
Is Sugar the Next Tobacco? - dcurtis
http://www.psmag.com/health/robert-lustig-sugar-obesity-diet-50948/
======
seivan
It's very bad, it's everywhere and addictive in ways you could never realise.
Sugar addiction is very related to carbohydrates. When I cut carbs (and
increased fat content) I also lost all interest in sweetness and sugar. Not
even diet cokes.

When I was my fittest, I had totally cut sugar/carbs out. Even complex carbs
(meh, not much benefit of "complex carbs anyway). I was running on ketone or
whatever the terminology is. I was swimming everyday for two hours with no
problems what so ever. I was basically running on fat. This takes a while,
usually 2-3 weeks to get into.

Usually when I switched from carb loaded fuel to fat. It took a day of being
tired and sleepy. That's it. But it takes a bit longer to completely exercise
on fat than just running normal errands.

Most "low calorie" or "low fat" branded "food" products usually have high
sugar content. The low fat version of the cremé fraiche we USED to consume at
home had more sugar and/or carbs than the high fat one. We consume the latter
these days and gain no additional weight. We're not as easy as thermo
dynamics, it's more complicated than kcal in/out. Which is why most people
prefer carbs/sugar instead of fat. Since the kcal per fat grams is higher.

EDIT; That being said, I've seen the opposite in my partner who happens to be
of Chinese descent and others of similar background. The only explanation I
have is that their bodies are more advanced than our primal vessels :-)

~~~
atomical
I thought this was satire until I got to the end. The human body needs carbs
to run. I'm really skeptical that someone can exercise for two hours without
any carbohydrates in their system.

~~~
corin_
No (or low) carbs is a pretty common dieting technique, originally made famous
(at least where I am) by the Atkins Diet. My simplistic understanding of it is
that when carbs are not available, your body burns fat instead, starting with
the fat you consume and then if necessary the fat that your body has
previously stored (hence losing weight). A colleague of mine does this for a
month once a year to get a bit fitter ahead of his scuba diving holiday, and
it works wonders for him.

Regarding long-term use of this diet, it would seem that opinion is divided
and I've no idea which side is likely to be right -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-carbohydrate_diet> is probably a decent place
to start if you want to find out more. But certainly, while it's suggested
that long-term use may not be a great idea, there's nothing to say that it
would cause problems such as not being able to exercise for two hours a day.

~~~
seivan
I don't think his concern was wether or not it was doable for general use,
just for exercise. It's very doable.

------
meerita
We will end forbidding everything. Besides, taking sugar is a personal option
wich doesn't kill anyone around you. Tobacco while you smoke you make smoke
everyone the room, even on the street. We just need education to measure the
excesses.

~~~
rb2k_
If it really does lead to obesity and the connected illnesses, treatment will
indirectly take money away from all of the other people with the same
insurance company.

Then again, you might not take back as much of your retirement fund :)

I guess ?once/if? insurance companies start charging premiums for people with
a diet high in sugar/carbs, this will become a more interesting conversation.

~~~
Roybatty
_f it really does lead to obesity and the connected illnesses, treatment will
indirectly take money away from all of the other people with the same
insurance company._

Socialists like rb2k claim that every individual action has some reprehensible
act on "society".

The new (or maybe old) tactic of the fascist left.

------
hreffob
I don't get these health related HN submissions. Salt bad, sugar bad, wheat
bad, fitness is a lie... what's next?

I dont't troll. I just don't understand why all of our basic foods are now
bad. Guess we made them bad as we put sugar and salt in everything...

~~~
hreffob
Like back in the day my grandmother was cooking with lard. Lard from pigs that
she kept in her own farm. Later lard also became bad (except bacon which is
good...). Nowadays lard is coming back and do you know who uses it? Haute
cuisine restaurants.

~~~
DanBC
They also use lots of other fats, and lots of salt, and lots of sugar.

They use it because it's tasty.

"Supersize Me" on Haute Cuisine would have similar catastrophic results, but
be considerably more expensive.

~~~
ihsw
Nonsense, the problem with McDonalds and other fast food restaurants is that
it barely qualifies as food -- it uses as few real ingredients as possible
because real ingredients have a short shelf life.

~~~
astrange
What non-real ingredients do you think they use? Hamburgers are pretty simple.
It's not like Kraft selling guacamole made with food coloring instead of
avocados.

~~~
snogglethorpe
I've no idea what mcd.s does, but you can add all sorts of crap to hamburger
before it becomes _too_ obvious. Probably a lot of it is not ... so appetizing
(the bits you don't want to know you're eating, etc).

My mom used to buy hamburger meat that was bulked up with soy protein, mainly
because it was cheaper than pure ground meat. [I absolutely loved the taste of
that stuff actually, much more than all-meat burgers! Wish I could find it as
an adult...]

------
ippisl
There's an easy fix for that: a shift from sugar to artificial sweeteners.
Same as there's an easy fix for cigarettes: move to electronic cigarettes.

But i guess we're more afraid of the unknown chemicals(although limited tests
have shown they are much safer) than the original poisons, And we're stuck on
trying to teach ideals than implement practicalities.

Such a shame.

~~~
corin_
There are other reasons for not switching as well. As an overweight smoker...
I drink normal soft drinks rather than diet (sweetener) drinks partly because
of vague things in the back of my head about them being carcinogens, but
largely because I'm not a fan of their taste.

Regarding smoking - well I've cut down lately, I was smoking 20-30 a day and
in November/December, with the exception of two trips abroad where I smoked
fully, I cut down to about 20 cigarettes over the two months, due to a
challenge from a friend's kid - I simply don't want to move to electronic
cigarettes. I love smoking, if it wasn't unhealthy I'd do it forever. I don't
love smoking an electronic cigarette, I don't even like it. I'd genuinely
prefer to spend a day without nicotine than a day with electronic cigarettes,
or nicotine gum/patches.

~~~
ippisl
I switched to sweeteners due to too many trips to the dentist and loving sweet
things. I started by changing my coffee from sugar. There are many types of
sweetener to choose from , so i've experimented until i found something i
liked.

But you do have to have a strong enough reason to switch, not something
abstract that will happen in 20-40 years.

------
jkat
"You want to get As and As? Eat breakfast."

"I don’t have time to eat breakfast," the [13 year old] girl said.

"She'd rather put on makeup than eat breakfast," the girl's mother
interrupted.

I'm a Lustig fan, but the people who deserve an overwhelming about of the
blame here are the parents.

------
Nux
Sugar is bad. I'm trying hard to quit using it, but it's EVERYWHERE! I bought
some smoked salmon the other day and the damn thing had sugar put in it! Why?!
The same goes for a lot of supermarket sold crap. Sugar, sugar, sugar.

~~~
nwh
The first thing I noticed about American food is that all their bread has
sugar in it. I've absolutely no idea how anyone can stand eating the stuff.

~~~
kd0amg
It's been a while since I was making bread regularly, but I don't think I've
ever seen a bread recipe that didn't include sugar. I was under the impression
that yeast must eat _something_ in order to make the dough rise.

edit: It looks like my mother has found some, but neither one of us really
understands how rising works in these cases.

~~~
nwh
I make my own pizza dough and other breads that rises quite happily with no
sugar in the mix. There's really no need for sugar, though I don't know enough
about yeast to tell you how it works.

~~~
snogglethorpe
AFAIK, the yeasties will eat lots of stuff, including flour, etc.

[I vaguely recall adding not sugar, but _corn starch_ to warm water to get the
yeast going. It's been a long time though ...]

------
loceng
Add wheat to that list, perhaps even gluten too. The body just runs better
without gluten.

~~~
graeme
This got some downotes. If you're skeptical, have you bet TRIED to quit wheat?

It's incredibly hard. I stopped, but it took months of cravings. Very easy to
stop eating almost anything else, usually.

~~~
jkat
Don't know about wheat, but are you implying that something's bad simply
because it's hard to quit?

~~~
loceng
If you're interested to learn more relating to wheat, there's a book that
recently has gained a lot of popularity called Wheat Belly. It goes into the
biology of it all.

------
Dirlewanger
Robert Lustig, while having great science to back up his claims, is very
alarmist and has been derided for some of his outright demonization of
fructose. Which, when you think about it, is opposite to many demagogues out
there; they'll talk up a big storm with very little to back it up. Here,
Lustig has plenty to back up what he's saying, but just does it in the wrong
way unfortunately. I also thoroughly disagree with his legislation ideas.
Legislating society's habits rarely ever works. This is an incredibly complex
societal problem that won't be solved by removing sugar from the Generally
Recongnized as Safe list.

~~~
loceng
I think for some things to gain attention being alarmist is needed, and then
people will hopefully come to their own conclusions after researching it.
Sugar is pretty much in everything we eat. It covers over a lot of other
issues, mainly that we don't eat as much fresh food as we should - otherwise
we wouldn't need sugar to make it taste good. This is profitable for business,
not profitable for a person's health.

------
bcl
And for an alternate viewpoint - [https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/david-
katz-md/sugar-health...](https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-
md/sugar-health-evil-toxic_b_850032.html)

"So while fructose as an ingredient excessively engineered into processed
foods is, indeed, a problem- I find it far-fetched at best to suggest the
native composition of, say, berries is "evil." Lustig seems to be tossing out
the the strawberries with the soda. You find me the person who can blame
obesity or diabetes on eating strawberries, and I will give up my day job and
become a hula dancer."

~~~
yobfountain
That article does not really disagree with Lustig's central thesis. That pull
quote in particular is actually in accordance with what Lustig is advocating.
The lecture focuses on the recent trend in the food industry of separating the
fructose from the fiber in ways not found in nature.

------
rickdale
I started the slow carb diet last year for new years resolution. At the time I
was addicted to peanut M&M's. Took probably 3-4 months to completely rid
myself of the temptations to eat a large bag of them. Anyways, in addition to
that time period I can remember the first week of the diet feeling the need
for a piece of bread. I was like feigning for it. But I resisted. Definitely
surgars have withdrawal symptoms, but with so many different foods and drinks
out there I do think its an easier addiction to cure than any drug like
alcohol or tobacco or even heroine for that matter.

------
subwindow
Why was this article suddenly de-ranked? It was on the front page, and
literally 10 seconds later it is on page 3. Is there some kind of rule that
this article violated? Who makes this decision? Why is there not any
transparency on if an article is de-ranked and why?

~~~
corin_
There's an argument, though I don't want to put words into PG's mouth
regarding his reasoning, that lack of transparency is a form of protection
against voting manipulation, as it's harder to trick a system if you don't
understand the system - security through obscurity really.

As it dropped only to page 3, not further, I would hazard a guess that it's
more to do with timing, for example maybe a post that's <60 minutes old
requires less votes to get a high position than a post that's 60+ minutes old,
and it's a hard line rather than gradual? Pure speculation on my part, but if
you're interested the answer may (or may not) lie within
<https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc>

------
kokey
While it's a good idea to get people off sweet stuff beyond the level of
healthy fruit intake, I think it would also help if people stopped demonizing
sweeteners like aspartame.

~~~
ihsw
How about we just kick the sweet tooth entirely instead of substituting it?

------
Roybatty
_especially after he proposed in the journal Nature that sugar should be
regulated like alcohol and that people who buy soda should be carded._

Another sick leftist that wants to regulate every human activity.

~~~
EvilTerran
Any particular reason you felt it necessary to make _three_ vacuous top-level
replies? Bundling everything you had to say into one post would have been
_some_ improvement, at least.

~~~
DanBC
He got replies to each response which is vaguely disappointing.

I'm not sure how the HN "anti down vote rampage" works - if I downvote all
three posts do all my downvotes count? Or is there something that detects I'm
downvoting 'too many' posts by a single user and silently drops some of my
downvotes?

------
Roybatty
_The suits against Big Food have largely been stalled at the failure stage._

Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and now Big Food. These socialists are sick in the head.

~~~
jshen
Really? You think the tobacco industry was doing nothing wrong and the evil
socialist came around and attacked them for some socialist agenda?

~~~
Roybatty
Woosh right over your head. That certain political agendas prefix industries
with "Big" doesn't make you think. Yeah, whatever

------
Roybatty
At what point do we start talking about sanctions against leftist-statists
like this guy and others who want to essentially enslave us.

At what point is enough is enough, and these people are held to account for
infringing on civil liberties.

~~~
sgift
So, someone uses his civil liberty to state his opinion and you want to "held
him to account" for "infringing on civil liberties" -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony>

