Tag Archives: sucrose

Keto myths & facts

Posted on October 8, 2016 | 53 comments

:::begin rant:::

Trigger warning?  Maybe.

Disclaimer: I’m pro-LC (P<0.05), but not anti-LF because LF works better than LC for some people.  And with the exception of things like keto for neurological issues, I think macros take a back seat to many other factors.

Myths: carbs cause insulin resistance (IR), diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.  Carbs are intrinsically pathogenic.  If a healthy person eats carbs, eventually they’ll get sick.

And the only prescription is more keto.

cowbell

And of course all of this could’ve been prevented if they keto’d from the get-go.

Proponents of these myths are referring to regular food carbs, not limited to things like Oreo Coolattas (which would be more acceptable, imo).  Taubes, Lustig, Attia, and many others have backed away from their anti-carb positions, yet the new brigade proceeds and has even upped the ante to include starvation.  Because “LC = effortless fasting?”

Does this sound sane?

“No carbs ever,
no food often…
otherwise diabetes.”

oreo-coolatta

no one in their right mind would say lentils & beans cause diabetes

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, diabetes, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, fiber, Fish, Fructose, gluten, Grains, insulin, Ketosis, melatonin, mortality, muscle, Protein, sleep, smoking, strength, Sugar, Sun, TPMC

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salt makes you thirsty, soda makes you hungry.

Posted on April 3, 2013 | 5 comments

As previously discussed, DRINK was a randomized intervention study that gave children either regular or diet soda for a year and surprise surprise, the regular soda drinkers gained about more body fat than the diet soda drinkers (de Ruyter et al., 2012).  And in the follow-up, with an opposite study design, overweight & obese children who continued to drink regular soda gained twice as much weight as those who cut their intake (Ebbeling et al., 2012).  There was no apparent black box in the latter study as the kids who stopped drinking soda also decreased their intake of other foods…

-does not compute-fructose

wait a minute … By switching from regular soda to diet, you just end up compensating by eating more of something else, right?  My initial response to that has always been that it doesn’t matter – ANYTHING else is better than a straight shot of 100% HFCS (+ some other chemicals).  But those kids didn’t do that.  they ate less of other foods.

 

Does HFCS soda make you eat more?

A recent study has put a little more fuel on this fire.  Similar to the abovementioned two, it’s not a sophisticated study designed to accurately assess the impact of regular soda on appetite, satiety, hunger, etc., but it supports the theory that diet soda negative calories are NOT compensated for by eating more of something else.


Food and beverages associated with higher intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (Mathias et al., 2013)

It was another big cross-sectional NHANES study that simply asked how much regular soda, diet soda, and other foods kids were eating.Mathias data 1

They showed that as soda intake increased, so did total calories, which could simply mean the soda was adding calories to their diets.  This would indirectly support the opposite of the above mentioned theory, namely, that soda calories aren’t compensated for.  But it gets better (or worse, depending how you look at it):Mathias data 2

soda didn’t simply add to the total calorie intake.  More often than not, calorie intake increased above and beyond that contributed by the soda.  And it wasn’t just that bigger kids were drinking more soda and eating more food – these data were controlled for body weight.  The authors estimated that for every 100 kcal of soda drank, an additional 36 – 86 kcal of food was eaten.

salt makes you thirsty, and now soda makes you hungry?

 

calories proper

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, Fructose, Leptin, Sugar

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The curious effects of calories in mice

Posted on November 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

What is the biological impact of a history of obesity and weight loss?  The metabolic trajectory of two calorically restricted skinny mice depends entirely upon whether or not they used to be fat.  The end of this story might be: ‘Tis better to have lost and re-gained than never to have lost at all; or it’s just an interesting new take on the body weight set point theory.

Caloric restriction chronically impairs metabolic programming in mice (Kirchner et al., 2012)

divide and conquer

Part 1.
Study 1. Calorie restricted lean mice: the effect of diet composition.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, pair-feeding, Sugar

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Soda vs. childhood obesity

Posted on September 24, 2012 | 11 comments

What happens if you give skinny kids a can of fully sugared regular soda to drink every day for a year?

What happens if you take the soda away from overweight kids for a year?

The answer to these two questions should be a definitive user’s guide to the question: how bad is soda for my children?   And we got those answers this week.

 

A set of powerful studies were recently published, the likes of which I thought we’d never see.  It’s unethical to assign anyone to start smoking so we can properly study the effects of cigarettes; and before today, I would’ve thought it unethical to assign young children to start drinking fully sugared regular soda.  And not just one or two cans…  over 350.  For the 4 year olds the first study, by the end of the trial they had been on soda for almost a third of their life… during a critical period of development.  Ethics schmethics.  Hopefully this study will never be repeated.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, empty calories, Energy balance, Sugar, TPMC

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Non-sequiter nutrition II, a sugar-thought experiment

Posted on June 20, 2012 | 1 comment

The average western diet contains about 50 grams of fructose from a variety of sources ranging from beneficial fibrous fruits to the more insidious sugar-sweetened beverages, soda and juice.  50 grams of fructose.   2 1/2 cans of Coca-Cola.

50 grams x 4 kcal/g = 200 kcal

200 kcal / 2,000 kcal = 10%

10% of your calories are provided by fructose

Even the very high end of fructose intake rarely exceeds ~85 grams, which is still < 20%.  My point?   This is nowhere near the 60% used in mouse diet studies.  Disclaimer: I think fructose causes leptin resistance because of data from such studies.  60% fructose is the fructose that causes leptin resistance and increased susceptibility to obesity.  What does this say about “normal” levels of fructose intake?  Toxic doses cause leptin resistance and obesity susceptibility in mice, well, because they’re toxic, and fructose toxicity just so happens to manifest like that (in mice).   60% is toxic.  15 cans of Coca-Cola per day (depending on who’s counting); but is it relevant?

39 grams of sugar, roughly half of which is fructose

In mouse studies, toxic doses are used for practical reasons- it’s cheap.  The animals can be rendered leptin resistant, glucose intolerant, and susceptible to obesity within a few months of feeding this expensive purified synthetic diet.  This probably (probably) takes over 100 times longer in humans simply because it’s nearly impossible for humans to ingest mouse-toxic-levels of fructose.

1. If the dose was based on body weight (like a drug; e.g., mg/kg or mpk):

60% fructose x 12 kcal/d = 7.2 kcal.  Divided by 4 kcal/g = 1.8 grams per day.

1.8 grams for a 40 g mouse = 45 g/kg.  For a 70 kg (154 lb) human = 3,150 grams of fructose or roughly 12,600 kcal.  I.e., 150 cans of soda or about a week’s worth of calories.  In other words, you’d have to eat a hypercaloric fructose-only diet for months.

2. If the dose was based on calories:

60% fructose x 2,000 kcal/d = 300 grams = 15 cans of soda or doughnuts per day.   News flash: that’s gross, but it won’t kill you.

fructose: still not as dangerous as playing in traffic

How about just lowering your lifetime sugar exposure.  39 grams of sugar is worse than 0.01 grams of stevia or sucralose.  Anyone remember “water?”  Even if you believe “a calorie is a calorie,” exclusively, it’s still really hard to burn off 39 grams of sugar.  Try running 2 miles.  Skinny kids might do this automatically after drinking a can of soda or eating a doughnut.  Not most adults.

Don’t play in traffic either.

calories proper

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, empty calories, Energy balance, Exercise, Fructose, Sugar, Uncategorized

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XL soda ban, Op. 80

Posted on June 8, 2012 | 1 comment

People have been warned about the dangers of excess sugar consumption, but compared to the anti-smoking campaign, the recent proposal to ban XL soda’s is like bringing a cup of water to a forest fire.

In an ideal world, a proper health initiative designed to provide people (kids too) with good nutrition information would work. The new proposal takes a different route: it bans the sale of soda’s larger than 16 ounces (but you can still buy 2-12 ouncers).  I see two possible outcomes: 1) someone who would’ve bought one 24 ouncer of soda might settle for 16 ounces; 2) the one in a million customer who wanted 24 ounces will walk away with two 12 ounce sodas instead.  Win-win, right?  In the first case, the toxic sugar burden is lessened by a third.  In the second, a potentially valuable lesson on “serving size” will be on display.   Serving size 2.0, in 3-D, spelling-it-out for all to see.

It might actually work.  From a nutritional perspective, 90 grams of highly bioavailable sugar (HFCS) is a biological disaster.  Pound for pound, there aren’t many worse things you can consume… it’s the anti-thesis of “moderation.”  Regardless of your stance on the calorie debate, no one can argue that 90 grams of sugar all-at-once is more detrimental than it’s caloric content would imply.  Even for skinny people (metabolic obesity?).  It’s worse than dietary fat, and  might be THEE cause of leptin resistance.

This isn’t a TPMC original, but this graph of soda, diabetes, and obesity is just about as compelling as epidemiology can be:

 

douse those sugar cubes with artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives, and we’re good to go

If the ban goes into effect and actually impacts sales, will there be a backlash? more food company lobbying?  increased government subsidies (reduced HFCS consumption -> more taxpayer dollars used to cover the losses)?  Who knows.  If it teaches people a lesson about serving size or empty calories it might be worth it.

calories proper

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, Fructose, Sugar

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