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The Sugar Conspiracy

theguardian.com

141–150 of 362 posts

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#141
post #62

It is sad to see how we are going from fat phobia to carb phobia, repeating the same mistakes 50 years later. I have genetic metabolic disease and I have thought about this many times. My conclusion is simple enough: Eat real food, ignore the macros, listen to your body and adapt your food intake accordingly. Paul Jaminet's diet [1] is the closest I have found to fit this idea. [1] http://perfecthealthdiet.com/

> Eat real food, ignore the macros, listen to your body and adapt your food intake accordingly

The middle two pieces of advice seem somewhat contradictory. I usually get a pretty strong sense for which macro I'm primarily hungry for. "listening to my body" is intimately tied to picking the macros that make up my meal[1]. Or did you mean something more like "avoid planning macros contrary to your appetite signals"?

[1] obviously I don't have meals that consist entirely of protein powder or fruit juice, but it just gives me a sense of what type of food to emphasize in meal to avoid the irritating " full but still hungry" feeling.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#142
post #94

Jack Lalanne (American fitness guru) stated "If man made it, don't eat it". I recall reading that and scratching my head at the sheer number of food products that encompassed. I thought it a rather presumptuous statement. Five years later and after many books and articles on nutrition I now fully agree with him. When I hit the grocery store I skip the middle aisles and head straight for the fish and meat counter or t…

"When I hit the grocery store I skip the middle aisles and head straight for the fish and meat counter" Those pretty packages of meat are just as much "man made" as the foods you demonize. If you want to eat meat, I suggest hunting and only using your teeth and hands (claws?) to kill your prey and to eat the meat raw; gotta eat all of it too, no picking and choosing what parts you want either. "If you want to eat tha…

There's a world of difference between a 'package' of meat and a corn dog. I love eating meat, I see no need to 'hunt' for the thing. In the same way I love apples, I'm not going to grow an Apple tree in my yard and only eat apples from that.

To be honest there's a big problem with seeing exercise as a 'punishment'. I enjoy exercising just as much as I enjoy a cold glass of beer (before or after) and to be frank my advice suggest the two are complementary.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#143

I still dont agree that sugar is the problem. Lustig himself seems to have not figured out what the secret is to health and weightloss as he is obese to morbidly obese. Saturated fats still do cause heart disease, strokes, alzheimers.. anything where blood is blocked or doesnt reach the organ it needs to. If anything, processed sugars like HFCS which is extracted from corn by a chemical enzyme process, could be the c…

>But the problem to me is when people think chocolate bar, cake, pizza or milk shake.. these are food items with 75% calories from fat. Those are all junk food. Use sparingly. Try eating a piece of fruit instead. I mean, FFS, I really like chocolate, but of course it's unhealthy . Salads and fish are healthy. Everyone knows that.

Modern fruit is junk food. It has a much larger sugar content than wild varieties of the same plant, and was purposely cultured that way because people like large sweet fruits.

Eat sparingly.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#144
It will take a solid 5 years minimum for the 'main stream dietitians' to start believing this and promoting it. My mom with all the information I have shared, still refuses to give up milk and thinks I may be reading too much into a 'FAD DIET' to say things like milk can be bad for health. Either she is too entrenched/doesn't care or I am not providing enough evidence or need to provide an alternative way of making her switch.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#145
post #50

Here is a more balanced and more scientific article about sugars and health: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-real...

Definitely. Lustig made numerous claims in his Bitter Truth talk that were just incorrect.

Here are articles that are unbalanced but on the other end of spectrum (pro sugar).

http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...

http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...

It's interesting that in the USA the calorie consumption rose from 80s to 00s from 3100 to 3600.

In the UK and Australia they eat less fructose but more calories.

Everyone keeps on getting fatter.

There's not a single food to blame. Any food can't be healthy or unhealthy. Diets can be healthy or unhealthy. Thinking otherwise is a sign of unhealthy relationship with food. Avoiding stuff because it is carcinogenic (processed meat) or correlates with cancer (red meat) is ridiculous.

Eating large amounts every day (which is what most of the obese do) isn't?

I don't care if apples have cyanide or 60g of fructose will give me liver disease. I won't eat 50 bananas a day, I won't eat 100 apples a day, I'll eat agave syrup all over my pancakes and won't feel a thing. It's food. I enjoy it. Having fructose in it, or animal products just means I can easily overdose if I consume it every day but I won't.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If man made it, don't eat it That's way too simple. It's a kind of naturalistic fallacy as applied to food. If you think your produce area is where you should be getting your calories (not disagreeing), it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., ar…

It's simple because it's a heuristic. I'm pretty comfortable with my nutrition, but when friends ask me to summarize it it's very difficult for me because I've spent an unholy amount of time researching it. Things like Pollan's famous quote or "avoid man-made things" are targeted at the 99% of people who aren't as obsessive about it as I was at one pt, but still very much want to eat healthy. It has its false positiv…

I replied to a sibling with what I meant to reply to yours. See there.

One quick thing I would add is, "NO" nature would not keep making them. It is only our direct action that props up these artificially selected species (q.v., hybrids that require us to actively produce them, or your favorite variety of apple which is a clone of some great-grandparent tree or the fact that these crops would not compete well with other plants because we've selected them for their food production, not overall hardiness. They'd be out competed. They put too much of their energy into producing stuff that doesn't optimally help produce a new generation, and thus require our tending).

Your statement is a bit like saying "if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making sheep." Probably not (at least medium term). Sheep generally require our protection to avoid being killed. It probably wouldn't take long for a predator species to take hold in a given area and kill them all.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#147
post #62

It is sad to see how we are going from fat phobia to carb phobia, repeating the same mistakes 50 years later. I have genetic metabolic disease and I have thought about this many times. My conclusion is simple enough: Eat real food, ignore the macros, listen to your body and adapt your food intake accordingly. Paul Jaminet's diet [1] is the closest I have found to fit this idea. [1] http://perfecthealthdiet.com/

Sound cautionary advice. I also have to work/plan around some weird diseases.

The audience for "pop nutritionists" is the normal, healthy human. Whatever that is. I'd LOVE for their to be a model, baseline, reference healthy human. To study and emulate. Then I could compare and contrast myself to that model, adjust accordingly.

On the flip side, note that some of the nutrition plans are meant for certain conditions. Like the Univ of Wash doctor who "cured" his diabetes patients with all meat diets.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural." You're ov…

I'm not overthinking it. I gave that as an example of people not thinking about food. The heuristic, even applied as you would prefer, is a poor one. I don't buy into the philosophy at all. Quick example, my mother-in-law (who is into all kinds of weird "food woo" (she's a drink-raw-milk-only, avoid-adrenal-stressing-foods, etc. kind of person) once handed me a some sort of baked good--a bread perhaps--and mentioned,…

I think some folk here are misinterpreting my original post (perhaps I wasn't clear enough). Neither I, nor I imagine Jack Lalanne were advocating we return to hunter gatherer foraging.

Whilst Jack Lalanne's quote 'if man made it don't eat it' is simplistic it's basically saying go for the steak or the bag of salad leaves rather than the corn dog and powdered mash potato.

This isn't about 'weird' foods like raw milk, or taking things to the nth-degree. It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it. As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.

Does that mean I'm not gonna pepper my cod fillet, of course not. But I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lite salt is better, it has sodium and potassium.

Nusalt (potassium chloride) tastes like something that will kill you. But I drank it everyday and about 3 grams of salt.

I put it in some chicken broth, it's a lot more tolerable that way.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#150

When I was taking nutritional chemistry in the late 70's the idea that serum cholesterol had little to do with consumed cholesterol was something our professor repeated over and over again. The next 40 years I heard the opposite over and over again. Now people are finally accepting this fact.

I think the you are what you eat maxim is somewhat responsible for the strange dietary beliefs held by many.
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