it would be extremely difficult to run a marathon without sugar in some form
Also no, it's no more difficult to run a marathon with an all meat, zero carb diet than it is with a carb heavy diet. People run ultramarathons on carnivore diets:
And this is how ancient humans hunted game as well, despite not having access to trail mix and Power Bars, as you can see in the Masaai persistence hunting technique:
Hunter gathers would and still do frequently gorge themselves on honey if they find a hive. They might not have access to a Mars bar but they definitely like sugar.
I have never heard of this. Where did you get this? Did you know that the only way for cancer cells to create/use energy is by fermenting glucose? They can't use fats or ketones.
> On the other hand, red meat and bacon are known direct cancer risks, […]
Bacon aside, there is no proof which shows that red meat causes cancer. Yes, there are studies that show a correlation between red meat and cancer. However those studies did not differentiate between fresh unprocessed red meat and other processed meat like bacon, sausages, etc.
Edit addendum:
> […] you don't really need bacon and red meat at all, it's something that you can easily take out of your diet.
I'd argue the opposite, bacon aside. Red meat is a highly nutrient dense food. Sugar on the hand is just empty carbs, Metabolizing sugar will drain you body of important vitamins (e.g. B1).
I meant that sugar causes cancer through obesity, not that there's an intermediate step between sugar and obesity.
> Bacon aside, there is no proof which shows that red meat causes cancer. Yes, there are studies that show a correlation between red meat and cancer. However those studies did not differentiate between fresh unprocessed red meat and other processed meat like bacon, sausages, etc.
Most studies do differentiate between unprocessed and processed red meat. And the correlation is fairly strong, not to mention the rest of health effects that a diet high in red meat is associated with.
> I'd argue the opposite, bacon aside. Red meat is a highly nutrient dense food. Sugar on the hand is just empty carbs, Metabolizing sugar will drain you body of important vitamins (e.g. B1).
Do you really think it's easier to take out sugar of your diet? I think the only way is to go full carnivore (not even milk or its derivatives). On the other hand, you don't even have to go vegetarian to remove red meat and bacon from your diet.
Yes, I understood that. However this is new information for me. Where did you get that?
> Most studies do differentiate between unprocessed and processed red meat. And the correlation is fairly strong, […]
Where are those studies? In vivo? In humans?
> […] not to mention the rest of health effects that a diet high in red meat is associated with.
You mean greater longevity, better mental health (less depression, less anxiety, …), better cognitive function?
> Do you really think it's easier to take out sugar of your diet?
Let's say processed sugar. And with "easy" I meant - that you won't suffer any negative health effects in the long term. If you stop eating something and in consequence suffer from malnutrition then that won't be "easy" to keep up in the long term.
There's not a lot of evidence that links sugar intake to cancer risk directly, when controlling for weight. Sugars aren't in the IARC list either. And the link between high sugar intake and obesity is clear too.
Obesity, though, is a well known cancer risk, and for quite a lot of cancers there's causal mechanisms proposed.
> Where are those studies? In vivo? In humans?
The IARC monograph has the details of the evidence collected to declare processed red meat as carcinogenic and unprocessed red meat as probable carcinogenic, and of course it includes studies in humans and studies that separated processed/unprocessed https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...
> You mean greater longevity, better mental health (less depression, less anxiety, …), better cognitive function?
I find it funny that you're asking repeatedly for sources for things that are repeated by every health agency in the world, and then just drop these claims with nothing to back them up.
> Let's say processed sugar.
But no one was saying "processed sugar". The diet I started criticizing was an all-meat diet, with the comment even criticizing fruit.
> If you stop eating something and in consequence suffer from malnutrition then that won't be "easy" to keep up in the long term.
You won't suffer from malnutrition by not eating red meat. In fact, most scientific diet recommendations include the limitation of red meats. You will, however, suffer from malnutrition if you withdraw from all foods that contain natural sugars, because that includes almost all fruits and vegetables.
If we talk about added sugar, diet recommendations usually include limiting its intake too. However, the point I was making in my original comment is that there's far more evidence linking red meat consumption to cancer risk than for sugar, and therefore I can't really trust the advice of someone who claims that an all-carnivore diet is better "because it has no sugar".
(Also: not all bacon is processed)
And yes, all bacon, by definition, is processed meat according to WHO's definition. Bacon is salt-cured meat and the WHO considers processed meat as "meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes".
Ask a real biologist for details. I know this was covered in my high school classes 30 years ago, but I haven't studied it since so I don't remember details or know anything later research has discovered.
Keto causes fatty liver disease
Some tribes hunt, running for several hours, without having breakfast. Their bodies are able to burn fat more efficiently and easily than us probably due to their lifestyle.
Sugar is not "literally poison". What it literally is is the body's primary energy source and a requirement for survival. The fact that eating too much of it is bad for you doesn't make it poisonous. Everything has a median lethal dose (LD50), including water.
You can perfectly healthy enjoy a moderate amount of sugar as part of a varied diet just like you can healthily eat a moderate amount of any food as part of a varied diet. Extreme diet fads and the demonisation of entire food groups work against moderation and variety which are what we actually need in our eating habits.
None of this is to say there isn't a huge sugar problem in modern society, ofc. What I'm saying is the problem is excess, not the consumption of it at all, and demonising it as "poison" and attempting to eliminate it entirely is not the way to bring about moderation.
Long bouts of exercise like a marathon or the Tour de France or medical conditions like diabetes are the only exceptions I can think of where you'd want to instantly flood yourself with glucose.
1) this claim is much weaker than "Sugar is the worst substance for public health ever. It's literally poison."
2) and it can be a good idea if otherwise someone would suffer from caloric deficit dangerous to health and eating more food is not viable (yes, this situation is unusual)
Its hyperbole meant to convey a sense of how bad sugar (particularly added sugars) is to the health of the population. Sugar is in everything (more hyperbole!) in the U.S. America by and large is addicted to sugar and it’s very bad for us. Everything is over sweetened. Can’t even buy bacon without sugar added in some form or other.
Anyhoo. Yes sugar can be good and sugar can be bad. "It's literally poison and worst thing ever" does not productively move the needle of the conversation, almost regardless of interpretation.
This is in contrast to carbs in general, and to protein and fat, where some level of each is useful in the diet and provides a reduction in mortality and CVD risk.
As far as I know, it could be useful in case of huge need for calories.
Which basically never happens with modern lifestyle. But I guess may apply to firefighters working for several days or soldier lugging around piles of equipment.
But unlikely to apply to anyone reading HN. Unless they climb Mount Everest for fun, or volunteer as firefighters or are unlike enough to end in a war zone.
If you need to rely on hyperbole/lies/propaganda then I am going to assume that you have no case.
Second, they ferment fruit because fruit is always slightly poisonous (fructose).
Third, after being close to our primate relatives for some time, our ancestors spent a lot of time hunting, which is not a trait of monkeys we know. They eat more varied meat diet than any predator known, did that for a long time, much longer than (now) we eat crops.
Fourth, we have much higher normal percentage of fat in our body. For men, the normal fat percentage range is from 18% to 22%. Our primate relatives have much less normal fat, for most primates it is less than 9%. Our primate relatives sport bodybuilder's or high performance athlete's fat range just living their life.
As with alcohol, fructose is not a toxin in small doses, because liver can handle it (especially when it is fermented into lactic acid). But it is a toxin in doses we usually experience now. Look for "non-alcoholic fat liver syndrome".
But in general it's a far more complicated causality chain. When weight gain leads to insulin resistance then sugar is poison. We have lifestyles that maximize both a lack of physical labor and an excess of high sugar foods.
https://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-t...
His understanding of what happens to fructose in the liver is fundamentally incorrect.
The way I understand it, poison is an umbrella term that includes toxins, venoms, and chemicals. Its definition is basically "is harmful to living beings", while the other three are specific types/sources of harmful.
Edit: Ended up looking it up, looks like I got poison and toxin backwards. Toxin is the umbrella term.
If you go in a supermarket in EU almost every food product contains sugar.
Why does a peas can has to contain sugar ?
There is exactly one common brand of mayo that has no added sugar. One.
And there's no way to buy sugar-free versions of many other kinds of food, from fried tomatoes sauce, sausages, etc. that were traditionally made without sugar for centuries.
It's a plague.
That just means that the item contains sugars. It doesn't mean that we've added sugars to it. A fresh apple has sugar. A fresh tomato has sugar. Many if not most fruits and vegetables do. It shouldn't be a surprise that the canned/frozen varieties have a bit of sugar on the label.
The pure apple in a can can't last for long.
If the ingredient list contains sugar, it was added.
I dont know if you particular peas have added sugar.
A person weighting 100kg should have less than 10 (ten) grams of sugar in a blood. This is less than 40 calories circulating in the blood of this 100kg person. The same person should have less than 10 (ten) grams of ketones in the blood and it is equivalent to less than 90 calories cirrculating.
Ketones are much more efficient energy source, they are twice as energy-dense. Glucose use needs a quarter of energy stored in the glucose, while fat (ketones) need only 3 (three) percents. Glucose needs insulin, fat (ketones) does not.
Glucose (which is not even table sugar!) is not a main source of energy in the body.
I also think that "variety" is a fad, just like other "extremes" you mentioned.
It is a big deal to chug a bottle of Gatorade while lounging in front of some screen when your body has nothing useful to do with all that sugar.
Simple carbohydrates such as pasta and potatoes break down quickly and can also cause one's blood-sugar to spike.
The trick is to not eat pasta with bread. Many people forget about the bread that they commonly combine with pasta and then blame the bloating and weight gain on the pasta that they had.
I'd imagine that cutting out red sauce, which commonly has added sucrose, would be better still.
Pasta is unique in that it seems to be beneficial, in terms of glycemic load, when eaten on its own. But combining it with other foods, but especially bread, may render it more taxing than other foods.
Which is a common trait of food combinations.
But simple pasta and fish dishes appear quite often in the "blue zones" around the globe. Something I should do a better job of eating more of.
I still add sugar and honey and other sweets to my drink and food. Cuz I'm a fiend. But I do now try very hard to avoid straight fructose.
Even strictly cutting out starch becomes problematic after some time, though my experience is also that humans will get unique health benefits from doing that for stretches. Which avoids the trouble of all-in zero carb.
Which chronic diseases are caused by sugar and nothing else?
People who find themselves consulates, irregular, or have to strain when they go should consider more fiber.
It doesn't, it can't. From paper "Stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and its associated symptoms" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435786/ :
"Whilst it is often stated in physiology textbooks that bulking agents improve peristalsis, there is no proof of this in practice nor experimentally. Regardless of the food ingested, small intestinal and right mid colonic contents are fluid and all ingestible dietary fiber is suspended therein. Dietary fiber, therefore, cannot act as solid boluses for the initiation of peristalsis. In fact, dietary fiber had been shown to retard peristalsis and hold up gaseous expulsion in human experiments[22]."
> "People who find themselves consulates, irregular, or have to strain when they go should consider more fiber."
They should consider less fiber; from the same paper:
"Dietary fiber is also associated with increased bloatedness and abdominal discomfort[22]. Insoluble fiber was reported to worsen the clinical outcome of abdominal pain and constipation[18-20]. In our recent study, patients who followed a diet with no or less dietary fiber intake showed a significant improvement, not just in their constipation, but also in their bloatedness. Patients who completely stopped consuming dietary fiber no longer suffered from abdominal bloatedness and pain.[...]"
"Stools only become well-formed in the sigmoid colon and rectum and by this time, especially in constipated subjects, more stools result in more evacuation problems. It is not logical to increase both the volume and size of stool in patients with idiopathic constipation and indeed for anybody with difficulty in passing stools, e.g., due to anismus or anal spasm from anal stricture, fissure or pelvic outlet disorders. We have shown that decreasing the bulk and volume of feces immediately enables the easier evacuation of smaller and thinner stools through the anal sphincter mechanism. This eliminates the need to strain in passing stools, and prevents the tearing of the anal sphincter and bleeding due to large and bulky fecal loads. None of our patients experienced anal bleeding or straining following complete abstinence from dietary fiber."
"The results of this study should lead us to reexamine popular beliefs in benefits of dietary fiber and more studies should be undertaken to confirm or repudiate these results."
I run a small business that sells sports drinks and other healthy beverages aimed at athletes. Our drinks have a few grams of naturally occurring sugar, because some ingredients that are naturally hydrating also contain natural sugars. Nothing wrong with that, as opposed to a 16oz BigCorp (Gatorade, Powerade, Lucozade, Carabao, Body Armor, etc...) sports drink that has over 1oz of added artificial sugars. There's a MASSIVE difference. People don't realize that.
I finally understand this phrase! "I worship God and I'm His slave" just never seemed to ring any bells.
Let me tune your system for you: Slave to Love.
Otherwise, you are right. The main ban (children under the age of 14) was in 1956, or 67 years ago.
It certainly is not here in Austria. 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.
Well, it's between classes, in their free time.
Don't know, seems natural to me, since I've grown up with that mindset but not all nations agree on that.
I don't get some countries or people that forbid alcohol until you are 18 or 21. I drank beer when I was 8 and got totally drunk at 14. Which was a good thing, because it was at home and, well, lesson learned. Starting with alcohol when going out at 18 or 21 sounds much more dangerous.
Social pressure/not yet fully formed brain etc. leads to ppl under 21 being more likely to drive drunk. That's the rationale for not being able to drink until 21.
"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that minimum drinking age laws have saved more than 31,000 lives from 1975 to 2017"
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
In other countries you will probably be drunk for the first time around the time you're taking driving lessons, or earlier.
They tested it out and the test was successful. The kids preferred beer to sugary drinks. The beer was much weaker than what adults are accustomed to at 1.5% to 2% alcohol.
The linked article says this was a trial in 2001. Only 1 school did it and it seemed to go well, but no other schools were willing to try it.
To my experience, society changed enough to no longer tolerate--or at least accept as normal- drunken family members. There was a point where the always-drunken-grandfather was suddenly considered ill and no longer just a little weird. A noticed this in my own family when I was still young. There was a point where constant-drunkenness was suddenly frowned upon with a certain vigor. And the younger generation sort of got the message: "I dont want to be like grandpa, he is actually a poor devil..."
- Society is now expected to be your babysitter. If your actions have negative consequences, they should have been forbidden and prevented.
If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.
It's not babysitting, it's self-defense.
By that same logic we should be locking down juice boxes, donuts, and bacon to prevent heart disease and diabetes.
At some point it’s definitely babysitting and we’re well beyond it.
That’s a pretty dumb example. People clearly want safety features in cars. Seatbelts existed well before they were mandated.
They shouldn’t be mandated but people should wear them anyway.
> No regulation of alcohol use any age anywhere any time.
I’m fine with that too. If someone is drunk and belligerent there’s plenty of other reasons to arrest them.
But having a beer in the park is banned because you’re worried about a bunch of winos?
> No rules for smoking any age any time anywhere. And so on. Pretty soon it would be a mess for everyone.
Having restrictions for children is orthogonal. That’s us as a society deciding that children are not capable of making informed decisions.
We’re not with them 24/7 so we as a society set rules for what we allow them to do when we are not around.
On that topic, I think it’s fine for a parent to give alcohol to their child. That’s the parents decision. But that doesn’t mean I think we should have 10 year olds buying 40’s.
I agree. We should.
> At some point it’s definitely babysitting and we’re well beyond it.
Lol. There is a constant, well-funded psychological warfare to make everyone pick up as many of these harmful and addictive consumption habits as they can. As I'm writing this, and as you are reading this there are teams of people paid by corporate interest working hard to figure out how the best it is to make all of us addicted to sugary drinks in the name of profit. This is completely legal, and even a "respectable" profession. Pushing back against all these forces ever so slightly is now babysitting?
QED: If you want to smoke yourself to death, you can. But the government wants to add some friction to that so it's not the default case for smokers. Taxes, awareness campaigns and (god forbid!) putting some limits on what cigarette companies can add to cigarettes.
It's worth remembering that alcohol sterilizes many otherwise dangerous things. Being drunk all the time can easily be better than being sick all the time.
So no you can't satisfy your long term hydration needs by drinking anything strong enough to be safe by its alcohol content alone.
The sterilizing only really happens in modern wine level alcohol (14%).
However I dove into it, Boiling wasn't always easy, so they didn't always heat it properly for sterilization: https://byo.com/article/raw-ale/.
In old times, a metal vessel large enough to boil an entire batch of wort may not have been feasible. Other techniques were used in these cases.
Say you have a wooden barrel or tub:
* Take off a portion of the wort, boil it, and add it back. This is decoction.
* Heat rocks and add them into the wort.
Define 'old times'?
Fresh water outsiderof cities was abundant, and inside cities there was usually a system of wells, often running water wells at that.
The coffee & alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West
High paced work environment & coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).
I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.
L-theanine
This product is excellent for energy on the go. Caffeine and l-theanine in a single pill. I keep a few in my bag. I don't know if there's anything special about this particular product. There are other ones that may be better/cheaper. But I've gone through a few bottles of it in the past years and am pleased: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MQWJYJ3
You can buy it separately but I don't see the point.
I do buy it separately. It's dirt cheap. I stir it into my coffee. Reduces caffeine jitter.
That all said, editorial time: caffeine is not awesome. It is a psychoactive substance (duh) and eventually it goes from "fun boost" to "I need this to feel normal." At least for me. I do have some every day but my goal is always to drink the smallest reasonable amount for me in order to manage my energy. Respect to people who drink 0mg.
Biggest issue I think would be making sure that there aren't any tells like flavor or some quality of the additive.
Brew identical looking bottles of cold brew. Label the bottoms 1 through whatever. Mix them up. Label the lids A through whatever. Probably need to add some creamer to mask any possible sediment. Drink from them throughout the week. Note the lid label and your reaction. At the end of the test period look at the bottoms of the bottles to correlate the controls and placebos with your experiences.
I personally don't feel the need with this particular thing though. It's a fairly pronounced difference.
It's also not really susceptible to the placebo effect IMO. Could I imagine some vague promised positive effect? Absolutely yes. Could I imagine the erasure of jitters? I don't think I could placebo that away.
Anyway as linked in another post this is well-studied.
That said:
- I'm middle aged and have had tens of thousands of cups of coffee
- The difference is pronounced, not subtle
- It's well-studied https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18296328/
FWIW, I've played around with a lot of supplements. Generally the effects are non-existent or subtle. I'm not generally given to a placebo effect wrt this kind of stuff
But caffeine and even coffee specifically seem to have positive health effects. If people are happy with 0mg they should continue that, but if people are happy with low doses of caffeine they should also continue that.
Personally I love coffee, but I limit myself to one cup a day and drink yaupon when I want more caffeine. This results in less sweating, nausea, anxiety. Supposedly yaupon should help with stress relief as well, but I doubt it's a strong enough effect to overcome learning that a new ticket is due in 5 hours.
Extremely speculative and based on nothing but pure, unadulterated dubious armchair/reddit science, but: L-theanine is a (mild) depressant/anxiolytic with reported effects not wholly unlike GABAergic substances' (benzodiazepines, pregabalin, gabapentin, phenibut, alcohol) reported effects. GABAergics modulate or increase GABA-related activity. (GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter.) L-theanine is structurally similar to glutamate (the primary excitatory neurotransmitter) and interacts with glutamate receptors in a way that inhibits their normal activity. Increasing GABA-related activity and reducing glutamate-related activity can potentially have similar "mellowing" brain effects, like the equivalency of pushing a "slow-down" button with more force and pushing a "speed-up" button with less force.
For some reason, GABAergics make some people more prone to irritability, and, in some cases, can reduce the threshold for anger and rage. Despite not being a GABAergic, I could see L-theanine potentially causing a similar effect in some people.
(To anyone with neuroscience knowledge, please feel free to address errors/leaps here.)
I've been overwhelmed by Gyokuro before...
Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.
Why didn't the caffeinated beverages stimulate the advancement of science in the countries where those plants are native from?
The enlightenment happened for the same reason that the renaissance happened. Exploration and introduction to new lands, knowledge, goods, wealth, etc. The renaissance was the result of western europe's direct connection to east ( china, india, etc ) via the mongol empire in the 1200s. The enlightenment is the result of western europe's direct connection to the americas via columbus in the late 1400s. It's not an accident that most scholars use 1500 as the boundary between the renaissance and the enlightenment.
No.
> My understanding of history is that up until like the 16th century North Africa, the Middle East, and India were global leaders in science and industry.
If anyone were 'global leaders' back then it was probably india and china but both were predominantly tea drinking societies. But there were no real global leaders of 'science and industry' back then because 'science and industry' didn't exist as we define it today and nobody had global influence. North africa hadn't been a leader of anything since the fall of ancient egypt. The middle east had it's moments of glory but far more moments of embarrassment ( european, mongol, turkish, etc conquest ).
Arguing coffee was behind the enlightenment is as silly as arguing tea is why britain conquered the world.
Not true; see Carthage. They dominated trade and seafaring, and were even the first to sail around Africa (as opposed to the Portuguese, 2,000 years later). Ancient Egypt was in its heydey 2,000 years before Carthage.
If your daily diet was previously primarily vegetables with some meat and in season fruits, and then suddenly you're having sugar with every meal, you would probably have more energy to work harder with the extra focus the caffeine provides.
https://michaelpollan.com/books/caffeine-how-coffee-and-tea-....
Citation? It sounds a lot like that's something that you find convenient to believe, perhaps because you gave up coffee and you want to tell yourself you did something good for yourself.
Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.
>Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.
For sure it is (for the reasons I described above). As for pleasure: I don't know, maybe you are the one who hates its smell, and taste, and just takes it as a medecine. It's not impossible, but it would make you an outlier.
Btw, I do consume caffeine, nicotine, and sometimes alcohol. I'm just conscious nothing of those gives me a superpower. Even though they can give a subjective feeling of superpower sometimes.
Yes, the baseline is unchanged - but it's controlled and on demand.
Here in north if we drink during lunch, we keep going.
University students are adults though, so that's not that surprising? (Well, Americans are a bit of an outlier with their 21 drinking age)
Uh...if you have to work with the public, or incompetent people, you may be driven to drink more. The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know. They do mostly leave it for after work though, because it has gotten quite easy to do sobriety tests on people that are more than subjective.
Less so in tech-heavy Utah, I imagine.
If you don't have to work in an 1800s-England-style coal mine, sure. Modern mining is a high risk occupation with stringent controls on intoxicants.
https://elpais.com/gastronomia/el-comidista/2015/11/11/artic...
In Spanish, but if you are a French speaker you might get some hints.
Ad from 1961:
https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2014/10/13/articulo/141317743...
What people here would find unbelievable is how much we drank as teenagers. I remember drinking mixes (double shot of hard liquors, like gin, with soda) as soon as 14 and they would serve us openly in bars. Different times.
Unless you are a software dev...
I'm one of those persons that think this is a luxury job.
Not buying it. Common sense has always been enough to see the downsides of alcohol. If people dont care about losing motor functioning and having a painful hangover right now they wont care about a chance they will have liver problems in 40 years.
Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.
But I think other factors came at play:
- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-...
- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.
- Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.
- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.