Sugar is not to be demonized, there is an overwhelming amount of research pointing to overconsumption as the culprit in ill health affects normally associated with sugar.
The Sugar Conspiracy
171–180 of 362 posts
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#172Only hacker news could bikeshed over the definition of man-made food.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#173Jack 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…
Judge each food on it's nutritional merits, not by some arbitrary naturalistic fallacy criteria.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#174Very interesting how people can all subscribe to an orthodoxy for so long, ignoring evidence to the contrary. Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Except in this case Lustig is not correct and sugar is not some evil food out to make everybody fat and diabetic.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#175Jack 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…
>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…
I'm just not so sure we're smarter than nature when it comes to what is best for our bodies.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I understand your sentiment. I'm pushing back against it being expressed in terms that promote a naturalistic fallacy. Why? Various reasons, but one is because the naturalistic fallacy is actively harmful, not just as it applies to food.
>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.
That's the thing. The first and last sentence of this quote run contrary to each other in the cited example. When we process raw milk by pasteurizing it, we are making it BETTER. We've tinkered with it, to use your word. "As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best" (emphasis added) is not necessarily true. (As an aside, there is nothing "weird" about raw milk other than your lack of exposure to it. I grew up in rural Wisconsin in the 1980s--as a kid, I've had plenty of raw milk. We all did living there. Heck, I used to milk cows and I once tried to see if I could squirt raw milk directly from the teat into my mouth at arms length--it doesn't get much fresher! As an adult, I avoid raw milk because I know better.)
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Related to battered fish, what's better (from a health standpoint): if you batter your own fish or you buy pre-battered fish? All else equal, most people would still say that as a matter of intuition will say that battering your own is better. If "feels" like the correct answer. But the real answer would be that it depends on what you battered it with and what the company battered it with. The reality is that many people who actively complain about "processed foods" are fine with the processing done as long as they are the ones doing it. Regardless of what the reality may be, a homemade noodle somehow feels healthier than a store bought one to those folks.
(And yes, I realize my battered fish question isn't what your fish example was talking about at all. I just ran with it in a different direction and am not trying to misrepresent what you said).
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#177It 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/
this is terrible advice. 'real food' is a term that means nothing.
you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#178Earlier 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…
>If man made it, don't eat it I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible. Simply eating more fat and less sugar/carbs, I have lost 10+ pounds and feel much better. These nutrition fads have done more harm than good. My mother switched from butter to Crisco when I was a kid, then she banned salt from the house, and bought (high suga…
Mmmm... Deep fat fried chicken with the skin on. Collards cooked low and slow with a ham hock. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Apple pie with a Crisco crust. Oh, wow. Now I'm starving.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#179[In response to a now-deleted comment] It is still a fringe theory in the context of "mainstream" nutritional science. It just happens to also be a theory that aligns surprisingly well with evidence. This paradox is what makes the story increasingly interesting to the community and media. Whether or not the fundamentals of this line of argument turn out to be ultimately correct, it shines a light on the way practical…
except it doesn't align with evidence, unless you cherry pick. people have been getting fatter as fructose consumption has declined, and the studies Lustig & Taubes use to demonize sugar/fructose are done in rats that were fed ungodly amounts of it.
the answer to why people are getting fatter isn't some evil sugar molecule; it's that people are overconsuming food.
Re: The Sugar Conspiracy
#180"Look at a graph of postwar obesity rates and it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it takes off like an aeroplane." Not that I disagree with the premise of this article, but the graphs I can find show that there is a steep increase in the late 70's, not after the Dietary Guidelines were written in the early 80's.
> but the graphs I can find show that there is a steep increase in the late 70's, not after the Dietary Guidelines were written in the early 80's. But still, the upward trend follows the cultural meme that "fat is bad" that started propagating in the early 1970s. The dietary guidelines only formalized that bit of "scientific wisdom". (naturally, correlation does not equal causation, but it does often indicate a pheno…
You are correct....
The McGovern committee (of the U.S. senate) published the first Dietary Goals For The United States in 1977. This was supposed to reverse the epidemic of heart disease.
McGovern rubber-stamped the prevailing views first made popular by Ancel Keys' Seven Countries Study, published in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study
So the steep increase in starting in the late 70s is right on time....