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from the sweets-for-my-sweet,-sugar-for-my-honey-The-Drifters-1961 dept.
Lustig, the maverick scientist, has long argued that sugar is as harmful as cocaine or tobacco – and that the food industry has been adding too much of it to our meals for too long.
If you have any interest at all in diet, obesity, public health, diabetes, epidemiology, your own health or that of other people, you will probably be aware that sugar, not fat, is now considered the devil's food. Dr Robert Lustig's book, Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Obesity and Disease ( http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/25/fat-chance-robert-lustig-review ), for all that it sounds like a Dan Brown novel, is the difference between vaguely knowing something is probably true, and being told it as a fact. Lustig has spent the past 16 years treating childhood obesity. His meta-analysis of the cutting-edge research on large-cohort studies of what sugar does to populations across the world, alongside his own clinical observations, has him credited with starting the war on sugar. When it reaches the enemy status of tobacco, it will be because of Lustig.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/24/robert-lustig-sugar-poison
I think moderation is the key. What do you think ?
(Score: 5, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 27 2014, @02:12PM
What people today considerate moderate amounts of sugar just a few generations ago would have been considered something only somebody would an out-of-control sweet tooth would even have wanted to eat.
Go back to colonial times, just at the start of the sugar triangle trade routes, and typical annual consumption was about ten pounds or so; roughly a tablespoon (~15 grams) per day or a teaspoon (~5 grams) per meal.
A single can of Coke has a quarter cup of sugar in it. A tablespoon of ketchup has a teaspoon of sugar. If it's pre-packaged, even if it's not something normally thought of as sweet, it likely has about a teaspoon or so per label serving -- and we all know that most people eat much more than single servings at a time.
If you want to moderate your sugar intake, don't eat anything pre-packaged; don't eat at restaurants; and limit yourself to a teaspoon per meal -- or, if you like to indulge, balance it out by completely eliminating sugar from other meals.
Oh -- and that applies to all sweeteners, not just sugar. Cane sugar, beet sugar, honey, maple syrup, HFCS, saccharine, Sucralose...all are either metabolically indistinguishable from sugar or metabolically worse than sugar.
If that's too much moderation for you, cut down as much as you can. With sugar, less is better; more is worse. That tablespoon a day figure gets you to levels we have historical evidence have negligible impacts on human health. Eat more than that and you increase your risk and severity of obesity and diabetes and the rest of the maladies associated with the metabolic condition. Feel free to eat less; your body doesn't at all need sugar.
If you have an insatiable sweet tooth, satiate it with fresh fruit -- not canned, and especially not juiced. Eat textbook-standard portion sizes of proteins (about the size of a deck of cards per meal) and carbohydrates (about a quarter cup before cooking of whole grains), add fats to taste, and fill yourself up on fresh veggies -- as much as you care to eat. A few times a week do half an hour or so of intense resistive (not cardio) exercise, and you're basically set.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday August 27 2014, @02:28PM
I like your advice, a pity bacon doesn't come in sizes as large as my choice of cards [photobucket.com] (or even text-books [themetapicture.com]).
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:07PM
It does if you make your own!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 27 2014, @03:31PM
Honey? Huh-uh!
I'll make allowances for the possibility that I'm just brainwashed. Please, give some references regarding honey being equal to or worse than sugar. I simply cannot buy that without something to back it up.
A google search offers up many comparisons favorable to honey, https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=honey+calories+compared+to+sugar&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t [google.com]
While honey actually has more calories than sugar, the calories in sugar is more readily stored as fat. The calories in honey are burnt up more easily, and far less likely to be stored as fat.
This PDF seems to summarize honey and sugar as well as anything else I've looked at: http://extension.arizona.edu/sites/extension.arizona.edu/files/pubs/az1577.pdf [arizona.edu]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Silentknyght on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:59PM
Careful about making assertions about things your body can't actually metabolize. From wikipedia:
(Score: 2) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Wednesday August 27 2014, @11:14PM
I lift weights, so I bought some whey protein powder and some creatine from the pharmacy at my local Walmart. I'm really blind so I couldn't get a great look at the labels until later, when I found out that both of them contained _massive_ amounts of sugar! They really do stuff it in just about everything, eh? It was a bit of an unfortunate surprise.
I avoid pure sugar like it's the plague, btw. Because it is.