Pretty sure the reason for the is also the do-gooders. For 40 years people have been preaching "low fat" and "no animal fat" to kids.
Now, wanting to be healthy...they eat "low fat" diets. Diets that are full of Carbs (because protein is expensive). Its a zero sum game.
And what's funny is that "low fat" foods are almost always high in sugar. Because starch is unappetizing. And protein is not an ingredient you can sprinkle into skim-milk yoghurt.
Don't get me started on 'gluten free', its just as bad. You know what's gluten free? Sugar. And stuff full of sugar (raisins!).
And while we're at it lets look at replacing "sugar" with Juice because its healtier. Oh, wait...its full of sugar.
If you want to eat healthy just pick a balanced diet.
That's one of the biggest problems here. What people have been taught is patently incorrect. It's a recipe for riding a blood sugar roller coaster.
We teach our kids from an early age to eat sugary foods. We use cartoon characters to goad them into begging their parents for them. What's cereal and milk? Most of the time, it's a sugar coated grain-based product soaked in a sugary liquid that is somehow healthier when you remove all the fat from it and add more sugar. What do kids want for a drink? Sunny Delight, a half-artificial sugar bomb which is nutritionally not much better for you than a can of soda. What do most kids get at school for lunch? Two enriched slices of bread surrounding a small piece of meat and some fried starch on the side. And more milk, because you can't ever have enough sugar to drink.
I can go on and on, but the point is, this starts with parents getting educated and taking charge of the eating habits of their kids.
This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.
It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.
Granted, getting parents to sit down and spend an hour or two a week watching videos on eating right (and then spending more hours buying groceries and cooking at home) is difficult if they're working minimum-wage jobs and barely making ends meet, and the children of those parents seem like they'd be most vulnerable.
Government initiatives in Canada to improve healthy eating in Nunavut, for example, ended up with passion fruit and coconuts[2] being shipped up to the arctic. I'm not convinced that resulted in better diets for children.
[0] http://justcookforkids.com/
[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/childnutrition
[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/why-i...
I think most of us know that sugar cereals are bad, sunnyd is fake and disgusting, and soda is poison. The problem is we just don't care. At least that's what it looks like. When you see an obese child whose parents are also obese and they're all happily consuming their favorite poisonous snack do you see that as an educational challenge? I see it more as a discipline problem.
If people could easily do that we wouldn't be facing an epidemic of obesity. It's sort of crazy you're so willing to ignore the major point of the article and blame those have historically tried to enact change.
As far back as 1675, when western Europe was experiencing its first sugar boom, Thomas Willis, a physician and founding member of Britain’s Royal Society, noted that the urine of people afflicted with diabetes tasted “wonderfully sweet, as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”
Tasting sick peoples urine is definitely not my idea of a dream job.
This, of course, muddies the waters for those with an actual issue, as a bandwagoner gone gluten free won't have a reaction if they accidentally consume gluten. This leads to erroneous beliefs about what is/isn't gluten free.
Of course, this isn't unique to gluten. One can find plenty of people claiming to be vegetarian, even vegan, who solely refuse to eat red meat.
This article highlights one of the many possible reasons why this is so. Refined fructose is absorbed by the body almost instantly and hits your liver like a freight train. The same amount of fructose eaten in the form of raw fruit takes longer to absorb and trickles into your liver, giving it time to cope. The same nutrients ingested in different forms have different health impacts. Never mind that it's also easier to eat far more sugar when it's refined! e.g. A 590 mL bottle of coke contains about the same amount of sugar as a half dozen apples.
What's the lesson learned? Try to let your body do some of the processing itself. That's what it has evolved to do. We will most probably continue finding ways in which highly processed foods are bad for us. Perhaps it's not a good idea to let industrial processes pre-digest your food for you. We are finding out that how we get our nutrients is as important as what those nutrients are.
A lot of low fat foods end up being high in sugar and end up having lower satiety than "regular" foods. The perfect example being skim milk vs. whole milk. That's super important because it means that people can consume the same calories but still feel hungry with a "low fat" food. And then they are faced either with persistent feelings of hunger or to eat more until they feel full. Also, high sugar foods are easily converted into body fat, which just makes the problem that much worse.
Maybe you've been reading particularly good advice about wealth, but I can assure you that far more than "nobody" tell the poor to just acquire the willpower to spend less and earn more.
I agree with your overall point, but I think the same issue plays out in the field of economic behavior of individuals as well as the eating behaviors. People who are advantaged in either scenario don't realize it and don't understand their own advantages, thus giving bad advice to the less-advantaged even when they mean well.
Adblock or Disconnect or something probably blocked it on my machine.
Sugar doesn't get into the blood stream. Glucose does. Glucose is the only nutrient that neurons are using in normal conditions.
Criticizing excess is fine and dandy but labeling sugar an "addictive drug" and comparing it with heroin and cocaine by way of some scientific sounding "pleasure centers" is downright insane. Makes me question the validity of the historic part I enjoyed so much...
And to elaborate, the other is ketone bodies produced by the liver from fatty acids.
Their production occurs in healthy individuals as nutritional ketosis under a carbohydrate restricted diet (typically less than 100g/day) or in diabetics as the pathological condition ketoacidosis.
> The brain can consume lactate as a substrate, as has been demonstrated by studies showing that the brain uses lactate during hypoglycemia or during periods of elevated blood lactate [...]
> However, because lactate does not pass through the blood-brain barrier nearly as well as glucose [...], lactate cannot serve the brain as a blood-borne substrate the way glucose does.
[1]: http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v23/n11/full/9591474a.ht...
Nutritional ketosis, unlike ketoacidosis is a loosely defined term. Everyone has experienced it on some level. Perhaps just not at extreme levels like people pursing NK with vigour.
The conclusion at the end of that article is:
"So, in response to the question, “Is sugar toxic?” it seems to me the answer is, “yes, sugar is probably chronically toxic to many people.” And so is water. And so is oxygen. My sincere hope, however, is that you now understand that this is probably the wrong question to be asking. The better question is probably “What dose of sugar can I (or my child) safely tolerate to avoid chronic toxicity?” The goal should be to figure out your toxic dose, then stay well below it. (It’s probably not wise to consume 95% of the toxic dose of APAP just because you have a really bad headache.) What makes this important, of course, is that with water and oxygen, the toxic doses are so far out of the range of what we normally consume, it’s not really necessary to expend much mental energy worrying about the toxicity. But with sugar, at least for many of us, the toxic dose is easy to consume, especially in world where sugar resides in almost everything we eat."
Just to point out, the high concentration of glucose in urine of diabetics is the result of the disease. A healthy person who just happened to eat some sugar would not have elevated glucose in urine. This of course does not rule out increased sugar consumption as a risk factor in developing type 2 diabetes (type 1 is genetic) but the article does not make it clear.
I understand the article focuses just on sugar, but when it starts getting to the health effects, the focus shouldn't be on just sugar but rather all high-glycemic-index foods, including bread, pasta, potatoes, and so on -- at least from what I understand. It doesn't do much good to cut back on sugar if you replace it with bread.
Here's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" that lays out the theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
1. And specifically the manufactured fructose isolates vs. natural fructose found in fruit.
Edit: rather glucose in high quantities as noted in response below.
http://www.andrewkimblog.com/2013/02/quick-commentary-on-dr-...
Assuming of course that you don't buy bread with sugar in it.
"Although the Glycemic Index provides some insights into the relative diabetic risk within specific food groups, it contains many counter-intuitive ratings. These include suggestions that bread generally has a higher glycemic ranking than sugar and that some potatoes are more glycemic than glucose." - Wikipedia
From a weight loss perspective sugars, such as in fruit juice, are superior to starches for two reasons. The fructose is thermogenic and raises base metabolic rate. Secondly, starches tend to reach lower lengths of the intestine undigested where they can feed bacteria that generate endotoxins.
Low starch, high sugar, low fat, and 80 grams of protein a day is a very good formula for weight loss.
For example, a candy bar had a lot if simple sugars in it, but also a lot of fat, which slows gastric emptying and results in a much lower than expected glycemic index.
I assume their refinement into sugar is a result of exposure to the arab techniques of sugar-cane refinement mentioned throughout the article, but the history of that other thread of sugar would have been another interesting one to weave into this narrative.
