I'm type 1. I used to believe artificial sweeteners caused the body to raise its blood sugar because the drink is perceived to be sweet, but when I got a CGM I was able to verify that they do not. I'd be interested in a switched label test with CGMs and T1s because a potential insulin response would be absent.
I realize this study is qualified (type 2, preprandial < 200mgdl, lab setting, fake labels, short term) and laud the potential connection between stress and elevated fasting glucose (seems similar to the connection between sleep and elevated glucose.) I've read the study and am just adding a personal anecdote to the thread.
> artificial sweeteners caused the body to raise its blood sugar because the drink is perceived to be sweet
This is subtly different from the effects claimed by the study, namely that blood sugar can change simply due to the test subject believing that a drink has high sugar content.
Substances other than sugar can affect the sugar balance.
This is why dogs can die from hypoglycemic shock if they consume xylitol. Their body is fooled into thinking its sugar, and the insulin response then evacuates the actual sugar from their bloodstream.
That's pretty interesting. Is it due to the taste, i.e. can it be replicated with any non-caloric or low-calorie sweetener, or is it an effect specific to xylitol (or sugar alcohols in general)?
Yes, which suggests a stress connection. Xylitol in dogs is a unique, (sadly) predictable toxicology, like their reaction to chocolate, and is more like what the human reaction to drinking artificial sweeteners would be, if humans had a similar vulnerability.
I’m not diabetic, but I’m using a CGM for a few weeks, out of curiosity.
My only surprising finding was that diet sodas don’t spike my glucose, but they do crash it, probably because my insulin response is triggered by perceived sweetness.
I thought this was common knowledge. Late 80s, my bro tech'd for his prof, who was researching artificial sweeteners, esp aspartame. He told me a burger w/ diet coke was worse than normal coke, because the excess insulin produced will then metabolize whatever useful protein is found into fat. He also said the fake sugars were more addictive, which I totally believe.
No it's far from common knowledge, if the way you find out is through some university professor.
My understanding is / was that fake sugars do not have response and do not cause you to get fat, while you've demonstrated there is an insulin response which is pretty major.
Now I have to figure out another way to deal with the bitterness of coffee other than my current 2 packets of stevia method.
If you're using a sweetener to cut the bitterness (rather than to add sweetness), then you may enjoy cold-brewed coffee. Cold water is far less effective than hot water at extracting tannins from coffee grounds, which are the primary source of the bitterness in coffee. So cold-brewed coffee tends to be naturally less bitter, as a result.
Bonus points in that it's less acidic, as well. And in case anyone else is as oblivious as I originally was, "cold-brewed" doesn't actually have to equate to cold coffee. You end up with a coffee concentrate, which you dilute with water to preference (taste, caffeine content, etc). You can dilute a cup with boiling water to get a hot cup of (non-bitter) coffee just as easily as you can dilute it with ice water for a cold, ice coffee.
This is a very common way to take coffee in New Orleans. If you're considering this method, Cool Brew sells containers that are perfect to store the concentrated coffee. This is how my family has stored their cold brew since I was a kid.
Trade sugar for good cream. Skip the fake dairy crap like soy/oat/etc. Find a creamy half and half or even heavy cream cut with half and half. A little goes a long way. I put two tablespoons in a 30oz travel cup.
I live in the northeast and find the Aldi brand heavy cream is fabulous and cheap. It is processed at ultra dairy in Syracuse, NY, shop around for a brand you like, but use the plant codes on the box to figure out who makes it — each dairy is different.
Surprising myself, as a long time breve partisan and hater of all things coconut, I've fallen hard for heavy coconut cream and now homemade oatmeal milk.
I started making oatmeal "cream" at home as base for my smoothies. (Two birds, one stone.) Put oats, chia, honey, banana, water in vitamix. Frappe a bit. Walk the dog (about an hour). Voila, oatmeal cream. Then add the other ingredients as normal.
Dr Google says the enzymes break down the oatmeal. I have no idea how or why.
Love the oatmeal smoothie base — my wife and I do something similar but substitute strawberry or blueberry for the honey.
The only issue with it as a cream substitute for me is that it’s heavy sugar. After not sweetening coffee, I find the cream complements the coffee flavor. Like all things, ymmv :)
Reading this comment thread from the top, for a moment I thought you were using this oatmeal cream for coffee. Do you? How do you make oatmeal milk (steps, duration, etc.) and what do you use it for? I’m looking for variations that people adopt and how they fare.
Cream in coffee is proof God loves us. Half & half, milk, coconut cream are okay. Almond milk and oat milk are terrible. Soy milk is a crime.
I also use a lot of cinnamon, because I once read it does something for glycemic response. And I've grown to like it. Ditto turmeric.
Soy milk and Yerba mate is pretty good. Soy milk steamers (fresh ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg) are delicious.
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From my brief googling, I understand that oat milk needs an enzyme. That's what Oatly does. You can buy some enzyme packets for home use, which I've never done.
I've read that honey and bananas also have an enzyme that works on oats. I already use both in my smoothies, so that's what I do.
Also, most howtos I've read say to filter the bulk. But I want the dietary fiber, the more the better, so don't filter.
I also use chia seeds, which makes the oat milk creamy like yoghurt. Someone smarter than me will replicate what I do, add misc tasty fruit, freeze it, and call it vegan ice cream.
> Now I have to figure out another way to deal with the bitterness of coffee other than my current 2 packets of stevia method.
Add a bit of salt to the grinds before you brew the coffee. Alternatively, try different coffee. I find lighter roasts taste better, and cheap coffee is just bad coffee. I used to take creamer in my coffee regularly, but since I've been buying better coffee, I've stopped buying creamer.
A solution (ha!) to that is to make good coffee. Seriously.
I always liked the smell of coffee but never drank it since it made my heart race and it never tasted like it smelled.
Now with a cheap burr grinder, a French press, a scale, and coffee beans I make great coffee. I grind the beans coarse which is for the French press method. My formula is 30g ground coffee per 450g of water, brew for 5 minutes.
It's amazing how cheap coffee beans can taste great. Hints of chocolate, caramel, a toasty note.
If it's too bitter you brew too much or the grind was too fine. If it's too sour or ashy tasting it wasn't brewed long enough (seems counter intuitive I know!).
I've gone from sugary, milk or cream loaded coffee to just black. Anything in the coffee now ruins it for me.
edit: related to all this talk of coffee and insulin coffee guru James Hoffman did a test of coffee and insulin. He used a continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) device to measure his own metabolism.
>Now I have to figure out another way to deal with the bitterness of coffee other than my current 2 packets of stevia method.
Cold brew is much less bitter than hot brew also it varies in coffee type and roast, with time you get accustomed to the taste, to me sweet coffee tastes weird.
> with time you get accustomed to the taste, to me sweet coffee tastes weird.
Yes, sugar in coffee tastes disgusting to me. Coffee is supposed to be bitter.
I think part of the reason why – my mother has always been very health-conscious (she is a doctor), and growing up she didn't allow us to have sugar in tea or coffee. She would hide the sugar at the back of the pantry, she'd bring it out when guests came over but then it would disappear again as soon as they left. And she only ever bought reduced fat milk. So make me a coffee with full cream milk and sugar, and it just tastes wrong.
Not sure what coffee you are consuming. But if you are making it yourself - hopefully you can find a local coffee roaster. Any semi-good Arabica is not bitter (but it can be more on the acidic side)
Well. It's been 30+ years. Meta: It's weird when you assume some arcane tidbit you know is widely known. Been struggling with that my entire life / career.
Now I'm gonna ask my bro, doctor, and nutritionist bestie, make sure I remember correctly. IIRC, insulin response for Type 1 and Type 2 are totally different. So advice does not transfer. (My bestie is a severe Type 1. They get upset about generalizations. Stuff that works for Type 2 is life threatening for them.)
Did you know it was diet? Given this article and some of the linked research, it seems like even incorrect knowledge of the caloric content has effects on the system. Would be cool to blind yourself to it and analyze the results of caloric vs diet soda.
I use to have the same problem. I met my wife who preferred diet and eventually transitioned to diet pretty much entirely without getting that sugar issue.
I do have a problem with aspartame. Diet Pepsi is okay, but diet Coke is not.
I have a friend who is a doctor. He was using it himself & offered to write me an Rx.
I’m now doing it a second time, using the levels health app [0]. If you can make it to the front of their massive waiting list (and don’t mind paying their fee), it’s the easiest way to get one.
It wasn’t covered by insurance, but the Freestyle Libre CGM was $37 at CVS & lasts for 2 weeks. The major cost factor (for most people) is getting a doctor to write you an Rx.
Levels is around $400, but all you have to do is fill out a form online & wait. They get a doctor to evaluate your profile & write an Rx, and then they fill the prescription & send it to you with patches & everything. Their app also does more data analysis than the default Libre app, and it puts the food-log directly on the glucose graph, which is surprisingly useful.
I could be wrong, but it seems like there's a distinction between perceived sugar (amount of sugar in drink) as mentioned in the study and perceived sweetness (how sweet the drink tastes) which is what you're referring to.
You’re right. I tried to make my disclaimer thorough enough. :)
However, unless there’s something particular about the visual vs. the taste path, there should be some overlap. I think the anticipation (stress) is the part of this study with the most interesting implications to me.
I’ve done a certain amount of research around GI due to my wife twice having gestational diabetes, and it was hard to find good numbers in general, but I couldn’t find any numbers related to artificial sweetners. I did find a lot of people claiming artificial sweetners didn’t cause a rise in glucose, which makes sense because the only way to get glucose would be for the liver to release glucose as a response. What I don’t know definitely is whether or not artificial sweetners cause an insulin response (though there seems to he a growing body of evidence that some do cause the pancreas to produce insulin). There also seems to be a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners cause gut bacterial changes ( which, as I write this, makes me wonder if my current gastro intestinal drama might be related to a recent reintroduction of diet soda in my diet...).
I will say as an anecdote, that I find intermittent fasting (skipping breakfast and late lunch) much easier when I have diet soda than when I have tea with sugar in the morning.
This. Kind of, since I just don't drink any soda but I still find that skipping breakfast and having late lunch (or dinner only) is much easier if I didn't have carbs for breakfast. Coffee and a waffle with syrup will make me hungry by lunch. Coffee only or with butter/coconut oil means no hunger until much later.
It's like the body "knows" there must be more carbs out there if you recently had some and wants more. If there were no carbs it "assumes" there aren't more so if no extra food is added (we ate all the mammoth meat yesterday and now we gotta go hunt first) I'll just use up the fat stores.
(Speculation) I believe it has more to do with the psychological effect of "knowing" beforehand that you are about to consume a high amount of sugar.
In the case of artificial sweeteners you know it's going to be sweet, yes, but you also already know that it is not real sugar and you are somehow "safe", and so, the stress involved is diminished.
A similar anticipatory mechanism exists for thirst quenching. We feel a decrease in thirst the moment we drink water but in reality it takes tens of minutes for the osmotic landscape to change with that newly ingested water.[1]
I also think it is overeager to take this result and run with it to condemn artificial sweeteners. It has been known for long that they can indeed increase cravings and cautioned against for dieters. However, the initial intake of food is only one part of the glucose metabolism. How much actual glucose is left in your bloodstream, muscles and liver (in the form of glycogen) will keep effecting your energy metabolism for days if you've ingested real, bioavailable sugars, with all the downstream consequences e.g. for weight loss.
I remember my old track coach using this during practices.
We would swish the water around in our mouths to get rid of that bad taste you get when you’re thirsty, but he always warned us that the second we swallowed too much that practice was over because you get a stomach ache if you sprinted with all that water sloshing around.
I have a theory that it isn't actually the water causing the ache, but rather the air that you drink while drinking the water. I've tried it and it works. See for youself: you have to drink a little bit differently (turn the water bottle upside down and be careful when drinking not to get air in. if you do, turn your head up and make sure you are only swallowing water.)
I think both you and the parent post are correct. I heard similar advice playing soccer: when you drink water during a game, what you usually do is drink it fast (and in a hand wavy way where the bottle is in the air). So the speed allows for more water and air, and thus you feel cramps. If you were to drink it slowly, which will reduce the air most likely, then you have less risk, but as a kid playing soccer, the urge to go back to the field is is too great. :)
Absolutely. This is worse when eating soup. You'd have to be veeeery careful when eating soup with a spoon. I always hated eating soups as a kid coz I'd feel so bloated after.
Anecdatally there is also one related to cramping. Putting suitable foods in one's mouth and then spitting it out can/will [EDIT: end] even severe cramping, despite never actually consuming anything. Apple cider vinegar and pickle juice both work well for this purpose.
Sorry, I don't have a citation for this, but it is broadly known in the ultra-endurance sports world, and among some parts of cramp research.
Also the sweeteners taste gross and unnatural.
I don't understand why things have to be sweet. If you lay off sugar for a month, you'll be able to re-calibrate.
Nowadays I find cakes and many desserts unbearably and disgustingly sweet. I conclude that that's because they are. If you're cooking something and the recipe asks for adding a full cup of sugar (or more) you should question how you got to that point.
Do you feel the same with food that is both sugar and fiber, such as fruits? My understanding is that the fiber slows down the metabolism, and thus the sugar is processed much slower.
Not the OP here but there's two things to that. As a European coming to America, you generally find the sweets here to be waaay to sweet. You get used to it though.
I also did Keto for a while though and after you've been on that and then you just eat something made from flower again not even with sugar in it it tastes sweet. That was eye openingly weird. Of course that goes away quickly if you start eating it regularly again even if in low quantities.
I'm fairly sure we evolved to cope with eating fruit.
We have a lot of feedback systems. I find I do the best when I don't push too hard in any particular direction. I try to let my needs guide my actions without too much deep introspection or trickery.
There are structures in our brains that served our ancestors well for millions of years, and I try not to out think them or get in their way.
The study had about 30 participants, with 15 in each arm, so that's not a lot of statistical power to begin with.
Both the low-glucose-label and high-glucose-label arms showed a spike in actual measured blood sugar after ingestion. The difference in blood glucose between the two arms was just about 10%.
The naïve p-value between the two arms was barely significant at 2%, 6%, and 2%, but the p-values were taken from a complex model that probably has p-hacking problems and needs p-value correction.
I would wait for the replication study before believing in this effect. If the effect is real, they only need to double their sample size to get a t-stat of 3 instead of 2, which would give a much more convincing p-value of 0.2% instead of the 2-6% right now.
I applaud the authors for exploring this theory though, and encourage replications to push the p-value down.
Not that my statistics knowledge is great, but I wonder why they don't show fig.4 with SD bars? (Or if the plot represents the model, show the data points the model was fitted to?)
One fundamental problem with this is the lack of baseline determination of glucose sensitivity. People with diabetes, especially type 2, have different sensitivities & levels of insulin production. A group with greater or lesser averages on those factors would strongly influence results. They don't even appear to have accounted for medication dosage, merely whether or not the person was on biguanide. Or even mention weight, another significant factor for insulin sensitivity.
Second is the glucose increase: Glucose tests have margins of error, an issue not addressed here, and the difference in glucose levels this study measure were small considering that factor, about 20 points. Specifically: Even a blood-drawn lab test has a total error of about 8%. If that's tge type of test they did, then an 8% swing could reduce the results to insignificance. If they used a rapid test, even the sort used in a doctor's office, it's even worse: those are considered accurate if it produces results that are within 15% of what a lab test would produce, meaning +/- 15% of a value that already has a total error of 8%.
There's just too much wrong with a study like this that's poorly controlled with ~15 people in each group. And unfortunately there's a decent chance we'll see headlines soon along the lines of "Diabetes: Think sugar matters? think again ::lol lol we made a pun::"
I wonder if this might account for the 'aspartame migraine' phenomenon. If the body is reacting in a way to handle a sugar overload coming, but there's no sugar overload... what happens?
I know that personally, if I drink an artificially sweetened soft drink, I am usually smacked with a headache that lasts hours. I'd never heard of the effect before, but after 2 or 3 attempts at a coke zero, I was done with them for life. And to be clear, I would really like to switch because my sugar intake probably isn't healthy.
It's not just aspartame. When I played soccer as a kid, coach would give us a little "fructose bar" at half time to boost us for the second half of the game. I would always get a headache from it so I started turning it down.
Just want to let people know, it is possible to lose weight while drinking diet soda and artificially sweetened tea. I personally lost 120 lbs (and counting) while drinking lots of sweet-n-low and aspartame-sweetened soda.
Anecdata isn’t data but I’d argue a study of 30 participants barely counts as useful data either.
Maybe the artificial sweeteners mess with glucose metabolism, maybe not. Maybe these things are more variable person-to-person than expected.
If you’re trying to lose weight, and you’re having problems with diet soda, maybe make a change. But if you’re drinking diet soda and artificial sweeteners, and also finding success, don’t let random low-sample-size studies scare you off.
Try 'Durianrider' on YouTube. His style can be abrasive, and he's very polarising (and the purely nutrition videos may be buried in the Social Media bs), but I too eat more sugar and am losing weight. When I 'diet', I gain weight. When I eat a lot, weight falls off me. YM(!)MV, of course.
Also I wonder why one needs to drink any soda at all. What's wrong with water? Simple plain water, not even carbonated. I don't get why so many people out there "can't drink it". Apparently it doesn't taste good. WTF? I mean yes you can taste differences in different waters based on mineral content and such but you get used to it. It's the _difference_ from what you're used to that makes it bad usually (again exceptions exist where the water just tastes bad - find other water). Ever been to Iceland? If not go look up what their water is like.
Carbonated water can be particularly refreshing. I find it can do wonders to settle my stomach if I’m not feeling well.
As a weight loss tool, diet soda is a great alternative to snacking between meals. Water, coffee, and tea all also offer that same benefit. IME it is easier to prepare cold soda than it is to prepare cold coffee and tea, at least with the devices I have in my kitchen.
I do drink plenty of unadulterated water, but its not an either/or situation. It is in fact possible, to enjoy water, coffee, tea, and soda, all in the same day. Some people will even throw beer and wine into the mix, but certainly if you wouldn’t drink soda, you would never consider beer, which is heavily caloric, tainted with poison, and carbonated.
I looked up Iceland’s water - apparently it smells of egg/sulfur. I don’t know why you asked me to look that up.
I think any good study has to consider habitual use. Spiking blood sugar in false anticipation once means nothing. How about daily? The body learns from its mistakes.
For me, I could never drink diet pop, but when I discovered Coke Zero it was amazing. Finally I could cut my sugar intake. Tastes delicious with a meal, or even after a meal.
Over time, I noticed if I've been fasting a lot of hours and then consume one - it won't taste good at all. My body seems to have become keenly aware that it is not contributing a single calorie of the energy it is dying for.
The body learns associations. There are reproducible experiments with rats who develop a liking for chalk water after sugar is added to it; and it takes them a couple of weeks to stop liking it when sugar is out.
There are some experiments showing the same is true with humans, with a time constant of 3-6 weeks.
From memory, relevant papers are from Michel cabanac. Seth Robert’s “what makes food fattening” is a great overview of related results, whether or nit you agree with his take.
Is it just me or are the images and text contradictory?
The text of this article says that the drink was, in reality, 62 grams of sugar and portrayed via the label as either 0 grams or 124 grams.
However, the image of the nutritional label shows the actual drink was 15 grams (but 62 calories) or 30 grams (124 calories).
Which is it?
124 grams of sugar doesn't pass the sniff test for anyone who is passing familiar with the basic fact there are 35-40 grams of sugar in a 12-oz can of soda. Was this noticed or not? Were questions asked whether people had a sense of how much sugar (or calories) are in a soda? Did people perceive they were getting a extremely-high-sugar beverage (124g) or a low-sugar beverage (30g)? Does that affect the psychological dynamics in a material way?
I am a little disappointed in the quality of peer review coming out of Nature here...
Which is a good thing; you experience this as a mild energy boost when you have sweetened tea vs non-sweetened tea, say.
The body perceives a sweet flavor and anticipates a deposit of glucose. You have a physiological process that manages economic use of glucose. When it registers a deposit, it permits a withdrawal/release into your blood, where it can be delivered to your muscles and mind for energy.
The problem with sugar, is when you have excessive sugar in the blood. Excessive sugar is potentially lethal, because glucose can cross the blood-brain barrier. the brain has a protein like substance, chemically similar to egg white, and when you mix too much sugar with egg white, you get meringue. meringue brain is bad. so in healthy individuals, we get insulin spikes, to flush the glucose from our blood when we have too much. sure it robs you of energy but it saves your brain. in type 2 diabetics their insulin safety mechanism can’t be relied on.
If you’re healthy you don’t need to worry about extra glucose released by your body from its stores. instead be reassured that you understand why you feel more perky when your drink is sweetened. But if you have sweetener in your tea, and then you have a sugary snack, that’s worse than the sugary snack alone. You’re more likely to generate harmful levels of blood glucose because your body will preemptively elevate blood glucose before you even get to the snack.
moral of the story, don’t eat food high in real sugar or flour. as always.
It depends on how sweeteners impact your unhealthy habits. If sweeteners help you fix your diet, help you eliminate unhealthy food so that your insulin levels remain in narrow healthy ranges, then they help. But they do elevate blood sugar levels, so if you still eat harmful levels of dietary sugar, then they would increase the chance of Type 2.
It might be better to train your taste preferences to prefer less sweet food, then you’re less likely to lapse because you stop anticipating sweet food. Susan Pierce in the book Bright Line Eating, recommends that approach.
The guy on YouTube called high intensity health is a keto diet evangelist who wears a real time glucose monitor to study more closely what’s going on biologically with ketosis and blood sugar. He’s reported that being in stressful situations, like being late at the airport, can spike your glucose even when you’re in ketosis and kick you out of ketosis. I’ve experienced this too with the resurgence of inflammatory symptoms that are usually gotten rid of by ketosis.
Some great GCM experiment(er)s out there. This guy commits to a 2 week test of potato starch, sharing screenshots, etc. I dig HIH, too, for his info, but I stop at vegan intermittent fasting vs. full-time carnivorous keto.
Very interesting study, but it's important to mention that all participants (n=30) had type 2 diabetes. I'm really wondering if stress played a bigger factor in their blood glucose levels, which has been observed to cause a release of glucose from organs into the blood. In this study participants played video games for 90 minutes after drinking the test beverage. I think playing video games can be very stressful for a lot of people, they also switched games every 15minutes. Participants also knew that the beverage might contain sugar, which if your a type 2 diabetic might be enough to cause stress(?). In figure 4 they show the effect on the blood glucose levels for the low vs high sugar beverage groups.
I think an easy way to learn about the effects on ones own body for this is to buy a blood glucose meter and test themselves before and after drinking beverages with artificial sweeteners.
This is incredibly true. Cutting soda (I was drinking diet soda) out of my diet has really changed how I taste.
I used to love crappy sour gummy candy, and I can't stand it anymore. It's far too sweet, and there's not really a remarkable flavor beyond syrupy sweet and a vaguely fruit-like flavor. It doesn't even taste like really sweet fruit to me, the sweet and fruit flavors seem disjointed.
I do have a sweet tooth for fruit smoothies, though, which are probably not a ton better in terms of sugar content. I do no sugar added, but there's still a ton of sugar in enough fruit to blend and fill a cup. Hell, even cheese tastes sweet to me sometimes, depending on the kind of cheese.
14 grams of sugar is equivalent to a tablespoon. I find it helpful to remember that imagery when looking at the ingredients of something I’m about to eat - would I want to shovel a tablespoon of sugar (or more) in my mouth right now? The thought tends to dissuade me and I have become a little more conscious of my sugar intake that way. It’s shocking how much sugar is in the processed “food” we buy. A 16oz strawberry açaí refresher from Starbucks has 32 grams of sugar. :P
And having been like this for a few years, it even seems strange to me that fruit wouldn't be the first thing you would think of when it comes to getting sugar. And I'm not directing this at you. I'm just saying I used to drink soft drinks a lot too and now it doesn't even cross my mind. I do drink wine and beer and I know there's some sugar in those.
There's no news. Insulin production starts ramping up even when you start thinking about eating and before putting any food in your mouth. It takes time for its release, so, all this is trying to predict when you'll need it. Still there's no single mechanism.
If the participants are consuming the same amount of sugar, then for those that have a higher label and have a higher glucose rise, where does the "extra" glucose come from?
And is it more glucose going in to the blood, or less being processed out?
Interestingly I had read that erythritol, which does not ferment in the gut, does not impact blood sugar in any way, in contrast to other sweeteners. Requires a larger body of research.
Can I ask how you came to this conclusion because I always thought the current belief was these sugars may be a lot worse for people after all. From my understanding the debate was still on going; can I ask why you would prefer sweeteners over white sugar?
Edit: I love how you can’t ask a genuine health question here without being down voted. The sugar industry has spent decades brainwashing people and using fake science to push sugar. Even recently I thought there were a lot of concerns over sweeteners hence why I asked the question hoping to gain some insight as why that is not the case. I have always thought sweeteners were worse in many ways but I don’t have any thing backing that up. I was genuinely asking because I am now wondering if I have it wrong about sweeteners. Thank you to those who added some insight.
The medical community does not consider artificial sweeteners to be worse than added sugar.
The common artificial sweeteners are generally considered safe for consumption, and moderate use instead of added sugar can help achieve a healthy weight to reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes, as well as better dental health.
Artificial sweeteners have been studied for decades, and there is no sound evidence they are carcinogenic. There are some other potential negative effects on health though, which are being studied. One concerning correlation is that people who consume diet soda regularly are more likely to be overweight. These articles provide a good overview:
Even excluding things like insulin levels, I think the main advantage of artificial sweeteners is that they reduce the amount of tooth cavities, because the bacteria in the mouth feed on sugar, but don't feed on sweeteners.
Maybe down voted due to context but it's correct. Sugar has 4 calories per gram, same as protein, while fat has 9 calories per gram.
Unless you're diabetic or have diabetes markers you really don't have to worry at all about glycemic index so at that point sugars aren't inherently bad, it's just their ubiquity as a favour enhancer
How do you reach this conclusion? They didn't test artificial sweeteners. They tested reading sugar on a label. If anything, logically one would expect this confirms the opposite. An artificially sweetened beverage will say zero sugar on the label.
That is an interesting take on his position. He recommends intermittent fasting as a way to keep insulin levels down. There are dozens and dozens of studies on this, many posted here to HN. Highly recommended reading.
I'm sorry, what's the difference? If you want to eat, have food available, and force yourself not to eat until a certain hour, how are you not starving yourself? Especially when you do this many times over a long time
Because that definition would mean that almost every single person in the western world is "starving" at some point during the day. The definition is -
"suffering or dying from hunger." (Oxford)
Starving is more extreme than hungry, just like suffering is more extreme than uncomfortable.
If you're looking to the Oxford dictionary then it sounds like you're just making a semantic argument. I was hoping to learn what the metabolic difference is.
We've been talking about metabolism, hunger has to do with metabolism, and you are the only one who has replied with a dictionary argument. Have a great day!
Three people replied to your comment, all correcting you. Several more have "replied" to our exchange with their up/down votes. Might I suggest that you were either wrong, or you accidentally failed in articulating your point? Both are perfectly fine. Mistakes happen.
I'm genuinely confused about why you're trying to prove by engaging me further. There's nothing more to say.
They made nonsemantic arguments, you made a semantic one. Not a big deal
Anyway I'm surprised that you read this all as people "correcting me". This is a mess of people shilling a diet book by a well-known quack, hence why the OP was downvoted to the bottom.
More like eight hours repeatedly in this case but cool, good to know there's not really a fundamental difference besides "spread it out". I wonder how Jason Fung of Dietdoctor.com judges what an appropriate amount of time is and which biomarkers he monitors besides fasting insulin. He must have some pretty scientifically rigourous methods since the stakes in things like this are high.
It's more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone who has done the diet and had multiple people around me also have results with it when other diets haven't worked (as well).
The hormonal impact of what and when you eat tends to have a larger impact than what a pure "calories in, calories out" model would suggest.
I've taken blood tests before and after 6 months of intermittent fasting (with a similar diet) and saw massive improvement in blood work and hunger pangs.
So is it expected that you do this intermittent fasting until you reverse T2 diabetes? If so - how long? Six months, 1 year, more or less? Or does this depend on individual - how long it takes her/him to reverse T2 diabetes? Or is this a lifestyle change that you incorporate until EOL?
Ideally start when you’re only in the “pre-diabetic” range: fasting glucose above ~105ish, A1C > 5.7.
Those are the numbers you’re trying to lower. So how long you go with a dietary change depends on how well you’re able to manage this numbers down, and keep them down.
Surely some of this depends on how rigorously you can decrease your sugar intake, fasting or not, and/or restore better function of your systems (e.g. exercise, fasting).
Fasting is not starving, it's just metabolizing your existing food stores. For people with large body fat stores, you by definition cannot be 'starving'.
He does not recommend that very lean individuals fast.
I realize this study is qualified (type 2, preprandial < 200mgdl, lab setting, fake labels, short term) and laud the potential connection between stress and elevated fasting glucose (seems similar to the connection between sleep and elevated glucose.) I've read the study and am just adding a personal anecdote to the thread.