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Comment by awolf | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your general sentiment, but one thing you said bears correction:

>We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

No, not really. Our bodies run on glucose yet our diets are rife with fructose which must be converted by our livers into a usable form. The metabolic pathway responsible for this conversion is a bottleneck and has nothing to do with how much exercise we get.

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Thank you. It's frustrating how much ignorance there is related to the blind "a calorie is a calorie" and "calories in = calories out = health" lunacy.

It's not very logical until you learn the science behind it:

If I want less of something (fat) on my body, I eat less of it, right? But I actually have to keep my fat consumption the same and eat less carbs.

You can probably increase your fat consumption, eat less carb, and still lose weight. Shoot for less than 50 grams or carbs a day.

I was thinking more in terms of glycogen and lipid getting burned up during exercise. Whatever glucose you can't use gets converted in one way or another. I'm sure there are nuances, and it's been a while since I had to be able to recite the TCA pathway, but isn't fructose converted to glycogen? So, can't it be burned for energy like anything else? It's one of the metabolites for the TCA cycle, right?

Not to mention, this article (and this thread) are all playing fast and loose with all sorts of scientific terminology... :)

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