And now, 13 years after Lustig's "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" totally convinced me it was sugar and not fat, and sugar consumption has decreased while obesity has increased, I'm unconvinced it's sugar either. It's some environmental contaminant.
Probably sugar consumption has gone down because people have replaced it with artificial sweeteners, which have similar metabolic effects in the body to what Lustig has attributed to sugar. It'd be nice to see a combined graph of sugar + artificial sweeteners.
Starch converts to glucose, which is processed VERY differently from table sugar, sucrose, or the type of sugar found in fruit, fructose.
So, sugar is not all sugar. I believe Lustig has argued that the latter two are much worse than the former.
I agree overeating of carbs is not good, but is the reason why America is so fat because we just magically eat more bread, noodles, and potatoes than comparable countries? Probably not.
White bread literally has basically the same affect on blood sugar as an equal amount of sugar (by weight) as does processed (not whole wheat) pasta. It may be a bit delayed vs sugar's almost immediate absorption but the end result is quite on the same order.
Also, the consumption of sucrose in the developed world may or may not have appreciably decreased in the period since Lustig's lecture came out, but the pandemic and corresponding spike in inflation have forced many people to seek out cheaper sources of food. And what are those cheaper sources of food loaded with? Yep: sugar and salt.
Now I’m just a person who has remained the same approximate weight for the past 3 decades so I don’t know anything about substantial weight loss or gain.
But is it at all possible it’s just calories in calories out? I know it isn’t a sexy theory but it works like hell for me.
I am down 14kg this year through IF (typically around 20:4, some 18:6 and even some 22:2) - was 16-17kg down until I got my bread machine, now slowly working my way down again. Started at nearly 100kg; I consider my ideal weight to be just under 80kg, being a reasonably tall male who lifts weights to combat the office chair, getting closer to 50 years old.
Speaking from personal experience, I will likely eat fewer calories if I get those from high protein, high fat sources (say: egg & bacon omelette, cooked in butter) than high carbohydrate (say: home made high protein bread, buttery spread, blackberry jam sandwiches).
Why? The former just has that slower, more impactful energy release - and it's easier to stop eating after that one meal, whereas the bread might very well make me go "oooh that was yum, I didn't realise how hungry I am, let's make another one".
Calories in calories out (CICO) is the what, not the why. If you saw someone who spent $1000 on jewelry every month and didn't pay their electricity bills, would you tell them to learn to budget? Heck no, you'd tell them they need therapy to fix much deeper root causes. So why are we telling obese people they need to "budget" by saying that CICO is the one and only solution?
CICO is great if you want to lose a few pounds, and if an obese person sticks to it, they will lose weight. But while CICO is a great tool, followers of CICO as the one and only way frustrate me, as they turn weight loss into a moral struggle solely about willpower. To them, the only reason someone is fat is because they are weak willed and any desire for an "easy way" out through anything other than CICO is viewed as laziness. Yet, while most of these "easy ways" out are indeed fake, we do know that in several specific cases there is a root cause separate from willpower, such as thyroid disorders and PCOS.
In these cases, it is not simply a matter of the affected person having less willpower, but rather that they need greater willpower to use CICO to overcome their obesity than their non-obese counterparts. Note that in these cases CICO does still work, but once you shift the perspective from "these people have less willpower" to "something is requiring these people to have greater willpower to do the same thing" then a new question immediately arises: "what is that something?"
Considering we know such root causes are possible, is it so unreasonable that rather than 1/3 of the population having bad willpower, that instead they have some sort of invisible disorder that is the root cause? Before 1982, gastritis and peptic ulcers had unknown causes and were attributed to stress. These days, we understand there is a bacteria H Pylori that is the root cause that we can give antibiotics for and "magically" cure. My personal belief is that within 100 years we will find some sort of similar root cause for obesity and if we are lucky, we may similarly be able to find a "magic cure" for it too.
Meanwhile, as someone who is obese and is working on it, I absolutely do recommend CICO as the best tool we currently have. But it's strikingly similar to trying to get a homeless person to budget in that there are likely other things that need to be fixed first, we just don't know what they are.
Just because someone believes CICO is accurate doesn't mean they also have this "all about willpower" perspective. I think CICO is most of the problem and I also think attributing overeating to a lack of willpower is naive.
More importantly, the willpower debate is irrelevant on a population level. Dieters and personal trainers can argue about it until they're blue in the face but it has nothing to do with policy.
We could achieve better public health outcomes if we accepted that CICO is the big and clear cut problem and ignored all that other stuff.
For example: if you accept that overeating calories is THE public health crisis to solve, our policies around subsidizing cheap calories would no longer make sense. It would follow naturally to discontinue those policies and subsidize nutrient-dense, low calorie foods instead (i.e. fruits and vegetables intended for unprocessed consumption).
Then you would give people an economic incentive to go to the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables instead of Hot Pockets. Public policy can't fix the whole problem, but it can adjust economic incentives.
Unfortunately people are off tilting at various windmills like mystery pathogens, estrogens in the water, plastic packaging, whatever - instead of accepting that CICO is this clear and central problem and crafting policy which reflects it.
> Calories in calories out (CICO) is the what, not the why.
CICO is basic thermodynamics, but yeah, it's incredibly reductionist.
OMAD (One Meal A Day) isn't some magic bullet that creates weight loss. If your One Meal is 3000 calories, you won't lose weight. What it's supposed to do though is train yourself to manage hunger. I can eat a massive meal (24 oz steak, 8 oz of broccoli or green beans, and a couple wheat rolls) and still be hungry less than 3 hours later. Some people have suggested OMAD and said that supposedly, if I force myself to remain hungry most of the day, eventually I'll get a bit numb to the sensation and it'll allow me to recalibrate me sense of hunger.
Keto is similar. It helps you reduce the CI part of CI by eliminating carbs which do very little to make you feel full compared to protein, fat, and fiber. But if you're still eating 3,000 calories/day because you're eating 24 oz steaks and half a pound of bacon and 6 eggs every day, then you won't lose weight.
Meanwhile, as someone who is obese and is working on it, I absolutely do recommend CICO as the best tool we currently have. But it's strikingly similar to trying to get a homeless person to budget in that there are likely other things that need to be fixed first, we just don't know what they are.
Sounds kind of hopeless when you put it that way doesn’t it?
It kind of sounds like a self-defeating narrative. “We don’t know the answer, so let’s either 1) keep status quo or 2) try a bunch of silly things that only temporarily help at best”.
I used to eat a decent amount of sugar including daily soda. Ten years ago I got my blood test back that showed high triglycerides - 251. It was very high for me and I resolved to do something about it.
I went cold turkey on sugar. Stopped soda, stopped sweets, etc. I didn’t try to stop all sugar like what’s added to bread but other than that I was done.I explicitly did not replace it with artificial sweetener. Instead I tried to develop the mentality that sugar was poison and I simply didn’t eat it. Not as a temporary diet, but ever. Two things happened:
1) I had two weeks of horrible sugar cravings trying to drive me to eating sugar
2) Then the cravings stopped completely. Fruit started tasting amazing.
At my next physical, triglycerides were 113. Ten years later and they stay about 80. Haven’t had a soda in ten years. The thought of drinking a disgustingly syrupy soda disgusts me. It’s probably one of the reasons it’s stuck: if I kept the mentality that I was depriving myself my willpower would eventually give in. Instead I crave soda about as much as I crave eating a bowl full of grasshoppers.
Anyway, just giving my experience. YMMV, good luck on your path.
Agreed - all of the things said below, plus: depression; less activity due to cars, sitting at desks all day, and other non-active activities; the absolute contant confusion about what foods are healthy and aren't; the complete confusion over what "food" actually is (Michael Pollan has done some great writing there).
It's a combination of all of these - and many other - variables, which have different influences on different people. For every morbidly obese person dealing with all of the health, societal, and metal affects, I can just as easily find at least one unhealthy "healthy" person who obsesses WAY too much over this stuff. Both have eating disorders for pretty much the same reasons, but with different results. And there are more than enough folks who continue to take advantage of all of this confusion to make money at both ends who see no reason to stop it and prefer to prolong it.
Based on personal observations I find it very hard to believe sugar consumption has decreased across the US population in the last 13 years.
There's a near constant line out every Starbucks drive-thru I pass. Whenever I go in one to work while caffeinated, those definitely aren't unsweetened beverages being prepared for the masses. Supposedly the whole reason Starbucks espresso is so bitter is so it works well with their sweetened beverages, straight espresso drinkers are in the extreme minority.
How fructose is metabolized is so well understood at this point it's clearly a major factor in obesity and diabetes. It's the primary cause of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease AIUI.
And it hasn't been removed from the US diet. That's very unlikely to occur until corn subsidies go away. Even once that occurs it'll take awhile for such a huge industry to evolve away from such a mature supply chain. It strikes me as a problem resembling pivoting from fossil fuels. It won't happen quickly, and we haven't even started yet w/fructose.
Which is why I don't think the graph at that twitter link above is even plausibly true. Furthermore there's massive business interest in convincing the public sugar isn't the problem, so don't bother stopping consuming it. That's what all the sugar addicts certainly want to hear anyways.
sugar isn't that much more expensive than corn syrup, so I don't think cancelling subsidies on it would make much difference at all as sugar could replace it 1:1 with very little overall increase in prices of food products.
I don't think it's so simple, HFCS has industrial advantages over sucrose in addition to the subsidies. So if HFCS were made more expensive it's unclear to me if sucrose would even be an acceptable substitute for all the ways HFCS is (ab)used due to its sweetness, stability, and ease of use advantages over sucrose.
They put HFCS in practically everything processed on store shelves because it's so cheap and checks many boxes from preservative to browning agent, and I'm sure myriad other effects I know nothing about.
The chart cited in that tweet seems to have a very suspicious trend. I highly doubt some consumption trend has such a sharp inflection point like that.
I would suspect that it is either both of the following:
- data is based on some food survey, and they changed how they asked the question
- "sugar" in the chart is just some specific sugar (e.g. cane sugar), and there was some substitute or reclassification (e.g. fructose -> sucrose?)
Also, I find it very hard to believe that global sugar consumption has been declining, given how hard junk food countries are pushing into less regulated developing economies (e.g. Coca Cola in Chiapas MX, just look on youtube).
Sugar decreased? I can't eat any US bakery just because it has enormous amount of sugar and gluten. Unbearable. If this is decreased... what was before?
It's processed food! Thinking it's sugar, fat, or some other macro/micronutrient is reductionist "nutritionism".
Food processing and industrial cooking is the culprit. It took me about 20 years to understand this.
Michael Pollan wrote lucidly about it starting ~15 years ago, and he wrote about the marketing patterns that the food industry uses (to this day) to cast blame.
And this is being made rigorous, e.g. by the NIH. Great article with history and science: How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket (includes recent Brazilian public health policy, and the NIH study)
You can eat ANYTHING except processed food: traditional Asian, Italian, Mexican, Indian, etc. with the ingredients and recipes they used. Really! The problem is that this is quite difficult to get in many areas, because so much food is processed and enhanced to sell.
For a rough picture, processed food was probably 5% of the American diet in 1940, and when I grew up in the 80's and 90's it was maybe 50%. But now it's more like 80%.
There is a group of scientists and policy makers making this rigorous. They are starting to use the label "ultra-processed food" which has a precise definition.
He is the one who is described as a physicist by training, and he thought a calorie is a calorie -- whether it's processed or not.
That's the "reductionist hypothesis".
He EASILY disproved it and changed his mind. The study controls for macro- and micro-nutrients and the only difference is PROCESSING.
And his new question is to ask how can we make processed food HEALTHY ! Because it feeds a lot of people. So he's not the typical person who espouses a view against processing. Again read the guardian article for background.
(Personally I will eat unprocessed foods until they answer that question.)
Governments are finally paying attention because their population has been ravaged by processed food in the last ~70 years. Brazil and Mexico have big problems. It corresponds to when processed foods and industrial cooking took over. This is an extremely repeatable experiment -- again read Pollan.
Historically, populations get the set of chronic conditions called "Western diet disease" (obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, etc.) when introduced to processed foods and industrial preparation/cooking.
Unless you believe in culinary Cartesian dualism, there must be some physical characteristic in which the effect of the processing is embodied.
The actual issue is almost certainly insufficient granularity in classification of nutrients. For example, treating chemically distinct plant fats as fungible with animal fats. (In fact, that's a serious contender as the single biggest issue behind "processed" food - it's all made using disgusting plant oils.)
It's all sorts of stuff, but avoiding "processing" will lead you to make the best choices in practice.
Food processing is complex, dynamic, and adversarial (see my comment above)
As Hall points out, there is more research possible to find the underlying mechanisms. However even those mechanisms are proximate causes, not the ultimate cause.
We already know a lot -- it basically boils down to economics:
(1) Processing uses ingredients you can't find in your kitchen which may be bad for you. For example, emulsifiers -- did your grandma cook with xanthan gum, etc.? Because these things make it easy to process food at scale.
A mechanism that has been suggested by Lustig is that the emulsifiers still emulsify in your stomach, and give you leaky gut syndrome
This is just one example; there are hundreds of food additives that basically exist to support SCALE of manufacturing and sale, including increased shelf life
(2) Predictable inputs to assembly lines support food processing, including both plants and animals
In plants, this is a monoculture of single breeds of wheat, corn, and rice. (Pollan talks about how everything in the middle supermarket shelves is like this. It has a very wide range of labeling, colors, packaging, etc. but most of it is the SAME commodities processed in various ways, and lacking in nutrition. Picture: think about that commodity wheat that was stuck on a boat in Ukraine.)
And a lack of things like fermentation, which is hard to control industrially.
In animals, it's factory farming, which optimizes the mass of the animal against all else (including nutrition). These homogeneous animals have a very homogeneous set of diseases treated with antibiotics and so forth
-----
In addition to dozens of other books, the recent book "What Your Food Ate" by U of W scientists talks how this optimizes for CALORIES and deoptimizes for NUTRITION.
e.g. Think bland, tasteless supermarket carrots and tomatoes -- those didn't exist 80 years ago! McDonald's has to put mayo and sauce on them to make them palatable, but a real carrot or tomato tastes amazing
If you believe in capitalism, and believe that it's possible for say a carrot of great mass/calories to have less nutrition, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen (e.g. regulation, which doesn't do it).
----
Basically people have to eat more to get the same amount of nutrition, making them fatter.
I think this gets at the core of it more than say "emulsifiers" or "trans fat". Your body is extremely resilient -- it can metabolize small amounts of almost any chemical.
But it CANNOT metabolize this steady and large volume of processed food -- say 50% more daily calories than what people ate in 1940, with fewer nutrients. This is what gets you chronic diseases, i.e. "Western diet disease"
----
Although I think Pollan's books have the most explanatory power -- they talk about how this system arose. (including advertising toward women, e.g. freeing the women of the burden of booking)
Like "don't eat what doesn't spoil". Processed food is made NOT to spoil. That's what makes it profitable.
One way to make it not spoil is to take out things that microorganisms want to eat. But if a bacteria doesn't want to eat it, then YOU probably don't want to eat it either! It's probably just empty calories and processed wheat/corn, with little nutrition
-----
tl;dr processing, scale, and profits are the fundamental causes. You can find more specific mechanisms and specific chemicals, but just avoiding processed foods is the most actionable advice. There have been dozens of vilified nutrients and foods ...
Also, I have to point out that this doesn't follow, and is naive
What we don't know about nutrition is greater than what we know -- that is obvious
You might hold an overly static model of food consumption and biology. In terms of what's relevant to your health, food is NOT a linear combination of its nutrients -- that is a fallacy promoted by the food industry and journalists who want catchy headlines.
For example, time is a variable. There's nothing that says that eating spinach for 3 meals, followed by beef for 3 meals, is the same as eating spinach and beef together in 6 meals. Even if you eat exactly the same thing.
And there are hundreds of other variables not captured by models -- e.g. things like gut bacteria means your body is quite stateful, and has many feedback mechanisms!
Models are not reality
Nutritional science necessarily relies on models (simple statistics), and there's lot of evidence that they're poor ones -- using their conclusions leads to astoundingly bad outcomes! It's weird that people continue to believe things that don't actually work
The kind of reasoning that Pollan uses, which includes a lot of science, is more explanatory and accurate than the reasoning you're using
The term "unprocessed foods" smells too much like the naturalistic fallacy to me.
According to that definition weight loss bars, that are designed to be high-protein (hence high-satiety), would be considered a processed food simply for using artificial colors.
It seems clear sugar is the culprit, and if you are avoiding processed foods you are also avoiding added sugar.
This is assuming that the food landscape and choices available has been static
It's actually dynamic and adversarial -- Michael Pollan has great examples of that, e.g. the "Snackwells" example
Over the decades, the industry has various types of processed food based on what the "accepted scientific advice" is at the time -- which often turns out to be wrong or in this case "interested" advice, like
- butter vs. margarine
- eggs and cholesterol
- does high fat cause heart disease? It was accepted, but we don't even know that
- vitamin D
When fat was vilified (by the sugar industry), you got pushed with "low fat" labeling
Then you got "Diet coke", 0% sugar labeling, 0 calorie labeling
There was also the "all natural" label to respond to a trend, which is ironically a bad sign, because the packaging to write the label on indicates processing. Does a banana need to have an "all natural" label?
Simlar to the way the first Whole Foods (I think in Austin TX) used to actually sell only whole foods!
Now they sell lots of processed foods at Whole Foods.
----
If you avoid processed foods, you do avoid sugar, but you also avoid salt, trans fat, etc. Concentrating on a single nutrient is the reductionist fallacy, and the cause of the "scientific advice whiplash" and "national eating disorder" that Pollan talks about
This really seems like touchy-feely, granola-mom type thinking, sprayed with a thin veneer of empiricism to sway the skeptics who don't look too closely.
Your two sources, as well as the Canadian heart and stroke center (the top google result for ultra processed food), all define ultra processed food differently, which lead to different outcomes to a question as simple as "is ice cream ultra-processed?".
(the answers: the Brazilian paper says it depends largely on ingredients and additives, Kevin Hall says milk itself is ultra-processed, the Canadian heart and stroke center classifies milk as a non processed food but almost certainly considers ice cream ultra processed because it defines ultra processed in terms of mechanical processes)
With no remotely similar operating definition, and the fact that a hundred other different consumption habits change across populations in the process of industrialization at the same time as some thus undefined sub-element of diet, this seems like a just-so story given legs by the fact that it gives an easy solution to an obvious problem.
Some ice cream is ultra-processed, and some isn't.
Just like some corn is grown in a dead soil with nitrogen fertilizer, and some grown in live soil (regenerative, with crop rotation, etc.)
I agree it's not easy to tell -- it took quite me a while, and also a lot of "unlearning"
See my other replies in sibling comments for more color -- the fundamental issue is that processed food is cheaper, and that the processing / scale / profits itself are what makes it harmful and even addictive
(as Hall found, the people who ate processed foods ate faster, and more)
----
Also did you watch the Hall video? Does it really come across as "granola-mom"?
Hall isn't who I'm talking about, more the general cultural movement around defining things as, and avoiding, ultra processed foods. It resembles a lot of other niche, contradictory diet movements I've seen, all backed by at least a handful of studies (and almost always with some well spoken PhD at the forefront), whether it's this, ketogenic metabolizing, avoiding poly unsaturated fatty acids, multi day fasts with supplements and salts, intermittent fasting, etc.
These generally tend to appeal to, and also cause massive schisms among the aforementioned granola mom types, much like say, how babies and kids sleep should be handled.
The reason I don't consider these movements all that valuable or useful is that they all seem to don the cloak of empiricism post hoc, after they have decided what they believe, and when it comes to pushing the idea, any relevant study will do, because the research result is effectively a marketing headline, similar to the original article for this thread.
And while Hall may be somewhat convincing, if I lived my life by the advice of every convincing talk I'd ever heard, I'd have to follow a lot of mutually exclusive advice, and with regards to dieting, between Kevin Hall, Ray Peat, and David Sinclair, I'm not sure they'd let me eat enough calorie dense food to survive.
That graph is misleading. The 1980s level of sugar intake is already way, way higher than sugar intake of prior generations of humans. For example, if you eat 3 times as much sugar as prior generations, reducing the intake to only 2 times as much, which is still too high, means you still get diabetes and liver disease. I'm impressed that people are so easily fooled by this one.
I'd agree that sugar isn't the only thing to blame - there's a lot more nuance, and increased sugar is only one of the many negative environmental/lifestyle changes affecting modern metabolic health (increased meal frequency, lower quality of sleep/circadian disruption, food processing and hyper-processing, and sure, hormone altering contaminants in the food and water supply all play a role. Also, speculatively an unprecedented increase in the consumption of PUFAs), but I think it's still worth noting some caveats to Guyunet's graph that you link to:
* While sugar (sucrose from sugar beets and sugar cane) has decreased since 1980, this is largely because of a switch to non-sugar caloric sweeteners, initially HFCS, and a range of others (I've noticed agave being pretty popular in "health" foods for example - while it has a slightly lower GI, it's actually more calorically dense than sugar: https://www.sugar.org/wp-content/uploads/Sweeteners-in-Food_...). Note you can look at a graph of the intake data from the Sugar Association (a sugar industry site) that shows that total sweetener consumption remains quite high: https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/ (data is sourced from the USDA)
* While these are aggregate/average numbers, and obesity in the US continues to grow https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html (41.9% in 2017-2020 data) - a declining overall consumption may mask a divergence between a decrease in healthier and increase in unhealthier populations - it's hard to separate that out because the data isn't broken down between the USDA consumption vs NHANES health data populations.
* A lot of the "sugar consumption is declining (or soda consumption is declining) so it can't be the problem" proclamations are also being masked by the aformentioned caloric sweetener replacement, and in the sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) replacement - less soda, but the same sugar consumption via sweetened teas or juices, sports drinks, etc. Here's the CCD data on SSB conumption, which remains grim: https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/sugar-sweetene...
SSB consumption has quite robust evidence (including many RCTs) showing that they are particularly bad for metabolic health and consumption continues to increase globally (and has not decreased, but actually mildly increased in the US as well): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778490/ (Fig 1 and Fig 2)
I don't track this space as closely now, but for anyone interested, a few interesting reads on some of the stuff I mentioned:
Some recent RCTs:
Hall, Kevin D., Alexis Ayuketah, Robert Brychta, Hongyi Cai, Thomas Cassimatis, Kong Y. Chen, Stephanie T. Chung, et al. “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake.” Cell Metabolism 0, no. 0 (May 16, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008.
Schwarz, Jean-Marc, Susan M Noworolski, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Natalie J Korn, Michael J Wen, Viva W Tai, Grace M Jones, et al. “Effects of Dietary Fructose Restriction on Liver Fat, De Novo Lipogenesis, and Insulin Kinetics in Children with Obesity.” Gastroenterology 153, no. 3 (Sep...
It could just have gotten more calorically dense. Nearly half of our increased caloric intake since 1961 is in the form of vegetable oils which are very calorically dense, and you might not even notice when you're eating them.
Portion sizes are probably a factor. Anecdotally they're a lot bigger than they used to be. Calories are cheaper to produce and restaurants put bigger plates in front of their patrons because it's a competitive advantage to serve bigger meals.
If I had to guess the big culprits are the increases in portion size and availability of cheap calories (corn syrup, oils, flours, etc.). You don't have to infer any major changes in individual behavior - people still finish what's on their plates, and still gravitate toward brightly colored boxes of junk in the supermarket (which are a higher % of shelf space than they used to be).
vegetable oils are a fat, and no one who only eats fats, gains any weight; in fact they lose weight, which is the whole principle behind Atkins and keto. The idea that people gain weight from fats, is thus false.
if all you did was eat fat calories, you would lose a ton of weight, because ketone bodies cannot be stored inside fat cells, only glucose fructose, etc. can.
If all you did was eat protein calories, then yes, you could gain weight via gluconeogenesis (conversion of protein to glucose, again for fat storage and energy needs), although it would probably take more calories than carb calories to do so (since conversion likely results in molecular and energy losses); there is no such biochemistry available for ketones from fat
Even with all that as an assumption it still fairly leads to, "so why are they consuming more calories?" and macros and ingredients are easily implicated.
Consider, for example, if you ate 10 boiled eggs before a meal at a Mexican restaurant instead of pounding the chips and salsa. Same calories, different feeling, different outcome.
It's high glycemic index carbohydrates, full stop. They do not satiate hunger, they result in more hunger, they are intrinsically addictive (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/ for example; animal studies conveniently dodge "human willpower" accusations and demonstrate this nicely), and at the end of the day they result in the average person using their average motivations (i.e. not strenuously avoiding calories) to steadily gain weight.
Watch the entire 3-part series on youtube, "Nature Wants Us To Be Fat"; Dr. Richard Johnson seems to know his stuff, he's accredited, and he cites plenty of research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAjC_BWMElk It's a little dry but fascinating- this seems to be the intellectual crowd that might be receptive to "dry but fascinating"
This news had a big impact on me, but I was wondering how they actually did it. It's like carbon credits, or the snake breeding or whatever, you can't pay people enough to not do something.
Per the article, it sounds like maybe
1. There actually is published research linking sugar to heart health
2. The sugar lobby paid $50k for a single review study that omitted/downplayed 1 and emphasized other papers related to fat and heart health
3. Policymakers used this single study to shape policy
I'm left with a lot of questions though. The article talks about the sugar lobby doing this for 50 years... what did they do in the rest of the 50 years? And $50k isn't a lot!
Do journalists only look at review papers? That doesn't sound right, there's a constant barrage of journalists jumping on a single paper with minor findings and sensationalizing it, I can't believe they'd as a whole completely ignore sugar research. Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow.
Did other industries (meat? butter? oil?) not fight back about this?
There's a bit at the end about Coca Cola and candy companies continuing to manipulate research. I assume it's been a constant battle, not just a one-time $50k expenditure. But, it must have been worth the money for the sugar producers.
>Do journalists only look at review papers? ... Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow.
It definitely did not ignore sugar. Artificial sweeteners have been a thing for a long time, for example. I'm sure there have been scientists and doctors screaming about this since the day the paper was published (as the article notes, there was already a ton of research speaking out against sugar). We knew sugar was bad, we just thought it was maybe a litttttle bit better than fat, which was exactly what the industry wanted.
My recollections from before 2016 re sugar were
1. Calories, so people wanted artificial sweetener to lose weight
2. Diabetes
3. Artificial sweeteners may cause cancer
But, like cholesterol coating arteries, these studies I _think_ suggest that sugar is bad beyond the weight gain issue. Like even if you don't gain weight, just replacing other carbs with sugar may have disproportionate health risks. At least, that's my reading.
I think the very latest I'd put public awareness of the health effects of sugar would be the Atkins diet fad, circa 2004. That diet was a big deal at the time, definitely part of the public discourse, and the premise was that sugar was bad. Note that that book was already 30 years old by then, but something suddenly changed in the culture that made it hit.
Then there were things like Paleo (2002-2013, hard to pin down) and The 4-Hour Body (2010), which were even more explicit about sugar being dangerous.
Up until a couple of years ago, Coca Cola was a high end sponsor for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. AND shapes standards and guidelines for Registered Dieticians in the US. While anyone can call themselves a nutritionist, RDs are certified and considered to be the authority for dietary advice.
The sponsor list [1] looks a bit less egregious than before, but it's still loaded with processed crap peddlers, e.g. Mondelez, no doubt trying to sell BelVita crackers as being good for you.
One of the things they did, was have an Oxford professor (maybe Cambridge) hounded out of the university because his research consistently showed that sugar was the problem and not fat.
It is and will always be wrong to focus upon a singel ingrediens in food and blame it for health problems.
Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation.
Then move around a bit
I had a teacher a long time ago who frequently told us to make sure we ate
Apples or Bananas or whatever it was, now while it was still healthy / good for you.
She had observed a lot of twists and turns in what science decided was healthy
or not over her lifetime.
All hype and fads that has laser focus on a single issue to avoid or pig out on are unhealthy.
I remember having co-workers who were dieting by eating big cubes of (Highly processed) cheese and packets of (highly processed) lunch meat.
Just 4 to 5 packages of plastic wrapped pseudo ham and whatever.
I dont care what it was called or who endorsed it but there is no way in
hell that was a healthy idea.
Really? My guess is the opposite. Everyone knows what they are supposed to eat but doesn’t. I don’t believe anyone on this site couldn’t recommend a healthy diet.
There is, at the very least, plenty of conjecture that the over-reliance on grains and grain-derived foods in the USDA food pyramid is better for the profits of agribusiness than the health of the nation.
Lots of tannins then? Not really healthy.
A balanced diet, switching between periods of meat and vegetables, punctuated by vigorous exercise. That will serve you better.
Is it? Lots of fruits and vegetables every day. Some nuts a few days a week. Red meat once or twice a week, poultry meat and eggs for the rest of the week. Add in things like olive/avocado oil, spices, vinegar, yogurt. Drink water, tea/coffee, milk. Rarely rice, pasta, potatoes.
How could you go wrong with that ? That's basically my diet.
This is often false. Many people following this way of eating are still sick, weak, and often skinny fat.
I was one of them. Of course this is going to be better than a McDonald diet, but it does a terrible job at fixing problems for people with any kind of metabolic problems.
"lots of fruits" after selectively breeding and engineering them into sugar bombs is one of the most unpersuading leads possible to me for a balanced diet.
Though it was annoying to read, Good Calories, Bad Calories [0] by Gary Taubes made it pretty clear bad science, for myriad reasons, poisoned the data informing US policy on nutrition. Blaming fat for all things bad, resulting in the food pyramid with carbs at the foundation.
If memory serves one of the main players responsible was Ansel Keys [1], who manipulated/filtered the data of studies backing his fat-is-fattening theories.
Elsewhere I heard a plausible claim, I believe it was from Taubes in a talk he gave, that much of this behavior stemmed from post-war anti-german sentiments in the medical and nutrition science communities (which I think were more or less the same group back then). The Germans at the time happened to be at the forefront of nutrition science. When the US joined the war against the nazis, in the scientific domains German papers were apparently often suppressed, as a way to harm those researchers' careers. A side effect was their science, good or not, became blacklisted in a way. The US research, right or wrong, was championed. It was a form of patriotism, and it seems public health has been paying the price ever since.
TFA strikes me as a minor footnote in this larger story.
Taubes is probably not a good citation for assessing scientific theories… his own initiative, NuSI, funded studies that debunked his primary dietary claims and yet he continues to peddle the same lies to this very day.
Yeah I've heard some concerning things, but part of what made Good Calorie, Bad Calorie so annoying to read is it's practically all reference-backed citations.
They are both thorough, easy to read, and contradict Taubes’ primary claims. A third was supposed to occur (I think) but the funding, surprisingly, was withdrawn.
Edit: there were three studies done, all of which contradict Taubes’ claims. You can read his wonky spin on how, even though the studies prove him wrong, he may just be right on his own website: http://garytaubes.com/the-dissolution-of-the-nutrition-scien...
Neither of those first 2 studies contradicts Taubes' claims. (What do you believe ARE Taubes' claims, anyway? That's probably important to establish, because my initial impression is that you have not read an entire Taubes book.)
Not only that, he cites far more studies than 3 to support his claims, so your cherry-picking is possibly just that.
Either that or you are a vegan or vegetarian. Whenever I encounter someone online who is vociferously anti-Taubes, it seems to be a vegan or vegetarian 90% of the time. No inherent bias there, LOL
Avid hunter and meat eater here. Getting in to spear fishing next week. I cited to those three studies because they were directly funded by Taubes’ foundation and designed to prove Taubes’ claims and failed to do so.
Again, from Taubes’ own webpage: “In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes tries to bury the idea that a low-fat diet promotes weight loss and better health. Obesity is caused, he argues, not by the quantity of calories you eat but by the quality. Carbohydrates, particularly refined ones like white bread and pasta, raise insulin levels, promoting the storage of fat.”
The studies he acquired funding for came to conclusions contrary to this very claim.
I've never really considered Taubes as anything more than a writer/journalist and I appreciated the obviously herculean effort writing something like Good Calories, Bad Calories must have required.
If he poorly ran poorly designed trials of his own with NuSI, it wouldn't remotely surprise me. It's not, to my understanding, his wheelhouse.
From what I recall of Good Calories, Bad Calories (it's been quite a few years now), the thing wasn't even making new claims by the author. It dryly stated the purported science and history surrounding claims that weren't even his own. And it was all thoroughly backed with citations.
I’m now 40+, but when I was 28, I had this bad, visible, unsightly eczema on my neck. No dermatologist could prescribe anything to make it go away and I had lived with collared shirts since.
I attempted to go on keto diet, fat, proteins, and zero sugar and carbs, twice. Once when the pandemic started, and a second time in Oct 2021. I wanted to lose weight, and to prevent diabetes as a possible future.
The first time around, it took a month to get into ketosis as dieting with zero carbs is incredibly hard. Ended up with a rash and had to reintroduce carbs to get rid of the rash after 2 days.
The second time was much easier. Paired with exercise, I lost 15lb (155 to 140 can see my 4-pack again) andhadn’t noticed until recently, but my eczema was gone!
Since then, I do have 1 or 2 cheat days a week, but my carb and sugar consumption is under 50g on those days. Whenever I eat sugar now, all the sweetness hits me like a truck and I need water.
I have no scientific proof, but the experiment on my own body worked for me, and I have a good idea now what happens when I eat “high” carb days vs not.
> all the sweetness hits me like a truck and I need water
I think (having experimented with keto and read a bunch) that this is possibly due to the fact that your fat cells need water to store the sugar. (This is also the reason, in reverse, why you need to pee when ketosis releases that fat from the same cells.)
The Coke and Pepsi and other drinks arrived to my country during my lifetime. It didn't take much to realize that these syrups over saturated with sugar and gas (more recently caffeine also) are hiv and aids. I don't need your fat-sugar-lifestyle "research" for this. What makes me hate you is that younger generations for whom this toxic waste is taken as granted, they are fat now.
The most critical issue here is not sugar industry, it is the possibility for any big $$$ company to fund researches to mislead people for their interest with little consequences and nobody noticing for long time researches.
How many other policies are applied based on "scientific" studies that are publicly considered sacred and weaponized against those "opposing science".
After decades of monkey to human illustrations in science books, scientist don't really know much to back the theory of cross-species evolution, and nobody is really giving it enough rejection as it has been weaponized for long with the accusition of being "creationists", despite that theory itself is just a belief with very few scientific information to back it.
Ironically, sucrose and fructose gained such nasty reputations in the popular zeitgeist that the chemical industry has succeeded in hooking us on one after another extremely harmful substitute, from saccharine to aspartame to stevia, ad nauseam.
Artificial sweeteners are ten times worse than real sugar, so don't bother wondering why you're packing on the pounds even as you guzzle 44oz Diet Colas.
85 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1414242490404720648
Yup. The largest part of the food pyramid: Grains.
Noodles, potatoes, porridge, bread... It's all sugar.
So, sugar is not all sugar. I believe Lustig has argued that the latter two are much worse than the former.
I agree overeating of carbs is not good, but is the reason why America is so fat because we just magically eat more bread, noodles, and potatoes than comparable countries? Probably not.
Also, the consumption of sucrose in the developed world may or may not have appreciably decreased in the period since Lustig's lecture came out, but the pandemic and corresponding spike in inflation have forced many people to seek out cheaper sources of food. And what are those cheaper sources of food loaded with? Yep: sugar and salt.
But is it at all possible it’s just calories in calories out? I know it isn’t a sexy theory but it works like hell for me.
The interesting part of nutrition here is how it affects hunger, which in turn determines how many calories most people will eat.
Speaking from personal experience, I will likely eat fewer calories if I get those from high protein, high fat sources (say: egg & bacon omelette, cooked in butter) than high carbohydrate (say: home made high protein bread, buttery spread, blackberry jam sandwiches).
Why? The former just has that slower, more impactful energy release - and it's easier to stop eating after that one meal, whereas the bread might very well make me go "oooh that was yum, I didn't realise how hungry I am, let's make another one".
CICO is great if you want to lose a few pounds, and if an obese person sticks to it, they will lose weight. But while CICO is a great tool, followers of CICO as the one and only way frustrate me, as they turn weight loss into a moral struggle solely about willpower. To them, the only reason someone is fat is because they are weak willed and any desire for an "easy way" out through anything other than CICO is viewed as laziness. Yet, while most of these "easy ways" out are indeed fake, we do know that in several specific cases there is a root cause separate from willpower, such as thyroid disorders and PCOS.
In these cases, it is not simply a matter of the affected person having less willpower, but rather that they need greater willpower to use CICO to overcome their obesity than their non-obese counterparts. Note that in these cases CICO does still work, but once you shift the perspective from "these people have less willpower" to "something is requiring these people to have greater willpower to do the same thing" then a new question immediately arises: "what is that something?"
Considering we know such root causes are possible, is it so unreasonable that rather than 1/3 of the population having bad willpower, that instead they have some sort of invisible disorder that is the root cause? Before 1982, gastritis and peptic ulcers had unknown causes and were attributed to stress. These days, we understand there is a bacteria H Pylori that is the root cause that we can give antibiotics for and "magically" cure. My personal belief is that within 100 years we will find some sort of similar root cause for obesity and if we are lucky, we may similarly be able to find a "magic cure" for it too.
Meanwhile, as someone who is obese and is working on it, I absolutely do recommend CICO as the best tool we currently have. But it's strikingly similar to trying to get a homeless person to budget in that there are likely other things that need to be fixed first, we just don't know what they are.
More importantly, the willpower debate is irrelevant on a population level. Dieters and personal trainers can argue about it until they're blue in the face but it has nothing to do with policy.
We could achieve better public health outcomes if we accepted that CICO is the big and clear cut problem and ignored all that other stuff.
For example: if you accept that overeating calories is THE public health crisis to solve, our policies around subsidizing cheap calories would no longer make sense. It would follow naturally to discontinue those policies and subsidize nutrient-dense, low calorie foods instead (i.e. fruits and vegetables intended for unprocessed consumption).
Then you would give people an economic incentive to go to the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables instead of Hot Pockets. Public policy can't fix the whole problem, but it can adjust economic incentives.
Unfortunately people are off tilting at various windmills like mystery pathogens, estrogens in the water, plastic packaging, whatever - instead of accepting that CICO is this clear and central problem and crafting policy which reflects it.
CICO is basic thermodynamics, but yeah, it's incredibly reductionist.
OMAD (One Meal A Day) isn't some magic bullet that creates weight loss. If your One Meal is 3000 calories, you won't lose weight. What it's supposed to do though is train yourself to manage hunger. I can eat a massive meal (24 oz steak, 8 oz of broccoli or green beans, and a couple wheat rolls) and still be hungry less than 3 hours later. Some people have suggested OMAD and said that supposedly, if I force myself to remain hungry most of the day, eventually I'll get a bit numb to the sensation and it'll allow me to recalibrate me sense of hunger.
Keto is similar. It helps you reduce the CI part of CI by eliminating carbs which do very little to make you feel full compared to protein, fat, and fiber. But if you're still eating 3,000 calories/day because you're eating 24 oz steaks and half a pound of bacon and 6 eggs every day, then you won't lose weight.
Sounds kind of hopeless when you put it that way doesn’t it?
It kind of sounds like a self-defeating narrative. “We don’t know the answer, so let’s either 1) keep status quo or 2) try a bunch of silly things that only temporarily help at best”.
I used to eat a decent amount of sugar including daily soda. Ten years ago I got my blood test back that showed high triglycerides - 251. It was very high for me and I resolved to do something about it.
I went cold turkey on sugar. Stopped soda, stopped sweets, etc. I didn’t try to stop all sugar like what’s added to bread but other than that I was done.I explicitly did not replace it with artificial sweetener. Instead I tried to develop the mentality that sugar was poison and I simply didn’t eat it. Not as a temporary diet, but ever. Two things happened:
1) I had two weeks of horrible sugar cravings trying to drive me to eating sugar
2) Then the cravings stopped completely. Fruit started tasting amazing.
At my next physical, triglycerides were 113. Ten years later and they stay about 80. Haven’t had a soda in ten years. The thought of drinking a disgustingly syrupy soda disgusts me. It’s probably one of the reasons it’s stuck: if I kept the mentality that I was depriving myself my willpower would eventually give in. Instead I crave soda about as much as I crave eating a bowl full of grasshoppers.
Anyway, just giving my experience. YMMV, good luck on your path.
It's a combination of all of these - and many other - variables, which have different influences on different people. For every morbidly obese person dealing with all of the health, societal, and metal affects, I can just as easily find at least one unhealthy "healthy" person who obsesses WAY too much over this stuff. Both have eating disorders for pretty much the same reasons, but with different results. And there are more than enough folks who continue to take advantage of all of this confusion to make money at both ends who see no reason to stop it and prefer to prolong it.
Who is there left to trust here?
There's a near constant line out every Starbucks drive-thru I pass. Whenever I go in one to work while caffeinated, those definitely aren't unsweetened beverages being prepared for the masses. Supposedly the whole reason Starbucks espresso is so bitter is so it works well with their sweetened beverages, straight espresso drinkers are in the extreme minority.
How fructose is metabolized is so well understood at this point it's clearly a major factor in obesity and diabetes. It's the primary cause of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease AIUI.
And it hasn't been removed from the US diet. That's very unlikely to occur until corn subsidies go away. Even once that occurs it'll take awhile for such a huge industry to evolve away from such a mature supply chain. It strikes me as a problem resembling pivoting from fossil fuels. It won't happen quickly, and we haven't even started yet w/fructose.
Which is why I don't think the graph at that twitter link above is even plausibly true. Furthermore there's massive business interest in convincing the public sugar isn't the problem, so don't bother stopping consuming it. That's what all the sugar addicts certainly want to hear anyways.
They put HFCS in practically everything processed on store shelves because it's so cheap and checks many boxes from preservative to browning agent, and I'm sure myriad other effects I know nothing about.
I would suspect that it is either both of the following:
- data is based on some food survey, and they changed how they asked the question - "sugar" in the chart is just some specific sugar (e.g. cane sugar), and there was some substitute or reclassification (e.g. fructose -> sucrose?)
Also, I find it very hard to believe that global sugar consumption has been declining, given how hard junk food countries are pushing into less regulated developing economies (e.g. Coca Cola in Chiapas MX, just look on youtube).
Food processing and industrial cooking is the culprit. It took me about 20 years to understand this.
Michael Pollan wrote lucidly about it starting ~15 years ago, and he wrote about the marketing patterns that the food industry uses (to this day) to cast blame.
And this is being made rigorous, e.g. by the NIH. Great article with history and science: How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket (includes recent Brazilian public health policy, and the NIH study)
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce...
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071809
You can eat ANYTHING except processed food: traditional Asian, Italian, Mexican, Indian, etc. with the ingredients and recipes they used. Really! The problem is that this is quite difficult to get in many areas, because so much food is processed and enhanced to sell.
For a rough picture, processed food was probably 5% of the American diet in 1940, and when I grew up in the 80's and 90's it was maybe 50%. But now it's more like 80%.
This doesn't mean anything. It's a floating signifier.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30744710/
Read this article for background on the Brazilian policy and the NIH studies:
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce...
And watch this video by Hall from the NIH, with a 2019 study:
ILSI NA: Ultra-Processed Foods (Kevin Hall) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_im2zAuBmME (mentioned in the article)
He is the one who is described as a physicist by training, and he thought a calorie is a calorie -- whether it's processed or not.
That's the "reductionist hypothesis".
He EASILY disproved it and changed his mind. The study controls for macro- and micro-nutrients and the only difference is PROCESSING.
And his new question is to ask how can we make processed food HEALTHY ! Because it feeds a lot of people. So he's not the typical person who espouses a view against processing. Again read the guardian article for background.
(Personally I will eat unprocessed foods until they answer that question.)
Governments are finally paying attention because their population has been ravaged by processed food in the last ~70 years. Brazil and Mexico have big problems. It corresponds to when processed foods and industrial cooking took over. This is an extremely repeatable experiment -- again read Pollan.
Historically, populations get the set of chronic conditions called "Western diet disease" (obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, etc.) when introduced to processed foods and industrial preparation/cooking.
The actual issue is almost certainly insufficient granularity in classification of nutrients. For example, treating chemically distinct plant fats as fungible with animal fats. (In fact, that's a serious contender as the single biggest issue behind "processed" food - it's all made using disgusting plant oils.)
Food processing is complex, dynamic, and adversarial (see my comment above)
As Hall points out, there is more research possible to find the underlying mechanisms. However even those mechanisms are proximate causes, not the ultimate cause.
We already know a lot -- it basically boils down to economics:
(1) Processing uses ingredients you can't find in your kitchen which may be bad for you. For example, emulsifiers -- did your grandma cook with xanthan gum, etc.? Because these things make it easy to process food at scale.
A mechanism that has been suggested by Lustig is that the emulsifiers still emulsify in your stomach, and give you leaky gut syndrome
This is just one example; there are hundreds of food additives that basically exist to support SCALE of manufacturing and sale, including increased shelf life
(2) Predictable inputs to assembly lines support food processing, including both plants and animals
In plants, this is a monoculture of single breeds of wheat, corn, and rice. (Pollan talks about how everything in the middle supermarket shelves is like this. It has a very wide range of labeling, colors, packaging, etc. but most of it is the SAME commodities processed in various ways, and lacking in nutrition. Picture: think about that commodity wheat that was stuck on a boat in Ukraine.)
And a lack of things like fermentation, which is hard to control industrially.
In animals, it's factory farming, which optimizes the mass of the animal against all else (including nutrition). These homogeneous animals have a very homogeneous set of diseases treated with antibiotics and so forth
-----
In addition to dozens of other books, the recent book "What Your Food Ate" by U of W scientists talks how this optimizes for CALORIES and deoptimizes for NUTRITION.
e.g. Think bland, tasteless supermarket carrots and tomatoes -- those didn't exist 80 years ago! McDonald's has to put mayo and sauce on them to make them palatable, but a real carrot or tomato tastes amazing
If you believe in capitalism, and believe that it's possible for say a carrot of great mass/calories to have less nutrition, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen (e.g. regulation, which doesn't do it).
----
Basically people have to eat more to get the same amount of nutrition, making them fatter.
I think this gets at the core of it more than say "emulsifiers" or "trans fat". Your body is extremely resilient -- it can metabolize small amounts of almost any chemical.
But it CANNOT metabolize this steady and large volume of processed food -- say 50% more daily calories than what people ate in 1940, with fewer nutrients. This is what gets you chronic diseases, i.e. "Western diet disease"
----
Although I think Pollan's books have the most explanatory power -- they talk about how this system arose. (including advertising toward women, e.g. freeing the women of the burden of booking)
"Food Rules" has aphorisms that get at the cause:
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Rules-Eaters-Michael-Pollan/dp/0...
Like "don't eat what doesn't spoil". Processed food is made NOT to spoil. That's what makes it profitable.
One way to make it not spoil is to take out things that microorganisms want to eat. But if a bacteria doesn't want to eat it, then YOU probably don't want to eat it either! It's probably just empty calories and processed wheat/corn, with little nutrition
-----
tl;dr processing, scale, and profits are the fundamental causes. You can find more specific mechanisms and specific chemicals, but just avoiding processed foods is the most actionable advice. There have been dozens of vilified nutrients and foods ...
Also, I have to point out that this doesn't follow, and is naive
What we don't know about nutrition is greater than what we know -- that is obvious
You might hold an overly static model of food consumption and biology. In terms of what's relevant to your health, food is NOT a linear combination of its nutrients -- that is a fallacy promoted by the food industry and journalists who want catchy headlines.
For example, time is a variable. There's nothing that says that eating spinach for 3 meals, followed by beef for 3 meals, is the same as eating spinach and beef together in 6 meals. Even if you eat exactly the same thing.
And there are hundreds of other variables not captured by models -- e.g. things like gut bacteria means your body is quite stateful, and has many feedback mechanisms!
Models are not reality
Nutritional science necessarily relies on models (simple statistics), and there's lot of evidence that they're poor ones -- using their conclusions leads to astoundingly bad outcomes! It's weird that people continue to believe things that don't actually work
The kind of reasoning that Pollan uses, which includes a lot of science, is more explanatory and accurate than the reasoning you're using
According to that definition weight loss bars, that are designed to be high-protein (hence high-satiety), would be considered a processed food simply for using artificial colors.
It seems clear sugar is the culprit, and if you are avoiding processed foods you are also avoiding added sugar.
It's actually dynamic and adversarial -- Michael Pollan has great examples of that, e.g. the "Snackwells" example
Over the decades, the industry has various types of processed food based on what the "accepted scientific advice" is at the time -- which often turns out to be wrong or in this case "interested" advice, like
When fat was vilified (by the sugar industry), you got pushed with "low fat" labelingThen you got "Diet coke", 0% sugar labeling, 0 calorie labeling
There was also the "all natural" label to respond to a trend, which is ironically a bad sign, because the packaging to write the label on indicates processing. Does a banana need to have an "all natural" label?
The word "organic" was also co-opted by the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29150342
It used to mean something, and now it doesn't.
Simlar to the way the first Whole Foods (I think in Austin TX) used to actually sell only whole foods!
Now they sell lots of processed foods at Whole Foods.
----
If you avoid processed foods, you do avoid sugar, but you also avoid salt, trans fat, etc. Concentrating on a single nutrient is the reductionist fallacy, and the cause of the "scientific advice whiplash" and "national eating disorder" that Pollan talks about
Your two sources, as well as the Canadian heart and stroke center (the top google result for ultra processed food), all define ultra processed food differently, which lead to different outcomes to a question as simple as "is ice cream ultra-processed?".
(the answers: the Brazilian paper says it depends largely on ingredients and additives, Kevin Hall says milk itself is ultra-processed, the Canadian heart and stroke center classifies milk as a non processed food but almost certainly considers ice cream ultra processed because it defines ultra processed in terms of mechanical processes)
With no remotely similar operating definition, and the fact that a hundred other different consumption habits change across populations in the process of industrialization at the same time as some thus undefined sub-element of diet, this seems like a just-so story given legs by the fact that it gives an easy solution to an obvious problem.
Just like some corn is grown in a dead soil with nitrogen fertilizer, and some grown in live soil (regenerative, with crop rotation, etc.)
I agree it's not easy to tell -- it took quite me a while, and also a lot of "unlearning"
See my other replies in sibling comments for more color -- the fundamental issue is that processed food is cheaper, and that the processing / scale / profits itself are what makes it harmful and even addictive
(as Hall found, the people who ate processed foods ate faster, and more)
----
Also did you watch the Hall video? Does it really come across as "granola-mom"?
These generally tend to appeal to, and also cause massive schisms among the aforementioned granola mom types, much like say, how babies and kids sleep should be handled.
The reason I don't consider these movements all that valuable or useful is that they all seem to don the cloak of empiricism post hoc, after they have decided what they believe, and when it comes to pushing the idea, any relevant study will do, because the research result is effectively a marketing headline, similar to the original article for this thread.
And while Hall may be somewhat convincing, if I lived my life by the advice of every convincing talk I'd ever heard, I'd have to follow a lot of mutually exclusive advice, and with regards to dieting, between Kevin Hall, Ray Peat, and David Sinclair, I'm not sure they'd let me eat enough calorie dense food to survive.
* While sugar (sucrose from sugar beets and sugar cane) has decreased since 1980, this is largely because of a switch to non-sugar caloric sweeteners, initially HFCS, and a range of others (I've noticed agave being pretty popular in "health" foods for example - while it has a slightly lower GI, it's actually more calorically dense than sugar: https://www.sugar.org/wp-content/uploads/Sweeteners-in-Food_...). Note you can look at a graph of the intake data from the Sugar Association (a sugar industry site) that shows that total sweetener consumption remains quite high: https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/ (data is sourced from the USDA)
* While these are aggregate/average numbers, and obesity in the US continues to grow https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html (41.9% in 2017-2020 data) - a declining overall consumption may mask a divergence between a decrease in healthier and increase in unhealthier populations - it's hard to separate that out because the data isn't broken down between the USDA consumption vs NHANES health data populations.
* A lot of the "sugar consumption is declining (or soda consumption is declining) so it can't be the problem" proclamations are also being masked by the aformentioned caloric sweetener replacement, and in the sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) replacement - less soda, but the same sugar consumption via sweetened teas or juices, sports drinks, etc. Here's the CCD data on SSB conumption, which remains grim: https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/sugar-sweetene...
SSB consumption has quite robust evidence (including many RCTs) showing that they are particularly bad for metabolic health and consumption continues to increase globally (and has not decreased, but actually mildly increased in the US as well): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778490/ (Fig 1 and Fig 2)
I don't track this space as closely now, but for anyone interested, a few interesting reads on some of the stuff I mentioned:
Some recent RCTs:
Hall, Kevin D., Alexis Ayuketah, Robert Brychta, Hongyi Cai, Thomas Cassimatis, Kong Y. Chen, Stephanie T. Chung, et al. “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake.” Cell Metabolism 0, no. 0 (May 16, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008.
Schwarz, Jean-Marc, Susan M Noworolski, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Natalie J Korn, Michael J Wen, Viva W Tai, Grace M Jones, et al. “Effects of Dietary Fructose Restriction on Liver Fat, De Novo Lipogenesis, and Insulin Kinetics in Children with Obesity.” Gastroenterology 153, no. 3 (Sep...
The average American consumes 24% more calories than they did in 1961. [1]
The average American is also 24 pounds heavier than they were in 1960. [2]
Sure there may be other contributing factors, but this is the simplest explanation based on our most fundamental nutrition science.
People have eaten more calories every decade, and have gotten fatter every decade as a result.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/american-calorie-intake-last...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/09/04/study...
Portion sizes are probably a factor. Anecdotally they're a lot bigger than they used to be. Calories are cheaper to produce and restaurants put bigger plates in front of their patrons because it's a competitive advantage to serve bigger meals.
If I had to guess the big culprits are the increases in portion size and availability of cheap calories (corn syrup, oils, flours, etc.). You don't have to infer any major changes in individual behavior - people still finish what's on their plates, and still gravitate toward brightly colored boxes of junk in the supermarket (which are a higher % of shelf space than they used to be).
if all you did was eat fat calories, you would lose a ton of weight, because ketone bodies cannot be stored inside fat cells, only glucose fructose, etc. can.
If all you did was eat protein calories, then yes, you could gain weight via gluconeogenesis (conversion of protein to glucose, again for fat storage and energy needs), although it would probably take more calories than carb calories to do so (since conversion likely results in molecular and energy losses); there is no such biochemistry available for ketones from fat
Consider, for example, if you ate 10 boiled eggs before a meal at a Mexican restaurant instead of pounding the chips and salsa. Same calories, different feeling, different outcome.
Watch the entire 3-part series on youtube, "Nature Wants Us To Be Fat"; Dr. Richard Johnson seems to know his stuff, he's accredited, and he cites plenty of research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAjC_BWMElk It's a little dry but fascinating- this seems to be the intellectual crowd that might be receptive to "dry but fascinating"
This news had a big impact on me, but I was wondering how they actually did it. It's like carbon credits, or the snake breeding or whatever, you can't pay people enough to not do something.
Per the article, it sounds like maybe
1. There actually is published research linking sugar to heart health
2. The sugar lobby paid $50k for a single review study that omitted/downplayed 1 and emphasized other papers related to fat and heart health
3. Policymakers used this single study to shape policy
I'm left with a lot of questions though. The article talks about the sugar lobby doing this for 50 years... what did they do in the rest of the 50 years? And $50k isn't a lot!
Do journalists only look at review papers? That doesn't sound right, there's a constant barrage of journalists jumping on a single paper with minor findings and sensationalizing it, I can't believe they'd as a whole completely ignore sugar research. Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow.
Did other industries (meat? butter? oil?) not fight back about this?
There's a bit at the end about Coca Cola and candy companies continuing to manipulate research. I assume it's been a constant battle, not just a one-time $50k expenditure. But, it must have been worth the money for the sugar producers.
>Do journalists only look at review papers? ... Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow.
It definitely did not ignore sugar. Artificial sweeteners have been a thing for a long time, for example. I'm sure there have been scientists and doctors screaming about this since the day the paper was published (as the article notes, there was already a ton of research speaking out against sugar). We knew sugar was bad, we just thought it was maybe a litttttle bit better than fat, which was exactly what the industry wanted.
But, like cholesterol coating arteries, these studies I _think_ suggest that sugar is bad beyond the weight gain issue. Like even if you don't gain weight, just replacing other carbs with sugar may have disproportionate health risks. At least, that's my reading.
Then there were things like Paleo (2002-2013, hard to pin down) and The 4-Hour Body (2010), which were even more explicit about sugar being dangerous.
The sponsor list [1] looks a bit less egregious than before, but it's still loaded with processed crap peddlers, e.g. Mondelez, no doubt trying to sell BelVita crackers as being good for you.
[1] https://www.eatrightpro.org/about-us/advertising-and-sponsor...
Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation. Then move around a bit
I had a teacher a long time ago who frequently told us to make sure we ate Apples or Bananas or whatever it was, now while it was still healthy / good for you.
She had observed a lot of twists and turns in what science decided was healthy or not over her lifetime.
All hype and fads that has laser focus on a single issue to avoid or pig out on are unhealthy.
I remember having co-workers who were dieting by eating big cubes of (Highly processed) cheese and packets of (highly processed) lunch meat.
Just 4 to 5 packages of plastic wrapped pseudo ham and whatever.
I dont care what it was called or who endorsed it but there is no way in hell that was a healthy idea.
But our notion of a balanced diet is wrong, which is the whole point of this. Who knows what a balanced diet really is now?
Processed grains perhaps but again I would be surprised if someone here was shocked that processed grains aren’t great for you.
Simple.
Food. Mostly plants. As close to raw as convenient.
The hippies were right
How could you go wrong with that ? That's basically my diet.
I don't see fish, which is, from what I've heard, important for nutritional diversity.
Also, fruit has lots of sugars so it might not be the best for "lots of".
How many people agree with you that it's a good diet? I'm especially surprised by "rarely rice", which is a staple in many Asian countries.
If memory serves one of the main players responsible was Ansel Keys [1], who manipulated/filtered the data of studies backing his fat-is-fattening theories.
Elsewhere I heard a plausible claim, I believe it was from Taubes in a talk he gave, that much of this behavior stemmed from post-war anti-german sentiments in the medical and nutrition science communities (which I think were more or less the same group back then). The Germans at the time happened to be at the forefront of nutrition science. When the US joined the war against the nazis, in the scientific domains German papers were apparently often suppressed, as a way to harm those researchers' careers. A side effect was their science, good or not, became blacklisted in a way. The US research, right or wrong, was championed. It was a form of patriotism, and it seems public health has been paying the price ever since.
TFA strikes me as a minor footnote in this larger story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys#Criticism
They are both thorough, easy to read, and contradict Taubes’ primary claims. A third was supposed to occur (I think) but the funding, surprisingly, was withdrawn.
Edit: there were three studies done, all of which contradict Taubes’ claims. You can read his wonky spin on how, even though the studies prove him wrong, he may just be right on his own website: http://garytaubes.com/the-dissolution-of-the-nutrition-scien...
Not only that, he cites far more studies than 3 to support his claims, so your cherry-picking is possibly just that.
Either that or you are a vegan or vegetarian. Whenever I encounter someone online who is vociferously anti-Taubes, it seems to be a vegan or vegetarian 90% of the time. No inherent bias there, LOL
as I tried to say, you cannot claim a claim is disproved, without elucidating that exact claim as precisely as possible, first.
The studies he acquired funding for came to conclusions contrary to this very claim.
If he poorly ran poorly designed trials of his own with NuSI, it wouldn't remotely surprise me. It's not, to my understanding, his wheelhouse.
From what I recall of Good Calories, Bad Calories (it's been quite a few years now), the thing wasn't even making new claims by the author. It dryly stated the purported science and history surrounding claims that weren't even his own. And it was all thoroughly backed with citations.
I’m now 40+, but when I was 28, I had this bad, visible, unsightly eczema on my neck. No dermatologist could prescribe anything to make it go away and I had lived with collared shirts since.
I attempted to go on keto diet, fat, proteins, and zero sugar and carbs, twice. Once when the pandemic started, and a second time in Oct 2021. I wanted to lose weight, and to prevent diabetes as a possible future.
The first time around, it took a month to get into ketosis as dieting with zero carbs is incredibly hard. Ended up with a rash and had to reintroduce carbs to get rid of the rash after 2 days.
The second time was much easier. Paired with exercise, I lost 15lb (155 to 140 can see my 4-pack again) andhadn’t noticed until recently, but my eczema was gone!
Since then, I do have 1 or 2 cheat days a week, but my carb and sugar consumption is under 50g on those days. Whenever I eat sugar now, all the sweetness hits me like a truck and I need water.
I have no scientific proof, but the experiment on my own body worked for me, and I have a good idea now what happens when I eat “high” carb days vs not.
I think (having experimented with keto and read a bunch) that this is possibly due to the fact that your fat cells need water to store the sugar. (This is also the reason, in reverse, why you need to pee when ketosis releases that fat from the same cells.)
Artificial sweeteners are ten times worse than real sugar, so don't bother wondering why you're packing on the pounds even as you guzzle 44oz Diet Colas.