The problem is the insulin response generated when the various sugary carbohydrates hit the blood stream; "slow" carbohydrates are nowhere near being a problem.
What you say is almost certainly true with regards to diabetes risk. However, the association is less perfect with regards to atherogenesis; in other words, the glycemic index/heart disease risk may be purely mediated by diabetes.
Nevertheless, this article is a great start; I like that the media is now starting to pick up on the correct correlation between carbs and atherosclerosis - and if they also begin to understand and convey the glycemic index, so much the better. As the studies discussed in this reasonably well-cited article indicate, carbohydrate load correlates with the atherogenic lipid profile, whereas saturated fat load does not.
A few months ago, I thought that sugar was glucose, and therefore good for the brain. On that basis I would drink two liters of Coke a day for the brainpower. Then, while on this forum, someone posted a link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM (Sugar, the Bitter Truth), which let me know that sugar is not pure glucose.
I resolved to find glucose, and I eventually did. I had to go to one of the more industrial neighborhoods in Santiago (I live in Chile) to find it, and after a few trips there I had myself a 55 lb sack of dextrose mono-hydrate, which dissolves in water to form pure glucose.
Now I mix it with water for 250 calories of food for thought per glass or put it in half-liter plastic bottles to drink at school. It's amazing stuff, it's 100% healthy, and it's great for working at hard problems.
Really? Does any one have some scientific references to back up this claim? Is this something people are doing a lot of? I'm not being negative, I just have never heard of this.
Until it runs out of glycogen and turns to beta-oxidation...
On the plus side, you'll be really sensitive to insulin when you do get some carbs into your system again :) And hey, I just read an article that said lowering insulin levels is the key to the longevity gains resulting from caloric restriction.
As I'm a beginner in this I can't really detect sarcasm in this topic. So basically does the liver produce enough amount of glucose? and depriving the body of glucose is that good or dangerous??
The liver stores long chains of biologically intert glucose in glycogen macromolecules located within hepatocytes. When the body requires more energy, the chains are cleaved and the glucose released into the blood stream. Glucose is essential for life, providing energy for all cellular activities through its conversion to ATP in the citric acid/Krebs/TCA cycle.
Reducing your caloric intake won't kill you and it has been shown in rats that it might even be good for you. Your liver only stores glucose, it doesn't create it (That would violate conservation of energy!).
This thread is talking about artifically spiking your blood suger which will rape your pancreas and eventually lead to diabetes. I wouldn't do it if I were you, but I might consider eating more vegetables and low calorie foods :-)
Step 2 in glycolysis is to convert glucose to fructose. Indeed, you can pretty easily interconvert between all of the monosaccharides.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that your pure glucose is "100% healthy." If anything, glucose is less sweet than fructose, so fructose may compel higher food intake. But if you can religiously dole out 250 kcal of glucose, doing the same with 250kcal of fructose would be nearly biochemically equivalent.
If you carefully read my post, where I emphasize that you restrict yourself to 250kcal of either, I think you'll find that we're all in agreement.
The video explains why fructose drives you to eat more (namely, it doesn't fulfill the hormonal role that glucose does). It also states that fructose is more likely to form advanced glycation endproducts, but this is far less important than the hormonal differences.
So from all practical viewpoints, I agree with you. Fructose is way worse! From the most limited perspective (basically, lock someone up and feed them 250kcal of glucose vs 250kcal fructose and don't let them have additional food), they will be very similar.
Step 2 in glycolysis turns glucose 6-phosphate into fructose 6-phosphate. And I'm not convinced that every glucose molecule undergoes glycolysis. According to the MD in the video (minute 45 or so), 80% of glucose gets turned to CO2 and water by the organs in the body before the rest of the glucose even makes it to the liver, where eventually, ~.4% of it turns into VLDL (which is bad for you). You only need a bit of pyruvate (the end product of glycolysis) to get the Krebs cycle going, and then that takes care of the glucose, turning it into CO2 and water, without turning it into fructose in the process. And at no point is there any native fructose involved. And besides, in the video, it says fructose can't be metabolized by the brain.
I'd also like to point out I'm not drinking a shitload of this stuff all at once. The reason I avoid this is to avoid an insulin spike, which would, without question, defeat the purpose of using dextrose.
While correct in some details, yours is an incorrect description of the bigger picture of glucose catabolism. Pyruvate is consumed the TCA (Krebs) cycle, so to say that you only need a "little" is like saying you only need a "little" gas to run your car. Your car runs on gas, consuming it. The Krebs cycle runs on pyruvate, consuming it.
Glucose gets broken down into pyruvate via glycolysis, which is by far the primary way in which you generate pyruvate. This process generates a bit of energy, but the vast majority of ATP is generated during the Krebs cycle, which is where glucose metabolites (namely, pyruvate) get oxidized into CO2 and H20.
To respond more directly to your point: if 80% of glucose is immediately metabolized to CO2 and H20 (I don't recall but I'll take your word), that means that 80% of glucose enters the body, undergoes glycolysis, and then enters the TCA cycle. This means that 80% of the glucose in your body is quickly converted into fructose (yes, F6P). You could easily make this into a pure fructose molecule with a phosphatase (though this doesn't happen in vivo). The upside is that phosphorylated sugars cannot be transported by facilitated diffusion, so F6P will remain intracellular.
Isn't this healthy by the same rationale that fat is unhealthy? Assuming that glucose intake is good because it's what the body transports around as energy (I assume that's the basis on which one would call glucose 100% healthy) sounds a lot like saying eating fat makes you fat. Which, incidentally, the article we're commenting on seems to be refuting.
Sorry, but that's just extreme foolishness. Glucose makes sense if you're at the Olympics starting a 100m sprint (to win enough money so that you don't need to be that foolish again). Any other time, it's like you're sadistically kicking your pancreas everyday or defibrillating your heart everyday. You are on route to early disability (including blindness/fractures/loss of limbs) and an early grave due to multiple organ failures.
You'd better be hoping science comes through with cheap organ replacement/re-growth therapies soon and that you are rich enough to afford them. In the meantime, you could try common-sense or even some education.
Though glucose is better than fructose, there's still enough credible concern out there about spiking glucose levels and insulin issues that your self-treatment may not be the boon you think it is.
In any case, a lot of formed and powedered candies are almost pure 'dextrose' -- so you don't need to go to industrial suppliers. Just grab some Sweetarts/Lik-M-Aid/PixieStix. (No corn syrup is listed on the ingredients of these, but sometimes 'maltose' is. It's two joined glucose molecules, but I don't know if it splits cleanly to that and only that in the body.)
Maybe we will start to finally see products in major super markets that are affordable and don't have tons of refined carbs. Right now it is either really expensive or really time consuming to eat a variety of food that doesn't have refined carbs.
What do you mean by refined carbs? Does it include bread, pasta, potatoes, etc? Because I don't think those are bad for you because they don't cause blood sugar levels to rise as quickly as stuff like HFCS and sugar (but I could be wrong).
Just because HCFS is worse for you, it doesn't mean refined carbs like white bread are good for you. They do cause an larger increase in blood sugar compared to other foods (such as unrefined carbs).
"Refined" includes flower and sugar, but not whole starches. I'm not sure where white rice falls, as I have heard that too much white rice is also unhealthy.
And yet, amongst the developed countries, it is those who eat rice at nearly every meal (Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan) that have the lowest rates of obesity, heart disease diabetes and similar lifestyle diseases.
Those rice-centered Asian diets are also very low in fats. It's supposedly the combination of large amounts of carbohydrates and any significant amount of fat or sugar that causes the problem.
Are there studies that study the effect of exercise on the badness of sugar? Do bread, pasta, potatoes, etc. qualify as sugar? (looking for an excuse to keep eating these things)
Take the spreadsheet 'carbocation posted, sort it by "glycemic index", skip past all the nulls, and you have a list from "foods this SciAm article suggests are unhealthful" to "foods this SciAm article suggests aren't unhealthful". You'll find sugar, flour, potatoes, and white rice at the top of the list, and fats and oils near the bottom.
There are some interesting counterexamples; it's possible to make white bread with a GI of 40 or so. Flour doesn't necessarily mean high GI, nor are ingredients the sole determinant of GI. There's a paper kicking round where the authors baked white bread with GIs between 40 and 100 (from memory). The _only difference was proving time...
That's because the longer a dough is proofed, the less white flour remains in its refined state — the yeast has had its way with as many sugar molecules as it could belch. The flour is still the GI determinant, it's just not refined white flour anymore.
Ah. First of all, those proofing times are not nearly long enough for the effect I was referring to to come into play. Secondly, each Bread sample is not at all controlled for its proof time, they are explicitly varying the volume of each bread (more volume = more proofing time, which is required in bread-making). Since the entire point of the study is that volume is correlated with GI, the results make sense.
Perhaps you are right, but the studies seem to indicate that the level at which sugar becomes "excess" is very low, especially if the sugar does not contain fiber (i.e. apple juice rather than apples). Even a single soda is in excess of the amount of sugar that your body can safely handle hitting your bloodstream all at once.
While it's nice that fructose doesn't raise blood sugar like the other monosaccharides, you need to keep in mind that fructose gets preferential uptake treatment by the liver. If you eat too much of a food that contains fructose, you can overwhelm your liver into producing triglycerides (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302539). While we're not entirely sure that triglycerides themselves are responsible for ill health, having elevated levels has been linked to all sorts of chronic diseases.
An issue that is just as great as that ^ is that fructose is a glycating agent potentially reaching high concentrations is the liver, causing direct damage to it, elevating liver enzymes and contributing to non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome.
Absolutely. All refined carbs are bad for you. This includes especially breads made of white flour, pasta, and potatoes. If you want to be healthy you need to keep your blood glucose at a steady level, which means eating complex carbs like whole grains, sweet potatoes, brown rice, etc. These carbs turn into glucose much slower than refined carbs, which cause a steady release of glucose rather than a sugar rush that you get from refined carbs.
Just because they aren't as quick as HFCS doesn't mean they aren't bad for you. A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it. Tell me that isn't bad for you. Eat one every day and you might just get diabetes...
Potatoes are not made up of refined carbohydrates.
If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice.
It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish.
I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you.
Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again.
There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.
"Refined" is actually only a heuristic in regards to carbs, not an all by itself meaningful distinguishing feature. Refined carbs that are bad are bad for reasons having little to do with being refined; there are also thoroughly refined foods that are harmless.
Potato in particular is bad because it is a concentrated source of very high GI starch,
> A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it.
Are you sure about that? My experience is that if I haven't eaten enough and eat bread and then go running it doesn't help much, whereas if I eat sweets or something else with a lot of sugar it helps almost immediately.
It's not difficult at all. Cheese, butter, and eggs are all cheap. Hell, if you're not a stickler for local and pastured meat, that's quite cheap as well (though you can usually manage to find decently-priced sources of those -- especially if you find a group to cowpool with.)
My standard meal is eggs, sausage, and onions sauteed in butter and topped with salsa. Very cheap and fast (and good).
if anyone is worried about insulin resistance from carbohydrates you can just start taking cinnamon everyday. It prevents the development of insulin resistance even on a high fructose diet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15002064
So, the problem is that the body doesn't respond to insulin well enough if you keep eating that kind of stuff. And this is a problem because blood sugar levels are too high. So is this reasoning correct: if you are fit and have more muscles then the blood sugar will drop better because more muscles => more stuff that takes sugar out of the blood => lower blood sugar => good.
I'm always a little perturbed when I read about "refined carbs" being bad for you. This is partially because of the "Paleo Diet" folks who rail against any and all grains (and legumes) all the time.
How refined is too refined exactly? Is whole wheat bread considered refined? Oatmeal? Granola?
Or are we specifically talking about white flour here?
No, I don't think that's true. Grains in general are troublesome (there are some worse than others, so that for instance bran won't kill you and flax is downright good for you [but yech]), but this isn't some fad about how bleached flour is particularly bad for you. Foods consisting primarily of flour are in general not going to be particularly healthy.
I think they're really focusing on glycemic index here rather than whole/non-whole wheat. The glycemic index of any food can be determined empirically (it's the AUC of the 2hr blood glucose response curve after ingesting a fixed amount of said substance). Usually, pure glucose is the reference food that is pegged at 100, and everything else is represented as the relative fraction compared to glucose.
I think I recognize the source of your distress. The same sort of thing I get when I see people use "natural" as a synonym for "good" and "unnatural" as a synonym for "bad", and think that once you've established something as "natural" or not, you can stop thinking about it.
In this case, in addition to the other replies, I would point out that refined is not merely a synonym for "unnatural". The refining processes in question make the refined food much easier to digest, which causes the insulin spikes and (theoretically) the rest of the problems that arise when that happens chronically.
Personally I don't think it's impossible to mass-produce quality food, and there are other forms of "refinement" that can either raise the quality of the food, or bring out specific characteristics of the food without much loss, such as cold-pressing oils, so I don't think of refinement itself as a sort of dirty word or anything. Much, if not most, of the reason we don't seem to mass-produce quality food is that we haven't had a correct definition of "quality food" here in the US for literally 50 years.
Yes, for example unrefined pure granulated sugar has about half the glycemic index of white pure granulated sugar. Lots of places around the world use it (often called jaggeree or jaggery) in all kinds of cooking and they often use it so unrefined you have to boil it and skim off the impurities before adding it to the food.
It might be possible to suggest that it is not in the interest of large corporations to have it known that doing nothing with food is better for you than having them do things to it and then sell it on for a decent markup. If you were to believe that we live in societies where Governments treat corporate interest ahead of that of their general population of course.
No. It's referring to foods that have a relatively high glycemic index; those do include sugar (of all sorts) but also white rice, potatoes, juice, and most things made from any kind of flour.
There are two possible things in the deep-frying that can be bad for you: Frying in transfats, and the batter. If you don't fry in transfats and are really gentle with the batter, instead of slathering it on, I actually don't see much reason to be concerned about deep-fat frying, under this theory of nutrition.
That said, I tend to just saute or steam. Deep-fat frying is a lot of work for dubious reward.
The rest, yes, assuming you mean full-sugar/full-HFCS soda. (Diet sodas may be bad, but I find the theories behind that to be a bit more theoretical than the I-think-proved danger of the full-sugar sodas.) You'd think in some sense that "easier to digest" would be a good thing, but it really turns out not to be. And you'd be surprised what all has sugar and HFCS in it.
(I'm ambivalent about whether HFCS is worse for you than sugar or not; to be honest, the evidence for both is such that you really ought to almost entirely cut them out of your diet. As both meet that threshold, I consider arguing about which is worse to be mostly academic.)
Demonizing any particular part of a diet is a dangerous route, as people tend to feel justified in eating how much of whatever doesn't contain the currently demonized nutrient. Example: the explosion of "low fat" snack foods that are downright bad for you,but sell well.
With refined carbs (refined foods, actually) it should be seen as a spectrum, with less refined things (whole vegetables) being on on end and highly refined things (HFCS) on the other.
Just favoring less refined things over more refined things, without specific prohibitions of any particular ingredient can be a good place to start. Example:I've cut out HCFS soda altogether, but I still put a teaspoon of real sugar in my coffee.
Whole wheat, now matter how "unrefined" it is, is still an extremely crap food. You get a bit more minerals and proteins, but get more harmful phytates along with it. In general, it is like adding an ounce of quality wine to a barrel of sewage to beef it up, but the endproduct remains pretty much sewage.
"Refined" is not the word we're looking for, we're looking for specific compositions and chemicals that pose risks to our health. Much like the natural/unnatural dichotomy refinedness provides almost zero explaining power in regards to the normative question of what is good for you.
The article contains this astonishing statement: the meta-analysis "found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease". No association! Yet this has been public-health, government, industry dogma for more than a generation. The history of this catastrophe has barely begun to be written.
It's too bad that this is the case for facts as well as ideas. Ideally science can turn on a dime when the data is overwhelming, but in practice there's a huge lag.
It depends on whether government gets behind a bad idea or not. Bureaucracy doesn't like diversity of thought and tends to reinforce current thinking. Look at how long its taken for alternative medicine to get blessed.
Huh? Bad example. "Alternative medecine" that actually works just becomes "medecine". The fact that this happens rarely is due to the fact that most products marketed as alternative medecine are a crock and don't hold up when tested. If anything, the fact that government allows these things to be marketed at all is a perfect example of bureaucracy accepting diversity of thought (when it really shouldn't!)
I'd rather the government accept medicines with centuries of empirical evidence than lab-synthesised chemicals which have been pushed rapidly through official process using cherry-picked clinical trials and promises of lucrative paid positions for soon-to-be-ex-FDA officials.
What you want, and everyone wants, is fair, unbiased testing of any medicine, regardless of origin. Peer reviewed science and FDA approval tests are not perfect, but in the vast majority of cases they are better than "centuries of empirical evidence." The placebo effect is very real; if people are paying money, betting their lives, and putting potentially dangerous compounds into their bodies (whatever the origin), then we'd like better than that.
Also, I would add that alternative medicines tend to fail by not working at all, whereas (what we'll call) lab medicines tend to fail by having unforeseen, unexpected, longer-term side effects.
But seriously, as far as I'm aware (and I try to stay current on this topic), there is no 'medicine' out there with "centuries of empirical evidence" that isn't already accepted. There are loads of compounds that claim to be effective, but when tested they are found to be no better than placebo.
Even if a compound is found to be effective, it isn't enough to make a good medicine. The active ingredient needs to be identified, extracted, and stabilised in a product that allows doctors to safely control the dose that a patient receives. Skipping all of that work and just trying to take an uncontrolled substance is dangerous - you can't tell if the active compound has broken down, or just isn't present in a particular sample, or conversely, is present in dangerous amounts. Furthermore, the naturally occurring compound may have other, undesirable compounds included with it.
Modern medicine aims to control for all of this, and yes, the complexity can be off-putting compared to the simplicity of "natural" solutions, but there are good reasons for that complexity existing.
Oh, I did miss the joke, which is a bit sad considering that I agree with transhumanists that fighting aging is a noble cause.
If people no longer die so much of the diseases of aging, it might cause some problems, but I think they would be small compared to the benefits (few things compared to 100-150k dying each day after getting frail and sick).
"In Defense of Food" has an interesting account of how that came to pass.
Basically, scientists told the politician, "We don't know what's causing it. Our advice is to eat less meat and dairy and less food overall."
The politician said, "I can't say that. I live in an agricultural state! I need something more specific to say... What's in meat and diary that MIGHT be to blame?"
And thus, fat and saturated fat were thrust into the mainstream as things to avoid despite there being little to no evidence to that point.
Side note: I've seen Food, Inc but I haven't read his books. I thought it was a huge leap for him to go from talking about food and where it comes from to giving nutritional advice in Food Rules.
Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating and Gary Taubes book on Calories both have two different arguments for how the current dietary advice became mainstream (and why it's wrong)
About 10 years ago the journal Science had a cover story review article called "The soft science of dietary fat". It's likely still behind a paywall, but that was the single best summary on this topic I have ever seen. I remember it went on at length about how the original research had been simplified by governments and policy groups because it was impractical to tell people which fats were OK.
Based on the interest generated in the glycemic index by this article, I found a link to the National Cancer Institute's glycemic index chart for over 4,000 foods.
It's not as simple as avoiding refined carbohydrates. Rice, baked potatoes, watermellon, dates, and parsnips all have a very high (>90) glycemic index, while some refined carbohydrates such as whole wheat bread and pasta have medium to low GI (<70).
Yeah. What's more, the same kind of bread from different makers can have significantly different GI. The sugar content of fruit (and so, presumably, its GI) varies with all sorts of things. So I completely agree that it's not that simple.
Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories is a great book that examines the science behind low-carb diets and attacks low-fat diets as completely lacking scientific support and being essentially the biggest public health disaster of the 20th century.
I recommend it too. The title makes it sound like light pop-science, but he did a lot more research than I expected, and unlike most people commenting on diet, he went to the primary sources, and even went back a far as 150 years to see where the current mainstream view comes from.
I think I read most of it, but then suddenly I felt no smarter than before. Yes, he presents a lot of evidence for what he is convinced is the right theory. However, just from reading his book, I can not really verify it. Who is to say that the cases he presents are not hand selected (in fact, he admitted himself that they are), and that the opposition could not be possible to line up a similar study of numbers? It is not a very readable book, it is just hundreds of pages describing various health studies and arguing why some of them are wrong and others were wrongly not taken seriously.
It makes me a little bit suspicious that it is such a bad read and such a huge collection of studies, because quelling the opposition with an immense amount of information seems more like a rhetorical approach than a scientific approach.
Also, on videos I saw Taube still is overweight. Not eating his own dog food?
I've mentioned Ray Peat's articles before on this site but if you've found this article interesting, have a look at some of his articles: http://raypeat.com/articles/
Barry Sears (of the Zone Diet), among others, has been saying essentially this for 15+ years. But I think ppl are starting to catch on, e.g., most know that corn syrup is terrible for you.
I always wondered about this as a kid in school, when they talked about 'the food pyramid' and that nonsense. It's not like when you eat animal fat, it slides out of your digestive tract unchanged into your own tissue. It has to be broken down and digested and turned into something else. At the time, I remember thinking it would have been like assuming you could eat someone else's brains and gain their knowledge.
But I was just a kid and they were the grownups, so I didn't say anything and believed what they were telling me.
(Nothing, literally nothing, I learned in school outside of how to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic has been correct or useful in my life.)
Not really; pigs in particular have been bred to contain much, much less fat and more muscle than what is typical in wild boars and ancient pig breeds. The relatively rare mangalitsa hog is a perfect example of a fatty breed. Although I note that this preference of lean pigs started only in the 20th century with the anti-fat craze and the advent of vegetable oil production.
Almost all nutritional research seems inherently flawed to me only because it's so difficult to control the diets, lifestyles, and (obviously) genes of the study participants.
The China Study makes some compelling arguments for avoiding "animal-based" foods, but of course, there are people like the Inuit, who don't exhibit high incidence of cancer and heart disease despite eating mostly animal-based foods.
I try to take all this stuff with a grain of salt, but the idea of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." seems most sensible to me. And I'd probably add to that, "Get some exercise."
Due to the lack of carbohydrates in their diet, Inuits apparently process protein differently than most others, through gluconeogenesis. I can't say whether that has any substantial impact on their susceptibility to cancer, but it's not necessarily inconsistent with the "China Study" findings.
The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.
Considering that this is the conclusion of the study, the article itself seems to soft-peddle the implications, stating in multiple places that saturated fat may be "less bad" than refined carbohydrates. I'm a little mystified as to why the article itself refuses to conclude that saturated fat is not a cause of heart disease. The evidence that it plays a role has never been particularly compelling.
t colin campbell, michael pollan, & Tim Robbins are probably the 3 most important writers on this topic. while the latter two definitely write more to stir reaction, prof. campbell basically published his results in the china study.
basically, all three writers/experts agree that a vegetarian diet consisting of unprocessed foods is the best (although not foolproof) way to ensure that you will lead a long and disease free life.
the modern food revolution is only about 60 odd years old at this point - human evolution cannot keep up with how quickly our food has changed and how quickly our caloric intake has increased. perhaps in 10,000 years we will be able to find a way to absorb nutrients from krispy kreme donuts and pizza but for now its best to stick low on the food chain and as michael pollan say - "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants".
Anyone looking for sources or more info i recommend the following:
The China Study - T Colin Campbell
The Food Revolution (Or Diet For a New America) - Tim Robbins
The Omnivore Dilemma (Michael Pollan)
Healthy At 100 - Tim Robbins
one last note - Diet for a new america was written in 1988!!! This information has been out there for decades - politics and misinformation has kept it relatively out of mainstream media and on the sidelines but the statistics and information is out there for those who take the time to look...
I strongly disagree with your recommendations for Campbell and Robbins (and I assume you mean John Robbins, not Tim Robbins). Like most nutritionists, they do agree on eliminating refined carbohydrates and processed foods from your diet. But these two specifically argue that saturated fats are unhealthy and low-fat diets are optimal, the exact opposite of the thesis of the study and article.
Robbins is a dietary extremist and his books make Quackwatch's list of non-recommended books that "promote misinformation, espouse unscientific theories, and/or contain unsubstantiated advice" [1]. The National Council Against Health Fraud even had a critical blurb towards his television program about Diet For a New America in their '91 newsletter [2].
While I find Campbell's actual research in the china studies important, the book infers much more than the studies showed, not to mention a lack of supporting follow-up studies that control for the most common criticisms (genetics, rates of exercise, comparisons with mostly meat-eating populations without diseases of civilization, etc.). I have a real issue with taking descriptive information from data and turning it into prescriptive advice before accumulating sound evidence. For a good critique, the always awesome SkepDoc Harriet Hall posted a review on the Science-Based Medicine blog (which I highly recommend) [3], although the comments get bogged down about her linking to a similar criticism by the Weston Price foundation.
Oddly enough, as a lifelong vegetarian myself, I find myself wanting to agree with these authors and recommending them to others. But it's disheartening these authors feel the need to fortify their ethical choices with shoddy scientific inferences. Yes, following their recommendations will almost certainly lead to better health, but only because those recommendations merely happen to correlate well with a healthier than average diet, not because their assumed causations about optimal health are necessarily correct.
However, I do agree with your recommendation for Pollan.
Weston Price was a prominent dentist and nutritional researcher in the 20s and 30s.
He went on a tour around the world, studying isolated groups of people, their diet (including mineral content) and checking their dental health, using it as a proxy for resistance to infection and proof that dietary needs are being met.
From studying groups as diverse as a remote Swiss village, windswept Scottish fishing town, African tribes, Pacific Islanders, and Inuit, he came to a series of conclusions which are at least somewhat in agreement with this.
A secondary point was also that poor nutrition of the mother, could be seen in children due to crowding of the tooth and other maladies.
The book is a little archaic and I am sure that some of the text sounds odd to modern-day ears, however if you can read past that you can find some interesting information.
I am aware of the skepticism some have about Weston Price, but recommend at least skimming his own words rather than reading only choice tidbits presented by those who disagree with him or would debunk his views as junk science.
Looking at the websites of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation <http://www.ppnf.org/ > and the Weston A Price Foundation <http://www.westonaprice.org/ >, both linked from Price's Wikipedia article, I am not convinced that those who call his views "junk science" are wrong.
Among their tenets:
* supporting raw whole milk instead of pasteurized milk
* believing that facial structure has an effect on health (and that the nutrition of one's parents affects this)
* campaigning against the fluoridation of public water
Yeah, the modern foundations espousing his ideals do promote junk science like homeopathy. But some of his original research is still interesting. Consider reading some of Stephan Guyenet's blog posts about that research (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/) (grain of salt implied, like with any prescriptive nutritional advice).
All I can tell you is that the linked book points out his reasoning.
The book I mentioned does not talk about #1 and #3, but does mention his reasoning concerning #2 - that a lack of specific nutrients during pregnancy can lead to health problems, and that crowded teeth has nothing to do with genetics but instead has to do with nutrition.
If you read up on livestock nutrition, you will find that a lack of certain nutrients during gestation does lead to certain well-defined problems in the offspring; and for the next litter fixing the nutrition for the mother, stops the problem from recurring. I suppose a search for "pig gestation nutrition" will get you some links.
Personally I do question the need for fluoridation of water supply, given that other countries do not do it and their populations do not have significantly higher dental problems, i.e. lack of fluoridation is not correlated with higher rates of dental problems.
If Price's argument about nutrition is correct, fluoridation is treating the symptom rather than the cause in any case.
There are a lot of errors in both fact and logic in that Quackwatch piece, which is why I suggest that you skim/read the link I posted in my original comment. (That is, read the original source material and make up your own mind.)
If it comes from a factory, factory farm or a lengthy cooking process, the food is optimized for low cost and nice appearance. It may be disastrous for you healthwise.
If a food is found in nature and humans evolved with it and like eating it, its more likely to be good for you if eaten with the sort of variety of foods you'd find in nature.
The fact that we like it is itself information about how healthy a food is, provided technology isn't fooling our brains somehow.
All grains regardless of how wholesome they are have numerous issues with them.
1. Glycemic index / load...all starchy carbohydrates raise your blood sugar quickly and then cause a crash. This includes both white bleached flour as well as whole grains.
2. Gluten is the protein found in many grains, wheat being the most common. Gluten is responsible for SO many of today's problems. Seriously just google "gluten" paired with any autoimmune disease or other health condition and you will find loads of information. This is not just for people who are diagnosed Celiacs but for all.
3. Lectins are found in all grains and legumes. They are the defense mechanism for the plant to warn off predators to not eat them. They are toxic. When we consume them they are considered "anti-nutrients" and bind to various nutrients in our body such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, etc. The more you eat, the more your body is leached.
4. Calorie per nutrient, grains are horrible. It is impossible to calculate a grain based diet to meet all the recommended intakes while staying below the recommended calories. When you calculate a diet based on lean meats, fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, it appears you are taking in a multivitamin.
5. Grains are acidic and the body is meant to run on an alkaline base. If you end the day leaning towards the acidic side you again start to leach nutrients, specifically calcium from your body. Replacing grains with fruits and vegetables gets you back to the alkaline side. The only acidic foods that should be consumed are grass-fed meats.
The Paleo approach is DEFINITELY the way to go for any person who is trying to get healthier and recover from chronic diseases your doctors have misdiagnosed you with. It is seriously amazing the vast number of misdiagnoses that occur when a holistic nutritional approach isn't considered.
Also, I shall point out that oat is a glaring exception to the grain rule; it has NO gluten and lectin, it has a relatively mild impact on blood sugar and has a lot of fiber, with special mention of beta-glucan, an immunoprotectant, anti-cancer and blood sugar regulating fiber. However, make sure that it is plain rolled oats, steel-cut oats or oat bran; Cheerios is not a towering source of oat.
How can this be?!?!?! The scientific consensus was overwhelming!!! Al Gore and Michael Mann tell me I am not to question scientific consensus and to do so I shall be branded a "denier".
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadNevertheless, this article is a great start; I like that the media is now starting to pick up on the correct correlation between carbs and atherosclerosis - and if they also begin to understand and convey the glycemic index, so much the better. As the studies discussed in this reasonably well-cited article indicate, carbohydrate load correlates with the atherogenic lipid profile, whereas saturated fat load does not.
I resolved to find glucose, and I eventually did. I had to go to one of the more industrial neighborhoods in Santiago (I live in Chile) to find it, and after a few trips there I had myself a 55 lb sack of dextrose mono-hydrate, which dissolves in water to form pure glucose.
Now I mix it with water for 250 calories of food for thought per glass or put it in half-liter plastic bottles to drink at school. It's amazing stuff, it's 100% healthy, and it's great for working at hard problems.
On the plus side, you'll be really sensitive to insulin when you do get some carbs into your system again :) And hey, I just read an article that said lowering insulin levels is the key to the longevity gains resulting from caloric restriction.
Reducing your caloric intake won't kill you and it has been shown in rats that it might even be good for you. Your liver only stores glucose, it doesn't create it (That would violate conservation of energy!).
This thread is talking about artifically spiking your blood suger which will rape your pancreas and eventually lead to diabetes. I wouldn't do it if I were you, but I might consider eating more vegetables and low calorie foods :-)
There is absolutely no reason to believe that your pure glucose is "100% healthy." If anything, glucose is less sweet than fructose, so fructose may compel higher food intake. But if you can religiously dole out 250 kcal of glucose, doing the same with 250kcal of fructose would be nearly biochemically equivalent.
The video explains why fructose drives you to eat more (namely, it doesn't fulfill the hormonal role that glucose does). It also states that fructose is more likely to form advanced glycation endproducts, but this is far less important than the hormonal differences.
So from all practical viewpoints, I agree with you. Fructose is way worse! From the most limited perspective (basically, lock someone up and feed them 250kcal of glucose vs 250kcal fructose and don't let them have additional food), they will be very similar.
I'd also like to point out I'm not drinking a shitload of this stuff all at once. The reason I avoid this is to avoid an insulin spike, which would, without question, defeat the purpose of using dextrose.
Glucose gets broken down into pyruvate via glycolysis, which is by far the primary way in which you generate pyruvate. This process generates a bit of energy, but the vast majority of ATP is generated during the Krebs cycle, which is where glucose metabolites (namely, pyruvate) get oxidized into CO2 and H20.
To respond more directly to your point: if 80% of glucose is immediately metabolized to CO2 and H20 (I don't recall but I'll take your word), that means that 80% of glucose enters the body, undergoes glycolysis, and then enters the TCA cycle. This means that 80% of the glucose in your body is quickly converted into fructose (yes, F6P). You could easily make this into a pure fructose molecule with a phosphatase (though this doesn't happen in vivo). The upside is that phosphorylated sugars cannot be transported by facilitated diffusion, so F6P will remain intracellular.
You'd better be hoping science comes through with cheap organ replacement/re-growth therapies soon and that you are rich enough to afford them. In the meantime, you could try common-sense or even some education.
In any case, a lot of formed and powedered candies are almost pure 'dextrose' -- so you don't need to go to industrial suppliers. Just grab some Sweetarts/Lik-M-Aid/PixieStix. (No corn syrup is listed on the ingredients of these, but sometimes 'maltose' is. It's two joined glucose molecules, but I don't know if it splits cleanly to that and only that in the body.)
Tables 1 and 2 will give you a quick summary.
fructose is a sugar with a propensity for glycation
If you want to follow a low glycemic index diet, it's much more important to avoid potatoes, white bread, white flour and rice than HFCS
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver
Just because they aren't as quick as HFCS doesn't mean they aren't bad for you. A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it. Tell me that isn't bad for you. Eat one every day and you might just get diabetes...
If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice.
It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish.
I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you.
Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again.
There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.
Potato in particular is bad because it is a concentrated source of very high GI starch,
Are you sure about that? My experience is that if I haven't eaten enough and eat bread and then go running it doesn't help much, whereas if I eat sweets or something else with a lot of sugar it helps almost immediately.
My standard meal is eggs, sausage, and onions sauteed in butter and topped with salsa. Very cheap and fast (and good).
How refined is too refined exactly? Is whole wheat bread considered refined? Oatmeal? Granola?
Or are we specifically talking about white flour here?
Here's a link:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Glycemic_index_and_gl...
'carbocation posted a link to an Excel spreadsheet of GI listings for lots of foods, too.
You'll find that the lists aren't simply about demonizing Coca Cola and Wonder Bread.
This seems to be a good summary of what refined carbs are: http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/glossary/g/refinedcarbohdra...
Or, in short: All sugar including corn suryp, white grains (rice, wheat), starch, and grains in the form of flakes, puffs and so forth.
In this case, in addition to the other replies, I would point out that refined is not merely a synonym for "unnatural". The refining processes in question make the refined food much easier to digest, which causes the insulin spikes and (theoretically) the rest of the problems that arise when that happens chronically.
Personally I don't think it's impossible to mass-produce quality food, and there are other forms of "refinement" that can either raise the quality of the food, or bring out specific characteristics of the food without much loss, such as cold-pressing oils, so I don't think of refinement itself as a sort of dirty word or anything. Much, if not most, of the reason we don't seem to mass-produce quality food is that we haven't had a correct definition of "quality food" here in the US for literally 50 years.
It might be possible to suggest that it is not in the interest of large corporations to have it known that doing nothing with food is better for you than having them do things to it and then sell it on for a decent markup. If you were to believe that we live in societies where Governments treat corporate interest ahead of that of their general population of course.
That said, I tend to just saute or steam. Deep-fat frying is a lot of work for dubious reward.
The rest, yes, assuming you mean full-sugar/full-HFCS soda. (Diet sodas may be bad, but I find the theories behind that to be a bit more theoretical than the I-think-proved danger of the full-sugar sodas.) You'd think in some sense that "easier to digest" would be a good thing, but it really turns out not to be. And you'd be surprised what all has sugar and HFCS in it.
(I'm ambivalent about whether HFCS is worse for you than sugar or not; to be honest, the evidence for both is such that you really ought to almost entirely cut them out of your diet. As both meet that threshold, I consider arguing about which is worse to be mostly academic.)
With refined carbs (refined foods, actually) it should be seen as a spectrum, with less refined things (whole vegetables) being on on end and highly refined things (HFCS) on the other.
Just favoring less refined things over more refined things, without specific prohibitions of any particular ingredient can be a good place to start. Example:I've cut out HCFS soda altogether, but I still put a teaspoon of real sugar in my coffee.
Whole wheat, now matter how "unrefined" it is, is still an extremely crap food. You get a bit more minerals and proteins, but get more harmful phytates along with it. In general, it is like adding an ounce of quality wine to a barrel of sewage to beef it up, but the endproduct remains pretty much sewage.
"Refined" is not the word we're looking for, we're looking for specific compositions and chemicals that pose risks to our health. Much like the natural/unnatural dichotomy refinedness provides almost zero explaining power in regards to the normative question of what is good for you.
What you want, and everyone wants, is fair, unbiased testing of any medicine, regardless of origin. Peer reviewed science and FDA approval tests are not perfect, but in the vast majority of cases they are better than "centuries of empirical evidence." The placebo effect is very real; if people are paying money, betting their lives, and putting potentially dangerous compounds into their bodies (whatever the origin), then we'd like better than that.
Also, I would add that alternative medicines tend to fail by not working at all, whereas (what we'll call) lab medicines tend to fail by having unforeseen, unexpected, longer-term side effects.
But seriously, as far as I'm aware (and I try to stay current on this topic), there is no 'medicine' out there with "centuries of empirical evidence" that isn't already accepted. There are loads of compounds that claim to be effective, but when tested they are found to be no better than placebo.
Even if a compound is found to be effective, it isn't enough to make a good medicine. The active ingredient needs to be identified, extracted, and stabilised in a product that allows doctors to safely control the dose that a patient receives. Skipping all of that work and just trying to take an uncontrolled substance is dangerous - you can't tell if the active compound has broken down, or just isn't present in a particular sample, or conversely, is present in dangerous amounts. Furthermore, the naturally occurring compound may have other, undesirable compounds included with it.
Modern medicine aims to control for all of this, and yes, the complexity can be off-putting compared to the simplicity of "natural" solutions, but there are good reasons for that complexity existing.
If people no longer die so much of the diseases of aging, it might cause some problems, but I think they would be small compared to the benefits (few things compared to 100-150k dying each day after getting frail and sick).
Basically, scientists told the politician, "We don't know what's causing it. Our advice is to eat less meat and dairy and less food overall."
The politician said, "I can't say that. I live in an agricultural state! I need something more specific to say... What's in meat and diary that MIGHT be to blame?"
And thus, fat and saturated fat were thrust into the mainstream as things to avoid despite there being little to no evidence to that point.
Link here: http://riskfactor.cancer.gov/DHQ/database/gi_values.csfii_94...
Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333106
Plus mixing high glycemic food with other food will flatten out the curve.
It makes me a little bit suspicious that it is such a bad read and such a huge collection of studies, because quelling the opposition with an immense amount of information seems more like a rhetorical approach than a scientific approach.
Also, on videos I saw Taube still is overweight. Not eating his own dog food?
But I was just a kid and they were the grownups, so I didn't say anything and believed what they were telling me.
(Nothing, literally nothing, I learned in school outside of how to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic has been correct or useful in my life.)
The China Study makes some compelling arguments for avoiding "animal-based" foods, but of course, there are people like the Inuit, who don't exhibit high incidence of cancer and heart disease despite eating mostly animal-based foods.
I try to take all this stuff with a grain of salt, but the idea of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." seems most sensible to me. And I'd probably add to that, "Get some exercise."
Considering that this is the conclusion of the study, the article itself seems to soft-peddle the implications, stating in multiple places that saturated fat may be "less bad" than refined carbohydrates. I'm a little mystified as to why the article itself refuses to conclude that saturated fat is not a cause of heart disease. The evidence that it plays a role has never been particularly compelling.
basically, all three writers/experts agree that a vegetarian diet consisting of unprocessed foods is the best (although not foolproof) way to ensure that you will lead a long and disease free life.
the modern food revolution is only about 60 odd years old at this point - human evolution cannot keep up with how quickly our food has changed and how quickly our caloric intake has increased. perhaps in 10,000 years we will be able to find a way to absorb nutrients from krispy kreme donuts and pizza but for now its best to stick low on the food chain and as michael pollan say - "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants".
Anyone looking for sources or more info i recommend the following:
The China Study - T Colin Campbell The Food Revolution (Or Diet For a New America) - Tim Robbins The Omnivore Dilemma (Michael Pollan) Healthy At 100 - Tim Robbins
one last note - Diet for a new america was written in 1988!!! This information has been out there for decades - politics and misinformation has kept it relatively out of mainstream media and on the sidelines but the statistics and information is out there for those who take the time to look...
Robbins is a dietary extremist and his books make Quackwatch's list of non-recommended books that "promote misinformation, espouse unscientific theories, and/or contain unsubstantiated advice" [1]. The National Council Against Health Fraud even had a critical blurb towards his television program about Diet For a New America in their '91 newsletter [2].
While I find Campbell's actual research in the china studies important, the book infers much more than the studies showed, not to mention a lack of supporting follow-up studies that control for the most common criticisms (genetics, rates of exercise, comparisons with mostly meat-eating populations without diseases of civilization, etc.). I have a real issue with taking descriptive information from data and turning it into prescriptive advice before accumulating sound evidence. For a good critique, the always awesome SkepDoc Harriet Hall posted a review on the Science-Based Medicine blog (which I highly recommend) [3], although the comments get bogged down about her linking to a similar criticism by the Weston Price foundation.
Oddly enough, as a lifelong vegetarian myself, I find myself wanting to agree with these authors and recommending them to others. But it's disheartening these authors feel the need to fortify their ethical choices with shoddy scientific inferences. Yes, following their recommendations will almost certainly lead to better health, but only because those recommendations merely happen to correlate well with a healthier than average diet, not because their assumed causations about optimal health are necessarily correct.
However, I do agree with your recommendation for Pollan.
[1] http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecbooks.ht...
[2] http://www.ncahf.org/nl/1991/9-10.html
[3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=385
He went on a tour around the world, studying isolated groups of people, their diet (including mineral content) and checking their dental health, using it as a proxy for resistance to infection and proof that dietary needs are being met.
From studying groups as diverse as a remote Swiss village, windswept Scottish fishing town, African tribes, Pacific Islanders, and Inuit, he came to a series of conclusions which are at least somewhat in agreement with this.
A secondary point was also that poor nutrition of the mother, could be seen in children due to crowding of the tooth and other maladies.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html
The book is a little archaic and I am sure that some of the text sounds odd to modern-day ears, however if you can read past that you can find some interesting information.
I am aware of the skepticism some have about Weston Price, but recommend at least skimming his own words rather than reading only choice tidbits presented by those who disagree with him or would debunk his views as junk science.
Among their tenets:
* supporting raw whole milk instead of pasteurized milk
* believing that facial structure has an effect on health (and that the nutrition of one's parents affects this)
* campaigning against the fluoridation of public water
The book I mentioned does not talk about #1 and #3, but does mention his reasoning concerning #2 - that a lack of specific nutrients during pregnancy can lead to health problems, and that crowded teeth has nothing to do with genetics but instead has to do with nutrition.
If you read up on livestock nutrition, you will find that a lack of certain nutrients during gestation does lead to certain well-defined problems in the offspring; and for the next litter fixing the nutrition for the mother, stops the problem from recurring. I suppose a search for "pig gestation nutrition" will get you some links.
Personally I do question the need for fluoridation of water supply, given that other countries do not do it and their populations do not have significantly higher dental problems, i.e. lack of fluoridation is not correlated with higher rates of dental problems.
If Price's argument about nutrition is correct, fluoridation is treating the symptom rather than the cause in any case.
If a food is found in nature and humans evolved with it and like eating it, its more likely to be good for you if eaten with the sort of variety of foods you'd find in nature.
The fact that we like it is itself information about how healthy a food is, provided technology isn't fooling our brains somehow.
1. Glycemic index / load...all starchy carbohydrates raise your blood sugar quickly and then cause a crash. This includes both white bleached flour as well as whole grains.
2. Gluten is the protein found in many grains, wheat being the most common. Gluten is responsible for SO many of today's problems. Seriously just google "gluten" paired with any autoimmune disease or other health condition and you will find loads of information. This is not just for people who are diagnosed Celiacs but for all.
3. Lectins are found in all grains and legumes. They are the defense mechanism for the plant to warn off predators to not eat them. They are toxic. When we consume them they are considered "anti-nutrients" and bind to various nutrients in our body such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, etc. The more you eat, the more your body is leached.
4. Calorie per nutrient, grains are horrible. It is impossible to calculate a grain based diet to meet all the recommended intakes while staying below the recommended calories. When you calculate a diet based on lean meats, fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, it appears you are taking in a multivitamin.
5. Grains are acidic and the body is meant to run on an alkaline base. If you end the day leaning towards the acidic side you again start to leach nutrients, specifically calcium from your body. Replacing grains with fruits and vegetables gets you back to the alkaline side. The only acidic foods that should be consumed are grass-fed meats.
The Paleo approach is DEFINITELY the way to go for any person who is trying to get healthier and recover from chronic diseases your doctors have misdiagnosed you with. It is seriously amazing the vast number of misdiagnoses that occur when a holistic nutritional approach isn't considered.
http://www.imminst.org/forum/Acid-base-hypothesis-t40269.htm...
Also, I shall point out that oat is a glaring exception to the grain rule; it has NO gluten and lectin, it has a relatively mild impact on blood sugar and has a lot of fiber, with special mention of beta-glucan, an immunoprotectant, anti-cancer and blood sugar regulating fiber. However, make sure that it is plain rolled oats, steel-cut oats or oat bran; Cheerios is not a towering source of oat.