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Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 10:36 am
by halfmoon
Farm_or wrote: That said, there's an average ten years pay back for every big round circle that you see flying over the countryside.
There's a 10-year payback for alien spacecraft? :lol:
Farm_or wrote:But there is no better recycler than a free range chicken for two excellent and renewable sources of aminos.
Agreed. I always roll my eyes at the supermarket chicken proudly labeled: All Vegetarian Diet. I've never seen a vegetarian chicken, because chickens love juicy bugs above all things. I can't (yet) bring myself to eat bugs, but I'm happy to let chickens convert them for me into tasty meat. If a person is concerned about being vegetarian, why would they eat chicken?

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 10:45 am
by Dragline
jennypenny wrote:I just finished Gary Taubes's new book The Case Against Sugar. It's good, and I like that he includes some history of sugar use as well as some history of the medical research. One of the terms I hadn't heard before was dopamine downregulation. I'm going to research that more, especially wrt mental health. If anyone knows of any good literature, please post it.
Taubes was just interviewed about this book on EconTalk -- its quite interesting, actually: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/0 ... es_on.html

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 8:43 am
by Smashter
This article presents an interesting takedown of "The Case Against Sugar".

http://www.stephanguyenet.com/bad-sugar ... nst-sugar/

Personally, I think Taubes is a great writer who has done a lot of good in pointing out that we shouldn't simply follow FDA dogma. Still, he seems like he's taking this whole crusade against sugar a little too far.

According to well-regarded obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet, Taubes excludes from his books any research he doesn't like. This becomes pretty funny when Taubes conveniently leaves out results from research his own organization is currently funding if the results contradict the narrative he's trying to push.

From the piece:

"Taubes upbraids the research community for its belief that body fatness is determined by calorie intake, rather than the impact of foods on insulin. He supports the latter proposition with semi-anecdotal observations from Africa suggesting that a group of people eating a high-sugar diet supplying “as little as sixteen hundred calories per day” were sometimes obese and diabetic.

A person who actually wants to get to the bottom of this question should conduct their investigation in a very different manner. The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness. This is true across a wide range of carbohydrate-to-fat ratios and sugar intakes, and a correspondingly wide range of insulin levels (17).

What makes Taubes’s oversight so extraordinary is that he was involved in funding one of these metabolic ward studies, which compared two diets that differed more than tenfold in sugar content. The results showed that a 25 percent sugar, high-carbohydrate diet caused slightly more body fat loss than a 2 percent sugar, very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet of equal calories (18). Despite these clear and consistent findings, Taubes continues to insist that calorie intake is not an important determinant of body fatness, and he offers the reader questionable evidence in support of this while omitting high-quality evidence to the contrary. All while exuding righteous indignation about the scientific community’s misguided beliefs."

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:34 am
by 7Wannabe5
Sugar isn't good for you, but anybody who was a female suburban teenager in the 1980s knows that if you want to fit into your designer jeans, you just have to take your sugar straight (lemon drops NOT muffins) with coffee and some aspirin and/or burn off caloric equivalent aerobically. Variation being you just hang out on the beach or by the pool eating nothing until dinner time then you only have one piece of pizza and 3 vodka and diet tonics. IOW, what constitutes best nutrition, the variety of factors that contribute to fitness, the variety of factors that contribute to longevity, and the straight-forward factors that contribute to weight loss are often confused by those who don't comprehend that all religions are based on rules for diet and sanitation. Exercise towards proof would be creation of Venn diagram intersecting dietary practice of individuals with frequency of visitation to establishment specializing in colon cleansing services.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 12:38 pm
by jennypenny
@smashter -- I thought Taubes was upfront in the book about only presenting his side of the argument wrt sugar.

At the end of the book, Taubes touched on something that concerns me the most. It has been determined that epigenetics can influence our susceptibility to diseases like diabetes. Our personal tolerance level for something like sugar might be at least partially determined by the conditions under which our grandparents lived. That could mean that (1) what is safe will vary for each individual and someone following 'healthy' guidelines might still be doing damage based on genetic influences, and (2) past studies might not prove useful if epigenetics influences the health of future generations (levels that made people sick in the past may be higher than what would make you and I sick). After reading The Sports Gene, I also question whether studies on different populations can be conclusive.

I think it's good to read all available information to make an informed decision about what works best for each individual. Some people may function best following a different diet -- I expect that's most likely the case. What I wonder about is the genetic coding they are passing on if they overindulge in sugar, even if it doesn't negatively affect their own health.

If you don't plan on procreating, enjoy all the Chunky Monkey you want. :D

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:09 pm
by 7Wannabe5
Epigenetics is interesting, but glucose intolerance in offspring is linked to famine more than feast conditions in utero. Also, it is trivial compared to the effects of industrial food production and robots performing most of our manual labor. A middle-aged overweight, over-worked female with whom I am acquainted was telling me that she pays somebody $160/week to prepare and deliver homemade, healthy meals for her husband and her. The undeniable clear correlation is employment of females outside of the home and obesity. The obvious solution is to reduce the average workweek of men AND women to 20 hours, so that everybody can engage in more home production.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:42 pm
by Ego
7Wannabe5 wrote:Epigenetics is interesting, but glucose intolerance in offspring is linked to famine more than feast conditions in utero. Also, it is trivial compared to the effects of industrial food production and robots performing most of our manual labor.
Hum. I believe more time has been spent studying the DNA of famine-offsprings. Feast conditions have been linked epidemiological to insulin resistance. Today they are working out the epigenetic causes.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles. ... heritance/

I don't think it is possible to say that the epigenetic influence is trivial, regardless of how much I want that to be true. I want to believe that we control our level of insulin resistance, but evidence seems to be showing that some people start their lives with the genes expressing in ways that are not ideal. They still influence this. They are not entirely victims. But I think it is not correct to say it is trivial when compared to industrial food and our sedentary society. I could be wrong.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:07 pm
by 7Wannabe5
Ego said: Hum. I believe more time has been spent studying the DNA of famine-offsprings. Feast conditions have been linked epidemiological to insulin resistance. Today they are working out the epigenetic causes.
So, according to the article you linked, it is high fat, not high sugar, diet that is linked with diabesity risk through epigenetic causation? That makes more sense since if/when you are in famine situation during pregnancy, you are basically eating a high fat diet. Also, this correlates with high fertility being linked to low waist-to-hip-ratio which is also strongly correlated with ability to convert carbohydrates/sugars into inert fat storage on lower body. Very obese women and very thin women with high waist-to-hip ratio are both more likely to give birth to underweight, at-risk infants. I wonder to what extent this is exacerbated through bottle-feeding with large protein/high sucrose cow milk formulas rather than small protein/high glucose human breast milk? Obviously, the industrial feeding of infants with formula was promoted prior to the industrial feeding of the elderly and adult workers with liquid soylent protein formulations and/or giant frozen TVP burritos.
. But I think it is not correct to say it is trivial when compared to industrial food and our sedentary society. I could be wrong.
On one of the permaculture forums I visit, a man who a number of years ago changed his diet from industrial wheat based to vegetables he raises himself by engaging in manual labor, recently posted some before and after photos. Stunning difference. He also noted that he now has to consume around 4000 kcalories/day to maintain his weight at his current level of labor. My 76 year old friend who can still run and do headstands, mostly lives on giant bowls of fresh fruit, fish and oatmeal. I do not always make the best choices for myself, but I can see what works. I guess it is just the part of me that tends a bit towards Sesame Street Socialism that doesn't like how "healthy" has been rendered into "elitist" signaling mechanism. Like your typical low-income, overweight, working-as-wage-slave, single mother does not have enough problems to overcome. Now she has to worry that the reason why her 6 year old is throwing a tantrum in the back seat because he is jonesing for McDonalds is she ate a candy bar the week his absentee father knocked her up.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:50 pm
by Ego
7Wannabe5 wrote: I guess it is just the part of me that tends a bit towards Sesame Street Socialism that doesn't like how "healthy" has been rendered into "elitist" signaling mechanism. Like your typical low-income, overweight, working-as-wage-slave, single mother does not have enough problems to overcome. Now she has to worry that the reason why her 6 year old is throwing a tantrum in the back seat because he is jonesing for McDonalds is she ate a candy bar the week his absentee father knocked her up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences

Not liking the consequences of a fact does not make it less true.

We are just now starting to learn the generational consequences of behaviors and already we are seeing people put on blinders of denial because they don't want to believe that when they did X they caused their child's Y disease or grandchild's Z susceptibility. Preventative medicine is gearing up to include primordial or inter-generational prevention. La Leche League was way ahead of its time. Where once we shrugged and said, "He/she is only hurting her/himself so it is up to him/her," we are now learning that they are also hurting those who are yet to be born. Sticky issue.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 5:25 pm
by jennypenny
I have no problem baking someone a cake for their birthday or having cookies on Christmas every year. It's the other 363 days that are the problem. And I would never disparage someone who doesn't understand the issue or can't cook or doesn't have access to decent quality food. Honestly, I'd be ok with doubling SNAP payments if they included mandatory home ec classes that included cooking and nutrition.

I think the biggest issue for me is that sugar (in all its forms) has been added to too many products unnecessarily and should be removed from most of them. It's the 30-40g of sugar in every yogurt or the high sugar content in condiments, canned goods, and cereals that are the hidden culprits and where a significant amount of sugar could be removed from our diets quite easily. It's like the trans fat issue. Everyone complained about laws banning trans fats, but does anyone really notice a difference in the quality of the food? I'm a celiac and most of the time I don't notice when companies reformulate their product to remove the gluten. Same with products like Kraft Mac & Cheese which just removed the yellow dye.

If half of the sugar was removed from packaged foods, that would reduce the intake of people who rely almost solely on those foods by half. I don't think that's an unreasonable goal. For example, fast food outlets vary the sugar content of their food -- a Whopper in the US has twice the sugar as a Whopper in Australia, but I'm sure our burger isn't twice as tasty. My point is only that I don't think it would be that hard to do with packaged goods and fast food (including crap like Gatorade and soda).

That said, I wonder if the damage from too much sugar is already baked in the genetic cake, so to speak, and subsequent generations will be forced to lower their intake or suffer severe consequences. Can you imagine what society will be like in a generation if 1 out of every 2 people has some form of metabolic syndrome?

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 5:36 pm
by Dragline
"WALL-E" here we come!

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 11:01 pm
by BRUTE
Smashter wrote:The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness.
except most humans don't spend their lives in metabolic wards eating isocaloric diets. if food composition influences future energy intake (hunger) or expenditure (how much the body burns off), forced isocaloric metabolic ward results are completely useless.

the whole point of dieting is that most humans can't do it - so proving that it's possible to lock them in a room is pretty damn useless.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:32 am
by 7Wannabe5
Ego said: We are just now starting to learn the generational consequences of behaviors and already we are seeing people put on blinders of denial because they don't want to believe that when they did X they caused their child's Y disease or grandchild's Z susceptibility. Preventative medicine is gearing up to include primordial or inter-generational prevention. La Leche League was way ahead of its time. Where once we shrugged and said, "He/she is only hurting her/himself so it is up to him/her," we are now learning that they are also hurting those who are yet to be born. Sticky issue.
Oh, this is really not all that new. Fetal alcohol syndrome, low birth weight due to smoking, babies born addicted to drugs, blinded by syphilis, with Down's syndrome due to maternal age or exhibiting recessive phenotype due to incest have all been accepted as scientifically valid.

One of my recent guilty pleasures was watching the series "Shameless." In one episode, when the hand-whores are no longer able to turn a profit, the bar-owner gathers up all the impoverished immigrant sluts who recently gave birth, hooks them up to pumps and sells their breast-milk on the internet to wealthy old Asian men. Meanwhile, the wealthy old Asian men who are trying to buy health at any price are likely dying of loneliness syndrome. Meanwhile the poor immigrant kids are being fed free government issue "whole" wheat toast with sugar topping sealed in a plastic bag for their breakfast, lunch and snack at school, but they are only given 15 minutes of recess for the whole day to burn it off because nothing can interrupt their rigorous and continuously tested training to be the robot keepers of tomorrow.

It's trivial to try to look at a linear measure of sugar or fat or ??? in our diets because the entire system in entirely f*cked up and not tending towards getting any better.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:21 am
by 7Wannabe5
jennypenny said: I have no problem baking someone a cake for their birthday or having cookies on Christmas every year. It's the other 363 days that are the problem. And I would never disparage someone who doesn't understand the issue or can't cook or doesn't have access to decent quality food. Honestly, I'd be ok with doubling SNAP payments if they included mandatory home ec classes that included cooking and nutrition.

I think the biggest issue for me is that sugar (in all its forms) has been added to too many products unnecessarily and should be removed from most of them. It's the 30-40g of sugar in every yogurt or the high sugar content in condiments, canned goods, and cereals that are the hidden culprits and where a significant amount of sugar could be removed from our diets quite easily. It's like the trans fat issue. Everyone complained about laws banning trans fats, but does anyone really notice a difference in the quality of the food? I'm a celiac and most of the time I don't notice when companies reformulate their product to remove the gluten. Same with products like Kraft Mac & Cheese which just removed the yellow dye.
The essential problem with packaged food is that it has to be processed in some manner to render it unlikely to go "bad" in short order. The reason why sugar has always been added to preserved food such as jams is that it inhibits the growth of bacteria through dehydration. IOW, when you add sugar from beets or sugar cane to a fresh wet fruit such as plums, you are just causing the concentration of sugars to be roughly the same as if you dehydrated the fresh plums into prunes. Obviously, salt is often used as a preservative for the same reason. People can't eat spoonfuls of whole wheat flour or dried rice, so some combination of water and fat has to be added to make grains palatable. If fat is primarily chosen, such as in cookies, then the food will stay shelf stable longer than if water is primarily chosen, such as in baguette. There is no magical ingredient that can be added to preserve foods that will make them as good as fresh foods. There will always be a trade-off between fat, salt, sugar, irradiation or natural/human-bred tendency towards dense,dry carbohydrate structure such as occurs in relatively cheaply stored/transported whole foods such as potatoes, bananas, carrots and apples.

I love Michael Pollan, and I believe that he is essentially correct when he suggests that most people need to spend more money on food. If you don't have money (or you tend towards frugality), then you have to spend more time/effort. Because the poor immigrant children I teach have mothers who know how to cook at home, their dinners are much healthier than their school lunches. They are also able to run around and play outside after school. This is in stark contrast with my affluent BF's 12 year old son who was tending towards becoming chubby under the influence of his obese mother, so she hired a male nanny to basically be the kid's after-school personal trainer. It's like we have all become our own pampered pets.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 11:33 am
by jennypenny
I understand what you're saying and I didn't mean to sound so cranky. It's just that I don't understand why the small jar of salsa currently in my pantry needs to have almost 10 teaspoons of sugar in it. Dialing back the sugar by half would probably still be enough of a preservative and also palatable enough for most people.

The increase in sugar is even obvious when I see what people drink at parties these days. I stick with my red wine and seltzer with a little fruit tossed in while everyone else is drinking blenderific concoctions loaded with sugar. Seems silly since my drink looks just as festive as everyone else's and we all end up pleasantly buzzed regardless of how much sugar is in our drinks.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 11:50 am
by Chad
7Wannabe5 wrote: I love Michael Pollan, and I believe that he is essentially correct when he suggests that most people need to spend more money on food.
I have found myself doing this over the last year as I tighten up my diet. I don't use any grains anymore during the week, so vegetables have to be the bulk food in all my dishes. Tastes great, but it gets pricey. Though, I feel awesome when doing it.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:06 am
by 7Wannabe5
jennypenny said: I understand what you're saying and I didn't mean to sound so cranky. It's just that I don't understand why the small jar of salsa currently in my pantry needs to have almost 10 teaspoons of sugar in it. Dialing back the sugar by half would probably still be enough of a preservative and also palatable enough for most people.
Likely I am the one who is being cranky. Part of my problem is that I understand the reason why mass produced food for the masses is such as it is. It's really just a logical extension of what any hostess/extended-family-cook who is attempting to prepare meal after meal for X people with varying tastes/allergies/preferences/taboos/nutritional-requirements for less than $Y will likely choose as default. For instance, if you are choosing to be rigid Atkins and I am required to spend money feeding you, you are going to be eating a whole lot of deviled eggs and dandelion salad. If you are a teenage vegetarian who doesn't actually like vegetables, beans or any sort of spice, then I will not be held responsible for the decline of your health due to the fact that I am not going to trouble myself with preparing anything besides cheese quesadillas for your consumption. Etc. etc. etc.

The other reason I am likely being cranky is that I am currently not in possession or dominance over one fully functional kitchen and storage pantry, yet I am likely to be overloaded with produce from my own garden and that of others in my social circle in the upcoming season. So, any stupid-narrow nutritional rule that will limit my ability to figure out how to process my way through the season will likely cause me to exhibit annoyance due to cognitive dissonance within my own functioning, as in "Was this mulberry jam sweetened only with locally produced honey which costs $16/lb.?" "No, it was sweetened with corn-syrup produced by greenhouse gas farting giant robot tractors or sugar-cane harvested by AIDS invested slave-labor."

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2017 8:31 pm
by Smashter
BRUTE wrote:
Smashter wrote:The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness.
except most humans don't spend their lives in metabolic wards eating isocaloric diets. if food composition influences future energy intake (hunger) or expenditure (how much the body burns off), forced isocaloric metabolic ward results are completely useless.

the whole point of dieting is that most humans can't do it - so proving that it's possible to lock them in a room is pretty damn useless.
I agree the studies are not perfect, but I still think they can point us in the right direction. Taubes is saying the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity is the cause of pretty much every disease of civilization. The best studies available show that model to be far too simplistic. Therefore, I think it's safe to say carbs aren't the devil.

Also, many humans have success with low-fat diets. They don't need to be locked in a room to achieve the results.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:35 am
by BRUTE
many is probably a little euphemistic - most humans in general have zero success dieting at all. what is the number, 95% of dieters fail?

it's probably not carbs period that are the problem, but refined carbs. what's tricky is that once a human metabolism is fucked up by enough refined carbs, even "regular, whole-food, plant-based" carbs can't be processed right any more. so it's not that potatoes and rice made humans fat, but once metabolic syndrome is achieved, even those relatively healthy carbs might have to be cut out by some humans.

metabolic ward studies ignore the most important part of diets - dieting. the hard part is not restricting calories for 24 hours, the hard part is eating a diet that tastes good, is socially viable, fits personal taste, AND fulfills certain health criteria, for the rest of a human life.

Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 9:16 am
by Smashter
BRUTE wrote: it's probably not carbs period that are the problem, but refined carbs. what's tricky is that once a human metabolism is fucked up by enough refined carbs, even "regular, whole-food, plant-based" carbs can't be processed right any more. so it's not that potatoes and rice made humans fat, but once metabolic syndrome is achieved, even those relatively healthy carbs might have to be cut out by some humans.
Totally agree with you here. The 37g of carbs you'll get from a medium Russett potato are not equal to the 37g you'll get from 12oz of Coca-Cola.

And yeah, I also think that people who already have metabolic syndrome shouldn't be downing orange juice in the morning. My brother is a family medicine doctor and a big Gary Taubes supporter. It drives him insane that his hospital's "Diabetic Diet" calls for things like wheat toast, juice and low-fat, sugary yogurt.