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.
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.