Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it.

Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.

Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.

> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.

Emphasis on refined sugar.

Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.

Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.

While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.

Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.

That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.

> That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic

there is no way to separate the discussion, doing so it’s just to avoid solving the issue that is to regulate refined sugar

Refined sugar is extremely concentrated compared to the natural sources. You need like 50 kilos of sugar cane to produce one kilo of refined sugar, and through multiple steps of heavy industrial processes.

You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

Sugar is literally evaporated sugar cane juice. You need a lot of cane to make a little sugar because water is heavy. "refinining" is just separating out the molasses to make it white and so the molasses can be sold separately. You only need "heavy industrial processes" to make it profitably at scale.

The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.

> You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

In the natural environment, said other ingredients would be the angry swarm of bees?

> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.

Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.

The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,

Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.

> Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

How do you go from "Sugar should be consumed in moderation" to "Sugar should be ripped out of all foods and the body doesn't need carbohydrates"?

Why jump from a reasonable and sound observation to some ridiculous extreme nobody asked for?

I interpret it to mean that we shouldn't be adding sugar to any of our foods. The natural sugar in the foods we eat is plenty.

I wouldn't even go that far. A slice of birthday cake won't kill someone. Added sugars have their place, but we shouldn't be adding them where they aren't needed and we should consume them in moderation. It's wild how much random stuff has added sugar. I've even seen deli meat with added sugar. Who is asking for corn syrup to be pumped into their roasted turkey?

In side by side taste tests more people like the version with added sugar. That’s why they add it; it sells.

> Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.

> The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

Again, the body does not :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?

Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.

> Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?

You mean, is there any evidence aside from every person who manages their diabetes through diet alone? Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?

> It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.

You seem to be confusing the ketogenic diet with starving. That's not how it works. If you deplete your fat body's stores and get hungry, you simply eat some fat and then your body will burn it for fuel. If you decide to eat much more fat than your body needs, your body will store the fat as fat. But it won't do it quite as readily as with sugar/carbs, and you won't get food cravings mere hours after eating.

> Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?

We have longer life span. We are healthier then them. And we have also bigger muscles for those fitness oriented.

That article starts with

> The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary therapy

Keto diet is low-carbs - not completely carbs free.

To split hairs, "low carb" means different things to different groups of people. Lifelong adherents of the keto diet put the limit at around 20g of carbs per day. But you can find research studies and the like where they take a normal Western diet (75-90% carbs) and reduce it to say, 60% carbs and then refer to THAT as "low carb."

It's not splitting hairs. Unless you are extremely physically active, even ~100g of carbs a day will inhibit ketosis where the liver converts fats into ketones for powering your brain and body. This is easily seen by using ketone strips to detect ketones in urine.

>The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.

Only in so much as that it will built glucose out of other things you eat if you don't eat carbs separately. Your body runs on glucose which is a carbohydrate.

Actually carbs are necessary and carbs are sugars. In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long. Personally I am not sure I am buying the narrative about fructose - but it is plausible that it might be bad - but glucose you'll have in your blood even if you don't eat any sugar - because your own body produces it if you don't get it from the food directly.

I wonder why nobody has started sweetening stuff with glucose as a 'healthy sweetener'. It is maybe 3 times more expensive than normal sugar - but I guess this is mostly because it is not a common product - cane sugar in Poland is of the same price - and the impact on the price of the end product would be marginal.

> Actually carbs are necessary

This is NOT true. Carbs are ONE form of energy that the body can use for fuel. Fat is the other one.

> people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.

I guess you're saying I don't exist?

For about 10 years, I haven't eaten carbs beyond the VERY rare cookie or two every other month and the insignificant trace amounts in above-ground leafy vegetables and the like. I'm not alone, there are lots of us who eat this way. Whole online communities, full of people who each have their own reasons. I did it for general health and fitness reasons, others do it to reverse their type 2 diabetes.

In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.

The planet used to be dotted with cultures that eat animals and fish primarily or exclusively for hundreds to thousands of years. The Inuit, Mongolian nomads, tribes in the Amazon, etc. They mostly don't exist anymore. (But not because of their diet.)

It's not a big group, but there ARE modern people who live on a carnivore diet for years on end and don't appear to suffer any notable long-term effects. Generally these are either extreme keto/paleo adherents, bodybuilders, or those who are trying to manage a medical condition.

> In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.

Read a little about this on Wikipedia, that's insane! I'm still being stubborn and halfway refusing to believe there were no bad side effects, though lol

> Angus Barbieri

So far as I can tell, he consumed yeast extract, which all my suppliers of assure me does in fact contain carbohydrates.

But perhaps Barbieri ate a special kind that didn't?

have you ever actually tried to read about indian diet on Amazon? ... it's not because they hunt(ed) fish and capybaras that you can make such a claim, go figure

i also tried to find a link for a paper here but it's been a long time but basically the population we have the smallest register of disease is an indian tribe around the coast of South America that mostly has a super high carbohydrate consumption compared to the rest of the world (will edit and comment if i find it)

edit: yeah, doubt i'll find but another counterpoint, go look at the rate of disease of Eskimos... they eat meat only!

OK - I stand corrected on the point of consuming carbs.

But our body produces glucose anyway - so consuming or not does not change much. Brain needs glucose.

> Brain needs glucose.

That is actually incorrect, just a common misconception. You might want to read up on ketogenic diets, and specifically the state of ketosis itself.

If you have an ultra-low carb diet (<30 g/day) with only moderate protein consumption (<30% of daily required calories), then the body can’t produce enough glucose to power the brain. Instead, it starts to convert fats to ketones in the liver, and the brain actually runs fine on ketones as well. Alternatively, if you’re not underweight, you can fast for 24 hours with a moderate activity level, and should enter ketosis regardless of diet (as you start converting stored body fat into ketones to power the brain).

Interestingly, you then notice that the “low blood sugar” mental haze disappears as your brain switches over to ketones, and you kinda avoid the rollercoaster between mental highs and lows throughout the day that you usually get with a carb-based diet – instead, mental energy is kinda just at a constant “medium” throughout the day. It’s also easy to measure more objectively, if you pick up a glucose monitoring device + “keto sticks” from a pharmacy.

I saw this randomly the other day - what do you make of it?

https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2020/10/excessive-ketone-me...

There are no essential carbohydrates. Essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids, yes. Essential carbohydrates, no.

> In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.

What is “long?” There are people living years on no carbs at all.

Who is living years without any carbs?

The Inuit, for starters. Oh, and me.

So far as I can tell, Inuit get about 15–20% of their calories from carbohydrates, because of all the glycogen from the raw meat they consume.

But I am only looking at summaries outside a bunch of paywalls, so I can't confirm the quotes on the wikipedia page.

People on zero carb and carnivore diets.

If you don't eat sugar directly your body will produce it. And unless you plan on eating no fruits or vegetables I can't imagine a diet devoid of all sugar.

Maybe you can't imagine it, but lots of people do it all the same.

What you are referring to would be something akin to a hyper-strict keto diet, which I think nearly all medical professionals would consider ill-advised if not outright dangerous.

There is a lot of stuff I can't eat because the amount of added sugar is disgusting.

Yeah, but even a cup of celery contains a gram of sugar. Eating "no" sugar is preposterous. You could never eat any fruits or vegetables! But lots of people avoid excess sugar, me included.

> Eating "no" sugar is preposterous.

This is relatively easy for anyone on a carnivore diet.

It's actually not hard to eat a diet that doesn't have a lot of fructose. More difficult to avoid heavily processed carbohydrates that are absorbed too quickly.

Almost correct, except sugar consumption has been declining for decades. The peak was prior to 2000 IIRC

Yeah there used to be a children’s breakfast cereal called Super Sugar Crisp and the cartoon character promoting it in commercials was named Sugar Bear. Foods in the ‘70s and ‘80s were loaded with sugar.

Pretty sure this still exists and in the US it is called "Golden Crisp". I personally always loved it :)

That is just eating disorder kind of thinking. Stop spreading it. You can eat sugar, it wont harm you. Pretty much anything harms you in super large quantities.

Sacharids are good for you in general, just like faits, protein and everything else.