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I'm getting sick of this ignorant sugar alarmism. Sugar is not the culprit behind all the diseases listed in the article. Obesity is [5] [6]. Unless of course y

• smtddr 13y ago
  >>Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet just like anything else. When you say "doughnut" you mean this[1], right? If so that's 100%, Grade A nonsense and abruptly ends any consideration I was giving your comment. 1. http://twincitiesdonut.com/images/donut.jpg http://twincitiesdonut.com/images/donut.jpg
  • georgemcbay 13y ago
    I'm not a particularly big fan of doughnuts but I do tend to eat one or two large bagels (which don't have nearly as much sugar content as doughnuts but do tend to get lumped into that whole "carbs are evil" thing) before going on a long run or bike ride. I also eat more fatty meats than average but that goes along with doing heavy weight training at least 3 times a week. There are many foods that looked at out of context aren't particularly "healthy" if considered against an average modern sedentary lifestyle but which are sources of either quick energy or useful protein which can be beneficial for weight management and overall health if properly utilized. All of this is why talking about diet without also talking about exercise is useless. My completely non-scientific belief is that while over-consumption of sugar isn't a great thing, the primary thing making us fat is that we've switched to a massively sedentary lifestyle on average. We aren't toiling in the factory or on the farm or walking door to door selling vacuums, and mostly that's a good thing because those jobs aren't particularly interesting for many of us, but at the same time our bodies aren't really evolved for sitting down 8-16 hours a day.
    • smtddr 13y ago
      I agree with your comment. Once every 2 months or so, I buy one of these[1]. But there's no way it can be "part of a healthy diet just like anything else", as the person I replied to seems to think. It is an exception to my healthy diet, not part of it. I deviate from my healthy diet once every 6 - 8 weeks to indulge. I'm also aware of Micheal Phelp's diet[2] would work for me too if I could swim back & forth for at least 4 hours a day instead of standing[3] in front of a computer for 8+ hrs. 1. http://www.militarydiscountscentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cinnabon-military-discount.jpg http://www.militarydiscountscentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2... 2. http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-diet-dont-try-it-at-home/ http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-di... 3. I have a standing desk and never use my chair.
• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet Can they?
  • maw 13y ago
    If it's ok to otherwise eat responsibly but allow oneself one doughnut a week—and I think that this is ok—then yes, they can.
  • snowwrestler 13y ago
    If you start from the assumption that sugar is a poison, then you'd probably say no. That seems like begging the question to me, though. If you examine the diets of healthy people, you'll see that some of them eat donuts occasionally. That would seem to indicate yes.
  • wavesounds 13y ago
    There's not a dietitian on this planet that when asked to define a "healthy diet" would include donuts. This guy is living in denial if he honestly think this.
    • vinceguidry 13y ago
      You're assuming the healthy diet concept is entirely prescriptive, in that there's a List of Healthy Things to Eat which thou must not deviate from. That's not how dietitians approach it. It mostly revolves around ensuring your macro and micro nutrient intake keeps to certain levels determined largely by your activity level.
    • brazzy 13y ago
      Actually, any dietician who knows their stuff and isn't trying you sell you something on comission will allow for a "healthy diet" to include pretty much anything you want in sensible amounts. Because they know that people aren't going to stick to a diet that completely bans their favorit foods.
  • 72deluxe 13y ago
    I didn't think he was advocating eating only doughnuts. Doughnuts are great, unless you eat nothing but doughnuts, in which case the diet is not particularly balanced, nor is it healthy.
• CEyzaguirre 13y ago
  Because skinny people don't get diabetes right? /s
  • cperciva 13y ago
    Rates of type 2 diabetes are in the non-overweight population are extremely low. Skinny people can get type 1 diabetes, but that's a completely different disease -- acquired hypoinsulinaemia, as opposed to hyperlipedaemia. (Note, neither diabetes is essentially about glucose; it just happens that hyperglycaemia is a symptom of both diseases, and Aretaeus didn't know better.)
    • CEyzaguirre 13y ago
      The only point I'm trying to make is that blood sugar is culprit of the numerous conditions afflicting wealthy countries, not just obesity. Clearly obesity isn't a neutral variable in this equation.
      • cperciva 13y ago
        And my point is that (aside from glycation damage), blood sugar is a symptom of disease, not a cause of disease.
        • eclipxe 13y ago
          If only we could figure out a way to not eat foods that increase the amount of sugar in our blood....
          • Dylan16807 13y ago
            Did you completely ignore the comment you were replying to?
• eclipxe 13y ago
  No, the reason sugar gets a bad rep is because of what it does to your body. The insulin response to sugar is the primary way your body stores fat and sugar itself is readily converted to fat. The glucose & fructose spikes are also source of inflammation. It is believed that this inflammation is the cause of some of the damage related to heart disease, etc.
  • CEyzaguirre 13y ago
    Heart disease etc, including[1]: "This is why hemoglobin A1C is frequently used in studies that try to correlate blood sugar control to various disease processes like Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, and coronary artery disease. It’s well documented that glycated hemoglobin is a powerful risk factor for diabetes, but it’s also been correlated with risk for stroke, coronary heart disease, and death from other illnesses. These correlations have been shown to be strongest with any measurement of hemoglobin A1C above 6.0 percent. We now have evidence to show that elevated hemoglobin A1C is associated with changes in brain size. In one particularly profound study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers looking at MRIs to determine which lab test correlated best with brain atrophy found that the hemoglobin A1C demonstrated the most powerful relationship.[2]” [1] Perlmutter, David. “Grain Brain.” [2] “C. Enzinger, et al., “Risk Factors for Progression of Brain Atrophy in Aging: Six-year Follow-up of Normal Subjects,” Neurology 64, no. 10 (May 24, 2005): 1704–11.”
    • carbocation 13y ago
      Nondiabetics have normal A1c because they do not exhibit wild blood glucose swings, even postprandially.
    • snowwrestler 13y ago
      Blood sugar levels are not a reliable proxy for dietary sugar intake.
      • eclipxe 13y ago
        Tell that to diabetics
• mishkovski 13y ago
  Sugar is not the culprit behind all the diseases listed in the article. Obesity is And sugar is culprit behind overeating and obesity.
  • eclipxe 13y ago
    Precisely. Experiment: eat 500 calories of sugar (ice cream, soda, candy). Wait 15-20 minutes, how hungry are you? Now, eat 500 calories of fat (heavy cream, bacon, pork belly, etc). Wait 15-20 minutes, how hungry are you? I've done this experiment a few times now, and without fail, I crave more food after the sugar and can't eat another bite after the fat.
    • mishkovski 13y ago
      I can confirm that from my own experience. I lost 20kg in 6 months. Yes I restricted my calorie intake. But how I did that? By controlling my appetite with avoiding carbs especially sugar. Ketogenic diet is powerful tool for restricting calorie intake.
      • eclipxe 13y ago
        Concur. I didn't restrict my calorie intake, and lost 40lbs eating 65% fat, 30% protein and 5% carb. As soon as I add in sugar or other carbohydrates in any capacity, I gain weight and eat much more. On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry.
        • sosborn 13y ago
          > I didn't restrict my calorie intake >On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry. You probably did lower your caloric intake. The trick is that you did it in a way that it did not bother you. In other words, you ate a healthy diet.
          • jerf 13y ago
            But this is giving away the farm; if the way to eat healthy is a high-fat diet that cuts out the empty carbs (and especially sugar), and then you just naturally eat a healthy amount of food after that without any sort of bizarre calorie counting, that's not proof that "it's all just calories", it proves the exact opposite, that the calorie type matters a lot and conventional nutritional wisdom up to this point on what constitutes a healthy diet is dead wrong. Which it is. But I find it bizarre that people will fall back to this defense, or, at least, I find it bizarre how many people still think this is some sort of defense, when it is in fact the exact, total, polar opposite of the position they think they are defending.
• PakG1 13y ago
  I'd like for you to actually explain how it's wrong to say that replacing a fat-heavy diet with a sugar-heavy diet is bad for health. You dismiss their premises and conclusions by saying they're looking at the wrong culprit for health problems. I'd prefer if you dealt with their premises and conclusions by falsifying said premises and conclusions.
  • pvnick 13y ago
    I advocate moderation and balance. Consume reasonable calorie and macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) quantities. Eat what allows you to do that. For me, those carbs come from doughnuts and candy but also from brown rice and pasta. Just like my meats include both lean meats (chicken breast) and fatty, delicious meats (bacon). Combine this with exercise and all you'll avoid all the scary things the article talks about.
    • oinksoft 13y ago
      You mentioned bacon as an example of a fatty meat, but one should think twice before having bacon at every breakfast: We estimated that 3.3% (95% CI 1.5% to 5.0%) of deaths could be prevented if all participants had a processed meat consumption of less than 20 g/day. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/63/abstract http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/63/abstract
    • eclipxe 13y ago
      Moderation and balance, based on what precisely? Who defines what balanced is? Who pays to have their product a bigger portion of a balanced diet?
    • PakG1 13y ago
      Again, you deal with their argument by avoiding it and offering an alternative plan of action. I am asking if you can explain why what OP is saying is wrong, not how we can make OP's issues become non-issues. Asking as you seem quite passionate about the subject.
  • CEyzaguirre 13y ago
    Your assumptions about a high fat diet are a function of the "greatest health scam of the century": “Somehow we have been led to believe that dietary fat will raise our cholesterol, which will in turn increase our risk for heart attacks and strokes. This notion continues to prevail despite research from nineteen years ago that proved otherwise. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a trial that compared older adults with high cholesterol (levels above 240 mg/dl) to those with normal levels (below 200 mg/dl).9 Over the course of four years, researchers at Yale University measured total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in almost one thousand participants; they also tracked hospitalizations for heart attack and unstable angina and the rates of death from heart disease and from any other cause. No differences were found between the two groups. People with low total cholesterol had as many heart attacks and died just as frequently as those with high total cholesterol. And reviews of multiple large studies have routinely failed to find correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.10 Mounting research like this has prompted Dr. George Mann, a researcher with the Framingham Heart Study, to go on record stating: The diet heart hypothesis that suggests that a high intake “of fat or cholesterol causes heart disease has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund-raising enterprise, food companies, and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.11” 9. H. M. Krumholz, et al., “Lack of Association Between Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Morbidity and All-cause Mortality in Persons Older Than 70 Years,” JAMA 272, no. 17 (November 2, 1994): 1335–40. 10. H. Petousis-Harris, “Saturated Fat Has Been Unfairly Demonised: Yes,” Primary Health Care 3, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 317–19. 11. http://www.survivediabetes.com/lowfat.html.” http://www.survivediabetes.com/lowfat.html.”
• ansimionescu 13y ago
  http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-wrong-with-the-modern-diet-charts-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-wrong-with-the-modern-d...
• mullingitover 13y ago
  Aspirin can be good for you too, but I wouldn't go drinking 32 ounces of aspirin solution every day.
• dilap 13y ago
  "Very few fossil hominins have cavities. The decline in oral health started with agriculture and resulting changes to oral microbiome." — John Hawks (paleoanthropologist). Diet has a lot to do with cavities.
  • clavalle 13y ago
    At what age did these pre-agricultural people die? Age might have a lot to do with cavities.
    • pja 13y ago
      Pre-agricultural people lived longer & healthier lives than post: The development of agriculture was terrible for individual health, but once invented we couldn't go back because the hunter gatherer approach couldn't support as many people. Regarding cavities: I recently read of a pre-agricultural tribe who had very high cavity levels due to a diet which was very high in nuts. Most H-G tribes appear to have lower levels of cavities than modern people at all ages I believe.
• GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
  It's not the smoking that gets you, it's the lung cancer and emphysema.
• geoka9 13y ago
  According to this guy, sugar and carbs contribute to the development of cancer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUlE1VHGA40 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUlE1VHGA40
  • CamperBob2 13y ago
    According to this guy, Jesus rode a dinosaur to work: (insert appropriate YouTube link here)
    • probably_wrong 13y ago
      Unless my irony detector is off, you can't make that accusation without posting some kind of evidence. That guy happens to be the president of the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center, so I'm willing to accept he knows a bit more about cancer than me.
• nnq 13y ago
  You're right, but the extremely low visibility of wonderful resources like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM (and the articles it's based on, even in the medical research community) make "pulling in the other direction" (even if it's just as wrong) a good course of action for achieving a properly balanced view of the scientific facts.
• saganus 13y ago
  An acquaintance I once met, that used to work on the product design team for one of the major brands of snack/potato chips makers, had a witty response to what a friend asked, along the lines of: "so, tell us, how can you work at something that you know is bad for people's health?" and he answered: "I am certainly used to the opinion that garbage food is bad for your health, and what I think is that garbage food does NOT exist. What it actually DO exist are garbage diets. If you eat one bag of chips every now and then, nothing bad will happen to you. However if you eat one bag a day for 10 years, you will probably feel the effects." So the bottom line is as usual, everything in moderation. I mean, the often used analogy is with water. You can't live without drinking it and yet you can certainly die if you drink too much of it. Isn't this like an overdone debate? I mean, you can definitely start an alarmist attitude towards almost anything you can think of, no?
  • sgift 13y ago
    The only thing this tells me is that your acquaintance has a good working "moral deflection" system. What? Cigarettes are bad? No, no, I wouldn't work on a bad product. All is good in moderation! What? I spam people with ads all day and that could be bad? No, no, I wouldn't work on a bad product. I only inform people! And so on. No one thinks he does bad* things. Your mind forbids it or you would probably go insane. That doesn't change the reality. * For various values of bad
    • saganus 13y ago
      I actually never thought of it that way. You could be right to some extent in that he is indeed a good "moral deflector", but the main point I was trying to make still stands, in that one bag of chips is not something that will significantly change your chances for cancer or whatever other disease could be associated with eating a lot of the stuff. Same with cigarettes. Indeed they have been undoubtedly linked to cancer, but still, if I smoke only one it really won't make a difference. Same with spam, one email every few months, as has been my experience with gmail for the past several years for example, really does not annoy me more than a mosquito could. There's a difference between working on a bad product such as, let's say hand grenades or other stuff actually made to harm, and working on a product that is definitely bad but only if you actually let it be, i.e. abuse it. My point is that the blame is not on who makes the product, as the product maker does not make said product with the intention to harm, even if they do know that if you cross a line it will be harmful. The blame is on the person that lets this product ruin its life. Just like any drug. If I hit a joint right now, I guarantee that it won't harm me. But if I let it run my life and I stop working because I want to smoke weed, then the blame's on me, not on whoever grows the weed or even the one who sells it to me. Precisely the reason as to why we usually put age restrictions on certain things, as we deem children to be not capable of drawing this line between use and abuse of things that could end up being very harmful. However as we grow up we believe that we are then capable of taking responsibility for your life choices. Including giving yourself cancer or diabetes by only drinking cola and eating chips.
• stdbrouw 13y ago
  Re: 4, don't you think it's a bit of a stretch to go from a study that notes that temporary carbohydrate overfeeding can increase leptin, to saying that a little bit of sugar will keep you on your diet? (It's an intriguing result, no doubt, just not something that I'd make sweeping extrapolations from.)
• dimitar 13y ago
  As you said elsewhere in the thread its calories-in, calories-out. This simple fact is a very big win for science, but it is very unpopular - no one likes to actually calculate calories, so a lot of people prescribe to dubious unbalanced diets that sound convincing by catering to their food preferences and aesthetics. No regulation short of destroying consumer choice and imposing an approved-foods-list will defeat obesity. Trying to just limit sugar is pointless because industry and consumers will substitute the current form of sugar for something else, raising the cost of food in the meantime, which will hurt the poor. (Just like an import quota on sugar in the US has not reduced consumption of sweets, because sugar got substituted for HFCS). I think the best way to solve obesity is to find some chemicals that satisfy appetite easily and cheaply or sweeteners that are as good or better tasting than sugars, but are not caloric. (Aspartame is very sweet, but tastes significantly worse than sugar).
• alexc05 13y ago
  Yet the pendulum has swung so far away from "just a bit of Moderation" that the now all-pervasive sugar (virtually) cannot be avoided. Left to their own devices, industry will NOT comply so regulation is a valid tool to stave off the massive public health risk that unchecked industry has introduced. While muscle growth does require sugars, it is not required in anywhere near the amounts present in every single food on shelves. Your arguments reek of industry propoganda and astroturfing. They've got an air of populism and fallisciousness about them... "But sugar is needed for muscles... See science?" Come on... You're one of those paid forum commenters we keep reading about right? Some guerilla marketer working for big sugar? Is it an agency with lots if clients or just one topic?
• jbcurtin2 13y ago
  If you watch the video, that is referenced in the article. Robert Lustig explains why sugar leads to obesity. Here it is for easy reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
• miralabs 13y ago
  Obesity is an effect. Not a cause. Seriously. Do you blame fire?. The problem here is that sugar is addicting. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23719144 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23719144