I can’t but help remember the Harvard study paid for by the sugar industry to blame fat:
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
out of curiosity, why is that particular study and publication weighed more heavily than... perhaps any other topic.
to me, this is like finding any random "coffee is good/bad for you" of which there are thousands that conflict, and saying "Aha! This particular one shaped the course of humanity for the last half a century due to a major conflict of interest and prestigious publication!"
were there just so many fewer studies in the 1960s? was there further collusion and influence with Congress and the FDA? did the sugar trade group fly airplanes and drop food pyramid pamphlets everywhere letting everyone know liberation was coming?
From your article:
> After the review was published, the debate about sugar and heart disease died down, while low-fat diets gained the endorsement of many health authorities, Dr. Glantz said.
so everyone just went along with it?
well, I've seen bad studies get headlines on Buzzfeed and stick in the collective conscious based on the headline alone, so stranger things have happened
Doesn’t the linked article explain the answer to your questions? I’m not sure I understand the snarky skepticism. Is it surprising that a scientific article with prestigious names attached has greater plausibility and weight than your example of “random” studies? Harvard backed studies as a rule seem to enjoy more support and media mentions than, say, University of Phoenix, no? There are examples of journal papers that are weighed more heavily than most, especially when the writing resonates with people emotionally. I can think of well known papers people talk about here on HN all the time as if they’re true, but aren’t.
Are you sure there thousands of primary-source coffee studies that make conclusions and judgements about whether it’s good or bad for you? Are you perhaps conflating blog spam and articles for scientific papers? There are lots and lots of articles, but not as many primary sources.
I've been very confused in the last couple decades about who the experts truly are. On one hand you have government agencies that hire "experts", and on the other hand you have the New York Times, Hacker News, Reddit, and CNN. There was a time when we thought the government was best to listen to, but now with the murder of George Floyd and the election of QAnoner Donald Trump and neoliberal Joe Biden I'm not so sure that they have our best interests in mind. Plus demonizing the press is textbook fascism.
In my view the real experts are writing for the New York Times, tirelessly searching for contradictions and ulterior motives in science so that the public may know the truth. Time and time again the press has shown that the real health foods are bacon, pork, and butter, and that we must avoid heart-disease causing foods such as rice, potatoes, fruit and carrots.
Whoosh, so the joke was that the centrists/independents/unaffiliated are perceiving things accurately but are ostracized by a polarized populace in every forum.
But its less beneficial for me to say that directly because then others would rather debate how both sides are different instead of acknowledging the overlapping areas of concern where they are the same.
Good luck with your approach of random non-sequiturs and false positives.
So much wrong with this article. First, it beats around the bush about the point of the article for quite a while, and then delivers a children's storybook version of the explanation after a while. Which is common in articles these days.
> The reason for this widespread genetic variation among Greenlanders is due to a diet that has stood out from that of the rest of the world for millennia.
Greenlanders haven't existed for millennia. Greenlanders have existed for just under a millennium.
> "It is probably due to Greenlanders not having had very much sugar in their diet"... He adds that this has made the genetic variation frequent, as there has never been a need to absorb sugar rapidly in the bloodstream.
That's not how evolution works. If this mutation gives a health or fitness advantage it would be selected for. It's selection probably ticked up after the widespread availability of sugar.
But on the topic in it, I think such a mutation would be great to have. I wonder if it exists off the island or how frequent it is.
Yeah it even starts with something not backed up by the study it's reporting on:
"Imagine being able to swap out broccoli for sweets, Ben & Jerry's or some other sugary treat and achieve the same health benefits. This is fact not fantasy for about two to three percent of the Greenlandic population"
The study does not say sweets confer the same health benefits as broccoli!
It kinda does, partially and indirectly. The study indicates it's not a matter of them eating less sucrose, the benefits actually don't show up in the absence of sucrose in the diet. It essentially acts like soluble fibre.
Of course the micro-nutrients that would be in the broccoli don't materialize out of nowhere.
The Thule people of which the Greenlanders seem to have been somewhat separate for at least 4000 years, this likely focuses on the Greenlanders because it is made by a Danish University. I don't think you can say that the same is not the case for other arctic populations, they just have no research showing that yet.
As the article points out, super high carb diets make them very sick, but what about the effects of lower or normal (pre 1900) carb diets when they're not feeling sick?
Given that its pretty well known that high levels of sugar in the gut cause gut bacteria to go wild, a very reasonable research hypothesis would be to figure out why their gut microbiome is naturally deficient, such that turbocharging it up with a dose of raw sugar beings their gut microbiome activity up to normal healthy levels.
Sure dumping 2 liters of pepsi soda in their gut might cause all kinds of IBS like symptoms when their guts explode. But in the old days they just ate a couple berries once in a while, or at least the article claimed that.
This could be something as trivial as lots of fat intake means lots of bile production means some probiotic bacteria that's sensitive to bile suffers, until they eat a tiny amount of sugar that lets them grow to normal levels.
Could look at what gut bacteria do in stereotypical average humans. Gut bacteria under normal conditions do churn out some thiamine, folate, biotin, riboflavin, vit K, and probably stuff I'm not able to find from a quick search at pubmed central.
I think a really good research paper would combine the article results with a hypothesis that greenlanders as a group suffer (or, archeologically suffered, or occasionally suffered, or their kids suffered, etc) from deficiencies in folate, biotin, vit K, etc, basically the list above, and turbo charging their gut bacteria with a dose of raw sugar makes the bacteria more active which brings their vit K level or whatever up to normal human levels such that they're healthier on average and/or their kids die less often etc.
I didn't google up much immediately for deficiencies in Greenlanders. Maybe folate. Small amounts of sugar in small intestine would superficially seem to help with that. Folate deficiency really screws up pregnant women. As a hypothesis for a future research paper, it all kinda adds up, almost too neatly (conspiracy theory like). So their diet is not exactly folate rich, their pregnant women get all messed up, someone gets a mutation where their gut bacteria which produce folate get turbocharged by a couple berries, thus producing more folate in their gut, which optimistically is absorbed by their pregnant women, so women with that mutation have like three times as many living children as folate-deficient women without the mutatuon, it all kinda adds up.
> Greenlanders haven't existed for millennia. Greenlanders have existed for just under a millennium.
I got google-y for fun and every scientific paper title implies its inuit greenlanders whom have the mutation, not the euro greenlanders, and greenland is about 90% inuit. The picture of the prof looks like he's a euro greenlander looks like Denmark heritage to me but who knows (and it doesn't matter much anyway).
wikipedia says the inuit greenlanders have been chillin on the island for near 5000 years now.
I would imagine due to intermarriage, if the euro greenlanders are outnumbered 10 to 1, that quite a few euro greenlanders have the mutation, but the paper titles all seem to imply inuit greenlanders only.
The wikipedia article implies the archeological inuit greenlander diet was mostly carnivore. That's actually pretty healthy as long as they eat enough organ meats but not too much (particularly liver)
It's also common knowledge, Inuit/Thule were pretty much the last ones that migrated from Asia across Bering. They displaced previous indigenous people that had been there for few thousand years before (at least in Canada).
They arrived in Greenland during the last millennium. Paleo-Inuit peoples have been in the Americas for probably around 5000 years. The previous indigenous people you're talking about were earlier branches of the same "family". Moreover, this particular mutation is known to be common in Arctic peoples as a whole, not just Greenlandic Inuit.
> If this mutation gives a health or fitness advantage it would be selected for.
That’s not always how evolution works, especially when you’re talking about characteristics that (as the writer pointed out) were not present or used during evolutionary selection. Adaptations that are selected for can and frequently do have byproduct effects that are not selected for. There are words for these effects, like “vestigial”, “tag-along”, “spandrel”, “byproduct”, “non-adaptive trait”, etc., etc.
I only read the article (not the study) but I also take issue with the following:
> Imagine being able to swap out broccoli for sweets, Ben & Jerry's or some other sugary treat and achieve the same health benefits.
The study finds the genetic variation/gut bacteria metabolizes the sugar directly from the intestines as opposed to being deposited in the blood-stream and triggering insulin to remove it and begin either the metabolic process or storage.
That is a metabolic benefit for sure and as a result could protect from metabolic and chronic diseases. But nothing about that process improves the nutritional value/health benefits of the sugar. Broccoli contains vitamins, minerals, and potentially enzymes (depending on cooking method) which the sugar doesn’t gain.
It doesn’t have to do with Greenland specifically but the Inuit lifestyle in general which is thousands of years old. Inuit settlement in Greenland may be more recent but people have practiced the Inuit lifestyle (and its almost 100% animal content) for much longer.
"The results demonstrate that carriers of the genetic variation have what is known as sucrase-isomaltase deficiency, meaning that they have a peculiar way of metabolizing sugar in the intestine. Simply put, they do not absorb ordinary sugar in the bloodstream the way people without the genetic variation do. Instead, sugar heads directly into their intestine."
Ha! What? SI, the gene that they studied, ONLY exists in the intestine. The inability to break down sucrose leads to microbe imbalance that concerts the sucrose to acetate. They are using the word "sugar" to cover everything from sucrose to any other oligosaccaride. They just do not understand the science enough. If you read the study it is clear.
And in NO way doe sthis mean that eating sugar is healthy for them as the title implies!!!! Look at what happens when you have this deficiency!
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/congenital-sucras...
"After ingestion of sucrose or maltose, an affected child will typically experience stomach cramps, bloating, excess gas production, and diarrhea. These digestive problems can lead to failure to gain weight and grow at the expected rate (failure to thrive) and malnutrition. "
So this is NOT a great mutation. There is no such thing as a universal "great" mutation. These genetic changes are just one change in a probably network of changes in the Inuit. Others would include genes like FADS1 and FADS2 and CPT1A.
(NOTE: I have Saami heritage, who are the Inuit of Finland.)
Next:
"'It is probably due to Greenlanders not having had very much sugar in their diet. For the most part, they have eaten meat and fat from fish, whales, seals and reindeer. A single crowberry may have crept in here and there, but their diet has had minimal sugar content,' "
Here the researchers are correct, this is not only a Greenlander trait, but a common trait in all Inuit, and very low sucrose is common in all Inuit diets.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25452324/
And this absolutely is a fitness example. For people with the common allele, the lack of sucrose in the diet leads to lower levels of acetate and these people would die off leaving the survivors with the less common allele to flourish.
The study does not conclude that at all. They only concluded they might be able to trick some people to make money off a a drug they will make.
Limitations: We hypothesize that the healthier metabolic profile observed in homozygous c.273_274delAG carriers was mediated by acetate produced by gut bacteria; however, we lack data to firmly verify this hypothesis.
Impact: Our results suggest that sucrase-isomaltase constitutes a promising drug target for improvement of metabolic health, and in a broader perspective add to the debate about the health effects of sugar consumption.
You know, it could be that these people are healthier because they avoid sugar because sugar makes them feel like crap when they get overloaded with aceatate.
There is no evidence that higher levels of acetate are better for people. Because if that as so drinking would be healthy for everyone.
>You know, it could be that these people are healthier because they avoid sugar because sugar makes them feel like crap when they get overloaded with aceatate.
They address that hypothesis and dismiss it. It's beyond my understanding to assess their methods, but don't pretend they didn't even mention it.
Where did the study say that? They did the genetic study on mice, not humans. And they only said it gave them a better BMI, which is only one indicator of health.
And then that part about the gut biome “learning how to make energy out of sugar”, facepalm. How can you write this, it’s really bad indeed. Oh and swap broccoli for sweets oh Greenlanders, like not being able to take up sugar efficiently equates to not needing anything of nutritional value.
> "Younger carriers of the variation experience negative consequences due to their different type of sugar absorption. For them, consuming sugar causes diarrhea, abdominal pain and bloating. Our guess is that as they age, their gut bacteria gradually get used to sugar and learn how to convert it into energy"
Sounds basically like lactose intolerance, but to sucrose instead of lactose.
Which raises the question, if gut bacteria can solve the symptoms, why don't we have probiotics to solve lactose intolerance too?
I don't have an answer to that question, but it's worth noting that lactose intolerance isn't a problem that needs solving, but rather the natural state of things for most humans on the planet and most (if not all) other mammals. There's no need for us to consume lactose after we've finished breastfeeding.
You've clearly never had a good goat cheese and thyme ice cream!
I kid but lactose intolerance does really hurt a lot of the food selection people are used to. Sure you can live off soylent or whatever but most people enjoy a wide variety of food including dairy.
Lactase is the main way that people digest lactose and it's produced by human intestinal epithelial cells rather than bacteria. It seems plausible that a bacteria to digest lactose could serve a similar role, but I don't think that's how people typically digest it.
We don't have probiotics but you can buy the lactase enzyme in pills and take it with lactose containing foods and avoid symptoms (as long as you dose right and eat quickly). My wife who is very lactose intolerant can still enjoy ice cream and queso.
I do have a friend who had a severe gastrointestinal issue and basically went through having his bacteria "reset" for a lack of a better term. It was pretty terrible and he was unable to eat most things before and during, but now is back to a pretty normal diet with some modifications. He was on very aggressive antibiotics followed by months long probiotic treatments.
This is super anecdotal and personal, but that quote sounds exactly like me. I'm Asian and didn't come from Greenland. Consuming sugar usually causes me those things, especially in high dose (like eating a slice of cake). Fortunately I don't like cake or most sweet things in general, but if I do eat them, I can only very eat very little or I would feel all of those (diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating). I'm also in my late 30s and borderline underweight (5'8" and 125 lbs). I have not grown out of this sucrose intolerance over the years.
That explanation doesn't really make sense, and a different one[1] appears in the paper itself. People who lack the enzymes to digest a sugar experience gastrointestinal distress because bacteria in the lower GI tract eat the sugar that wouldn't otherwise make it to them, producing gas in the process.
[1]>This discrepancy between adults and children, may be due to the maturation and growth of the small intestine, increasing the capacity to absorb luminal fluid with increasing age, and to dietary adaptation caused by symptoms in childhood.
They are guessing and they are wrong. Higher levels of acetate are just as bad as lower levels of acetate. You know what also raises acetate levels? The metabolism of Alcohol.
The Inuit need a different diet. They do not "get used to" these sugars.
And why should someone who is lactose intolerant eat lactose? We have been getting around this for years by making yogurt and cheese.
If the mutation makes it so kids have diarrhea every time they eat sugar - it might be possible that they learn not to eat sugar and are healthier as a result. Some of the bad consequences of sweet diet are very delayed.
My kid has an autoimmune (not genetic) version of this. It almost killed him. He is 5’ 10” and got down to 105 lbs, was severely malnourished and dehydrated. Couldn’t keep food down without significant medical intervention. He spent a month in the hospital and another month in an inpatient clinic to start to address the resultant eating disorder.
Also, without insurance, the drug to treat it (sucrase) is $4000/month and is available only in a liquid form that has to be refrigerated… and you have to take it with meals. Which means you have to carry a small cryo bottle with you wherever you go.
That's an absolutely insane price for something used in food production. Have you looked into using food-grade sucrase instead? There's an article about using BioInvert 200 as a substitute for Sucraid here: https://ejhp.bmj.com/content/24/Suppl_1/A226.2
52 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
to me, this is like finding any random "coffee is good/bad for you" of which there are thousands that conflict, and saying "Aha! This particular one shaped the course of humanity for the last half a century due to a major conflict of interest and prestigious publication!"
were there just so many fewer studies in the 1960s? was there further collusion and influence with Congress and the FDA? did the sugar trade group fly airplanes and drop food pyramid pamphlets everywhere letting everyone know liberation was coming?
From your article:
> After the review was published, the debate about sugar and heart disease died down, while low-fat diets gained the endorsement of many health authorities, Dr. Glantz said.
so everyone just went along with it?
well, I've seen bad studies get headlines on Buzzfeed and stick in the collective conscious based on the headline alone, so stranger things have happened
People tend to chose what they want to believe first, then build a framework around that to support the decisions they wanted to do anyway.
Are you sure there thousands of primary-source coffee studies that make conclusions and judgements about whether it’s good or bad for you? Are you perhaps conflating blog spam and articles for scientific papers? There are lots and lots of articles, but not as many primary sources.
In my view the real experts are writing for the New York Times, tirelessly searching for contradictions and ulterior motives in science so that the public may know the truth. Time and time again the press has shown that the real health foods are bacon, pork, and butter, and that we must avoid heart-disease causing foods such as rice, potatoes, fruit and carrots.
But its less beneficial for me to say that directly because then others would rather debate how both sides are different instead of acknowledging the overlapping areas of concern where they are the same.
Good luck with your approach of random non-sequiturs and false positives.
> The reason for this widespread genetic variation among Greenlanders is due to a diet that has stood out from that of the rest of the world for millennia.
Greenlanders haven't existed for millennia. Greenlanders have existed for just under a millennium.
> "It is probably due to Greenlanders not having had very much sugar in their diet"... He adds that this has made the genetic variation frequent, as there has never been a need to absorb sugar rapidly in the bloodstream.
That's not how evolution works. If this mutation gives a health or fitness advantage it would be selected for. It's selection probably ticked up after the widespread availability of sugar.
But on the topic in it, I think such a mutation would be great to have. I wonder if it exists off the island or how frequent it is.
This is not always the case. Be wary of assigning intent to a stochastic process like evolution. It's about probability, not certainty.
See: vagus nerve
"Imagine being able to swap out broccoli for sweets, Ben & Jerry's or some other sugary treat and achieve the same health benefits. This is fact not fantasy for about two to three percent of the Greenlandic population"
The study does not say sweets confer the same health benefits as broccoli!
Of course the micro-nutrients that would be in the broccoli don't materialize out of nowhere.
Given that its pretty well known that high levels of sugar in the gut cause gut bacteria to go wild, a very reasonable research hypothesis would be to figure out why their gut microbiome is naturally deficient, such that turbocharging it up with a dose of raw sugar beings their gut microbiome activity up to normal healthy levels.
Sure dumping 2 liters of pepsi soda in their gut might cause all kinds of IBS like symptoms when their guts explode. But in the old days they just ate a couple berries once in a while, or at least the article claimed that.
This could be something as trivial as lots of fat intake means lots of bile production means some probiotic bacteria that's sensitive to bile suffers, until they eat a tiny amount of sugar that lets them grow to normal levels.
Could look at what gut bacteria do in stereotypical average humans. Gut bacteria under normal conditions do churn out some thiamine, folate, biotin, riboflavin, vit K, and probably stuff I'm not able to find from a quick search at pubmed central.
I think a really good research paper would combine the article results with a hypothesis that greenlanders as a group suffer (or, archeologically suffered, or occasionally suffered, or their kids suffered, etc) from deficiencies in folate, biotin, vit K, etc, basically the list above, and turbo charging their gut bacteria with a dose of raw sugar makes the bacteria more active which brings their vit K level or whatever up to normal human levels such that they're healthier on average and/or their kids die less often etc.
I didn't google up much immediately for deficiencies in Greenlanders. Maybe folate. Small amounts of sugar in small intestine would superficially seem to help with that. Folate deficiency really screws up pregnant women. As a hypothesis for a future research paper, it all kinda adds up, almost too neatly (conspiracy theory like). So their diet is not exactly folate rich, their pregnant women get all messed up, someone gets a mutation where their gut bacteria which produce folate get turbocharged by a couple berries, thus producing more folate in their gut, which optimistically is absorbed by their pregnant women, so women with that mutation have like three times as many living children as folate-deficient women without the mutatuon, it all kinda adds up.
I got google-y for fun and every scientific paper title implies its inuit greenlanders whom have the mutation, not the euro greenlanders, and greenland is about 90% inuit. The picture of the prof looks like he's a euro greenlander looks like Denmark heritage to me but who knows (and it doesn't matter much anyway).
wikipedia says the inuit greenlanders have been chillin on the island for near 5000 years now.
I would imagine due to intermarriage, if the euro greenlanders are outnumbered 10 to 1, that quite a few euro greenlanders have the mutation, but the paper titles all seem to imply inuit greenlanders only.
The wikipedia article implies the archeological inuit greenlander diet was mostly carnivore. That's actually pretty healthy as long as they eat enough organ meats but not too much (particularly liver)
The Thule people, from whom modern indigenous Greenlanders descend, originated around 1000 CE in Alaska.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25452324/
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_Inuit
It's also common knowledge, Inuit/Thule were pretty much the last ones that migrated from Asia across Bering. They displaced previous indigenous people that had been there for few thousand years before (at least in Canada).
That’s not always how evolution works, especially when you’re talking about characteristics that (as the writer pointed out) were not present or used during evolutionary selection. Adaptations that are selected for can and frequently do have byproduct effects that are not selected for. There are words for these effects, like “vestigial”, “tag-along”, “spandrel”, “byproduct”, “non-adaptive trait”, etc., etc.
> Imagine being able to swap out broccoli for sweets, Ben & Jerry's or some other sugary treat and achieve the same health benefits.
The study finds the genetic variation/gut bacteria metabolizes the sugar directly from the intestines as opposed to being deposited in the blood-stream and triggering insulin to remove it and begin either the metabolic process or storage.
That is a metabolic benefit for sure and as a result could protect from metabolic and chronic diseases. But nothing about that process improves the nutritional value/health benefits of the sugar. Broccoli contains vitamins, minerals, and potentially enzymes (depending on cooking method) which the sugar doesn’t gain.
the more important question is if a mutation presents as a disadvantage for reproduction.
They needed this polymorphism to survive on a diet with low sucrose.
That sentence is saying the diet is millennia old. The diet and genetic variation are also common to other Inuit populations.
(Note: I am an amateur Nutritional Geneticist)
They said:
"The results demonstrate that carriers of the genetic variation have what is known as sucrase-isomaltase deficiency, meaning that they have a peculiar way of metabolizing sugar in the intestine. Simply put, they do not absorb ordinary sugar in the bloodstream the way people without the genetic variation do. Instead, sugar heads directly into their intestine."
Ha! What? SI, the gene that they studied, ONLY exists in the intestine. The inability to break down sucrose leads to microbe imbalance that concerts the sucrose to acetate. They are using the word "sugar" to cover everything from sucrose to any other oligosaccaride. They just do not understand the science enough. If you read the study it is clear.
And in NO way doe sthis mean that eating sugar is healthy for them as the title implies!!!! Look at what happens when you have this deficiency!
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/congenital-sucras... "After ingestion of sucrose or maltose, an affected child will typically experience stomach cramps, bloating, excess gas production, and diarrhea. These digestive problems can lead to failure to gain weight and grow at the expected rate (failure to thrive) and malnutrition. "
So this is NOT a great mutation. There is no such thing as a universal "great" mutation. These genetic changes are just one change in a probably network of changes in the Inuit. Others would include genes like FADS1 and FADS2 and CPT1A.
(NOTE: I have Saami heritage, who are the Inuit of Finland.)
Next:
"'It is probably due to Greenlanders not having had very much sugar in their diet. For the most part, they have eaten meat and fat from fish, whales, seals and reindeer. A single crowberry may have crept in here and there, but their diet has had minimal sugar content,' "
Here the researchers are correct, this is not only a Greenlander trait, but a common trait in all Inuit, and very low sucrose is common in all Inuit diets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25452324/
And this absolutely is a fitness example. For people with the common allele, the lack of sucrose in the diet leads to lower levels of acetate and these people would die off leaving the survivors with the less common allele to flourish.
That's actually exactly what the study concludes. They say children do experience those symptoms, but adapt as adults and are better off for it.
Limitations: We hypothesize that the healthier metabolic profile observed in homozygous c.273_274delAG carriers was mediated by acetate produced by gut bacteria; however, we lack data to firmly verify this hypothesis.
Impact: Our results suggest that sucrase-isomaltase constitutes a promising drug target for improvement of metabolic health, and in a broader perspective add to the debate about the health effects of sugar consumption.
You know, it could be that these people are healthier because they avoid sugar because sugar makes them feel like crap when they get overloaded with aceatate.
There is no evidence that higher levels of acetate are better for people. Because if that as so drinking would be healthy for everyone.
https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article-abstract/23/2/123/96...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.20.212597v1....
They address that hypothesis and dismiss it. It's beyond my understanding to assess their methods, but don't pretend they didn't even mention it.
Sounds basically like lactose intolerance, but to sucrose instead of lactose.
Which raises the question, if gut bacteria can solve the symptoms, why don't we have probiotics to solve lactose intolerance too?
I kid but lactose intolerance does really hurt a lot of the food selection people are used to. Sure you can live off soylent or whatever but most people enjoy a wide variety of food including dairy.
I do have a friend who had a severe gastrointestinal issue and basically went through having his bacteria "reset" for a lack of a better term. It was pretty terrible and he was unable to eat most things before and during, but now is back to a pretty normal diet with some modifications. He was on very aggressive antibiotics followed by months long probiotic treatments.
[1]>This discrepancy between adults and children, may be due to the maturation and growth of the small intestine, increasing the capacity to absorb luminal fluid with increasing age, and to dietary adaptation caused by symptoms in childhood.
They are guessing and they are wrong. Higher levels of acetate are just as bad as lower levels of acetate. You know what also raises acetate levels? The metabolism of Alcohol.
The Inuit need a different diet. They do not "get used to" these sugars.
And why should someone who is lactose intolerant eat lactose? We have been getting around this for years by making yogurt and cheese.
I wonder how they controlled for that effect.
Also, without insurance, the drug to treat it (sucrase) is $4000/month and is available only in a liquid form that has to be refrigerated… and you have to take it with meals. Which means you have to carry a small cryo bottle with you wherever you go.
Don’t wish for this to happen to you.