4 ms·

There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you, at all. All this talk about "sugar" swings is completely off base, IMO, especially

There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you, at all. All this talk about "sugar" swings is completely off base, IMO, especially considering most starches are much higher on the GI and II scales than sugars. Fructose is low GI, and most of it is converted to glucose in the gut, anyway. Higher consumption is converted to fat, but most vilifying sugars promote fat, so what's the difference? If anyone can link me evidence that moderate sugar intake promotes worse blood sugar regulation (compared to saturated fat, especially) in healthy, non-diabetic populations, would love to see it. FWIW, I've had anywhere from <30g total carbs in my diet, to moderate sugar/carb intake, to very high (300+g sugar [mostly from fruit], 500+ carb) diets. The very low carb diets were the worst for my energy levels (and yes, I did intake plenty of electrolytes, and was on it for 12+ weeks). Moderate carb feels best, to me, as an active, healthy body-weight male, for what anecdotal evidence is worth.

bluntfang 7y ago
>There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you There's plenty of evidence that foods in America are loaded with above-moderate sugar levels, so it's generally hard/expensive to receive moderate sugar levels.
stronglikedan 7y ago
Hear, hear! I couldn't imagine cutting sugar out completely, or anything non-processed for that matter. It just seems like a miserable way to live, but to each their own, I guess. I personally like to enjoy everything nature has to offer, just in moderation. Portion control using non-processed ingredients is the only sustainable diet I've ever successfully implemented, and I've tried a great many.
snarf21 7y ago
Anecdotally, I agree that it isn't that moderate carbs is bad and low carbs is good. The one thing that I feel is not talked about enough is the human aspect. Some people can limit themselves to a small helping of carbs, others can't. For a lot of people, the only good strategy is denial. If I know I'll be tempted to eat too much pasta or drink too much orange juice, I have to just not buy it or order it at all. I always talk about this analogy. It is really hard to eat 8 medium oranges with a meal, it is trivial to drink a 16 oz bottle of orange juice. It is also pretty easy to have a second 16 oz bottle of orange juice (but no one is likely to eat 16 medium oranges). Most people struggle because life is stressful and eating the whole bag of chips is a release. It is hard to stop after 10 chips when your day was sh!t. Just my two cents....
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  Yeah, sugar is pretty addicting. I used to be a cigarette smoker. Limiting myself to just a few cigarettes a day would never work. Cold turkey worked just fine though.
will_brown 7y ago
>If anyone can link me evidence that moderate sugar intake promotes worse blood sugar regulation (compared to saturated fat, especially) in healthy, non-diabetic populations, would love to see it. I think you should reframe this...and ask if anyone can link evidence of a case of type 2 diabeties or non alcoholic fatty liver disease where the patient didn’t consume sugar/carbs (those cases don’t exist). I think historically type 2 diabeties being called adult onset diabeties shows that even life long moderate consumption of carbs/sugars leads to type 2 in many individuals who were “healthy” in their younger years. Moreover, for many people type 2 was just a natural progression, it’s not like historically everyone with type 2 began over consuming carbs/sugar later in life.
- ZeroFries 7y ago
  The vast majority of the population eats sugar and carbs, so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them, too. Moreover, there are plenty of populations which consume very high carb diets who don't suffer from diabetes.
  - will_brown 7y ago
    >so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them No, not a majority, every single patient with T2D has consumed them, whereas a majority could reverse diabeties by cutting them. Medically it is undisputed T2D could have been avoided in 100% of cases through diet and exercise. Do other factors contribute (obesity, genetics, etc...)? Yes, but notwithstanding those issues still 100% of T2D cases could have been avoided (unfortunately not 100% can be reversed). Sure people can consume high carb diets live long healthy lives, no one is saying 100% of people who eat carbs/sugar get diabetes, but 100% of patients that get T2D consumed sugar/carbs.
- goldenkey 7y ago
  I agree low carb diets are the healthiest. But for those like myself that cant totally commit, I just want to add: Creatine supplementation has hugely improved my body's ability to attenuate sugar spikes. I feel amazing being able to handle high amounts of sugar by my muscles helping intake the sugar. If you have blood sugar issues or have diabetes, 2.5 mg of creatine daily is safe and has a great efficacy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20881878/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20881878/ The exercise portion is important because your muscles can reach peak sugar/ATP storage. Once that occurs that muscle wont really help attenuate your blood sugar any longer.. You need to drain the muscle reservoirs often to keep them as good sugar sinks.
shusson 7y ago
> Moderate carb feels best Yeah I agree, but I think the problem is it's way too easy to eat a lot of sugar without realising it. Eat an average low fat yogurt cup and if you're not careful you just ate 30g of sugar.
- ZeroFries 7y ago
  I'd argue it's easier to over-consume fats (in the context of a mixed diet). 30g of sugar is less calories than a tablespoon of oil.
EForEndeavour 7y ago
> Fructose is low GI, and most of it is converted to glucose in the gut, anyway. The first half of this sentence (fructose is low GI) is factually correct. The second half (most fructose is converted to glucose in the gut) is factually incorrect. The entire sentence and comment oversimplify sugar metabolism. tl;dr: control your fructose intake. First, nitpicky corrections: about half of ingested fructose is converted to glucose, not most of it, and this occurs in the liver, not the gut (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/). Second, and more importantly: GI is a woefully inadequate measure of the healthfulness of a food. the glycemic index (GI) of a food is indexed to a standard amount of carbohydrate mass (usually 50 g) from that food. GI captures the impact on blood glucose per gram of carbohydrate, but it certainly misses crucial aspects of sugar metabolism. For example, carrots have a high GI (above 70), but that's not a reason to stop eating carrots. You'd need to eat a huge amount of carrots to spike your blood sugar. Glycemic load is a more useful metric (https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load/ https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/glycemic-index-a...), but even that is beside the point when it comes to fructose and its deleterious health effects. Fructose, being fructose and not glucose, of course has a low glycemic index, since GI is defined based on blood glucose. Dr. Robert Lustig (UCSF pediatric endocrinologist) has devoted years of effort to communicating the disproportionate damage that fructose causes to human metabolism. In brief, fructose is processed along different metabolic paths than glucose, and is better than glucose at making people fat, diabetic, and metabolically unhealthy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592517/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592517/) A top-level summary from 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructose-poison-sugar-industry-pseudoscience https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructo... A very detailed lecture (video and transcript): https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/ https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/
- ZeroFries 7y ago
  It takes high doses of sugar for frutose to not get converted in the small intestine. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(17)30729-5 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(17)... Lustig is a highly biased source. I would be interested in summaries of controlled studies which aren't cherry-picked comparing iso-caloric diets of sugar vs fat.
Afton 7y ago
I initially did a 'dirty carnivore' type diet for around 18 months. I took it up because of the fairly extreme praise that a family member for the diet, and its effects on her mental and physical well-being. In the end, I lost a bit of weight, and I never really had to think about when to eat (skipping meals was easy on this diet if it was inconvenient, and I'd just make it up later. On a higher carb diet, I find hunger to be a more insistent sensation with worse effects (tiredness, irritability, headache). But since eating 'on time' is usually pretty easy to do, the diet had no great impact on my life. But I can't discount my family member's subjective and objective results either. Even in this thread you can find lots of folks talking about how great it is. I suspect this is just a YMMV kind of situation.

bluntfang 7y ago

>There's actually not that much evidence moderate sugar intake is bad for you There's plenty of evidence that foods in America are loaded with above-moderate sugar levels, so it's generally hard/expensive to receive moderate sugar levels.

stronglikedan 7y ago

Hear, hear! I couldn't imagine cutting sugar out completely, or anything non-processed for that matter. It just seems like a miserable way to live, but to each their own, I guess. I personally like to enjoy everything nature has to offer, just in moderation. Portion control using non-processed ingredients is the only sustainable diet I've ever successfully implemented, and I've tried a great many.

snarf21 7y ago

Anecdotally, I agree that it isn't that moderate carbs is bad and low carbs is good. The one thing that I feel is not talked about enough is the human aspect. Some people can limit themselves to a small helping of carbs, others can't. For a lot of people, the only good strategy is denial. If I know I'll be tempted to eat too much pasta or drink too much orange juice, I have to just not buy it or order it at all. I always talk about this analogy. It is really hard to eat 8 medium oranges with a meal, it is trivial to drink a 16 oz bottle of orange juice. It is also pretty easy to have a second 16 oz bottle of orange juice (but no one is likely to eat 16 medium oranges). Most people struggle because life is stressful and eating the whole bag of chips is a release. It is hard to stop after 10 chips when your day was sh!t. Just my two cents....

amanaplanacanal 7y ago
Yeah, sugar is pretty addicting. I used to be a cigarette smoker. Limiting myself to just a few cigarettes a day would never work. Cold turkey worked just fine though.

will_brown 7y ago

>If anyone can link me evidence that moderate sugar intake promotes worse blood sugar regulation (compared to saturated fat, especially) in healthy, non-diabetic populations, would love to see it. I think you should reframe this...and ask if anyone can link evidence of a case of type 2 diabeties or non alcoholic fatty liver disease where the patient didn’t consume sugar/carbs (those cases don’t exist). I think historically type 2 diabeties being called adult onset diabeties shows that even life long moderate consumption of carbs/sugars leads to type 2 in many individuals who were “healthy” in their younger years. Moreover, for many people type 2 was just a natural progression, it’s not like historically everyone with type 2 began over consuming carbs/sugar later in life.

ZeroFries 7y ago
The vast majority of the population eats sugar and carbs, so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them, too. Moreover, there are plenty of populations which consume very high carb diets who don't suffer from diabetes.
- will_brown 7y ago
  >so it's not surprisingly the majority of diabetics consume them No, not a majority, every single patient with T2D has consumed them, whereas a majority could reverse diabeties by cutting them. Medically it is undisputed T2D could have been avoided in 100% of cases through diet and exercise. Do other factors contribute (obesity, genetics, etc...)? Yes, but notwithstanding those issues still 100% of T2D cases could have been avoided (unfortunately not 100% can be reversed). Sure people can consume high carb diets live long healthy lives, no one is saying 100% of people who eat carbs/sugar get diabetes, but 100% of patients that get T2D consumed sugar/carbs.
goldenkey 7y ago
I agree low carb diets are the healthiest. But for those like myself that cant totally commit, I just want to add: Creatine supplementation has hugely improved my body's ability to attenuate sugar spikes. I feel amazing being able to handle high amounts of sugar by my muscles helping intake the sugar. If you have blood sugar issues or have diabetes, 2.5 mg of creatine daily is safe and has a great efficacy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20881878/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20881878/ The exercise portion is important because your muscles can reach peak sugar/ATP storage. Once that occurs that muscle wont really help attenuate your blood sugar any longer.. You need to drain the muscle reservoirs often to keep them as good sugar sinks.

shusson 7y ago

> Moderate carb feels best Yeah I agree, but I think the problem is it's way too easy to eat a lot of sugar without realising it. Eat an average low fat yogurt cup and if you're not careful you just ate 30g of sugar.

ZeroFries 7y ago
I'd argue it's easier to over-consume fats (in the context of a mixed diet). 30g of sugar is less calories than a tablespoon of oil.

EForEndeavour 7y ago

> Fructose is low GI, and most of it is converted to glucose in the gut, anyway. The first half of this sentence (fructose is low GI) is factually correct. The second half (most fructose is converted to glucose in the gut) is factually incorrect. The entire sentence and comment oversimplify sugar metabolism. tl;dr: control your fructose intake. First, nitpicky corrections: about half of ingested fructose is converted to glucose, not most of it, and this occurs in the liver, not the gut (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/). Second, and more importantly: GI is a woefully inadequate measure of the healthfulness of a food. the glycemic index (GI) of a food is indexed to a standard amount of carbohydrate mass (usually 50 g) from that food. GI captures the impact on blood glucose per gram of carbohydrate, but it certainly misses crucial aspects of sugar metabolism. For example, carrots have a high GI (above 70), but that's not a reason to stop eating carrots. You'd need to eat a huge amount of carrots to spike your blood sugar. Glycemic load is a more useful metric (https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load/ https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/glycemic-index-a...), but even that is beside the point when it comes to fructose and its deleterious health effects. Fructose, being fructose and not glucose, of course has a low glycemic index, since GI is defined based on blood glucose. Dr. Robert Lustig (UCSF pediatric endocrinologist) has devoted years of effort to communicating the disproportionate damage that fructose causes to human metabolism. In brief, fructose is processed along different metabolic paths than glucose, and is better than glucose at making people fat, diabetic, and metabolically unhealthy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592517/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592517/) A top-level summary from 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructose-poison-sugar-industry-pseudoscience https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructo... A very detailed lecture (video and transcript): https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/ https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/

ZeroFries 7y ago
It takes high doses of sugar for frutose to not get converted in the small intestine. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(17)30729-5 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(17)... Lustig is a highly biased source. I would be interested in summaries of controlled studies which aren't cherry-picked comparing iso-caloric diets of sugar vs fat.

Afton 7y ago

I initially did a 'dirty carnivore' type diet for around 18 months. I took it up because of the fairly extreme praise that a family member for the diet, and its effects on her mental and physical well-being. In the end, I lost a bit of weight, and I never really had to think about when to eat (skipping meals was easy on this diet if it was inconvenient, and I'd just make it up later. On a higher carb diet, I find hunger to be a more insistent sensation with worse effects (tiredness, irritability, headache). But since eating 'on time' is usually pretty easy to do, the diet had no great impact on my life. But I can't discount my family member's subjective and objective results either. Even in this thread you can find lots of folks talking about how great it is. I suspect this is just a YMMV kind of situation.