Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain • Hacker News Board

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#51

Post by wooster » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:44 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #41

illumin8 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.

How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)? I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats). But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the…

Cattle rancher here. You can get tapeworms by eating uncooked beef. Thankfully it's usually easily, albeit unpleasantly, cured. However, you need to know you have them first, which can take some time.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#52

Post by timcederman » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 10:01 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #44

timcederman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).

Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts. However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)

I guess I was surprised by the example, as the modern commonplace banana (in the western world at least) is very static.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#53

Post by e1ven » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 10:03 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #35

e1ven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon,…

What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch…

I had my cholesterol checked a few weeks ago as part of my annual physical. The Dr said it's in line with a normal 28 year old; Sorry, don't remember the numbers, it's never been very important to me.

I am curious- Where would you buy a meal with Steel cut oats near your office? As nice as it would be to bring things with me everyday to work, I really prefer getting out of the office for a while to clear my head, and re-focus on the tasks left to be done.

I can get a steak anywhere, but I'd have a hard time finding a more balanced lunch.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#54

Post by ars » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 10:08 PM UTC

gte910h wrote: post #47

ars wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related problem is the tariff on sugar, which artificially keeps the price of sugar high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Sugar_Program So you have a subsidy on corn, a tariff on sugar, and the double imbalance causes companies to use HFCS. If we got rid of the tariff on sugar we could import sugar from brazil, and make ethanol out of it. (Which actually works, unlike ethanol from corn.) It's politically impracti…

I'm surprised we can't grow sugar beets there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

You're right, we could. The range goes all the way up to canada.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#55

Post by rsheridan6 » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 10:09 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #13

maxharris wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.) The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.

I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program. Irony.

That was a military program - hardly the same as propping up an industry. Even libertarians accept the need for a military.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#56

Post by electromagnetic » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 10:11 PM UTC

tcskeptic wrote: post #25

riahi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A basic explanation is that fructose is metabolized very differently from glucose. Glucose is absorbed from the digestive tract and directly enters the blood; fructose is routed to the liver and converted into fat. Considering the difference in these mechanisms, it isn't surprising that HFCS leads to higher weight gain, because it directly leads to increased synthesis of adipose tissue.

But sucrose is 50% fructose as well, the 5% difference in Fructose content between Sucrose and HFCS does not appear to be sufficient to explain the difference in weight gain, especially since overall HFCS calories consumed were lower. There is something weird going on here beyond just the fructose content of HFCS.

Glucose enters the bloodstream directly where it is likely measured by our body (like everything is from blood salinity to oxygen and CO2 concentrations), a 5% reduction in glucose in a concentration of sucrose (IE natural sugar) would likely be misread by the body.

If you get 50 calories of glucose in a set quantity of sucrose, your body expects there to be 50 calories of fructose. If you're getting 47.5 calories of glucose, your body expects you to be getting 47.5 calories of fructose not 52.5, this would mean your body interprets you eating an equal amount of calories as eating less calories.

There's another reason I've read as to why we're naturally susceptible to high-fructose, which is that our direct ancestors are predominantly fruit-eaters. Humans, and many of our ancestors, are unable to produce Vitamin C directly because our food sources were high enough sources that our bodies didn't have to waste energy synthesising it. This means we have the instinct to pig out when we find high-fructose concentrations, our bodies cheaped out on a solution to ensure high Vitamin C intake. It only happens that we've recently began screwing around with our foods to a large enough degree that we're directly suffering from this short cut evolution took.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#57

Post by illumin8 » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 11:18 PM UTC

e1ven wrote: post #53

illumin8 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch…

I had my cholesterol checked a few weeks ago as part of my annual physical. The Dr said it's in line with a normal 28 year old; Sorry, don't remember the numbers, it's never been very important to me. I am curious- Where would you buy a meal with Steel cut oats near your office? As nice as it would be to bring things with me everyday to work, I really prefer getting out of the office for a while to clear my head, and…

Yeah, you're right, you pretty much have to cook your own food if you want to eat the good grains. Steel cut oats are not so bad; just soak them the night before in a pot of boiling water, cook for 10 minutes in the morning, add some cinnamon and chopped apples and you've got a great healthy breakfast.

Beans and other good carbs are also difficult to cook on your own, but you can get canned ones.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#58

Post by illumin8 » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 11:21 PM UTC

msluyter wrote: post #34

Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.

Fruit does have a lot of sugar, but it also has a lot of fiber in it which causes your body to process the sugar in a different, slower way. Drinking fruit juice, however, is just about as bad as drinking HFCS soda.

Berries are truly awesome fruits. I eat blueberries almost every day, although it can be pretty expensive, especially during the winter when they have to ship them in from the southern hemisphere.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#59

Post by tokenadult » Fri, Mar 26, 2010, 12:14 AM UTC

zackattack wrote: post #23

Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g., "I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of proteins, digestive enzymes, and other n…

It's important to point out that a paleo diet is not a raw diet, in view of some of the other comments your question has received. Cooking goes far back in the hominin ancestral line, well before the speciation of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

"There are two really fascinating things about human evolution that we have yet to really fully come to grips with. One is the evolution of cooking. Whenever cooking happened, it must have had absolutely monstrous effects on us, because cooking enormously increases the quality of the food we eat, and it enormously increases the range of food items that we can eat. We all know that food quality and food abundance are key variables in understanding animal ecology. But the amazing thing is that although at the moment there is no conventional wisdom that says when cooking evolved, social anthropology and all sorts of conventional wisdom say that humans are the animals that cook. We distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world because they eat raw stuff and we eat cooked stuff. The best anthropology can do at the moment is to say that maybe sometime around 250 or 300 thousand years ago cooking really got going, because there's archeological evidence of earth ovens.

"This is fine, but long before earth ovens came along we must have learned to cook. And you would think that cooking would be associated with things like evidence in your body of the food being easier to digest, such as smaller teeth, or maybe a reduction in the size of the rib cage as the size of the stomach gets smaller, or maybe the jaw getting smaller. And there's only one time in human evolution that all that happens; that is, 1.9 million years ago with the evolution of the genus Homo. It's there we must look for evidence that cooking was adopted."

All of our ancestors in paleolithic times cooked. Human beings are adapted to eat cooked food.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#60

Post by 27182818284 » Fri, Mar 26, 2010, 12:37 AM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #33

elblanco wrote: post #18

I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy. About a year ago I figured it out a…

It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked. I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously s…

In accordance with what you wrote, I think one of the most insightful rules has to be the new rule from author Michael Pollen that says something close to, "Only occasionally eat foods that have more than 5 ingredients on the label."