Diets high in advanced glycation end products promote insulin resistance | Hacker News Reader

Diets high in advanced glycation end products promote insulin resistance

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61 pointsMatrixik45 comments

For others who also don't know what advanced glycation end-products are/are a bit confused by the headline:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-produ...

Found in humans, they are bio markers for quite a few diseases, including diabetes (type 2 = insulin resistance).

Food sources are animal products.

Wiki says vegetarians have been shown to have more than non-vegetarians, discounting dietary reasons for high levels in humans. This study suggests otherwise.

The infographic in the article suggests they occur in aged cheeses, fried foods (including chips and french fries), roasted nuts (including peanut butter), and seared tofu. I believe those are all vegetarian staples.

The infographic also blames it on seared meats and fried eggs, so not exclusively an issue for vegetarians. The link to diet in general does seem a little tenuous though?

My takeaway from this was to consider not only the food product of choice, but the cooking method. It may be the cooking method is more important than the food choices themselves?

Perhaps, if you are a vegetarian that eats lots of fried, sauteed, or roasted vegetables (chasing umami), you might be no better off than a non-vegetarian who is consuming predominantly raw, steamed, or boiled animal products.

Anecdotally, this would correlate with the many obese or poorly nourished vegetarians I have known, despite their "healthy" diet.

In any event, we should all be eating more fiber.

Yeah, I just thought "Food sources are animal products" might be an inaccurate characterization.

As far as the link to diet goes, I'm not an expert but look at pretty much every report with suspicion unless there is a lot of independent confirmation.

From the outside "meta-analysis" seems like fishing for signal and then jumping on results as causal. But I honestly don't know if these things proceed via scientific method (I have a theory, I've devised this test, etc) or are digging up possible relations between data and then making a story to match whatever pops up.

Don't over-cook your food. AGEs, PAHs, etc. are all bad.

but how else will we get that sweet sweet aroma from Maillard reaction....

Cook it sous vide and then give it a quick sear.

Everything in moderation.

> Cook it sous vide

Then you're getting heated plastic?

Is sous equivalent to an Instant Pot set to a lower temperature and at atmospheric pressure?

It kind of could be for some meals maybe, but not really.

What people love about sous vide is that you can cook a steak to 135 or whatever exact temperature you desire then sear it. To do that you need both circulating water (to make sure the water bath is exact everywhere) and plastic (so half the meat flavor doesn't leach out into the water bath.

The “quick sear” is specifically what causes the Maillard reaction though!

> Everything in moderation.

What's interesting about them is that if you microwave your food, you get fewer of them[1]. That's because they are primarily produced by the mallard reaction which is caused by food, such as bread, getting toasted[2]. The worst foods for this are barbecued stuff. Also, carmel color is very rich in advanced glycation end products, so avoid Diet Coke!

[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3704564/

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

> they are primarily produced by the mallard reaction

Hmm, I wonder if the propensity to poach, velvet or steam meats aligns with some of the discrepancies we see in diabetes and longevity among otherwise similarly-eating populations.

> also, carmel color is very rich in advanced glycation end products, so avoid Diet Coke!

Interesting, why can't all of chemistry not provide a better formulation for darkening Coke? is there something difficult to mask in there?

I would bet money there are many different ways to color a beverage similarly. But I would bet even more money that Coca-Cola won't ever change its formula, and especially not based on dietary research. When there's public paranoia and sales suffer, they'll introduce something like Coke Plus in an effort to win over a more health-conscious market. They'll keep making Coke Classic same as it ever was and keep selling it to everyone else.

Why do caramelized or otherwise 'yarded foods please us then?

Original paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39320860/

This definition of AGEs is interesting (linked from the article, same site):

"Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) form when proteins and fats (lipids) in the body react with sugar (glucose) and become glycated and oxidized."

So, maybe it's not so much the Maillard reaction but that sweetened brioche bun used in your fancy hamburger.

That's how AGEs are formed in the body. The article is primarily about dietary intake of AGEs that are formed in high temperatures with certain foods.

Or that bag of Doritos washed down with a bottle of Mountain Dew!

For the uninitiated in Advanced Glycation Ends (AGEs):

> AGEs can also be ingested from food, especially food cooked at high temperatures and with little moisture, like grilled meats, fried foods, and baked goods.[23] The Maillard reaction is the main nonenzymatic reaction known to form AGEs in cooking and is famously known for the distinct browning color and complex flavor and aroma of roasted coffee, French fries, seared meat, and other favorites.

In short, if it tastes nice and was man-processed, it probably will be bad for you?

That's a good first-order approximation, but is missing some nuance.

An example they use is eggs: Pan-fried eggs are listed as high in AGEs, whereas scrambled eggs aren't. Admittedly my diet isn't the best, but I wouldn't have expected a meaningful difference between ordering my eggs scrambled vs sunnyside-up.

Or for meat, stewed meat would be healthier than roasted meat.

I'm suddenly curious about coffee, now that they mention it...

Scrambled eggs don't have any browning, sunny side up does.

That depends. Some people like to brown their scrambled eggs a bit.

I mean, the nuance seemed captured by the "in short" here, as you are just providing examples of things that taste nicer ;P.

The browning is what makes food taste great for me, and that is what makes sunny side up eggs be less healthy. If you browned an omlette, it’d have a similar effect, I imagine.

Coffee is very low in AGEs as per Table 2 of https://www.jandonline.org/article/S0002-8223(10)00238-5/ful...

Well, it was good for us when we first tamed fire, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Ain't greater modern cargo cult than "healthy food".

People didn’t live very long when we first tamed fire - not because of diet, but because something else in nature would eventually get you first. So it didn’t really matter what early humans ate as long as it gave them immediate energy.

People only needed to live long enough to reproduce, and that’s what our bodies are optimized for. Most people would prefer to live longer, though. ;)

I haven't read the full paper, but do they control for fat intake? Because pretty much everything on the "high AGE" side of the infographic is also high in fats, and we already have studies that show high fat diets have a negative effect where diabetes is concerned

Wonder if these negative outcomes still exist if high and low AGE diets were iso-caloric

No, "calories in, calories out" is a popular myth, usually used as a way to insult and degrade people who are overweight.

You could drink your body's caloric needs in gasoline each day, but you'd quickly find out that WHAT you consume affects your body's response too. Biology is surprisingly complex.

I don't think "drink gas" is a reasonable rebuttal, better to actually provide some kind of a reference[1].

1: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/to-lose-weight-focus...

Spreading "cope" hurts other people who read it and believe. Bomb-calorimeter energy is an upper bound on what your body can extract from the food, and limiting an upper bound works.

But ok, there is a problem with "CICO": Although true, it does psychologically put "CI" and "CO" on an equal footing -- whereas 90% of your attention really needs to be on "CI". The body is very efficient; exercising doesn't burn much. It's more for the purpose of maintaining some muscle mass as you drop weight. But junk food companies like to skew perception ("balance what you drink and do") to make it seem like a Big Gulp would be ok if only you ran more. Yeah, they're happy to shame and mislead overweight people, so long as they keep buying.

Your body doesn't absorb all the calories you consume, nor does it expend or store as energy all the calories you absorb. Biology is complicated and CICO is a flawed and condescending oversimplification. It's like telling people "well, you know, if you eat more than you need to, you'll gain weight". Duh, not helpful.

>It's like telling people "well, you know, if you eat more than you need to, you'll gain weight". Duh, not helpful.

It is a foundation to work from. Far better than believing that you can cheat thermodynamics, which is generally the alternative.

There are some fringe cases and nuances, but I have never heard of one that was relevant. Do you have a use case where deviations would matter?

Absorbed calories don't match label calories, but weight loss and gain are studied in terms of label calories, so it is irrelevant unless you are doing chemistry or particle physics.

Labels could be in terms of arbitrary moon units instead of calories and it would still be true. Weight loss is a function of moon units in and moon units out.

If you have a diet, say each week you eat X grams of meat, Y of vegetables, Z of cereals, and then next week (or for a number of weeks) you eat {X,Y,Z}1.1 or {X,Y,Z}0.9, that will have a net effect all else being equal.

There is nothing condescending about that. No-one is really claiming that all calories are equal e.g. you can replace 500 kcals of chicken with 450 kcals of olive oil and that be some sort of blockbuster great idea.

CICO does have an implicit "your diet isn't completely batshit insane" attached to it.

The "calories in" part is usually understood to mean "metabolically available calories from food (& drink) in a human or other animal's diet". Calories from heat, electricity, gasoline, etc., wouldn't count.

There can be some edge cases around water retention, foods an individual happens to metabolize more/less effectively than average, & practical considerations like negative-satiety foods (things like candy or beer that contain calories but end up making you more hungry after a short while). Metabolic & activity level changes are another confounding variable one might need to track. But overall the CICO model gives accurate predictions for weight change in most cases as far as I know. I pay attention to my diet & weight & it's been perfectly reliable for me (although maybe that makes me biased to think it's a better model than it really is -- sorry if that's the case)

Anyway, you'll need to provide some evidence other than a straw-man/non-sequitur about drinking gasoline if you want to convince me CICO is a "myth"

If I had to choose between sugar and meat that's been Maillarded, the properly cooked meats win by a landslide.

Stop the war on Maillard. Start the war on sugar.

better show the graphics to my kids, it's very well done

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I got that at first, but it worked on the second click.

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