Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain • Hacker News Board

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#41

Post by maxharris » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:25 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #37

maxharris wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been eating mostly raw food for about a year, and I love it. My diet so far has consisted of blue-rare steak (all you need to do to be safe is to sear the edges and sides to kill E. coli that has gotten onto the meat during butchering. I learned this in my microbiology class!) [You have to watch out about things like steak sauce - read the labels, and you'll find out that almost all of them have sugar in them. S…

Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.

How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)?

I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats).

But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste.

The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#42

Post by elblanco » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:28 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #33

elblanco wrote: post #18

I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy. About a year ago I figured it out a…

It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked. I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously s…

I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat.

I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule.

So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad.

The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi.

However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#43

Post by illumin8 » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:31 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #41

illumin8 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.

How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)? I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats). But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the…

You're fine then. I assumed you might eat other raw meats. I still enjoy a nice medium rare steak from time to time, although I don't like mine quite as rare as yours.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#44

Post by maxharris » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:33 PM UTC

timcederman wrote: post #36

msluyter wrote: post #34

Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.

Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).

Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts.

However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#45

Post by gte910h » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:33 PM UTC

nas wrote: post #31

yanowitz wrote: post #10

This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon. If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.

That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy for the body to break. Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?

Table sugar is sucrose.

First off to turn sucrose into its component molecules, it must first undergo a reaction with a sucrase enzyme. So there is at least one metabolic step left out there. Studies are being done to test if Sucrase is actively regulated by the body or not. In either case, this metabolic step must occur, and can only occur so fast (limited by the amount of sucrase in your body), no matter how much sucrose you ingest. This means slower absorption of sucrose over HFCS as you get this with the whole load of glucose in HFCS instantly, but only see the sucrose's glucose released over time.

Secondly, fructose has many forms. In sucrose, the fructose is often of the fructose-5 variety. In HFCS, it completely depends on the application, as any heat applied to a fructose-5 molecule upon separation from the glucose turns it into fructose-6.

Fructose-6 is notably less sweet than Sucrose This means when used in heat processed goods, you use quite a bit more HFCS (including all baked goods, etc) then the equivalent amount of sucrose. This means more calories.

Secondly, there are all different kids of HFCS. Notably, there is one with 38% less fructose than sucrose (HFCS 42), one with 22% more fructose than sucrose (HFCS 55) and one with 800% more fructose than table sugar (HFCS 90, often seen in diet foods I might add). They are all used for differing applications, but HFCS is not a single product, and most of the forms are likely metabolically worse in any amount of a single dose than the equivalent sweetness worth of sucrose. It is important you calculate your fractions correctly when realizing the differing amounts of fructose, as they're larger then they appear at first.

One could say a steak and the meal in your small intestines are "about the same thing" but I doubt you'd want to eat it then, and you'd be as accurate as saying table sugar is basically HFCS 55

(all percentages are in terms of "per molecule of glucose", which is what appears to be important as per the evolving science of satiation)

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#46

Post by elblanco » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:36 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #35

e1ven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon,…

What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch…

I did a similar diet for a couple of years once. Lost lots of weight, about 40 pounds, had absolutely bottomless pools of energy I could never seem to exhaust no matter how much I exercised, recovered from sporting injuries alarmingly fast, almost never bruised at all, and grew hair and nails at ridiculous rates, like having to cut my nails 2 or 3 times a week on occasion and my cholesterol was absolutely fine.

I ended up quitting because:

1) It gets expensive.

2) It got boring, all the stuff I wanted to eat was not on the diet. I think much of the weight loss was from not wanting to eat another bunless burger.

3) I actually felt gross all the time, like oils were just oozing from my pores.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#47

Post by gte910h » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:36 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #24

icey wrote: post #3

Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.

A related problem is the tariff on sugar, which artificially keeps the price of sugar high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Sugar_Program So you have a subsidy on corn, a tariff on sugar, and the double imbalance causes companies to use HFCS. If we got rid of the tariff on sugar we could import sugar from brazil, and make ethanol out of it. (Which actually works, unlike ethanol from corn.) It's politically impracti…

I'm surprised we can't grow sugar beets there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#48

Post by houseabsolute » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:39 PM UTC

tghw wrote: post #21

Take a look at http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/ It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.

Reddit had a really great comment from someone who had actually read the study that seemed to point at some serious flaws.

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#49

Post by infinite8s » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:41 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #19

maxharris wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix? There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to us…

The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more. I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the f…

subsidies != research funding

Re: Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

#50

Post by maxharris » Thu, Mar 25, 2010, 9:42 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #35

e1ven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon,…

What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch…

The key step in cholesterol synthesis is the formation of mevalonate from beta-hydroxy-beta-methylglutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA), which is catalyzed by HMG-CoA reductase.

You can be certain that that HMG-CoA reductase is really, really important in cholesterol biosynthesis because statins work by blocking this enzyme.

HMG-CoA reductase activity is induced by insulin, and reduced by glucagon.

To really control cholesterol, it's more important to cut carbs, not dietary sources of cholesterol (which fall anyway when appetite control is restored as leptin receptors in the hypothalamus regain function.)