F them seed oils!

The BBQ Pit
61

Yep, candy is food. This is not in dispute; glucose is the energy currency of your body. Candy has food value.

I mean, I suppose you could eat cigarettes, and derive some food energy value from them, but this is irrelevant because nobody does. Stimulation is not energy. Cigarettes are not food.

Not in dispute.

Again, not an argument I have been asserting.

Look, things are not neatly divided into two and only two categories labelled ‘bad things’ (which are exclusively bad and have no good attributes) and ‘good things’ (which are exclusively good and have no bad attributes) - the world simply doesn’t work like that. Most things contain a mixture of properties and whether or not those properties are good or bad is highly contextual (for example: a small amount of salt is vital for the function of your nervous system; a large amount of salt is deadly).
Certainly there exist things that are closer to one end of that good-bad spectrum than the other, in various contexts that they are used by humans (that is the whole idea of what a spectrum is); cigarettes are, I would say, pretty close to the ‘mostly very bad’ end. Seed oils are probably not; they contain a mix of properties, some of which are good, and some which may be bad - which is why I do not think the two things are analogous. If you want to make analogies about how we should deal with seed oils (I think argument by analogy is pretty impotent anyway, but go ahead if you must), your argument would perhaps make more sense if you picked something else that occupies a similar position on the good-bad spectrum.

62

Can I get a little help with the meaning of GTFTT? I asked Uncle Google and all he had was some random person’s username on some sites that seemed to be about programming.

I did see suggestions for GTFT (single T) like Ginnie Thompson Flower Thread and Generous Tit for Tat but those seem rather unlikely.

Thanks

63

Got To Feed The Troll, I would imagine.

64

These views aren’t issues with seed oils at all. If processing is the problem and not seed oils as an ingredient. You should have an issue with the snack aisle (which is IMO a much more reasonable concern).

As a comparison, there is fairly convincing research that artificial sweeteners can cause a lot of health problems and might be as bad as sugar in some ways or might cause other issues that sugar doesn’t cause. This is a problem for processed foods that formulate it with a bunch of other stuff that might also be bad, might be using it to get you to keep craving all the other bad stuff etc., but it’s also a problem if I buy splenda and put it in my otherwise minimally processed coffee. So it makes sense to specifically call out the artificial sweeteners, and to show evidence specifically that the artificial sweeteners might be bad or at least not a good alternative to sugar.

And as an aside if you’re worried about hydrogenated oil (at least in the US), you don’t have to check the ingredients for vegetable oil, you can just check them for hydrogenated oil, as hydrogenated oils are required to be listed as ingredients

65

My mind went straight to “Get The Fuck Toutof There.”

66

Hotel Management would also like to add that It’s also a fire code violation in most jurisdictions to cook in there room unless it has a kitchen as part of the room. Also remember fire marshals have the power to arrest you for any code violations. They don’t care if you’re not from the local area, or if you’re on vacation with your family. Nor do they care if you are attending a comic/ anime convention… and you and the 7 people who are staying in your room (which is registered to you for only 2 people) decided to make that weird Korean “stew” with hot dogs, kimchi, spam, top-ramen, baked beans and American cheese; and left the pot on hot plate while you and your cosplay friends were down in the lobby posing for the chicken hawk taking pictures of all the teenagers dressed like Naruto. They Will arrest you and your friends for violating the fire codes. And we at the hotel will evict you, charge the card on file for any anticipated revenue, cleaning fees, and any fines that the hotel pays because of your BS.

67

I have a dream. A dream of a better world; a world of promise and enlightenment.

I have a dream that people of all nations will learn not to muck their posts with unintelligible initialisms–where instead, Dopers are unambiguous in expression and spell out mysterious words and phrases that, heretofore, exist only in their heads, words which readers have no way of knowing, and which only present strife and confusion.

I have a dream.

68

STFU? 

69

Everybody needs a hobby…

70

That’s it :flushed:

(Sorry, I made it up)

71

Cite? Not to say that it can’t be true - some sweeteners haven’t been in wide use long enough for us to really know the long term effect - but the last I’m aware of, we’re seeing tiny differences in impact on mortality compared to the fairly sizable impact of the overuse of sugar.

Saying, for example, that aspartame leans closer to cancer causing than water doesn’t mean that aspartame is more dangerous than sugar. Papercuts lean more towards decapitation than marshmallow massages but I’m not really worried about handling paper, sometimes.

72

I don’t think @DeadTreasSecretaries is talking about cancer. There is increasing evidence that artificial sweeteners are having unintended and unforeseen metabolic effects that may make them as bad or even worse than sugar.

At a minimum, they are certainly not succeeding in their intended effect with regards to weight control. And it’s possible they may also be screwing up people’s metabolism and/or insulin response.

Sorry, it’s too late for a cite tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

But personally I’ve concluded that sugar in the quantities typical of the Western diet is unhealthy, and artificial sweeteners are no better. With respect to beverages, I’ve switched to water and flavored seltzer water.

73

Yep. The only non-sugar sweeteners that had apparently escaped indications of potentially bad health effects were, until fairly recently, stevia and monk fruit - which are technically “natural,” I guess, although using them to sweeten highly processed treats is hardly “natural.”

And now there are studies showing those might be bad for you too. (Also too late here to provide cites, but can do so tomorrow if challenged.)

Really the only healthy approach seems to be to severely limit the intake of anything sweet-tasting except for fresh fruits. I’m just grateful that I can do that easily because I don’t like much sweet stuff. If I did like sweet food, I shudder to think of how much willpower it would take to maintain a healthy diet.

74

Ah, no from what I saw when I investigated this, when you test mice or normal people in a controlled study, by adding artificial sweeteners to their diet, there’s no particular effect on their body (except maybe xylitol and other sugar alcohols). But if you go out into the wild and sample normal people versus people who have chosen to include artificial sweeteners in their life, the proportion of people with obesity, diabetes, etc. is higher in the latter group.

For that, there’s two basic theories.

The first is that this is simply a correlational happenstance. People who live an unhealthy lifestyle try to make up for it by including sugar substitutes - which is insufficient to undo all of the other things they’re doing wrong.

The second idea is that there is some amount of causation. For this, first, any sweet sensation is still going to light up your pleasure zone. Over time, that builds a predilection for sweet things that encourages one to overlook whether the thing you’re putting in your mouth is also made of artificial sweeteners. You end up being driven to eat more sugary foods. The other factor is the idea that you’ve convinced yourself that you’ve done “the good” by cutting out the sugar. This means that now you’re free to go out and eat more pizza and such since, obviously, you don’t have all those calories coming in now. I.e., it provides an excuse to overcompensate for the loss.

In general, it would be very strange that a wide berth of wildly different chemicals would all cause the same end effect. If they did, it would be because of the one thing that the actually have in common - that they taste sweet. If there’s some sort of chemical reaction in the body that corresponds to how our tongue detects sweetness, then that’s going to also be true with sugar.

In general, there’s no reason to think that there is any other effect of sweetness than sweetness. It’s that dopamine hit from it that keeps you coming back for more that’s problematic. But, if that doesn’t affect you then, likely, most sugar substitutes are going to have less impact on your health than sugar.

The best is to reduce your need for sweetness, though.

75

The hypothesis is that when we taste sweet, it body prepares to digest sugar. Insulin levels rise, our mouth waters, etc. this can even happen when we think about eating sweets. It’s how the pancreas keeps up. Otherwise it would always be “behind”, not spitting out insulin until our blood sugar is already high.

I’ve seen studies that both support and disprove this hypothesis. Good studies in both directions. I’m honestly not sure what to believe. But i avoid artificial sweeteners because i don’t see any real need to eat them. I don’t drink enough soda for the sugar from soda to be an issue.

76

On the contrary, there are reputable studies showing a link between artificial sweeteners and insulin resistance (which can lead to and/or worsen type-2 diabetes). Here’s one:

From the abstract:

Here’s another that tested normal (non-diabetic) mice:

I totally agree with this.

77

One of the important things to understand is that most artificial sweeteners don’t even enter the bloodstream - that significantly limits the scope of things they could do. Some studies have hypothesised that they may alter the gut biome. Others have hypothesised a psychological trigger mechanism. The evidence is really thin and certainly doesn’t support the sort of scary noises people make about artificial sweeteners in general.

I mean, I agree that adjusting your tastes away from high levels of sweetness is probably a good thing, just because it means you’re less likely to accept real sugar when artificial sweeteners aren’t being offered.

78

Yes. I’ve made changes to my diet over the last five months or so. I’ve lost over 30 lbs and two sizes. But I do allow myself an occasional “cheat” meal. Sometimes, it’s a cheeseburger; sometimes, it’s a dessert. But if I’m going to cheat it’s only going to be with real things. I’m not going to eat a veggie burger – I’m going to eat a real cheeseburger. I’m not going to eat something full of articial sweeteners – I’m going to eat something with real butter and real sugar (a small portion, of course). Otherwise, the cheat doesn’t work. I’ll feel unsatisified and will continue to crave that whatever. So far I haven’t tipped over the edge into a week’s long gluttony.

79

its a fiction book that was written in the early 60s but some of this reminds me of the argument in a book called “anybody got a Match” where a cigarette maker tries to say all the new food additives that they were coming up with in the mid-century was worse than smoking of course it fails because the argument was “no ones eating so much of things like the lab created butter substitute that even if there were unhealthy things in it it’s not enough to cause lasting harm”
which was actual scientific thinking back then But now it’s 60 or more years later and people have been eating things like preservatives that makes 100 percent artificial butter spread last forever for decades and it’s coming back to bite us in the ass

80

Yeah, this is basically what I was badly remembering about artificial sweeteners. And that they can affect the gut microbiome.

My memory of this evidence was stronger, seeing this thread and looking into it again the evidence is a lot more mixed than I remember. Ironically I heard a lot of this initially when I randomly got something on my feed about UPFs and went on a rabbit hole and in the midst of a lot of pretty poorly presented/badly argued cases for various things that show up in UPFs the artificial sweetener piece had pretty good internal logic which probably predisposed me to be more credulous to the evidence.