Active Low-Carber Forums
Atkins diet and low carb discussion provided free for information only, not as medical advice.
Home Plans Tips Recipes Tools Stories Studies Products
Active Low-Carber Forums
A sugar-free zone


Welcome to the Active Low-Carber Forums.
Support for Atkins diet, Protein Power, Neanderthin (Paleo Diet), CAD/CALP, Dr. Bernstein Diabetes Solution and any other healthy low-carb diet or plan, all are welcome in our lowcarb community. Forget starvation and fad diets -- join the healthy eating crowd! You may register by clicking here, it's free!

Go Back   Active Low-Carber Forums > Main Low-Carb Diets Forums & Support > Low-Carb Studies & Research / Media Watch > LC Research/Media
User Name
Password
FAQ Members Calendar Mark Forums Read Search Gallery My P.L.A.N. Survey


Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #31   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 02:49
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
Posts: 26,664
 
Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160 Female 5'10"
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
Default

Good to see that it's being promoted in the UK by the British media


Quote:
From The Sunday Times
London, UK
1 January, 2017

How sugar got us in a sticky mess

Addictive, fattening, deadly... a new book says it’s sugar, not overeating, that is causing the obesity crisis


It is January 2037 and your children are watching an old TV show on their floating screen. Two of them are screeching with horror, one is weeping uncontrollably.

“Mum,” cries the oldest, “these people are making funny shapes out of sugar and then eating them!”

It’s exactly like those quaint old ads for cigarettes from the 1950s you used to watch on YouTube. Nobody smokes now and nobody has eaten sugar since it was reclassified as a toxin in 2025. Nobody, thank God, would ever again make a show like The Great British Bake Off.

“People in those days,” you explain, “were incredibly stupid. They thought it was safe to eat sugar …” the children groan, “… and they all caught horrible diseases. Now eat up your fatty bears and fun-sized steaks, it’s nearly bedtime.”

It could happen, but it probably won’t. The sugar-making and sugar-using industries would fight it every step of the way. Their customers are addicted to their daily sugar hits, their muffins, buns, sweets and fizzy drinks. A Martian walking into Starbucks would think humans could only be induced to eat by the addition of sugar in terrifying quantities.

Furthermore, as yet there is no general agreement that sugar is toxic. Yes, it’s fattening and yes, it’s just empty calories, containing nothing that we actually need. But toxic? Surely not.

Then again, maybe it is. Gary Taubes thinks so and since 2002 he’s been sugar’s most powerful and convincing critic. In that year he published an article in The New York Times Magazine headed What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? “It was,” he says, with a mildly self-deprecating air, “the most controversial article in that magazine in a decade.”

The roof fell in and the next 15 years of his life were determined. He was to write a sugar trilogy — the third book, The Case Against Sugar, is just out.

The lie his article spoke of was the one that said eating too much fat was implicated in many of our contemporary woes — most obviously heart disease, but also diabetes and everything that came under the heading of “metabolic syndrome”. Every year 610,000 Americans die of heart disease. In 2012 7% of them had diabetes, an 800% increase since 1960; this was a disease that, not long ago, was incredibly rare. Two in three American adults are overweight or obese (the figure in the UK is much the same, we are the fattest nation in Europe).

Nutritionists said fat was the problem; Taubes said sugar was. It was a life-and-death struggle and it still is. Three books on the subject later, he is as committed as ever to the fight, though he admits he was partially wrong in that article.

“I still believed that people got fat because of energy balance — there were too many calories going in and not enough going out. I now know that can’t be right.”

This, if true, represents an overturning of almost everything you’ve ever been told about diet and nutrition. The truth according to Taubes is that if you eat properly, you can eat as much as you like (within reason) and you will never get fat. Calories in versus calories out is irrelevant, a gross scientific error.

Before I explain that, I’d better explain Taubes, who, even if he didn’t write about sugar, would be quite a character. He lives in North Oakland, California. He and his wife, Sloane, and their two children partially occupy a lovely 1908 house built by a middle-class family fleeing across the bay from San Francisco after the terrible earthquake of 1906.

Standing outside the house, I was slightly dreading the encounter. I worried that he might be one of those appallingly efficient American writers; literary cyborgs who know their market better than their adverbs. In fact, I meet a sweetly tentative man with overtones of a hapless Larry David and an anxious Woody Allen. His man cave at the top of the house is almost as chaotic as my own.

He is 60 years old, 6ft 2in, 15st 9lb, muscular, and his features, though anxious, look fresh — important factors when discussing diet. He was born in New York state and studied physics at Harvard, but it did not turn out to be his thing and he took a degree in journalism at Columbia.

What physics did teach him was how the scientific method should work — doubt, testing, retesting, peer review and, above all, not fooling yourself. His first two books, Nobel Dreams and Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, were both sharply critical stories of what goes wrong when this method is abused. They also demonstrated Taubes’s formidable and relentless talent for research.

“I’m a compulsive reporter. After Bad Science I had a lot of people in the physics community say to me that if I was interested in bad science — what they called pathological science — I should look at this stuff in public health because that is really bad.”

Nutritional science, in particular, seemed to be a mess beneath its surface confidence. Ever since the 1970s, a consensus had hardened into a dogma that attempted to explain the evidently interconnected pandemics of heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity.

The explanation was dietary fat and overeating. Even to the layman, it seemed plausible. Fats are more calorie-dense than carbohydrates, so they must make people fat, and being fat — it was thought — caused diabetes. Fats also contain cholesterol, an excess of which in the blood stream had been implicated in heart disease. There was even an evolutionary underpinning — our ancestors ate mainly the plant food they foraged and only seldom managed to kill and eat an animal.

Everybody took it as an established truth, but it was actually rather an exotic and implausible idea. Before the Second World War in Europe, most dietary thinking was focused on carbohydrates as the cause of obesity. Sugar is a carbohydrate and refined carbohydrates — white flour, pasta, refined grains of any kind — rapidly turn into sugars when consumed. So a high-carb diet is likely to be a high-sugar diet.

In the 1960s, a great British nutritionist, John Yudkin, was looking at the same evidence as the fat freaks and coming to a quite different conclusion — that sugar was the real culprit. Yudkin, a mild-mannered soul, was mocked, derided and eventually ignored. In 1972, his book Pure, White and Deadly implicated sugar not only in tooth decay, but also in obesity, diabetes and heart attacks. It was a big hit, but it was buried by the dogmatists.

For the next 40 years we were told to cut down on fat and eat plenty of carbs. But people just got fatter, the diabetes pandemic grew worse and people continued to die of heart attacks. Enter Taubes. Sensing bad science, he looked at what was happening rather than what dogma said should be happening.

“I was asking what is the fundamental trigger of these diseases? We have pandemics of obesity and diabetes, it shows up in every population in the world when they transition to western lifestyles and diets. The conventional thinking is still that this transition goes along with too much food and not enough physical activity. But there is this alternative hypothesis that it’s the change in the carbohydrate content and specifically the sugars.”

He started out with two views that he later had to modify — first that the primary issue was a compound of too many refined grains and sugar, and second that it was still true that eating too many calories made you fat. The first idea ran up against what he calls the Southeast Asia Problem. People there eat vast quantities of refined rice grains, but they didn’t seem to be as afflicted as those in the West.

“A huge proportion of the world were, to a large extent, living on refined grains and not getting fat. The problem with that kind of observation is that it’s not a randomised controlled trial and you can imagine any number of hypotheses to explain it. The most likely is that southeast Asians were historically very low sugar consumers. Japan in the 1960s was consuming the same amount of sugar as we were in the 1860s and their diabetes rates were probably very similar to ours in the 1860s.”

Over the course of his sugar trilogy — he laughs at the literary grandeur of the phrase — Taubes closed in on the prime suspect.

Meanwhile, he was being abused and disparaged by the fat camp. Sometimes he responded with long and dazzlingly detailed rebuttals, but mostly he shrugged and carried on. The forces ranged against him were formidable.

The 1970s saw the apparent abandonment of sugar by the fizzy-drinks makers in favour of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Look, was the message, it’s got fructose in the name, it comes from fruit. It must be good for you. Actually, it’s worse. Fructose in fruit is released relatively slowly into the bloodstream, but in fizzy drinks sweetened with HFCS, the higher fructose content subjects your liver to an instant sugar bath. This promotes fat deposits and, in excess, causes fatty liver disease, common in alcoholics and potentially fatal.

“The biochemistry of how fructose is metabolised in the liver had been worked out in the 1960s. There’s evidence that fat accumulation in the liver is a fundamental cause of insulin resistance.”

Taubes does not commit himself on the effects of anything other than sugar. Other sweeteners such as agave or maple syrup may be just as damaging, but that would require other research. The same applies to artificial sweeteners, though he does think they would be less damaging as their high sweetness means they are used in much lower doses.

Insulin resistance is the heart of the matter. Insulin’s functions are complex, but its primary role is to promote the absorption of blood glucose into body cells. If you consume lots of sugar, your pancreas has to release ever more insulin and, at some point, your cells will resist. Type 2 diabetes may follow, as will getting very fat and thereby putting yourself at risk from — well, you name it.

For a time both the anti-sugar lobby and the fat freaks were able to agree on one thing: if you ate more calories than you burnt, you would get fat. But that idea came from a time when little was known about the reactions of hormones, especially insulin, to the type of food we eat. In reality, different types of food produce an elaborate hormonal dance designed to keep you fit, efficient and sleek. If Taubes is right, then the introduction of sugar disrupts this dance and, to simplify, makes your body lay down fat irrespective of your calorie intake. By any reasonable standards, that would make sugar toxic, very toxic.

As Taubes puts it in his latest book: “Sugars like sucrose and HFCS are the fundamental causes of diabetes and obesity, using the same simple concept of causality that we employ when we say smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. It’s not because we eat too much of these sugars … but because they have unique physiological, metabolic and endocrinological (ie, hormonal) effects in the human body that directly trigger these disorders.”

Bizarrely, sugar also helped to create cigarettes. Taubes tells the story of how Big Tobacco wanted to increase addiction by getting people to inhale cigarette smoke, something they couldn’t do with cigars and pipes. It did this by treating the tobacco with a sauce made of — you guessed it — sugar.

So how much sugar is safe? Taubes answers the question by pointing out that nobody ever asks how many cigarettes are safe. A toxin is a toxin. He eats hardly any sugar or carbohydrates himself, but insists, “I am no zealot.” This means, in essence, he gives in to his children. One cold morning in a northern California safari park, he let them drink hot chocolate “for the joy on their faces”.

Fruit, which is full of sugar, is a problem — he says he eats about two apples a week. But he adds that modern fruit is cultivated to be sweet and bears no relation to the fruit our ancestors ate. His big point, however, is that if we ate healthy diets — which hardly any of us do — then we could safely eat fruit.

Such a diet would exclude any added sugar and refined grains such as white flour, white pasta and rice. It would be very low in the carbohydrates found in bread and root vegetables such as potatoes. These would be replaced by proteins in meat and fish, and in non-root vegetables such as broccoli.

So should sugar be classified as an addictive drug? “There is no point when I am eating a sweet that I am satiated. I imagine alcoholics are like this with alcohol. One of the things I am implicitly arguing is that sugar addiction has to be treated with the same seriousness as you would treat nicotine or drug addiction. One of the ideas behind these low-carb diets is that you are replacing carbohydrates with fat. Animal studies from the 1930s show that if you do that, you mute the cravings for the carbs.”

Over and over again he insists he is open to any independently sourced evidence that proves sugar is safe, but it is now 15 years since that magazine article and nobody has yet come up with anything. And, meanwhile, the fat dogma is crumbling.

There is one strong hypothesis that seems to stand in opposition to the sugar theory and that is the case of the microbiome. The friendly bugs in our gut are under assault from diet change and antibiotics. Many point to this as the source of the diabetes epidemic and all our other modern woes. Taubes is sceptical. But it may not matter, both could be true.

We leave the man cave and he drives me in his battered Lexus to the nearby Claremont Club for lunch. Bathed in cool sunshine, we eat giant salads on the terrace looking out across San Francisco Bay. To the east lies the entire continent, gorging itself on the pure, white and deadly. Dying for the love of sugar.

With his starter, Taubes eats half a slice of white bread soaked in some sauce.

“I shouldn’t,” he says, “but it’s so delicious.”

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/...-mess-3l8l6s50z
Reply With Quote
Sponsored Links
  #32   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 14:01
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

Quote:
Calories in versus calories out is irrelevant, a gross scientific error.


What a horribly wrong thing to say. It's just abject wilful stupidity.

We get fat because too many calories go into fat cells and too little come out of fat cells. It's really very simple but unfortunately people want to pretend something else.
Reply With Quote
  #33   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 14:39
Liz53's Avatar
Liz53 Liz53 is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,140
 
Plan: Mostly Fung/IDM
Stats: 165/138.4/135 Female 63
BF:???/better/???
Progress: 89%
Location: Washington state
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by inflammabl

We get fat because too many calories go into fat cells and too little come out of fat cells.


Why does this happen? Why does it happen to proportionately more people now than 50 or 100 years ago?

Last edited by Liz53 : Sun, Jan-01-17 at 14:45.
Reply With Quote
  #34   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 14:54
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Liz53
Why does this happen? Why does it happen to proportionately more people now than 50 or 100 years ago?

Sugar.

Lustig has made an excellent case against sugar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnR1RLE3RJw

Peter Attila has explained the mathematics of fat cells fairly well. http://eatingacademy.com/weight-los...ons-of-fat-flux . What he uses is most times called a 1-D or lumped parameter model although if you want to get fancy, you can call it a dilation model.

No scientist would ever say, "Calories in versus calories out is irrelevant, a gross scientific error." When some deliberately ignorant reporter writes something like that it causes serious people not to take the idea seriously.
Reply With Quote
  #35   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 16:52
Calianna's Avatar
Calianna Calianna is online now
Senior Member
Posts: 1,847
 
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000 Female 63
BF:
Progress: 50%
Default

The "calories in/calories out" mantra assumes any calorie from any source which goes in can come out just as easily with enough exercise - that's the gross scientific error.

That premise has problems -

It doesn't take into account that an overactive pancreas can produce excessive insulin, forcing even inadequate sugar/starch calories into fat cells before you can possibly use them via exercise.

It also doesn't take into account that it's extremely difficult to access the calories stored in fat cells while your body is geared to running on sugar.

Our bodies also are not bomb calorimeters - our bodies process calories differently, depending on the type of macronutrient.



As I understand it those are the basics of the error in the calories in/calories out premise. There's probably plenty of other fallacies in the assumption that calories in/calories out is all that matters - I just don't have enough knowledge of the biochemical processes to be able to list them all.
Reply With Quote
  #36   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 17:46
Liz53's Avatar
Liz53 Liz53 is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,140
 
Plan: Mostly Fung/IDM
Stats: 165/138.4/135 Female 63
BF:???/better/???
Progress: 89%
Location: Washington state
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by inflammabl
Sugar.


No scientist would ever say, "Calories in versus calories out is irrelevant, a gross scientific error." When some deliberately ignorant reporter writes something like that it causes serious people not to take the idea seriously.


OK, agree with you on sugar, not because of calories but because of changes to hormonal milieu.

As for what a journalist says, yeah, they often get the details wrong when trying to dumb things down for lay audiences. At least she did not present it as a quote from Gary Taubes. Her eyes probably glazed over when he gave her the long version - it's a lot to take in for someone not well versed in Low Carb. Even though the details are not up to our standards, it's still a relatively positive article, I think. Those interested in a more rigorous explanation of why Sugar is toxic will check out one of Taubes' books.
Reply With Quote
  #37   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 18:38
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

Oh I agree the writer is using one part interview based journalism and three parts click bait. Taubes' writing is also one more step removed from the science of Lustig. I guess that makes it four steps removed?

Lustig's approach is particularly compelling as he attacks the problem in multiple ways. He acknowledges the low-carb, anti-insulin argument. He provides a mechanistic chemical pathway argument against sugar. He shows strong correlations between soda consumption, weight gain and t2 diabetes. Last he is clear that while excessive sugar consumption is a strong culprit, it is not the only one and does not explain all the ill health effects seen in international economies. In short it's thorough, multifaceted and self-effacing.

What I particularly liked about the article is the statement by Taubes that even the sugar in apples is bad. None of the "added sugar" nonsense for him!

PS this was written and corrected by my thumbs. I apologize for typos

Last edited by inflammabl : Sun, Jan-01-17 at 19:58. Reason: diabetesies? Seriously thumbs?
Reply With Quote
  #38   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 18:51
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Calianna
As I understand it those are the basics of the error in the calories in/calories out premise. There's probably plenty of other fallacies in the assumption that calories in/calories out is all that matters - I just don't have enough knowledge of the biochemical processes to be able to list them all.
I agree with you to an extent. Fat gain is a simple matter of calories into fat cells and out of fat cells. Both sides of the argument fail at that point. The LC side wrongly argues with the premise. The other side fails to understand that figuring out HOW those calories go in and out is not well understood let alone quantified. IMHO no one has a good enough understanding of the biochemical processes.

Ps again, my thumbs... Can't live with them. Can't live without them.
Reply With Quote
  #39   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 19:12
Liz53's Avatar
Liz53 Liz53 is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,140
 
Plan: Mostly Fung/IDM
Stats: 165/138.4/135 Female 63
BF:???/better/???
Progress: 89%
Location: Washington state
Default

And yet Lustig thinks fruit is fine as long as it is consumed whole, not juiced. Nothing makes me hungrier an hour later than fruit.

I like Taubes' argument that sugar is what first compromises the body's ability to deal with carbs. If you eat enough sugar, then you become less able to deal with starches as well. That seems to make sense for societies that consume high carb/low sugar (especially refined sugar). Assuming the Chinese are really eating significantly more refined sugar than they were 50 or 100 or 500 years ago it explains why they are beginning to show metabolic damage even though they've long eaten a relatively huge amount of rice.
Reply With Quote
  #40   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 20:03
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

Quote:
especially refined sugar

I'm sorry but refined or not refined has nothing to do with it. If you mean HFCS, then okay the conversion of glucose to fructose is a problem but fructose is a chemical with no memory of where it came from.
Reply With Quote
  #41   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 21:09
Liz53's Avatar
Liz53 Liz53 is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,140
 
Plan: Mostly Fung/IDM
Stats: 165/138.4/135 Female 63
BF:???/better/???
Progress: 89%
Location: Washington state
Default

I think refined sugar is a problem mainly because it is so concentrated, not because it is so different chemically. You can eat a lot of sugar without much effort. If you had to eat 6 or 8 apples to get the same number of carbs as, say, a large piece of chocolate cake, you'd probably give up long before finishing them.

Not following what you mean about the conversion of glucose to fructose....
Reply With Quote
  #42   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 23:18
inflammabl's Avatar
inflammabl inflammabl is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,371
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 296/220/205 Male 71 inches
BF:25%?
Progress: 84%
Location: Upstate SC
Default

I googled it and found this link explaining the difference, http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/dif...ctose-8704.html I'm sometimes confused by the difference too. Even nice natural cane sugar (sucrose) breaks down into one part glucose (okay-ish) and one part fuctose (bad).

Lustig damns fructose in particular. Not that it's concentrated but that it's the chemical fructose. That's why HFCS justly gets a bad rap. It's near 55% of the bad stuff while white sugar is 50% the bad stuff. "Processed" sweetener is worse if it's HFCS instead of processed sugar because it has higher fructose.

Just to make it more confusing... Manufactures need less HFCS to make something as sweet as if they used sugar so banning HFCS would just cause them to switch to white sugar and use more of it thus negating the purpose of a ban.
Reply With Quote
  #43   ^
Old Sun, Jan-01-17, 23:51
deirdra's Avatar
deirdra deirdra is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 4,324
 
Plan: vLC/GF,CF,SF
Stats: 197/136/150 Female 66 inches
BF:
Progress: 130%
Location: Alberta
Default

The other thing is that fructose raises insulin without raising BG, so if you measure BG you have no warning. ~15 yrs ago fructose was heavily promoted because it didn't raise BG like glucose, but now we know it is worse for you.
Reply With Quote
  #44   ^
Old Mon, Jan-02-17, 04:50
Calianna's Avatar
Calianna Calianna is online now
Senior Member
Posts: 1,847
 
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000 Female 63
BF:
Progress: 50%
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by deirdra
The other thing is that fructose raises insulin without raising BG, so if you measure BG you have no warning. ~15 yrs ago fructose was heavily promoted because it didn't raise BG like glucose, but now we know it is worse for you.


As I said before, I don't know a whole lot about the biochemical processes, but this is extremely interesting to me, as I've had reactive hypoglycemia - more accurately called hyperinsulinism, for my entire life. (I was born back when there was no ready-made baby formula, so the pediatrician would give the new mother a recipe to make the formula, so Mom would put corn syrup in the homemade formula, although I have no idea just how high in fructose standard corn syrup was in those days) (But I digress...)

I ate lower carb off-and-on for a few years when I was finally diagnosed as hypoglycemic in the early 70's. At some point after that, fructose was presented as not raising blood sugar (I was occasionally seeing this back in the 80's), and therefore safe for diabetics, and since the hypoglycemia diet I'd been given was essentially the same one they used for diabetics, I gave it a try - although pure fructose was prohibitively expensive as a home-cooking ingredient, so I didn't use it much at all, and therefore didn't notice any real difference from it.

However, they also started using HFCS in a lot of processed foods, and I foolishly thought that if fructose was ok for me, then HFCS must be mostly fructose, and ok too. (Remember that there was no google back then - accurate information about what was really in food could be difficult to come by)

Thus began the blood sugar roller coaster that lured me back to sugar. I spent the next 2 decades or so in a constant blood sugar cycle, up and down, up and down. Not that I was monitoring my blood sugar (since I wasn't considered a diabetic), but I could certainly feel the effects - eat, experience a quick burst of energy, blood sugar crash within in an hour or two, and either eat to bring it up again (and crash again, then eat again), or sleep for a couple of hours until it started to level out a little bit, then eat to bring it up again (and crash again in an hour or two). If I had only known that fructose was causing me to have such an increase in insulin, I would have avoided it like the plague.

After reading this about fructose actually causing the same insulin reaction as glucose, I'm seriously reconsidering the tiny little bit of fruit I eat these days - a few berries, and this time of year, the occasional clementine (Cuties - the smallest ones I've found).
Reply With Quote
  #45   ^
Old Mon, Jan-02-17, 05:32
JEY100's Avatar
JEY100 JEY100 is online now
Posts: 13,368
 
Plan: P:E/DDF
Stats: 225/150/169 Female 5' 9"
BF:45%/28%/25%
Progress: 134%
Location: NC
Default

Demi, thank you for posting The Sunday Times article. I always enjoy reading their position even if written "only by a journalist", which is what Taubes is too

The Sydney Morning Herald lets their Economics Editor take a stab at the No Sugar diet and Taubes book as well. Net down, he gave up sugar and it works.

Ditching sugar is a new year diet that might actually work. Here's why.
By Peter Martin

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/ditch...229-gtjqgt.html

Quote:
This year you're going to lose weight. Really.

Not like last year, when you tried to eat less and exercise more and ended up no lighter, but by approaching the problem differently. Because calories in and calories out is probably the worst way to think about it. Here's another one. Four or more drinks in a night could be adding a whopping 4,000kJs (or half a day’s worth of food). Excluding waste and sweating, it's true that the calories we take in have to be turned into either energy or weight. So it ought to be true that taking in less will cut weight. But what usually happens first is that we get hungry (and add back the calories, leaving our weight unchanged) or lethargic (expending less energy so that more of what we take in is directed to maintaining our weight). It's almost as if our weight wants to be maintained; as if it has a will of its own and manipulates the rest of us to get what it wants?

Tumours act as if they have minds of their own. They press-gang whatever they can find into making themselves grow. Children do it. During growth spurts their growth hormones direct whatever's coming in to building bones and muscles, leaving the rest of the body bereft or hungry. Only in a trivial sense is it true to say that children grow because they eat more. They eat more because they are growing. And that growth is regulated by hormones.

In 1977 Rosalyn Yalow won the Nobel Prize for tracking the hormone insulin. When it's released, fat cells start packing in fatty acids. And they also close the exits so the fatty acids can't escape while the insulin is there. It's why, oddly, we often feel weak or hungry after having sugar. The energy we thought we'd get isn't accessible. So we want to eat more, which also gets tucked into fat cells if there's insulin around; which there will be if what we've eaten is rich in sugar or other carbohydrates.
It's almost as if our weight wants to be maintained. It's almost as if our weight wants to be maintained. Veteran science journalist Gary Taubes has just set out his findings in a book entitled The Case Against Sugar, which follows Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories. He is more of a forensic examiner of evidence than he is a purveyor of diets, and his main finding is that much of the evidence has been buried. He says in the 1960s it was fairly widely accepted that carbohydrates (especially sugar) boosted the production of fat and increased appetites. It's one of the reasons we use bread as a starter at meals; it prepares us to eat.

Fat, by contrast, doesn't bring on the production of insulin at all. It may eventually be stored in fat cells, but it doesn't make those cells pack fat in and prevent them letting fat out. It's one of the reasons it rarely makes us hungry. Try eating half a slab of butter and see whether it boosts your appetite. But in the 1970s, in the United States and in Australia, where our dietary guidelines follow the US, a new more plausible theory took hold. It was that fat causes fat. Nutritionist Ancel Keys laid it out in the massive Seven Countries Study which compared nations including the US, Finland and Japan and concluded that the nations that ate the most fat suffered the most heart disease. Later research concluded that the results derived were particular to the seven countries chosen. Had Keys chosen other countries, such as France and Switzerland with high rates of fat consumption and low rates of heart disease, the correlation would have disappeared. But by then an abhorrence of fat had been written into the guidelines.

Consuming less fat meant consuming more carbohydrates, especially sugar which improves the taste of low-fat foods. So obesity climbed. The University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre is one of the few that disputes the connection. It produced a paper defending sugar that later had to be corrected after economist Rory Robertson ripped into it for misuse of statistics. Columnist Peter Fitzsimons details links between sugar and those dietitians promoting sugar in his book The Great Aussie Bloke Slimdown.

Just last month an industry-funded paper purporting to defend sugar fell apart when one of the funders, Mars Inc, disassociated itself saying it made all industry-funded research look bad.

Naturally, I am unable to guarantee that giving up sugar will make you lose weight. But I can guarantee that if you are anything like me it'll make you less hungry. I ditched sugar several new year's days ago, lost weight, and never got it back.

Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.

Last edited by JEY100 : Mon, Jan-02-17 at 08:44.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off



All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:05.


Copyright © 2000-2024 Active Low-Carber Forums @ forum.lowcarber.org
Powered by: vBulletin, Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.