Much like we used to think dietary fat created visceral fat, and dietary cholesterol created blood cholesterol, we've been operating under the assumption that eating sugar is the primary cause of high blood sugar leading to insulin resistance. When you look at the glycemic index and glycemic load of foods, it's actually wheat that comes out on top. Cutting wheat out of your diet is likely to be much more effective at reducing your insulin resistance, and there are often a litany of other positive health outcomes as well.

Don’t know what the glycemic index says on sugar, but that’s not the whole story.

The story is that fructose gets metabolized differently than glucose and for example leads to accumulation of fat in your liver and then your pancreas and it’s all downhill from there, I.e. having a fatty pancreas is correlated very well with insulin resistance and prediabetes.

And then the problem with sucrose and HCFS are is that they have both glucose and fructose and the foods containing them have no fiber to slow down the digestion, so it’s hitting that liver hard, with that fructose being converted directly in fat deposits.

I do agree that wheat is bad too. Personally I’ve cut wheat from my diet.

But don’t look at the glycemic index alone as that’s an oversimplification.

Also let’s get one thing straight ... you cannot live without fat, no matter what fat we’re talking about and anybody that claims otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And you can die without salt. In these cases the debate has always been about quantity.

But you can live without putting another gram of sugar in your mouth for your remaining life. Although it’s pretty hard to do because sugar is in everything these days, including packaged bread because it extends shelf life ;-)

> Much like we used to think dietary fat created visceral fat, and dietary cholesterol created blood cholestero

Those have been debunked. You're running on that same assumption, correct?

> we've been operating under the assumption that eating sugar is the primary cause of high blood sugar leading to insulin resistance

That's called Type 2 Diabetes. I don't know if that's an assumption?

> When you look at the glycemic index and glycemic load of foods, it's actually wheat that comes out on top.

Wheat is glucose though, not fructose.

Cutting soda out of your diet is probably better than having a naked sandwich.

I would say that switching to whole wheat from white bread is a positive, though.

Sorry if I was unclear, but you seem to have completely misunderstood my post. I hardly know where to start with clarifying.

1. Yes, those have been debunked. That's why I said "used to".

2. Most people assume dietary sugar creates high blood sugar. I'm stating that, like saying dietary fat makes you fat, it sounds intuitive but may not be true.

3. Yes, wheat is glucose. Why do you mention fructose? I didn't.

Whole wheat bread will raise your blood sugar, just like white bread.

And possibly more than soda. http://quittingsugar.com/2012/07/11/bread-and-coke-smackdown...

> 2. Most people assume dietary sugar creates high blood sugar. > I'm stating that, like saying dietary fat makes you fat, > it sounds intuitive but may not be true.

Consuming excess amounts of fructose will (via complicated metabolic pathways) produce a lot of uric acid by your liver. That's what's causing hypertension. This shows the metabolic pathway diagrammed out:

https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?t=3395

Pretty interesting.

Is there a competing theory?

> 3. Yes, wheat is glucose. Why do you mention fructose? I didn't.

Glucose is not sugar; fructose is. They take different pathways when metabolized. It's true that lots of white bread has added sugar, but that's not the wheat. I would say that if wheat is a silent killer, France would be in big trouble, and they're not.

Hypertension? How is that relevant??

Glucose is absolutely sugar. Fructose and glucose are both simple sugars (table sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose).

The starch in wheat is made up of long chains of glucose, which again, is a sugar. It sometimes has added sugar as well. Both those facts are true for both white and wheat bread.

RE: France, are you kidding me? French people do get fat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France

> RE: France, are you kidding me? French people do get fat.

Like most of the world that switches to a "western diet", France is not immune to it. They've got McDonald's and junk food there too.

That said France has been a "paradox", as noted since the 1980s, due to their low incidence of coronary heart disease or other chronic diseases, in spite of their high consumption of dietary fat and cholesterol.

Of course, the French diet is only a paradox due to the American dietary guidelines being dead wrong. And as they switch more and more to the American diet, of course, they stop being a paradox.

> Hypertension? How is that relevant??

Hypertension is another word for high blood sugar - that's what you were talking about. It's part of a larger related problem called, Metabolic Dysfunction/Syndrome

> Glucose is absolutely sugar.

Glucose is a complex carbohydrate. Sugar is not, it's a simple sugar.

Edit: As other's have pointed out, I am wrong: glucose is a simple carb - the fact remains that it is not fructose and still feel that this is important.

Fructose is metabolized in the liver via Fructolysis

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

Glucose can be utilized by almost every living cell on earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_metabolism

And that big difference is why taking in cals. via sugar is different than taking it in via glucose, even though, as you say, glucose is just a long chain of simplier carbs.

> RE: France, are you kidding me? French people do get fat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France

Fat isn't necessarily unhealthy; Metabolic Syndrome is the underlying problem.

It's all interesting stuff, huh?

Hypertension is high blood pressure. Glucose is a simple sugar.

With respect, please do some fact checking before restating whatever you think you know outside your area of expertise.

Hypertension can be caused by many factors, including genetics, however there are indications that one of the biggest factors is sugar consumption and not salt, as was previously believed and still is to some extent.

I've been reading The Salt Fix (http://thesaltfix.com), it has references to many studies ... not sure what to think of it, but being confronted with a serious electrolytes deficiency lately and having the symptoms to go with it, I tend to believe it.

As a professional athlete, health is an area of my expertise. Desk jockying is the hobby.

Lots of different issues are related, and I'm not going to say there can be a simple way to make it all make sense - for example: what is the symptom, and what is the disease?

I'm trying to share what I know to help others, not to stroke my own ego. If I make mistakes in typing things out, I apologize. I never said I was a doctor, and I appreciate the feedback.

Glucose and fructose are both monosaccharides - also known as "simple sugars".

Sucrose, "table sugar", is a disaccharide of one glucose group and one fructose group.

"Complex carbohydrate" is ill-defined, but I guess could refer to polymeric saccharides, a classification which wouldn't apply to sucrose, glucose, or fructose. In any case, you'd need a strange perspective to see glucose as a "complex carbohydrate": it's only got six carbon atoms.

> Glucose and fructose are both monosaccharides - also known as "simple sugars".

Point taken.

The metabolism of the two are still, very different (glucose and fructose)

This thread has sunk into absurdity. I assume at this point that you are a hilarious troll, but in case you are actually serious: virtually everything you said is wrong on a basic level you could verify with Wikipedia or whatever.

I am being as honest as possible - I'm not a troll. Do trolls usually have 6+ year accounts?

But, I do try to study up on the subject, since I am an athlete. If I bobbled two things up: calling glucose a complex carb, and mixing up high blood pressure with high sugar levels, I believe I believe I have already apologized and conceded that I was wrong. If it isn't clear, take this post as doing that again.

>Glucose is a complex carbohydrate

Citation? Everywhere I look says that it is a simple sugar.

> 2. Most people assume dietary sugar creates high blood sugar. I'm stating that, like saying dietary fat makes you fat, it sounds intuitive but may not be true.

That is not what most people assume. In fact sugar has never been vilified properly, which is why diabetics are still prescribed diets with sugar, which is basically murder.

But btw — this is not an assumptions, you can actually measure it at home. I got a glucose meter at home, got it for self experimentation. Whenever I eat something with sugar in it, my blood glucose spikes and even stays slightly higher than my average for several hours afterwards. Whenever I'm eating meat or green veggies however, I don't get any glucose or insulin response (you can measure your insulin response by noticing a lower blood glucose than the baseline).

You can also understand if you're a diabetic or pre-diabetic too by the time it takes your blood glucose levels to come back to the baseline (the level you were at prior to eating). If it takes 2 hours, you're still insulin sensitive enough. If it takes 4 hours, you're a diabetic, or well on your way to becoming one.

Self experimentation is actually easy in this case, you don't have to guess ;-)

In fact T2 diabetes is not a disease of high blood sugar, although the health care industry is yet to fully acknowledge it. T2 diabetes is a disease of hyperinsulinemia (i.e. high levels of insulin in your blood), which creates a vicious cycle that can lead to high blood sugar as a symptom, due to developing insulin resistance, which makes your pancreas dump more and more insulin into the blood stream, until the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the required load of insulin, very high blood sugar levels being the symptom. At some point the beta cells of the pancreas begin to die too. And if you lose the function of your pancreas, that's T1 diabetes.

Interestingly T1 diabetics can also develop T2 diabetes by injecting themselves with too much insulin. People without a functional pancreas (T1) and with high insulin resistance (T2) are essentially screwed.

This is why treating T2 diabetes by giving patients synthetic insulin shots is like giving them poison, the same poison that's been making them ill, treating the symptom and not the disease.

To treat T2 diabetes, or pre-diabetes (which is prevalent in half of the US's population by now), you have to stop your body from producing so much insulin.

Many doctors claim that T2 diabetes is a degenerative disease that can only get worse (if you give them poison as treatment, of course) and yet many T2 diabetics have reportedly achieved full remission, completely getting rid of their medication, by switching to low carbs diets. Assuming they still have a functional pancreas of course.

---

So yes, it's without doubt that dietary sugar creates high blood sugar and T2 diabetes, but the way it does that (via hyperinsulinemia) is not common knowledge or treated properly ;-)

But to make things clear — we are talking of sugar as in the generally understood sense of sucrose and HCFS, whose consumption has been out of control and rising since the end of WWII at least, with obesity and diabetes rates to match it. And we can agree that anything based on white flour has been a problem too.

We are not talking about eating fresh apples (although apple juice is a problem). And fruits too are damaging on diabetes, anything with a lot of carbohydrates becomes damaging, so we'd better ensure that we don't get there.

Cutting out the sucrose, the HCFS and even the white flour is not such a drastic change. A few years back people couldn't imagine living without cigarettes either.

My grandparents lived without any sugar in their diets (countryside folks), my grandfather was eating 10 eggs per day and lived to 99 years old, working his land until 95.

We're not disagreeing here, except I'd argue most people DO in fact still think (incorrectly) that fat makes you fat.

Have you measured blood sugar after ingesting bread, and compared it to ingesting pure sugar? It might surprise you to know that a typical serving of bread will cause your blood sugar to spike MORE than even a very large amount of sugar.

This might be simplistic thinking, but isn't this why exercise helps? The liver turns the fructose from the sugar into glycogen. Exercise consumes the glycogen before it has a chance to be overly abundant, which is what causes the harmful effects. So you can either avoid sugar altogether, or have sugar with sufficient exercise.

Yeah, you have a good point. When/while you exercise fructose can be more easily converted to glucose, to be used right away by the body (faster than glucose alone). That's what's meant by, "a higher metabolism"

Under rest, 30% of fructose is converted to fat by the liver.

https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?t=3873

The real reason to exercise (for health) is it improves your skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity - it's certainly not because you burn a ton of calories from the exercise,

https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?t=4300

As in my other comment, I see more benefit from cutting wheat than sugar. But to your question, keeping your blood sugar low, and then exercising, helps your metabolic flexibility, i.e. your body's ability to generate energy from fat. So the best answer is, do both.

I think simple carbohydrates are a much bigger silent evil than even alcohol and opioids.

Alcohol and opioids at least have a stigma, and most governments enforce marketing and public health information accordingly. Starch and sugar can never be appropriately demonized because they are "just food", and have some of the largest companies in the US behind them.

The advent of processed food has created 2 entire generations of obese, insulin resistant people. The marketing starts as young as possible, and it is normalized to not think twice about eating sugar all day.

I'm still trying to get over the fact that the FDA actually banned partially hydrogenated oil. Very surprising that they said no to the entire processed food industry in such a big way, to the benefit of consumers. I'm sure the food conglomerates went into it knowing they had other options like interesterified oils up their sleeves, though.

That doesn't implicate sugar any more than excess body fat. There is no established causality from sugar intake. It's just popular to slam on sugar and promote fat acceptance so sugar is the "obvious" demon.

Can you clarify what you mean? I might have misunderstood you. I was a little flabberghasted that you seemed to say that there's no causality between sugar and insulin resistance. Based on everything I've been reading in the past 10 years, there's very clear causality between insulinogenic foods, insulin resistance, and body fat. The mechanisms, I thought, were also very well understood.

Perhaps they're talking about Alzheimers specifically? If you frame Alzheimers as a disease of affluence (Which is a bit of a stretch, I'll admit), you could look to the same causes (like excess added sugar in industrialized diets)

There is a link between sugar intake and diabetes.

Some people also suggest Alzheimer is a 3rd form of diabetes. I read a study that nasal applied insulin actually helps Alzheimer.

So, no slamming of sugar, just some preliminary evidence that may want to ask yourself if you really need to drink a liter or 2 liters of coke per day.

I wonder whether taking Metformin defensively helps in any way to reduce the odds of Alzheimer's if you have metabolic syndrome.

But my brain runs on glucose !

Sugar is nutritious for people who have a healthy gut biome.

This.

STOP EATING SUGAR PEOPLE!

> STOP EATING SUGAR PEOPLE!

But sugar people are delicious! They're such sweethearts.

Sour Patch Kids for life <3

eats shoots and leaves