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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 opinionated_science on Thursday August 28 2014, @06:41PM
Which is why the emphasis is on life style. If you eat the same amount, and simply exercise the calorie equivalent of 1 days food (e.g. 2000 cals, walk for 4 hours /week, run for 2 hours/week etc..), this is putting your body with 1 days less food. No starvation.
Metabolism really cannot change that much (perhaps 20%?), and as I have posted more than one, if you run a marathon you will need a *minimum* of 3500 calories. One of the parameters of metabolism is the amount of muscle mass. So if there is a feedback scenario, it is being inactive that leads to inactivity.
The problem is , people leave college and begin sedentary life habits. Earning more cash, spending on richer foods. Aging does lose muscle mass, but that is mainly due to lack of activity than the actual aging.
Provide the citation of this "experiment" and I will read and respond. Studies of rats and mice are reliable to monitor, but humans really are not...
(Score: 1) by JeffPaetkau on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:43PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday August 29 2014, @03:29PM
Assuming the wikipedia article is accurate....
This is a poorly designed study, too small (36), narrow (young white men), and "special in circumstance". i.e. during the war recruits "volunteered".
Just a cursory look at the parameters that define "starvation". Start on 3200 calories and cut it in half (~1560)....go have a look at the modern FDA limits....
Starvation makes you crazy, maybe. Being stuck in an army camp....definitely!!
Revisionism is greatly in fashion, but articles like this just show how poor some studies have been used to make a political point.
Moderation is the key, sure. The point that DL and many others have made (Jamie Oliver had a crack at it too), is that the food *industry* has changed the landscape of what *can be bought* to largely favour foods that promote consumption.
The reason this is now an epidemic is because it has been 70 years in the making. As the forms of food have been mutated to accommodate cheaper ingredients, the industrialization of food, general consumption has risen due to poor nutrition. Employment restrictions and lifestyle habits have come to favour sedentary poses.
The hard edge is this, calories do matter. But so dose physiology. Both together is the problem.
Glucose is controlled by insulin but can be "burnt" by every cell in the body and ends up as glycogen. Fructose is metabolised to pyruvate and ends up either ATP (for immediate use) of stored as fat. Insulin has no effect on fructose, it just gets turned in to work, or fat.
Too much HFCS skews the body towards ignoring insulin and processing fat. Too much sucrose, eventually overloads the metabolism and impedes organ function. The clinical definition is more forgiving than the biochemical one. The liver is an amazingly flexible organ, but when it can no longer process all the food you eat, nutrients remain in the blood as toxins, and then opportunistic pathogens get a look in.
We all know that eating is a biological imperative. The problem is that it has also become a profit making one too...