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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: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 28 2014, @06:49AM
The paleolithic diet [wikipedia.org] refers to a time that ended 10.000 years ago. The starter of this thread even mentioned a time 250.000 years ago, but for the sake of argument I will stick to the period mentioned on wikipedia.
Reference 3 in that article is dead, reference 2 is not based on any artifacts/evidence but rather a conjecture. Both refer to meat, not dried fruits, and I never doubted that people in that time ate meat in winter-times; if it was preserved or fresh doesn't make that much of a difference until we start discussing salt-consumption etc.
Sugar [wikipedia.org] (in crystalline form) is known since ~450AD. Before that, sugar was not used in any relevant amounts, and afterwards usage also developed slowly since it was very expensive. That was more or less the point of the article. Honey [wikipedia.org] is used by humans since at least 8.000 years ago, and I would assume it was eaten even long before that, but I doubt it was available in big enough quantities to preserve fruits for the whole winter.
Is 6.000 years too late for the discussed time-frame.
Again, no more accurate information is given on the time frame.
All in all, I think at the time most of human genetic properties developed (>10.000 years ago), carbohydrates were not available in significant quantities, except maybe for fresh fruits in autumn.
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(Score: 2) by Geotti on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:26AM
Well, the other drying techniques were just for reference, but drying came about
. Good enough?
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:45AM
For the reference frame of the paleo diet according to the wiki link it depends, if these drying techniques were successfully applied to fruit or only to fish and meat, how far spread their usage was, and how extensive it was used. But generally, yes, since I brought the figure 10.000 years into this discussion and you exceed this time-frame, it is relevant.
Still, the 10.000 years time-frame from the wikipedia article seems to be intended to mark an order of magnitude rather than a accurate point in time, so I reserve the right to not fundamentally change my opinion ;-)
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(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday August 29 2014, @03:17AM
The ballpark is ~14k, though, since it's 12k B.C. and we're in 2k A.D. Anyway, a shame that there's no time-machine to check the facts ; )