I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
More recently, I'm starting to apply this to meat as well. I really enjoy meat, but I'm not one for quantity since I'm on the skinnier side. So I'm trying to enjoy meat more, and in doing so, get better quality, prepare it better, etc. while at the same time eating less of it. This is still a work in progress, and eating in restaurants can be challenging as they usually favor quantity over quality—except for the very high-end & costly places.
I think for meat especially, there's a difference between the stuff people talk about (like premium steaks they almost never eat) and the reality of what ends up on their plates which is a lot less glamorous.
A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one. For me the cheap and nasty stuff is easy to skip on a daily basis and it's not like I eat the expensive premium stuff that often anyway. I love a good steak, but I don't splurge on paying 3x the other items on the menu when I'm at a restaurant typically. Which is what it takes typically to get a nice premium cut of meat.
I do enjoy cooking with meat but I'll make an effort to make the most of it. E.g. I made a nice beef stew over the weekend. That's a bit of of work and a humble/affordable cut of meat. And very tasty.
If you like Indian food, try having or making a dal. As it turns out, Indians know a thing or two about making very tasty vegan food from cheap/simple ingredients. And this can as nice as some chicken curry with a few chunks of cheap chicken that is maybe a bit overcooked and dry (I've been served that in many Indian restaurants). Those curries actually still taste fine if you don't eat those chunks of meat. And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India. Fridges are a fairly recent novelty too.
And the meat doesn't even add a lot of flavor; they just add it last minute typically. Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat. The only difference between eating meat or vegan in such places is literally what protein is added to the dish at the last minute. The rest is basically vegan or vegetarian by default.
Anyway, I skip sugary drinks mostly. And I've cut down on my alcohol intake as well. Most of what I drink has basically very little or no calories.
Most of my remaining food challenges are unhealthy snacks, unnecessary carbs and the temptations of unhealthy restaurant food, or late night shopping in super markets and the associated bad decision making.
Restaurants bulk out their dishes with carbs and they make things taste good by adding salt and fats. It's hard to eat healthy in restaurants. So, I try to limit my restaurant food intake. And like with meat, most of the restaurants people visit aren't actually that great anyway. At least where I work, Michelin stars are not a thing for the typical lunch options. Quite the opposite actually. I'm only an OK cook but I can cook tastier/better versions of a lot of the shit I get served in places like that. It's not that hard.
I recently actually started just skipping lunch entirely at work mainly for this reason and I'm training myself out of having a Pavlovian craving for food just because the clock says so. I don't actually need the calories. Or the post lunch dip in productivity. I especially don't need the lousy food choices imposed by that one person that wants to go to the burger place. There's a lot of group thinking inspiring unhealthy choices around lunch time. I took part in that for years. It's stupid when you think about it and I've suffered the health consequences as well. There's a cumulative effect if you do that for a few decades.
Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “If you eat at any good restaurant, assume you've eaten a stick of butter.”
The "Big Mac Attack" is real. I used to get one about every six months or so. Then I would eat a Big Mac, and the attack would be sated, but the GI discomfort reminded me of why I don't get Big Mac Attacks more often.
These days I just avoid fast food. I live in a part of the country that's actually rather persnickety about good food, and there are much fresher options available nearby that are rather cheap. Plus I'm stocked up on low-carb soups, lunch meats, and other yummies most of the time now.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime.
My dad used to tell me stories about roadside chili houses in Texas. They kept a big pot of chili constantly going, and added whatever meat they could find, together with beans, spices, etc. to keep the pot full as the chili was served to customers. Roadkill was, supposedly, one of the most convenient sources of meat for the pot.
> Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
First, while there are a lot of tasty Indian vegetarian dishes, vegan food is decidedly not a cultural thing. We use butter and ghee pretty commonly in food: definitely not vegan. India is the world's largest milk producer; also not vegan. That dal you refer to will often have a "tadka" of ghee and spices on top. The "dal makhani" - another popular restaurant dish - literally means "buttered dal".
And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
> Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat.
If it's India, you're talking about, you're unlikely to find tofu being used in a restaurant. Paneer is made from milk, so...not vegan. Maybe restaurants abroad do it differently.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
OK, this annoying canard is the worst. [1] Spices and meat used to be both historically expensive. A bit of research will tell you that. You know, that whole "spice trade" thing. Malaysian, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, food also use spices and they're not vegetarian cultures at all. (For that matter, only some 30% of Indians are vegetarians, despite the stereotype, but that's a discussion for another day.)
TL;DR India has lots of good vegetarian food, but hardly any of us are vegans.
A. Is it ok to eat a cow if someone else raise the cow?
B. Is it ok to eat milk raised by someone else
C. Is it ok to 'milk' a stray cows while they looks skinny?
D. How do they regards the calves needed once in a while for milk production?
E. Does Hindus only eat chicken (and so) but no milk while muslims eat everything?
F. Where goes the dead free roaming cows cadavers? Is there enough vultures?
Note I'm not trying to find logical incoherencies or logical fallacies, I'm very aware there's many think that can been seen as inconsistant or very consistent depending on your knowledge on a subject - which is never 100% reachable.
Some years ago I fell into a Youtube rabbit hole of British Indian Restaurants. (Actually most seemed Bangladeshi) In Britian Indian cuisine has a far more "takeout" status. Hence BI restaurants started to deconstruct popular dishes into components which can be prepared in advance and combined into different dishes. It may not be original but I found the process of adaptation rather fascinating.
(Here in Germany it seems rather worse. Also takeout status, but I suspect a lot of takeout orders are simply microwaved stuff.)
I actually make ghee myself sometimes from butter (easy and a lot cheaper than buying it from the super market).
A lot of (british) indian restaurants use cooking oil instead and I'm well aware that that's not the same as what people in India would consider Indian food and that something like a Tikka Massala is not actually a thing you'd find in a proper restaurant in India; which is a country I've never been to and would love to go to to experience the food.
But anyway, a lot of these restaurants use cooking oil because it's cheaper and because it makes everything they cook with that vegan by default. Which at least in places with a lot of vegans is a nice feature.
Here in Berlin, finding decent Indian food is a bit of a challenge in any case. Germans are hopeless with spicy food. And I know only a few Indian places that add more than homeopathic amounts of chili. Most of the Indian restaurants in the more touristy spots are owned by one family and those aren't great. I've gotten some tips from Indian colleagues over the years for better options.
Anyway a lot of dals indeed don't use a lot of spices or flavoring. And that's just sidestepping all the different regions and food styles. Which are a thing as well of course.
As for Malaysian/Indonesian style cuisine; I'm Dutch and got exposed to a lot of the Dutch Indonesian food which, similar to British Indian food is not really that authentic. Lots of meat in there indeed. And quite spicy.
Same thing happened to me at probably around the same time. I realized I could just have a lollypop, and it would be a tenth of the sugar. Most of the sweetness in soda doesn't even get a chance to touch your tongue before it's going down your throat. If I want candy, I should just have a piece of candy. If I'm thirsty, I should have a glass of water.
Also, the carbonation in soda enables them to get twice the sugar into it. Drinking a flat soda is like drinking maple syrup.
Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
> Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
No. People live on no-carb diets just fine and enter ketosis. (And in any case, the comment you replied to only talked about sugar, not carbs in general.)
'A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.'
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2989112/
It is of course rather difficult if not impossible, to have a vegetable diet completely devoid of carbohydrates.
Alas, it doesn't have much bearing on the part of the comment I wanted to focus on 'You have to have carbs for your brain to run.' Because the diets in question here still have some carbs. (And the changes in mortality rates are fairly modest, too.)
What I wanted to say is that even if you eat no carbs at all, you brain will still get its energy. You won't just keel over after a while, like if you didn't eat anything at all henceforth.
Of course, there might be second order health effects, like the study you linked suggest.
So any argument based on “it worked for our ancestors” is flawed.
“It worked for our ancestors” could be the beginning of an idea for research, but certainly does not take you much further than that.
"You have to have carbs for your brain to run" doesn’t make sense. You have to have sugar in your brain to run, but that sugar surely can comes from fat as well.
There are other metabolic pathways to produce glucose (or produce ketones). The other pathways ‘push’ the body more since they have to do some conversion. This ‘extra effort’ is considered to be more healthy.
If you have any sense for your health you will not have regular intake of sugar, white bread, potatoes crisps, rice cakes, any thing with a high GI.
Some carbohydrates reduce your risk of diabetes, and if you're smart you follow the evidence and you eat these-
The brain can run well on ketone bodies (which the liver makes from fatty acids). In fact, causing the brain to run on ketone bodies is used by doctors to treat illness (and not just epilepsy).
If I have soda cravings, I can take a single Tic Tac. It doesn't satisfy my soda cravings, but crucially, it prevents the soda itself from satisfying those same cravings if I do subsequently drink it.
Usually I crave soda after a high salt/fried food. Giving myself a tiny amount of sugar (Tic Tac has 0.5g) removes the salt/fried taste, and I just can't get the good soda effect I know I would have gotten without the Tic Tac. There just isn't a point for me to take soda after a Tic Tac.
So yes, substituting a small amount of sugar for a large one can be very effective.
Be aware that a lot of candy has similar amounts of sugar. M&M packets have even more.
A 12oz coke has 39g of sugar. A 20oz bottle of coke is 65g.
Coke isn't close to the worst offender and this ignores soda at restaurants when 28oz is often the smallest you can buy
True but you can get 250ml cans in most grocery stores.
Also, there are plenty of places I shop at where the smallest Hershey's bar or M&M packet is the King/share size one. The M&M one has 57g of sugar.
Difficulty in buying smaller portions is not unique to soda.
I will sometimes have a ginger ale, from time to time, when I'm eating out, and usually won't finish it, but I otherwise, don't drink soda, anymore.
yep. The can of soda has something like 10 spoons of sugar. In that volume i stop feeling the difference after 2nd-3rd spoon of sugar. I do drink soda - by diluting it about 1:5. For the pastries and other bakery products - it does depends where it comes from. The standard American bakery sill puts a lot of sugar into pastries, cakes, bread (especially the fast-rise), etc. while some of the ones trying to do European style do use sugar more moderately (they also usually use more fat like butter thus making the taste better, more balanced, and probably also thus more healthy - my personal impression/opinion - as the more balanced content (fat/carbs vs. low-fat-high-sugar approach somehow more popular in the American bakery) seems to me to be better).
For me I was absolutely shocked at how a soda being sugar free didn't have to imply it was like drinking horse piss. I had tried Diet Coke a few times and assumed that was what you had to deal with if you went sugar free. One day someone gave me a Coke Zero and it was actually not bad, even if not quite being as good as Coke. This led me to try some others like Dr Pepper Zero Sugar for which I thought "what the hell, this tastes better than Dr Pepper???".
Obviously which are better will vary by person and most people will, overall, like sodas with actual sugar more often but if everyone tried a few different options they might be surprised how little they'd have to trade down on the soda for, if anything, to drastically drop their sugar intake.
Is this a normal soda consumption levels in humans or when feeding it to rats at some obscene rate?
I'm not saying it is good for you, but we need facts not blind statements with no context.
> We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage
I’d be glad to see the full paper
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25231862/
> normal soda consumption levels in humans
I note that "normal" here should be read as "common during the last 50years (or less)", where the last 50ears is quite reductive in human dietary habits.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265791239_Artificia...
I would be very reluctant to read too deep into this given saccharin is known to behave very differently in animal models - for a long time it was thought to cause bladder cancer, but follow up studies proved that it’s an idiosyncratic reaction only found in female lab rats and no other gender/species combination. Not to mention the dose used was unrealistic to begin with.
It’s entirely plausible that sugar analogs like sucralose and non-calorific sugar alcohols such as erythritol and maltitol can cause long term changes in the gut biome but high quality evidence is still lacking.
Research suggests a link to cancer. It'd be bad for your microbiome if you die.
We are increasingly moving away from looking at fat as an indulgence, towards understanding it as an essential nutrient, with a large variance in fat types and their benefits. E.g. some people would avoid eating nuts, because they are high in fat, and not as tasty as something similarly fatty, like a pastry. This seems wrong both intuitively, but also from empirical findings about the impact of certain omega-3 fatty acids (such as in nuts) versus that of, say, omega-6 fats, which are way overrepresented in our diets due to being so cheap.
But society didn't replace some of the fat with increased intake of vegetables and lean meats.
Food manufacturers compensated for less fat with more sugars and salt, which we've been finding are even worse.
If this is true then what the hell is going on? We knew this about sugar with certainly at absolute minimum a half century ago when I was a kid (I know as I remember the message).
The message—even as told at school—was that 'excessive and repeated amounts of sugar (especially the refined type as in drinks and sweets) causes diabetes'. QED!
So what the fuck has happened, how was this once well-established message erased from the collective consciousness of more recent generations?
The message back then was so all pervasive that everybody knew it.
So many important facts have been lost to recent generations that I'm beginning to think education is going backwards fast. What happened to health lectures in primary school where we were told these facts?
We had a lot of evidence for sugar causing weight gain. And higher weight is strongly correlated with type II diabetes. But from a public health standpoint, we were worried about fats. We realized that many fats caused health problems even without weight gain and also viewed fats as having a more primary role in weight gain.
It's only recently (in the last couple of decades) that we've gotten evidence that sugar on its own can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes--even if you are of normal weight.
OK. But first let me say most of what follows about health I learned in the 1960s, back then it was common knowledge and discussed in schools, newspaper reports and on radio talk shows, etc. As I was reasonably healthy I wasn't given any special advice or instructions so the info I received was essentially the same as everybody else.
The big questions are how strong or irrefutable does evidence have to be before we act on it or take it seriously, and what disruptive factors interfere with our considerarion of said evidence. It's probably best to illustrate this with a couple of examples from when I was at school. Around that time carbon tetrachloride/CCl4 was commonly used in dry cleaning shops and one could wiff it as one passed by. It was also the time when health worries about using CCl4 for cleaning became a prominent issue and phasing it out for safer alternatives started.
In highschool chemistry we were instructed that CCl4 was toxic and to avoid getting it on one's skin and not to breathe its fumes. This led some kids including myself to ask why is it toxic when it's so inert (with four Cl atoms and no hydrogen versus say DCM/CH2Cl2—with its two hydrogens DCM would be more reactive, thus it would seem to be more harmful but whilst still harmful it's less so). The teacher said he wasn't sure why CCl4 was so harmful but went on to say it affects the liver and probably has something to do with upsetting fats as they are very soluble in it, he did not mention it was a likely carcinogen. We accepted that answer.
Then there was the matter of benzene/C6H6, he said it was very toxic and a known carcinogen, and it could be absorbed through the skin and its vapors breathed in. To make matters worse it is often a constituent of other solvents and fuels, gasoline for instance. He stressed repeatedly that we must handle it carefully and take precautions especially so if we were to become chemists as we'd likely have access to it more frequently and in higher concentration than most others. I still recall him holding up a small sealed bottle of it while he spoke about it.
This raised similar questions as to why C6H6 was dangerous whilst many compounds containing benzene rings are either not poisonous or are much less so than benzene (and of course some are even more so).
This is where the teacher was out of is depth and said we're not toxicology experts so we just have to accept the evidence that many of these chemicals are dangerous and especially so benzene. He then went on to state a general safety rule that we should always apply which is to treat all aromatics, petroleum-like chemicals (which back then also contained Pb/TEL) and chlorinated hydrocarbon compounds as toxic, dangerous and flammable. This applies to everyone, not just chemists—painters and industrial workers are also at risk of exposure to many different types of volatile solvents. That and related safety mantra was drummed into us often.
That general rule I've applied ever since and I'm still a living member of this planet despite the fact that I've used many different toxic solvents over the years.
The point of all that is we are often not fully aware of the dangers of these chemicals but there is a 'smoking gun' that manifests out of observation and statistics, that is the harm they've caused to others. Even back in the '60s when the biochemistry of chemicals such as CCl4 and C6H6 was much less well understood than today toxicologists and biochemists considered the causal link between past exposure to them and illness strong enough to warn and where necessary act to minimize harm. Definitive proof wasn't need to act.
Similar but less forceful instructions were applied to smoking. Back then cancer was hardly mentioned (despite evidence from the early '50s of the link) but we were told at school not to smoke because we would likely get lung disease which would shorten our lives. (BTW, I don't smoke.)
And there was a similar message with NaCl. 'Do not use or put too much salt on your food' was a common lecture of the time from both parents and teachers—'you'll get hardened arteries and high blood pressure if you do.' Moreover, this understanding was around long before I was born yet in the 1980s some authorities modified this to say it only applied to a percentage of the population who were susceptible and that most of us didn't have to worry about our salt intake levels. This dangerous message was reversed in the '90s. One wonders how much damage it caused. A question remains about how this wrong and corrupt message took hold in the first instance when the 'facts' as stated were so evidently wrong (so contrary to longstanding evidence).
I'd note it seems not much has changed since the reversal as so much commercially prepared food still contains hugh amounts of salt. Forget health effects for a moment, I find much of this food too salty for my liking and in some instances it's just too salty for me to eat.
On the matter of fat, you're right. By the 1960s fat was a hot ropic mainly because it was linked to heart disease. I recall in our household my father switching to margarine which later turned out to be questionable but the rest of us continued to use butter, albeit sparingly. My mother always discouraged heavy butter usage and spread it thinly. With meat-based soups etc. she'd always let them settle and skim off the fat. Same with fried foods, they'd be patted with paper towels to remove any excess fat (note she was not faddish about the practice because she was concerned about getting fat—she was naturally skinny—but rather because she was following long-held advice). I say that because my mother's concern with fat long predated the 1960s fat scare as my grandmother did exactly the same. Clearly my mother had learned the 'dangers' of fat from her mother so that meme goes back at least a century I'd reckon.
No doubt misleading information from vested commercial interests pressured much of society to act not in its best interests but two things stand out in these debates. The first is why the medical profession, health departments, statisticians, etc. didn't speak out in unison and with more force as it would have saved many lives (and on evidence they still don't do so). Medical statistics alone ought to have been a sufficient smoking gun for governments to act, but they didn't.
Second, education in these matters from a young age by both parents and schools is essential. In my case, one thing stands out which is that we kids were not only told what was bad for us but also we were given clear reasons for why they were so. Logical reasons for why we should act in our best interests are much more effective than some nebulous edict without explanation saying 'don't do it'.
I am still unclear as to exactly why these health messages became so derailed from around the 1970s onwards. It's always been clear to me that health issues surrounding fats and sugar were always separate despite them having many common factors and interactions. So why was such a simple notion so hard to explain to a lay public? (I have my theories but I'll leave them for now.)
With sugar we kids were taught all the usual facts at school: rotting teeth, getting fat and the risk of diabetes, but perhaps what made those facts sink in and last a lifetime was that as the same time we were taught the heroic story of how Charles Best and Frederick Banting separated insulin in 1922 and immediately saved lives. This history was even more poignant to us as one our classmates had type-1 diabetes and it was obvious to all that he wouldn't be alive but for them. Both facts sharpened our minds about the dangers of high sugar intake.
Again, for me it seems something went wrong with the education system, and it was made worse when professionals went off course and changed health messages midstream, they made the disaster worse.
Public health decided dietary fat was the big problem to focus on, despite imperfect evidence. Three things screwed this all up:
* Dietary fat wasn't nearly as bad as everyone thought, because eating lots of fats was correlated with lots of other negative lifestyle choices. * It looks like dietary sugar was actually worse than the evidence of the time said. * Policymakers didn't understand that an emphasis on reducing fats would cause food chemists and others to add more sugars and salt to food to make it more palatable.
In the end, we need to go where the evidence points. The earlier evidence that was hopelessly confounded was much more clear that fats and salt are universally bad; later evidence painted a much more ambiguous picture. It is so dang hard to measure what actually happens in real populations.
> With sugar we kids were taught all the usual facts at school: rotting teeth, getting fat and the risk of diabetes,
And the last we only have evidence of in the past couple of years, and it's relatively weak evidence.
> but perhaps what made those facts sink in and last a lifetime was that as the same time we were taught the heroic story of how Charles Best and Frederick Banting separated insulin in 1922 and immediately saved lives. This history was even more poignant to us as one our classmates had type-1 diabetes and it was obvious to all that he wouldn't be alive but for them. Both facts sharpened our minds about the dangers of high sugar intake.
Well, sugar intake isn't a risk factor or cause of type 1 diabetes.
Perhaps so, but it turned out to be good advice—I heeded the advice and have always limited my sugar and salt intake. As I said, at what point or how much evidence is need to heed such advice. Leaving it until factually certain could mean it's too late.
"Well, sugar intake isn't a risk factor or cause of type 1 diabetes."
That was known at the time (and to me also—in fact to all of us). The instance further highlighted the sugar/diabetes issue as we kids actually knew someone who had diabetes and who had to inject insulin (even if we didn't have diabetes, we knew we could still develop it and that excessive sugar would likely be the cause).
The thought of having to inject insulin daily focused our minds. That seems obvious doesn't it?
This is like a Pascal's wager. There's a bazillion things we could be doing that there's a little evidence for or a plausible explanation. And we can't do them all, or believe in every God, or whatever.
And even things that we had a lot of evidence for (like dietary fat) turned out to be harmful when given as public health advice.
In the end, things are tricky. Best to do whatever seems like it's reasonably careful to you, and for science to try and figure more of this out and decide the best things to give advice on.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...
Also, it's "obvious" (but completely wrong) that if you don't want to be fat, you shouldn't eat fat.
So "low-fat" products were (still are...) sold as a "diet" option. In fact processed carbs, and sugar in particular, are a far more direct cause of weight gain.
Fats do contribute to weight gain, but they're much more complicated. Sat vs unsat, trans vs ordinary, and so on all have very different health effects.
Put directly, the sugar industry lied and is now responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
Frankly, the dishonesty of the Sugar Industry and the effects of its deception are utterly appalling. Tragically, this industry is not alone in deceiving both public and supposedly august (professional) authority—the tobacco industry is yet another, and there are many more.
The question I keep asking myself is why are both experts and governments so easily hoodwinked by these miserable Cretans when it's not that difficult to see though or undermine their bad arguments. Scratch the surface of false and or propped up arguments and they quickly fall apart. If any key proposition is proven false then it's likely the whole argument/case is a sham.
With regard to sugar, I'd have thought the long history of diabetes together with patient histories and their lifestyles ought to have been enough evidence alone to bring the Sugar Industry edifice down. No doubt the playing field wasn't level.
Re the Guardian article in your link, why for example was the author of Pure, White, and Deadly, John Yudkin so ostracized by his professional colleagues? If they had his or similar training and had checked the evidence then they would have known that he was correct and come to his defense. Given the enormous implications—the death of millions—they all should have been up in arms against the Sugar Industry, but they didn't act.
In a way I hold these professionals almost as culpable as the Industry itself. I've asked myself for years what motivates people to be such utter bastards (trouble is one of my subjects was philosophy but unfortunately I didn't study its other half—psychology, perhaps if I had I'd be somewhat the wiser).
You've mentioned millions dead, little doubt this is correct, although it'd be good to firm up those numbers with factual evidence. Perhaps over time AI could crunch the numbers together with all relevant docs and history and we could end up with a statistically accurate number of deaths together with error bars.
A definitive number of deaths would put an actual measure on the Sugar Industry's culpability and those companies still in business would be forever tarnished. But to conclude the Sugar Industry alone is responsible for the harm and deaths is not good enough, we also need to link to those people who were actually responsible. Whether dead or alive we need to tarnish and destroy their reputations as a lesson for others. These corporate bullies need to learn that they can no longer hide behind corporate walls.
This is not the first time this week I've raised this matter, if interested see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42629712. Also, note its thread below. Incidentally, the post received both up and down votes and currently stands at just one vote. It seems the notion of holding those responsible to account isn't overly popular with a significant percentage of the population. Perhaps guilt racks too many and this could be part of the reason why so many professionals failed to come to John Yudkin's defence.
I've also posted a similar rave about this in reply to mlyle.
I will conceed that's not how science or the cause and effect works, but that's what I and everyone around me thought.
Started setting aside the coins he was using at the vending machine and at the end of the week would get a bar from a higher quality brand at the grocery store. Learned he really liked dark chocolate. Started upgrading to nicer and nicer chocolate. Last I heard from him he was going to some of the bougie chocolate shops downtown every few months.
What people and scientists haven't been saying in any meaningful way is the truth that carbohydrate poisoning is a real thing. If you eat too much, its harmful.
Its common knowledge that medicines may become poisons when taken in too high amounts. This applies to most things in this area.
Protein poisoning is fairly easily discovered in the scientific literature, why isn't carbohydrate poisoning? Its a conundrum.
Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though. Too many potatoes and whole grains, for example, aren't poisoning you. More people should be replacing junk food with those things.
It's just a fad to use "carbs" as a euphemism for "junk food" and it only further confuses the discourse about nutrition.
It's not always about a certain boogeyman inside it, but whether it makes it easy to overeat and whether it pays its rent in nutritional content.
Consider potato chips. Even if they have zero saturated fat, the issue most people have with them is that they are hyperpalatable and low nutritional value compared to their calorie density. Combine fat and salt and certain textures, and we can't stop ourselves. Trying to blame a macronutrient like carbs doesn't make much sense to me.
Add in bad ingredients like saturated fat and the problem becomes multifaceted, but it's not necessary for individual ingredients to be bad for us for a food to have its downsides.
e.g. consider: A baked potato, with salt and butter vs. an equivalent weight of potato chips. They are essentially identical post-mastication, except one is 'junk food' and 'ultra-processed' and the other is quintessential home cooking. What system do I use to rank them if they are in fact not identical?
[0] What (or combination of whats) at a structural/chemical level in a food causes the harm, and by what biochemical/psychological/psychosomatic pathway(s) does said harm occur?
I find myself leaning heavily in the other direction these days. If it's not something that has a long history and (I'm not already dying anyway), I'll pass. If I lose out on some benefits because of that, so be it.
Speaking for myself, its a matter of how my brain works. Setting aside rational considerations like cost-benefit analysis or Bayesian likelihoods: if there isn't a generalizable logic to 'what (is harmful)' and 'how (it is)' I just get a 404.
It's not that I don't (or do) believe potatoes chips are harmful it's that the e.g. statement 'ultra-processed foods are bad for you' is literally devoid of meaning. Might as well be baby-speak.
As such, any attempt to incorporate that information[0] into my decision making process goes nowhere: I can't categorize a food as to it's degree of ultra processed-ness nor can I assess whether another foods/foods/etc might cause harm like UPF's are purported to do. Ergo: no basis for a behavioral modification, no new pros or cons to weigh.
[0]not even getting into the reliability of e.g. a paper's conclusions
So I guess my question is what are your defaults? What is your unmodified behavior?
There is a package on the shelf, you only know what it says on the box, what you've seen on commercials, and maybe you've seen/heard of other people eating its contents. What's the decision tree for this scenario?
What I 'know' can be more or less completely summed as: I need to eat ~2500 calories per day, +/- 100 calories being 1/35th of a lb or so
I should eat ~1g/kg to 1g/lb lean body mass in protein to avoid losing muscle mass
I need to eat/drink enough salts/electrolytes to replace what is lost through perspiration
I need to eat enough of various micronutrients (e.g. Vitamin C) to avoid specific deficiencies.
[0]My understanding of what has been meaningfully proven/characterized with a 'to me' significant impact/effect.
In the end the body realizes it didn't get the nutrition it needed so I sends out a notice "eat more".
But we never get an explanation from them as to what exactly is IN the junk food or ultra-processed food that causes the disease.
You don't get it, because 1. there is something VERY CLEARLY wrong with it, and 2. what is wrong with it is at odds with what is hammered into them over and over.
No, I know it does, but it doesn't properly communicate the relationship with correct words, where other related subjects do. Instead it dances about with a disconnection, I would guess because of the sugar and health industry lobby.
The medical definition of poisoning is generally defined as injury or death due to swallowing, inhaling, touching or injecting of various substances.
Disease can be considered as an injury when it refers to a condition that develops gradually over time due to repeated exposure or stressors.
> Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though
Carbohydrates are in the potatoes, but are not the potatoes.
There are contextual limits when you associate specific things into a unique word definition, potatoes (unless green, or unsafely handled), would not be poisonous because they have a finite amount of components that our bodies can handle, and it would be quite hard if not impossible to eat sufficient amounts given biological limits and rates inherent in structure.
A concentrated chemical solution of simple carbohydrates in reduced liquid form that absorbs more quickly than your pancreas can handle on the other hand would be different.
When you exceed safe operating limits, this can cause injury, and that may show up, or present as symptoms of disease.
I would have responded sooner but apparently when posts get downvoted, it automatically applies a strict QoS filter that won't let the poster respond at all.
Not a very reasonable thing to do for a rational-minded community, for something as tame as what I said.
That system structure almost always trends eventually towards collectivist sock-puppetry opinion with the mob silencing others based solely on individual mass hallucination. Not very scientific, and at the same time eliminates requirements needed for intelligent thoughts.
In order to learn you must be able to risk being offended. In order to think, you must be able to risk being offensive. In order to share the benefits of either broadly, you must be able to communicate.
Without these inherent strengths skewing towards survival, its just a matter of time and circumstance before losing the fight against extinction.
The concept that sugar leads to diabetes is not exactly news at 11. But articles like this are helpful in moving the popular mindset.
Personally though I'd avoid the term "poison". Mostly because it's a very long-term effect, whereas people use "poison" in general usage more as a short term thing (rat poison versus feeding rats carbs till they get diabetes).
Secondly calling it "poison" is far outside normal understanding and so you become the "nutter" in the conversation. Which then devalues the valid points you have to make.
I say this as someone in your camp. While your body certainly needs some carbohydrates its safe to assume everyone is getting enough. Nobody needs sugar though, and removing as much of that as possible from daily diet will have big impacts in the long term.
For me that doesn't mean 'never sugar'. It means cake at celebrations, ice-cream once a month, eating "normally" when at restaurants (which is probably less than once a month) and so on.
The goal is not to be "perfect" the goal is to improve one step at a time. Coffee without sugar? Check. No daily, or weekly, sugar sodas or fruit juice? Check. And so on.
Small changes introduced slowly over time become the new normal, and that leads to sustained improvements.
(This is also done with various flavor essences from the juice, so they can recombine them in such a way as to produce a uniform flavor all throughout the year regardless of where the fruits are coming from.)
> It should be clearly indicated when a product is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
Not perfect but at least you can’t just say it’s fruit juice.
> 4. For fruit juices which have been sweetened by the addition of sugars, the sales name shall include the word "sweetened" or "with added sugar", followed by an indication of the maximum quantity of sugar added, calculated as dry matter and expressed in grams per litre. [1]
> A claim stating that sugars have not been added to a food, and any claim likely to have the same meaning for the consumer, may only be made where the product does not contain any added mono- or disaccharides or any other food used for its sweetening properties. [2]
Coming from a country of impenetrable legalese everywhere, I find these regulations very refreshing, they are incredibly easy to read and always straight to the point.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_0...
Giving up sweetened drinks and learning to cook healthy foods from scratch have been my most effective lifestyle changes.
<https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/agave-nectar-is-even-wo...>
Stevia would be a non-sugar-based sweetener, though it does have a distinctly different taste.
I'd learned to drink coffee with milk/cream, no sugar. With decent beans (Trader Joe's Bay Blend, e.g., nothing fancy) and a Moka pot that's more than sufficient.
I think a lot of people go espresso at home, but I do think that's an extremely difficult thing to transition to consuming black unless you're really into the hobby of it all and have adjusted. It's just really intense, which naturally blends well with the fats and sugars in dairy, especially with most espresso roasts being darker. If I personally go espresso, it's either a latte or black Americano.
I don't add sugar to my coffee either.
Unfortunately, I add 100 calories of crap to it. But I drink it slower than Coke and it’s at least half the calories of a 32oz (my other vise). I use it as a way to lower my calorie count, just a little.
If you ever want to try and ease off both those vices, I'd simply recommend buying a McDonalds coffee, buying a Starbucks Blonde Americano, and then taking them home and brewing a cup of the folgers instant with no additions. Get someone to pour them into identical cups, and have them play a shell game (move the cups around to hide which ones they are), then try them back and forth. Try to avoid anything with sugar in it for a few hours before. I bet you'll pick out some differences and maybe even like them, then if you want to try and delete the sugar from your coffee, avoid it in exchange for black coffee for at least a few months. It's not as hard as it seems, but it does take some time.
Then if you like, play around with easy home brewing methods like french press or pour over, grinding beans etc.. those were probably the most impactful things I tried when I went on the same journey. Grinding recently roasted beans before brewing was eye opening. I honestly didn't believe black coffee could be palatable, and was drinking Folgers with half and half from the big red can for ages.
What I don't like is "Church Coffee", where it has brewed within an inch of its life and is the darkest, most bitter/burned flavor that ever existed.
I can definitely tell the differences between different coffees or teas or bread etc. The range for wine isn't that large. And that's not just in 'quality', but also just in less variety than eg (craft) beers or breads.
Drinking black coffee only has been difficult though, even with more expensive coffee (I'm not sure what's considered higher quality necessarily, but I have an espresso machine and I'm grinding whole beans for brands of coffee that websites claim are good)
I personally do not enjoy espresso on its own enough to invest in that sort of equipment, and am fine just getting that periodically at a cafe.
Anyone recommending any particular coffee on the internet should qualify it with their brewing method and personal preferences, because some people like a french press, some people like espresso, or aeropress, or pourover, for various reasons, and none are better than any other, but some people like the intensity of straight espresso, and some people like what you'd call drip/filter coffee, which would be a classic cone that you drip water through.
Likewise, among "high quality" coffee, there's a world of variety. Many great South American beans lean into chocolatey, but some end up quite sweet and fruity, while east african or indonesian beans can pretty much taste like candy. Quality usually refers to "grade", which is more technical and I'm not too well versed on, but to me it means how well the roasted product reveals the potential of a well-selected batch. Sounds a bit pretentious, but basically if you like bitters or cocoa or milk or dark chocolate, high quality beans will make that very enjoyable, both because it was a good crop from the right region, and because the roaster did their job by leaving enough of the sugars and moisture in the bean throughout the roasting process. It's worth experimenting with all of this.
If it doesn't taste that good, it can be because any of those other variables are off, or the blend that the roaster chose to make wasn't a good selection; they might have chosen to mix a brazillian with an east african and got the balance wrong for your taste, or it's too bitter because they roasted it too long, or it might just be stale, or you just don't like it because it's not your vibe.
Right now, I'm doing pour overs with a Hario Switch or V60 dripper and use a modest grinder. It's a pretty standard and inexpensive setup, the dripper usually comes in plastic or glass, and I get beans that are roasted in the neighbourhood within the month for about ~$10USD or sometimes more, and often they'll be an african or columbian blend. It costs me very little and is a simple pleasure. This is probably what I'd recommend if you were looking to play around, it's cheap and would require only the most marginal of equipment changes. It admittedly did take me a long time to taper off the cream and milk, I'd get it from McDonalds or whatever, but now I can even drink that stuff black pretty easily, but it's nearly impossible to tolerate if you're just side-by-side comparing with a coffee+milk mix, the contrast is too harsh.
I do still drink an occasional soda fwiw, and enjoy a latte, but now that I've figured out how to find and make good black coffee, there's no turning back. I'd rather the sugar come from a dessert.
The best tasting coffee beans I found for the manual grinder / pourover setup was Mayorga brand Mayan Blend coffee (Medium Roast), which you can get on Amazon. Although even then I was putting a little half and half in there.
There's not too many neighborhood coffee roasters nearby (there's only one non-chain coffee shop near us, it's a bit of a dead zone). If I drive half an hour or more I start to have some choices though (three places if I drive 30 minutes, a couple more if I drive further), so at some point I should make the drive (or go a little out of my way when I'm roughly in that area for some other errand).
The best time to stop eating sugar is yesterday. I wish I hadn't fucked up my body so much with sugar.
Going back to it, I think the need to simplify things was key for me. We are bombarded with so many choices, especially in our food products which I've described as the Breakfast Cereal Problem in the past. There are simply too many to consider them all with each shopping trip, so you are almost forced to just make one arbitrary choice and live with it unless you want to be paralyzed in the grocer aisle. None of the choices really offer a significant value or weight over the others, each cereal promising the same thing; to be part of a balanced breakfast, that Gestalt puzzle created by marketers to kick off our day.
Once you step back from that world, it does seem miserably pointless and the same can be said for the SSB's in the article. But on a deeper level, it says something about the stresses we introduce into our lives by chasing too many choices. I can't remember which of his books he mentions this in, but Richard Feynman seemed to have the same realization when struggling to decide what to get for dessert in restaurants. Eventually, be just settled on chocolate cake so he didn't have to make that decision anymore. That stuck with me for some reason, more than any concerns about how soda or whatever might be affecting my blood sugar, pushing me in the direction of just going with the more ubiquitous alternative; water.
Plus with soda at $4USD a pop in most restaurants these days, it's just cheaper to go with water. So we have health, simplicity and financial reasons to not go for the SSBs. Seems enough for me.
/ramble
Note: Robert Lustig is a professor of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF, I promise I wouldn't ask you (the reader) to watch a long-ass youtube video unless it contained extremely relevant science about how you (the biological machine) work.
Lustig specifically claims that sugar is addictive; that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose; that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss; that in fact, weight loss is somehow a function of insulin, not calories; that fructose is uniquely bad relative to other sugars; that fructose causes inflammation; that recent decades' increase in obesity is caused by increased sugar consumption; that statins are essentially useless; that some kinds of LDL cholesterol are good for longevity; that non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar; etc, etc, etc, etc.
A few of these claims are wholly unsubstantiated by research; the rest have some research and the research does not support Lustig's claims.
>sugar is addictive
>>The evidence supports the hypothesis that under certain circumstances rats can become sugar dependent. This may translate to some human conditions as suggested by the literature on eating disorders and obesity.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2235907/
>that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose
>>Dietary fiber (DF), especially viscous DF, can contribute to a reduction in the glycemic response resulting from the consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9736284/
>that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss
>>Mechanisms smooth out the large day-to-day differences in energy consumption, decreasing the importance of the size of a meal. In the short term a reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that reduce metabolic rate and increase calorie intake, ensuring the regaining of lost weight.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5639963/
I'm not going to go on and on... UCSF, which is one of the most respected teaching hospitals in the country, isn't hiring cranks. He specialize in exactly this stuff. Yea, he's a bit more strident than would would expect from a scientist, yes, he deals with the extremes of childhood obesity, which isn't really relevant to most people's bodies, but christ, he's not a crank.
If calorie intake increases, then it's no longer "calorie restriction".
If his actual claim was that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss, then that's wild despite your quote.
> I'm not going to go on and on...
Well you didn't address the other really egregious supposed claim, that "non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar". If that's an accurate description of his stance, that's really bad.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2892765/
Again… things that are counterintuitive are exactly the purview of good science. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system that is confounding even in the areas we pretend to understand.
The interaction of the neurologist of taste on biological processes may be affecting the hunger responses, thus weight gain.
This shit is not simple, and the simplistic models we use to explain these processes are exactly the type on ultimately wrong knowledge that Karl Popper rails against.
Again, I definitely think Lustig claims debatable things overconfidently, but he’s no crank.
Even more so if there's a calorie restriction going on, but still so if there isn't.
I'm not arguing that everything Lustig says is correct, on the contrary, I've gone out of my way to criticize him. My point in this conversation is that saying a reputable scientist, at a reputable institution, doing reputable research is somehow a crank... is bananas.
"a person who has strange or unusual ideas and beliefs"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/crank
And the counterargument you had for calorie restriction described a situation that is not calorie restriction.
I'm not saying he's a crank for sure, but my evaluation of him is riding on whether loeg's description of his claims is accurate, not the evidence you brought, because that evidence really does not support the plausibility of those claims.
22:31 - "fructose is addictive"
No. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27372453/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28330706/
25:14 - "the fiber is what mitigates the absorption ... that fructose wasn't for you"
Not how that works. You absorb the same fructose whether or not it's co-located with fiber.
33:40 - "this whole calories in / calories out makes no sense ... there's no study that actually shows that cutting calories makes a difference"
Completely wrong and against the literature. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32238384/
1:00:17 - "fructose causes leaky gut; that causes inflammation of the liver and ultimately systemic inflammation"
No. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29757229/
1:31:10 - Asked to explain trend towards obesity over the past 20 years if not the transition away from trans fats. "It's the increase in sugar."
No. Sugar consumption has fallen steadily since about 1999, while obesity continues to rise. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31938015/
2:03:40 - "The mean increase in lifespan from being on a statin is 4 days."
No. They have a huge positive impact on mortality and CVD events. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32619724/
2:05:10 - "LDL is not really the problem, there are two LDLs: large buoyant, small dense. Large buoyant is irrelevant, cardiovascularly neutral."
No. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642874/ (small particles do penetrate easier, but large particles have more apoB; they're both bad)
2:26:39 - "when people go on diet sweeteners ... are they reducing the fat? no."
Wrong again. There's a wealth of literature on this. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33168917/
Directly following that, he goes on to totally misrepresent a 2011 study in which groups were assigned diet soda, water, milk, or full sugar soda; the study saw diet soda participants gain less weight than the water group and actually lost fat. (All other participants gained weight and fat.) That's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22205311/ .
If he isn't a crank, he should stop going on podcasts and saying crank things.
And finally, he's a pediatric endocrinologist. Not a specialist in many of the subject areas he makes claims about (cardiology, gastroenterology, nutrition).
From the article:
> High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways...
Orange Soda (i.e. Fanta), an SSB, and Orange Juice have glycemic indexes of about 68 and 48 respectively. I assume that's a material difference in that OJ doesn't spike your insulin as abruptly and therefore is not as harmful. Thre's more to it than simply grams of sugar.
Source: Family of diabetics who have actually lost limb to the poison that is refined sugar.
To that effect, perhaps the glucose in OJ is absorbed faster than the glucose in other SSBs specifically when consumed with other foods, leading to this anecdotal understanding that OJ is "worse" than other SSBs among diabetics?
OJ also has more vitamin C than typical sodas.
Milk has more calories/ounce than soda, but it also has protein, fat, and calcium.
Anecdotally, I find juice more filling than soda, milk even more so.
Acids and bases on your diet have very little to do with what pH is exposed to the rest of your body. Your stomach is probably more acid than anything you eat or drink, and your lungs and kidneys tightly regulate the pH of the blood. If your diet is effecting your blood pH, your probably already on death's door
Not sure what suspicious extra super powers your dentist suggests flossing has?
It's mostly under control now, except for problem areas in two specific spots, but even those are still better than they were.
I haven't really changed my dental hygeine habits other than going in for routine cleanings twice as often, so it's definitely helping.
"Recent findings show that increasing dietary phosphorus through inorganic phosphate additives has detrimental effects on bone and mineral metabolism in humans and animals. There is new data supporting an educational intervention to limit phosphate additives in patients with chronic kidney disease to control serum phosphate."
"Cola is a unique source of additive inorganic phosphate that has been studied over the years in its effect on bone health. Cola delivers a load of phosphoric acid that is absorbed readily and rapidly and is often consumed between meals. A 20 fl. oz. bottle of cola, for example, provides 55 mg of phosphorus, whereas non-cola sodas are phosphate-free. In addition, cola may displace milk in the diet, so it can contribute to lower calcium intake concurrent along with greater inorganic phosphosphates intake (12)."
But, you could be correct regarding bone effects:
"It seems likely that any potential negative effects of cola on bone when it substitutes for milk in the diet would be driven by decreased calcium intake and other bone health nutrients (e.g. protein, vitamin D) in milk, rather than the difference in phosphorus load. This is because milk has about ten times the phosphorus content of cola by volume,"
Though I still wonder about possibly different effects from inorganic phosphorus additives in cola vs. naturally occurring phosphorus in milk and other foods.
What? They're different molecules
"Due to their liquid form, SSBs are rapidly consumed and digested, resulting in lower satiety, higher caloric intake and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways, which can result in visceral fat production, hepatic and skeletal muscle insulin resistance and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested fructose directly activate hepatic fat synthesis, leading to ectopic fat deposition and metabolic dysfunction in liver and muscle"
Unfortunately I can't find where they define high dose, but if you look at what they say is high elsewhere, it seems to be around 9 servings a week of "any beverage with added sugars and >50 kcal per 8 oz serving, including commercial or homemade beverages, soft drinks, energy drinks, fruit drinks, punch, lemonade and aguas frescas." - A can of coke is 12oz I believe?