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Is Sugar Really Toxic?
11–20 of 114 posts
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#12I really hope not. I love sugar. It's also the only stimulant I can mete out in small doses that will keep me going without obliterating my concentration, as caffeine tends to do (disclaimer: I haven't tried cocaine).
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 mor…
This test is flawed, as it doesn't have a "neutral group" - a group that had neither sugar nor artificial sweetener. How can they conclude that the sugar made people do better, rather than the artificial sweetener making people do worse?
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#13This line... > Considering that our cells depend on sugar for energy, Is dishonest. In general parlance "sugar" refers to sucrose. Sucrose is a glucose bonded to a fructose. Our bodies need glucose to live. However they do not need fructose.
I've even heard a university nutritionist make the claim that sugar is just glucose. Some days I feel stupid; others, I feel other people are more stupid.
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#14Yes sugar is toxic because of the metabolic by-products of fructose, which is similar to the by-products of alcohol. Both are known to make freshmen put on weight.
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#15Sola 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 cal…
>Sola dosis facit venenum
Pedantically we might say that, but it's not really true.
Sure, what makes something poisonous/dangerous is the dosage, but the dosage itself depends on more basic characteristics.
It's not like we arbitrarily try high dosages of stuff. We don't go out eating small amounts of cyanide for a reason.
Nice taste facits venenum -- by making us increase the dosage. Think sugar, salt, red meat, etc.
Uplifting side effects facit venenum. Think heroin, alcohol, etc.
Adverse withdrawal effects also facit venenum. Else we could easily quite alcohol, drugs, cigarettes with a little self restraint.
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#16I really hope not. I love sugar. It's also the only stimulant I can mete out in small doses that will keep me going without obliterating my concentration, as caffeine tends to do (disclaimer: I haven't tried cocaine).
You can take your sugar in the form of whole (not juiced) fresh fruit. Your body will be able to handle it then.
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#17Man. 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…
Fatty meat and fat is healthy as well!
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#18"—a nutrition scientist at Archer Daniels Midland, a major food processing corporation—"
Facepalm
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#19Man. 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…
The link mentioned above is Robert Lustig MD's talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth". I found it very interesting and quite convincing, but beware that it's long (1.5 hrs) and you have to be willing to sit through a lot of biochemistry, since he goes through a bunch of cellular metabolic pathways in gory detail. If you don't care about the biochemistry, the parts about how everything we "know" about nutrition is based on shaky ground (e.g., the FDA's food pyramid, "fat in the diet is bad", etc.) is well worth watching, as is the history of how the amount of sugar in the U.S. diet has been dramatically increasing (e.g., the steady increase in the serving size of Coca Cola since 1915).
Re: Is Sugar Really Toxic?
#20Net caloric balance is still the best long term predictor of average body mass, regardless of dietary macronutrient composition.
http://examine.com/faq/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-loss.htm...
In turn, obesity is a strong predictor of many diseases, regardless of other factors.
In individual cases unobservable "noise" can affect the rate of gain or loss vs the estimated rate given by subtracting an estimate (calories gleaned from an activities database) from another estimate (calories written on the side of the food packet).
But when you look at population BMI vs population calorie intake, it looks suspiciously like a perfect correlation:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/calories-st...
Which is what we would expect from a basic acceptance of freshman physics. Energy and matter are conserved. No exceptions.
Singling out fructose as some kind of super-baddy doesn't work, for the simple reason that the population BMI-calories correlation appears in countries outside the USA. Only the USA has corn politics and only the USA has HFCS in the food supply in any abundance. Yet the rest of the developed world is getting fat on the same trajectory as the USA has.