This is… vague. What are the qualities of a cheese that make it shift into the ‘high quality fats’ category?
From the formal standpoint a high-quality fat product should not contain trans fats or contain just a small amount of them.
Edit: to expand, a quick look in my fridge shows the following cheese have no trans fats at all.
- Tillamook’s widely available industrial cheddar - Generic brand feta - Generic low-moisture cheddar - Dutch Gouda
We should probably eat good cheese because it tastes better, but I would imagine that trans fat free cheese would encapsulate most common cheese varieties.
I don't think most people think it's the right diet. I think most people know that sugar is potentially harmful. Nobody is espousing the idea that sugar is part of a balanced diet, or that we should be increasing the amount of added sugar in processed foods. Or that we should increase our consumption of candy.
Rather, when we think of sugar, we think of obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Maybe even fructose toxicity?
I have never heard anyone, even informally, claiming that sugars are a useful form of carbs in the diet. Any source that claims that carbs should be part of a balanced diet is talking about long-chain carbs like starch, not sugar.
I highly doubt many people are seeing carbs listed as an important part of a diet and then deliberately eating more sugar thinking that they are being healthy.
I think we should be careful here about calling glucose "sugar" and talking about harmful metabolic process because most people think sucrose when talking about sugar. And the potential harm from sucrose, glucose+fructose is quite different than glucose alone. Eating 100g of pasta, what you call "basically sugar", is not at all the same as eating 100g of table sugar. There's just so much room for misinterpretation and miscommunication around food. And in addition, so much is unknown.
But both cause a huge glucose spike (ignoring fructose metabolism for now) and in that respect they are quite similar, and very different from basically any other kind of food in terms of metabolic response.
sugar is glucose + fructose.
The human digestive system metabolizes fructose differently than glucose.
Bears eat lots of fructose prior to hibernation, birds eat lots of fructose prior to migrating south for the winter.
Consuming lots of fructose, say in a large container of carbonated drink dosed with high-fructose corn syrup/sugar, sends signals to your body to stop burning fat and start storing fat.
Ever hear someone say, "I just have to look at food and I gain weight". Well, those people have probably consumed enough fructose such that their body started storing food calories as fat.
see "Peter Attia - #87—Rick Johnson, MD: Fructose—the common link in hypertension, insulin resistance, T2D, & obesity?"
That's not the definition of sugar. Not even if you meant sucrose there (which is different from just a mix of glucose and fructose). Wikipedia puts it:
> Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. ... White sugar is a refined form of sucrose.
I know Wikipedia is not perfect but that matches what I've seen in the past. For example, fructose (by itself) is absolutely a sugar and it would be outrageous to claim it's not because it's not sucrose.
However when most people talk about sugar they are referring to table sugar, which is a molecule of glucose (a six carbon ring sugar) chemically bonded to a molecule of fructose (a 5-carbon ring sugar) - otherwise known as sucrose. The first thing your body does when it sees sucrose is split them into a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose (this happens in your small intestine). Glucose can be metabolized right away, in any cell, however fructose needs a bit more processing in the liver before cells can use it to generate ATP.
What can I say? (shrug) I disagree, that's not my experience from talking to people in person (about diet; obviously it's a different matter if you're talking about cake ingredients). Anecdotal evidence from replies here on HN seems to agree with you though. Who knows what's more common in reality.
Many forms of carbohydrates are trivially converted to sugars such as glucose when they hit our digestive system, and so are roughly equivalent to eating sugars directly, metabolically speaking.
I’ve been told that adding a healthy dose of fat to a processed carbohydrate is a good way to prevent this instant sugarification process, and so I eat my bread with lots of olive oil or cheese or butter.
See: cyclists drinking coke or housing gummy bears after a race.
Speaking of fructose, absolutely there are people promoting sugar as part of a "balanced" diet. You know what's in fruit, right?
Sugar actually was for a time touted as energy you either use or excrete, and that's an idea that's been discredited to the extent that most people know that sugar is considered harmful. They believe this because sugar is indefensible, hence the agriculture industrial complex have thrown it under the bus. Yet they insist that fruits, starchy vegetables, and whole grains are part of a "balanced" diet. What is a balanced diet? A diet with all the essential nutrients despite the presence of exogenous carbohydrates and other things that reduce bio-availability?
A "balanced" diet successfully rebrands sugar as an essential nutrient. As long as it's in the form of lactose and galactose in your "healthy" yogurt, fructose in your "healthy" fruit, and glucose hydrolized from the carbs of "healthy" whole grains, few are the wiser. Even better if you can dump refined sugar into these things anyway and call it "dextrose" to confuse people.
Yes, I know I wrap a lot of things in quotes. I do so because I must emphasize how incorrect these ideas are.
While you don't require carbs to survive that doesn't mean they're harmful or should be completely cut out from your diet.
What else are fatty acids used for? What are the metabolic pathways involved and how do different fatty acids impact our cells?
Can you cite sources for your claims? Research is a passion of mine and I would love to read some literature on the topic if you have any to share.
Energy storage, hormone synthesis.
> What are the metabolic pathways involved and how do different fatty acids impact our cells?
Triglycerides are used as a substrate for energy production by mitochondria. Short-chain fatty acids with chain lengths < 22 can readily enter mitochondria and be turned into energy. Long-chain fatty acids cannot enter mitochondria; but they can be shortened by peroxisomes, another cellular organelles, to more feasible lengths which then can enter mitochondria. This whole "fatty" metabolic pathway is called beta-oxidation.
Both glucose and lipids are transformed into substance called Acetyl-CoA which is then used by mitochondria to produce ATP. Acetyl-CoA is a common denominator of our energy production pathways.
We can also imagine a software pattern when there is a main implementation (mitochondria working internally from Acetyl-CoA) and two adapters for glucose -> Acetyl-CoA (glycolysis) and lipids -> Acetyl-CoA (beta-oxidation) to simplify the whole thing.
Trans fats cannot be processed neither by mitochondria nor peroxisomes because they belong to a different class of fatty acids. This causes their accumulation inside the cell and a gradual development of a metabolic dysfunction because mitochondria cannot produce enough ATP (energy) from trans fats. If the accumulation is large enough it starts to block other metabolic pathways including glucose pathway. The mitochondrial "hunger" increases even more. Because glucose cannot enter mitochondria anymore, its level is rising leading to a condition known as insulin resistance. What happens next? A person may develop quite a few secondary conditions such as T2DM, hyperlipidemia, neurological and cognitive impairment, various cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.
> Can you cite sources for your claims? Research is a passion of mine and I would love to read some literature on the topic if you have any to share.
I would gladly do that, but the list would be enormous. Materials on Krebs cycle are probably the best starting points. The next important milestone is to read information about Beriberi and Pellagra diseases because those conditions are caused by mitochondrial dysfunction which in turn is caused by nutritional deficiencies. The next thing to study is that metabolic dysfunction can be acquired not only from nutritional deficiencies but from a condition known as oxidative stress, which in turn can be caused by viruses, bacteria, poisons and so on. It can be acquired from the pathological excess of sugar during 10-20 years. Metabolic dysfunction can also be caused by genetics because some enzymes in metabolic pathways do not work as they should. To get a grasp of that, you can watch "Lorenzo's Oil" movie to see how it happens and what kind of sufferings a person may have.
As you can see, the amount of materials is quite enormous and hardly fits into a web-page-with-links format.
Such asymmetry of presentation may create a dangerous illusion about the glucose as the ultimate nutritional fuel. That illusion may affect nutritional choices of a reader because the article painted glucose as the supposedly purest source of energy.
At the end, we have a world full of asymmetry in sugar's favor and this article is just a brick in the sugar wall.
I spent a summer working* a Dairy Queen in high school. EVERY SINGLE DAY someone, usually obese, would come in, order an extra large blizzard and say "I really shouldn't do this..." while receiving their paper cup of crack.
It is good that you have knowledge and numbers to help you make better choices about your diet. It is unfortunate that knowledge and numbers don't drive better food choices for everyone.
*I wasn't really employed there, my buddy managed the place and I'd hang out and occasionally work the register while he smoked a joint out back.
Oxidizing lipids doesn't introduce chain rotation about their double bonds (which is the difference between cis and trans fats). This change in structure is why trans fats are solid at higher temperature (for the same types of lipids - think the difference between margarine and vegetable oil). The reason trans fats are bad is we can't process them as easily and they seems to accumulate faster than even saturated fats in our blood vessels, mostly because they are synthetic in nature and we don't have specific enzymes optimized to process them.
There are natural sources of trans fats, like vaccenic acid in breast milk.
It's a matter of personal taste, but for me it would be: avocado, high-quality cheese, high-quality meat.
> If you and I could never talk again, what single book, article or video would you recommend for me to turn to in order to find my own way through this topic?
Book: "Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition" by D. Longsdale and C. Marrs.
Video: [1]
The materials present information with the focus on specific vitamins, but the knowledge about metabolism is universal and can be applied to all similar situations.
Anecdotally I have a much easier time handling carb-rich meals since mostly eliminating polyunsaturated fats from my diet. My previous experience was some combination of “food coma” and “noticeably hangry” a few hours later, but now I mostly just feel energetic for a few hours.
Some of the most metabolically-healthy populations in the world eat mostly starches [2] (and maybe 1–2% of calories from PUFAs), so my hunch is that eating low-carb is more of a workaround for widespread metabolic dysfunction than a requirement to be metabolically healthy.
[1] https://fireinabottle.net/the-ros-theory-of-obesity/ [2] https://fireinabottle.net/pontzers-burn-and-metabolic-rate-m...
(It’s worth pointing out that both of these links are from a site that also sells supplements, but they do link back to the primary sources)
But it's not only sugar excess that makes that damage, primarily it's the lack of nutrients in processed foods that causes a gradual mitochondrial decline.
For instance, most people consume white sugar because it's cheaper. On the other hand, sugarcane consists of the same glucose + fructose combo as the white sugar but it also contains vitamins, giving us much better chances to remain healthy.
Fats still have some uber-abilities compared to the glucose though. The main one is the ability to "shortcut" the faulty metabolic pathways.
I will give an example. When glucose pathway is broken in a cell, it leads to inability to produce enough Acetyl-CoA in the given cell. Acetyl-CoA is an intermediate substance that is used by mitochondria to produce the ATP. When there is not enough Acetyl-CoA, the ATP output levels drop, causing detrimental effects on health and general well-being. Such cells start starving, degrade and eventually die.
When beta-oxidation pathway is broken, it leads to nearly the same defect, but this time for fats. However, if a person still has at least some number of cells that can do beta-oxidation correctly, those cells can "share" their Acetyl-CoA with other cells through the blood stream. This happens mainly in the liver thanks to the fact that the fats are so powerful that they cause a huge abundance of Acetyl-CoA. And that excess finds its way from the liver cells' mitochondria into the bloodstream, feeding other cells by "shortcutting" their broken glycolysis/beta-oxidation pathways.
The excess Acetyl-CoA from liver gets delivered to every single cell in the body, including the brain cells. Even if a specific cell has subpar beta-oxidation or glycolysis abilities, it still can consume the external Acetyl-CoA without any problem and produce the adequate amounts of energy from it to keep the cell healthy.
That's why a low-carb high-fat ketogenic diet has so tremendous effect on some health conditions - it allows to "shortcut" the subpar metabolic pathways in affected cells allowing them to survive and even heal over time. This is a natural cycle of the body and suppressing it with a sugar too often will cause serious problems over time.
Regarding high-carb low-fat diets: probably they can work given enough nutrients (minerals and vitamins) quite well, probably stretching those 10-20 years of adequate glucose metabolism well into 60-80 years. But still, you better be doing some fasting (or keto) to heal the accumulated damage, at least several times a year.
The obesity is a factor but it is not the cause. For example, Asian people may appear thinner than Westerners, but they are ridden by beriberi more often. (Beriberi is a metabolic condition that is caused by mitochondrial damage due to the lack of vitamins)
Regarding what blocks what it's a complex question. Glucose metabolism blocks lipid metabolism and vice versa for sure, but I have no specific data. From my own observations, glucose is much more potent in blocking the fatty metabolism than the other way around.
For reference: fat metabolism is equally important, or maybe even more important than the glucose part of it. It should not be ignored, it should be taught.
Otherwise a reader may get a wrong impression that glucose is _the_ energy and then will go to a shop to grab the usual candy, thinking that sugar + oxygen is what makes cellular ATP. But this is only one half of the story. The full formula is:
But there is a trick. Sugar suppresses fat metabolism and vice versa. This suggests that eating sugar + fat is a bad idea, and it is. But what the average Joe does not know is that: For example, 1 molecule of glucose leads to production of 32 ATP molecules, while one fatty acid molecule produces 48 ATP molecules. ATP is the energy currency in our bodies, so the more we have it the more healthy and energetic we can be.The catch with fats is that they are slow to get going. Glucose action is instant while the fats need tens of minutes to be engaged in energy production.
Another catch is that fats can be relatively easily damaged rendering them unhealthy. For example, the production of refined vegetable oils uses high temperatures to "squeeze" the oil out of the seeds. This process inevitably damages long chain fatty acids breaking them into shorter pieces and oxidizing them along the way. Such trans fats cannot be consumed by our bodies: their chains are too short to be correctly processed and are too big to pass the mitochondrial membranes. This will gradually lead to a metabolic dysfunction while filling the cells with unprocessable "junk".
But if you consume high-quality fats as a part of a daily low-carbohydrate diet it makes miracles: no belly, better cognition and you don't need so much food anymore. For example, the following products are considered as the sources of high-quality fats: avocado, fatty fish, extra virgin oils, nuts, European round cheese.
The thing is that people don't know this until they hit a health condition that makes them vulnerable and sensitive. We live our lives eating tons of sugar and thinking that this is the right diet because "sugar = energy", but it is not. Articles like this fuel this wrong impression. As the result, we gradually loose our metabolic flexibility and may become seriously sick at some point of our life.