It's all so confusing since sugar and carbs are in all fruits and vegetables and grains. What are we supposed to eat? I think all the "sugar is toxic and always bad" stuff is too simplistic and a better understanding will hopefully emerge.
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.
(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?)
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.
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.
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.
There's plenty of people losing 15 - 20 lbs per month.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
That requirement puts you several standard deviations from the mean, yes.
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.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/27/th...