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Comment by pjbrunet | Hacker News Reader

I thought the article was going to show brain scans ;-) I gave up sugar in high school because nothing else was working on my acne. It was difficult but you can replace sugar with maple syrup, honey and fruit. After a while the craving goes away and the effect for me was pretty much permanent.

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I can't see how honey, fruit, or maple syrup would be much different from any other simple carbs. As far as I've seen there's not been much difference determined between sucrose and fructose metabolism, for example. The big difference would be in cutting out all simple carbs, I would think, and then in cutting out carbs in general and going full ketogenic.

The complex sugars in fruits and honey are different from table sugars because of the way they are metabolized by your body. They don't spike your insulin as much, and can also add essential nutrients to your diet. Nothing in dieting (and life for that matter) needs to be done on the extremes, oftentimes common sense and moderation prevail.

Fruits and honey do not have complex sugars. They have simple sugars like fructose, glucose and maltose. Fructose doesn't spike your insulin as much, but it's also 50% of table sugar. So honey is chemically almost the same as diluted sugar.

Most of the nurtients in honey is small bee pieces. The rest of it is sugars and water.

Excluding water, honey is about 85% fructose and glucose in a ratio which is close enough not to matter to HFCS. It also has about a 10% of maltose and sucrose.

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.

those are all sugary replacements for sugar. That's not going to affect your brain chemistry at all. The 'difficulty' was a nocebo.

How does sugar affect acne? And how are those sugary substances any better than other sugary substances?

It doesn't, and they're not. But it's possible he lowered his intake of things like soybean oil by not eating sugar.

My acne also disappeared when I cut all carbs for a diet.

Not the same as cutting out just sugar. If you cut out sugar and pig out on bagels, what did you really gain?

I break out in pimples any time I eat sugary, carb-rich foods. A few weeks without these foods, and I have no issues at all.

Repeated exposure to certain things cause an allergic reaction. Acne, fatigue, headaches, allergies come in many forms. I can't say for sure it was the sugar. All I can tell you is, I gave up sugar. (And other things, keep reading.) You come up with an educated guess and test it. In the case of the food allergist, he generally knew what foods caused acne problems for other people. Basically, you're using the process of elimination combined with an educated guess. If you completely eliminate sugar from your diet and you still have acne--then you know sugar isn't the problem. (I went to a dermatologist first, tried a number of prescriptions--no effect.) The food allergist worked. The food allergist explained, it's not the sugar by itself. The sugar is one component of a reaction, creating conditions for the acne. At the same time as giving up sugar, I also gave up dairy and yeast/bread. Maybe extreme but it worked. I went about two years without dairy! No ice cream, no cheese! Lots of salads and oatmeal LOL.

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