6 ms·

"He had a proper dietary routine now, he said. [...], made oatmeal for breakfast, ate a banana as a snack, had a salad or PB&J for lunch, and some pasta for din

"He had a proper dietary routine now, he said. [...], made oatmeal for breakfast, ate a banana as a snack, had a salad or PB&J for lunch, and some pasta for dinner." Ah yes, the proper diet of carbs and sugar, little protein and even less fat. PB&J for lunch for a diabetic, seriously? We're still a few decades away before the common populace and your GPs learns that sugar, especially fructose, is one of the biggest causes of the obesity epidemic.

ravenstine 5y ago
I hope someday this concept of a healthy diet goes by the wayside because even just a cursory investigation makes it obvious how flawed it is. It's like people think that a food is "healthy" as long as it's not pizza or ice cream, and even most GPs don't totally know better (they're not stupid, it's just that they're not as educated in that subject). A reasonable diet isn't even that complicated. Control the sugar and choose foods lower on the insulin index and it will be surprisingly difficult to not control your weight. You won't necessarily get ripped on that alone, but it would be really unlikely to get anywhere near as large as this guy or for him to stay that way. For instance, even though oatmeal is pretty overrated to start with, it's by no means the worst thing one can be eating, so he would just need to not eat it with sugar. Oatmeal is a somewhat higher glycemic food if I remember correctly, but it's a good source of fiber. Bananas are pretty high on the glycemic and insulin indexes so they should only be eaten occasionally and as an alternative to something worse like ice cream. Salad is of course mostly fine if it has minimal dressing and no added sugar (and hopefully a good fat like olive oil). Peanuts are, surprisingly enough, very low on the insulin index and are fairly low on the glycemic index, and they're high in satiation. A peanut butter sandwich with natural peanut butter (no added sugar) and whole grain bread would be far better to a PB&J, though eating some peanut butter without bread would be optimal. Pasta probably isn't the best thing to be eating if you're 600+ lbs, but at lower weights it's not necessarily that bad relative to other things. Better to replace it with something closer to a low carb Mediterranean dish if you want a substantial dinner. If you (the reader in general) read those two paragraphs then I just saved you countless hours in reading research papers and fad diet books/sites. Metabolism is complicated, but the insulin response is the most important thing to understand for body fat control. If you don't have an insulin response, you can't gain adipose fat. The most successful diet plans usually select for foods that have a lower glycemic effect and a lower insulin response. The leptin/ghrelin balance is also important, but even that is less important in the long term than insulin. Both diet and fasting help with those, the latter being of greater help in the short term. > especially fructose I would generally agree, although I think the fructose thing is a little overstated and misleads some people to lumping food into the same category is Coca Cola. Different fruits have different insulin index values, different amounts of sugar, and usually come with fiber which helps with blood sugar spikes among other things. With some exceptions (bananas and obviously fruit juices), if you're consuming whole fruit but you're not eating refined sugars then you'll probably be fine. Even mangos, which are super tasty IMO, aren't particularly high in calories relative to many other foods people normally consume, and if your source of sugar is a mango a day then most of that sugar will be processed by your liver and it's little enough that you can burn it off with some low intensity exercise.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Re: fructose. I was reading recently some interesting theories about fructose possibly being obesogenic, I'm about to leave so I can't do a proper Google search and link the studies. The theory makes sense evolutionarily: fruits were mostly available for a couple months a year, so the body tries to store fruit sugar as fat, for the long cold winter days, instead of using them immediately as short term energy in the form of glycogen.
  - lhl 5y ago
    There's lots of research on negative metabolic effects of high fructose consumption, particularly on the liver. Here's a couple recent reviews as a starting point for those that are interested: Mai, Brandon H, and Liang-Jun Yan. “The Negative and Detrimental Effects of High Fructose on the Liver, with Special Reference to Metabolic Disorders.” Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy 12 (May 27, 2019): 821–26. https://doi.org/10.2147/DMSO.S198968 https://doi.org/10.2147/DMSO.S198968. Jensen, Thomas, Manal F. Abdelmalek, Shelby Sullivan, Kristen J. Nadeau, Melanie Green, Carlos Roncal, Takahiko Nakagawa, et al. “Fructose and Sugar: A Major Mediator of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.” Journal of Hepatology 68, no. 5 (May 2018): 1063–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2018.01.019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2018.01.019. And some interesting evolutionary speculation on why effects of fructose might be so powerfully conserved: Johnson, Richard J., Peter Stenvinkel, Peter Andrews, Laura G. Sánchez-Lozada, Takahiko Nakagawa, Eric Gaucher, Ana Andres-Hernando, et al. “Fructose Metabolism as a Common Evolutionary Pathway of Survival Associated with Climate Change, Food Shortage and Droughts.” Journal of Internal Medicine, October 17, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12993 https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12993. BTW, beyond mechanistic research, I think one of the most interesting recent trials was this elegant study done recently in obese children (n=41) where it was shown that over 10 days of isocaloric (calorie-matched) swapping of sugar for starchy carbs resulted in a halving (!) of liver fat, a 68% decrease in DNL (de novo lipogensis = fat produced by the liver), and improved insulin kinetics across the board, showing that fructose was not only uniquely bad from a metabolic perspective even vs glucose, but that the response to removing the fructose was a dramatic and immediate improvement in health markers: Schwarz, Jean-Marc, Susan M Noworolski, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Natalie J Korn, Michael J Wen, Viva W Tai, Grace M Jones, et al. “Effects of Dietary Fructose Restriction on Liver Fat, De Novo Lipogenesis, and Insulin Kinetics in Children with Obesity.” Gastroenterology 153, no. 3 (September 2017): 743–52. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2017.05.043 https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2017.05.043.
weq 5y ago
Totally. Sugar is the Cigarettes of our time, no doubt. My mother's gastric bypass at 50 saved her life. She took artifical sweateners for 20yrs thinking they would help her control her weight but in reality all they do is keep you conditioned to the rush. She regained weight after her initial surgury but has finally been able to kick the sugar and has kept it off long term - now 67. She has the same problems with skin flaps; even though she keeps loosing weight she doesnt get the apperance changes because of it.
- delusional 5y ago
  > Sugar is the Cigarettes of our time, no doubt. People have been saying this for the past 15-20 years, yet it keeps not being true. The difference is pretty obvious with just a little thought. Sugars are part of a balanced diet, it's perfectly healthy to consume some amount of sugars during a normal day. Cigarettes have NO health benefits, they only serve to kill you. Cutting out all cigarettes is a pretty minimal sacrifice compared to avoiding large swaths of foodstuffs. Comparing the two only makes normal people rolls their eyes at you and ignore anything you have to say from your ivory tower.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    How is it not true? Overeating / over-sugaring is at least close to smoking in its aggregate detrimental effects. So many health problems are caused by overweight. If people feel this is a ridiculous comparison, they need to be corrected. The lowest common denominator does not dictate how I communicate.
    - delusional 5y ago
      You're giving away the differentiator right in your comment. You've never heard anyone talk about "oversmoking" because there's no such thing as "the right amount of smoking" (or rather, that amount is zero. No smoking is the _correct_ amount of smoking). I agree that obesity is terrible. I even agree that the "oversugaring" is probably a large portion of the cause side of the obesity problem. I'm just pointing out that when you compare it to smoking, you sound full of yourself. I'm of normal weight but consume way too much sugar (I'm working on it). When you tell me that I'm as bad as smokers I don't hear someone telling me the hard truths. I hear someone erecting a pedestal they can put themselves on.
JoeyBananas 5y ago
Except... This diet worked for him and he lost weight.
- karmakurtisaani 5y ago
  It was probably due to just taking in less calories than he was consuming. Now that sounds like a gross simplification, and it is, but it's missing a key insight: sugars don't really keep you full for long, and limiting calorie intake with such a diet requires a lot more willpower than eating fats and proteins that actually curb your feeling of hunger for a long period of time. I'm not an expert on the topic, but that's how it works in my limited experience.
  - JoeyBananas 5y ago
    > It was probably due to just taking in less calories than he was consuming. Yes, absolutely. My point is that obese people shouldn't worry about what specific diet is the best diet. I see people make this mistake all the time. It doesn't matter as much as many people assume. The only way to lose weight is to eat less calories. This article is about how a formerly fat guy managed to lose weight. This is a big accomplishment. Many obese people try to lose weight and fail. Criticizing the minor details of his new diet is foolish. There are so many armchair diet experts who don't understand this.

ravenstine 5y ago

I hope someday this concept of a healthy diet goes by the wayside because even just a cursory investigation makes it obvious how flawed it is. It's like people think that a food is "healthy" as long as it's not pizza or ice cream, and even most GPs don't totally know better (they're not stupid, it's just that they're not as educated in that subject). A reasonable diet isn't even that complicated. Control the sugar and choose foods lower on the insulin index and it will be surprisingly difficult to not control your weight. You won't necessarily get ripped on that alone, but it would be really unlikely to get anywhere near as large as this guy or for him to stay that way. For instance, even though oatmeal is pretty overrated to start with, it's by no means the worst thing one can be eating, so he would just need to not eat it with sugar. Oatmeal is a somewhat higher glycemic food if I remember correctly, but it's a good source of fiber. Bananas are pretty high on the glycemic and insulin indexes so they should only be eaten occasionally and as an alternative to something worse like ice cream. Salad is of course mostly fine if it has minimal dressing and no added sugar (and hopefully a good fat like olive oil). Peanuts are, surprisingly enough, very low on the insulin index and are fairly low on the glycemic index, and they're high in satiation. A peanut butter sandwich with natural peanut butter (no added sugar) and whole grain bread would be far better to a PB&J, though eating some peanut butter without bread would be optimal. Pasta probably isn't the best thing to be eating if you're 600+ lbs, but at lower weights it's not necessarily that bad relative to other things. Better to replace it with something closer to a low carb Mediterranean dish if you want a substantial dinner. If you (the reader in general) read those two paragraphs then I just saved you countless hours in reading research papers and fad diet books/sites. Metabolism is complicated, but the insulin response is the most important thing to understand for body fat control. If you don't have an insulin response, you can't gain adipose fat. The most successful diet plans usually select for foods that have a lower glycemic effect and a lower insulin response. The leptin/ghrelin balance is also important, but even that is less important in the long term than insulin. Both diet and fasting help with those, the latter being of greater help in the short term. > especially fructose I would generally agree, although I think the fructose thing is a little overstated and misleads some people to lumping food into the same category is Coca Cola. Different fruits have different insulin index values, different amounts of sugar, and usually come with fiber which helps with blood sugar spikes among other things. With some exceptions (bananas and obviously fruit juices), if you're consuming whole fruit but you're not eating refined sugars then you'll probably be fine. Even mangos, which are super tasty IMO, aren't particularly high in calories relative to many other foods people normally consume, and if your source of sugar is a mango a day then most of that sugar will be processed by your liver and it's little enough that you can burn it off with some low intensity exercise.

1_player 5y ago
Re: fructose. I was reading recently some interesting theories about fructose possibly being obesogenic, I'm about to leave so I can't do a proper Google search and link the studies. The theory makes sense evolutionarily: fruits were mostly available for a couple months a year, so the body tries to store fruit sugar as fat, for the long cold winter days, instead of using them immediately as short term energy in the form of glycogen.
- lhl 5y ago
  There's lots of research on negative metabolic effects of high fructose consumption, particularly on the liver. Here's a couple recent reviews as a starting point for those that are interested: Mai, Brandon H, and Liang-Jun Yan. “The Negative and Detrimental Effects of High Fructose on the Liver, with Special Reference to Metabolic Disorders.” Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy 12 (May 27, 2019): 821–26. https://doi.org/10.2147/DMSO.S198968 https://doi.org/10.2147/DMSO.S198968. Jensen, Thomas, Manal F. Abdelmalek, Shelby Sullivan, Kristen J. Nadeau, Melanie Green, Carlos Roncal, Takahiko Nakagawa, et al. “Fructose and Sugar: A Major Mediator of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.” Journal of Hepatology 68, no. 5 (May 2018): 1063–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2018.01.019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2018.01.019. And some interesting evolutionary speculation on why effects of fructose might be so powerfully conserved: Johnson, Richard J., Peter Stenvinkel, Peter Andrews, Laura G. Sánchez-Lozada, Takahiko Nakagawa, Eric Gaucher, Ana Andres-Hernando, et al. “Fructose Metabolism as a Common Evolutionary Pathway of Survival Associated with Climate Change, Food Shortage and Droughts.” Journal of Internal Medicine, October 17, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12993 https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12993. BTW, beyond mechanistic research, I think one of the most interesting recent trials was this elegant study done recently in obese children (n=41) where it was shown that over 10 days of isocaloric (calorie-matched) swapping of sugar for starchy carbs resulted in a halving (!) of liver fat, a 68% decrease in DNL (de novo lipogensis = fat produced by the liver), and improved insulin kinetics across the board, showing that fructose was not only uniquely bad from a metabolic perspective even vs glucose, but that the response to removing the fructose was a dramatic and immediate improvement in health markers: Schwarz, Jean-Marc, Susan M Noworolski, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Natalie J Korn, Michael J Wen, Viva W Tai, Grace M Jones, et al. “Effects of Dietary Fructose Restriction on Liver Fat, De Novo Lipogenesis, and Insulin Kinetics in Children with Obesity.” Gastroenterology 153, no. 3 (September 2017): 743–52. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2017.05.043 https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2017.05.043.

weq 5y ago

Totally. Sugar is the Cigarettes of our time, no doubt. My mother's gastric bypass at 50 saved her life. She took artifical sweateners for 20yrs thinking they would help her control her weight but in reality all they do is keep you conditioned to the rush. She regained weight after her initial surgury but has finally been able to kick the sugar and has kept it off long term - now 67. She has the same problems with skin flaps; even though she keeps loosing weight she doesnt get the apperance changes because of it.

delusional 5y ago
> Sugar is the Cigarettes of our time, no doubt. People have been saying this for the past 15-20 years, yet it keeps not being true. The difference is pretty obvious with just a little thought. Sugars are part of a balanced diet, it's perfectly healthy to consume some amount of sugars during a normal day. Cigarettes have NO health benefits, they only serve to kill you. Cutting out all cigarettes is a pretty minimal sacrifice compared to avoiding large swaths of foodstuffs. Comparing the two only makes normal people rolls their eyes at you and ignore anything you have to say from your ivory tower.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  How is it not true? Overeating / over-sugaring is at least close to smoking in its aggregate detrimental effects. So many health problems are caused by overweight. If people feel this is a ridiculous comparison, they need to be corrected. The lowest common denominator does not dictate how I communicate.
  - delusional 5y ago
    You're giving away the differentiator right in your comment. You've never heard anyone talk about "oversmoking" because there's no such thing as "the right amount of smoking" (or rather, that amount is zero. No smoking is the _correct_ amount of smoking). I agree that obesity is terrible. I even agree that the "oversugaring" is probably a large portion of the cause side of the obesity problem. I'm just pointing out that when you compare it to smoking, you sound full of yourself. I'm of normal weight but consume way too much sugar (I'm working on it). When you tell me that I'm as bad as smokers I don't hear someone telling me the hard truths. I hear someone erecting a pedestal they can put themselves on.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

Except... This diet worked for him and he lost weight.

karmakurtisaani 5y ago
It was probably due to just taking in less calories than he was consuming. Now that sounds like a gross simplification, and it is, but it's missing a key insight: sugars don't really keep you full for long, and limiting calorie intake with such a diet requires a lot more willpower than eating fats and proteins that actually curb your feeling of hunger for a long period of time. I'm not an expert on the topic, but that's how it works in my limited experience.
- JoeyBananas 5y ago
  > It was probably due to just taking in less calories than he was consuming. Yes, absolutely. My point is that obese people shouldn't worry about what specific diet is the best diet. I see people make this mistake all the time. It doesn't matter as much as many people assume. The only way to lose weight is to eat less calories. This article is about how a formerly fat guy managed to lose weight. This is a big accomplishment. Many obese people try to lose weight and fail. Criticizing the minor details of his new diet is foolish. There are so many armchair diet experts who don't understand this.