Comment by magnusson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magnusson | Hacker News Reader

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As a practicing internet commenter I will go out on a limb and say that's nonsense. Sugar tends to promote overeating because it makes foods highly palatable and rewarding to eat, but it doesn't cause fat gain independently of an energy surplus. See Surwit et al, Metabolic and behavioral effects of a high-sucrose diet during weight loss. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9094871

Obese women consuming a hypocaloric diet with 71% of their daily energy as carbohydrate and 43% of it as sucrose had no trouble losing fat. "Results showed that a high sucrose content in a hypoenergetic, low-fat diet did not adversely affect weight loss, metabolism, plasma lipids, or emotional affect."

Moreover, all carbohydrates, as well as protein, stimulate insulin release, and insulin is not in itself problematic: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319

Reducing carbohydrate intake can be an effective weight loss method, but that doesn't mean that carbohydrates intake is uniquely responsible for obesity to begin with. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

All of the world's longest-lived populations consume carbohydrate as their primary macronutrient.

No one serious is saying it is uniquely responsible. Just that the more sugar and starch eaten, the less time the body can stay in fat-burning mode, which is well known. Perhaps the obese-hypercaloric would have lost more with less sugar.

All the other variables and laws of physics still apply.

> Just that the more sugar and starch eaten, the less time the body can stay in fat-burning mode

This is 100% bullshit.

Eagerly awaiting further erudite explanation...

Firstly, the body is not a finite state machine. All the mechanisms of metabolism and there are a lot of them are, basically, active all the time. A great deal of complicated chemistry is underway, simultaneously, day and night. Including reactions whose effects cancel out, meaning that it is the balance of reactions that determines the system configuration.

(Yes! It's multivariate integral calculus, back from your youth to haunt you!)

Anyway, the second problem is that blood sugar in healthy individuals is very well regulated anyway. The blood sugar pathologies you see in obese individuals are usually pathologies of obesity, not the other way around.

The third problem is that carbohydrates, even simple ones, don't have a monopoly on short-term blood sugar effects. Insulin is usually identified as the primary regulator of blood sugar, but insulin is affected very strongly by protein as well as by carbohydrates. This is because insulin actually has a whole bunch of functions, only one of which is blood sugar regulation.

Biology is really complicated. It's the worst spaghetti code ever. It works, but there's no modularity, no information hiding, no clean APIs, everything is a global variable and there's not even the most basic concurrency controls. It's very hard to reason about.

But because it is so robust, it is easy to do thing A, get result B and attribute the results to factually incorrect theory Z9-gamma-pink-battleship.

You have an odd way of looking at things. ;) I happen to find the whole thing pretty amazing, the universe is beginning to understand itself.

Not to mention elegant in the way the human body runs perfectly on early-human food.

I'm not obese, and when eating sugar/starch I end up sleepy at times and starving a few hours later. Everyone knows it... moms have been telling us for decades if not centuries, not to give sugar to children.

Proteins/fats must be converted, meaning their glycemic index will be much lower. As such, a day or two after I substituted green-veggies & nuts for grains the difference was palpable.

I have not been stuffed or starving for over a month, lost my spare tire, and am loving it. Fits perfectly with everything I learned in chem, bio, and nutrition at uni. long before this became a movement. I don't think of this as FSM, rather differential equations such as these: http://17calculus.com/calc08-app-ccfluids.php

There are benefits to keeping blood sugar levels stable whether people want to believe it or not.

Fat-burning stops when you consume fat, not just when you consume carbs.

Effects of an oral and intravenous fat load on adipose tissue and forearm lipid metabolism. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9950782

"Six subjects were fasted overnight and were then given 40 g of triacylglycerol either orally or as an intravenous infusion over 4 h. Intracellular lipolysis (hormone-sensitive lipase action; HSL) was suppressed after both oral and intravenous fat loads (P < 0.001). Insulin, a major regulator of HSL activity, showed little change after either oral or intravenous fat load, suggesting that suppression of HSL action occurred independently of insulin."

The latest research I've read (I'll edit with a link once I get back to my desk) and my own personal experience suggests that: A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

All the fad diets that cut out a certain type of food all really just work because of calorie restriction. Look at the "cookie diet" for an example.

For me, I'm 6'2, I went from 210 to 175 over 10 months (while adding significant muscle mass, suggesting fat loss of 40+ lbs). I did this by changing my diet: I eat nothing for breakfast. One cup of coffee with cream. For lunch, I eat only fruit. Seasonal. Always an apple, sometimes two, berries and grapes, that sort of thing. Sure they're good for you in a non-processed-foods sense but they also are very high in sugar.

I eat a very large dinner.

I always, always eat dessert. Always.

I work out 3 mornings a week, those days I eat half my "lunch" right after my work-out.

Obviously I'm sharing an anecdote but I mention it just because it echo's the research I mentioned and as a testimonial that it works for me. I eat an absurd amount of sugars and carbs but my total calories are restricted and I'm in fantastic shape.

True about calories at the lowest level. You can eat sugar and workout and feel hungry a lot of the time and stay trim, certainly not impossible... riding the blood-sugar roller-coaster every day, so to speak.

I eat some junk on the weekends myself, that's how I get perspective on drastic changes in my energy levels.

Or, instead you can switch into fat-burning mode and have a constant blood sugar and not feel hungry nor have to skip meals. Lots of good stuff too, eggs, spinach, olive oil, flax, etc. Doc says my bloodtest numbers some of the best he's seen.

Fad diets are suspect, but this isn't one of them. When was the last time in the wild you saw a chimpanzee or early human eating a loaf of bread, pasta, or cookies? Never, because they are man-made creations. The fad diet is the empty-carb diet pushed by the modern world, the results of which are obvious.

Humans have evolved over millions of years eating veggies, fruit, nuts, meat, etc.

I'm forming an idea, that there is nothing wrong with these two approaches. Rather there is a choice. Perhaps some of us prefer trading off in favor of tasty sweets, while some of us prefer stable blood sugar. You can live much longer than our poor ancestors with either approach. So, let's not bash the A- students on the other side because they're not perfect.

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