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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

It's all about the quantities and the delivery mechanism. An apple has about 20g of sugar, about the same as half a can of coke. But two apples come with fiber and vitamins where a can of coke doesn't. That fiber will help you feel full. The coke won't. In fact, the pure refined sugar in a coke will make you feel hungrier.

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.

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>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've seen far too many folks on /r/keto shed tens (or even 100+) of pounds on a fat and protein macro heavy diet to not believe it.

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.

Protein-heavy diets accelerate aging, don't they? I thought that was the result from studies into caloric restriction... a reduction in certain kinds of protein (leucine?) and a reduction in DHEA loss correlate heavily with calorie intake, and are what makes caloric restriction good?

To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week. That's 1550 - 2570 calories less per day. A sedentary person needs somewhere between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. You were either eating half as much food than you needed or there is a more likely explanation.

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.

Finally someone with reason.

Check out reddit.com/r/keto.

There's plenty of people losing 15 - 20 lbs per month.

I've been at about 2 lbs weight loss a week on a 1350 calorie diet since mid December. I know 2000 calories seems to be a standard but after a couple weeks I don't really feel any different consuming <1400 cal a day than I did when I was consuming 2500. I also sit at a desk all day so I'm pretty sedentary. I doubt I could maintain this deficit if I was still doing manual labor. (I'm not doing a keto diet, just an eat less diet)

What is your TDEE, if I may ask?

> To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week. That's 1550 - 2570 calories less per day. A sedentary person needs somewhere between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. You were either eating half as much food than you needed or there is a more likely explanation.

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.

> To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week.

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.

Correction, keto is not protein heavy. It's fat heavy, moderate protein, and low carb. It say "moderate" but I usually eat about the same amount of calories from fat that I do from protein. I don't think that is high protein though. I probably consume <1g per pound of bodyweight. High protien diets are usually more like 2-3 per pound.

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 opposite was never true; even when fat was looked at much worse than it is now, sugar was still held to be a problem, too. "Sugar free" options have been pushed as healthy just as long as "fat free" options.

(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.)

But the thing is artificial sweeteners are bad for you too, so going "sugar free" doesn't help from a nutritional standpoint.

When I was a kid, sugar was bad for your teeth, not for your overall health.

If you want to find out why the opposite has been true for so many years, Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is a good read.

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?)

We've been pushed the low fat high carb diet for so long now that people are confused. Especially in the US. They are starting to come around to the idea that maybe fat isn't so bad.

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.

Most fruits don't have that much fructose to begin with.

https://thorfalk.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/healthy-fruits-fru...

Why is fructose "much worse for you" than sucrose?

The body processes it differently

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)

Because the body burns glucose more or less directly, but fructose has to be processed by the liver, which turns it into fat.

Into fat, glucose, glycogen and other carbohydrates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructolysis

I might not be the average HN user, but I have to choke down ~4500 daily calories in order to maintain both weight and athletic performance, and doing so without simple sugars would be a pretty difficult task, not to mention if I suddenly started drinking oil instead as per advice.

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.

4500 daily calories

That requirement puts you several standard deviations from the mean, yes.

It depends on age (and BMR in general) and type of athletics. When I'm in a marathon training routine (typically a 16-18 week cycle, ramping up to 55-70 miles per week), I'm burning an extra 1000-2000C/day. Considering I'm already an ectomorph, and tall (6'3" 185lbs), I have to eat a lot just to maintain. I don't always make good choices (last night I snacked on pretzels and toffee), but somehow my body self-regulates ingestion and I have never gained weight. I know it sounds hokey, but I am convinced my body does an excellent job telling me whether I need protein or carbs/sugar. Not so much fat, so I eat cheese & similar with intent, but you get the idea. My problem is finding healthy calorie heavy snacks. Avoiding empty sugars & simple carbs while snacking is a challenge.

My fav is walnut halves and dates.

6'4" 200 lbs here, marathon training and vegan... I eat very little refined sugars any more but I do consume a large amount of my calorie needs in grains and rices. Interestingly I was 230 or so in weight right up until I started cutting out the sugars, oreos are vegan, ice cream can be vegan, etc.

Yeah. I have a hard time losing weight at 2,000 calories a day at a weight of 272. This person is either some type of endurance athlete (burns a ton of calories) or has a crazy metabolism. I run about 2 miles 2-3 days a week and do weight training 4 days a week. Although I will add that I have low T and am not on testosterone right now. When I'm on a low dose of T I can shed fat much easier. So obviously hormones come into play.

Liquid calories (especially in the form of sugar water) do not satiate somebody in the way e.g. fruits would (since fruit contains fiber and "fills" one up better). If one took a top-down approach to diet and planned out intake appropriately (as it sounds like you do) then it would certainly be easy enough to slot in some sugar water and still meet all of one's nutritional needs. The sad truth is that most people are not very mindful of what (and just as critically how much) they are eating, presumably due to poor education.

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.

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