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Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?
- loceng 14y agoAdd wheat to that list, perhaps even gluten too. The body just runs better without gluten.
- graeme 14y agoThis got some downotes. If you're skeptical, have you bet TRIED to quit wheat? It's incredibly hard. I stopped, but it took months of cravings. Very easy to stop eating almost anything else, usually.
- jkat 14y agoDon't know about wheat, but are you implying that something's bad simply because it's hard to quit?
- loceng 14y agoIf you're interested to learn more relating to wheat, there's a book that recently has gained a lot of popularity called Wheat Belly. It goes into the biology of it all.
- loceng 14y agoYup, I've been wheat-free for 7 years. It caused me life-long problems that made my body get in worse and worse shape, including leading to developing hyperacusis (hypersensitivity to sound); It was an audiologist I found, also a naturopath, who told me to stop eating it. And yes - it wasn't easy. ~20%+ of the population is actually addicted to wheat - so you could literally be going through withdrawl. I believe the book Wheat Belly goes into the biology of this.
- pooooool 14y agoI have tried quitting wheat, did so for 2 months. Did not see any benefit and it was incredibly hard. Even though I pack my lunches, it's still almost impossible to avoid it as it is in almost everything.
- loceng 14y agoTried quitting wheat for 2 months, meaning you didn't eat any wheat (or anything regularly 'hidden' in it) for 2 months? It'll take 2-3 weeks minimum, maybe longer depending on how reliant you are on it, without having any put into your system. It's okay to "re-lapse" too. Best way to get over it is days that you crave something, tell yourself that Friday (or pick a day) will be your pigout day. And then plan to not have it again.
- graeme 14y agoVery good point. Having any at all can slow down the benefits. The major effect I noticed is that I NEVER feel groggy after a meal. Used to happen all the time.
- meerita 14y agoWe will end forbidding everything. Besides, taking sugar is a personal option wich doesn't kill anyone around you. Tobacco while you smoke you make smoke everyone the room, even on the street. We just need education to measure the excesses.
- rb2k_ 14y agoIf it really does lead to obesity and the connected illnesses, treatment will indirectly take money away from all of the other people with the same insurance company. Then again, you might not take back as much of your retirement fund :) I guess ?once/if? insurance companies start charging premiums for people with a diet high in sugar/carbs, this will become a more interesting conversation.
- Roybatty 14y agof it really does lead to obesity and the connected illnesses, treatment will indirectly take money away from all of the other people with the same insurance company. Socialists like rb2k claim that every individual action has some reprehensible act on "society". The new (or maybe old) tactic of the fascist left.
- Roybatty 14y agoespecially after he proposed in the journal Nature that sugar should be regulated like alcohol and that people who buy soda should be carded. Another sick leftist that wants to regulate every human activity.
- visualcsharp 14y agoWhether he's leftist, rightist or centrist, I don't care. But your message is spot on: people like him need to be ostracized for suggesting government regulation and legislation to control our every waking move.
- corin_ 14y agoLet's be honest, from extremists to moderates on both sides, not just the left, everyone wants human activities regulated, we just disagree on which ones. Unless you're implying that non-leftists would remove minimum age of alcohol, sex, etc...? Anyway, let's steer clear of politics. No need for a left vs. right argument, just wanted to point out that your issue with lefties is what they want to regulate, not that they want to regulate stuff.
- EvilTerran 14y agoAny particular reason you felt it necessary to make three vacuous top-level replies? Bundling everything you had to say into one post would have been some improvement, at least.
- jacquesm 14y agoAt a guess it is to give us three chances to upvote him. There is a possible downside to that strategy.
- DanBC 14y agoHe got replies to each response which is vaguely disappointing. I'm not sure how the HN "anti down vote rampage" works - if I downvote all three posts do all my downvotes count? Or is there something that detects I'm downvoting 'too many' posts by a single user and silently drops some of my downvotes?
- jkat 14y ago"You want to get As and As? Eat breakfast." "I don’t have time to eat breakfast," the [13 year old] girl said. "She'd rather put on makeup than eat breakfast," the girl's mother interrupted. I'm a Lustig fan, but the people who deserve an overwhelming about of the blame here are the parents.
- Nux 14y agoSugar is bad. I'm trying hard to quit using it, but it's EVERYWHERE! I bought some smoked salmon the other day and the damn thing had sugar put in it! Why?! The same goes for a lot of supermarket sold crap. Sugar, sugar, sugar.
- kokey 14y agoI tend towards hypoglycemia and have diabetes in my family, so I've always been weary of sugar. I try to avoid it during a work day and in the evenings, so I don't 100% avoid it, and I manage fairly well but it means getting to know what products contain sugar and what doesn't.
- nwh 14y agoThe first thing I noticed about American food is that all their bread has sugar in it. I've absolutely no idea how anyone can stand eating the stuff.
- xyzzyz 14y agoThis is so true. I spent tons of time in US supermarkets searching for bread that is not sweet. The regular sweet bread is only good for toasts with honey, or sandwiches with Nutella or something similar, I couldn't stand eating it with ham or cheese.
- kd0amg 14y agoIt's been a while since I was making bread regularly, but I don't think I've ever seen a bread recipe that didn't include sugar. I was under the impression that yeast must eat _something_ in order to make the dough rise. edit: It looks like my mother has found some, but neither one of us really understands how rising works in these cases.
- yobfountain 14y agoTechnically, the only ingredients required to make bread are flour, yeast, salt and water. Active dry yeast will proof just fine without sugar, just a little more slowly. But sugar does increase the yeast's activity. This can be useful when you are trying to revive common active dry yeast from its freeze-dried stupor.
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- Dirlewanger 14y agoRobert Lustig, while having great science to back up his claims, is very alarmist and has been derided for some of his outright demonization of fructose. Which, when you think about it, is opposite to many demagogues out there; they'll talk up a big storm with very little to back it up. Here, Lustig has plenty to back up what he's saying, but just does it in the wrong way unfortunately. I also thoroughly disagree with his legislation ideas. Legislating society's habits rarely ever works. This is an incredibly complex societal problem that won't be solved by removing sugar from the Generally Recongnized as Safe list.
- visualcsharp 14y agoI agree, Dirlewanger. His goal isn't to actually solve the problem, though. Haven't folks learned to be very, very leary of people who espouse more government regulation as a way to control people? These people are concerned with power. They don't care about you and they don't care about me. He only cares about exercising his view--whether good or bad--on everyone else by using the physical force of the government.
- loceng 14y agoI think for some things to gain attention being alarmist is needed, and then people will hopefully come to their own conclusions after researching it. Sugar is pretty much in everything we eat. It covers over a lot of other issues, mainly that we don't eat as much fresh food as we should - otherwise we wouldn't need sugar to make it taste good. This is profitable for business, not profitable for a person's health.
- Roybatty 14y agoThe suits against Big Food have largely been stalled at the failure stage. Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and now Big Food. These socialists are sick in the head.
- Dirlewanger 14y agoEasier to blame a non-existent entity than one's own poor habits!
- gahahaha 14y agoThe "poor fat people are just weak-willed" argument is SO despicable. Americans did not suddenly get poor habits in 1976 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States The obesity problem was caused by a change in the environment (and, yes, the increasing power of the food industry is one of those causes) and only a change in the environment will fix it.
- corin_ 14y agoAs a fat person I, to an extent, disagree with you. Yes you're right about environmental changes, and that new changes could solve, or help solve, the problem. That doesn't mean that my fatness isn't related to me being weak-willed. I absolutely have the ability to lose weight and get fit, but I'm too lazy to do this. I know people who love food just as much as me, but they chose either not to eat everything that they want to, or to do extra exercise to make up for it, or both. Maybe there are people out there for whom it isn't about weak will. I know genetics play at least some part, and obviously environment as well (if you grow up with parents who only feed you fast food for example). But I'm confident that for a lot of people, weight issues are about being weak-willed.
- gahahaha 14y agoSurely you must understand that the current obesity epidemic CAN NOT be caused by people suddenly becoming more weak willed? If you had been born in Japan you would almost certainly be thin now. Why? The answer is not that Japanese people have more will power.
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- hreffob 14y agoI don't get these health related HN submissions. Salt bad, sugar bad, wheat bad, fitness is a lie... what's next? I dont't troll. I just don't understand why all of our basic foods are now bad. Guess we made them bad as we put sugar and salt in everything...
- hreffob 14y agoLike back in the day my grandmother was cooking with lard. Lard from pigs that she kept in her own farm. Later lard also became bad (except bacon which is good...). Nowadays lard is coming back and do you know who uses it? Haute cuisine restaurants.
- corin_ 14y agoHaute cuisine isn't really relevant when discussing "bad" food where bad means not good for you, their job is to create tasty food, not necessarily healthy food.
- DanBC 14y agoThey also use lots of other fats, and lots of salt, and lots of sugar. They use it because it's tasty. "Supersize Me" on Haute Cuisine would have similar catastrophic results, but be considerably more expensive.
- ihsw 14y agoNonsense, the problem with McDonalds and other fast food restaurants is that it barely qualifies as food -- it uses as few real ingredients as possible because real ingredients have a short shelf life.
- DanBC 14y agoYou can still cover real food in fat and sugar and salt. Someone eating food bought only from Michelin starred restaurants is going to be in trouble unless they're careful about what they eat.
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- Roybatty 14y agoAt what point do we start talking about sanctions against leftist-statists like this guy and others who want to essentially enslave us. At what point is enough is enough, and these people are held to account for infringing on civil liberties.
- sgift 14y agoSo, someone uses his civil liberty to state his opinion and you want to "held him to account" for "infringing on civil liberties" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
- jacquesm 14y agoWhat do you mean by leftist?
- mistercow 14y agoIs it melodramatic in here, or is it just you?
- seivan 14y agoIt's very bad, it's everywhere and addictive in ways you could never realise. Sugar addiction is very related to carbohydrates. When I cut carbs (and increased fat content) I also lost all interest in sweetness and sugar. Not even diet cokes. When I was my fittest, I had totally cut sugar/carbs out. Even complex carbs (meh, not much benefit of "complex carbs anyway). I was running on ketone or whatever the terminology is. I was swimming everyday for two hours with no problems what so ever. I was basically running on fat. This takes a while, usually 2-3 weeks to get into. Usually when I switched from carb loaded fuel to fat. It took a day of being tired and sleepy. That's it. But it takes a bit longer to completely exercise on fat than just running normal errands. Most "low calorie" or "low fat" branded "food" products usually have high sugar content. The low fat version of the cremé fraiche we USED to consume at home had more sugar and/or carbs than the high fat one. We consume the latter these days and gain no additional weight. We're not as easy as thermo dynamics, it's more complicated than kcal in/out. Which is why most people prefer carbs/sugar instead of fat. Since the kcal per fat grams is higher. EDIT; That being said, I've seen the opposite in my partner who happens to be of Chinese descent and others of similar background. The only explanation I have is that their bodies are more advanced than our primal vessels :-)
- atomical 14y agoI thought this was satire until I got to the end. The human body needs carbs to run. I'm really skeptical that someone can exercise for two hours without any carbohydrates in their system.
- seivan 14y agoPlease do more research. I've done it. That being said, I am sure I got VERY little carbs from cabbage, cucumbers, olives, avocado, and onions (the usual vegetables I got, and it was usually only for dinner) A usual day would go like this Breakfast: Eggs + Butter + Bacon and Coffe with either 40% fat cream or coconut oil and butter. Lunch: Not hungry, if I am, I usually have some avocado. Dinner: Beef with butter on top, spring onions and slices cabbage and some avocado You sound either uneducated on the subject or educated with old data. Get some more recent studies under your belt. There are many swedish ultra marathon or tri-athletes who compete on LCHF. Not sure about foreign ones. Please do more research, if you think I was joking.
- kokey 14y agoWhile it's a good idea to get people off sweet stuff beyond the level of healthy fruit intake, I think it would also help if people stopped demonizing sweeteners like aspartame.
- ihsw 14y agoHow about we just kick the sweet tooth entirely instead of substituting it?
- ippisl 14y agoThere's an easy fix for that: a shift from sugar to artificial sweeteners. Same as there's an easy fix for cigarettes: move to electronic cigarettes. But i guess we're more afraid of the unknown chemicals(although limited tests have shown they are much safer) than the original poisons, And we're stuck on trying to teach ideals than implement practicalities. Such a shame.
- rb2k_ 14y agoThis works fine for e.g. sodas, but sadly all foods heavy in carbohydrates (pizza, pasta, bread, ...) will be broken down into sugars :( That being said, there are tons of paleo/keto blogs out there offering alternatives (e.g. coliflower pizza http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2012/08/the-astonishing-cauliflower-pizza-crust-you-have-to-taste-it-to-believe-it.html http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2012/08/the-astonishing-...). The sad part is that things like lettuce wrapped burgers are still hard to find when not cooking at home. Also: I'd love to see more stevia-sweetened things rather than aspartame sweetened ones
- ippisl 14y agoFrom the little i know(mostly from lustig's youtube video ,and from some googling) sugar is composed of glucose and fructose ,and fructose is the main culprit in metabolic syndrome(which causes/increases diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) and also increases cancer risk and creates liver inflammation and fatty liver disease. Glucose generally is much more harmless than fructose. And carbohydrates are broken to glucose.
- vraid 14y agoYou seem to have confused sugar with sucrose, also known as table sugar. First off, a carbohydrate, also known as a saccharide, is a molecule composed of one or more monosaccharides. Sugar includes both monosaccharides (e.g glucose, fructose, galactose) and disaccharides (e.g sucrose, lactose, maltose). Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose, lactose is composed of glucose and galactose, and maltose is composed of two glucose molecules. Starch, composed of glucose, is the only polysaccharide digestible to humans.
- rickdale 14y agoI started the slow carb diet last year for new years resolution. At the time I was addicted to peanut M&M's. Took probably 3-4 months to completely rid myself of the temptations to eat a large bag of them. Anyways, in addition to that time period I can remember the first week of the diet feeling the need for a piece of bread. I was like feigning for it. But I resisted. Definitely surgars have withdrawal symptoms, but with so many different foods and drinks out there I do think its an easier addiction to cure than any drug like alcohol or tobacco or even heroine for that matter.
- bcl 14y agoAnd for an alternate viewpoint - https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/sugar-health-evil-toxic_b_850032.html https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/sugar-health... "So while fructose as an ingredient excessively engineered into processed foods is, indeed, a problem- I find it far-fetched at best to suggest the native composition of, say, berries is "evil." Lustig seems to be tossing out the the strawberries with the soda. You find me the person who can blame obesity or diabetes on eating strawberries, and I will give up my day job and become a hula dancer."
- yobfountain 14y agoThat article does not really disagree with Lustig's central thesis. That pull quote in particular is actually in accordance with what Lustig is advocating. The lecture focuses on the recent trend in the food industry of separating the fructose from the fiber in ways not found in nature.
- subwindow 14y agoWhy was this article suddenly de-ranked? It was on the front page, and literally 10 seconds later it is on page 3. Is there some kind of rule that this article violated? Who makes this decision? Why is there not any transparency on if an article is de-ranked and why?
- corin_ 14y agoThere's an argument, though I don't want to put words into PG's mouth regarding his reasoning, that lack of transparency is a form of protection against voting manipulation, as it's harder to trick a system if you don't understand the system - security through obscurity really. As it dropped only to page 3, not further, I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with timing, for example maybe a post that's <60 minutes old requires less votes to get a high position than a post that's 60+ minutes old, and it's a hard line rather than gradual? Pure speculation on my part, but if you're interested the answer may (or may not) lie within https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc