Earlier quoted context omitted.
People basically evolved without any sugar (fructose) except what they could get in fruit (which was limited and contained fiber). With the sugar islands it became available to people though expensive and volatile in price. With high fructose corn syrup etc. it became a consistent priced commodity with little to no volatility.
Agree but for clarity "people" = "people far from the equator". If your ancestors are from those sugar islands it's a bit different.
Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
171–180 of 185 posts
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you are skeptical about but you seem to have very poor understanding of history. Starch and sugars are a staple of the primate diet to the point where it is and was our main source of calories for ever. Grain has been domesticated for over 12,000 years ago, wild grain has been as early as around 30,000 BCE. Grain isn't the only source of starch, in fact for most of our history including our recent o…
Sorry, I misspoke. I have no doubt that any readily available calorie source, regardless of type, would have been important to pre-agricultural humans. What I should have said is this: The low-carb diets are about staying away from highly refined carbs. They're fine with eating most fruit and vegetables (though they may recommend abstaining from all carbs for an introductory period or for people who are extremely ove…
"Fruit/Sugar" and carbs in general weren't seasonal, there are different sources of carbs through the entire year it's not like you just ate wild apples.
Starchy tubers, starchy nuts / seeds (the ones that you have to crush rinse to draw off nasty stuff and then cook), wild grain, berries, fruits etc. are for the most part available all year round in one form or another. Not all fruits ripen during the same period this is why we have seasonal fruits from early spring to late summer and autumn, infact the only period when food was "scarce" is dec-feb and then hunting was out of the question also what did not hibernate migrated, what didn't do either you wouldn't want to mess with.
Additionally we became quite good at preserving food, fermentation, and sun drying fruits and other sources of carbs was commonly practiced both to preserve them as well as to break complex carbs into more simple one for high caloric value, fire cooking also changed the game because it gave us near immediate access to "refined carbs" through the process of cooking there is a reason why a cooked potato tastes sweet while a raw potato doesn't. The ability to efficiently process starch and the ability to cook it actually precedes the large explosion in tool making especially for hunting purposes, so rich caloric carbohydrates actually what gave early humans the caloric allowance to be able to hunt.
In fact I would go out on a limb and predict that you are "white" if so you owe your whiteness to the balance of vitamin d and folic acid and specifically the added folate from the daily consumption of grains, this is why your ancestors from the baltic area could keep their skin white (infact they had too) while other populations in the same parallel like inuits, eskimos and chukchi are fairly dark skinned (they need to protect the little folate they gain from their diet with darker skin while they gain more vitamin d from animal sources).
Overall we have a pretty good idea of how our ancestors ate (and this picture becomes clearer every day) not directly but through prehistoric dumps and more importantly the tools, we can know the ratio of tools that were made to process flora vs tools made to process and gather meat. Throughout history there is no evidence whatsoever that meat made a large portion of the human diet, even during paleolithic times, meat isn't easy to gather, it's time consuming, it's dangerous and overall the energy expenditure associated with it is quite high.
The "paleo" diet in general is for the most part a bunch of horse shit, sorry folks read what evolutionary biologists actually think about it (and him, read Hillard Kaplan, Marlene Zuk, Jennie Miller and many others) , it's pretty much a commercialization of a fantasy by one man - loren cordain, which while it has some benefits it's really not a unilateral case.
Now don't get me wrong "low carb" diets can be "beneficial" on "rare" case by case basis' however the wide adoption of them isn't back to basic/nature/old way in any way shape or form, and oddly enough this is one of the most immoral diets out there.
Low carb diets are unsustainable and the vast majority of the population cannot afford them and it's good that they can't. Meat, fish, dairy and animal based fats come at a huge expense of the environment, the beef industry alone is responsible for a huge part of our energy consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p.... Fishing isn't good either, we overfish the oceans, inland fish farms are an environmental disaster and "open ocean" fish farms aren't much better. While I am not a vegetarian nor do i wish to be the world would be a much better place if we all were, and one of the best thing you can do for the environment is to do 1 day without meat or any animal products ironically this would have more impact than recycling and other "feel good" activities people tend to do.
And don't get me wrong, no one says that you should eat twinkies and drink soda all day, but using pretty silly terms like "super refined sugars" and other nonsense that sounds scary and somewhat scientific is just absurd, there is very little reason for people to drop their daily carb consumption below 40-50%, but you don't need keep it at 80% either. But somehow people have been brainwashed that one of the comments in this thread to myself equated rice to eating dry leaves, rice is one of the most nutritious foods out there, with decent carbs, fiber, some protein, and more importantly nutrients like iron, magnesium, niacin, B1, B6 etc.
And I wouldn't bang the obesity drum too hard, it's a really big unknown atm there seem to be generational changes and even with the same caloric intake some people become obese while the previous generations haven't and no this has nothing to do with "refined sugars" or "industrial food", while that food isn't especially healthy it doesn't explain the shifts in metabolic factors, the over representation of the insulin receptor genes and other epigenetic differences.
Overall reducing your caloric intake is the main thing you should be concerned about, some of the "healthiest" (based on life expectancy in various regions) diets in the world are a far cry from being low carb without showing signs of obesity.
So eat what you want, but take everything with a grain of salt, but more importantly don't base your arguments on "we need to eat less carbs because cavemen" or "we are obese because of gluten and starch" your grandparents, and great grandparents, and likely even parents ate much more carbs than you and they weren't obese.
Overall the human caloric intake has remained "flat" this includes even modern hunter gatherers (one of the more surprising discoveries of modern nutrition science) that although are considerably more active than their western / industrialized world counterparts consume the same amount and even less calories each day (this was adjusted for body mass and condition), our brains consume quite a bit of energy ;) (sometimes actually wonder if we aren't getting fatter because we are getting dumber).
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you are skeptical about but you seem to have very poor understanding of history. Starch and sugars are a staple of the primate diet to the point where it is and was our main source of calories for ever. Grain has been domesticated for over 12,000 years ago, wild grain has been as early as around 30,000 BCE. Grain isn't the only source of starch, in fact for most of our history including our recent o…
Sorry, I misspoke. I have no doubt that any readily available calorie source, regardless of type, would have been important to pre-agricultural humans. What I should have said is this: The low-carb diets are about staying away from highly refined carbs. They're fine with eating most fruit and vegetables (though they may recommend abstaining from all carbs for an introductory period or for people who are extremely ove…
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that logic, everyone peddling any kind of diet, including paleo or keto or whatever diet is the fad of the day, is insincere. The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.
Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems. Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now…
There is also the fact that people in different stages of their health react to the same diet in different ways.
So, the diet that might be healthy at one point in your life, is what will sicken you at another.
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that logic, everyone peddling any kind of diet, including paleo or keto or whatever diet is the fad of the day, is insincere. The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.
Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems. Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now…
There is also the fact that people in different stages of their health react to the same diet in different ways.
So, the diet that might be healthy at one point in your life, is what will sicken you at another.
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The opposite, actually. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc... Beware of small sample sizes in these sorts of studies. Until you get up into the hundreds or thousands, I personally would expect regression to the mean. Just FYI.
No. that study used sucralose ("Splenda" et al) -- a completely unrelated, artificial sweetener. Stevia is a naturally occurring plant extract which has steviol glycosides, having 150x the sweetness of sucrose (according to Wikipedia).
Now I'm a little curious what happens to blood insulin when athletes fire down a stevia-flavored source of short chain carbohydrates prior to exercise vs. unflavored. When I have time I'll look it up. The nice thing about this (stevia vs. sugar or vs. artificial sweeteners) is that it lends itself naturally to a two factor design, "natural" vs. not and "real sugar" vs. not, orthogonally.
Anyways, yes, I was wrong about that and will probably fuck it up again in the future, although at least now I'm aware of the problem.
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#177I decided to start lifting heavy shit... everyday. When I say heavy shit, I mean getting close to the max I can lift in one lift, each day I dedicate to that lift. I've tired no-carb days, lifting on fasts, lifting on protein heavy mornings, etc... and it comes down to carbs being mental energy for me wanting to lift heavy. If I don't have carbs, I feel less energetic, and less willing to continue my lifting regimen…
I think the religion of food would be much better understood if food was approached as workloads. CPU bound, memory bound, IO bound, etc. But in general, carbs for physical activity and fats for mental activity.
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your central thesis -- molecules that taste like sugar have the same shape -- is unalloyed horseshit. Pull up the structures for glucose and aspartame. Are you seriously claiming they are similar? Incidentally, I'm probably old enough to be your father, unless you're in a nursing home.
My final thought before I leave you is that you are likely emotionally vested in this issue and so your limbic system is blinding your neo-cortex. Perhaps you or someone you care for deeply uses artificial sweeteners. Maybe you are pedantic and are passionate about proving things to 100% (is that even possible?). I am not sure. But for a rational mind, you are very emotional as well. Maybe you see yourself as a free…
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
My final thought before I leave you is that you are likely emotionally vested in this issue and so your limbic system is blinding your neo-cortex. Perhaps you or someone you care for deeply uses artificial sweeteners. Maybe you are pedantic and are passionate about proving things to 100% (is that even possible?). I am not sure. But for a rational mind, you are very emotional as well. Maybe you see yourself as a free…
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines after we've asked you to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, fruits are the core diet of primates, infact most primates wait for the fruits to start ferment which increases their caloric value while actually reduces the fiber count. Humans have evolved eating sugar just fine, fruits and fermentation were used before we learned to walk, and other sources of sugar including honey were also commonly consumed. You can easily look at the diets of "modern" hunter gatherers and s…
> Until the 1900's starch fed the world, it still does, some how what is succesfully feeding the 5.5-6bln poor people of the world is no longer good for you. What are you even talking about? We have a public health epidemic of obesity, especially among the "poor people of the world." They are literally the most affected group by low-cost availability of processed foods. This is undisputed and self-evident. Of course…
The only thing that harmfull in this thread is the viral groupthink, you are more than capable of doing your own research.
The Journal of Human Evolution is a good place to start, PMC also has some good sources on dietary and nutritional habits throughout human evolution.
Reading the works of evolutionary and molecular biologists like Hillard Kaplan, Marlene Zuk and Jennie Miller would also do you good.
But sure keep spreading your "scientific" fact, just ignore the studies and research and cherry pick your evidence like that initial NHS study that was disavowed by the NHS itself because it was utterly flawed as the data about the greatness of the low carb and paleo diets eventually came out of 6 people since everyone else dropped the study which also lacked a control group. Or the 2nd UK study that again had issues with high dropout rates and still somehow managed to get published even tho the dropout rate effectively attached a huge selection bias to the study.
But hey you and your gang are more than welcomed to downvote actual evidence even statements like the fact that our ancestors processed plants ;) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2973873/
Overall if you actually care about GI and carbs the research authored and coauthored by Jennie Miller is a great source of information, unlike people like Loren Cordain she's actually accredited to making the claims she makes, and it's ironic that one of the biggest proponents of the low GI diet is for the most part against low carb diets in general. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Brand-Miller%20J%5...