Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?
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psmag.com
When I was my fittest, I had totally cut sugar/carbs out. Even complex carbs (meh, not much benefit of "complex carbs anyway). I was running on ketone or whatever the terminology is. I was swimming everyday for two hours with no problems what so ever. I was basically running on fat. This takes a while, usually 2-3 weeks to get into.
Usually when I switched from carb loaded fuel to fat. It took a day of being tired and sleepy. That's it. But it takes a bit longer to completely exercise on fat than just running normal errands.
Most "low calorie" or "low fat" branded "food" products usually have high sugar content. The low fat version of the cremé fraiche we USED to consume at home had more sugar and/or carbs than the high fat one. We consume the latter these days and gain no additional weight. We're not as easy as thermo dynamics, it's more complicated than kcal in/out. Which is why most people prefer carbs/sugar instead of fat. Since the kcal per fat grams is higher.
EDIT; That being said, I've seen the opposite in my partner who happens to be of Chinese descent and others of similar background. The only explanation I have is that their bodies are more advanced than our primal vessels :-)
Regarding long-term use of this diet, it would seem that opinion is divided and I've no idea which side is likely to be right - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-carbohydrate_diet is probably a decent place to start if you want to find out more. But certainly, while it's suggested that long-term use may not be a great idea, there's nothing to say that it would cause problems such as not being able to exercise for two hours a day.
A usual day would go like this
Breakfast: Eggs + Butter + Bacon and Coffe with either 40% fat cream or coconut oil and butter.
Lunch: Not hungry, if I am, I usually have some avocado.
Dinner: Beef with butter on top, spring onions and slices cabbage and some avocado
You sound either uneducated on the subject or educated with old data. Get some more recent studies under your belt. There are many swedish ultra marathon or tri-athletes who compete on LCHF. Not sure about foreign ones.
Please do more research, if you think I was joking.
My concern is performance. But a lot of ultras aren't very competitive. It just depends who shows up.
That being said, I DO AGREE with carbs being rocket fuel. But 99% of the population does not need rocket fuel. 40x25 meter swimming works perfectly fine with no carbs. I did that for four weeks, just eggs and butter twice a day and vitamin shots for missing nutritional values.
5000 IU's of Vitamin D (as we have no sun in Sweden :-) )
Hit me up on Twitter if you want to do some more research, I'd gladly help you out.
There is this talk from a 50 year old ultra marathon runner where he just ran on cream. Unfortunately it's in Swedish.
But it debunks "carb loading" for long running performance, as he was just running on fat.
This is an excellent resource on transitioning and coping: http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/low-carb-diet-side-ef...
Heed warning, two weeks is the minimum length for the transition.
Then again, you might not take back as much of your retirement fund :)
I guess ?once/if? insurance companies start charging premiums for people with a diet high in sugar/carbs, this will become a more interesting conversation.
Socialists like rb2k claim that every individual action has some reprehensible act on "society".
The new (or maybe old) tactic of the fascist left.
I dont't troll. I just don't understand why all of our basic foods are now bad. Guess we made them bad as we put sugar and salt in everything...
I don't mind the people saying "Food is probably complicated and we don't have much information about it"; but the amount of anecdote and pure nonsense that comes out on almost any thread about food is depressing.
> Salt bad, sugar bad, wheat bad, fitness is a lie
Hyperbole and link-bait titles. Too much salt is probably bad; too much sugar (a 2 litre soda is not a single serving and people who drink 64 ounce sodas should expect it to be harmful) is probably bad; doing no exercise[1] is worse than doing some exercise.
[1] Some people do remarkably little exercise - they have sedentary jobs; they don't move around at home; they drive everywhere and park close to where they need, etc.
A sizable part of HN worships at the alter of the pursuit of extreme efficiency. It seems to lend itself to jumping from one fad to another to squeeze out whatever iota of perceived benefit they wish to measure themselves by.
Another part is simply related to peoples superiority complexes, a complex that is strong in programmers but by no means limited to them. They've become better than you programming, so they see themselves as better than you in everything. People like that just can't stay away from secret knowledge that you don't know. In this case secret knowledge about the way the human body works.
However, there are a lot of really smart, capable people who can't lose weight, or they suffer from some ailment they can't understand, so these articles have a lot of power. Everyone wants an explanation!
They use it because it's tasty.
"Supersize Me" on Haute Cuisine would have similar catastrophic results, but be considerably more expensive.
My mom used to buy hamburger meat that was bulked up with soy protein, mainly because it was cheaper than pure ground meat. [I absolutely loved the taste of that stuff actually, much more than all-meat burgers! Wish I could find it as an adult...]
Someone eating food bought only from Michelin starred restaurants is going to be in trouble unless they're careful about what they eat.
Margarine on the other hand is an abomination that isn't fit for consumption.
In fact, the group that says that sugar and wheat is bad says that bacon is very good for you.
But i guess we're more afraid of the unknown chemicals(although limited tests have shown they are much safer) than the original poisons, And we're stuck on trying to teach ideals than implement practicalities.
Such a shame.
Regarding smoking - well I've cut down lately, I was smoking 20-30 a day and in November/December, with the exception of two trips abroad where I smoked fully, I cut down to about 20 cigarettes over the two months, due to a challenge from a friend's kid - I simply don't want to move to electronic cigarettes. I love smoking, if it wasn't unhealthy I'd do it forever. I don't love smoking an electronic cigarette, I don't even like it. I'd genuinely prefer to spend a day without nicotine than a day with electronic cigarettes, or nicotine gum/patches.
But you do have to have a strong enough reason to switch, not something abstract that will happen in 20-40 years.
But again, compare this to the possible harms of sugar and especially fructose. It might look quite good.
That being said, there are tons of paleo/keto blogs out there offering alternatives (e.g. coliflower pizza http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2012/08/the-astonishing-...). The sad part is that things like lettuce wrapped burgers are still hard to find when not cooking at home.
Also: I'd love to see more stevia-sweetened things rather than aspartame sweetened ones
And carbohydrates are broken to glucose.
Starch, composed of glucose, is the only polysaccharide digestible to humans.
"I don’t have time to eat breakfast," the [13 year old] girl said.
"She'd rather put on makeup than eat breakfast," the girl's mother interrupted.
I'm a Lustig fan, but the people who deserve an overwhelming about of the blame here are the parents.
edit: It looks like my mother has found some, but neither one of us really understands how rising works in these cases.
Active dry yeast will proof just fine without sugar, just a little more slowly. But sugar does increase the yeast's activity. This can be useful when you are trying to revive common active dry yeast from its freeze-dried stupor.
Bread is really simple -- the only things you need are flour, yeast (or sourdough starter), and water; optionally maybe salt or eggs (but these are definitely not necessary). Everything else is decoration.
[You don't even need a bowl or utensils! Just make a simple bowl shape on the counter with flour and mix in the liquid stuff from the center. Of course you do need an oven of some sort (but the bread can be cooked on a simple metal plate)... :]
[I vaguely recall adding not sugar, but corn starch to warm water to get the yeast going. It's been a long time though ...]
http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Lox-at-14-the-Cost/
It's incredibly hard. I stopped, but it took months of cravings. Very easy to stop eating almost anything else, usually.
And yes - it wasn't easy. ~20%+ of the population is actually addicted to wheat - so you could literally be going through withdrawl. I believe the book Wheat Belly goes into the biology of this.
"So while fructose as an ingredient excessively engineered into processed foods is, indeed, a problem- I find it far-fetched at best to suggest the native composition of, say, berries is "evil." Lustig seems to be tossing out the the strawberries with the soda. You find me the person who can blame obesity or diabetes on eating strawberries, and I will give up my day job and become a hula dancer."
As it dropped only to page 3, not further, I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with timing, for example maybe a post that's <60 minutes old requires less votes to get a high position than a post that's 60+ minutes old, and it's a hard line rather than gradual? Pure speculation on my part, but if you're interested the answer may (or may not) lie within https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc
Another sick leftist that wants to regulate every human activity.
Anyway, let's steer clear of politics. No need for a left vs. right argument, just wanted to point out that your issue with lefties is what they want to regulate, not that they want to regulate stuff.
I'm not sure how the HN "anti down vote rampage" works - if I downvote all three posts do all my downvotes count? Or is there something that detects I'm downvoting 'too many' posts by a single user and silently drops some of my downvotes?
Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and now Big Food. These socialists are sick in the head.
Yes you're right about environmental changes, and that new changes could solve, or help solve, the problem. That doesn't mean that my fatness isn't related to me being weak-willed. I absolutely have the ability to lose weight and get fit, but I'm too lazy to do this. I know people who love food just as much as me, but they chose either not to eat everything that they want to, or to do extra exercise to make up for it, or both.
Maybe there are people out there for whom it isn't about weak will. I know genetics play at least some part, and obviously environment as well (if you grow up with parents who only feed you fast food for example). But I'm confident that for a lot of people, weight issues are about being weak-willed.
If you had been born in Japan you would almost certainly be thin now. Why? The answer is not that Japanese people have more will power.
Maybe if I was born a century ago I would be skinny and fit, but that doesn't change the fact that my current weight is caused by my own lack of will as well. Will power is the reason on an individual level, but not the reason behind the cultural trend.
I think we basically agree.
On a side note, is it not also possible for different cultures to have different levels of self-control? Within the areas of society that I know there definitely seems to be correlation between how kids are brought up and how much self-control they have, so surely on a greater scale it would indeed be possible for entire countries to have more or less than other countries? (Not talking weight related now, just thinking out-loud.)
Has a child of christian parents who have never heard anything but religious music, books, stories, people had the opportunity to make a free choice? I don't think so. Has an American child who has seen thousands and thousands of ads for garbage food taken an independent choice to eat that? I don't think so.
We humans have precious limited mental resources and can’t afford to spend the time considering every decision rationally; therefore, we automatically subconsciously make decisions based on salient features of the current stimulus. In normal words, we make shortcuts based on limited information.
Since people are so very irrational (See Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman) the idea that we are rational can be used as an excuse by those (advertisers, politicians) who want to manipulate us. So, it is in fact a dangerous idea.
I sometimes entertain the notion that it would be better to live in a totalitarian dictatorship where some benevolent dictator manages the information people are exposed to and thus makes people make better choices of their own free will. (I'm aware that such a society has some dystopian aspects as well, of course)
So - nobody is responsible for any action, but it is useful to pretend they are.
Another reason why the concept of free will is so ingrained in western culture is the role it plays in religion - being saved/forever damned makes no sense without it. But like much of religion it is just an untruth that has (at least historically) proved useful for people. Since religion is so important to many people, they will also hold on to the idea of free will because understanding reality in a more accurate way wil undermine their religion.
At what point is enough is enough, and these people are held to account for infringing on civil liberties.