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Is Fat Killing Us, or Is Sugar?
- mcorley28 10y agoI think that it's a deadly combination of both. We tend to consume way to much sugar, and usually sugar without the associated natural fiber. The fats typically consumed are cheap, low quality fats and oils. Following a paleo-keto diet has been working wonders for me, I never felt or looked better in my 30+ years. So I think fats, when they are high quality, are the best source of fuel for the body.
- snarf21 10y agoSo true, the one thing that people leave out is the human factor. It doesn't matter how "perfect" a diet is if the person can't follow it. Switching to vegetables, lean proteins and good fats (olives, almonds) is not complicated, just hard and hard to sustain for most people.
- bigbugbag 10y agoThere's a BBC Horizon episodes with two identical twins, one goes for the low fat diet and the other for low carb diet to test which one is worse. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1amh2t_bbc-horizon-sugar-v-fat-h264-1280x720-aac-rmac_lifestyle http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1amh2t_bbc-horizon-sugar-v...
- agumonkey 10y agoFinally, I have something worth watching with my soda can.
- mkaziz 10y agoDo you have a quick synopsis of what happens?
- Danihan 10y agohttp://www.drbriffa.com/2014/01/30/my-take-on-the-horizon-documentary-sugar-v-fat/ http://www.drbriffa.com/2014/01/30/my-take-on-the-horizon-do...
- praveenster 10y agoAt time mark 57:20 in the DailyMotion video they say that it is neither of them individually but the combination of fat and sugar that is the problem.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoHow does that follow? If you have a below-average diet and replace foods from it, you're likely to do better simply due to regression to the mean. You could replace a shitty diet with one with different foods but the same macronutrient distribution and likely end up improving things.
- Danihan 10y agoSpoil it for me, I don't have time to watch at work.. Also, what kind of fat? Saturated fats are very stable and easily used by the body -- in my opinion they have very very different health effects compared to cheap, polyunsaturated fats.
- bigbugbag 10y agoEat a balanced diet, exercise is important and the brain has a very hard time resisting or stopping eating when fat and sugar are combined, 50/50 ratio being the most effective combination. So better eat sugar and fat separated.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- blakesterz 10y agoI skipped to the last few minutes of that, they seem to do a nice summary... "avoid processed foods" "All faddish diets are wrong and exercise is important" "the combination of fat and sugar is bad" (not just one or the other but foods full of both like donuts are bad)
- tiglionabbit 10y agoI thought eating fat with sugar was better than eating sugar alone since the fat slowed down the absorption of the sugar, thus dampening the insulin response.
- milesvp 10y agoYeah, I'm not sure how to model the fat+sugar problem I keep hearing whispers of. I know from the research I did with my wife's gestational diabetes is that the glycemic index of a food went down if you added just about any other food volume that with a lower glycemic index. The best example I found was that toast is like the worst possible food you can eat in terms of GI, it was higher than anything but pure glucose . But toast with jam, actually had a lower GI, since sucrose has ~half the GI of glucose (makes sense since sucrose is glucose+fructose, and fructose requires time for the liver to process). Toast with butter was even better, since butter fat has 0 GI. I still don't know how much I trust the claims that fat+sugar is particularly bad, but I suspect it may have to do with some kind of second order insulin response. Like, the presence of triglycerides in the blood cause fat cells to be more likely to respond to insulin, storing fat, instead of releasing it. I dunno. Also keep in mind GI is falling out of fashion as a key indicator. Glycemic Load seems to be more indicative of poor health indicators. That is to say, that the area under the curve is potentially more important than the max height of the curve. I'd say limiting both is probably important as well. I also highly suspect that the slope of the curve is very important in how we perceive hunger, which is why we tend to feel hungry shortly after eating foods with fast carbs... FWIW, at the end of the day, in order to keep my wife healthy, we ended up giving up fast carbs, and she had to keep her carb count low in general. Her basic formula for a snack was to add the grams of fat+ grams of protein, and if that was bigger than the grams of carbs it was safe to eat. Sorry I don't have links to this stuff, this was like 5 years ago, and I'm not sure if I ever saved those bookmarks. I can say it was really hard to find credible data sets. There didn't seem to be anything from America (draw your own conclusions :) ), most of everything I found was published datasets from Australia and New Zealand. Also, don't take this for anything other than anecdata, do your own research. You'll find very quickly a lot of really bad nutrition information. I had to plow through most of it, and might have given up if it wasn't for my pregnant wife, coupled with a friend with a digital signal processing background pointing out engineering problems with most of the current thoughts on controlling diabetic blood sugar levels.
- loader 10y agoThese twins also did one on Alcohol (Casual but Consistent vs Binging) which was pretty interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wdfhk http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wdfhk
- kannan 10y agoThe episode isn't currently available, do you know what was the outcome of the experiment?
- ramchip 10y agoI found this: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569
- kbenson 10y agoI found this[1], which summarizes nicely. Basically, they are almost equally as bad for your liver, and that was with one of them taking 21 shots of vodka[2] once a week, which left him insensible, and actually in a dangerous medical state. 1: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32798569 2: I assume measured to 25ml which is the low end of single shot size, to be in line with the standard units of alcohol they mentioned.
- loader 10y agoThere's always this method: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/11952358/BBC.Horizon.2015.Is.Binge.Drinking.Really.That.Bad.PDTV.x264.AAC https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/11952358/BBC.Horizon.2015.I...
- dlsso 10y agoDo they take cholesterol tests at the start and end? I skimmed a little but didn't see it. That's the only thing I'd really be interested in.
- crusso 10y agoThat episode is no longer available, but I remember it when it was first released. I wasn't at all impressed with the depth of the research they did before starting their experiment, their ability to stick to their diets, and their general understanding and approach to the potential science they could have been doing. The whole thing was a superficial puff piece that you can't take seriously when evaluating something as important as health.
- parenthephobia 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980272
- sqeaky 10y agoWhy not both? Why not neither?
- ellyagg 10y agoNeither by themselves, but when combined... I read somewhere that when they want to fatten up lab mice they feed them a mixture of 70% sugar and 30% fat or something similar. When you make something much more delicious and available than what appears in nature, it screws with an animal's energy balance signals.
- snarf21 10y agoI generally agree with you but sugar also tends to make you crave more sugar as it does more crazy things with insulin.
- VT_Drew 10y agoVery true, when combined they are horrible. But disagree with "neither". Sugar is really bad by itself, it isn't an "empty calorie" at all, it spikes insulin and will rot your teeth.
- omgwtfutoo 10y agoBeef spikes insulin more than table sugar.
- QuantumAphid 10y agoThis. Sugar and simple or highly processed carbs cause your body to release insulin in order to regulate blood sugar. Insulin switches off any fat burning and tells the body to store fat. Whenever your diet consists of carbs and fat nutrients, the fat is going to be immediately stored in your fatty tissues, and any excess carbs that you can't burn quickly will go there also.
- omgwtfutoo 10y agoNope, totally wrong. Sugar does NOT easily metabolized into fat in humans. It does in animals, which is why we feed them lots of carbs. Please learn how de novo lipogenesis works in humans, because you're just repeating a falsehood now. The sugar doesn't get stored, but it does keep fat from being burned, hence the false blame.
- X86BSD 10y agoSugar. Hands down. Dr. Atkins is right.
- dibujante 10y agoObesity is killing you.
- Memebook 10y agoAfter years reading about what is right or not for me. I just gave up and began eating what felt good to me. After awhile, I begin to notice that my body's constantly telling me what feels good or not. Sometimes good health is nothing more than a bit of awareness and experimentation.
- cheald 10y agoThe problem is that your body is highly adapted for survival, and it frickin' loves calories, and we have a food industry that has perfected the process of putting as many calories into as small a package as possible, with a composition that sends your brain hormones into overdrive and tells you to shove as much of it into your face as you can. Obesity is epidemic in our society because the food available to us presses all the "this feels good" buttons. Most people eat what feels good to them; the healthiest are the ones who intentionally restrict themselves from eating what their brains tell them they should be eating.
- Memebook 10y agoPerhaps. That's one story. Another possible angle, we're so out of touch with our bodies, our emotions, our very selves. That we've essentially numbed ourselves to the signals that our body's constantly sending us. Sitting children down in neat little rows for 16 years, while hammering them into preconceived form; no play, no socialization, no getting to know self, this seems to have a deleterious effect on their awareness. Funny thing is that I subscribed to that often-repeated theory, and it may not be wrong, after all, that story does make sense. However, when I started to be mindful, I began to notice that sugar doesn't feel that great and it's kinda gross same goes when I ate too much meat. Just the simple act of noticing has led me to a healthier diet. The hardest part was relearning how to be present and aware, the rest is gravy. Makes me wonder how much bullshit we've been fed over the years about ourselves.
- Shanbo 10y agoKind of crazy that you guys don't understand this yet. I may not know how to hack, but I know how the body operates. Most people would do well to read Volek & Phinney, both 'the art and science of low carbohydrate living' and 'the art and science of low carbohydrate performance'
- molloy 10y agoIn turn, I recommend you read How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. http://nutritionfacts.org/book/ http://nutritionfacts.org/book/
- cies 10y agoThis is the single best advice in this whole thread. I read it: it covers so much ground. You need to be a bit of a nerd (the text is loaded with refs to papers) and makes use of jargon where no simple alternative exists -- but it is by no means a hard read. Srsly this book can add 15 healthy years to your life!
- mjevans 10y agoYes. For me, probably most is the highly sedentary office lifestyle. Compounding this problem, I more or less live alone and thus 'community food' (eating out) is my best access to non-frozen pre-prepared meals. I refuse to do leftovers (this is not negotiable). The main problem with eating out is the portion size. Everything is insanely large.
- beaconstudios 10y agoRead into meal prep, a number of friends in a similar situation have tried it and reported great success.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoIt is "insanely large" because leftovers are built into the meal. You're meant to take some home and have it for lunch. I don't really know what your post is about. It starts with the word "Yes" (???) and then gives a ton of incoherent excuses for something which isn't specified.
- antisthenes 10y agoOf course it's specified. It's an excuse for being fat.
- ikeyany 10y ago> I refuse to do leftovers (this is not negotiable). Do you see a difference between eating leftovers and preparing a future meal? For example, I may cook extra chicken for dinner, chop up the extra pieces and put them in a salad for the next day's lunch.
- magic_beans 10y agoWhat do you mean leftovers are not negotioable? Are you saying you never cook because you don't want to eat the food the next day? Or are you saying you never take food you don't finish at restaurants to go? Not the most healthful path you're on :/
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
- mvpu 10y agoBah, why do people write such painfully long posts without an executive summary at the top?
- munificent 10y agoThe entire gist of the article is that nutrition cannot be executive-summarized and that it is likely the confluence of many many factors that determine how our diet affects our health.
- antisthenes 10y agoBut that's provably wrong, so the article is incorrect in its entirety then? Here's the executive summary: 1. Do not eat more calories than you need. 2. Exercise 3 times a week (or more if you have time and enjoy it), with moderate intensity 3. Ensure that most of your meals follow a good macro nutrient profile (but if you have to cut something, do it in carbs --> fat --> protein order) Not sure why people have such difficulty grasping those concepts and will come up with statistically irrelevant anecdotes in futile attempts to prove the main concepts wrong.
- coolsunglasses 10y agoIt's the New Yorker.
- Luc 10y agoI often start with the last paragraph and work my way up until I get the gist of it. Works remarkably well!
- tf2manu994 10y agoNeither. Calories.
- jlebrech 10y agoFat is for survival, if you're don't spend the night outdoors you wont burn it. Sugar is for energy to use immediately, if you don't use it it's turns into fat, 30% of it is wasted in that process though. Overeating carbs is better than overeating fat.
- pnw_hazor 10y agoNot really. Excess fats do not convert to body fat. They just pass through. Excess glucose (from sugar and carbs) triggers insulin production which causes glucose to be converted to body fat and your muscles to stop consuming fat. (Which also causes your muscles to be nutrient depleted leading to being hungry soon after...) The insulin flood caused by sugar and bad carbs is your body trying not to die of glucose poisoning.
- jlebrech 10y agoexcess fat causes insulin resistance which causes sugar to stay in the blood stream.
- nether 10y agoWelp
- alpha_squared 10y agoYou can be at a healthy weight and still develop diabetes. I think the whole health discussion is about more than just weight.
- pnw_hazor 10y agoYes. Weight is a symptom, not a cause. Eat too many carbs/sugars -> more insulin which yields more body fat.
- solipsism 10y agoAh, good to know the first law of thermodynamics is still in effect, thanks!
- abraves10001 10y agoIt matters in weight loss, without a doubt and weight often matters in a lot of these arguments about what is killing you. I don't think you can equate weight and cholesterol though.
- slothtrop 10y agoWith regards to weight-gain, yes. Not overall health. You'll get yourself diabetes maintaining that kind of sugar consumption.
- abraves10001 10y agoI think I am misunderstanding the 30% claim. Is it over time or is it just that 4.4 is ~30% greater than 3.4? I think the latter makes sense without "the complex statistical way that the study’s results were projected over time" but then again I haven't read the actual study.
- justboxing 10y agoDUPE of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980272
- Aron 10y agoMy intuition is that there is a small delta in impact between a 'reasonable' diet and a 'perfect' diet, and so playing in that margin is pointless. But I've always felt it notable that you can consume a whole day's worth of calories in about 5 minutes with a super happy value meal, and then be hungry again a few hours later. I'd say avoid doing that.
- kough 10y agoActually, it's pretty hard to eat a whole day's worth of calories in a single meal. I know this because I've tried to, regularly, as part of a longer attempt to gain weight. If you're ordering at McDonald's, your best calorie/dollar ratio [edit: s/your best/my preferred] is the ~800 calorie double quarter pounder with cheese for ~6 dollars. My daily caloric requirements are estimated at 3000 calories based on my age and gender, which means I'd have to eat a little under four of these. The best I've managed is two, and that's even with smoking weed to increase my appetite.
- dnissley 10y agoIf you use that $6 to get 6 $1 McDoubles (are they still $1?) then you can get 2280 calories at 380 per burger.
- kough 10y agoThere's a lot of food on the menu I refuse to eat because it's far too gross. McDoubles are one of them. Should have mentioned that in my earlier comment – some taste preferences are involved.
- snarf21 10y agoA McDouble is 390 calories for $1.39 and I think you are also missing the fact that a "large" coke is around 310 and we haven't even gotten to the fries yet.
- cheald 10y agoNow add a 32oz coke (320 calories) and a large fry (510) and you're at 1,652 calories for what many people would consider a "small" meal. Throw in a 510 calorie McFlurry for dessert and you've just blown past 2k calories in a single sitting.
- finid 10y agoIt’s one of many cautionary tales about assessing dietary data. Everyone wants to be healthy, and most of us like eating, so we’re easily swayed by any new finding, no matter how dubious. That's why I ignore the headlines and read the paper of any study that I'm interested in.
- necessity 10y agoNone of the above.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoA lot of nutritional studies have a common flaw: 1. Various health outcomes and indicators are caused by a food or combination of foods that you regularly eat. 2. A diet is studied where these foods get removed from your diet, to be replaced with whatever the diet under study is. 3. The participants in the diet study have poorer than average health outcomes and indicators (otherwise, why would they try changing their diet?) 4. Regression to the mean happens, and all sorts of dietary changes appear to be good for your health. Basically, if you're fatter than average, and it's caused by the foods you eat, you can fix that by making a list of everything you eat and not eating those foods. "Whatever you don't eat" is a more average diet than what you're currently eating, so you'll get more average results. (This idea shamelessly stolen from HN user jimrandomh. Hopefully I didn't butcher the details too badly.)
- coldtea 10y ago>3. The participants in the diet study have poorer than average health outcomes and indicators (otherwise, why would they try changing their diet?) Because they're asked to, as part of the experiment? >4. Regression to the mean happens, and all sorts of dietary changes appear to be good for your health Why would the mean be better, since in (3) you mentioned that those people had "poorer than average health outcomes and indicators" to begin with? For regression to the mean, they should have started the diet after some extreme readings. But who said those are what prompted them to the diet? People don't start on a diet when they get extremely heavy, they start and stop diets all the time, while being continuously obese. >Basically, if you're fatter than average, and it's caused by the foods you eat, you can fix that by making a list of everything you eat and not eating those foods. "Whatever you don't eat" is a more average diet than what you're currently eating, so you'll get more average results. Well, if you eat the same calories from your new "Whatever you don't eat", then you'll get as fat.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago>Because they're asked to, as part of the experiment? Let me try another way to word the same concept: why would an actor in the best shape of their life with a personal chef and nutritionist participate in the experiment? Similar logic goes for less extreme examples on this end of the curve. >For regression to the mean, they should have started the diet after some extreme readings. They're obese, their diet is an extreme reading from the space of possible diets. They're choosing foods that only satisfies their various needs at a caloric quantity that causes weight gain. >But who said those are what prompted them to the diet? People don't start on a diet when they get extremely heavy, they start and stop diets all the time, while being continuously obese. Caloric restriction diets and food choice diets aren't the same thing here. People usually start and stop diets all the time because caloric restriction diets have huge user experience issues. Specifically, the very common yoyo dieting; you feel bad about being fat so you decide to do something about it, then you do caloric restriction in a way that fails to meet many of your other needs, then you abandon the diet because the stress of not meeting your needs starts to outweigh the negative feelings from being fat. >Well, if you eat the same calories from your new "Whatever you don't eat", then you'll get as fat. If your current diet meets your needs at an above-average number of calories, you won't eat the same number of calories (unless you try to manually control caloric intake through some variant of calorie counting).
- jimjimjim 10y agoall things in moderation. not too much sugar. not too much fat. not too much food. eat more green veges. not too much carbon/charcoal. avoid processed stuff. but most important: don't tell anyone else. If everybody does it then the food industry will insidiously alter itself to pull people back in while finding a way to make good things bad.
- omgwtfutoo 10y agoThis is such vague, banal advice that it is useless. Suggest looking at peer reviewed papers when deciding what to eat. See http://nutritionfacts.org http://nutritionfacts.org
- jameslk 10y agoI see a lot of suggestions for diets in the comments here, but not a lot of citations. It's good that others have recommendations to share, but at least back it up from something.
- shirro 10y agoIt is neither and both. The problem is overconsumption. People eat too much and the food they eat has far too much energy for their daily demands. People just need to eat smaller portions, less energy dense refined foods and eat less often.
- tchock23 10y agoThe author lost me when it left out the mention of Ancel Keys cherry picking data to support his hypothesis that fat is bad, and then noting off-hand that he lived to be 100 (somehow validating his hypothesis?) Poorly written article that felt more like a defensive hit piece (e.g., dedicating eight paragraphs to destroying the credibility of Sylvia Tara) than something that sought to answer the question posed by its title.
- emmanuel_1234 10y agoTotally. He comments on well documented pieces of work (at least Taubes', I'm not familiar with the other one) and discard huge part of them without bringing any evidence whatsoever (he even seems to admit that his wife is the expert on the topic of understanding statistics!). I like Taubes work because he's thorough and refutable (notably in refuting a lot of other studies). Doesn't mean he's always right, but I've yet to see arguments against his work that are as sound as the one he brought to the table.
- naasking 10y ago> and then noting off-hand that he lived to be 100 (somehow validating his hypothesis?) Longevity like this is virtually all genetics, so it wouldn't validate any such hypothesis.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- godgod 10y agoBoth.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- upofadown 10y agoAt this point I am quite cynical about any claim that you can get healthier with a specific diet. I can guarantee you that my cyanide and toxic metal diet will make you less healthy but knowing that one thing is true does not automatically mean that you know that another thing is true. Exercise will make most people healthier in general, particularly stuff associated with your cardiovascular system. We know that. That doesn't mean exercise will make you anything else associated with good health. It might not make you thinner, it might not change any sort of index based on medical tests normally done on inactive people. It might not even make you better looking or hotter in any way. We don't actually know any of that other stuff for sure. This all simplifies things a lot. The advice should be: "get some exercise every once in a while. Don't worry so much about stuff that we don't actually know."
- loco5niner 10y agoAs a single guy that checks out girls a lot, I can verify that exercise makes you hotter, if not better looking. Yes, it may be true that healthier people are more likely to exercise exactly because they are already healthy, but I would imagine that is true in less that 1% of the population.
- neilk 10y agoI don't know, man. If you're trying to make a serious point about health, do you have to cite your expertise as an ogler of women? It sounds like you're trying to allude to something we're all supposed to know, that people past a certain percentage of body fat are all inactive and lazy. Maybe what you meant was that, all things being equal, someone who is strong and healthy is more attractive. That's probably true. But as upofadown pointed out, there are lots of people who are very healthy and strong, and exercise a lot, but their body shape or fat percentage doesn't conform to the desires of the average voyeur.
- loco5niner 10y ago> If you're trying to make a serious point about health Not trying to make a serious point about health. > do you have to cite your expertise as an ogler of women You are misappropriating my comment.
- omgwtfutoo 10y agoIt's both. Eat whole plant foods, I.e. a vegan unprocessed diet, and you'll be fine. Just like your ancestors did and were.