This is a common myth, but it's wrong. Dietary fat is what is primarily stored and leads to weight gain during caloric excess; dietary carbs just decrease the amount of fat being used for energy, but can also get stored as fat tissue during overfeeding in a process called de novo lipogenesis (which is what you're describing) [1] [4]. Would you believe protein also elicits an insulin response? [2] So why not just eat butter? Well, it turns out fat can get stored without insulin at all, with the help of a little molecule called acylation stimulation protein [3].
Nutrition is harder than it seems. Again, it all comes back to calories in vs calories out.
[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/6/707.full
[2] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/66/5/1264.full.pdf
[3] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/insulin-levels-and...
[4] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/nutrient-intake-n...
Salt and sugar save low aroma food (>80% processed food). Their combined power on the human body is vicious.
How sweet everything is.
At places like Chili's or Applebees she ended up ordering appetizers and eating half of that as a meal. I got a regular meal but I knew in advance I would be taking it to go halfway through, as I usually do.
Usually your comments are good so I am going to believe you are sincere here.
Somewhat related I am one of those people who needs to make a change as I get >1000 calories from soda a day. I did quit years ago (just cold turkey) and after the initial headaches and tiredness the biggest change I saw was that I was constantly hungry. Much like quitting smoking made me for quite a while.
Increasing portion sizes (see for example the increasing sizes of servings in McDonalds menus) mean that people now drink huge quantities of this sugary drink.
The volume of drink, the quantity of the sugar, is the problem.
Two cookies are not a problem. Two packets of cookies are a problem.
eg. It's not THIS it's THAT. (It's not sugar, it's sugar in excess.)
The first thing to losing weight is to get serious about how much you are eating. Write it all down. People tell me all the time they don't understand why they are gaining weight, and then we go through a day of eating. It's not just sugar or fat or some other thing someone has said trying to sell a book, it is simply eating too much. Oftentimes people don't even realize it.
I had the opposite problem with I started weight lifting years ago. I simply couldn't gain weight, and thought it was impossible based on how much I thought I ate. When I started writing things down I realized I was barely breaking 2k calories/day if I was lucky. It took concerted effort to eat more, and results quickly followed. Now I'm older and am not as active, so I simply don't eat as much. My weight has stayed the same for a long time.
Better to avoid the problem entirely in the first place. If you don't feel hungry (stable blood sugar) eating becomes a moot point/routine task.
Like with anything else, including alcohol or even heroine (altho that one very limited) - nothing in reasonable limitations will kill you. If you have strong will then you keep your brain on leech and treat it as a pleasure you consume time to time in limitations. If you eat it daily in large quanitities, then you helping yourself to get sick.
12 cans of Coke a day = healthy diet?
In fact, numerous studies have found exactly this.
The negative effects we see in addicts today are mostly caused by two factors: (1) if you shoot up, needle - especially dirty needles - can be a vector for infection and diseases such as HIV, (2) if you can't get a reliable supply of known potency you can go through withdrawal or overdose - the wild swings are harmful. (Impurities in the drug can also be harmful depending on what it's been "cut" with.)
So if the drug were legal it'd be fine. But when it's illegal, some characteristics of an illegal market make it bad for people - those are problems related to the illegality, not really having much to do with the drug itself.
The problem is that moderate consumption of either is known to cause overconsumption.
So, perhaps not so fine in an environment of abundance.
Not everyone is obese. Even in the US, where obesity is at its worst, it's around 35%. That suggests that 65% of people can consume sugar and then not become obese.
Certainly amongst my peer group of middle class graduates almost everyone eats sugar and almost nobody is obese. That suggests that people are perfectly capable of consuming moderate amounts of sugar without becoming rampant sugar addicts rapidly turning obese.
The physical cause of obesity may be the overconsumption of simple carbohydrates, but the socioeconomic distribution of obesity suggests that there's many factors which drive that consumption.
Try having the same diet when you're in your 40s and I am sure you will have a different experience.
So counterexamples are not disproof. You'd have to construct a lab experiment with enough subjects and measure over a long enough time.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to construct a perfect double-blind study, because people usually know if they are eating sugar or not. Maybe if artificial sweeteners are good enough it might work, or maybe the experiment would still be convincing even if the subjects know.
I'd be interested to see the results of such a study for sugar and heroin. I probably should be able to cite one before I claim it as fact, but I didn't think it was a very controversial claim. I think it's mainly a question of degree.
Which is nicely analogous to telling someone to focus on calories in versus calories out.
Healthy? Maybe not.
Which is both true and irrelevant, because the system that governs calories in and calories out is a complex control loop. When it's working correctly, weight is effortlessly maintained within a narrow range thanks to compensating adjustments in appetite and, to a lesser extent, metabolism.
When it isn't working right, people try to drive the process with their frontal cortex instead, which only a small fraction of population can actually achieve for any significant length of time.
So the most interesting questions in nutrition science are all around what effects satiety and why we have an epidemic of people with broken control loops. Sugar is a very strong suspect in that investigation.
And before someone says we aren't evolved for an environment of plenty, and our bodies just hoard every calorie they can get in case of famine -- that's really not it. No mammal simply hoards every calorie it can get without homeostatic feedback. Survival incentivizes balance -- hoarding a calorie means you don't spend that calorie today on something else that would aid your reproductive success. Which is why we (and most animals) have an extremely dynamic system to monitor and maintain appropriate energy stores.
What evidence leads you to believe this? There's no prima facie reason to believe evolution has adapted mammals to a glut of food, since for all but, generously, about the last ten thousand years, it wasn't really a problem that a significant portion of the gene pool faced. It would require some evidence to believe that the body has this capability.
1. gain weight during the summer by eating high sugar, high starch, high calorie foods such as fruit, berries, roots, honey/insects, and as much whole fatty fish as it can get its hands on for a super high calorie kick. it HAS to gain weight in the summer, and does so easily on that diet.
2. during the winter it hibernates and burns nothing but fat, losing the weight and avoiding starving. people can do this too, believe it or not. fasted ketosis is a thing you can sustain for quite a while as long as you drink water.
this doens't prove anything in humans, but is an obvious counter-example to no evidence to believe that mammals don't have food glut adaptations.
but just for anecdotes' sake, what does an obese human typically eat? exactly the same diet. high sugar (soda/fruit juice), high starch (all junk food), roots (LOTS of potatoes, mostly fried), and extremely high calorie kickers like cheeseburgers and pizza to ensure a calorie surplus.
i'm pretty sure if a bear can gain hundreds of pounds in a few months, there's an excessively abundant supply of food.
if not, well, there isn't a glut, now is there. and there's soon going to be no more bear, either.
I thought it was interesting to learn from Alaskan's that when salmon are plentiful, bears will gut the salmon and just eat those tasty eggs.
Who knew? My mental picture had never included them possessing much of a palate. This article suggests they also go for the brains and skin.
http://grizzlybearblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/grizzly-bear...
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/71/3/665.full?ijkey=f7644b...
At the biochemical level, we actually know a lot about some of the pathways that allow food and body fat composition to govern appetite. See, for example, leptin signaling.
At the anthropological level, we have good examples of several different pre-agricultural societies where food was abundant and obesity was rare.
At the whole-animal experimental level, researchers have demonstrated in both rats and humans that when you give an animal unlimited access to food, it doesn't gain unlimited weight. It reaches a plateau and then resists further changes up or down from there. Interestingly enough, rats fed a diet of unlimited human junk food reach a much higher plateau than rats fed a diet of unlimited standard rat chow.
And finally, we all know people (perhaps even our younger selves) who never consciously worry about what they're eating yet undergo very little fluctuation in weight. Judged from the perspective of a control system designer, getting that kind of stable outcome from wildly varying inputs doesn't just happen by luck. And indeed, experimenters have shown repeatedly that "naturally lean" people experience reduced appetite in the days following a period of overeating. You can even deliberately perturb the system by force-feeding them, and they bounce right back to their long-term weight thanks to reduced appetite and increased metabolism.
Stop your nonsense. Its chemistry.
Do you have a source for this? The sources [1], [4] you quoted don't seem to say that, at least in a way I could understand.
Yeah, try telling me you get fat from eating proteins and fat.
Furthermore there are many practices in cattle raising that allow for more fat and muscle gain without increasing calories but instead changing other factors.
The following shows the hormone regimen for cattle to increase fat without changing the calories in aspect of the equation.
http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/livestock/production/beef/g...
"This is why hemoglobin A1C is frequently used in studies that try to correlate blood sugar control to various disease processes like Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, and coronary artery disease. It’s well documented that glycated hemoglobin is a powerful risk factor for diabetes, but it’s also been correlated with risk for stroke, coronary heart disease, and death from other illnesses. These correlations have been shown to be strongest with any measurement of hemoglobin A1C above 6.0 percent. We now have evidence to show that elevated hemoglobin A1C is associated with changes in brain size. In one particularly profound study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers looking at MRIs to determine which lab test correlated best with brain atrophy found that the hemoglobin A1C demonstrated the most powerful relationship.[2]”
[1] Perlmutter, David. “Grain Brain.”
[2] “C. Enzinger, et al., “Risk Factors for Progression of Brain Atrophy in Aging: Six-year Follow-up of Normal Subjects,” Neurology 64, no. 10 (May 24, 2005): 1704–11.”
And it's also perfectly possible to be a moderate consumer of sugar and have low hemoglobin A1C depending on other lifestyle factors.