Is Sugar Really Toxic?

Sola dosis facit venenum.

I didn't pay attention to my weight for a couple years, ate a lot of sweets and drank a lot of beer. Before I knew it I'd gained 30 pounds, and had a minor freakout. I decided to do three things--weigh myself every morning, stop eating sugar except for from fruit, and stop drinking. I ended up shedding 30 pounds in 90 days, and have kept it off for a full year. I didn't exercise or count calories in any way, in fact I probably upped my overall calorie consumption but I replaced the sugars with more complex energy sources like nuts. I'm not sure if it was cutting the alcohol, cutting the sugar, or both that did the trick. However, I've been letting myself have some alcohol for the past few months (wine, not beer) and haven't gained a pound since doing so, so my gut tells me it was the sugar. I definitely feel a whole lot healthier.

Most of your changes could be explained just by calories. Beer is quite high calorie since it has so many carbs, and eating nuts satiates you faster so you end up eating less.

Alcohol itself doesn't affect weight much, though IIRC fat isn't metabolized well together with it. But it can improve your lifespan: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9481115

Man. Sugar is the worst. Take it from me. I moved to the city the moment I turned 18, I didn't know much about cooking. Back in the 'burbs you'd be lucky to live within 10km of a grocery store. Downtown however, totally different story. I went NUTS with sweets and pizza.

I gained over 100 lbs in just under half a year. I was eating around 10k calories a day.

I then stuck to only these foods and have only been eating this the past couple years:

chicken

lean beef

kale + other greens

various fruit

cheese

That's it. No seasoning, nothing. I'm so much happier now. Better sleeps, better mood, better everything. My mood and days fluctuated like crazy when I didn't keep track of my diet.

I'd love to hear some opinions on the following talk from fellow HNers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I read about some research* regarding ego depletion and its relationship to blood glucose levels that was pretty interesting. Basically, they did a study with two groups of people. Both were asked to do some challenging problems requiring concentration, then both were given lemonade. One group's lemonade was sweetened with glucose, and the other with some artificial sweetener. The two groups were then asked to do more challenging problems. I can't recall the actual numbers, but the group that had glucose in their lemonade did significantly better on the second round than the other group, and the two groups were about the same on the first round.

The implication was that the brain uses glucose in its operation, and requires a certain level of glucose to function at full capacity. At least one cause of the brain fog we get after a full day's focused work is that we're low on fuel, which happens to be easy to fix. Unfortunately, it has other effects too that we might not want so much. I've been meaning to experiment on myself a bit with some glucose tabs after a long day of code, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

(*) I think that was in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" but I'm not certain now, too many similar books in between.