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Comment by pie420 | Hacker News Reader

Not a doctor, but from what I have seen, there is a healthy amount of spiking from eating normal foods, but our modern diets are so sugar and carb heavy that the glucose spikes are way outside the range that our bodies evolved to handle. Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there. The modern human eating pizza, tons of bread, ice cream, soda, etc. creates such massive glucose spikes that they are unhealthy and unsustainable for the pancreas to handle for 60+ years.

Again, not a doctor and not sure if this is accurate, but this is my very limited understanding

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> Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there.

Archaic humans had access to plenty of wild fruit that were high in sugar and tubers that were high in complex carbs. They even had access to concentrated forms of sugar like sugarcane and honey.

They obviously didn't have refined sugars in everything they eat like we do but that they had access to limited sugar in the form of berries is a persistent myth. They would have been exposed to large glucose spikes regularly whenever they came upon a new tree that was in season while migrating.

We live 2x-3x longer than we used to. We should take the best possible care of our bodies.

Only as a statistical average. Hunter gatherers who survived past age 5 had a good chance of living into their 60s and 70s.

There would be skeletal evidence of that. The oldest remains of early humans points to 35-40 year olds with high child mortality rates per https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/people-lived-up-to-40-year...

Not to mention humans 150 years ago who ate plenty of bread and still didn't have the problems we have with obesity and diabetes. Or even 50 years ago...

That could also be because a fair amount of the bread in supermarkets today is closer to confectionary than homemade sourdough.

light bread starts turning into sugar almost instantly in the mouth and stomach. It's only one step removed and saliva can break it down quickly because it has amylase. Sour dough and whole wheat/grain breads tend to break down a bit slower. You can freeze bread overnight and make it a bit more "resistant" to breaking down quickly and I pretty much do this with all my breads along with toasting them a bit for sandwiches. Pasta can similarly have its glycemic index lowered by first making it "cold"

Do you mean that they need to be cold when they are consumed, or is it the process of freezing itself that does something, even if it's later reheated?

The process of cooling down converts starches in rice, pasta, potatoes etc... to a more resistant forms that your body cannot process easily.

Does chilling also work to convert bread starches into resistant ones, or does it only work for rice and potatoes?

GP mentioned bread specifically. I looked up some studies, and they are in agreement: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17426743/

A starch is a starch.

However, this study seems to compare freshly baked bread to a frozen/toasted one.

I'd guess that the difference will be smaller when regular store-bought bread is used instead.

They don’t need to be cold when consumed.

That’s not really a fair statement. Many problem who would die of diabetes today would have died of something else 200 years ago long before the diabetes got them. Non-juvenile diabetes is a slow killer, it’s really hard for it to kill you before the age of reproduction.

A diagnosis today that is imminently manageable like asthma was far more readily in a world without antibiotics, steroids, or even medical oxygen.

Even something like a CPAP that many of us take for granted has only been readily available for 30 years or so.

Plus, diabetes is much like AIDS in that it’s more of a systemic thing than acute. It doesn’t really have symptoms that kill you. It just slowly weakens your body until your heart gives in, or you have a serious infection, or something like that. No one dies “of” diabetes, they die with it.

They also moved around more than most people do today. Most of us are stuck sitting pretty much all day in front of a computer.

fruit and berries do have sugars but in their wild state they tend to have much less than their modern equivalents bred to be sweeter and tastier. Even then they still typically are 75-95% water and often have some fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins which all can help with inflammation unlike snickers bars.

It's not really that the pancreas itself can't handle it (though this may be true also). What happens is that having high blood glucose, even if it's not continuously high, is just bad for you by virtue of the high concentration of glucose in your blood. Having high blood glucose leads to the creation of "Advanced Glycation Endproducts" (AGEs) which bind to certain receptors (RAGEs). The AGE-RAGE interaction is linked to downstream diabetes side effects like atherosclerosis.

There's also research that indicates that cancer thrives in high-glucose environment, and that starving cancers of glucose reduces their size over time.

Wrong:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

I have better life expectancy then them.

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