> in mice deficient for glyoxalase-1 (GLO1), an enzyme involved in detoxification of sucrose metabolites.
This is for me the missing part of the title.
I often think reading pop science that they’re making absurd shortcuts and we should get to the actual report, but here TBH I am reading the study and don’t really understand what I’m looking at or what’s the take from this, apart that mices with specific deficiency got some specific illnesses.
I saw mentions of human brain analysis but it didn’t seem to go beyond sheer comparison.
Does anyone see more interesting stuff in this piece ?
Someone who works in medical research once pointed out to me that some research is intended to be confirmatory (i.e. confirming a hypothesis) but other research is actually intended to be hypothesis-generating. This definitely seems to be the latter.
My read on this is that we really don't know what causes things like schizophrenia, so much so that we're not even sure what to study to try to determine the cause. But the authors of this study found that a specific diet in mice with specific genes causes something that looks sort of like human psychiatric disease. They also found similar brain changes in both the mice and humans with psychiatric disease and that aspirin prevented some of the symptoms and brain changes in mice (which possibly suggests the brain changes are related to the behavioral symptoms and not just coincidental). Based on these results further study of, for example, GLO1 deficiency and/or the brain changes they found might be justified. So basically the takeaways are questions about whether/how these finding relate to human disease.
In the end, like most hypothesis-generating studies this strikes me as vaguely interesting but probably only really meaningful to other researchers in the field.
The real substantial issue stemming from the litany of problems with sugar isn't that its harmful in high doses, but rather that it is impossible to avoid a diet in western society that relies on high quantities of sugar as a lynchpin for mass produced food.
-the average breakfast cereal is just a dessert.
- even the healthiest breads contain refined sugar to mask quality inherently absent from mass production.
- sugar is used for its crispening and browning properties, it's shelf stabilizing abilities and its addictive properties in virtually every processed snack.
-most yogurt at the store is just sugar.
The industry response to this is a resounding punt. That somehow you're fat because you're irresponsible abdicates so much of the real guilt from multinational food conglomerates driven solely by profit, not nutrition.
>but rather that it is impossible to avoid a diet in western society that relies on high quantities of sugar as a lynchpin for mass produced food.
just... don't consume the mass produced food with loads of sugar in them? eg.
>average breakfast cereal is just a dessert
Is non-sweetened cereal hard to find in your supermarket or something?
>even the healthiest breads contain refined sugar to mask quality inherently absent from mass production.
I checked around on costco and it seems like their "Kirkland Signature Country French" contain 0g of added sugars per serving (I'm guessing slice?). To your point their regular "Multigrain Bread" contains 2g of added sugar per serving. In any case I doubt you're not getting diabetes from that.
>- sugar is used for its crispening and browning properties, it's shelf stabilizing abilities and its addictive properties in virtually every processed snack.
don't eat snacks then.
>-most yogurt at the store is just sugar.
just get plain yogurt? "Kirkland Signature Organic Greek Yogurt" has 0g added sugar.
I get it's hard to avoid sugar because it tastes so damn good, but let's not pretend it's "impossible to avoid".
This really misses the point. Any well-informed individual can cut their sugar intake if they are careful enough.
But that has no effect on the massive public health crisis unfolding that (e.g.) absolutely dwarfs COVID-19. Liver disease caused directly by sugar intake is indirectly responsible for many often-fatal conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, circulatory disease, even metastatis of cancer. The only thing that can have any effect on that is massive policy changes, and a re-architecting of the public food supply.
This is not impossible: we have mostly eliminated hydrogenated fat from the US diet (although I recently found you can still buy Crisco at the grocery store!) So, artery blockage and heart disease from that will be on its way down. It took Fred Kummerow his entire career to get hydrogenated fat out of the American food system, from the '50s well into this millennium, but not substantially until 2017, even though it was known to be poison. (Europe banned it earlier.)
Try finding even a loaf of bread in the bread aisle of your supermarket that is less than 10% sugar. (You might find one or two. Good luck.) Even the multi-grain "healthy" ones are loaded. Check your sauces. Ketchup, mustard, barbeque sauce, mayonnaise, salad dressing, peanut butter, all usually have lots of sugar. So, even if you think you have cut it out, you probably haven't.
Kids have massive promotions directed at them to make them demand unlimited amounts of sugar. It works, they get it. Kids in the US are getting cirrhosis, like alcoholics.
This is not about self-discipline, it is about public policy. People will eat what is promoted to them, that they find on the shelves at the store, on the menu at the drive-through, in the snacks stock at the office. They will keep eating it while it makes them sick, and even while it kills them. (My mother-in-law died in October. She packed on sugar right to the end.)
>Try finding even a loaf of bread in the bread aisle of your supermarket that is less than 10% sugar.
What is meant by this? Even on the high end, standard Wonderbread isn't 10% sugar by weight. 10% sugar by calorie content, or a serving accounts for more than 10% RDA? A banana would be far worse by those metrics.
There are some good points in here about NAFLD. It's worth pointing out that (i) high sucrose (and/or fructose) intake makes it hard for people to self regulate appetite (i.e. not overeat). And (ii) the above stated ill effects of high sugar consumption are basically stopped in the presence of a caloric deficit -- e.g. IIRC there are controlled chimp studies on this and inadvertent human 'experiments' like with food shortages in Cuba in the 90s. But I don't think (ii) is particularly relevant for rich countries whereas (i) is.
>This is not about self-discipline, it is about public policy.
it can be instructive to compare school lunches in the US vs other rich countries. Not everyone serves highly processed junk food for lunch.
The real issue is that not everyone has 7 hours a day to think about their diet (or someone else to do that for them).
I tried this and after a month or two, I was burnt out and achieved much less of what I wanted to achieve outside of my diet. So yeah for me with my particular set of goals in life (ie: work, have a life, etc...) it's pretty impossible.
I know some people who eat the same healthy foods every day to simplify this, but this is a) not something a lot of people can tolerate, and b) not actually good for you in the long run.
Edit:
"7 hours???" No it's not literally 7 hours every single day. The point is that it takes a long time to find recipes, cook, clean, shop, etc. But go ahead and miss the point to fixate on a little detail if you want I guess
Edit 2:
Another thing to consider is that even 'fresh natural healthy non-GMO' ingredients are selectively bred to taste better, resulting in a higher sugar content. This has gotten to the point where it causes issues in zoos [1]
You tried spending 7 hours a day thinking about your diet?
Also what do you mean by ‘have a life’? Doesn’t that just mean diet is a lower priority than other things?
If you really don’t have much time, one approach is to improve your diet incrementally. Switch out cereal for oatmeal and fruit. Make another improvement next month. Keep doing this and in a year or so you’ll have a great diet.
There is nothing wrong with "carbs" that are not sugar. Starch is made out of glucose, which is generally harmless. Oatmeal has lots of fiber. The problem with sucrose is the fructose that makes up half of it.
Fruit almost always has plenty of fiber in it to modulate sugar absorption long enough that your gut bacteria get most of it. So, fruit is harmless, except grapes, which apparently have had the fiber bred out of them.
>> Fruit almost always has plenty of fiber in it to modulate sugar absorption
> but do we have sufficient sources to back it?
It's not an assumption, it's a well known fact that adding fat or fiber[2] to a high GI food will decrease it's GI. Conversely removing fiber increases it. For example brown rice(50) has a lower GI than white rice(72). The spike/crash in blood sugar from high GI foods is likely to cause carb craving and is linked to obesity/diabetes.
I have been unable to find out whether wild ancestors of grapes (if there are any left) have more fiber than domestic varieties. And, I don't know about dates.
But I am assured by numerous online sources that domesticated grapes have vanishingly little fiber, however that came about.
I have encountered a claim that sugar in mango is, uniquely, mostly fructose. But I have been unable to confirm that.
> Hate to break it to you but fruit is not far removed from sugar.
Hate to break it to you, but you don’t need a lot.
Also my point is that you can incrementally improve your diet. Oatmeal and fruit is way better than most packaged cereal. If you know of something better still why not share it, so people can make another incremental improvement?
Have a life means different things to different people, but in the end the point is the same. Make friends, do hobbies... things that make life actually enjoyable.
Is cooking enjoyable? Sure, but spending so much time on it every single day can be a serious burden
You don't need to spend "so much time" cooking to eat low in sugar.
Plenty of vegetables can be eaten raw, notably all the "standard" salad vegetables in the west like cucumber, carrot, tomato, avocado, celery, bell pepper and so on. You can eat them in a salad by themselves, or you can make some noodles (thin Asian noodles just require stirring for a few seconds in boiling water) and toss the raw veges in with some seasoning of your choice. Nuts and seeds are easy to add too, and don't require cooking. Tofu doesn't need cooking. If you don't mind eating bread, you can make a sandwich instead of a salad or a noodle bowl. If you are making a breakfast or don't mind oats for dinner, just buy quick oats and add some water, stir it up and eat. Frying an egg doesn't take long, or stir-frying some meat, if you eat those things. No need to put a pot on the stove or chuck something in the oven. Think about how people eat when they are camping, or how short order cooks make food in diners, or how street vendors cook stuff up for you on-the-spot.
I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried. It's really not that big of an investment.
> I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried. It's really not that big of an investment.
This is how I cook dinner when its my term, but that is usually just broccoli or cauliflower and pork (stir fried) over rice. My wife takes a lot long with her meal prep...and they taste better.
Restaurants/cafeterias have scale and specialization working for them, you can't compare that to making individual or family meals on your own.
I didn't talk about restaurants/cafeterias, I mentioned diners and street vendors for a reason. Specifically these places feature solo cooks who cook complete dishes to order within a few minutes by using a griddle or wok. The only significant amount of time required here is the chopping of the raw ingredients, which they do beforehand so the customers can get their orders in 5 minutes. At home that might take up to 20 minutes, depending how much you need to chop. There are plenty of different dishes you can cook like this.
Of course there are also plenty of other dishes that require a longer time to cook, but that's beside the point. The original comment was complaining that it takes "7 hours a day" and causes burnout to prepare a variety of meals that aren't packed with sugar. This is an absurd statement that at best adds nothing to the conversation and at worst discourages people from attempting to develop simple, healthy eating habits.
7 hours a day is definitely an exaggeration but it isn’t that far from some common extreme cases. My mother in law when we visit her will spend most of her time in the kitchen preparing each meal, but then she kills her own chickens also (this being a low tier Chinese city). She has just done cooking that way most of her life. Then again, when we lived in China eating in was a special case and eating out was cheaper/more time efficient and was pretty healthy if you chose the right stuff.
Sure - but the point is that the original commenter is using an extreme as though it was typical or necessary, when it is clearly not.
I have a curry recipe that takes about 3 hours to execute, however it makes about 20 portions which can then be frozen, and reheated. That’s 9 minutes per portion, and reheating it along with some rice from a rice cooker takes 5-6 minutes of attention. I.e. 15 minutes per meal.
My lunch today will be pan fried salmon with crispy skin, a baked potato, and lettuce.
The potato takes at most 2 minutes to scrub and put into a toaster oven. It takes about 2 minutes to rinse and select a few lettuce leaves. The salmon takes about 10 minutes to pin-bone, season, and cook isolaterally. Again, around 15 minutes.
I learned the salmon cooking technique from watching a 10 minute Gordon Ramsay YouTube video. This stuff isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to spend 7 hours a day cooking, but you do have to accumulate learned techniques steadily over time, just like with anything you want to do yourself.
Our family relies a lot on frozen Tilapia that can be fried up easily enough in a non-stick. It isn't rocket since, 7 hours is an exaggeration (for the USA at least), but...there is surely a better way to do this food preparation thing (outsource to businesses who can scale up and specialize in it, like we did in Roman times).
Yes, that is the problem with the USA. But surely there must be some room for disruption here: food that can be prepared more economically than you could by yourself. It has happened in other countries (even Switzerland has lots of nice cafeterias that are very competitive with home preparation), why not here?
And this is what I do, but it doesn't meet my caloric needs unfortunately. I really wish I could sustain myself off of just that. Same with some of your other suggestions. I know because I've tried for a while :)
> Think about how people eat when they are camping
People eat like that because they're camping
> I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried
I'm not sure what you mean by your "caloric needs" being so high that you cannot possibly meet them with a meal made in 20 minutes. You could eat a stick of butter in 5 minutes. No sugar. Plenty of calories. In fact, that's exactly what some thru hikers do. If you really require a vast amount of calories, this is solved by eating fat, which you could get in oils, nuts, seeds, butter, cheese and processed meats - all of which require zero cooking time.
If you don't like the taste of any vegetables, or noodles, or porridge/oatmeal, or bread, or fruit, or stir-fried meat, or anything that does not require being stewed or baked or smoked for several hours... then just say so. But then that's a personal preference for the type of food you choose to eat - it doesn't mean that it takes "so much time" to cook nutritional, varied and delicious food. It's fine if you only enjoy a very limited set of foods, but I suspect most people have a broader palate.
> And this is what I do, but it doesn't meet my caloric needs unfortunately. I really wish I could sustain myself off of just that. Same with some of your other suggestions. I know because I've tried for a while :)
From the way you talk, it sounds like a diet full of sugar and quick to prepare processed foods is actually the optimal one for you because your body and mind simply can’t deal with anything else.
If this is the case, then maybe it’s best to enjoy convenient foods, and enjoy ‘living’, and not worry about health consequences because that will only detract from your present enjoyment.
Such a passive aggressive comment. I don’t understand why people feel the need to be so vitriolic in the face of an experience that doesn’t match their own on this site
You’re reading something into my comment that isn’t there, indeed it’s the opposite of what I wrote.
The point is that people keep offering you suggestions because you seem to be saying there is a problem.
You’re obviously wrong that the problem can’t be solved since lots of people have solved it. That isn’t a matter of your experience not matching others.
What we are left with is that you are simply making a choice based on your own priorities and preferences.
I genuinely think that if this is true, you would be better off simply being happy with your choice. That sentiment is about respecting what is true for you and wishing you well.
I imagine there are a lot of people who have similar priorities to you and are just fine with that.
I said sauteed to simplify, but what we do is a kind of ratatouille. We do it once every 2-3 weeks and use a bit on every breakfast. We freeze it in batches, and every couple of days we defrost a new batch in the fridge.
Our version of ratatouille has tomato, eggplant, onion, zucchini, and carrot.
Typically we do scrambled eggs, preheat the ratatouille, and then serve it on top of the eggs with sprinkled goat cheese. It's super easy and fast to do for any number of people.
Another preparation we absolutely love is: a toast of low glycemic Ezekiel bread[1] with the pre heated ratatouille on it, some sprinkled goat cheese, and a fried egg on top of everything with sprinkled hot salsa (I guess some Sriracha would work too if you're into that). It's delicious.
We also typically add half avocado on the side of those dishes. Since we live in Mexico these are plentiful and very cheap.
We've measured our blood glucose before and after eating either of those breakfasts and it barely changes.
I cook up some meat and vegetables in 20-30 minutes and they last a few days. It's not that hard to do. It just takes a bit of learning what vegetables you like and how you like them cooked. I mix it up with some less healthy foods, but as long as that isn't the majority of your diet, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
So you would rather eat a sugar filled diet of processed food then eat the same healthy things because you think its not good for you? not good for you based on what?
Based off what? these are ambiguous terms. You can have a varied diet of mcdonalds, taco bell, arbys and wings or eat chicken, eggs and broccoli everyday, the second will be healthier without question.
I think the only thing you might be thinking of is missing out on some nutrients if you really just eat the same things but that is pretty extreme situation. eating meat will get you almost everything you need to function.
unless you have some sources that say otherwise or explain your point better
> Is non-sweetened cereal hard to find in your supermarket or something?
They aren't. Cheerios is a popular option, it has 1G of sugar per serving. You go up quickly to around 5G/serving for cereals like Wheeties. But milk is where you really get killed: 12G of sugar in one cup of skim milk.
A plain bagel will run you 4G of sugar also. If you are trying to keep your sugar intake to the recommended less than 36 grams a day, it is tough. And then there are the sugar substitutes that may or may not be good for you (e.g. monk fruit in supercoffee).
In this way, some of the plant milks can be worse, if they're sweetened with sugar.
Typically oat milks tend to be sweetened with malt which is mostly glycans and glucose, no fructose.
Lactose turns into glucose and, with a little more processing, more glucose. Glucose is absolutely harmless. (Unless you have diabetes. A huge number of Americans have given themselves diabetes by taking in so much sugar: specifically, the fructose in sugar. That will go away, absent fructose.)
To be clear: table sugar is half fructose. Honey is half fructose. Any fruit juice or soda is about half fructose. Both are equally harmful.
There is no problem with the sugar in any amount of whole fruit (except grapes) -- the fiber slows absorption, and your gut bacteria get it. Your gut bacteria need to be fed, or they feed on you.
> just get plain yogurt? "Kirkland Signature Organic Greek Yogurt" has 0g added sugar
This only goes so far. Sometimes manufacturers add lactose to dairy products, or change the balance in favor of lactose, which doesn’t count as added sugars because it occurs naturally in the food. But it’s still sweeter than a comparable plain/unsweetened product if you look at sugar content.
> I get it's hard to avoid sugar because it tastes so damn good, but let's not pretend it's "impossible to avoid".
Have you eaten sugar. Ever? Do you know any American, let's say over 10, that has never had any sugar, ever? Oh, perhaps it is impossible to avoid.
Don't like my semantic argument? It's at least more honest then your "oh just choose (and make your children choose) only good stuff, and avoid all the other stuff that companies spend billions marketing, problem solved!"
By food, he means stuff with minimal processing. A potato, not potato chips, fruit not juices, etc. Let how the food is prepared guide your choices as if you were processing it yourself. Consider the difference between you baking a potato vs making potato chips or eating an apple versus you making apple juice.
It may also be endocrine disruptors in the environment, from stuff like shampoo making its way into drinking water. Wildlife is also getting fat, despite being no better fed than usual. That suggests some other cause of the obesity.
> The industry response to this is a resounding punt. That somehow you're fat because you're irresponsible abdicates so much of the real guilt from multinational food conglomerates driven solely by profit, not nutrition.
I mean, that's partially true and partially false. You do have the choice to not consume products that are bad for you. People change their nutrition and lose weight all the time - it's definitely doable.
There certainly is a case to be made for food companies being at least somewhat liable for the obesity epidemic. But I hate to see people promoting a defeatist attitude that puts all the blame on outside parties, if only because I think the message most people need to hear is that it is possible to lose weight if they choose to do so. It's not even very complicated (though it can be hard to implement). It only takes a bit of knowledge and a few choices to make it happen.
My breakfast was primarily toast made from Natures Own brand bread (which is available at Walmart supercenters for a very affordable price), yogurt, and eggs.
I make my own yogurt which is EXTREMELY easy to do (I hate to do any cooking and prep and even I can do it). You basically get some yogurt from an Indian store which has live culture (you can eat it or throw it out, but you just need a teaspoon as a starter). You boil milk then let it cool to lukewarm temperature. Stir in the starter yogurt. Then put the light on in your oven and put the yogurt in over night. By next morning it will be yogurt. The purpose of leaving the light on in the oven is to keep the oven warmer than room temperature. You don't need to do that if you don't have cool nights where you live.
Dinner and lunch were usually pasta, grilled, cheese, or tuna. BTW, Rao's pasta sauces have no added sugar. They are available for very cheap at Costco. Canned Tuna, ground meat, and fish are also good to get at Costco. Rice as well.
Speaking of Costco, get Raw Honey there. Great prices.
For snacks I suggest nuts and fruit. I consume a lot of bananas and oranges. Also mangoes when available.
Honestly, the only time I was effected by not eating sugar was when people invited me to dinner or restaurant. In those circumstances I often had to just eat what was offered because I could not control the inputs.
Saying it's impossible to avoid sugars is a cliche spread by lifestyle agitators. Its only true if you basically want to autopilot through your life ... then yes ... sugar free food will not fall into your open mouth. Sugared foods will fall in.
Actually there are (minor) meaningful health considerations to be made between sweeteners like sugar and honey.
>Honey has a lower glycemic index (GI) than sugar, too. The glycemic index measures how quickly a carbohydrate raises blood sugar levels. Honey has a GI score of 58, and sugar has a GI value of 60. That means honey (like all carbohydrates) raises blood sugar quickly, but not quite as fast as sugar.
So not game changing, but if you have to make a choice one is likely a little better
The sugar in whole fruit is no problem, because there is enough fiber. Sugar without fiber is poison. Sugar with fiber feeds your gut bacteria, which thrive on sugar.
I recommend books, or even Youtube videos, by Robert Lustig, a distinguished pediatric endocrinologist who has done a great deal of work in liver metabolism.
It is absurd to say it is impossible to avoid high quantities of sugar. Utterly absurd.
Oats are cheaper than any of the brand name cereals. Eggs are super cheap. Beans are super cheap. Bagged spinach and kale is super cheap. Olive oil is super cheap.
The only problem with oats is they taste like shit compared to Cap'n Crunch. People could easily eat better but they don't want to because it is far less enjoyable.
And India, Pakistan, Australia, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria. Mostly UK and its former colonies. But not exclusively.
The public health debacle is worst in the US because the US federal government massively subsidizes production of sugar as a way to use up what of its (also massively subsidized) maize production is not forced on every kind of livestock, or exported.
Ironically, regular corn sugar, dextrose, is relatively harmless. It becomes poison only via treatment with the enzyme that turns half of it to fructose.
The "common sense" about healthy eating in those countries is essentially the same as it has always been in the US, in my lifetime. Where a home-cooked meal is the only healthy option, and that those who consume processed/fast food are ignoring their health in favor of instant gratification (something that has never been seen as a good thing or even ok). The grocery store carries whole grain options like wheat bread (for many decades), butter vs margarine, and half an aisle of vitamins, because such healthy choices are very popular among people who care.
If you ignore common knowledge about food, then just as with ignoring advice about exercise, maintaining your teeth, and many other things, you will probably suffer. Good health was never presumed to be the baseline regardless of what one ate, it always took persistence and impulse control. The question is why people are doing such a poor job at it now.
Judging from the skeletons they left, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were healthy without need to pay much attention to diet beyond doing their best to get enough.
In particular, they had no difficulty getting enough fiber: there was plenty in everything. Our problem is that our whole food-industrial complex is devoted to stripping out and discarding the fiber we need.
If 40% of Americans didn't brush their teeth or bathe, we would have a hygiene problem of a magnitude commensurate with our health problem.
Roughly that percentage of people don't take sufficiently-good care of their teeth, yes. But brushing one's teeth (and bathing) is easier than resisting food cravings.
The value of fiber (apart from keeping some nutrients indigistible and hence less calories for obese people who need to eat less) is still a matter of debate.
Being home bound during the apocalypse, I finally embraced beans, lentils, squash, etc. Pressure cooker FTW. Mostly as a labor saving measure.
Also finally started baking breads, scones, biscuits, pies, etc.
I love eating like this. I probably won't go back. Even when I biff (tbh most of the time), stuff is still pretty good fresh out or the oven.
To your point: Craving some sweets, I bought some cookies. Ugh, way too sweet. Baking for myself, I cut the sugar to 1/3 to 1/2 of what the recipe says. If I still want more, I just have some jam.
Only in the sense that bad things happen to you if you consume too much. I don't like that label though, because if you follow that logic nearly everything is a poison (eg. water poisoning), which makes it useless as a label. A more accurate label would be something like "substance that we're likely to overconsume and cause harm, due to human psychology/physiology", but I guess that's not as attention grabbing as comparing it to rat poison or draino.
Toddlers are just werebears. The crash might be real, but there has been research into the "rush" part and its been shown that kids really don't get a rush. It's probably just confirmation bias on the part of adults. https://www.yalescientific.org/2010/09/mythbusters-does-suga...
Not saying we should feed our kids endless sugar, however.
Under discussion here is the long-term (not short-term) effects. The short-term effects are not, as far as I can tell, especially acutely dangerous, though they could be bad per se if experienced all the time (e.g. sleep disruption).
But toddlers can also be pretty wild with or without sugar. They sometimes get very excited when hungry, when tired, when woken from a nap, when lacking exercise, when frustrated, when separated from specific adults, when in conflict with other children, ...
Except that US food culture emphasizes sugar as a keystone ingredient. It's so ingrained into the American palate at this point, it would present a competitive disadvantage to remove it from your food or restaurant.
Sugar is put into everything. Cereal, sauces, drinks, bread, meat, salad dressing, mashed potatoes. If you try to eat without sugar for the first time in a while, you'll be in total shock by how bland things taste. And your body won't tolerate the change either.
We're signing ourselves up for diabetes, inflammation, brain disease, physiological and mental dysfunction, and a multitude of other disease states by continuing the status quo.
Sugar is poison by the sheer volume with which we consume it.
I experience physical withdrawal from sugar. There isn't really any medical literature to back it up. It gives me sinus headaches so I do not consume it at all. The multiple times I've cut it out (took a few tries) I would get quite sick for 12-24 hours. Strong sinus headache, cold sweat, shivering, vomiting, diarrhea.
That is my point. Saying sugar is poison is useless statement. Its not poison in the same way that arsnic is. Treating sugar the same way you would treat arsenic makes no sense. Arguably its closer to being poisinous the way broccoli is, but that also makes no sense. Its a gross oversimplification that leads to bad conclusions.
They’re a relatively high source of dietary cholesterol. When we first figured out that serum cholesterol is correlated with cardio problems, we basically assumed that dietary cholesterol must be bad. We’ve since figured out that dietary cholesterol is a much less significant driver of serum cholesterol than one would naively assume.
I mean, the Framingham study found no link between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol in non-diabetics (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024517/). It doesn't really get bigger or higher quality than that.
Oh yes, they had cholesterol (and they still do)... it's just that they CAN be a part of a healthy diet, while breakfast cereal arguably can't no matter how many vitamins you add to it. You'll still find plenty of egg white only things out there in the dairy aisle or at your local diner... since it was the dreaded yolk with all the fat (and vitamins and cholesterol) that was supposed to be bad.
And.... it turns out that fat is totally harmless. Saturated fat, anyway. What we were blaming on regular fat turns out to have been caused by sugar and trans-fat. Trans fat, or hydrogenated fat, was finally (almost!) banned in the US in 2017. (Although you can still buy Crisco!) Trans fat was invented in the 19th century as a way to get people eating cottonseed oil margarine. When fat got blamed for what sugar was doing, they pretended hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and later other hydrogenated oils, were not at fault.
Even people who have learned that sugar is poison often still believe there is something wrong with fat.
Eggs have plenty of cholesterol. But there is nothing wrong with dietary cholesterol. Your liver makes it for you all day long. Blood cholesterol measurements are about markers for circulatory disease that is not caused by cholesterol.
Well, it's less about the total amount of calories as it is about the amount per volume of food. 300kcal of egg whites is just a lot more food in size, and some people (myself included) just enjoy eating larger quantities and are willing to sacrifice some quality in taste. Also, if you're paying attention to protein intake then 300kcal of egg whites is also a lot more protein than the equivalent amount of whole eggs.
The fat isn't inherently bad, but there are tradeoffs that some people prefer.
Sugar, specifically the way we stuff all foods these days full of it, is the “root of all evil”. Healthcare costs, the obesity crisis (just because everyone is fat now doesn’t make it normal or healthy), lack of military readiness, sugar addiction, it’s all linked to sugar being extremely cheap and highly addictive which means every mass manufactured food is stuffed full of it.
I absolutely believe that sugar is the cigarette of our time. It’s just a lot harder to point out the deleterious effects on society. With cigarettes you can point to lung cancer and that’s all you need. Sugar causes varying harms, of varying degrees, so you can’t easily point to something to scare people, especially when obesity is normalized. On a societal level however, the price is clear.
Sugar must be regulated, taxed, and zero-calorie sweeteners encouraged as the default.
Just to add to this, anything processed is generally not great for health. After going through a lot of gut issues and reading many articles and books here is what I understood..
Avoid things which...
* contains more than 3 components which you can't understand.
* your grandma doesn't recognise as food.
* comes in a plastic cover and doesn't degrade for a long time.
I know this pretty much eliminates the entire super market but if you go through what I have you will rethink everything you put in your mouth.
The fat free craze then is what led to many more food items having added sugar then ever before. They took out the fat, and added more forms of sugar to more foods.
Demonizing one food type completely just because they've been mis-used by industry is rarely healthy. Focusing on demonizing sugar is repeating the cultural mistakes of the past. Focusing on whole foods would be a better way forward.
Honest question - what about if you drink a ton of water? Does that "dilute" the effect that consuming too much of one thing has? I've never actually looked into it myself but I've always held that belief, perhaps falsely.
Might slow digestion down a little bit, but probably not significantly. Fiber helps slow down sugar absorption, which is why fruit is okay for you. Ultimately most of what you put into your stomach absorbs into your blood stream, so eventually your pancreas will have to deal with all the sugar by releasing a lot of insulin
I’m trying to give up sugar now and it’s worse than giving up smoking so far and almost exactly the same feeling for me, inability to sleep, joint pains, headache, disorientation, mood swings and so on (obviously hunger too). I had a small amount of mass produced bread with stew for dinner and the bread was insanely sweet in a way that can only be described as like a fix for a drug addict - pure pleasure - but it was so extreme that I think any bread is out too until I’m able to break my addiction.
I LOVE sugar. I can easily eat two pints of ice cream in one sitting. When working, I can consume ungodly amounts of sugar to keep my mind running. When my blood sugar would get low, I would literally eat 3 snickers bars out of sheer desperation. I started doing a keto diet to lose a little weight, and it's actually been extremely easy. Apparently, having a high fat, low carb diet causes hormones to be released that suppress appetite and sugar cravings. I really would enjoy eating some sugar, as I miss the food I love, but I don't have a single craving.
The craving for sugar is so difficult to resist as well, and low sugar attractive food is hard to find. And as soon as you have to eat socially with a partner, friends, family etc it basically becomes impossible to avoid sugar because the only way to do it is basically handcraft your own diet.
I used to drink sugared beverages constantly (Coke, Snapple). Just stopped one day. Replace the Snapple with unsweetened iced tea and add just a dash of lemonade. Today years later if I try a Snapple I find it disgustingly cloying and overly sweet. So it's quite possible to retrain your palate. That and a square of dark chocolate are all I need - the darker, the less sugar.
In my experience your body "learns" when you normally eat and makes you hungry/cranky at that time. You can re-train it, and the hunger/crankiness disappears.
For example when I started doing IM (no eating from 7 pm - 11 am) I'd get cranky around breakfast time for the first few days, and then it went, and my most productive time is now 8 am - 10:30 am.
Same thing with OMAD or regular fasting, you can retrain your body into what is normal, and you do gain better focus. You do crash fairly hard around your new eating window though.
That means you are pushing your limits. Don't start with a full day fasting. Start slow by doing some form of intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding. I would say go for having early dinner and a late breakfast to begin with. Once you are adapted to log hours of not eating, skip one of the meals in the day, depends on your situation but the easiest one to start with is skipping breakfast. Then you can slowly work your way to full day fasting.
For those who would like to break away from sugar, I'd recommend first trying intermittent fasting to reduce the time window for eating. I tried to remove sugar from my diet permanently before IF and it takes considerable effort to maintain your distance all day, and in the long run it doesn't stick. My longer experience was 15 months before.
After doing one year of IF, it felt much easier to completely eliminate sugar from the diet, and sticking doesn't require tons of willpower. It's been 18 months but I know I can continue this indefinitely. I'm in that phase of sugar elimination where donuts look disgusting.
Yet, it causes fatty-liver disease, also called metabolic disorder, on its own. And, the secondary effects -- heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure -- are products of liver disease, not weight gain.
Which, of course, is you. Not only are you the sole dissenting voice in this thread, you disagree with the article, and the broad consensus. While there are plenty of cases where a thread, an article, and a general consensus are all wrong, you have absolutely no ground to stand on to claim that everyone else's claims are extraordinary and your claims require no evidence.
To the comments regarding unable to purchase foods that are healthy - maybe we should re-introduce "home econ" to middle and high school?
Let us teach our children how to cook their own food. Maybe this will allow them to eat healthier. Clearly the "food pyramid", scientific articles, or scare tactics do not seem to work.
Yes, it's 'in mice'. Where else should we study this?
Should we study these effects on prisoners, military personnel, government workers, or school children? Perhaps those with this 'in mice' attitude think we should raise primates for these purposes?
Mice are not the best model for humans, just like a Representative Democracy isn't the best model for a government. These things are, however, the best we have at this point in time.
This is a great study as it conclusively proves not that sugar diets are bad, but HOW they are bad, and WHY they are bad. Sucrose is shown to interrupt key systems in the brain and now we have a model of how this occurs. Now we can try to image human brains that are suffering from these psychosis and we'll know better where to start our investigations.
This is a good study with many implications for future human health studies. Great work.
> When people start getting 2/3rd of their calories from sucrose.. @ivalm
I don't think you understand how scientific studies are performed.
Inducing change is what the study is accomplishing. Monitoring the changes and what changes occur is what the study sets out to document.
Both of those goals are accomplished in the study. Correlations between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients with high glucose mice brains were readily recognized.
Science isn't a god. Science is a method of study. We follow the method so that others may perform the same experiments in the future and reach similar conclusions, for proofs.
The methods we use for testing such things have been in place for decades now, and they've served us well.
If you don't understand why mice models are utilized, and why testing is done with such high percentages, then perhaps you should read more into pharmaceutical testing and development. Like I said, we've been doing this for decades now, and it serves us well.
I’m no against mice models, but I do think that relationship between amount and outcome are important and non-linear and what happens when 2/3rd of your calories come from something is not indicative of an effect when you consume a smaller percentage. That said, your ad hominem attacks on me are not appreciated, do better.
This kind of comment has no substance and just betrays a lack of understanding about the role of animal models.
Mouse models are imperfect, but they tell us quite a lot about humans. That's why we use them. Where they are weak, we adjust the experiment and the conclusions accordingly.
I apologize if I seem frustrated. In truth, I am. Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating.
This headline absolutely needs an "in mice" added to it to be accurate.
Also, we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. They seem to be poor models more often than they're not.
I agree that they're valuable, but there is also extreme over-reporting of results in mice, leading laypeople to make decisions in their lives based on those very early and/or extreme studies.
> we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale.
Mice models don't attract many rights protesters, the way other animals would, even though they are just as sentient and intelligent as humans, dogs, cats, horses, and whales.
Why don't animal rights protesters stick up for mice more? This experiment sounded like a horrific experience for the participants.
Animal rights absolutists are certainly against animal studies and protest them. There just aren't that many of those people.
For the rest of us, the horrific experiments are theoretically in the service of reducing human suffering. A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade (although the real ratio is unknowable).
I disagree. It is relevant, and not lowering level of discourse. Animal models are both very useful and very limited. There is no way to 'adjust' them into such a perfect proxy that the model is irrelevant. You can do better, but at the end of the day the most important adjustment to make is to keep in mind that it is in fact... in mice.
While "... in mice!" can get a little jokey at times, the alternative is often a discussion that more or less assumes that the smallest of effects in any model are directly actionable information for the readers. It's not. Even with human studies, a single study is rarely enough to come to strong conclusions.
In an ideal world, sure, it's just a repetition of facts everybody knows because everybody read and understood the article before engaging in the discussion at all (even just reading). But that's unrealistic on multiple fronts.
Until that's a reasonable assumption, I'm more than happy to see some reminders of important facts in the comments. Even if it spawns the occasional joke.
I feel like you're giving the people aggressively generalizing results from studies like these too much of the benefit of the doubt. The mice in this study were fed a diet that was more than 2/3 sucrose, compared to an average of ~20% in human diets. The level of attention given to these studies does far more to lower the level of discourse than the people who point out how exaggerated the model used to reach the study's conclusion is.
This study, and others like it that use mice, would be a lot more interesting if they bucketed out some ranges for the test variable. For this one, I would have liked to see groups with 20, 40, 60, and 80% sugar diets.
To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis. And it's understandable that this is done given academia's incentive structure, and you could justify this study's existence as a foundation for further studies, but real damage is done to the discourse around these topics when people pick up on these results and generalize them across both input size and species lines. This study alone tells us virtually nothing useful about whether or not "High-sucrose diets contribute to brain angiopathy and higher brain dysfunctions" in humans, as the post's title implies.
>To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis.
No. The reason is to approximate long-term exposure. There are obviously (big!) problems with that, but we don't have a better way of "speeding up time".
You really should try to understand things before you attack them with tired caricatures of legitimate arguments.
I really can't answer more precisely than that without knowing what you consider to be a "good" model, and what you are interested in modeling. Perhaps a marginally more useful answer is that they can be _excellent_ metabolic and cellular models. It's a case of "if you know what your looking for, you can pick animal models that effectively have exactly what you're looking for". The "what", here, would be a metabolic pathway, for example.
Ah. That makes sense. It's a tool that tests certain things.
My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans?
To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
>My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans?
Accuracy is very high when you are studying a metabolic pathway that is (near)identical in humans and in mice.
>To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
Yes. More precisely: animal models are accurate when the metabolic machinery in humans is also found in the animal model.
I don't know if these issues have been fixed but here's a study that looked into all types of animal studies for cancer for an overview and suggested fixes and listed notable failures. There is one study here that showed a promising cancer treatment in mice used at 500x dilution in humans and it caused systemic organ failure in humans.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/
I don't like to infer people's motives, but I suspect it is more exactly a self-aggrandizing "look at how smart I am because I am calling bullshit" reflex.
I have been guilty of this in the past, and try very hard not to do it now.
> Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating.
When certain groups of people have a monopoly on the spread of information as well as the narrative accompanying it, then these “lower levels of discourse” are perfectly acceptable as a grassroots counter. You may be frustrated because it is a very effective counter. Mockery/jokes, even very innocent mockery (which rings very true, by the way) like the one in the comment you quoted, is one of the most effective means to fight back against authoritarianism et al.
Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” or go against establishment opinion. Sorry but we don’t haven’t take what they give without pushing back a bit. We’re not going to just roll over and take it.
> Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean”
Sites have always had terms of service. If you're seeing them enforced more often, it's because we've reached the end of the laissez-faire enforcement experiment for several key large sites; they attempted to maximize what was allowed, and found they had facilitated an attempted coup in their headquarters country, which would not be in their best interests.
Yet apparently, facilitating the burning down, rioting, and violence in cities across the country in the name of (allegedly) a convicted felon who died of a heart attack while restrained by police after attempting to drive on public streets high on fenty and meth, is in their best interests.
Also, you... think this just started after January of last year? And that everyone who thinks differently than the establishment idea of what is "right" is part of that group? Interesting. You only further my point.
The truth is, it has been happening for a while, but certainly sped itself up when the establishment realized that allowing people to freely spread ideas and opinions very likely resulted in that really mean tweeter winning, rather than the person they wanted to win, and that to ensure that the only ideas considered "correct" moving forward are allowed to propogate, that comments either needed to be disabled, or heavily regulated, by the very smart, very good people in Big Tech, who cried tears of frustration and anger after the Cheeto won. [0]
Trump's victory was not the last gasp of laissez-faire moderation by the big companies. As you've noted, they allowed people to use their service for what people wanted after that day.
The end of his Presidency, though, is a different story.
Indeed, Twitter, upon being forced to decide whether their laxly-enforced TOS meant they'd have to kick a sitting President off their service or whether they would find a way to avoid that scenario, modified their TOS to allow him and his ilk to stay.
... and the consequences of that decision were that their CEO, four years later, got hauled in front of Congress to talk about what their communications service facilitated on January 6, 2021, and whether they should have done anything differently.
They tried their damnedest, they really did. They don't actually want to be some kind of benevolent dictators over what people see and hear; it's not the job they set out to have. But they've seen what happens now if they don't assume the responsibility their size has thrust upon them.
We're now at the beginnings of the experiment where they assume the role of benevolent dictators, and the results remain to be seen.
> For sucrose, mice apparently have the opposite reaction that primates have in this study. Maybe the guys who did the linked study didn't read it. @stevenwoo
Did YOU read the study, because it seems as if you may have skipped the very beginning reading... This is a direct quote.
> The association of glucose with survival is inverse for mice versus monkeys/humans.
That is -not at all- what the study in this post is reviewing, and is not the conclusion you're purporting. The study you linked looks at how glucose and aging work together.
The study in this post is looking to how glucose affects the brain function itself, and what inhibitors are triggered by high-sucrose in a diet.
> he high-sucrose diet induced microcapillary impairments and reduced brain glucose uptake in brains of Glo1-deficient mice. Aspirin protected against this angiopathy, enhancing brain glucose uptake and preventing abnormal behavioral phenotypes. Similar vascular damage to our model mice was found in the brains of randomly collected schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, suggesting that psychiatric disorders are associated with angiopathy in the brain caused by various environmental stresses, including metabolic stress.
That's a direct quote from this post's linked study.
These two studies are dissimilar enough to be completely different in comparison and their conclusions are not similar because the studies look at different effects of sucrose. This post's linked study looks at immediacy and how the sucrose interacts with the brain. Your post looks at the effects of aging and possible links to high-sucrose and fasting diets.
This is for me the missing part of the title.
I often think reading pop science that they’re making absurd shortcuts and we should get to the actual report, but here TBH I am reading the study and don’t really understand what I’m looking at or what’s the take from this, apart that mices with specific deficiency got some specific illnesses.
I saw mentions of human brain analysis but it didn’t seem to go beyond sheer comparison.
Does anyone see more interesting stuff in this piece ?