9 ms·

Maybe we will start to finally see products in major super markets that are affordable and don't have tons of refined carbs. Right now it is either really expen

by csmeder 16y ago

Maybe we will start to finally see products in major super markets that are affordable and don't have tons of refined carbs. Right now it is either really expensive or really time consuming to eat a variety of food that doesn't have refined carbs.

jules 16y ago
What do you mean by refined carbs? Does it include bread, pasta, potatoes, etc? Because I don't think those are bad for you because they don't cause blood sugar levels to rise as quickly as stuff like HFCS and sugar (but I could be wrong).
- ig1 16y ago
  Just because HCFS is worse for you, it doesn't mean refined carbs like white bread are good for you. They do cause an larger increase in blood sugar compared to other foods (such as unrefined carbs).
- ynniv 16y ago
  "Refined" includes flower and sugar, but not whole starches. I'm not sure where white rice falls, as I have heard that too much white rice is also unhealthy.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    According to the spreadsheet 'carbocation posted from the National Cancer Institute, white rice has almost as bad a glycemic impact as white bread.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - xiaoma 16y ago
      And yet, amongst the developed countries, it is those who eat rice at nearly every meal (Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan) that have the lowest rates of obesity, heart disease diabetes and similar lifestyle diseases.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Those rice-centered Asian diets are also very low in fats. It's supposedly the combination of large amounts of carbohydrates and any significant amount of fat or sugar that causes the problem.
- tptacek 16y ago
  What's the evidence that you're thinking of that HFCS is particularly bad for you? Sugar is bad for you no matter what form it takes.
  - jules 16y ago
    Are there studies that study the effect of exercise on the badness of sugar? Do bread, pasta, potatoes, etc. qualify as sugar? (looking for an excuse to keep eating these things)
  - dalore 16y ago
    I don't think sugar is bad for you. Excess sugar certainly is, but then excess anything usually is.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Take the spreadsheet 'carbocation posted, sort it by "glycemic index", skip past all the nulls, and you have a list from "foods this SciAm article suggests are unhealthful" to "foods this SciAm article suggests aren't unhealthful". You'll find sugar, flour, potatoes, and white rice at the top of the list, and fats and oils near the bottom.
      - pmccool 16y ago
        There are some interesting counterexamples; it's possible to make white bread with a GI of 40 or so. Flour doesn't necessarily mean high GI, nor are ingredients the sole determinant of GI. There's a paper kicking round where the authors baked white bread with GIs between 40 and 100 (from memory). The _only difference was proving time...
        bbatsell 16y ago
        That's because the longer a dough is proofed, the less white flour remains in its refined state — the yeast has had its way with as many sugar molecules as it could belch. The flour is still the GI determinant, it's just not refined white flour anymore.
- whyenot 16y ago
  Fructose actually has a very low glycemic index, about 20 compared to 100 for glucose and about 68 for sucrose. HFCS has a glycemic index of about 62. If you want to follow a low glycemic index diet, it's much more important to avoid potatoes, white bread, white flour and rice than HFCS
  - katanil 16y ago
    While it's nice that fructose doesn't raise blood sugar like the other monosaccharides, you need to keep in mind that fructose gets preferential uptake treatment by the liver. If you eat too much of a food that contains fructose, you can overwhelm your liver into producing triglycerides (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302539 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302539). While we're not entirely sure that triglycerides themselves are responsible for ill health, having elevated levels has been linked to all sorts of chronic diseases.
    - Kutta 16y ago
      An issue that is just as great as that ^ is that fructose is a glycating agent potentially reaching high concentrations is the liver, causing direct damage to it, elevating liver enzymes and contributing to non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver
- illumin8 16y ago
  Absolutely. All refined carbs are bad for you. This includes especially breads made of white flour, pasta, and potatoes. If you want to be healthy you need to keep your blood glucose at a steady level, which means eating complex carbs like whole grains, sweet potatoes, brown rice, etc. These carbs turn into glucose much slower than refined carbs, which cause a steady release of glucose rather than a sugar rush that you get from refined carbs. Just because they aren't as quick as HFCS doesn't mean they aren't bad for you. A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it. Tell me that isn't bad for you. Eat one every day and you might just get diabetes...
  - azanar 16y ago
    Potatoes are not made up of refined carbohydrates. If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice. It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish. I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you. Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again. There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.
    - Kutta 16y ago
shiny 16y ago
It's not difficult at all. Cheese, butter, and eggs are all cheap. Hell, if you're not a stickler for local and pastured meat, that's quite cheap as well (though you can usually manage to find decently-priced sources of those -- especially if you find a group to cowpool with.) My standard meal is eggs, sausage, and onions sauteed in butter and topped with salsa. Very cheap and fast (and good).
metamemetics 16y ago
if anyone is worried about insulin resistance from carbohydrates you can just start taking cinnamon everyday. It prevents the development of insulin resistance even on a high fructose diet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064
- jules 16y ago
  So, the problem is that the body doesn't respond to insulin well enough if you keep eating that kind of stuff. And this is a problem because blood sugar levels are too high. So is this reasoning correct: if you are fit and have more muscles then the blood sugar will drop better because more muscles => more stuff that takes sugar out of the blood => lower blood sugar => good.

by csmeder 16y ago

jules 16y ago

What do you mean by refined carbs? Does it include bread, pasta, potatoes, etc? Because I don't think those are bad for you because they don't cause blood sugar levels to rise as quickly as stuff like HFCS and sugar (but I could be wrong).

ig1 16y ago
Just because HCFS is worse for you, it doesn't mean refined carbs like white bread are good for you. They do cause an larger increase in blood sugar compared to other foods (such as unrefined carbs).
ynniv 16y ago
"Refined" includes flower and sugar, but not whole starches. I'm not sure where white rice falls, as I have heard that too much white rice is also unhealthy.
- tptacek 16y ago
  According to the spreadsheet 'carbocation posted from the National Cancer Institute, white rice has almost as bad a glycemic impact as white bread.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - xiaoma 16y ago
    And yet, amongst the developed countries, it is those who eat rice at nearly every meal (Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan) that have the lowest rates of obesity, heart disease diabetes and similar lifestyle diseases.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Those rice-centered Asian diets are also very low in fats. It's supposedly the combination of large amounts of carbohydrates and any significant amount of fat or sugar that causes the problem.
tptacek 16y ago
What's the evidence that you're thinking of that HFCS is particularly bad for you? Sugar is bad for you no matter what form it takes.
- jules 16y ago
  Are there studies that study the effect of exercise on the badness of sugar? Do bread, pasta, potatoes, etc. qualify as sugar? (looking for an excuse to keep eating these things)
- dalore 16y ago
  I don't think sugar is bad for you. Excess sugar certainly is, but then excess anything usually is.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Take the spreadsheet 'carbocation posted, sort it by "glycemic index", skip past all the nulls, and you have a list from "foods this SciAm article suggests are unhealthful" to "foods this SciAm article suggests aren't unhealthful". You'll find sugar, flour, potatoes, and white rice at the top of the list, and fats and oils near the bottom.
    - pmccool 16y ago
      There are some interesting counterexamples; it's possible to make white bread with a GI of 40 or so. Flour doesn't necessarily mean high GI, nor are ingredients the sole determinant of GI. There's a paper kicking round where the authors baked white bread with GIs between 40 and 100 (from memory). The _only difference was proving time...
      - bbatsell 16y ago
        That's because the longer a dough is proofed, the less white flour remains in its refined state — the yeast has had its way with as many sugar molecules as it could belch. The flour is still the GI determinant, it's just not refined white flour anymore.
whyenot 16y ago
Fructose actually has a very low glycemic index, about 20 compared to 100 for glucose and about 68 for sucrose. HFCS has a glycemic index of about 62. If you want to follow a low glycemic index diet, it's much more important to avoid potatoes, white bread, white flour and rice than HFCS
- katanil 16y ago
  While it's nice that fructose doesn't raise blood sugar like the other monosaccharides, you need to keep in mind that fructose gets preferential uptake treatment by the liver. If you eat too much of a food that contains fructose, you can overwhelm your liver into producing triglycerides (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302539 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302539). While we're not entirely sure that triglycerides themselves are responsible for ill health, having elevated levels has been linked to all sorts of chronic diseases.
  - Kutta 16y ago
    An issue that is just as great as that ^ is that fructose is a glycating agent potentially reaching high concentrations is the liver, causing direct damage to it, elevating liver enzymes and contributing to non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver
illumin8 16y ago
Absolutely. All refined carbs are bad for you. This includes especially breads made of white flour, pasta, and potatoes. If you want to be healthy you need to keep your blood glucose at a steady level, which means eating complex carbs like whole grains, sweet potatoes, brown rice, etc. These carbs turn into glucose much slower than refined carbs, which cause a steady release of glucose rather than a sugar rush that you get from refined carbs. Just because they aren't as quick as HFCS doesn't mean they aren't bad for you. A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it. Tell me that isn't bad for you. Eat one every day and you might just get diabetes...
- azanar 16y ago
  Potatoes are not made up of refined carbohydrates. If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice. It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish. I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you. Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again. There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.
  - Kutta 16y ago

shiny 16y ago

It's not difficult at all. Cheese, butter, and eggs are all cheap. Hell, if you're not a stickler for local and pastured meat, that's quite cheap as well (though you can usually manage to find decently-priced sources of those -- especially if you find a group to cowpool with.) My standard meal is eggs, sausage, and onions sauteed in butter and topped with salsa. Very cheap and fast (and good).

metamemetics 16y ago

if anyone is worried about insulin resistance from carbohydrates you can just start taking cinnamon everyday. It prevents the development of insulin resistance even on a high fructose diet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064

jules 16y ago
So, the problem is that the body doesn't respond to insulin well enough if you keep eating that kind of stuff. And this is a problem because blood sugar levels are too high. So is this reasoning correct: if you are fit and have more muscles then the blood sugar will drop better because more muscles => more stuff that takes sugar out of the blood => lower blood sugar => good.