Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 221 posts

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

#171

Post by narag »

SwellJoe wrote: post #118
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

https://www.google.com/search?q=dissociated+diet

I remember seing a book about that diet 20 years ago by a singer:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffaella_Carr%C3%A0

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

#172

Post by jm2721 »

projektir wrote: post #105
ericabiz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an anecdote the other direction. One of our employees decided to cut out fast food completely. Total weight loss in over 6 months of doing this? 0 pounds. Why? Because his at-home diet was still full of sugar and carbs (and he admitted as much..."I'll never give up bread!") Meanwhile, I did a low-carb "lazy Keto" diet where all I did was keep carbs under 20g net per day. I continued to eat fast food at least a…

Another anecdote: I'm in the "I'll never give up bread!" camp; I have never been on any kind of specialized diet, and I have never been obese. At one point I wanted to lose 10 LB, and I just counted calories, and it worked, albeit slowly. Given that bread is a fairly old food, while the obesity problem seems recent, something seems off with the idea that we should all be on a keto diet.

I think sugar is really what pushes societies from healthy and slightly stout to obese and diabetic, since those diseases are issues of insulin resistance. If you eat too much sugar, your insulin resistance will go through the roof because excess fructose (which makes up ~50% of sugar) leads to a fatty liver, which leads to insulin resistance. The liver is the only organ that can process fructose. Bread, on the other hand, will get metabolized into glucose (oversimplifying a bit here) and every muscle in your body can use glucose for energy, so it's a lot more evenly distributed.

If you're in the "I'll never give up bread!" camp, I would encourage you to try and find sugar-free bread. I tried doing that, and let me tell you, it is extremely difficult. Even your healthy looking whole grain, multi-seed, organic superfood bread usually has a ton of sugar. But it can be done :)

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

#173

Post by jm2721 »

iopq wrote: post #151

I'm lean and I eat a lot of sugar. Sugar is not a toxin. It's a source of energy. I'll eat some sugar and go to the gym. I'll come back and eat more sugar to replace the glycogen I drained. What happens to overweight people has NOTHING to do with lean people who exercise.

You know what would give you even MORE energy? COCAINE! Try it out!

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

#174

Post by toephu2 »

iopq wrote: post #151

I'm lean and I eat a lot of sugar. Sugar is not a toxin. It's a source of energy. I'll eat some sugar and go to the gym. I'll come back and eat more sugar to replace the glycogen I drained. What happens to overweight people has NOTHING to do with lean people who exercise.

Sugar is a drug that is addictive and releases dopamine when consumed which is why you feel good when you eat it and have cravings for it.

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

#175

Post by jm2721 »

refurb wrote: post #168
electriclove wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sugar was not readily available until relatively recently.

In the 15th century, Venice was the chief sugar refining and distribution centre in Europe.[6] From Wikipedia. Sugar has been around far longer than our very recent obesity epidemic.

Not really for the masses, since it wasn't cheap or plentiful. The wealthy that consumed high quantities of sugar did have the same illnesses that are so prevalent today.

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

#176

Post by gtrubetskoy »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #55
renaudg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Calories count, no matter where they are from." This is the exact point the article is proving wrong.

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.

To illustrate the point: dietary fiber, which contains a lot of calories, is not digestible. Eat as much as you can, but you will not get one calorie of energy from it. So just based on that, where calories come from matters.

There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.

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

#177

Post by Fnoord »

cpymchn wrote: post #161
Fnoord wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So FWIW @ericabiz is correct "It really is the carbs and sugar that do you in". Its not. The people who are obese mostly [1] consume too much, and often carbs are the culprit. If they reduce their calorie intake, they lose weight. It doesn't matter if they use a keto pseusoscience with that, go to a dietist to follow a raw food pseudoscience diet, or diet solo without a dietist limiting caloric intake on sheer will…

"keto pseudoscience" is loaded phrasing for a mechanism that has been understood and uncontroversial for 200 years. If you are unfamiliar... the core insight is that obesity is an endocrine disorder; your hormones — not your caloric intake nor the amount you exercise — is the primary reason you gain or lose fat. Here is a short explanation as to why this is: * [enzymes] whether you store fat or not is determined by e…

> "keto pseudoscience" is loaded phrasing for a mechanism that has been understood and uncontroversial for 200 years.

Certainly not 200 years, and also certainly not "understood and uncontroversial". Atkins/keto goes against the conventional science of dieting from the 20th and 21st century because it doesn't follow the caloric intake affecting weight loss premise (though it can have that effect, like almost every diets can). It goes against the convention that saturated fats are unhealthy, and should be severely limited. Finally, we should remember that transfats were only in recent decades found unhealthy, mostly due to research in 00s by M. Katan. Your Atkins diet during its hype in 70s didn't exclude transfats.

> not your caloric intake nor the amount you exercise

I didn't claim the amount one exercises significantly matters in weight loss. In fact, I wrote throughout the thread that muscles increase weight.

However, having more slightly more muscles than the default 9 to 5 job (lack of muscles) helps with doing tasks like grabbing your bicycle to do a grocery, assembling an Ikea wardrobe, carry your toddler around, that type of activity. Being fit allows endurance. Both are arguably useful motivators.

The Atkins hype is recent (and the keto hype is more recent), not 200 years old. Its also not established by our governments (the equivalents of NHS, Voedingscentrum, etc).

Voedingscentrum has this to say in summary: "Het Atkins-dieet levert gewichtsverlies op, omdat de voeding in totaal minder calorieën bevat. Uiteindelijk gaat het erom de gezondheidswinst die dit oplevert vast te houden met een gezond, gevarieerd en volwaardig eetpatroon.

Diabetes-patiënten en mensen met een gestoorde nierfunctie kunnen dit dieet beter alleen volgen in overleg met hun arts en onder begeleiding van een diëtist." [1]

Which boils down to: "The Atkins diet achieves weight loss because the diet contains a total of less calories. Ultimately, it is about retaining the health gain that results in a healthy, varied and full-bodied eating pattern.

Diabetes patients and people with impaired renal function are better off only following this diet in consultation with their physician and under the guidance of a dietitian."

Compared with various other diets they're not even that negative about Atkins. Many alternatives are worse established.

If you got any sources where government organizations like the ones I mentioned recommended 200 years ago the Atkins or keto diet I'd love to read about that. Or perhaps sources where they actively recommend it to this day, including the theory behind it. Any government health service sources supporting it, also welcome. The burden of proof lies at you.

And of course there are tons upon tons of articles which suggest Atkins/keto don't work, complete with test subjects losing weight at start, finding diet not practical, and a yo-yo effect. Here's a quote from one of the many [2]: "[...] These observations led Sacks et al. to conclude that behavioral factors rather than macronutrient composition are the main influences on weight loss [...]" Recommend reading entire article.

[1] http://www.voedingscentrum.nl/encyclopedie/verzadigd-vet.asp...

[2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0810291

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

#178

Post by projektir »

tslug wrote: post #102
y4mi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find a great substitute is olive oil where I'd use butter for non-cooking (eg. instead of butter on pasta or instead of butter on bread). It's not quite as tasty but still a huge improvement over dry, and it's healthier. For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting tem…

> For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting temperature.

I believe the situation with oil is a bit more complicated than that, and you're generally fine with olive oil unless you make it smoke, which is fairly non-trivial to do, despite its low smoking point. There seems to be some debate on the topic: http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/cooking-with-olive-oil-fa...

Coconut oil in particular actually has a low smoking point. If you want to be safe, you want Avocado oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point

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

#179

Post by mike_o »

jnordwick wrote: post #14

The recent demonization of sugar substitutes hasn't helped either. The problem with studies that link them to weight gain is that they confuse correlation and caution then make some wild unsubstantiated stab at causation by guessing that maybe they cause insulin issues. I went looking for information on that, and found and excellent article by a diabetic site summarizing the evidence and treating each substitute as i…

"The Obesity Code" by Jason Fung goes into all the issues from the article in more detail. He references studies that seem to prove sugar substitutes cause weight gain rather than correlate with weight gain: Sucralose raises insulin by 20 percent, despite the fact that it contains no calories and no sugar. This insulin-raising effect has also been shown for other artificial sweeteners, including the “natural” sweetener stevia. Despite having a minimal effect on blood sugars, both aspartame and stevia raised insulin levels higher even than table sugar.

Fung, Jason. The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (p. 172).

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

#180

Post by sn9 »

jm2721 wrote: post #170
sn9 wrote: post #155

Sugar's role in diabetes seems likely to be true, but to say that CICO is false and a mutually exclusive explanation compared to the way in which insulin affects one's metabolism is empirically false [0]. Taubes would be hard pressed to explain how you could lose weight on a diet of Twinkies or how those subsisting on high carb, low fat, low protein diets that fail to meet their caloric needs in famine-afflicted regi…

CICO is not 'false', per se, but it's fundamentally misleading and tautological. Yes, people will lose weight on a calorie restricted diet of just twinkies. However, their bodies metabolic rate will decrease gradually to the point where continuing to maintain a caloric deficit will be unsustainable (i.e. a 500 calorie deficit if your basal metabolic rate is only 750 or 1000), at which point they'll stop losing weight…

If your BMR is 750-1000, you're likely a female shorter than 5' and/or weighing less than 100 lbs. At that point, you are likely severely underweight and probably shouldn't be trying to lose weight.

I'm not denying that there are other reasons to eat a diet with greater nutritional density, but trying to convince people that CICO is wrong is far more harmful than trying to convey that it is literally the most important factor in trying to modify your weight.

If you want to make changes in your life, you need to know the right things to measure, and your caloric intake relative to how your weight changes is the single most important factor for people trying to lose weight. If you're not even doing that, it's unlikely you'll succeed, as millions of people who struggle with their weight will understand.

Once you've convinced people of the value of that, it then becomes more productive to go into the value of high protein intake and strength training to further improve body composition, the importance of eating a diet centered around fruits and vegetables, etc.

For people that are severely overweight, getting their weight down will have the highest impact on their health.

>Nobody is suggesting that CICO and the insulin theory are mutually exclusive;

Taubes literally argued this in the paragraph where he quoted the biochemistry text.

Post reply on HN