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Whether or not you believe in low/no carbs for everyday health, it is uniquely horrifying that the Diabetes association is promoting a high carb diet. Having r

• ng12 10y ago
  > I don't have diabetes and the doctors say my blood sugar control is very good I don't understand what this means for a non-diabetic. Are they measuring your A1c? How are you "controlling" your blood sugar? Secondly, even if you're not building fat your body still needs insulin.
  • nxc18 10y ago
    I have some risk factors for diabetes (which I'm doing my best to minimize/eliminate/control) so my doctor had me get my blood sugar tested a few times. It always came back with results that looked good and at least to him weren't worth investigating further.
• mchmch 10y ago
  This one minute video will save your life. FAT is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Fat in cells stops your body from processing sugar correctly. You need to reduce dietary fat to very low levels and your body will be able to process carbs correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51D07bvlPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51D07bvlPY
  • charlesism 10y ago
    Dangerous nonsense. Do you fatten up a goose by feeding it butter, or by feeding it grain? Since America fell in love with a low-fat diet, have Americans become lighter, or heavier?
    • mchmch 10y ago
      Americans never fell in love with a low fat diet. Our diet is extremely high in fat and individuals that are obese consume much a much higher amount than average. By very low fat, I am saying reduce saturated fat to near 0 and limit intake of unsaturated fat to 30g or less a day. http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-fat-intake-sad-11370.html http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-fat-intake-sad-11370...
      • charlesism 10y ago
        Well, whatever the fat intake, it won't be enough to mitigate the refined wheat, and sugars.
        • eatfruitnoteggs 10y ago
          What about instead of fat, wheat and sugars, we eat whole plant foods, which are the most physiologically appropriate things to put into our bodies?
          • prostoalex 10y ago
            Pure vegan diets work for some, yet lead to feelings of constant hunger, weakness, lack of energy, sleepiness or headaches in others. As a result, people who try them frequently revert back to their old ways with vengeance when they need that extra boost of energy, and yo-yo dieting usually leads to worst outcomes than no dieting at all. If a pure vegan diet worked for you and your gut bacteria, that's great. It's a challenge for a lot of others.
  • QuercusMax 10y ago
• CPLX 10y ago
  > Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda Is there any scientific basis for this claim?
  • aduitsis 10y ago
    A 15-second google search reveals this: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin... Some interesting links to pubmed there. Seems that aspartame does not affect insulin fwiw.
    • apathy 10y ago
      Mark has a bit of an agenda. He is not nearly as full of shit as many others (to include many in academia) but he nonetheless has a financial conflict of interest due to the way he makes a living. I'm not saying he is wrong, but I am saying that you must think critically in the presence of COI.
      • bjterry 10y ago
        Mark Sisson's intellectual rigor is certainly higher than the average blogspam but not as high as the best diet bloggers in the paleo or fitness communities (e.g. Stephan Guyenet, Alan Aragon). That said, his biases would tend to go against artificial sweeteners, rather than towards them. In that article he suggests that you shouldn't eat them, even though he thinks the evidence of their insulin response effects is weak at best. If your point was that you should take all of his advice with a grain of salt, I definitely agree, since he promotes many things which have at most a marginal effect.
  • GarrisonPrime 10y ago
    I don't have references on hand, but I can tell you that US medical schools are teaching: Artificial sweeteners do not appear to promote as significant an insulin response as digestible sugars do, however they appear to stimulate gluconeogenesis and lipogensis in a similar manner. In other words, drinking diet soda may not by itself cause problems, but it will stimulate your body to absorb even more of the burger and fries you consumed with the soda (or whatever other metabolites you currently have circulating in your bloodstream). I'm on mobile now with limited connectivity. I'll try to edit later with a link to a source.
• rayiner 10y ago
  Of course they are. People continuing to get diabetes is how they get funding for their organization.
  • GarrisonPrime 10y ago
    It's amazing how many people are ignorant of this logic, and go around wondering why big companies and governments always seem to be offering band-aids and aspirins, but never cures. :)
    • jcranmer 10y ago
      By that logic, everyone peddling any kind of diet, including paleo or keto or whatever diet is the fad of the day, is insincere. The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.
      • luketych 10y ago
        Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems. Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI). We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.
        • apathy 10y ago
• ggregoire 10y ago
  Why people drink diet soda? If someone cares about his sugar intake, why not skip the soda and drink some water? It also amazes me how people associate some dishes to sodas. For example, at lunch with my colleagues (I'm in France), I observed that when they eat a pizza or a burger, they order a soda. But if they eat a salad, they order a bottle of water! (I don't like sodas so my opinion is probably oriented)
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    Bad habits. Took me maybe a year to switch off soda. I guess switching to diet is less work than switching to water. Used to drink 5 mountain dews a day. Havent had one in 10 years now. Much happier.
  • oldmanjay 10y ago
    Personal preference is pretty easy to assume whenever you question why your opinion on something isn't universal.
  • Malician 10y ago
    I haven't had soda more than (once every year or so) for several years now, other than as a mixer in cocktails. It's still delicious. Water is still disgusting. I don't drink diet soda because it tastes terrible. Stevia sodas taste worse. But I'd be ecstatic if there was a drink which tasted like soda without the negative effects. So, yeah, I'm confused over what led you to write your first line given your last line. It's because it's utterly delicious to many of us.
  • Malician 10y ago
    I haven't had soda more than (once every year or so) for several years now, other than as a mixer in cocktails. It's still delicious. Water is still disgusting. I don't drink diet soda because it tastes terrible. Stevia sodas taste worse. But I'd be ecstatic if there was a drink which tasted like soda without the negative effects. So, yeah, I'm confused over what led you to write your first line given your last line. It's because it's utterly delicious to many of us.
• arjie 10y ago
  Which diet do you mean? I looked and can only see evidence of their recommending 45-60 g of carbohydrates a meal. That's 180 g a day, some 60 g below my personal non-diabetic maintenance level.
  • mixedCase 10y ago
    180g a day is 6-9 times as many grams of carbs allowed in a low-carb diet.
    • arjie 10y ago
      20 g carbohydrate per day is a very drastic diet. That's not something the ADA can recommend to the general public. It's not fair to expect them to do so.
      • mixedCase 10y ago
        20-30g is low-carb, and induces dietary ketosis (read: not ketoacidosis) which is in essence a cure for type 2 diabetes. Everything other than that and it no longer fits that category.
• pdeuchler 10y ago
  The ADA does a lot of dumb stuff and rightfully gets a good amount of stick for it, but you have to remember that they are also having to optimize for a population that is overwhelmingly less educated and financially insolvent. If you are educated and/or wealthy with diabetes[0], the odds are you have a good endocrinologist and/or are disciplined about diet and exercise. In these cases, given you're not an extreme case, your diet is largely based on consistency. It's not necessarily low or high carb diets (although the extremes obviously create complications), it's about keeping your insulin input consistent. This means you have to keep your "carb" (diabetes isn't all about carbs, but they are the biggest factor in your diet) to exercise ratio relatively consistent, so those that exercise a lot or have high metabolisms often still have high carb diets after diagnosis. The real killer with people who have the wherewithal to manage their diabetes is blood glucose swings, and the swings to the low end are quite a bit more dangerous than those to the high end. You have much less wiggle room for "lows"... using general numbers, a "healthy" blood glucose reading is ~120, a low is <60, and a "high" is >200. While that difference may seem small, a reading of 40 is much more dangerous than a reading of 220, as 40 presents a decent risk of loss of consciousness and other very serious, immediate complications while 220 may cause some long term damage if not controlled but mostly manifests as mental fatigue or irritability. To drive my point home, a reading of 400 is very bad, but quite fixable without professional medical help. A score of 30 or below is serious cause for an itchy 911 trigger finger, and might mean death if the patient has already lost consciousness. All this is to say: Even in the best case, low carb diets are only for diabetics with a very good A1C and highly controlled and managed diet/exercise/insulin ratios. Now consider that the vast majority of people with diabetes (see footnote again) are poor, genetically predisposed to obesity, and uneducated. Asking them to manage their diabetes in the first place is hard enough, much less asking them to make substantial lifestyle changes to eat healthily. These people are going to have high carb diets whether they like it or not. Given the dangers of lows on top of this, the responsible thing is to keep them consistent, recommend higher carb diets, and just hope you can help them manage their condition in other ways to the point of maybe not having limbs amputated, losing their sight, or dying at a middle age. Most of all, though, this is a huge testament to how poorly we're taking care of the diabetes epidemic (yes, it's an epidemic) sweeping our nation. You can point to socio-economic issues, political issues, ecological issues, and so on, but the end result is we are abandoning and failing millions of people with a serious, chronic illness. Organizations like JDRF and the ADA do have serious problems, but at the end of the day they have very few avenues to actually affect change while the root causes still exist. Thus we end up managing symptoms and trying to minimize damage. Sad state all around. [0] I'm going to blur the line a bit between Type 1 and 2 here. Of course, it's important to note that treatment and management varies wildly between the two but there are good general rules of thumb that apply to both, so i'll stick to those in order to make my point simpler