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posted by martyb on Friday November 30 2018, @06:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-coffee,-bacon,-and-poutine? dept.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It's not everyday an issue of Science contains articles about newly discovered "fresh" impact craters (Hiawatha) or fingers the source of the worst year to be alive (534 in case you're time traveling).

But the same issue has these open (no paywall) articles summarizing what we do know about eating and living long healthy lives.

Quick takeaways:

  • The 1977 guidelines that we all grew up with were written by politicians, not scientists.
  • Trans-fats are bad, no matter what.
  • Intermittent fasting can help your brain, kidneys, chemotherapy effectiveness and recovery, AND encourage weight loss.
  • Refined sugars and carbs are generally bad for you.

There's way more than any summary can contain. In fact, almost every section of these four meta-articles could be their own discussion topic.

Since I care for all of you, I want you all to be as healthy and live as long as you want. These articles contain the state of-the-art on how to do that through proper eating habits.

Optimizing the diet.
Dietary fat: From foe to friend?
A time to fast
The gut microbiota at the intersection of diet and human health
Swifter, higher, stronger: What’s on the menu?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @12:43PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @12:43PM (#768244)

    i dont understand all the hate refined sugar gets.
    ofc theres alot sugar in unhealth stuff but how can refined sugar per se be unhealthy?
    my argument goes something like this: sugar is very very close to the chemical (atp?) that the
    body really uses. not many extra steps required. other stuff needs to go thru more steps using enzymes and what
    not to arrive at the chemical the bidy can really "burn".
    these extra steps are not for free. they themself require energy in conversion steps and the "cogs and wheels" involved get
    used up and need to be replaced.
    in car analogy: dont use refined oil (gasoline) but rather connect a mini heavr crude refinery plant to the engine
    that works by using some of the engine output to refine the heavy crude in gasoline that the engine can really use...
    now i am not saying a sugar only duet is healthy but i just want to point out that sugar gets a bad rap for no obvious reason

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @01:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @01:20PM (#768254)

    Well, refined sugar products generally lack the nutritional profile of other sources of sugars. Sterile food is probably a bigger problem than excess sugar though - the modern microbiome is probably incredibly lacking compared to those of our ancestors who got new yeasts and bacteria with every fruit and vegetable they ate.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @01:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @01:36PM (#768257)

    If you believe in evolution, millions of years have tuned your body to thrive on a certain type of diet.
    Piles of sugar only became available in around the 18th Century with sugar cane plantations. It's not something our bodies are adapted to consume in such amounts. Neither is large quantities of flour. It's a reliable food source (agriculture), but not a healthy one compared to alternatives. It kept the peasants alive to work for the king who ate better, though.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @02:50PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @02:50PM (#768278)

    how can refined sugar per se be unhealthy?

    Refined sugar generally means fructose. Fructose has a double effect on insulin resistance, the precursor for diabetes. It both stimulates production of insulin (because it's a sugar), and it reduces liver function (because it gets stored there as fat).

    source 1: [medium.com]

    Fructose is particularly toxic for several reasons.
    First, metabolism occurs solely within the liver, so virtually all ingested fructose becomes stored as newly created fat [..]
    Secondly, fructose is metabolized without limits. [..] it can overwhelm the export machinery of the liver leading to excessive buildup of fat in the liver [..]
    Thirdly, there is no alternative runoff pathway for fructose. Excess glucose is stored safely and easily in the liver as glycogen. When needed, glycogen is broken back into glucose for easy access to energy. Fructose has no mechanism for easy storage. It is metabolized to fat, which cannot be easily reversed.

    source 2: [nih.gov]

    For thousands of years humans consumed fructose amounting to 16–20 grams per day, largely from fresh fruits. Westernization of diets has resulted in significant increases in added fructose, leading to typical daily consumptions amounting to 85–100 grams of fructose per day. The exposure of the liver to such large quantities of fructose leads to rapid stimulation of lipogenesis and TG accumulation, which in turn contributes to reduced insulin sensitivity and hepatic insulin resistance/glucose intolerance

    Note that this study specifically mentions glucose intolerance. Once a body's metabolism has been affected with insulin resistance, all sugars become toxic and can increase diabetic risk.

    source 3:

    both isocaloric fructose consumption and hypercaloric fructose consumption induce hepatic insulin resistance in normal-weight, nondiabetic adults

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @02:53PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @02:53PM (#768281)

      argh. source 3 [fructosefacts.org].

      • (Score: 1) by doke on Friday November 30 2018, @03:45PM

        by doke (6955) on Friday November 30 2018, @03:45PM (#768308)

        fructosefacts.org is an industry shill site. You can't trust it to be unbiased. There are a lot of other sites saying fructose is bad.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @11:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @11:01PM (#768497)

      'Sugar' without a modifying adjective is sucrose not fructose. Chemically it is basically one glucose and one fructose molecule bonded together. However, the first thing your body does with it is break it into the two parts.
      Glucose is the one used all over the body (and especially the brain) as the main energy source, getting it in a big lump can trigger blood sugar spikes and fat storage, but is generally not too bad for you unless you are a diabetic.
      Fructose is processed in the liver via basically the same metabolic pathways as alcohol. It has pretty much all the same nasty secondary effects as alcohol. If you are an alcoholic trying to give up drinking, you should give up fructose as well.

  • (Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday December 03 2018, @04:33PM

    by DECbot (832) on Monday December 03 2018, @04:33PM (#769180) Journal

    It's not all sugar that is bad. Glucose is fine as is and lactose is good for those who can handle it. The specific problem is fructose.
     
    Dr. Lustig, MD does a good job present the problem. "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" [youtube.com]
     
    tl;dw;
    Glucose can be readily be used by every cell in the body the body. It goes from your gut, to your bloodstream and roughly 80% is directly used by the body and used for fuel; no processing needed. The remaining 20% is processed by the liver, which converts it to light density fat cells (VLDL) that are associated with heart disease. The brain will also receive signals to stop eating when glucose is consumed. Ethanol is also a carbohydrate--but is also an acute toxin. The reasons why we regulate ethanol is because of the effects of ethanol being metabolized by the brain. Roughly four times the amount of ethanol will reach the liver than glucose when the same serving size is consumed; 10% is consumed by stomach and intestine, 10% by the kidneys, muscles, and brain, and the remaining 80% by the liver. This gets converted to lots of things the liver tries to expel, like free fatty acids that end up in the muscles which causes insulin resistance or as light density fat cells (VLDL).
     
    Fructose on the other hand must be processed completely by the liver because only the liver can metabolized it. Fructose does not stimulate insulin, and thus the signal to stop eating is not sent to the brain. Fructose ends up depleting the liver of phosphorous, and in the attempt to recover as much phosphorous as it can, the liver produces lots of uric acid as a byproduct--uric acid is the cause for gout and hypertension (high blood pressure). The end result is VLDL. But not all the fat is able to leave the liver and some becomes a lipid droplet within the liver and also causes liver inflammation. It also creates compounds that cause insulin in the the liver to be ineffective. This results in the pancreatitis making more insulin which raises blood pressure. This encourages more fat cell creation, hence obesity, and changes how your brain recognizes energy in a negative fashion--so it thinks it is starving and signals for more eating. The result of this is the common liver related diseases of alcoholism: hypertension, myocardial infarction, dyslipidemia, pancreatitis, obesity, hepatic dysfunction, fetal insulin resistance, habitual if not addictive consumption--that's 8 of the 12 diseases associated with alcoholism.
     
    What we consider as refined sugar, or table sugar, is sucrose. It is one part glucose and one part fructose with a single molecular bond joining the two. Take in a glucose load, nearly none of it ends up as fat (less than 5%). Take in a fructose load, 30% of it becomes fat. A high sugar diet results in the same as a high fat diet. Fructose will cause new fat cell production, triglycerides to rise, and free fatty acids to rise (high levels of free fatty acids will call insulin resistance). In clinical studies, these numbers will tend to double in participants consuming the fructose load within 6 days.
     
    The take away: glucose is fine as long as you don't consume excessively and start producing fat cells. Fructose will always become fat cells and will damage the body's ability to regulate itself and is always as harmful or more harmful to the liver than ethanol. Refined sugar is half fructose and thus why the informed community rails against it. If you want a challenge, eat food without added sugar, corn syrup, or high fructose corn syrup. I've found the easiest way is to make it yourself.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base