Re:Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research (2016)
by nradov on Friday April 19, 2024 @01:15PM
(#40089431)
Hunter-gatherer tribes such as the Hadza get a significant fraction of their calories from honey and other simple sugars. They don't seem worse off for it.
Re:Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research (2016)
by adrian_b on Friday April 19, 2024 @02:08PM
(#40090139)
They also are so active that all the ingested fructose must be oxidized immediately, instead of being converted by the liver into fat, as it happens in the more sedentary modern people.
Re:Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research (2016)
by watwut on Friday April 19, 2024 @01:37PM
(#40089730)
Historically, they would not had that many vegetables available to eat daily either. Likewise, meat was quite expensive. In quite a lot of places, beans and such vegetable proteins were not available all that much on regular basis. Majority of contemporary diets, including keto, vegan, vegetarian were impossible or expensive. Raising bees for honey is not a new thing by any standard.
Another thing is that historically, malnutrition was a thing, not just something rare. The people would be getting serious diseases or be dying because of this or that missing in the food, there were whole epidemics of diseases that basically do not exist anymore.
The physiological effects of starch, which is composed only of glucose, are very different from the effects of sugar, half of which is fructose.
Until about two hundred years ago, all the sources of concentrated sugar, i.e. honey, cane sugar, dried fruits and boiled fruit juice were very expensive in comparison with other kinds of food and very few people could afford to eat them more frequently than a few times per year, at more important holidays.
Almost nobody could eat food with high content of sugar every day, like most people do now.
The availability of sugar or glucose-fructose mixtures that are cheaper than almost any other kind of food, so they are now added to reduce the cost of industrially-processed food, is a very recent phenomenon.