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The Sugar Conspiracy

theguardian.com

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Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#291

Post by dsyph3r »

ceejayoz wrote: post #166
slacka wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Snarky "lead paint?" aside, this only really works if you're also as active as great-grandma was. Chances are she got a lot more exercise than we modern folk do.

If you read the article you would have seen this

"There has been no commensurate decline in physical activity, in either country – in the UK, exercise levels have increased over the last 20 years."

Sure, exercise is important, but a potential lack of it is not the problem. The most significant way you can interact with you body is through the food/drink you put in your mouth.

Food has changed so much over the past few decades that most people no longer eat food but instead consume food like products.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#292

Post by chillacy »

xiaoma wrote: post #258
jzwinck wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If wine is just grapes, it must be vegan-compatible, right? But it isn't! Not only is wine sometimes made with products like nuts and milk, it can even be made using fish guts! https://www.organicwine.com.au/what-makes-a-wine-vegan A French wine maker told me this. I had no idea...these "extras" are not on the label.

Wow! Do you know of any specific labels made using fish guts? This sounds interesting.

It's not fish guts, but one of the fining agents used is made from chitin from shrimp: https://winemakermag.com/26-a-clearer-understanding-of-finin...

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#293

Post by sirtastic »

SpaceCadetJones wrote: post #277
sirtastic wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't always work. Many people, myself included can fail to lose weight on a restricted calorie diet. I spent 12 months eating below 1200 while working out religiously (4-6 days a week with 30sh mins of cardio followed by 45sh mins of weight lifting). In the beginning I lost weight and fast. At 5'9 I went from 240 down to 148 lbs in 7 months. At 148 I still had excess fat on my body and no matter how hard I wo…

Are you sure it wasn't a mental issue? How were you measuring fat? 5'9 and 148lb isn't close to being overweight. I'm just under 140lb at 5'9 and I'm quite thin. It looks like I have some around my stomach due to poor posture, but that's it.

Definitely not. If you are curious I have pictures. (at home, would need to wait till I'm off work)

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#294

Post by sirtastic »

eigenvalue wrote: post #245
sirtastic wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't always work. Many people, myself included can fail to lose weight on a restricted calorie diet. I spent 12 months eating below 1200 while working out religiously (4-6 days a week with 30sh mins of cardio followed by 45sh mins of weight lifting). In the beginning I lost weight and fast. At 5'9 I went from 240 down to 148 lbs in 7 months. At 148 I still had excess fat on my body and no matter how hard I wo…

You might be a good candidate for some newer devices for non-invasive fat removal. Take a look at CoolSculpting, which freezes fat cells (leading to apoptosis), or Vanquish, which uses deep RF stimulation to heat fat cells and kill them. CoolSculpting has been around for about 5 years and has already been used for over 3 million treatments and seems to be pretty safe and effective. Vanquish and SculpSure (uses lasers…

Looking into these though I'm always wary of things like these. Any personal experience?

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#295

Post by tomaskazemekas »

cableshaft wrote: post #222
buserror wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I've been doing it for years! As soon as I notice the waistline expanding, or I feel like a bit of 'detox', I try to schedule myself on a week where the fridge isn't too full of nice and/or perishable things, and I have a good mean on sunday night. Then it's occasional fruit juice in the morning (bit of an energy boost) and coffee only until the friday. It's a lot easier than it sounds, the 'key' thing is preparat…

This isn't for everyone. I had a period when I got really into fasting (I loved the challenge), often doing 24 hour and 48 hour fasts. However, one time I tried to go for three days, and on the third day I got suddenly extremely lightheaded while hanging out with friends, and it was a scary enough that they insisted I end the fast right there (I agreed). My enthusiasm for fasting was tempered quite a bit after that.…

Fasting in the 5:2 method does not mean not eating all day. It means reducing the amount of calories to 1/4 of typical daily value. Usually it comes to having light breakfast, 180-220 kcal, skipping lunch and finishing the day with 250-350 kcal dinner.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#296

Post by brashrat »

leonroy wrote: 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…

You believe that humans evolved to eat certain foods, but you ignore that we also evolved to be lazy and avoid unnecessary exercise. Maybe we evolved to eat everything we could get our hands on and to live to 40 years old in order to propogate. What about the fact that we evolved to carry and support tons of parasites? (look up the guy who walked barefoot around latrines in the 3rd world to pick up worms which he carries and is willing to sell you... he'd not a crackpot, either) What about the fact that we did not evolve to be immune to smallpox (and all the others), maybe we are supposed to get it.

I'm not taking sides here, I'm saying that you are being selective about what you choose to believe in a way that is not entirely supported by science. Yes you can selectively come up with science to support your beliefs, but what this article is about is how for many many years in modern times we all arrogantly believed the wrong science.

Your comment strikes me that you are not reading the news story about sugar as a cautionary tale against believing things that could quite well not be true.

I myself doubt that there is a magic diet that makes us live a long time, because living a long time is not something we evolved for; rather, we evolved to eat anything we could get our hands on because living thru times of shortage was more important than maybe having an allergy that made us gassier. 2nd order effects have a lot of trouble overcoming firsts.

And if you enjoy exercise, great! but if you don't enjoy it, remember that the hour you spend running will not lead to you living an hour longer, so you just shortened your overall enjoyable life, while you also increased your carbon footprint which is a socially selfish thing to do. See what I mean? these things just cannot be reduced to formulas for how we should live.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#297

Post by chillacy »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #97
tkyjonathan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the food industry has been pumping money into research while governments have withdrawn most of it. The whole "butter is good" article in the times was funded by the US dairy industry. Gov funded research still does not agree with it.

I will take butter every time over margarine and other spreads. Simply on the grounds of how they are made. One is a food, the others entirely chemical processes. Nearly all the butter is bad is funded by the spread industry.

Margarine's production is more complex but it doesn't seem too wild: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Butter-and-Margarine.html

Either way the milk is coming from a cow pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#298

Post by munificent »

leonroy wrote: post #148
torgoguys wrote: post #137

Earlier 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,…

> the steak

A carefully carved out subset of an animal that lived on a carefully maintained agricultural plot, fed a precisely calibrated diet, and slaughtered at a precisely chosen time. An animal of a special humans have been breeding and molding for thousands of years.

> bag of salad leaves

Again, species we have been cultivating and changing for so long that we would no longer recognize its original wild form. Lettuce is related to daisies.

> It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it.

That common sense makes no sense, why would we spend effort making things worse for ourselves?

We tinker with things because it improves them. Sure, sometimes we don't discover the long term implications for a while (like with sugar), but in general, we cultivate and process because it makes things better.

Cassava that isn't processed is poisonous, as are many beans. Eating most fish that isn't deep frozen or thoroughly cooked is a good way to get worms. The same would be true for beef and pork too, except that we humans have so carefully managed (tinkered with?) our livestock that we've eliminated most of their parasites.

Given a choice between a package of heavily processed bacon from the grocery store, or a fresh chunk of wild boar meat that you hunted and killed yourself, which is better for you? Well, the latter is a hell of a lot more likely to give you trichinosis.

> As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.

So, like:

Corn: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/images/relevance/Z_...

Watermelon: https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CRPlJWtfmDnCTNMv02Cx1DSiaws...

> I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!

That's not because the fish fingers are unnatural, it's because they're made of shitty, cheap ingredients.

Given the choice between, say, a nice cheese (a very heavily processed food involving a number of chemicals and months of human attention) versus finding a wild bee's nest and drinking all the honey, the former would be healthier for you, even assuming you don't get stung.

If you want to eat things that are good for you, "natural", "unprocessed" or "free from human tinkering" are simply not useful signals. They're not even that well-defined.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#299

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pixl97 wrote: post #143
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Look, I'm pretty sure that if I want something sweet, fruit is better than cake. I'm also pretty sure that if I want to never, ever "sin" regarding diet, I will probably die, because some jerk is going to find something wrong with boiled greens and then I won't even be able to eat those anymore.

Balance.

Re: The Sugar Conspiracy

#300

Post by acchow »

joesmo wrote: post #195

My take on this article is that nutrition science is not science, no one knows what the fuck they're talking about, and we're basically still in the 1920's with absolutely no real nutritional information or system (usually science in our society) to get there. Having lost someone very dear to me to "cholesterol" and knowing it was a lie at the time, let alone now, this makes me fuming angry. But I live in the US, whe…

I wonder if we will someday discover that everybody's bodies are dramatically unique and require their own diet to maintain health - i.e. some people can't handle much sugar, some people can't handle much cholesterol, some saturated fat, etc.
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