Sugar Love
ngm.nationalgeographic.com
ngm.nationalgeographic.com
Pretty sure the reason for the is also the do-gooders. For 40 years people have been preaching "low fat" and "no animal fat" to kids.
Now, wanting to be healthy...they eat "low fat" diets. Diets that are full of Carbs (because protein is expensive). Its a zero sum game.
And what's funny is that "low fat" foods are almost always high in sugar. Because starch is unappetizing. And protein is not an ingredient you can sprinkle into skim-milk yoghurt.
Don't get me started on 'gluten free', its just as bad. You know what's gluten free? Sugar. And stuff full of sugar (raisins!).
And while we're at it lets look at replacing "sugar" with Juice because its healtier. Oh, wait...its full of sugar.
If you want to eat healthy just pick a balanced diet.
If people could easily do that we wouldn't be facing an epidemic of obesity. It's sort of crazy you're so willing to ignore the major point of the article and blame those have historically tried to enact change.
As far back as 1675, when western Europe was experiencing its first sugar boom, Thomas Willis, a physician and founding member of Britain’s Royal Society, noted that the urine of people afflicted with diabetes tasted “wonderfully sweet, as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”
Tasting sick peoples urine is definitely not my idea of a dream job.
A lot of low fat foods end up being high in sugar and end up having lower satiety than "regular" foods. The perfect example being skim milk vs. whole milk. That's super important because it means that people can consume the same calories but still feel hungry with a "low fat" food. And then they are faced either with persistent feelings of hunger or to eat more until they feel full. Also, high sugar foods are easily converted into body fat, which just makes the problem that much worse.
Maybe you've been reading particularly good advice about wealth, but I can assure you that far more than "nobody" tell the poor to just acquire the willpower to spend less and earn more.
I agree with your overall point, but I think the same issue plays out in the field of economic behavior of individuals as well as the eating behaviors. People who are advantaged in either scenario don't realize it and don't understand their own advantages, thus giving bad advice to the less-advantaged even when they mean well.
This, of course, muddies the waters for those with an actual issue, as a bandwagoner gone gluten free won't have a reaction if they accidentally consume gluten. This leads to erroneous beliefs about what is/isn't gluten free.
Of course, this isn't unique to gluten. One can find plenty of people claiming to be vegetarian, even vegan, who solely refuse to eat red meat.
I've come across accounts of celiacs who are concerned that the rise of gluten-free options while expanding their menu options, has also raised their level of anxiety. Because some places might just be trying to adapt to a fad diet, but aren't taking enough precautions to avoid food cross-contamination, such as re-utilizing utensils to cook "gluten free" foods.
I think part of the concern is that "gluten intolerance" as a serious medical condition is getting overshadowed by the flaky diet mumbo jumbo.
That's one of the biggest problems here. What people have been taught is patently incorrect. It's a recipe for riding a blood sugar roller coaster.
We teach our kids from an early age to eat sugary foods. We use cartoon characters to goad them into begging their parents for them. What's cereal and milk? Most of the time, it's a sugar coated grain-based product soaked in a sugary liquid that is somehow healthier when you remove all the fat from it and add more sugar. What do kids want for a drink? Sunny Delight, a half-artificial sugar bomb which is nutritionally not much better for you than a can of soda. What do most kids get at school for lunch? Two enriched slices of bread surrounding a small piece of meat and some fried starch on the side. And more milk, because you can't ever have enough sugar to drink.
I can go on and on, but the point is, this starts with parents getting educated and taking charge of the eating habits of their kids.
This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.
It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.
Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (although little of it gets into established journals). There's no such thing as "settled science", and the term alone should set alarm bells ringing.
Note that "denialist" is a very broad (not to say loaded) term. A better term would be: skeptical of the claimed "consensus" that we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, even if the economic costs are huge, or else the planet is doomed.
I wanted to give you a chance to show me something I hadn't seen before, on the off chance that maybe somebody, somewhere, was actually doing intellectually defensible work that wasn't being publicized...and you bilged it by bringing up the same utterly discredited junk that's in the denialist toolbox. I mean, you do realize why it's named the NIPCC, right? It's named that to confuse people with the IPCC, an actual scientific organization that does not lead off their papers with statements about how politically independent they are.
The mindset that compels one to the false equivalency you are choosing to employ between a policy group's own paid-for studies and the peer review process of, like, actual science is exactly why I use the term "denialist".
(For folks interested in a pretty good rundown of exactly why I and folks who pay attention to this may react in this manner towards the NIPCC, I recommend this as a great summary: http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/09/heartland-inst... )
Neither is the IPCC report, taken by itself. It references peer-reviewed work. So does the NIPCC report. Did you bother to actually read any of it?
NIPCC is bankrolled by...
In other words, you didn't bother to read any of it. You just assumed that they must be wrong because of their funding source. Well, guess what? If we're going to judge by funding sources, the IPCC itself is just as suspect. They are funded by governments which have a vested interest in increasing government control over all aspects of life. Government-funded research is not likely to come up with the answer, "No reason for government regulation here", even if it's the right answer.
If you want to play the funding source finger-pointing game, sorry, I'm not interested. I don't care who funds what; I want to see the actual content. See below.
the IPCC, an actual scientific organization
No, the IPCC is a political organization. It's an Intergovernmental panel. It uses information from scientists, but the final reports, and particularly the summaries for "policymakers", are driven by politics, not science.
the false equivalency you are choosing to employ
Not at all. Anyone can refer to peer-reviewed science, and both the IPCC and the NIPCC do so--see above.
Actually, if anyone is making a false equivalency here, it's you; you are equating "peer-reviewed science" with "valid science", which is simply laughable. Many peer-reviewed papers turn out to be wrong, for a variety of reasons: honest mistakes, insufficient knowledge in the field, reviewers too busy to really review, and corruption of the peer review process by political agendas.
If you want to actually distinguish valid science from invalid science, you have to look at the content. There is simply no shortcut; there is no way to tell what's valid science by looking at funding sources, or "consensus", or any other indirect measure. You have to look at the actual content. In the case of the IPCC, there's a very simple content question you can ask: have the IPCC's predictions about the climate matched the actual climate? The answer to that question is "no". No amount of harping on how wonderful the IPCC's process is will change that.
I recommend this as a great summary:
This article makes the same mistake you are making: it looks at process instead of content. There's not a single substantive point addressed; it's all about who is funding whom and what process they are using. Sorry, no sale.
University of East Anglia emails are actually a thing
So we're supposed to disregard one group's arguments because of some perceived bias, but look the other way when "our team" is guilty of unprofessional, unscientific behavior.
This is exactly the kind of special pleading political advocacy that is a disaster for good science.
I think most of us know that sugar cereals are bad, sunnyd is fake and disgusting, and soda is poison. The problem is we just don't care. At least that's what it looks like. When you see an obese child whose parents are also obese and they're all happily consuming their favorite poisonous snack do you see that as an educational challenge? I see it more as a discipline problem.
When you reach the counter (and the same thing happens near supermarket checkouts), there is literally shelving with hundreds of chocolate bars between you and the attendant.
And this is where you're filling the car that enables you to avoid walking a distance instead.
Another opportunity example is fast food. The 24-hour shops will be Hungry Jacks (Burger King in AU), McDonalds and so on, or servos. Supermarkets will generally have shut by 9pm.
Granted, getting parents to sit down and spend an hour or two a week watching videos on eating right (and then spending more hours buying groceries and cooking at home) is difficult if they're working minimum-wage jobs and barely making ends meet, and the children of those parents seem like they'd be most vulnerable.
Government initiatives in Canada to improve healthy eating in Nunavut, for example, ended up with passion fruit and coconuts[2] being shipped up to the arctic. I'm not convinced that resulted in better diets for children.
[0] http://justcookforkids.com/
[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/childnutrition
[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/why-i...
This article highlights one of the many possible reasons why this is so. Refined fructose is absorbed by the body almost instantly and hits your liver like a freight train. The same amount of fructose eaten in the form of raw fruit takes longer to absorb and trickles into your liver, giving it time to cope. The same nutrients ingested in different forms have different health impacts. Never mind that it's also easier to eat far more sugar when it's refined! e.g. A 590 mL bottle of coke contains about the same amount of sugar as a half dozen apples.
What's the lesson learned? Try to let your body do some of the processing itself. That's what it has evolved to do. We will most probably continue finding ways in which highly processed foods are bad for us. Perhaps it's not a good idea to let industrial processes pre-digest your food for you. We are finding out that how we get our nutrients is as important as what those nutrients are.
Adblock or Disconnect or something probably blocked it on my machine.
Sugar doesn't get into the blood stream. Glucose does. Glucose is the only nutrient that neurons are using in normal conditions.
Criticizing excess is fine and dandy but labeling sugar an "addictive drug" and comparing it with heroin and cocaine by way of some scientific sounding "pleasure centers" is downright insane. Makes me question the validity of the historic part I enjoyed so much...
And to elaborate, the other is ketone bodies produced by the liver from fatty acids.
Their production occurs in healthy individuals as nutritional ketosis under a carbohydrate restricted diet (typically less than 100g/day) or in diabetics as the pathological condition ketoacidosis.
> The brain can consume lactate as a substrate, as has been demonstrated by studies showing that the brain uses lactate during hypoglycemia or during periods of elevated blood lactate [...]
> However, because lactate does not pass through the blood-brain barrier nearly as well as glucose [...], lactate cannot serve the brain as a blood-borne substrate the way glucose does.
[1]: http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v23/n11/full/9591474a.ht...
Nutritional ketosis, unlike ketoacidosis is a loosely defined term. Everyone has experienced it on some level. Perhaps just not at extreme levels like people pursing NK with vigour.
The conclusion at the end of that article is:
"So, in response to the question, “Is sugar toxic?” it seems to me the answer is, “yes, sugar is probably chronically toxic to many people.” And so is water. And so is oxygen. My sincere hope, however, is that you now understand that this is probably the wrong question to be asking. The better question is probably “What dose of sugar can I (or my child) safely tolerate to avoid chronic toxicity?” The goal should be to figure out your toxic dose, then stay well below it. (It’s probably not wise to consume 95% of the toxic dose of APAP just because you have a really bad headache.) What makes this important, of course, is that with water and oxygen, the toxic doses are so far out of the range of what we normally consume, it’s not really necessary to expend much mental energy worrying about the toxicity. But with sugar, at least for many of us, the toxic dose is easy to consume, especially in world where sugar resides in almost everything we eat."
Just to point out, the high concentration of glucose in urine of diabetics is the result of the disease. A healthy person who just happened to eat some sugar would not have elevated glucose in urine. This of course does not rule out increased sugar consumption as a risk factor in developing type 2 diabetes (type 1 is genetic) but the article does not make it clear.
I understand the article focuses just on sugar, but when it starts getting to the health effects, the focus shouldn't be on just sugar but rather all high-glycemic-index foods, including bread, pasta, potatoes, and so on -- at least from what I understand. It doesn't do much good to cut back on sugar if you replace it with bread.
Assuming of course that you don't buy bread with sugar in it.
"Although the Glycemic Index provides some insights into the relative diabetic risk within specific food groups, it contains many counter-intuitive ratings. These include suggestions that bread generally has a higher glycemic ranking than sugar and that some potatoes are more glycemic than glucose." - Wikipedia
From a weight loss perspective sugars, such as in fruit juice, are superior to starches for two reasons. The fructose is thermogenic and raises base metabolic rate. Secondly, starches tend to reach lower lengths of the intestine undigested where they can feed bacteria that generate endotoxins.
Low starch, high sugar, low fat, and 80 grams of protein a day is a very good formula for weight loss.
I agree that fructose (whole fruits) is preferrable to starch, and people with colitis/IBD seem to find relief from that: http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info
But I'd recommend agains juices - they allow to pour down way more fructose quicker than you could chew in the form of whole fruit.
IIRC, although your body can run on just the glucose it gets by breaking down fat, it is less efficient. In my own experience this shows up as a negative effect on mood -- which makes me more likely to want to eat (and binge).
Here's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" that lays out the theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
1. And specifically the manufactured fructose isolates vs. natural fructose found in fruit.
Edit: rather glucose in high quantities as noted in response below.
Is there an explanation as to why this would be the case (if it is)? With a lot of vitamins the argument is over absorbability of different forms, e.g. there are various forms of dietary calcium, and various kinds of calcium supplements, and they may not be equivalent. But my understanding was that fructose in fruit is pretty much just fructose, readily absorbable just like the isolated version is. The only plausible difference I can come up is concentration; there's a limit on how much fructose you can get from fruits because the average person is not going to scarf down a half-dozen pears in a sitting. But if high concentrations are the issue, it would also apply to concentrated "natural" fructose, e.g. the pear-juice concentrate that some "naturally sweetened" products use.
There are a couple of differences with natural fructose. First natural fructose almost always comes with fiber. The fiber if processed at the same time as the fructose allows the liver to properly process more fructose. This is because the fiber provides certain nutrients which allow the liver to process more fructose along the proper pathways.
Second, natural fructose is usually in plant cells. In order for us to process these, we much first break down the plant cells in our stomach. This takes some time, so the effect is that the natural fructose does not hit the liver in the same speed and concentration as refined fructose.
This all has scientific support by the way. Lustig mentioned a study in old Caribbean sugar plantations. There they tracked the health of the masters and workers. It turned out that while both the masters and workers ate mostly sugar, the masters had a lot of health problems associated with obesity and diabetes, while the workers did not. The difference was that the masters ate refined sugar, while the workers mostly just ate raw sugar cane.
There was another study in japan, where scientists tried to give people massive amounts of sugar in the form of apples. These people did not have any of the problems associated with high sugar intake.
Fructose is fructose, there's no "natural fructose" however it's one thing to eat it pure, another one in a fruit
"The problem with fructose is that the liver has only a limited ability to properly process it."
Correct, glucose can replenish muscle glycogen, fructose can't (the liver produces both types of glycogen) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3592616
"This is because the fiber provides certain nutrients"
Fibers, per definition are not digestible but are other things that may happen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Fiber
And of course glycemic index may be a problem with sugars as well.
That I can buy. What I'm more skeptical of is that there's a distinction between "manufactured" and "natural" fructose once both have been concentrated and are used as additives to sweeten other products. Eating a pear is one thing, but I'm less sure that a "naturally sweetened" product which has been sweetened with concentrated pear juice or a similar fruit-based sugar extract is really more healthy than the same product that has been sweetened with more conventional "manufactured" sugars. I don't doubt that eating an actual fruit is almost certainly better than either one.
Every cell in your body runs on glucose. To say glucose is "bad for you" is simply idiotic.
Otherwise, you can quite healthily gorge on starch and sugars and your tissues will happily mop up the glucose and fructose into glycogen. And then if necessary into fat, but lipogensis from sugars is surprisingly inefficient and glycogen capacity is more than you probably think.
This by the way reflects real life. You can find populations that live on mostly bread and pasta, or mostly rice and noodles and they do not have obesity problems. It is only when refined sugar enters the diet that obesity shows up.
http://www.andrewkimblog.com/2013/02/quick-commentary-on-dr-...
What are Andrew Kim's qualifications (his web site doesn't list any)? Why should I believe him more than Lustig, who is an endocrinologist who has treated and studied a lot of obese patients?
For example, a candy bar had a lot if simple sugars in it, but also a lot of fat, which slows gastric emptying and results in a much lower than expected glycemic index.
I assume their refinement into sugar is a result of exposure to the arab techniques of sugar-cane refinement mentioned throughout the article, but the history of that other thread of sugar would have been another interesting one to weave into this narrative.