. In fact, most of the people I know who are obese don't seem to be eating handfulls of cupcakes or sodas. They're eating chicken wings and burgers and fries and nachos and big macs. Not to say fat is another single cause of obesity, but it's clear that an overabundance of fat, or perhaps simply just over-eating, is another simple cause for obesity which needs to be weighed with all the rest.

Technically just drinking alcohol could lead to diabetes as it lowers the blood sugar and insulin swoops in to fill the gap. Sure, sugar can be very detrimental to your health, but let's not make it out to be the devil. Promoting nutritional balance and moving away from non-fresh foods would probably go a lot farther towards preventing diabetes than never eating sugar.

> chicken wings and burgers and fries and nachos and big macs

Thats loads of carbs. And they are probably also eating a lot of crisps, along with all the sodas and sweetened drinks they are drinking. What I am trying to say, is that its not the fat in those meals which is making them fat, its the carbs.

I am on a diet which has cut out all carbs entirely, and increased the amount of fat I eat drastically. I lost a large amount of weight fairly quickly on this diet, and the loss continues.

Edit: Americanized chips to crisps.

     I am on a diet which has cut out all carbs
     entirely, and increased the amount of fat I eat 
     drastically

Be careful about it, because your body needs those fruits and vegetables. Like, I know it is trendy to hate the potato, but it still has an unique nutritional value that can hardly be replaced.

Unfortunately you can't precisely measure the effect carbs can have on your body. Things like the quantity of carbs, or the glycemic index, or the insulinemic index ... are clues, but not proofs of what you should eat. To make matters worse, we don't actually know what nutrients our body needs, we just know that this shit is really complex.

What you have to really watch out for are the refined carbohydrates (sugar, white flour, white rice) and keep in mind that not all carbs are created equally ;-)

Personally I think the best diets are those dissociated. You may lose weight slower than on more drastic diets, but that's also good for preventing loose skin and other health related issues.

I should have been more specific - I have completely cut out all refined carbs like bread and sugar, and massively cut down on the rest (I do still eat some fruits, vegetables and even a little starch in the form of sweet-potatoes etc, but very little while I am losing weight).

Once I have lost enough weight, I will increase the amount of carbs in my diet (NOT refined carbs) until I find the point at which I start putting on weight again.

See, if I was going to take on an extreme fad diet that cut out entirely one of the three basic building blocks of nutrition, I would have gone with the junk food diet: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

I have only cut them out completely until I have reached a healthy weight. Once I am there, I will not introduce any refined carbs (sugar, flour etc) into my diet, but will increase certain carbs (Sweet potato, other fruits etc) until I find the point at which I put on weight again.

Can we just shut up about sugar already?

Yeah, it's freaking terrible, even though I eat sugar every day of my life and I have no health issues.

Drop the agenda.

P.S. I'm not bragging that I'm superman or anything, and I'm grateful for my health. I just want to make the point that this stupid propaganda fear mongering has to stop.

Congratulations on your good health. Not everybody is you.

Also: what's (inherently) wrong with agendas? We've all got 'em.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com