Some of it depends on how well-controlled your blood sugar is. Since mine is basically under control at this point, I can eat pretty much any kind of sugar. My blood sugar will rise, but it’s not going to spike and crash. The main thing for me is to keep my diet under control so that my resting blood sugar is down under 100.
I know some diabetics who aren’t as well-controlled, even with medication, and they do have to avoid spiking their blood sugar.
Moderator Note
There is a valid point to be made that while different types of sugars and carbs haven’t been proven harmful at this point, research is ongoing in that area (a point that’s been made elsewhere in this thread). However, your opinion of watchwolf49 is a topic better suited to the Pit.
I think watchwolf49 was making a generalization. If you want to point out issues like fructose intolerance and if you want to question what a proper balance is, that’s fine. But don’t attack the poster.
If your intake of calories (from any food source) exceeds your expenditure the excess will be stored as fat. As I said sugars, per se, are empty calories because they provide no nutritional value other than being necessary to provide energy. Simple sugars (including sucrose - although it is a combo of fructose and glucose) are quickly digested and cause a rapid rise in insulin. Too much insulin too quickly can eventually impair the body cells to intake the sugar, causing a rise in blood glucose.
Although fructose is a culprit, the fructose in fruits is not handled the same way by the body. The danger is taking any sugar that is quickly digested (high glycemic index). Complex carbs are not the same. They contain fibers which slow down the digestion. That is the reason whole wheat and other unrefined cereals (oats, quinoa, barley) are healthy. I buy only bread that has whole grains.
Carbs that have a low glycemic index are much better than simple sugars or foods with a high glycemic index.
What you said was specifically about sugars:
“They are needed to perform work, but if you ingest more than you need, they can impair insulin production, be converted to fat”
Again, that’s very rarely what happens.
And as I said, this is wrong. Specific foods are empty calories. It’s silly to single out a macronutrient and label it an empty calorie. No macronutrients contain micronurtients.
There’s a five part series you really should read. Starting here:
That is not dangerous.
No, they don’t contain fibers.
Almost no food is healthy or unhealthy. Overall diets are.
False. Take a look at the foods with a low glycemic that you think are “better.”
Low glycemic: Twix candy bar, a Pizza Hut supreme pizza, and a Betty Crocker chocolate cake
And I guess not so good?:
High Glycemic: Dates, parsnips, watermelon
The following by James Krieger, also a highly respected nutritionist (author of the five part series above). Plenty of links to peer-reviewed, journal published studies.
The macronutrient and individual component discussion always seems to lose sight of the very obvious: the package matters.
Large doses of quickly absorbable 50/50 fructose and glucose (be it HFCS or sucrose) added to other foods will give a dose of fructose too big in too short of a time for the liver to process into energy and induces liver fat formation (hepatic lipogenesis) with resultant liver inflammation, damage, dysfunction, and so on. Seriously it does not matter that the fructose delivered above that threshold is not directly turned into fat. It directly results in fat formation and deposition in the liver with all the consequent harms.
The same exact large dose of fructose and glucose delivered in fruits and whole grains, packaged inside cells and with fiber, will take a while for the body to get to. The cell walls need to be broken down, the fiber slows down absorption, so on. No idea how that correlates with the glycemic index and don’t care. The rate of fructose delivery to the liver will be such that it can be handled without inducing hepatic lipogenesis.
Moreover the added sugar condition compared to fruit and whole grains almost inevitably results in a larger dose too, not just faster delivery. One grocery store cupcake (using MyFitnessPal today) typically has 220 calories, 35 g carbs with 27 of them sugar. A medium banana typically has less than half the calories, 6g of carbs with 3 of them as sugar. You’d have to eat almost six bananas (!) to get the same carb dose as one cupcake. 70 ounces of raspberries (that’s more than nine of the packages I buy) if you went that route. Those things would fill you up fast, high satiety … the cupcake not so much so. Easy to eat another.
You know what has hardly any fructose at all? Regular corn syrup. Glucose and some glucose molecules still hooked together in chains of two or three. No I do not think it would be healthier to have a cupcake that was made to the same sweetness with Karo only. The lack of fructose would not make it any higher satiety or decrease the desire to eat another.
Large is a vague term. Large amounts of water will kill you. no one here is defending “large” consumption of anything.
So, when a poster makes a claim about something that isn’t true, should it not be corrected because it’s irellevant in another context?
Sorry to not be precise enough.
Best guesses (per the WHO) “large” in this context means total of 25 grams or more of added sugar (again it doesn’t matter if it is HFCS or sucrose) over the course a day. To most Americans not so large since that one cupcake is over the daily added sugar total and a 12 oz can of Coke nearly 150% of it. Pretty much most Americans are in the “large” consumption of added sugar range and it is very very different than sugar in the packages of vegetables (even carrots with their high Glycemic Index), fruits, and whole grains. Still physiologically it’s large.
As to the second, there are statements that may not be precisely true but are true for general purposes. I’m reminded of what my wife said to me back when our youngest, as a toddler, would gag on some food and she’d yell at me to “Do something. He’s choking!” and I’d stupidly reply that he wasn’t choking, he was just gagging, and that he’d be okay. Her reply? “A normal parent would say he’s choking.” Believe it or not we’re still married!
In terms of general understanding it’s right enough. IMHO.
I see you’ve moved the goalpost here. I don’t care what the WHO says about how much added sugar they recommend. What I quoted you on is “large doses of quickly absorbable 50/50 fructose and glucose” and hepatic lipogenesis. You should read my fourth quote box in post 17.
Nice story, but this is GQ, so a statement about sugar turning to fat is not “right enough” if it’s wrong. I am quite confident I can point out plenty of times you corrected others here in which I can contextually state back to you “seriously it does not matter that…”
Yeah odd post that #17.
Your link is to something very different. Something that discusses how
and
Weird. Not what I think you wanted to cite.
Your fourth quote box actually is apparently from “Alan’s Blog” and I’ve listened to and read Lustig, not so sure Alan has … Lustig is fairly clear that he is talking about added sugars (and not fruit) and few of the comments in that blog bit have anything to do with either the major points that I’ve heard in Lustig’s lectures or about the hepatic de novo lipogenesis and damage from standard American doses of added sugars. Oh Lustig goes over the top quite a bit and there are fair criticisms of his schtick but that’s no reason to misrepresent.
Oh your other un- or incorrectly attributed quote box, from the McDougall Newsletter? Well let’s just focus on this single bit: “… de novo lipogenesis does not occur under usual living conditions in people. Thus the common belief that sugar turns to fat is scientifically incorrect—and there is no disagreement about this fact among scientists or their scientific research …”
Is it completely settled science? I wouldn’t go that far. But your cited newsletter is simply wrong.
Seriously, excess “fructose is turned to fat in the liver” is a true statement. How important that direct process is in de novo lipogenesis vs a variety of other impacts of the excess fructose on enzymes that otherwise result in de novo hepatic lipogenesis is an open question, with the likely answer being not so much.
And the bigger point remains: the devil is not the fructose but the context it is put in - too much too fast in the form of added sugars and in presence of energy excess, facilitated by the high hedonic value and relatively low satiety of added sugars.
Actually, the original green-glass Coke bottles were 6-1/2 oz. not 10. Cite, scroll down to 1955.
Is this the official term? Because I thought the Glycemic index - the new buzzword in the 90s/2000s has since been disproven (in one of Cecil Columns even?) because
a) different People put Food like carrots or whole grain with different values on the glycemic index, so a big study was tried to nail down the glycemic value with People digesting (instead of looking at Food singly in the lab) -
b) which led to discovering that different People react very differently to the same Food.
So as has been said before, in the future (hopefully) the ideal diet plan is one where a doctor and a lab look at your individual metabolism - how many calories do you actually burn, not according to a table, but by testing you - and which Foods do you react to in what way? - by testing your blood or measuring your Insulin Spikes, and then custom-tailoring a diet plan for you, which will be different from the one for your neighbor, brother and mother.
At the Moment, that amount of measuring takes so much time that most People can’t afford it. But if labs get more automatized and cheaper, or if more data allows some markers to be found that lead to maybe a dozen different types of People metabolisms, and as the cost of obesity is more realized - maybe this will become more available.
There is a Dope on this: “Is the glycemic index the new key to healthy eating?”
Interesting that the article uses the standard of 50 grams of carbs … the links both **x-ray vision ** and DSeid are more like 100 grams to 135 grams … I gotta say, if one sits down and eats a quarter pound of sugar, it may not really matter what kind of sugar it is … I looked up a random cupcake recipe and it worked out to a tablespoon of sugar per cupcake … that’s around 25 grams … so maybe not a good idea to eat too many before we sit in front of the TV for four hours … but maybe it’s okay if we’re out humping trusses …
The key is to eat complex carbs, not simple carbs: carbs that contain fiber and take longer to digest, such as fruits, veggies, and whole grains and not refined flours, sucrose, etc. I don’t know if the glycemic index has been disproven, but obviously it is not the ultimate guide to healthy eating.
Correct. Wrong link to the correct quote.
Then you’re not paying attention. Alan linked to a particular video of one of Lustig’s presentations. He makes no straw man arguments. Lustig appeared in the link I sent you to defend himself. He didn’t make the claim you are. See this:
Again, his points are specific to Lustig’s claims in that video. Not to what DSeid has heard.
What did he misrepresent?
From one of your quotes:
… fructose can rapidly and without any control produce glucose, glycogen, lactate, and pyruvate, providing both the glycerol and acyl portion of acyl-glycerol molecules. These particular substrates and the lack of regulation of this pathway could result in large amounts of TG that can be packed into very-low density lipoproteins by the liver. …The investigators demonstrated that post meal lipogenesis increased in proportion to fructose concentration in a beverage: from 7.8% for 100g glucose beverage to 15.9% after a mixture of 50g glucose: 50g fructose and 16.9% after a mixture of 25g glucose: 75g fructose beverage. Body fat synthesis was measured immediately after the sweet drinks were consumed. This study concluded that fructose has an immediate acute lipogenic effect; with greater serum TG level in the morning, and after a subsequent meal, even if consumed as a small amount in a mixture of sugars. …
75g of fructose was needed to produce acute fat storage. Typically sugars are at least 50% glucose so we are talking about 150g of sugar in total - that is a massive 600 calories purely from sugar. I would call that exceptional conditions, in order to produce an insignificant result. From that same paper:
The key to what? There is nothing inherently wrong with simple carbs.
You are overstating an importance to how long foods take to digest. Most people aren’t eating a single food in a fasted state. And you just said to not eat simple carbs. That’s what’s in fruits and veggies.
You should click on the links I posted.
Fruits and veggies contain fiber and compound carbs in addition to fructose. In addition they have fiber which slows the digestion of the sugars. I don’t know about “most people.” Many will have coffee with sugar to start the day after a night’s fast.
And NOTHING is wrong with that! Nothing bad is going to happen to a person that doesn’t have a specific condition that has coffee with sugar in the morning. You are making fear-mongering types of statements about sugar as if those statements should be relevant to “most people.”
If you are a person who is watching his sugar intake, the FDA just made it more difficult to track high fructose corn syrup :
You’re quoting bullshit claims like “even when used in moderation it is a major cause of heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia, liver failure, tooth decay, and more.” Why should we believe anything else your source says?
How dare you question that site? Right there are the top it says “News. Truth. Unfiltered.” That’s the unfiltered new truth.
Why, just look at these headlines on their Health page. All guaranteed to turn your life around quick. And your head. Which will be spinning at 8,000 rpm.
There’s also a Conspiracies tab.
DON’T LOOK! FOR THE LOVE OF OG, DON’T LOOK! THE HORROR! THE HORRORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR…