Re: Anti-Sugar Elitism
Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 5:36 pm
"WALL-E" here we come!
---an online community leveraging 14 years of experience in resilient post-consumerist praxis
https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/
https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=8212
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.BRUTE wrote: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.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.
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.
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.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.
My new favorite quote.....Felipe wrote:tldw; brittle, fudge, and coke tend to increase happiness more than broccoli and water and overeating anything leads to obesity.
7Wannabe5 wrote:But, but, but...
...the problem with targeting sugar as the root cause of all afflictions, and the relatively recent epidemic of diabesity is that humans have always eaten a good deal of sugar.
Since I taught myself to cook when I was quite young from a random collection of cookbooks, some of which were fairly archaic, including an older edition of this one https://www.amazon.com/UNITED-STATES-RE ... B000BRPEOOI have continuously been confused whenever somebody suggests that sugar, meat or grain foods in the diet is the cause of the much more recent epidemic of obesity. The oldest cookbooks in my collection of Americana,dating well back into the 19th century, all have entire chapters devoted to making candy, cakes and pies, as well as processing rhubarb, rendering carp edible, and pickling cabbage. When I was an 11 year old at Girl Scout Camp celebrating the Bicentennial we churned full fat butter and pulled taffy.We made troughs, tapped hard maples on each side of the creek; took our oxen, sled and
two barrels (as the trees were scattered) to draw the sap to the place we had prepared for
boiling it.
Now I had an employment entirely new to me: boiling down sap and making sugar, in
the woods of Michigan. This was quite a help to us in getting along. We made our own
“sweet” and vinegar, also some sugar and molasses to sell. Some springs, we made three
or four hundred pounds of sugar...
We also secured some more very nice honey. Father said, judging from the amount we got, he should think the
tree contained at least a hundred pounds of good honey, and I should think so too. And
he said “This truly is a goodly land; it flows with milk and honey.” He also said, “I will make
a barrel of metheglin, which will be a very delicious drink for my family and a kind of a
substitute for the luxuries they left behind. It will slake the thirst of the friendly pioneers,
who may favor us with a call in our new forest home; or those friends who come to talk
over the adventures of days now past, and the prospects of better days to come.”
-"The Bark-Covered House"- William Nowlin
Huh?BRUTE wrote:too bad studies have also shown that thin, healthy hunter gatherer tribes exert themselves a great deal LESS than most modern humans. they just sit around and do nothing.