Sorry for the threadjacking, but any HNers doing caloric restriction? I'm at a normal weight, but a checkup a few months ago revealed a personal-worst blood pressure of 128/75, so I've been on CRON since then. Latest blood pressure is 110/65.
I'd love to hear about your experience, as I'm intrigued by the idea of trying caloric restriction but am somewhat stymied by the details.
Specifically, how did you transition to a restricted diet? How have you felt, both emotionally and physically, throughout the process? What is a typical day like in terms of intake? Where do you get recipes? Do you count calories?
I transitioned pretty much in one day. I'm not sure if I'm doing it perfectly, but it's gone quite well so far. I got some background on it from this article in the NYT:
and the details from a vigorous Googling. I'm 6 feet tall, 165 lbs, and probably moderately physically active, so I picked a daily target of 1800 calories. That was based on some online calculators I found and anecdotes from people doing caloric restriction.
You can eat anything. The trick is not using up your whole quota on empty calories. If I have a can of soda and a cup of Ben and Jerry's, that's 37% of the day's calories right there, with pretty much no nutritional value. So you can have junk food, but not so much that it's going to make it hard to get all the nutrients to need while staying under your whole quota.
Another guideline is that if you end every day hungry, you're doing it wrong. Cheese will fill up your quota without filling you up. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, are filling and nutritious without packing a lot of calories. I shoot for a roughly even three-way split between calories from fat, protein, and carbs. I don't really use "special" caloric restriction recipes; I just cook/prepare whatever I want, while staying within the rules. I eat out a few times a week too.
Typical breakfast is eggs, maybe with mushrooms or something thrown in, and a fruit. A lunch might be chicken or fish with salad, or maybe a sandwich (bread is calorically dense, though, so careful). Dinner is pretty much the same as lunch, except that it's almost never a sandwich, is probably a bit more food, and includes red meat more frequently. Lentils and beans are all-around excellent, by the way.
I do count calories, because it would be too easy to lose track or cheat otherwise. I use Daily Burn, which has a huge number of foods in their database, and if I eat something they don't have, I guesstimate using things they do have. Counting calories makes it a lot easier to stick with it, because the more aware you are of what you're eating, the less tempted you are to be naughty.
Thanks! This is helpful, and I think I'll give it a shot. I've pretty much already transitioned to eating mostly fruits/veggies/meats/whole grains, so I guess the main thing would be simply focus less on the grains and start counting calories.
Taubes' take on the caloric balance equation (thermodynamic law) is fascinating.
Change in energy stores = Energy intake – Energy expenditure
According to my biochemistry professor in college, this had one - and only one - interpretation: The change in energy stores is controlled by energy intake and energy expenditure. The right side of the equation controls the left side of the equation. Also, there was an implied "just eat less and exercise more" (that energy intake and expenditure are independent variables).
But Taubes suggests that the causation could be reversed, and that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables. In other words, a metabolic change could cause a change in energy stores, and energy intake and expenditure would change to match.
That (amazingly!) translates to: if you are losing weight you are likely to be less hungry and likely to have more energy. Or perhaps, if your metabolic state is such that you are losing weight, your hunger will adjust to match your activity level. Or even, if you're burning fat, you will only eat to make up for what you aren't getting from stored fuel.
It makes sense to think that if your energy stores are releasing fuel into the blood stream you would be less hungry (I'm assuming that hunger signals are a function of available fuel to some extent).
Naturally, we eat for nutrition as well as fuel, so I suppose it can't all be broken into thermodynamics, but it's an interesting way of thinking about it!
Energy intake - Energy expenditure - Change in energy stores = 0
There. Just f(x,y,z)=0. That's what the first law really says. There is no causality implied, it just a first integral of the "motion" of metabolism that the body, naturally, has to follow.
It does NOT say what variables are free to independently modify. It's just a relation the three of them have to obey.
I'm confused by the application of this law to food. My reason: excrement.
You put some mass that contains chemical energy into your body. Then that mass comes out of your body, minus SOME of the chemical energy. How much of it is extracted? What determines this? I have no idea. That said, I think it is funny to treat it as if the only way to get rid of energy is expenditure. How about:
Energy intake - Energy Ependiture - Energy still in food when it comes out the other end = Change in energy stores
Yes you can decompose it further but it doesn't matter. Just consider that "energy intake" is the energy actually absorbed by your body, not what you put in your mouth. (Try eating grass. It has energy, but we can't use it)
My point is that a lot of people misinterpret conservation of energy assigning it a direction of causality it doesn't have. It's a constraint between variables (not an assignation as in programming languages) which are under complex feedback control systems in the body, and that's why the kind of calories you eat (fats vs carbohydrates) DOES matter, you don't eat abstract pure energy but as you say mass with chemical energy that has to be metabolized.
That's why starvation diets (just counting theoretical calories, which are numbers obtained in laboratories, dismissing the type of macronutrient) often fails in the long term and leave serious damage. The book talks long about this.
Previously, I never believed the notion that calories in/calories out was wrong - it always seemed too much like "feel good science" to me. Y'know, where a diet says it's not your fault that you're overweight, it's just because of the darn environment around you, so feel good about yourself, etc, etc.
I think I was mistaken.
There was a thread on here with a video that was just incredibly insightful and it was a big part of what convinced me. I'm starting to rethink my own nutrition and diet.
It's obviously right by conservation of energy, but it's equivocating the word "in". Food is "in" when you eat it, but calories are "in" when they're digested and metabolized - that's several steps further down the pipeline.
That's part of the issue. Eating slower has been suggested to help losing weight for that reason - it gives your satiety response time to kick in.
The issue with calories in minus calories out is not equivocating the word "in", though. It is that it doesn't provide a useful model of how weight gain works. "Calories in" and "Calories out" are not independent variables, they are managed by the body's various feedback systems. Changing one of them will almost always change the other. Going for a run will make you hungrier, and undereating will lower your energy level and probably make you hungrier as well.
Based on a lecture of his I've seen, I'm convinced that his major hypothesis is God's own truth - that "calories in - calories out" is not a useful model for controlling weight, and that the regulatory systems of the body are what you have to get at to have a real effect on body weight. I am sold on the idea that diet is one way to get at those systems effectively. I'm eager to read his book to find out more about the case he's making.
Honestly, you might just want to stick with the notes. The book is full of good information, don't get me wrong, but it's a tough read. It's dense and slow-going, but thorough. These notes contain everything you practically need to know, so unless you're really interested in understanding it in depth, the notes will probably do.
After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet
Taubes' book is not a diet book, it's a thick book on all the things that are wrong on modern research on nutrition. It explains why the problem is not fats (nor greens), but refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour.
American obsesity can correlated to eating too much salt, sugar and fat.
Fast food makes it cheap and easy to get into a pattern where a significant portion of your daily intake is essentially a combination of sugar (soda, coffee, tea, etc), fat (burgers, fries, tacos, etc) and salt (flavoring, preservatives, etc.)
If we went back to the diet before there was fast-food then we'd have a lot less obesity. People would be eating more whole grains, fruits, veggies, fish and lean meat.
Look, you just spouted the dietary dogma in the face of a book that has dozens upon dozens of references to scientific literature. The only thing stopping me saying "hundreds" is I'm not quite sure if it gets up to 200, though I bet it does. (I don't have it in front of me to check.) Even if you're completely right (which I do not believe despite being raised on that theory), simply re-spouting it is not an adequate response to this book.
That theory simply doesn't explain all the observations, and you need to catch up to modern science. Salt especially; current science strongly indicates that salt is not a problem for a normal person, it only matters if you already have a blood pressure problem (and I still think it may yet be revealed that it actually has no effect at all and it's all sugar). This isn't even from Taubes' book, this is simply the current state of the science.
Running on the dietary theories of the 1960s leaves you defenseless in the face of our current food environment, and when you get in trouble it doesn't give you a way out. Check this new stuff out. Check out the sugar video lionhearted referenced, it's free and the source is unimpeachable, and unlike reading the book which has the step of obtaining a book, that video is as easy to watch as any other video on YouTube. It has biochemistry in it. It's pretty good.
I was referring to concepts presented in "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite" by David Kessler.
Of course, I wouldn't expect a lot of people on HN to agree, thus the down-votes.
A lot of the food industry is based on pumping the salt, sugar and fat so that we eat/buy more. So people focused on making money are more likely to side with Taubes (even if he's wrong) than with Kessler.
The funny thing is that Taubes book basically recommends you do away with those things anyway:
who likes burgers without the bun? fries are out, shakes are out, tacos without the shell? no thanks, etc, etc.
Where he differs, he has a lot more science to back it up.
This quote is taken from the wiki article on Gary Taubes
"Although Taubes has no formal training in nutrition or medicine, his book was praised as "raising interesting and valuable points" by Dr. Andrew Weil, while Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Jillian Michaels who appeared on the same program disagreed with Taubes on many questions. [6]"
I think we have to question the science when he states that exercise is an inefficient tool for weight loss.
Taubes is against refined carbs (OK, that does make sense) but is a bit of a nutter on other causes and solutions to obesity.
I think we have to question the science when he states that exercise is an inefficient tool for weight loss.
The science of the book is sound. And he is right about exercise: it's good for fitness (as in muscle) and other health reasons, but for weight loss is almost useless by itself. The reason is insulin, which signal the body to store, not use, energy.
Of course you could calorie-count people on a high carb diet and whip them to exercise and they will probably lose weight. But you will also destroy their health and they will regain all of its former weight (and then some) later. This is documented and is all in the book too.
Actually the notes indicate the opposite, that meat was more lean when it was free-range, hunted for and todays meat (grown in feed lots, etc) is much more fatty.
This is strikingly obvious - even in modern agriculture - when moving between countries with lots of grain fed beef (USA) and those with paddocks of grass fed beef (Australia, Argentina).
Taubes book is not a diet, but an extremely thorough review of the last 100 years of research into obesity, heart disease, diabetes etc. I think easily 1/3 of the book consists of references to the scientific literature.
Contrary to popular belief there is lots of research backing up the low carb theory, but they are mainly found in the fields of endocrinology and physiological psychology.
The picture coming out of it as outlined by Taubes is of an extremely complex system.
The endocrinologists have shown that the primary hormone governing obesity is insulin which isn't controversial anymore. It isn't that simple though to avoid foods that physiologically spike insulin.
The Physiological psychologists have shown that insulin can see short spikes in preparation for a meal due to smells and tastes, which is why artificial sweeteners can be problematic sometimes.
The issue is not if you eat a lot of meat or not, it is if you eat a lot of carbohydrates or not.
I know plenty of fat vegans including a family member who became diabetic and suffered a stroke because of it. Of course your and my experiences are both anecdotal, but I do believe I have heard studies showing that vegetarians do suffer disproportionately of heart disease. I'll try and google it.
Followup to that, because vegetarians eat things that are less dense in some vital nutrients, a good health-aware vegetarian will discover they need to stay away from the high-carb veggies like potatoes because they also have no nutrient value to speak of, and filling up on potatoes means you're not filling up on things high in iron (for example).
(Yes, part of the reason some vegetarians are vegetarians is because plants can be more rich in nutrients, but it is not automatically balanced, and some vital nutrients are more challenging to get than others.)
In that case, a vegetarian ends up eating a not-excessively-large portion of carbs naturally.
A bad vegetarian who assumes if it's not meat it must be healthy can still get in trouble, not just on this front but on others as well. It's not that simple.
(I've resolved that if any of my children ever want to be vegetarians, I'm OK with that, but a critical precondition is that they demonstrate that they have done their homework and understand the nutritional implications. I believe it can be done safely, but it's not trivial; it takes work in our environment.)
"(I've resolved that if any of my children ever want to be vegetarians, I'm OK with that, but a critical precondition is that they demonstrate that they have done their homework and understand the nutritional implications. I believe it can be done safely, but it's not trivial; it takes work in our environment.)"
You legitimately have a point that there are certain nutritional deficiencies that vegans/vegetarians are more prone to.
That said, I would hope that whether or not the child is a vegan, you would have him understand the nutritional implications of what he is eating. Being an omnivore safely is also quite difficult.
Sorry, question, why do you say that potatoes have no nutritional value? Everything I have found seems to indicate potatoes are high in nutritional value (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Nutrition). I have also heard it said that it is possible to subsist entirely on a diet of milk and potatoes, as many Irish families did for quite a long time.
The Irish have also had a long time to adapt to that diet. They're much less carb sensitive than others. Hence the difference between people from cultures who've eaten a traditionally low-carb diet vs those eating a high-carb diet. Native Americans suffer greatly, but those who traditionally farmed (Asians who eat rice for example) are healthy.
Then why are rural Chinese who live off of a rice and noodle based diet thin, while westerners who eat far more protein and fat are enormous?
Measured against GDP, countries in which rice-based diets are common (Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, etc...) have very thin, very long lived people compared with the protein crazed areas such as the US, UK, Australia, Canada.
Honestly, the only place I hear this carbohydrate-bashing crap is in English language news from places filled with fat people.
According to UCSF's Lustig from "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" video in Lionhearts post it's because they don't consume hardly any fructose.
I do believe though that urban Chinese and Japanese are experiencing the same health issues we are here due to increased fructose consumption.
Traditional Inuit diets consist of 0 carbohydrates and is very high in fat. They had very low levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes being unknown.
First of all, SE Asians have had access to a great deal of fruit for millenia, and rural Chinese are no exception. Secondly, Inuit are a very poor group to try to make your point with:
"Inuit Greenlanders, who historically have had limited access to fruits and vegetables, have the worst longevity statistics in North America. Research from the past and present shows that they die on the average about 10 years younger and have a higher rate of cancer than the overall Canadian population"
Edit: I don't doubt that highly processed foods that are full of fructose are dangerous. Of course eating a banana is different from getting the same amount of fructose by drinking soda.
It could be that vegetarians are more likely to be health conscious than meat eaters. Someone who is vegetarian (and comes from a meat eating nation) has definitely put some thought into their diet, whereas the meat eater may not have.
Interestingly if I recall correctly he mentions that 7th day adventists (vegetarians) have roughly the same heart disease level as Mormons (meat eaters).
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] threadSpecifically, how did you transition to a restricted diet? How have you felt, both emotionally and physically, throughout the process? What is a typical day like in terms of intake? Where do you get recipes? Do you count calories?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11Calories-t.html...
and the details from a vigorous Googling. I'm 6 feet tall, 165 lbs, and probably moderately physically active, so I picked a daily target of 1800 calories. That was based on some online calculators I found and anecdotes from people doing caloric restriction.
You can eat anything. The trick is not using up your whole quota on empty calories. If I have a can of soda and a cup of Ben and Jerry's, that's 37% of the day's calories right there, with pretty much no nutritional value. So you can have junk food, but not so much that it's going to make it hard to get all the nutrients to need while staying under your whole quota.
Another guideline is that if you end every day hungry, you're doing it wrong. Cheese will fill up your quota without filling you up. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, are filling and nutritious without packing a lot of calories. I shoot for a roughly even three-way split between calories from fat, protein, and carbs. I don't really use "special" caloric restriction recipes; I just cook/prepare whatever I want, while staying within the rules. I eat out a few times a week too.
Typical breakfast is eggs, maybe with mushrooms or something thrown in, and a fruit. A lunch might be chicken or fish with salad, or maybe a sandwich (bread is calorically dense, though, so careful). Dinner is pretty much the same as lunch, except that it's almost never a sandwich, is probably a bit more food, and includes red meat more frequently. Lentils and beans are all-around excellent, by the way.
I do count calories, because it would be too easy to lose track or cheat otherwise. I use Daily Burn, which has a huge number of foods in their database, and if I eat something they don't have, I guesstimate using things they do have. Counting calories makes it a lot easier to stick with it, because the more aware you are of what you're eating, the less tempted you are to be naughty.
Change in energy stores = Energy intake – Energy expenditure
According to my biochemistry professor in college, this had one - and only one - interpretation: The change in energy stores is controlled by energy intake and energy expenditure. The right side of the equation controls the left side of the equation. Also, there was an implied "just eat less and exercise more" (that energy intake and expenditure are independent variables).
But Taubes suggests that the causation could be reversed, and that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables. In other words, a metabolic change could cause a change in energy stores, and energy intake and expenditure would change to match.
That (amazingly!) translates to: if you are losing weight you are likely to be less hungry and likely to have more energy. Or perhaps, if your metabolic state is such that you are losing weight, your hunger will adjust to match your activity level. Or even, if you're burning fat, you will only eat to make up for what you aren't getting from stored fuel.
It makes sense to think that if your energy stores are releasing fuel into the blood stream you would be less hungry (I'm assuming that hunger signals are a function of available fuel to some extent).
Naturally, we eat for nutrition as well as fuel, so I suppose it can't all be broken into thermodynamics, but it's an interesting way of thinking about it!
Energy intake - Energy expenditure - Change in energy stores = 0
There. Just f(x,y,z)=0. That's what the first law really says. There is no causality implied, it just a first integral of the "motion" of metabolism that the body, naturally, has to follow.
It does NOT say what variables are free to independently modify. It's just a relation the three of them have to obey.
You put some mass that contains chemical energy into your body. Then that mass comes out of your body, minus SOME of the chemical energy. How much of it is extracted? What determines this? I have no idea. That said, I think it is funny to treat it as if the only way to get rid of energy is expenditure. How about:
Energy intake - Energy Ependiture - Energy still in food when it comes out the other end = Change in energy stores
My point is that a lot of people misinterpret conservation of energy assigning it a direction of causality it doesn't have. It's a constraint between variables (not an assignation as in programming languages) which are under complex feedback control systems in the body, and that's why the kind of calories you eat (fats vs carbohydrates) DOES matter, you don't eat abstract pure energy but as you say mass with chemical energy that has to be metabolized.
That's why starvation diets (just counting theoretical calories, which are numbers obtained in laboratories, dismissing the type of macronutrient) often fails in the long term and leave serious damage. The book talks long about this.
I've just noticed that people generally do equate "energy intake" with calories that go into your mouth, and find that interesting.
I think I was mistaken.
There was a thread on here with a video that was just incredibly insightful and it was a big part of what convinced me. I'm starting to rethink my own nutrition and diet.
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth", +132 points, 86 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980
Takes a while to watch the video, but it was very worthwhile for me and highly recommended.
The issue with calories in minus calories out is not equivocating the word "in", though. It is that it doesn't provide a useful model of how weight gain works. "Calories in" and "Calories out" are not independent variables, they are managed by the body's various feedback systems. Changing one of them will almost always change the other. Going for a run will make you hungrier, and undereating will lower your energy level and probably make you hungrier as well.
Based on a lecture of his I've seen, I'm convinced that his major hypothesis is God's own truth - that "calories in - calories out" is not a useful model for controlling weight, and that the regulatory systems of the body are what you have to get at to have a real effect on body weight. I am sold on the idea that diet is one way to get at those systems effectively. I'm eager to read his book to find out more about the case he's making.
After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet: less carbs lots of fat.
No thanks. Read a little Dr. Fuhrman for a different approach to nutrition: more nutrients, less calories. Greens in other words. More carbs though.
Who's right?
Taubes' book is not a diet book, it's a thick book on all the things that are wrong on modern research on nutrition. It explains why the problem is not fats (nor greens), but refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour.
Very worth your time, really.
Fast food makes it cheap and easy to get into a pattern where a significant portion of your daily intake is essentially a combination of sugar (soda, coffee, tea, etc), fat (burgers, fries, tacos, etc) and salt (flavoring, preservatives, etc.)
If we went back to the diet before there was fast-food then we'd have a lot less obesity. People would be eating more whole grains, fruits, veggies, fish and lean meat.
That theory simply doesn't explain all the observations, and you need to catch up to modern science. Salt especially; current science strongly indicates that salt is not a problem for a normal person, it only matters if you already have a blood pressure problem (and I still think it may yet be revealed that it actually has no effect at all and it's all sugar). This isn't even from Taubes' book, this is simply the current state of the science.
Running on the dietary theories of the 1960s leaves you defenseless in the face of our current food environment, and when you get in trouble it doesn't give you a way out. Check this new stuff out. Check out the sugar video lionhearted referenced, it's free and the source is unimpeachable, and unlike reading the book which has the step of obtaining a book, that video is as easy to watch as any other video on YouTube. It has biochemistry in it. It's pretty good.
Of course, I wouldn't expect a lot of people on HN to agree, thus the down-votes.
A lot of the food industry is based on pumping the salt, sugar and fat so that we eat/buy more. So people focused on making money are more likely to side with Taubes (even if he's wrong) than with Kessler.
If I could down vote this thread, I would.
Where he differs, he has a lot more science to back it up.
This quote is taken from the wiki article on Gary Taubes
"Although Taubes has no formal training in nutrition or medicine, his book was praised as "raising interesting and valuable points" by Dr. Andrew Weil, while Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Jillian Michaels who appeared on the same program disagreed with Taubes on many questions. [6]"
I think we have to question the science when he states that exercise is an inefficient tool for weight loss.
Taubes is against refined carbs (OK, that does make sense) but is a bit of a nutter on other causes and solutions to obesity.
The science of the book is sound. And he is right about exercise: it's good for fitness (as in muscle) and other health reasons, but for weight loss is almost useless by itself. The reason is insulin, which signal the body to store, not use, energy.
Of course you could calorie-count people on a high carb diet and whip them to exercise and they will probably lose weight. But you will also destroy their health and they will regain all of its former weight (and then some) later. This is documented and is all in the book too.
I suspect that if we went back to the diet before there was fast-food, people would be eating more flavorful (a.k.a. fatty) meat than lean meat.
Contrary to popular belief there is lots of research backing up the low carb theory, but they are mainly found in the fields of endocrinology and physiological psychology.
The picture coming out of it as outlined by Taubes is of an extremely complex system.
The endocrinologists have shown that the primary hormone governing obesity is insulin which isn't controversial anymore. It isn't that simple though to avoid foods that physiologically spike insulin.
The Physiological psychologists have shown that insulin can see short spikes in preparation for a meal due to smells and tastes, which is why artificial sweeteners can be problematic sometimes.
I know plenty of fat vegans including a family member who became diabetic and suffered a stroke because of it. Of course your and my experiences are both anecdotal, but I do believe I have heard studies showing that vegetarians do suffer disproportionately of heart disease. I'll try and google it.
(Yes, part of the reason some vegetarians are vegetarians is because plants can be more rich in nutrients, but it is not automatically balanced, and some vital nutrients are more challenging to get than others.)
In that case, a vegetarian ends up eating a not-excessively-large portion of carbs naturally.
A bad vegetarian who assumes if it's not meat it must be healthy can still get in trouble, not just on this front but on others as well. It's not that simple.
(I've resolved that if any of my children ever want to be vegetarians, I'm OK with that, but a critical precondition is that they demonstrate that they have done their homework and understand the nutritional implications. I believe it can be done safely, but it's not trivial; it takes work in our environment.)
You legitimately have a point that there are certain nutritional deficiencies that vegans/vegetarians are more prone to.
That said, I would hope that whether or not the child is a vegan, you would have him understand the nutritional implications of what he is eating. Being an omnivore safely is also quite difficult.
The Irish have also had a long time to adapt to that diet. They're much less carb sensitive than others. Hence the difference between people from cultures who've eaten a traditionally low-carb diet vs those eating a high-carb diet. Native Americans suffer greatly, but those who traditionally farmed (Asians who eat rice for example) are healthy.
Measured against GDP, countries in which rice-based diets are common (Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, etc...) have very thin, very long lived people compared with the protein crazed areas such as the US, UK, Australia, Canada.
Honestly, the only place I hear this carbohydrate-bashing crap is in English language news from places filled with fat people.
I do believe though that urban Chinese and Japanese are experiencing the same health issues we are here due to increased fructose consumption.
Traditional Inuit diets consist of 0 carbohydrates and is very high in fat. They had very low levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes being unknown.
"Inuit Greenlanders, who historically have had limited access to fruits and vegetables, have the worst longevity statistics in North America. Research from the past and present shows that they die on the average about 10 years younger and have a higher rate of cancer than the overall Canadian population"
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-do-primitive...
Edit: I don't doubt that highly processed foods that are full of fructose are dangerous. Of course eating a banana is different from getting the same amount of fructose by drinking soda.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479222
Interestingly if I recall correctly he mentions that 7th day adventists (vegetarians) have roughly the same heart disease level as Mormons (meat eaters).
meat eaters who should be nearly vegetarians (although definitely are not, in general): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom#Meat