Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research (2016)
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
While not incorrect, that's an interesting framing as your great-grandparents and most of their lineage already had all the needed info too. Cultures can't really survive hundreds or thousands of years without sorting out a reliable way for their members to thrive well enough, a knowledge that gets gradually and continuously encoded in their food traditions.
Our modern culture may be gaining insight into how to squeeze a little more wellness out of late life, or take a little more specific control when edge cases need attention, but those gains came on the tails of a dramatic disruption of cultural knowledge that was already there and already encoded in communities' daily intuitive eating practice.
We have finer and more evidenced ideas now, but it's going to take many generations to convert that from the intellectual, explicit knowledge we have now into a widespread practice that people no longer need to invest attention in.
My current approach is to look at the % daily value for carbs and for fiber whenever I buy bread, cereal, etc. If the carbs are higher than the fiber I buy something else.
There are a few switches that worked out particularly well: Flour -> Corn tortillas, and the Ezekiel brand (or other recipies-from-the-bible-themed varieties from the same company) sprouted whole grain bread at the store.
Stuff marked "low carb" or "keto" often is primarily mode of bizarre ingredients like extracted starch. Worse, they often contain artificial / organic non-caloric sweeteners that are way worse than just eating sugar.
This is not true, you have amylase in your saliva that has a tiny impact on breaking down starches. While there is a little bit of hydrolysis in the stomach, most of the break down happens in the small intestine for smaller oligosaccharides (pancreatic and small intestine enzymes mostly) and the colon for large ones including most fibers (bacteria are doing it)
All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age, while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams. Before anyone lectures me on epistemology, I offered this as a data point, not an academic study.
Industry wants to move product. If fat is the problem--or at least if people think it is--industry moves to sugar. If sugar is the problem, they'll move back to fat. An inconvenience, but an easily surmountable one. Packaging and preservatives would be a tougher nut to crack--far fewer options. An entire market segment could be up-ended if a single option were suddenly forbidden.
It may not even be the food. The younger generation has been on a staggering number of medications in their formative years. Boomers are also inveterate pill-poppers, but not from early childhood. Think of the difference between giving aspirin to a child or to an adult. There may be another "reye's syndrome" hiding here.
The human body has been working with fat and sugar and such a lot longer than all the newer, more engineered stuff, making it seem even more reasonable.
Most people didn't have much access to sugar until the sugar islands were cultivated a few hundred years ago. Before that it was just fruit which was probably less sweet, has fiber in it and was more rare.
all the newer, more engineered stuff
Like what specifically?
The physiological effects of starch, which is composed only of glucose, are very different from the effects of sugar, half of which is fructose.
Until about two hundred years ago, all the sources of concentrated sugar, i.e. honey, cane sugar, dried fruits and boiled fruit juice were very expensive in comparison with other kinds of food and very few people could afford to eat them more frequently than a few times per year, at more important holidays.
Almost nobody could eat food with high content of sugar every day, like most people do now.
The availability of sugar or glucose-fructose mixtures that are cheaper than almost any other kind of food, so they are now added to reduce the cost of industrially-processed food, is a very recent phenomenon.
Another thing is that historically, malnutrition was a thing, not just something rare. The people would be getting serious diseases or be dying because of this or that missing in the food, there were whole epidemics of diseases that basically do not exist anymore.
The context here is that major food group that was pretty significant source of calories - complex carbohydrates was skipped creating dichotomy between sugar and fat.
The recommendations that I have seen are that up to around 50 g of sugar per day (25 g of fructose) should be fine.
Most fresh fruits have about 10% of sugar, so you need to eat more than a pound or a half of kg to reach levels of sugar intake that could be unhealthy.
Only a few fruits have more sugar, above 15%, e.g. grapes, fresh figs or fresh dates. Even with those you must eat an amount over what would satiate most people, in order to get too much sugar.
On the other hand, if you eat one chocolate (many of which contain 60% or more sugar) or a few candies you are likely to have already exceeded an acceptable daily intake.
And still, that doew not mean you nmed to cut complex carbohydrates and go keto ... especially if argument is how people 300 years ago eate. It was not keto.
And it is not used that way by people who push keto and low carbohydrates diets on HN.
And again, it renders fat vs sugar dichotomy meaningless.
I was reading Emma by Jane Austen recently which was written in the late 1800s and the story opens with the main father going on a tirade about cake being bad for you and nobody else caring. It is a scene that would fit all over the place today. It feels as though abundant, cheap and rich food has simply been scaled up to the level where the damage it does has become too visible to ignore anymore. It's not just a few lazy rich guys getting plump, it's the entire population.
That's a data point.
> while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams.
That's not a data point. That's a broad statement that generalizes about a population, and yes: It would be a good to see a source that indicates that an entire generation is "falling apart at the seams" either as a result of their preference for "fair trade free range organic" food or their avoidance of fat and sugar -- if, indeed, that is even true of the population in question.
> With all of the keto grifters on the internet, I suspect this is merely a pendulum-swing to another mistake.
You suspect. In a vacuum (without data) this pendulum-swing argument is equally convincing as both carbo-macros-are-good and fat-macros-are-good. You don’t get any extra points for seemingly taking a step back and concluding it’s-all-the-same. Exactly because it’s just “I suspect”.
The grift in keto seems entirely optional. You can eat low-carb or keto based on things you get at the supermarket.
> Industry wants to move product.
We have to eat. So I guess anything but calorie-deficit or photosynthesis can be accused of being a grift?
I never wrote "it's all the same". I did write that it may be something else entirely, and that some of the more likely suspects are not investigated with the same intensity--probably because a conclusive answer would upset many apple carts.
to ta988: for publishing royalties, i'm not talking about research papers, but popular books / articles. teicholz is a one-woman industry in that respect. not saying that she's right or wrong, but that she (like many others in this space) is both financially and reputationally locked-into a narrative, which is not really science.
Now theres lots of grifters, but the core idea of keto is an incredibly powerful dieting strategy for many people and has very positive effects on symptoms of a number of difference health problems.
Unfortunately, such results about certain kinds of fat have been wrongly used to justify bad nutritional advice that any fat is unhealthy.
From my personal experience, I am convinced that eating the wrong kind of fat can be harmful.
For a large part of my life, I had been eating large amounts of dairy products. Some years ago, at a medical consult, I was surprised to learn that I show signs of atherosclerosis.
My best guess was that this must have been caused by eating excessive amounts of saturated fat. Based on this supposition, I have changed immediately my diet. I have stopped eating dairy products and from that day on about 90% of my daily intake of fat is provided by a mixture of vegetable oils, extra-virgin olive oil with cold-pressed sunflower oil in the proportion 5:2 (the latter is added for an adequate intake of linoleic acid and vitamin E). Typically about one third of my daily energy intake is provided by fat.
One year later, there were no longer any signs of atherosclerosis and there was a very noticeable improvement in my peripheric circulation. Since then, my cardiovascular health has only improved, so I presume that my guess about the saturated fat from dairy being the culprit must have been right.
It's (probably accidental) motte-and-bailey rhetoric where someone provides the motte "fat isn't bad for you" and then grants themself the bailey "therefore I can eat saturated fat ad libitum" when in reality you'd want to minimize saturated fats while allowing unsaturated fats in the diet.
Yet "low carb" is basically a euphemism for eating butter, eggs, meat, and cheese rather than unsaturated fats. The whole thing seems built on that motte-and-bailey.
Why would this be convincing? We don't need antioxidants, polyphenols, fiber, nor all sorts of nutrients to survive, yet consuming those things improve our health outcomes.
Exercise isn't essential either for survival.
What I see is that the low carb community is full of story-telling sophists convincing people to give up "carbs" like beans and broccoli to eat foods full of saturated fats (usually avoiding unsaturated fats). And then weaving more convenient stories about how elevated LDL / ApoB isn't a concern when the saturated fat comes home to roost.
Seems like I was being coy again. What I meant was: some fatty acids are essential for us to function at all. Meanwhile there are no health benefits to carb-sugars. It’s only function is as an energy source. And then pile on top of that the documented drawbacks of carb-sugars. And this was just an off-hand example.
> What I see is that the low carb community is full of story-telling sophists convincing people to give up "carbs" like beans and broccoli to eat foods full of saturated fats (usually avoiding unsaturated fats). And then weaving more convenient stories about how elevated LDL / ApoB isn't a concern when the saturated fat comes home to roost.
Broccoli is entirely kosher. So are leafy greens, fish, nuts, eggs, salads, etc. as long as they don’t contain some glycemic sinners…
"No better way to sum up the generations"
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/s4nbru/no_better_way_...
It's much harder to become obese if you aren't eating products that come out of food labs.
However, when you say "boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style", 1) I'm assuming you meant "my family", and 2) the point of the link is that Boomers as a whole didn't eat a lot of sugar until fat was demonized by campaigns specifically intended to "downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat"†.
And I don't believe they consumed comparatively nearly as much sugar as their children. And let's not even get started on the topic of high fructose corn syrup (which is problematic for more reasons than potential negative health effects.) Seriously, if you look at just how many food products in a typical American supermarket have added sweeteners, it's can be staggering.
† https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
e.g. you will often see health influencers mention that black coffee early in the morning is a good way to suppress appetite.