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Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

aeon.co

111–120 of 221 posts

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#111
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If butter is the only thing you removed from your diet, you must have been eating an incredible amount of it?!

As I mentioned above, removing butter also resulted in the elimination of other things from my diet.

Perhaps you removed bread?

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#112
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't fat make food more satisfying, making you feel fulfilled sooner? Needs a citation I guess.

https://www.ncbi.nqlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10435117 For most people high fiber foods are better.

It is a study of 14 people that self reported how hungry they were and how much they ate on their own. I don't think we can get to advice stating "most people" should do anything from that. It is an example of how bad science gets translated to bad advice and bad behavior. Not picking on you, you are responding rationally to a headline or blurb about the study. But it is a worthless study.

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#113
post #10

I would like to share an anecdote. In March 2016, I was weighing 96 kilograms (211.64 pounds). I made just one change during that time which is to stop having anything with sugar. I continued to take other natural sweeteners like jaggery and honey. The rest of my diet remained the same and my activity level remained the same ( I work in IT as a network engineer in a desk job) In October 2016, I was weighing 72 kilos…

Honey is made of sugar...

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#114
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a calorie is a calorie" This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion

No, the article is saying that people are getting obese and diabetic because of sugar. Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either. The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many…

You are getting lost in semantics, because if you are saying:

there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.

Then a calorie isn't a calorie.

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really prove it wrong. If you eat 3000 calories of butter every day, you're gonna get fat. In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

> In that sense, a calorie is a calorie. This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.

I know we like to one up each other on HN, but you're just talking past the main point.

Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#118
post #10

I would like to share an anecdote. In March 2016, I was weighing 96 kilograms (211.64 pounds). I made just one change during that time which is to stop having anything with sugar. I continued to take other natural sweeteners like jaggery and honey. The rest of my diet remained the same and my activity level remained the same ( I work in IT as a network engineer in a desk job) In October 2016, I was weighing 72 kilos…

Oddly enough, I can share an anecdote too. After a health scare, I decided to change my diet. I didn't think that I was self disciplined enough to count calories, so I arbitrarily eliminated certain things from my diet, most notably butter. My exercise didn't change much: Cycling to work every day. I got a new bike, but it didn't make me go that much faster. Within a few months, I went from 175 to 150 pounds (about 7…

I remember reading a study that indicated that simple carbs combined with fat are worse than either fat or simple carbs alone. I can't find the study at the moment, but the gist of it was that a high fat, high sugar, meal will be metabolized differently than either in isolation and also that it triggers cravings for more fat and sugar.

So, a keto diet is fine. Eating bread every now and then is fine. But, something like a fast food meal consumed with a sugary soda may be particularly unhealthy and may cause you to eat more and crave more similar foods.

I don't know all the mechanisms at play, and I don't think even experts have a really good understanding of how our very complex digestive and metabolic systems (and the bacterial colonies that live in our guts) interact. It's clear that caloric reduction works for weight loss, even if you're eating mostly carbs or mostly fats. Some people report better management of cravings and hunger on different kinds of diets, and the research indicates that a low-fat or low-carb diet results in weight loss at about the same rate (contrary to popular belief about low-carb diets lately).

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/low-carb-v...

But, really, if you run a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. Cutting arbitrary foods can do it for some folks. Some folks like keto or other relatively extreme restrictive diets. Some folks do intermittent fasting (I've been intermittent fasting for several months and have lost a little over 20 pounds). No matter how you do it, if you cut 500 calories off of your diet, you'll lose weight at a healthy clip.

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#119
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, butter makes the other stuff more delicious, making you eat just a little more each time.

I think this is important, and that the food industry has been progressively making food more and more yummy over the past few decades. So far I really don't have a good answer for how to reduce consumption without reducing pleasure, at least in the short term. Developing a taste for food that isn't designed to be addictive, probably requires a long term change of habits.

>So far I really don't have a good answer for how to reduce consumption without reducing pleasure

Salt.

Re: Sugar alters hormones and metabolism, sets stage for obesity and diabetes

#120
This about sums it up: "A far more parsimonious hypothesis is that the same thing that makes our fat cells fat makes us fat: ‘high blood glucose’ and concomitant elevated levels of insulin and the insulin resistance itself, both caused by the carbohydrate content of our diets. Insulin is secreted in response to rising blood sugar, and rising blood sugar is a response to a carbohydrate-rich meal. Sugar is implicated, in particular, because its chemical structure includes a large proportion of the carbohydrate fructose, and fructose is preferentially metabolised in the liver. As such, it is a prime suspect for the fat accumulation in liver cells that is hypothesised to be the trigger of insulin resistance itself."
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