My personal experience is that cravings are gone after about 2-3 weeks after I cut simple sugars out (that includes all types of "healthy" sugars and even fruits). After that period I can watch people who gorge on cakes just like I watched people smoking after I quit and see that with different eyes and different thought process then when you are hooked too. It is pure addiction. Also, for me, if I fail and eat one portion of sweets after some time, my brain goes to the swirling path of explanation why it is ok to eat one more and tomorrow again and again... One more fix, and another...
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.
Simple sugar is really more poisonous and addictive than some of the banned drugs
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.
Everything is toxic in high enough doses, even water.
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.
This, I can't imagine anyone reaching toxic levels of glucose in their bloodstream by oral means, as nausea and vomiting are symptoms of hyperglycemia, preventing further intake.
Though I might underestimate people's addiction, maybe there are IV glucose junkies out there now?
Also, there is diabetis, which should be enough evidence in itself that eating excessive amounts of sugar for a long time is really bad.
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.
That's especially true since our bodies essentially run on glucose. Supplying food closer to that state means faster utilization, which in turn helps a lot in situations of physical exertion. I would love to see the rat experiment repeated for athletic rats, where they train an hour a day or more.
Ok, maybe a bad choice of wording, or maybe not if you think about it. Definition of poison "In the context of biology, poisons are substances that cause disturbances to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism." I think we could agree that eating 200-300gr cake filled with sugars IS causing disturbances (certainly more than a 150gr peace of fish and 150gr salad) that are bad and when you repeat eating that cake we all know where that leads to and what adverse effects it has on the body and mind. Compare that adverse and permanent damage that sugar can cause to damage that for example LSD was proven to cause (none). And you can go to jail for taking LSD, but on the other hand we subsidies sugar production and we empower bad behaviour of eating junk food in many ways. For example I watched yesterday that in UK many people who are not sick, they just are overeating and are overweight so they can not work now are given large amounts of money and housing. There are people that are using that help for decades and are not working, not loosing weight and not expected to, they are put in the category with really disabled people (which is really sad, this people can help themselves and people without limbs cant grow another.. or maybe it just shows the power of sugar addiction for some people).
Sugars is what the body runs on. Saying it is poison is equal to saying water is poison, because too much water will kill you. Or salt, or fats, or anything the human body depends on - you can have too much of it all, but it isn't poison.
The sickness is industrial food uses mass amounts of sugar, artificial sweeteners, fat, salt, and manufactured 'flavor' to hide what was otherwise made to taste terrible in the process of being engineered to be easy and shelf-stable (and to a degree to exploit human food-psychology).
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.
I don't agree with your last point, but very much do agree that we become acclimated to the high levels of sugar. Just last year I was eating a lot more sweet than I do now, usually in the form of a Starbucks or a Jamba juice. I cut that out completely, (not caffeine, just caffeine from Starbucks) and haven't had anything from either place in many months.
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?!
> Simple sugar is really more poisonous and addictive than some of the banned drugs
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.
I think using these during intense activity is probably somewhat different from sitting in front of the couch eating chocolate every night. I personally don't have much of a sweet tooth these days, but I do get cravings for sugar when I do a long bike ride, or climb a mountain.
I do not eat fruit when I am on a diet to lose weight. Just clean diet (meats, eggs, nuts, lots of vegetables, few types of oils and butters, mostly no dairy, no fruits (maybe a little of berries), no junks...) and exercise. Fructose is metabolised different than glucose and is bad to eat when trying to lose weight, you would not die of course or something like that, it would just slow the process. But otherwise when losing weight is not a primary goal I eat fruits, but max 1 fruit per day or equivalent of berries or other smaller fruits.
Anecdata: I've stopped drinking alcohol (3 years), and I've stopped smoking (~10 years), but giving up candy, sweet pastry, or anything that's got significant refined sugar in was too much. I managed it for six months, and then broke down, then three months, and really I haven't tried again.
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.
Nine months ago I quit sugar to see if that would help my chronic sinus congestion (it did). I had a killer headache for about two weeks, then I was fine. After my pants started falling down I noticed I'd lost a ton of weight. I lost 25 pounds and I still eat a ton of carbs.
That's interesting - I have chronic congestion. How much sugar did you eat before you quit? What did "quitting" mean to you? (Just no sweets/cakes/biscuits, or did you go more extreme - no chinese food!?)
I didn't think it was that much ... per day maybe couple of cookies, or a chocolate croissant, or hot chocolate. But almost always some kind of treat everyday. When I quit my nose cleared up in about 5 days, but the sinus headaches lasted another two weeks. That's when I knew something weird was going on.
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.
Until December 2013 I drank about 300 calories of soda per day. I also ate a good amount of candy. I have never had a weight problem in my life but at my yearly physical I found my triglycerides were 248 when they should be below 150.
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.
If you ever decide to try again, try replacing sugary snacks with meaty ones. Want a cookie? Eat a pepperoni stick. Want a slice of cake? Have some cheese. Fatty foods keep you satiated so the whole idea of sugar seem repulsive.
Too bad... For me it was. First couple of weeks were challenging (with free pizza at work, donuts at coffee shops), but around week 3 I completely lost all cravings of sugar or starch.
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 :)
Your comment actually made me doubt myself so I looked up the correct plural form form anecdote: it's anecdotes or anecdota. But I saw that most probably you made a well-placed pun on the quip "The plural of anecdota is not data", commonly attributed to the economist Roger Brinner (http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...).
A few times, and using decaf coffee + caffeine pills, and then decreasing the dose of the caffeine pills - it's pretty pain free.
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.
Coffee has similar withdrawal symptoms as sugar: huge headaches, cravings, and feeling like shit for two weeks. I'd say alcohol is way easier to quit for example.
Mostly personal experience :) I have stopped drinking alcohol for a year, coffee a couple times for few weeks at a time, and sugar for couple days at most. Never tried smoking though.
IMO drinking both coffee and alcohol casually leads more easily to a coffee addiction, but without you noticing.
> I haven't seen any indication that being addicting is bad in itself.
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.
Carbohdyrates like starches are polymeric sugars. They are easily broken down by enzymes. They don't taste very sweet unless they are very short. Between white flour and glucose powder there is little difference except for the taste. Demonizing sugar is of little use when the other carbohydrates are ignored.
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.
Fibers (very long/complex carbonhydrates) actually retard the intestines ability to process simpler carbonhydrates. That's why it's ok to eat a lot of fruit, cause they have the right mix of simple and complex ones.
Yes, I forgot fiber. In Europe they are not counted as carbohydrates because they are indigestible. In the US you can subtract fiber content from total carbohydrates. Yes, fiber helps slowing digestion down and thereby reduces the height of spikes in the blood sugar level. But No, it's not OK for everybody to eat a very high amount of fruit because it may still be too much easily digestable sugar.
Fruit as such is no saint - partially because our current crops are optimized for sweet taste.
What I wanted to express is that white flour which is usally used in industrial food is a simple carbohydrate and its digestion is so fast that it doesn't really make a difference compared to pure glucose.
Complex carbs are less bad - but still, eating too much of them is not good.
extra virgin olive oil, or good balsamic vinegar is great addition to any +- raw food... in fact, especially oil helps digestion of vitamins soluble only in fats.
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.
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.
>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 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.)
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?)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sugars in fruits, vegetables and grains and crystallized sugar are in totally different forms.
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.
If you can sit through 90 minutes of what feels a lot like a sermon, this is fairly informative - and I think (?) more or less accurate although there's one glaring math error you can't help but see. Sugar: The Bitter Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Actually, thermodynamics is absolute and adhering to the laws of thermodynamics is a certainty. You can estimate your daily caloric needs on your basal metabolic rate combined with a multiplication factor based on your daily activities. Then you can estimate how much you eat. Within a small error you will be consuming and expending known amounts of energy. Eat less than you use and you'll end up losing mass whether it's fat if you are more active or muscles and fat if you are inactive. It won't be reflected 1-to-1 in the scale measurements and your size but over the long run you'll lose weight.
Remember, though, that we only absorb a certain proportion of the calories available in our food. Our rules of thumb about estimating caloric needs based on basal metabolic rate are approximate and work for many people, but not all. Digestive and metabolic disturbances can result in some folks not absorbing calories and nutrition (classic presentation of celiac) or extracting calories much more efficiently. The preparation of food also influences this processing: the energy required to digest your food starts to become a non-trivial factor. If you're struggling with weight despite tracking your intake, it might be worth switching your intake to foods from which you absorb fewer calories and for which you expend more energy in digestion: nuts, raw vegetables, and less sugar etc.
None of this violates the laws of thermodynamics. These are all quantities that one could measure/estimate/calculate. Once you know the rough quantities then you'll have a more accurate estimate. Perhaps "net calories" of food could become a thing - how much is left after the initial input of energy. Absorption will be a different deal altogether - a factor that you'd need to get measured.
Yeah, it is the processing that does the damage. Notice those sugar containing items you considered are also fat free. What we have in processed foods is fat, sugar, starch and salt, reduced fibre. Not a natural combination.
The article summaries as 'we eat too much sugar', 'here's some science that suggests it can be bad in rodents', and finally 'maybe you should swear off sugar'.
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 ;-)
I can't find a source quickly -- but I remember reading that many years back (like when we were apes in Africa), the sweetest fruit was probably as sweet as a carrot. We increased the sweetness of fruits through selective breeding to current levels.
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.
That doesn't explain blackberries which have only been cultivated in the last 100 years, due to more advanced farming techniques. They have been seen as more of a scourge for centuries, because of their knack for strangling other cultivated plants.
And I imagine the fruits wouldn't be eaten as ripe as they are now - people prefer sweeter fruits, and they sweeten as they ripen. I prefer more sour and tart fruit, so I tend to prefer less ripened fruit.
Why are there no referenced human experiments? Low/No carb diets have been around for ages. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to get good data on something this basic. The claims made in this article are pretty significant, why do we only have rat behavior to observe?
>It seems that for most people total calories are more important than the carbohydrate/fat-ratio.
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.
> [Total calorie intake] is also relatively easier to track [than carb/fat ratio].
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.
>Not relevant to calorie intake (relevant to calorie expenditure, which is a different issue.)
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?
There are actual studies. For example, there is no negative effect on health eating 100g of sugar a day. But above a certain amount you do start to run into problems with the amount of fructose your liver has to deal with.
>These are extreme experiments, of course. We humans aren’t depriving ourselves of food for 12 hours and then allowing ourselves to binge on soda and doughnuts at the end of the day.
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.
Yeah stroke me too as very US centric view.
From european view it's more about Belgium & Switzerland (for me personally Suisse, which has better chocolate, Belgium rules in pralines)
I know I'm anthropomorphizing, but quotes like the one below give me new and increased empathy for rats and their cause. I know that without us killing them "for science" lots of drugs and medical treatments wouldn't have been discovered, is just that seeing us, humans, forcing anxiety-related feelings on other beings makes me, well, a little anxious.
> 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.
Just to be pedantic, that's a monument to lab mice, not lab rats, for their use in genetic research experiments.
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.
I bet this video will make you think - Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods
After reading these comments, I'm more confused than entering. Throughout the years, we've constantly been subjected to advertising from fad diets claiming low-fat or low-carb or no-grain or no-sugar or low-whatever is the magic elixir to being healthy and losing weight. It seems that every nutritionist you talk to has a subjective bias as to the key. I understand that the body is an incredibly complex machine, and it's probably impossible to distill things down into a set of manageable steps, but I would just like to know what to eat, what not to eat, some simple science as to why, and not have bullshit or biases injected into the conversation.
People looking for an overriding simple comprehensive rule (or small set of rules) are destined to be confused and disappointed, because we simply don't have one with any degree of confidence. That being said, there are a fair few rules that are common to many of these conflicting diet plans that don't add up to a comprehensive diet plan but can still be applied to your existing diet. See the rest of this thread for examples, but it's _mostly_ common-sense stuff (that is still widely not-followed) like "limit quickly-absorbed sugar/simple-carb intake", "eat lots of vegetables", "eat a hefty amount of good fats (like in fish)", "eat a fixed amount of protein relative to bodyweight". Note that I'm using vague terms here, but a lot of the quantity terms that I'm using are actually directly quantified with not too much variation.
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).
What I've been able to gather over the years (and in this thread) and pretty much what I've incorporated into my diet is the following:
- 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.
I'm interested in that last statement regarding aspartame. It seems you find extremely polarized opinions on artificial sweeteners. I've often read that, regardless of the health impact (or lack thereof), artificial sweeteners are more-or-less "tricking" your body into thinking it has calories incoming, when in fact, it doesn't. Your body, feeling jipped, tries to compensate by craving more calories. But, again, this is hearsay.
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.
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).
I don't really notice withdrawal. I do have cravings for about a week then they go away. What I really notice when I'm on a keto diet is if I have a cheat meal with carbs I get a kind of high feeling in my brain. Seems like some kind of dopamine response because I equate the feeling to how I felt taking Wellbutrin once (which has a dopamine effect). Drinking alcohol has even a worse effect. Where I could normally drink 4-5 rum and coke before really feeling drunk. Now two of them will make me drunk enough that I wouldn't drive.
I was fortunate enough to be broken during a tonsilectomy. I woke up and couldn't stand anything sweet at all and it made me feel instantly sick. It has baffled many a doctor but they reckon its down to the anaesthetic and/or oxygen management. Yay to brain damage...
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.
It will become even more weak and dull, because the consciousness it produces is to dump to learn how a carbohydrate metabolism works and what are the sources of glucose and other simple sugars.
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.
Obesity is most prevalent in countries without overdeveloped food supply chains and food marketing apparatus.
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.
Mexico has a higher rate of obesity than the US according to some reports I have read, but having been to both, there is something more I have noticed.
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 don't think you should read too much into the obesity rates of the pacific islands, their small populations means you're mathematically more likely to get extreme results. It wouldn't surprise me if the nations with the least obesity rates were also the pacific islands.
Don't you think that applying mathematical models without understanding of all the causes and their relative weights would yield a meaningless results (not even approximate ones)?
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.
> Obesity is most prevalent in countries without overdeveloped food supply chains and food marketing apparatus.
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.
In my experience I cut out a lot of candy, sugars, and sweets from my diet at a very young age and haven't looked back, so I don't have that much experience with the "cravings" or withdrawal symptoms people describe (I don't drink coffee either). I like to believe the reason for this is that my tongue was a little more sensitive than normal and so I often got "overwhelmed" by sugary foods and simply started avoiding them (I still do). Grownups used to tease me about this whenever candy came up, they were flabbergasted that a child would reject candy as a reward or present for doing something. What? A kid that wouldn't do anything for a candy bar? Impossible.
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.
There's been some research that suggests that children, unlike adults, have no limit to the amount of sweetness they will tolerate/enjoy in a food. Maybe your sweetness limit just kicked in earlier than your peers.
I stopped drinking any kind of fizzy drinks for more than a year now and I don't miss them. Before stopping I used to drink three to six glasses of coke (around 200ml per glass) every day and making two plus two I realized this habit was going to do me harm sooner or later. I wasn't fat nor I had health problems. I just wanted to do something healthy for myself.
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.
my personal experience in this regard has been that after i took up running (3 times a week, approx 3-4 miles each), my sugar intake has dropped to very close to zero (with an occasional once-month-type deal of a single candy). even those colas with 'zero-sugar' appear too sweet, and the regular ones are just bleh...
Same experience. When I run regularly (one to two times a week) I have no desire for sugary or fatty foods. Instead I crave fresh fruit and vegetables.
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 gave up sugar products 3 years. (30 march 2012).
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.
> Most of us prefer sweets over sour and bitter foods because, evolutionarily, our mesolimbic pathway reinforces that sweet things provide a healthy source of carbohydrates for our bodies. When our ancestors went scavenging for berries, for example, sour meant “not yet ripe,” while bitter meant “alert—poison!”
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.
Actually it's because our taste is not a perfect poison detector, it's SUPPOSED to filter out foods that are good for you and those that aren't, but it's a heuristic model, it's not perfect.
Toxic berries are not toxic because they want to be eaten (by the species for whom they're toxic), whereas pitcher plants look tasty because they want insects to land on them.
I've decided to give up sugar after reading this. I get the feeling a lot of the interest in eating food is down to sugar rewards. I guess I feel that response of boredom after eating a no carb or sugar meal rather than a small feeling of pleasure is something I should get used to - I don't have to have a reward after every item of food I eat and I hope giving up sugar will make the other rewards I get from doing a good piece of work or say accomplishing giving up sugar for 30 days that much more rewarding.
The fast food knows this that's why you get free soda refills so you will back to their restaurant and spend more money. I think there is also a similar addiction to fat which would also make evolutionary sense if you were starving. Personally I get addicted to potato chips as long as the bag lasts I wont stop eating.
My sugar cravings don't feel like cravings, they feel more like hunger. I can eat a delicious meal of whole foods and be full to the point that it's physically uncomfortable, but I still feel ravenously hungry for sugar. It's like I have two separate appetites.
I am currently in the process of trying to quit sugar.
"These are extreme experiments, of course. We humans aren’t depriving ourselves of food for 12 hours and then allowing ourselves to binge on soda and doughnuts at the end of the day."
Does anyone know if artificial sweeteners (aspartame etc) have the same effects? Why can't I find any recipes for cooking with aspartame instead of sugar? (I tried but couldn't find any)
I'm into keto. You should give xylitol a try, as it's bulk and texture match table sugar closely and can be used interchangeably. It can cause gastric issues for some in certain quantities.
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.
Aspartame is much, much sweeter than sugar (it actually has the same calories/unit mass as sugar) and sugar does more than provide sweetness in recipes (especially chewier things like cookies). Aspartame also degrades at baking temperatures. So it just isn't a good substitute.
Maybe try sucralose, which you can just swap in for the same amount of sugar (Splenda is a famous brand).
Splenda does have a version of the product specifically for cooking - it seems to have a lot of 'filler' to get it to the similar consistency and volume of regular sugar (1 cup of sugar being as sweet as 1 cup of the cooking Splenda). That being said, it's best to just avoid the stuff when you can. I've found eating things with tons of Splenda in it can be pretty gross - I experimented with it a bit years ago when I first started going low carb and had bad sugar cravings, but wouldn't touch that stuff nowadays.
Yes, I just eat things with normal sugar if I want something sweet.
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).
First of all, sugar isn't bad, it's bad in the quantities we generally eat it in modern diets. People also generally don't recognise that sugar you put in your coffee is pretty much the same as the carbohydrates in your pasta.
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!
It was scarce, and starvation was more common threat than diabetes.
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.
I think it's because our ancestors didn't have easy access to food in the way we do now. Our bodies are wired to consume and store energy which are necessary for survival in times of starvation.
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.
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.
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.
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.