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Comment by sabbaticaldev | Hacker News Reader

I’m wondering why so many people just can’t accept that sugar is bad to humans health. Are they super-fit or super addicted? I think it’s the latter

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note that sugar != blood sugar.

For example carbs include fiber, which can stabilize blood sugar. fat can also help.

I listened to the audiobook for "the glucose revolution" and it was pretty educational. glucose spikes are what you want to prevent.

Doesn't white rice cause significant glucose spikes though? A huge chunk of the planet eats it in significant portions... ?

The chunk that is famous for skinny-fat people and high Diabetes Type 2.

Yes. I'm diabetic and eating a relatively meal with rice in it (think sushi) absolutely spikes my blood sugar (it's not uncommon for filling sushi meal to have as many carbs as 4 or 5 candy bars)

I'm speaking only to carb content; the discussion of whether it's healthy on a holistic basic is a much larger conversation.

But sushi rice is usually prepared with extra sugar, it's not plain rice.

Depending on the type of white rice, yes. However eating rice with high fat/protein foods can reduce the sharpness of the spike. And rice is rarely eaten alone.

In an otherwise healthy adult, no. In diabetics, maybe.

Your body adjusts its insulin production to match the food you're digesting. Diabetics need to calibrate this manually, which is error prone as there's more variables than just what you ate (stress, sleep, hormone cycles, prior meals...).

The problematic aspect of foods with large amounts of easily digested carbohydrates is that the immediate demands for insulin are higher which might pose a problem in diabetics (unless they are treating hypoglycemia, in which its desired).

> In diabetics, maybe.

Sushi rice causes me (type-1) to spike. Other kinds of rice (jasmine, pilaf, etc) behave more like normal carbohydrates.

The first recipe[0] I found has 4g of added sugar per serving of rice, fwiw. That's probably why.

[0] https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/99211/perfect-sushi-rice/

Not surprising since iirc you wash away parts of the normal starch and then add sugar as a binder.

Your body produces insulin exactly to stimulate absorption of the increased glucose.

Your blood sugar won't stay high if you are healthy, but there is certainly sugar digested from the rice entering the bloodstream.

portions matter

and of course as industrialization, relative food abundance, and sugar sweetened drinks proliferated all over the world obesity did (and does) too

I wonder: if you eat carbs or suger in smaller portions but more often throughout the day, can you "flatten the curve" this way and reduce the spikes. Is this good for you?

Nope, it is impossible to flatten the curve of insulin spike and that is actually quite damaging, you will be releasing insulin the whole day, the hormone that signals energy storing mode which also makes it more difficult to burn it

Then how is eating low-glycemic index food different from eating high-glycemic index food slowly/in a spread out manner?

they aren’t that different in the end, just a measure of digestion

I asked Claude what's going on, and she said that the main difference lies in the fact that low-GI food naturally contains fiber and other stuff that slow digestion, and that merely spreading out the consumption of high-GI food cannot replicate the same effect.

It would be eating smaller portions and less throughout the day. It'll spike anytime you have a meal, however, any five minute activity that cause sweat will significantly drop your blood glucose levels. Eating fiber, then protein, followed by carbs will flatten and slow down the curve.

>through the day

Means the body always has some available.

Or, in other words, it does not get a chance to burn fat.

And eventually the mechanism itself degrades, becoming unable to burn fat.

Keep in mind that our always-available food supply situation is very recent in our species history.

Intermittent fasting is what the human body has evolved to do, and how we can get our health back.

I think is not about accepting that fact. They probably know this. It's all about palatability. Once you taste something sweet and like it, you remember that and come back to it. An icecream, a soda, a croissant, chocolate, cookie, donuts. You name it. Is simple as that. You barely think about that the soda you drink is bad a thing, you like it and you drink it. Some people do think about this though and refrain from making sugary food a habit and I think that's the key. Making any of those sweet things an exception and not a rule.

That’s me, but I recognize it’s bad and feel bad when I eat it (which is bad in itself but better than normalizing eating sugar).

I’ve been thinking about it the whole day and your reply made me wonder about getting in the business of sugar

For me, I'm not overweight at all (quite the opposite, actually), but I'm totally addicted to sugar. To the point that food other than carbs/sugar is really uninteresting to me. Doesn't help that I don't like meat. What else can I eat? I can't survive on just vegetables

There are a whole bunch of sources of vegetable protein, and carbs/sugar for that matter. It’s actually quite easy to survive on just vegetables.

If you don’t eat meat then your sugar and carbs probably are processed from a vegetable in the first place.

whole wheat pasta is much better than a cake.

eating chips (fat/oil, salts, carbs) is also better than sugary stuff, it's just very easy to overeat by snacking (and then usually people still go and have full meals)

Well you can't be healthy on just sugar either.

Be an adult and eat your fruits and veggies.

A pretty easy solution would be to mix vanilla whey protein into a fruit smoothie to boost your protein.

Another would be to just abstain from sugar for a few weeks before slowly reintroducing foods. [0]

[0] https://philmaffetone.com/method/nutrition/

It's also so very difficult to avoid. I opened yesterday a can of tuna and beans salad - it tasted almost like dessert. Are the producers really crazy? Or are they onto something? Sweet bread for sandwiches, sweet bbq on grilled meat, jam with cheese, so much of the (modern?) cuisine is just disgusting to me. Note, desserts are fine and good, I'd love a tiramisu right now. But sweet corn soup??? Ew.

Sugar is a popular (because it’s inexpensive) preservative.

They add a lot more than sugar as preservative nowadays. Good luck finding something without preservatives sold in stores.

They even put acids in your food! ACID! The stuff that melts steel beams and makes IE6 crash. Think about that.

The point of preservatives is to prevent biotic life from consuming it. If the food is actively preserved--sugared or salted or what have you--it will be just as cytotoxic if not prepared in a way to dilute or remove the preservative.

One of my least favorite games to play these days is trying to find ham that doesn't have glucose or its relatives added to it. My understanding is that it's added simply because it makes the product more addictive, gives bigger spikes of energy which many people enjoy, but it's the polar opposite of what I'm trying to find.

Speaking of that energy spike, is it something you would get from sweetened ham? Does it have that much sugar oh my... Isn't the spike rather coming from a piece of cake, which happens also to be the proper way to consume sugars? That or fruit, also good.

True! As a real addicted to sugar (but under control), I prefer to eat a lot of sugar intentionally, a proper dessert. Nothing is more waste of biological clocks than added sugar.

> but under control

I could quit at any time, I just don't want to.

I mean, RIGHT NOW, I'm not eating every candy or chocolate I see in front of me (last time I ate a chocolate was one month ago).

This was an interesting film that talked about how fat was demonised in the 1960s(?) so food companies started taking it out as much as possible but replacing it with sugar to retain taste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sugar_Film It certainly matches your experience.

> fat was demonised in the 1960s(?)

Still nowadays. Docs still learn about LDL and HDL like it says something about your future cardiovascular risks and tell you to control your diet to avoid fat. The original study on this is full of flaws.

Yes and no, docs are taught that LDL and HDL are not the targets themselves, it's possible to move those numbers without actually improving outcomes at all (especially improving HDL doesn't seem to really do anything).

Docs are _basically_ taught to just put everyone on Statins. On as high a dose as people will tolerate. There's fairly good evidence that statins work, the problem is more than people don't like taking them.

Retain taste? Fat doesn't taste sweet, at least not to me... the only reason I can imagine is they do it to mask a bad taste, or just to hide that the ingredients are bland (and/or low quality). That, I can understand - although still not approve as it's even worse, lying under the guise of sweetness.

Yeah, "retain" was the wrong word - what I meant was that it replaced one thing that tastes nice with something else that tastes nice. But like GP I find almost every processed food too sweet these days.

Blood sugar is not affected by only "sugar" (sucrose). All carbohydrates are converted into sugars by your body, thus potatoes, grains (rice, bread, pasta, etc), fruit (and juice) also cause your blood sugar to spike.

It's not only people who drink lots of soda and eat candy, sweets, and desserts...it's also people who have a carb-heavy diet with lots of bread, pasta, tortillas, chips, etc.

The advantage of those foods over sugar is they usually come with fiber, which buffers their absorption and reduces the blood sugar spikes & insulin response.

I can eat a bagel with cream cheese and see a massive blood sugar spike in my CGM, it's definitely something to be avoided or moderated.

Because as stated, it's not true. As with most things in diets, it's about what amounts you eat, not so much what you eat. In other words, this is a good example of how oversimplifying your argument makes it weaker. Similarly, lactose is a sugar, yet it has numerous health benefits, especially in young kids. I think a better wording of what you mean would be to say that consuming too much sugar is bad for your health, because that is both more accurate and has less holes you can poke in it.

Poisons are not deadly, it's the amount of poison that is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Well, you say that as a rebuttal, but that's literally true. Alcohol is a known carcinogen, it causes cancer in humans without a shadow of a doubt and there is no disagreement on this matter. Medical professionals and government agencies worldwide agree on this fact. But we still drink alcohol, whether for the taste, to unwind, or for other reasons, because we accept that so long as it's not excessive, it's not too bad.

Fructose syrup and that kind of shit, not so beneficial for your health and it's in everything you buy

It is also in honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, some fruits, and some vegetables. In otherwords, it is pretty available in healthy foods.

Fructose itself isn't unhealthy. It also isn't unhealthy if there is a little in most things you eat - assuming you are eating healthy amounts of fruits and vegetables, you'll wind up eating fructose. Like a lot of things, overconsumption is bad and adding sugars to everything isn't the best thing.

Fructose is unhealthy literally the same way as alcohol. It’s the only carb that needs to be processed in the liver because it’s toxic and the excess is converted to visceral fat which is damaging and causes nonalcoholic fatty liver

Sugar is my own personal Satan.

Even when I was super fit, and literally with 4% body fat, it was still something I should not have been doing

I've seen this discourse all over the internet and IRL. People are simply not honest with themselves. Take for example that the US government essentially cuts a check every year to the tune of billions to soda companies via EBT/food stamp programs. Whenever this comes up, "let poor people enjoy things" is the general consensus. They have such poor quality of life that a little soda here and there is an enjoyment that we cannot take away. Imagine if we allowed people to buy cigs or booze on government assistance. I use to have libertarian views on fast food and junk food but at this point, we should ban it all, esp if we are providing reduced/free healthcare to a population where we fund food/grocery purchases.

Flip side of this is the very high cost of true organic and pesticide-minimal/free foods. And yeah, not being honest is somewhat commonplace, regrettably. I for one don't always like wiping off the mirror for a better look.

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