What happens to your brain when you stop eating sugar
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qz.com
Also when I do not eat sweets and junk for a few months your taste changes and can feel stuff you could not feel before. Once after a few month I ate one bag of small chips and almost puked from it how it tasted then after my taste "cleared".
Simple sugar is really more poisonous and addictive than some of the banned drugs, but the problem is that the most people do not think that way and most people know next to nothing about foods which is sad. Also when you go in to the shop there is almost not one thing without sugar in it, food industry is sick today, excpecially in USA where they are using high fructose corn syrup in every item they produce.
Saying that eating large amounts of simple sugar is worse than small amounts of some of the banned drugs is one thing. But saying that sugar is poisonous, or simply worse than banned drugs, is a little too much.
Source: I gave a presentation once in middle school. ;)
Don't people remember the story of the woman who died drinking water to win a Nintendo? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-dies-after-water-drinking-...
Though I might underestimate people's addiction, maybe there are IV glucose junkies out there now?
Then again, too much of nearly anything is bad. There are lots of known cases of people dying of drinking too much water, for example, but that doesn't make water a bad thing in itself.
I notice that you changed the text in the parents post from "some banned drugs" to "banned drugs", making the common mistake of grouping them all together and treating them as one category. (To me this indicates a fair amount of ignorance on the subject.)
Heart disease is the biggest killer in the UK, and I am assuming many other developed countries, so it could be could be easily argued that anything that causes obesity should be labeled more harmful than say psilocybin mushrooms, which I believe have very low toxicity. Just because they are banned, doesn't make psilocybin mushrooms harmful.
Sugar, fat, and salt are all essential to a healthy properly functioning body – it is just that industrial foods give you these things in unhealthy proportions and in foods deprived of much of their original nutrition.
Artificial sweeteners can also do weird things to your taste and metabolism.
A big source of the problem? Caffeine. Not it's slightly addictive stimulant properties, but it's bitterness which has to be covered up by extreme amounts of sugar and carbonation.
Last week the kids needed a snack and we stopped at Jamba. I ordered my old regular, Orange Dream, which I split in 3, and when I took a sip of mine, I literally spit it out. It had somehow become disgustingly sweet to me, I couldn't even drink it, just threw it away.
As we were walking back to the car I was just shaking my head, thinking, how the hell could I have ever liked that?!
This is ridiculous. Marathoners, mountain climbers, and other endurance athletes survive on simple sugars during their activities, mainly in the form of maltodextrin energy gels. Maltodextrin is classified as "complex," but it's metabolized so quickly it might as well be simple. That's why it's used in sports.
Interestingly, when I came at it from a slightly different angle ("mindful eating") and allowed myself as much of anything I wanted eaten mindfully, my natural desire tapered off, and I eat a lot less sweet stuff these days.
If I have almost any dessert now I'll have a sinus headache the next day. I can get away with a teaspoon of honey in the morning and that's about it. Berries are ok but I'm still not sure about fruit (bananas are definitely not ok). But I can eat good bread three times a day and I'm fine.
I have mostly settled on a triple-espresso in the morning and then a cup of tea at lunchtime as a reasonable and effective dosing that I don't think is causing me sleep or health problems.
Per se, unnecessary dependence is simply inconvenient. This is a big part of why I never got into drinking coffee: I'd see friends and family who (for some reason or another) wouldn't be able to get their morning coffee on a given day and how shitty they would feel that morning. I don't like the lack of flexibility inherent in having a dependency on anything. I've always been a big fan of getting enough sleep (even throughout high school and college), so I never had occasion to get hooked in the first place.
To be clear, it's very possible that they find the benefits of routine caffeine consumption to be entirely worth the downside of dependence (particularly given how ubiquitous access is on an average day). My comment, and my experience, just provides a motivation (albeit a fairly minor one) for avoiding dependence per se.
Try this for starters: https://www.google.com/search?q=substance+withdrawal+compari...
IMO drinking both coffee and alcohol casually leads more easily to a coffee addiction, but without you noticing.
I immediately stopped drinking soda, replacing it with water and unsweetened green tea. The first two weeks were rough, constantly craving a soda. Then it stopped and almost all the cravings were gone.
In my annual physical in December 2014 my triglycerides were 107. The only change I made in that year was to stop consuming soda/candy/desserts. Not consuming refined sugar was never a diet for me though; it was more of a permanent lifestyle change. I can't imagine having a soda now.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Chocolate-yo-yo-dieting-weigh...
Aimed at middle-aged British women, but it was a good book.
Fun fact: one of the strongest withdrawals I have experienced was sugary drinks. To make matter worse it was just the middle of summer and drink of cold coke seemed to be a blessing. So I went to the store, bought a 6-pack of sugar-free semi-keto-friendly Coke, put it in the fridge and never took it back. Just the fact that I could get it whenever I want seemed to help :)
If you have cravings you should limit your intake of total carbohydrates per hour (starting with sugars and simple carbohydrates). Complex carbohydrates should also be kept low. Protein and fat are not too bad. The body can use both sugar and fat for fuel. Everybody has a different body and different needs depending on genes and activities. Don't demonize food. Sugar as such is not evil.
Try a fruit - but not more than a handfull at a time.
Drink a glass of soda - but not more than once a week and preferably before doing exercise.
Eat a bag of chips - on friday with a group of friends.
That's not the only difference. Simpler carbs are processed faster than more complex ones. This plays a big role in the body's chemistry after eating.
Complex carbs are less bad - but still, eating too much of them is not good.
Fruit as such is no saint - partially because our current crops are optimized for sweet taste.
could I take fiber supplements before eating dessert to minimize the impact, lower the calories absorbed?
Raw food with no additives (oil, vinegar, any kind of sauce):
- is quite rich in taste, that taste is good AND bad
- meaning it's pleasurable but your brain is gonna be sick of very fast.
- you can't over eat
This resonnates with R. Lustig talks [2] IIRC saying that processed food tricks your brain into "hunger" by coating things into fatty sugary content.----
[1] I don't know how well founded his ideas are
[2] you won't eat 5 carrots or 1 kg of salad
WARNING: May be completely subjective bias, or just biological clock changing my senses.http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/27/th...
Also, not all sugars are created equal. Fructose is much worse for you than glucose, so sucrose (which is half glucose and half fructose) is much worse for you than starch, which is long chains of glucose molecules. Also, because your body has to work to decompose starch into glucose, that too will make you feel full longer.
But by far the best thing you can do is replace sugar with non-saturated fat. Fat is not the enemy, sugar -- and fructose in particular -- is the enemy.
I tell this to myself and anyone who wants to listen so I believe it but it bothers me that this is just the current "fact". A while ago, the opposite was "true", and who knows what we will all be thinking in the future? That, I think, is the most depressing thing about nutrition advice.
I myself am doing keto with Ketochow (a Keto-esq Soylent mixture made by a gentleman out of Utag), and lose 3-5 lbs a week on it (yet it tastes like delicious pancake batter) while doing minimal exercise.
It's obviously a combination of eating less and losing water weight. Your body can maintain about 1 lb of glycogen and 3 lb of water associated with that glycogen. Not eating carbs will likely lead to a big decrease in this weight. Also the fat itself is stored in 1:1 ratio with water. So your 3-5 lbs per week is likely either a 1 or 2 time thing where you progressively lose all your glycogen. Together with a moderate calorie restriction you end up losing some fat and an equivalent amount of water.
There's plenty of people losing 15 - 20 lbs per month.
Not only are my macros significantly skewed towards fats now, I am indeed consuming less calories (only 1000 cal/day of Ketochow) while still feeling satiated. My TDEE is ~2200 cal/day.
The actual range for the weekly calorie deficit is more like 1800 (3 pounds, 100% muscle @ 600 Cal/pound) to 17,500 (5 pounds, 100% fat @ 3,500 Cal/pound)
And if you are doing losing weight through calorie deficit with a basically sedentary lifestyle, the percentage of weight loss through fat is probably going to be no higher, and possibly substantially lower, than your starting body fat percentage. The key reason for working out while losing weight is maintaining muscle mass.
Less protein is converted to glucose than carbs but you can still eat too much protein and kick yourself out of ketosis. Fat converts to glucose at the lowest amount of the 3 macros.
(The idea that complex carbs are problematic is somewhat newer, but sugar's been held to be a concern for a long time -- that's why its broken out separately from general carb totals on nutrition labels.)
In a nutshell: long-term nutritional studies are hard and expensive, scientists of the era jumped to some conclusions without the gold-standard double-blind experiments that are expected of scientists today, and once the mantra of low-fat (and high-carb) diet being good for you was accepted by a government-run National Institutes of Health, chances of grant money going towards scientific study proving otherwise are virtually nil (did I mention those studies are hard and expensive?)
It's hard for people to understand dietary fat != body fat because they've been basically "fed" bullshit their entire lives by advertisers and our own government guidelines. So many people think "low fat" is healthy but all it usually means is "we took the fat out and gave you more sugar".
I'm a bug fan of keto but I wouldn't recommend every one do it. I would recommend everyone cut their carb intake in at least half, unless you are some kind of endurance athlete but then you probably know enough about your body to know what to eat. We eat way too many processed foods which means way too many carbs and not enough of them are fiber. Many people probably don't even realize how many carbs they eat in a day.
https://thorfalk.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/healthy-fruits-fru...
Even at a standard 2500kcal diet half a can of coke still leaves enough room for micronutrient dense foods so I don't see what's the big deal.
Perhaps it's time to stop blaming it on foods.
That requirement puts you several standard deviations from the mean, yes.
I would be inclined to speculate that in humans most of the benefit of reducing sugar intake is in the form of improved satiety when sugar is replaced with other foods. Sugar water and the like simply don't satiate in the way most other calorie sources do. That doesn't matter to a person who is mindful of how many calories they need to consume, but a person who is not educated or mindful of caloric and nutritional requirements might grab a glass of sugar water and later on (upon not being satiated) they might simply return for another one.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/abundance-of-fruc...
(The only thing I would note is that this article blankets all HFCS as 55/45 fructose/glucose, when there's actually three main HFCS formulas in use - HFCS55, which is what is used in soft drinks, HFCS42, which is 42% fructose 53% glucose, used commonly in food products, HFCS90, which is 90% fructose 10% glucose, and used only in specialty applications or blended with HFCS42 to make HFCS55 - HFCS42 is potentially better for you than 'regular' sugar due to the lower fructose amount)
Along with sugar, in a fruit you have fiber, basically cellulose and lignine, chitines in fungus like a champignon.
In fruits and vegetables you include thousands of different substances, like vitamins,anti oxidants and anti cancer, co enzymes, and enzymes, aminoacyds and dietary elements absent in crystallized sugar. Those are specially abundant in integral grains, specially if they are germinated, and vegetables , like Broccoli.
Lots of those could get destroyed by storage time, cooking or freezing. So we could believe that we eat well, but actually lack lots of needed substances.
That is the reason too much pre-process(pizza, hamburgers, hotdogs) food is not good for you long term.
Fiber is inert, and we humans could not process it, only some symbiotic cells in our intestines, but they have a very important function: they physically block the maximum sugar concentration release in the digestion.
Concentration is important because sugar is in fact toxic, too much of it will simply kill you. That is what a diabetic is, someone who does not natively release insulin to block the excessive sugar and could die as a result.
Your body needs to control glucose in your blood, too much glucose and you die, too much insulin and you die too because you need glucose.
When you eat artificial sugar dissolved in water, like in a soda, you disrupt the control mechanism of the body because it is so fast spike compared to normal fiber mixed sugar in a fruit that you disrupt the control process.
You are also not eating glucose, but fructose and tissues like those in the liver have to overwork. Some of those could only do one thing at a time, so they need to stop doing important things because you put the body in panic or emergency situation.
You create short euphoric behavior, but also over corrections, too much insulin, then the body enters panic depression, and so on.
I agree, we eat too much sugar. However, it is a step to go from rodents to humans and they have not addressed it.
We're apes that lived in Africa. We spent a lot of time in trees eating fruit all year around.
We have eyes that are adapted to find fruit - so much so that while most of our furry mammal relatives, like rodents tested in the article, are red-green color blind (dichromats) [1] we are mainly trichromatic, color vision. Trichromatic helps you to pick out a red fruit from a green background [2]. So, for some reason, our ancestors that could see fruit, did better than those that didn't, which was not the case with rodents.
I suggest we evolved on different diet than what rodents evolved on. Before comparing sugar to an addiction you should reproduce the results on primates - I'd be happy to be in the control group and snack on a Snickers bar ;-)
A quick browsing indicates that while our modern fruits are all domesticated, there are plenty of wild, sweet, and large African fruits. Apparently some modern wild berries also have similar sweetness profiles as their domesticated counterparts.
The article points out that one prominent difference that does seem to exist is that wild fruits are harder to eat, due to big seeds, thick and tough exteriors, and lower water content. So you might have to do a lot more work to get the good stuff with wild fruits.
I've eaten wild Muscadine grapes in Georgia that someone found in the woods (I'm not sure if this counts as a wild fruit or not due to potential Native American cultivation, but close enough imo), and they were fairly sweet. They had thick skins and giant seeds in them, so they weren't great actually, but they were sweet.
Also, there is [data for humans](http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Sugar-The-Bitter-Truth-16717) but nutritionists are only slowly coming to conclusions.
It's also relatively easier to track. It's easy to say "Well, I can consume about 2000 calories per day, this donut has about 300 so I'll have roughly 1700 calories left", but it's quite difficult to know the breakdown of how much carbs/protein/fat should be consumed within those 2000 calories and more difficult again to plan and monitor for those values.
I'm not sure about that...knowing total calories is not quite that simple (without fairly-sized error bars), due to differences in basal metabolic rate, efficiency of absorption of calories, determining calorie counts in general (particularly for restaurant food), etc etc.
On the flipside, it's much easier to understand the level of fats and carbs in a given item of food; hell once you start paying attention, you can even get a good rough guess just by the taste. On top of that, your body gives you some pretty nuanced signals related to hunger: without having put in any extra research or effort, I can definitely tell when I'm hungry for protein/fats vs carbs. I doubt it's just me, but IME at least, the feelings are completely different (this is also supported to some degree by nutritional science, in that protein and fats are known to provide satiety in a way that carbs don't).
Not relevant to calorie intake (relevant to calorie expenditure, which is a different issue.)
> efficiency of absorption of calories
differences here are the aggregate of differences in the efficiency of absorption of particular nutrients, so while this is a real source of challenges in measuring total calorie intake, its also a challenge in measuring carb/fat ratio of intake.
> determining calorie counts in general (particularly for restaurant food)
Again, the same problem with calorie counts here applies to carb/fat ratios.
What? How in gods name would you determine the appropriate amount of calories without having a sense of expenditure?
> differences here are the aggregate of differences in the efficiency of absorption of particular nutrients, so while this is a real source of challenges in measuring total calorie intake, its also a challenge in measuring carb/fat ratio of intake.
The variance (across time) of the ratio of absorption of fats vs calories is presumably much lower than that of calories in general (the latter is MUCH more sensitive to both lifestyle and things like "I happened to walk s lot this week"). That's partly conjecture though and your point in general is sound.
> Again, the same problem with calorie counts here applies to carb/fat ratios.
Come on man,the only part of my comment you didn't address is the one that talks in detail about the differences in difficulty between calorie estimation and macronutrient makeup estimation. Why pretend to respond if you're going to ignore the half of my comment that directly addresses your disagreement?
http://www.foodlabel.org.uk/label/reference-intakes.aspx
I find it difficult (but also fun) to resist all the treats.
I guess the author is completely unaware of the lifestyle of many Americans? (Myself included). 12 hours is not a short span at all, when you consider time between going to bed and first meal. Plenty of sugar to be found in all American meal options, doubly so if you add soda to any meal / throughout the day.
So tired of Americans proclaiming everything here as the greatest in the world / world champions / best in the world - far from it! And I'm American.
> Naloxone treatment also appeared to make the rats more anxious, as they spent less time on an elevated apparatus that lacked walls on either side.
Monuments dedicated to lab rats like this one (http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1hhyta/a_monument_to_l...) make me just a little bit happier on the inside.
If you know what happen to mice used in these experiments then I'm sure you'll agree they deserve their monument.
It's a bit worse than anxiety-related feelings but we do need things like cures to cancers, cystic fibrosis, etc. so IMHO ...it has to be done.
So we try to do it as little as possible and minimise suffering as much as possible. Again, IMHO, it's also one of the ethical arguments for why all information from sequencing experiments should be in the public domain.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
Also Aspatarme is likely less dangerous than sugar.
The diabetus journal seems to agree with you (I was unable to follow what they had found completely) http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/30/7/e59.long
Finally (N=1) I drink way more aspartame sweetened soda than any sane person should and I was relatively easily able to shred roughly 1/3 of body weight without serious hunger.
- Avoid processed foods
- Avoid added sugars
- Limit fruit intake (especially those high in fructose) and especially avoid fruit juices
- Avoid simple carbs (e.g., bread, tortillas, flour) and look to lower carb intake in general (~300g daily limit seems excessive)
- Eat more meals composed of higher fat/protein and a vegetable (e.g., protein and a vegetable)
- Fats aren't as bad as people believe
When it's all said and done, I think you're right though. The fact of the matter is we all love carbs and sugar way too much. We need to eat more plants.You basically can't go wrong sticking to the simpler rules that are more well-supported, and don't stress too much about the under-determined parts of your diet. For my part (and someone else could follow the same rules and end up with a fairly different diet), I basically eat a certain amount of lean meat or fish, occasional fruits, a middling amount of nuts, a medium amount of carbs with fiber (mostly beans and pulses), and backfill an assload of vegetables. I don't eat simple carbs and do eat the occasional dessert but treat like a special occasion that I know is terrible for me (e.g. like drinking 5+ drinks in a night: I'd be fine not doing at all, I'm aware that it's bad for me, but I don't limit myself to NEVER doing it ever).
So true. It happens to me within 1-2 days of cutting out refined sugar. Headaches and sluggishness, but goes away within the week. My dad tried it and got bone/joint aches. He got into a habit of eating a bowl of ice cream every night, I think it's better now, but when eating ice cream helps your bones not ache...
Withdrawls to certain foods happen so quickly. Middle of last year I switched from water to tea, was drinking like 6 bottles a day and didn't think anything of it. Weekend hit, didn't have tea in the house and got headaches the entire time. Caffiene withdrawl x_X. I don't even depend on caffiene (no coffee kind of guy).
Unfortunately I was hooked on sugar at the same time so cue epic battle of addiction vs hatred of what I was addicted to.
Took two weeks to get over the cravings. Now the sweetest thing I can eat is a banana. Lost 35kg in six months though which cured a couple of problems I had. Dumping sugar albeit forcibly is one of the best things that happened to me.
The idea is about the balance - proper ratios - not too much, not too little - just enough. The idea as old as humanity.
The problem is not the sugar, it is wrong eating habits, developed due to some methods of the food industry which, of course, tries to maximize its profits, including aggressive marketing of products with to high salt and/or sugar or fat concentration. This is what is wrong - amounts, concentrations and ratios.
The more correct answer is - avoid packaged, processed foods in favor of simple cooked raw foods, mostly veg. It is what some Nepalese and Tibetan tribes (actually everywhere around the world) do.
Also consumption of carbohydrates or any other substances cannot be considered seriously or studied without taking into account the behavioral patterns. If a typical couch potato is eating high calorie, high fat meals, intended for a docker or a peasant after full day of intense work, well, no matter sugar, he or she will end up in a well-chair. Same would happen to a vegan docker (there is zero of vegan Sherpas in a whole Himalaya).
Balance is the key word. It is ancient word. It is a cornerstone of the Yoga (which, surprise! is not about wearing cute yoga pants and forming fingers into mudras). The modern word is homeostasis has the same meaning.
According to http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/23/obesity-in-world-... "the top ten most obese nations were overwhelmingly pacific islands, with American Samoa taking the top spot with almost 75% of the population reported as obese and Nauru and the Cook Islands coming in at second and third places with 71.1% and 63.4% obesity respectively."
As far as couch potatoes, the closest research that's available is this - http://www.economist.com/node/9527126 and if you look at the list of top "couch potato" countries, some have high obesity rates, and some dates, so the correlation is inconclusive at best.
My eyes are telling me a different story.) But I live in Asia most of the time.
huffingtonpost? economist? research?) Give me a link to something on coursera or edX at least.)
Most of diseases are imbalances in homeostasis. The causes of such imbalances could be genetic or acquired. Most of the later ones could be called habits or conditioning, and could be treated by appropriate CBTs - by corresponding changes of behavior and habits to return back to the balance.
This is the basis of ancient medical sciences (at least in India), which served humanity very well, except, of course, the cases of bacteria and virus caused diseases, which is quite different kind of an imbalance due to activities of an external parasite.
There is a good starting point - https://www.coursera.org/learn/childnutrition
Keep in mind that it is slightly biased by being "American middle class".)
There are innumerable cases of misapplication of statistics (without even having a third control group) and probability distributions to incomplete or simply irrelevant data in history of so called data-driven sciences?
Math is a tool, and application of it to a poorly understood context will lead to false conclusions or mistaking a correlation for causation. Correlations, by the way, could be found everywhere, especially when there is a prize hunt for them.
Back to the subject - tribal eating habits are driven by availability of food sources in a particular location, and the traditional dishes usually were evolved to give the best ratios possible. The case of Tibetan nutrition, which is based on barley flour and yak butter is the good example. Traditional Nepalese food, which varies according to altitude, is another one.
Yes, you see a lot of moderately fat Mexicans, but when you go to the US, there are people that get big on a level that you don't see in Mexico. I am fairly sure the figures would reverse if it was "morbidly obese" being measured rather than "clinically obese".
I also avoid soft drinks like Coca-Cola because they produce an almost allergic reaction with my tongue (it aches for the rest of the day) though that might just be the preservatives. As a result I mostly stick to "vanilla" foods and drinks as I like to call them, like plain water and milk.
I might be wrong and still be getting too much unhealthy sugars and stuff from other food, but I'd like to think that it's not so severe since I live in Finland and not the US. I'm also slightly underweight so there's that, though I suspect that might be due to my genes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm sort of glad they way things turned out in my case.
I remember that it wasn't hard at all for me to stop. For the first week I kind of craved it, but not even that much. Every time it happened I just started thinking "This is going to make you feel bad and guilty" and the craving went away. It must be said that at the time I was on a diet plan and I was practicing running, counting every single calorie I ate and every single calorie I burnt. Thinking that it took me twenty minutes of running to burn 250Kcals and that a single glass could have given me back almost half of them (105Kcal for a glass of Coca-Cola) was a very powerful motivation.
overall, a good thing i hope :)
I am sure this is a type of hibernation reflex, where, with inactivity, the body wants stuff that packs a lot of energy for storage (dense with fat and/or sugar).
Consequently, I focus only on getting exercise and let my diet take care of itself - it always does.
I've had no physical cravings or reactions what so ever. Not the first hours, days or weeks, nothing, ever.
I don't care about the marginal stuff though. Sugar is added to a lot of non-intuitive products. My rule of thumb is - if it is highly probable that the product wouldn't be around if it weren't for its sugar, I don't eat it.
Not everyone has the 'physical addicted' genes I guess. I suspect my "secret" is that I don't allow considering sweets to stay in my brain for even the smallest amount of time. I look away and think about something else. Start a dummy conversation with someone, look at the magazines, pick up my smart phone.
There is absolutely no basis/source for this. There are in nature a number of foods that are palatable and even taste good and which are extremely toxic/lethal to humans. I rather think the association between taste and proper food is largely coincidental more than anything else.
I am currently in the process of trying to quit sugar.
Have they talked to anyone working with IT? ;)
Maybe try sucralose, which you can just swap in for the same amount of sugar (Splenda is a famous brand).
But apparently the commenter I replied to had not considered the potential differences between the substitutes, so I pointed out a way forward.
I was confused about sucralose though, I hadn't realized that it required fillers to use as a 1:1 substitute. The fillers also apparently are not very hydroscopic (which is a major role that sugar plays in baking, in addition to being sweet).
Debates on /r/keto rage all the time on whether artificial sweeteners cause an insulin response. And if it does, whether or not it is a chemical or psychological response.
The science on the topic seems to be nacent at this point, at least from this layman's view.
The most common recommendation is to simply give up sweets entirely, not just carbs. As one hooked on the Monster Zero line of power drinks, I have a tough time with this myself.
Evolutionary wise, in palaeolithic times sugar was probably very rare (you'd come across a bush of fruit every now and then perhaps but not all the time). Sugar is something extremely beneficial for your body if there's a lack of it in your diet and you're in a daily survival situation, it's pretty much pure energy. So evolutionary wise, when you come across a patch of sugary fruit it's beneficial to eat it all!
Nowadays we're surrounded by sugar and our diets are saturated with it. The food industries are advertising lies to us all the time. Seen those green cans of Coke with 'healthy' sugar in them? Pretty much complete bullshit!
Also evolution doesn't care if you are happy, healthy, live long, etc. It only cares how good are you at spreading your genes. We only live long because grandparents make kids more probable to live long enough to procreate.
Also, evolution doesn't care about life span, beyond what is necessary to ensure the survival of genes across multiple generations.
Most of the nurtients in honey is small bee pieces. The rest of it is sugars and water.
Either there is something extremely protective in that remaining 5% that we all should consider supplementing ourselves with or the whole 'honey is healthier' thing is nonsense.