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How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

nytimes.com

251–260 of 623 posts

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#251
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the "simple ingredients" that people used 100 years ago aren't really available anymore, at least not in the US. That would somewhat true even with traditional breeding and cultivation, but over the past 100 years we've greatly improved our understanding of how breeding works, the rate that we can modify plants and animals, and with GMOs we now have a lot of direct control over the outcome. We just don't have…

What about people that are living in more rural parts of Europe? There are a lot of small time farmers there that still grow the same sheep/cows/animals their grandparents grew 100 years ago. They grow the same veggies on the same rotated soil that was grown 100 years ago, the same way. Sure it may be a niche but if I'm living around there and eating that food, I think it's pretty darn close to what our ancestors wer…

I'm specifically talking about the US, and in particular the majority of the US population. My understanding is that the rest of the world tends to be somewhat better (not as much industrialization of farming and breeding) and of course there are still farmers all over the world who are still using traditional methods.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a "fat industry"? Sugar production is very industrialized, just a few companies with a strong lobby. Fat is much more diverse. Sure, there are a few giant soybean oil producers, but it's not their only product, and individual companies don't dominate their market.

There are definitely meat and dairy industries.

Which is why the average American store shelf is full of painfully lean pork and nonfat Greek yogurt (Seriously, WTF?).

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#253

I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind. Recently in the last 3 months I gave up sugar, hard core, it's hard but the benefits are out of this world. I was healthy and active. I ate healthy, or so I thought. Boy was I wrong and mis informed. I had heard theories so I decided to check them out. I went all out to avoid sugar for a couple of weeks ju…

So what did you actually eat? It seems like sugar is everywhere these days.

I'm not the OP but I'd guess it's mostly vegetables, nuts/non meat proteins, and/or meat. Maybe some of the less processed grains like flax or quinoa.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#254
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there isn't a fat industry, can you imagine manufacturing fat? Paid for by the Fat for America Industry.

What? Where do you think soybean, corn, Canola/rapeseed, peanut, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, olive, coconut, and palm oils come from? Animal fats are rather expensive in comparison, but I can also buy pork lard, beef suet, and butter rather easily. The problem there might just be fragmentation. Growers of cane and beets (and sorghum, too, I guess) have basically just one major homogenized end product: refined s…

They're not as powerful as the sugar lobby, but they did manage to get out recommendations that unfairly demonized saturated fats and promoted unsaturated fats.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#255
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is arsenic.

I didn't know that elemental Arsenic (As) was made of chains of elemental carbons (C)... The more you know??

Incorrect.

Arsenic is an element. Elemental arsenic, as with elemental carbon, or hydrogen, or any other element, is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Its chemical properties are defined largely by its valence electrons, and atomic mass.

There is no more carbon in arsenic than there is sound in light. They are different things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#256
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this not include sugar found in foods? Are those considered complex? Is eating natural sugar found in fruits as bad as eating refined/processed sugar?

Sugar that occurs naturally in foods are often complex. Complex sugars are larger molecules that can be broken into simple sugars (lactose, fructose, glucose). There is actually very little sugar in fruit, and they are full of vitamins and minerals which are good for you. If you cut artificial (added sugar) foods from your diet you will likely find that other foods taste sweeter as your taste becomes more sensitive.

The word fructose comes from the word fruit, it literally means the sugar found in fruits. Most fruits have more fructose than other sugars. A banana has 14 grams of sugar, equivalent to 4 teaspoons of table sugar. If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it. You can argue that it's ok to eat fruit because it's balanced by the fiber and vitamins, but that's equivalent to saying that fructose is ok in moderation. Which seems to go against the current nutritional science understandings.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#257
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the question is why do they eat 3500kcal? The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more. A calorie is not a calorie.

I didn't check the science, but I'm pretty confident that "feeling full" is a matter of volume and not of calories. At least in my personal experience a really dumb and easy way to lose fat without feeling hungry was to eat food with a low calorie density.

The goal isn't to "feel full", but to feel full and good for a long period of time. Otherwise, I might as well gorge myself on isotonic water.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#258
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the people who die from diesel particulates? Failing to consider that is exactly the mistake Europe is still making.

Particulates are easy to deal with using current technology--burn lean, burn hot (and inject lots of urea to get rid of all the NOx that this regime creates), and stick on a filter on the tailpipe to get rid of the stuff that does get created. The main problem is that diesel engines last forever, and a lot of old engines that don't meet requirements are still on the road.

This is partly true: You can reduce particulates, but they're still bad in areas with a lot of less-emitting vehicles. Also, the technology that reduces particulates needs to be carefully maintained to continue working as well as it did the day the vehicle left the factory... and there's plenty of incentive to cheat, in order to save money.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer I live, the more I value the lessons I learned from my Grandparents: - Don't listen to the shit you hear in the media, it's all self serving. Do your own research, that way it serves your need, not anyone elses. - Stay out of the centre aisles at the grocery store. Buy simple ingredients. Make it yourself. If you can't grow it yourself or kill it, you probably shouldn't be eating it. - Do the research, buy…

You had a good set of grandparents. Bottle that and sell it.

Not that they weren't awesome, but we pick and choose the advice we follow and I'm sure I've forgotten as much advice that they gave me as I remember - and that I do remember is really only as it slaps me upside the head with a "holy fuck were they ever right about that!" It probably would have helped more if I'd listened 30 years ago when they first told me and stuck to it, but then I didn't have the hindsight to be able to tell which were the good lessons and which were rubbish; so like all 10 year olds, I ran it through my "you have no idea what you're talking about you crazy old wo/man" filter and what came out of the other side was a kid whose lifetime epiphanies are like a list of what I would already have known had I listened to my grandparents.

Hindsight... crazy accurate.

Re: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

#260
post #8

RIP: British Scientist John Yudkin - The man who tried to warn us about the perils of sugar.. Source(s) : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/diet/10634081... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin Edit: Lest we not forget his arch-enemy Ancel Keys

My mother (1973, Edinburgh) bought "Pure, White, and Deadly," and we all read it. I was ten or so. Yudkin attacked white flour, white (processed) fat, and above all white sugar. It made perfect sense to us all, and cutting back on sugar became a slow, yet consistent part of our lifestyle. We never ate that much anyhow. I stopped eating sugar entirely at 15. I still recall the book's cover. Edit: it took me a lot long…

well the lie has recently morphed into the laws slowing and prohibiting soda sales in schools and such all the while promoting juice which can be worse in many cases because people assume its healthy and you cannot over drink because of that
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