Sixto Rodriguez singing "Sugar Man" in Background of this site.
John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
181–190 of 248 posts
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#182On a recent BBC Horizon, two identical twins went for a month on two separate diets. One of the twins ate a high carb low fat diet, the other did the reverse.
By the end of the experiment the one with the worse metabolical and biological outcomes was the twin on the high fat low carb diet. In fact the doctors told him to stop as he was becoming pre-diabetic.
link to bbc programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#183Calories in v calories out is absolute in terms of weight loss/gain, but that's just a quantitative measure, not a qualitative one. For instance, the famed "Twinkies at a Caloric Deficit" diet will cause you to lose weight, but not in any sort of good way, and will do all sorts of terrible things to your health, not the least of which is deprivation of important micro and macro nutrients.
Sugar isn't inherently "bad", but the way most people consume it is. High sugar foods, in essence, have very poor bang for your caloric buck.
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#184The underlying premise that there's something strange about the correlation between the rise of sugar and the rise of health issues is stark. Obviously, we can't say that correlation = causation. But such data points should be taken seriously for more investigation, much like for example, global warming (which is a debate that I still don't completely understand either). This is the key quote for me: Yudkin's detract…
Gonna have to call you up on the cell phones I'm afraid. It has been pretty conclusively proven that there is no link between cell phone radiation and cancer [1]. Unless you call a study of 420,000 people over 20 years insignificant...
And as for a mechanical explanation why cell phone radiation doesn't cause cancer: It's because the radiation type used is non-ionising! As for thermal effects, it's orders of magnitude less than standing in direct sunlight. It's basic physics. (Well perhaps not the ionising radiation part, Einstein got a Nobel for the photoelectric effect...)
This myth has been debunked as pure fear-mongering time and time again. The only slight recommendations that are issued are for longer term studies - simply because cell phones haven't really been in heavy usage for more than 20 years. Pure fear of the unknown, despite study after study showing no effect.
[1] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/23/1707.abstract
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#185On a recent BBC Horizon, two identical twins went for a month on two separate diets. One of the twins ate a high carb low fat diet, the other did the reverse. By the end of the experiment the one with the worse metabolical and biological outcomes was the twin on the high fat low carb diet. In fact the doctors told him to stop as he was becoming pre-diabetic. link to bbc programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t…
Sounds like it was bad, for those two. Hard to draw any further conclusions from that.
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#186Sometimes it seams that people are interested in these technical and highly specific debates on how to eat right to avoid responsibility. They want to "know" that eating right is so difficult and badly understood that it can't be done without a special diet. When they then select a diet and it works, they attribute it to the diet and not the utmost care that they followed the diet with.
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh c'mon, lighten up. Sure, kids shouldn't be eating frosted flakes and garbage like that on a regular basis, but you're not going to give your kid a birthday cake? No occasional ice cream cones? Must be fun to be your kid. Everything in moderation.
Birthday cakes, Halloween candy, Christmas candy....this is a tremendous amount of sugar, and is kind of shocking to one who grew up without it. The ubiquity of sugar today discourages moderation by normalizing consumption. It would be like having ash trays in every public space and cigarette ads on tv, with "enjoy responsibly" as the tag line.
> Birthday cakes, Halloween candy, Christmas candy....this is a tremendous amount of sugar, and is kind of shocking to one who grew up without it.
Each of those events happens 1 time per year. Having the occasional slice of cake or some candy is not the problem in terms of a diet.
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#188Mentioned in the article, here is the direct link to Professor Lustig's talk "Sugar: The Bitter Truth". I can personally attest to its high quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
You might be interested in Alan Aragons take on it too: http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
This is a brilliant article and everyone should really listen to people like Alan Aragon (and Lyle Mcdonald too fwiw). They know and communicate the science very well and aren't about to resort to the sensationalist rhetoric that's so prevalent in nutrition. Thanks for posting!
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Concur. I didn't restrict my calorie intake, and lost 40lbs eating 65% fat, 30% protein and 5% carb. As soon as I add in sugar or other carbohydrates in any capacity, I gain weight and eat much more. On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry.
OTOH I lost 20Kg eating lots of fruit (evil addictive fructose in there) and no meat. Any one-sided diet can work if your awareness rises. More wholesome diets might even work better in the long run.
How many of those 20 kilos was lost muscle mass? Protein intake is crucial for muscle maintenance. Body cannot synthesize it from either fat or carbs.
Re: John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Concur. I didn't restrict my calorie intake, and lost 40lbs eating 65% fat, 30% protein and 5% carb. As soon as I add in sugar or other carbohydrates in any capacity, I gain weight and eat much more. On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry.
> I didn't restrict my calorie intake >On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry. You probably did lower your caloric intake. The trick is that you did it in a way that it did not bother you. In other words, you ate a healthy diet.
But this is giving away the farm; if the way to eat healthy is a high-fat diet that cuts out the empty carbs (and especially sugar), and then you just naturally eat a healthy amount of food after that without any sort of bizarre calorie counting, that's not proof that "it's all just calories", it proves the exact opposite, that the calorie type matters a lot and conventional nutritional wisdom up to this point on what constitutes a healthy diet is dead wrong.
Which it is. But I find it bizarre that people will fall back to this defense, or, at least, I find it bizarre how many people still think this is some sort of defense, when it is in fact the exact, total, polar opposite of the position they think they are defending.