Sugar: The Bitter Truth

[ArcBound]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Anyone watch this? What do you think?

It talks about how lots of sugars are bad and high fructose corn syrup isn't really worse than fructose and how much worse fructose is than glucose in terms of metabolism and causes of obesity, and etc. Points out why the low-fat fad is BS and lots of interesting things.

 

[betheman]

really interesting video, anyone who cares about their health needs to watch it, particularly so if you have kids too. makes a lot of sense, the food authorities are absolute scum, I have held this view for years and this just re emphasises my views, they really do poison people

 

[Bible_Belt]

Sugar wouldn't be so bad if people would exercise. For about 4-6 hours after intense cardio, sugar is actually good for you. But if you sit on your ass all day like most people, it is deadly poison.

 

[betheman]

it isnt just about losing weight, there are significant benefits for the health of your heart too which are directly related to the use of sugar substances

 

[ArcBound]

Sugar wouldn't be so bad if people would exercise. For about 4-6 hours after intense cardio, sugar is actually good for you. But if you sit on your ass all day like most people, it is deadly poison.

Well I'm a believer in that both diet and exercise are necessary to really be healthy and its much easier to not eat something, then to exercise and burn it off.

The spokesperson in the video also cites a study that shows if you give soft drinks to a person, they could actually eat even more food. Something about the way fructose and HFCS is metabolized makes it so that you aren't actually that full even if you downed a 500 calorie soft drink.

Plus the average American running 4-6 hours?

 

[bukowski_merit]

Just so you can get the perspective of a guy who actually debated Lustig:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMc0_s-M08I

---
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/ (Note: the comments section has pretty much all the debate, knowledge, and published studies anyone could possibly care to read on this subject. As well as the debate itself between the Dr. and Alan. Which begins around the 1000th comment)

While Lustig correctly points out that the nation’s overall caloric consumption has increased, he proceeds to blame carbohydrates as being the primary constituent. The thing is, he uses data spanning from 1989-1995 on children aged 2-17. Survey data is far from the gold standard of evidence, but if you’re gonna cite it, you might as well go with something more recent that includes adults.

Here’s the latest from the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), which tracked the percent of total daily calories of the range of food groups from 1970-2007. The actual spreadsheet of the following figures can be downloaded here, click on the “Percents” tab at the bottom (note that these figures are updated regularly by the ERS, so the version you download may be different from what’s reported here) [1]:

Meats, eggs, and nut kcals decreased 4%.
Dairy kcals decreased 3%.
Percentage of fruit kcals stayed the same.
Percentage of vegetable kcals stayed the same.
Flour and cereal product kcals increased 3%.
Added fat kcals are up 7%,
Added sugars kcals decreased 1%
Total energy intake in 1970 averaged 2172 kcal. By 2007 this hiked up to 2775 kcal, a 603 kcal increase.

Taking a hard look at the data above, it appears that the rise in obesity is due in large part to an increase in caloric intake in general, rather than an increase in added sugars in particular.

Lustig insufficiently addresses the ‘energy out’ side of the equation. According to the research, it’s possible that over the last couple of decades, we’ve become more sedentary. King and colleagues recently compared the physical activity data in the National Health & Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1988-1994 with the NHANES data from 2001-2006, and found a 10% decrease [2]. From a personal observation standpoint, that figure seems conservative (internet surfing for hours after your desk job shift, anyone?). It’s safe to say that all 603 extra daily calories have been landing in the nation’s collective adipose depot.

It’s also safe to say that all this finger-pointing at carbohydrate is just as silly as the finger-pointing toward fat in the ’80′s. Lustig takes the scapegoating of carbohydrate up a notch by singling out fructose. Perhaps the most passionate point he makes throughout the lecture is that fructose is a poison. Well, that’s just what we need in this day and age – obsessive alarmism over a single macronutrient subtype rather than an aerial view of the bigger picture.

 

[ArcBound]

Just so you can get the perspective of a guy who actually debated Lustig:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMc0_s-M08I

---
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/ (Note: the comments section has pretty much all the debate, knowledge, and published studies anyone could possibly care to read on this subject. As well as the debate itself between the Dr. and Alan. Which begins around the 1000th comment)

Interesting, will take me a while to read through all of this.

So do you think all this alarmism over sugar is the same thing that happened several decades back when everyone was blaming fat?

 

[bukowski_merit]

Interesting, will take me a while to read through all of this.

So do you think all this alarmism over sugar is the same thing that happened several decades back when everyone was blaming fat?

I don't believe the Doc is wrong about everything. There's some merit to certain elements.

But I don't agree that sugar is responsible for the rise in obesity. I mean, obviously those numbers don't either!

As is the case with just about every diet discussion - it comes down to Calories in/Calories out!

A 603 calorie increase per person is not something to overlook.

I honestly feel like people are more bored in today's society. That's because we don't have to be active to survive anymore. We don't even have to be active to interact with people.

Most people are so bored.

It's Work/School, Tv, Internet, Video Games, Texting, etc. For the vast majority of people in modern society.

Boredom is probably the number one cause of overeating.

I'm guilty of it my damn self.

I tend to overeat when i procrastinate.

Luckily for me - I don't buy much junk; so i overeat on good foods that fill me up faster.


I definitely agree with Allan on this:

To say sugar is responsible for the increase in obesity of society (and to single out Fructose) is laughable.


But:

There's other valuable things to take from the Doc's point of view.

 

[Down Low]

Forgot where I heard it, but the increase in daily calories is very close to the increase in calories from soda.

When I was a kid, people drank one 10-oz. Coke at a time. Maybe one coke every couple of days. And they returned the glass bottles to the store. It's pretty believable that high fructose corn syrup in soda accounts for the increase in total calories.

BTW, high fructose is not fructose. It's a chemical invented in Japan around 1900.

 

[d!ckmojo]

Well I'm a believer in that both diet and exercise are necessary to really be healthy and its much easier to not eat something, then to exercise and burn it off.

The spokesperson in the video also cites a study that shows if you give soft drinks to a person, they could actually eat even more food. Something about the way fructose and HFCS is metabolized makes it so that you aren't actually that full even if you downed a 500 calorie soft drink.

Plus the average American running 4-6 hours?

Nah dawg, you're missing his point. He said that AFTER exercising, sugar can be helpful, i.e. in order to replenish Glycogen stores in the muscles.

That's why carb timing is critical. Its a fool's gambit to eat sugar and be all like "oh, its cool, I'll do exercise later and burn it off". Body doesn't work like that.

You eat that sugar, your body will just be all like "Oh, cool, some more surplus calories... We'll just store that away in the fat around mah belley, get mah spare tyre a bit bigger, that might come in handy next time a famine breaks out around here".

And then, when you go and exercise, all you'll do is deplete the glycogen stores in your muscles and you'll never make a dent in the fat deposits around your abdomen.

But if you eat the sugar AFTER you've engaged in intense exercise, your body won't store it as fat, it will store it as glycogen in your muscles so that you can exert them just as hard again next time you exercise

Carb timing is critical. If you are going to eat sugar, EVER, you have to make sure its directly after some intense cardio + weights training imo.

 

[Bible_Belt]

Carb timing is critical. If you are going to eat sugar, EVER, you have to make sure its directly after some intense cardio + weights training imo

Yep. When I was training mma, after a 2-hour intense training session, I would typically drink a 32-ounce bottle of Gatorade on the way home and a 6-pack of beer when I got home. Those are the same simple carbs that make people fat, but I was ripped. That was the lowest my body fat had ever been. I can honestly say I drank a 6-pack about every day, and yet still had a 6-pack. It was all about carb timing.

 

[ebracer05]

The biggest problem with fructose and to a lesser degree, sugars in general, is the inflammatory response they produce in the body. That's not such a big deal when sugar quantities are limited, but people nowadays eat a lot of sugar. The inflammatory response can be particularly important in the coronary arteries and has been proposed as a mechanism for cardiovascular disease and the progression of arteriosclerosis.

The other big issue is insulin resistance. People tend to forget that all hormones are governed by the principle of negative feedback, even academics forget this at times. It's the reason dudes who use roids get their HPTA shut down and stop producing natural testosterone. If a person's sugar intake is significantly higher than whatever it is that it should be, they're going to develop the inverse problem. Their bodies will have to produce a much larger amount of insulin and the research coming out over the last 10 years or so had demonstrated that there is receptor desensitization as a result of what would be "hyper" endogenous levels of insulin.

This was a proposed mechanism for type II diabetes in my human physiology textbook. Belly fat is strongly correlated with type II diabetes, but where does the belly fat come from? In general, it comes from people who consume inordinate amounts of sugars. Their insulin levels peak higher than they otherwise would, bombard cellular receptors with insulin and over time, the receptors become less sensitive to insulin. A similar thing happens to neurons in people who take clinically appropriate amounts of prescription stimulants (and it's really bad if you abuse them). It's called neuronal excitotoxicity and essentially what's going on is that the constant depolarization and repolarization of the neuronal cells "revs" them up so much that they eventually stop working.

Fructose has gotten a bad rap because there is a growing body of evidence that it does all of the negative things other sugars do to a greater extent. It is significantly sweeter than glucose, sucrose, and the other common dietary sugars, and that's why it's used so frequently... more sweetness/per mass = a cheaper product.

Carb timing is important if you don't want to store excess fat, but it's not going to do anything about the insulin spike your body experiences after ingesting a simple carbohydrate, unless you have defunct islet cells (and that would be bad).

 

[Basil325]

No doubt every thing has a positive and a negative effect.Same like other sugar has also many positive and negative factors.Sugar is sucrose that becomes glucose. Glucose is easily regulated by our body if we eat it regularly. If our levels are low and we get some glucose, the body does rush to consume it. But this is because glucose is so essential for us to live. Glucose is our energy. It keeps our body sustaining a regular temperature. Our brain thinks using glucose.But if some one uses massive quantity of sugar daily that become the series problem.

 

[webpiter]

This is really very informative and vedio is also really very interesting. Thanks for the share with us.

 

[ArcBound]

No doubt every thing has a positive and a negative effect.Same like other sugar has also many positive and negative factors.Sugar is sucrose that becomes glucose. Glucose is easily regulated by our body if we eat it regularly. If our levels are low and we get some glucose, the body does rush to consume it. But this is because glucose is so essential for us to live. Glucose is our energy. It keeps our body sustaining a regular temperature. Our brain thinks using glucose.But if some one uses massive quantity of sugar daily that become the series problem.

If you actually watched the video I posted you would have known one of the main points the doctor makes is that a lot of the sugar we consume today is fructose and fructose is not at all well regulated by our body. Next time watch the video then comment on the thread.

 

[Basil325]

No doubt every thing has a positive and a negative effect.Same like other sugar has also many positive and negative factors.Sugar is sucrose that becomes glucose. Glucose is easily regulated by our body if we eat it regularly. If our levels are low and we get some glucose, the body does rush to consume it. But this is because glucose is so essential for us to live. Glucose is our energy. It keeps our body sustaining a regular temperature. Our brain thinks using glucose.But if some one uses massive quantity of sugar daily that become the series problem.

Please share your comments .
Tacoma fitness trainer

 

[Down Low]

And then, when you go and exercise, all you'll do is deplete the glycogen stores in your muscles and you'll never make a dent in the fat deposits around your abdomen.

Aerobic exercise burns fat and sugar together. Anaerobic exercise, such as weight lifting, burns only sugar. If you have belly fat, forget the weight lifting and concentrate on walking, jogging, biking, and swimming.