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Is Sugar Toxic? - New York Times/Robert Lustig

Discussion in 'Serious' started by Malvolio, 16 Apr 2011.

  1. SuicideNeil

    SuicideNeil What's a Dremel?

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    How many artificial sweetners are there in that crap though ( I tried some pepsi max at work t'other day, tastes like watered down generic coke- I'll stick to water I think )?

    I think common sense should dictate how much sugar we consume- if we eat lots of junk food & get fat, we are eating too much; if we try to live from lettuce & thin-air and get scrawny and weak, eat more of a varied diet & in larger quantities. Not rocket science, just requires a bit of will power more than anything to stay healthy...
     
  2. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    Sugar is digested mainly by the liver; so, if you eat a lot of sugar you're making your liver work just as hard as if you're drinking. Artificial sugars aren't easily digested by the body and usually have to go through dozens of extra steps that actually try to convert the substance into glucose or something digested like it. So yeah they're all pretty crappy for you, but I would definitely go for sugar (unrefined if possible) over an artificial sweetener.

    If I get a chance I'll try to find a good link on the actual process, I saw it in a video that explained it well and i can't find it atm.
     
  3. faugusztin

    faugusztin I *am* the guy with two left hands

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    This kind of topic brings up memories... In '90s eatings eggs was bad, because it is full of cholesterol, and that kills you! Then in '00s they come up with good and bad cholesterol thing, making egg a recommended to eat again, because it's full of good cholesterols. Now they are again thinking if there are good cholesterols...

    Eating/drinking too much of anything is bad for you. Eat and drink different stuff, make your food varied. Then you won't have problems. On other side, if you eat same food all the time, full of fat & stuff like that, together with Cola, then dont be surprised if you become obese.
     
  4. Picarro

    Picarro What's a Dremel?

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    A bit of sugar = ok
    20 kg's of sugar = not good

    A carrot = ok
    20 kg's of carrot = not good

    Everything should be eaten in equal measure. Eating varied, and with an eye on fat and sugar will get you a long way to a healthy life.
     
  5. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    I kind of have to disagree with the general consensus that everything in moderation is ok. I definitely agree that sugar is OK in small amounts, but other foods like grains, vegetables, dairy, meat/proteins are definitely meant to be eaten in more than moderate amounts; they're meant to be our main source of energy and nutrition.

    I tend to treat sugar like I would alcohol because they're both processed by the liver and can cause damage if over eaten/used. I would still stand by the idea that sugar is toxic in the same way that alcohol or caffeine are toxic. You're not going to die if you use them a little bit and as a very small portion of your overall diet, but once you start using them too regularly you start seeing addictions and behavioral changes. Sugar is less noticed because #1 it's in a lot of stuff now, #2 the effects aren't as apparent (other than a sugar rush/crash). Excess sugars especially fructose will convert almost directly into fat as that's the easiest way to get rid of it for your liver.

    I'm still at work so when I get home and get some time I'll try to find the site or a graphic about the whole process sugars and artificial sweeteners go through in the liver to be digested.
     
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  6. Bufo802

    Bufo802 Minimodder

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    Sugars probably aren't the most healthy food for you but it's getting a bit ridiculous how many food now are supposedly bad for you.

    As long as you're not stupid an exercise regularly in the vast majority of cases cutting out certain types of food is unlikely to have significant health benefits, and I'm sure you could get some sort of data supporting that the stress of avoiding foods is more harmful than there effects.

    Does remind me a bit of this though-if you try hard enough you can get statistics to prove anything.

    [​IMG]
     
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  7. Threefiguremini

    Threefiguremini What's a Dremel?

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    +rep for xkcd
     
  8. javaman

    javaman May irritate Eyes

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    Is that the scientific or nutritionists calorie?

    Scientific:1000 calories = 1 kilocalorie = 1 kcal = the energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1°C.

    nutritionist calories = kilocalories and are used interchangeably.
     
  9. Malvolio

    Malvolio .

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  10. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    If you're a regular soda/pop or sugary beverage drinker (pretty much anything you'd get in a convenience store besides water), cut that out and you'll notice the significant health benefits within at least a week. Within a month you'll have lost weight, have more energy, and think noticeably clearer.

    There have been plenty of studies on the health effects of sugar, it's not new, and I wouldn't include it in the list of foods they keep trying to convince people are either super-foods or really bad for you.

    Also: I found it! He goes through the metabolism of alcohol and different types of sugars.
    45:00ish glucose metabolism
    53:00ish ethanol metabolism
    57:00ish fructose metabolism
    If you want to get right to it, those are the times you'll find that stuff. I'd highly recommend watching the whole thing though because he goes over a LOT of information and it's hard to get much out of it if you only see a tiny bit of it.

    Also notable in this video is at 21:21 where he says that excessive consumption of any sugars may lead to health problems.

    Anyway, I found it. Yay! Here you go. Enjoy.


    For anyone who doesn't know: Sucrose or table sugar is 50/50 glucose/fructose (High Fructose Corn Syrup is nearly identical).
     
  11. faugusztin

    faugusztin I *am* the guy with two left hands

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    Excessive consumption of anything leads to health problems. Ever heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication ? :D
     
  12. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    The only time the excessive consumption of water leads to actual health problems is when that's all you're drinking and usually if you're not letting it out. Just on that wiki page it notes that the problems have been mostly from water drinking contests (you lose if you pee).

    Yes, there's also diabetes insipidus which I had for a short bout because for some reason one day I found water to be absolutely delicious and drank about a liter every half hour. I didn't develop any actual water intoxication however because I was still eating and snacking (which supplied electrolytes). It took me about a week to completely recover from that bout of stupidity.

    Either way point taken: over consumption of anything can be poisonous. But what we know about sugar is that you don't need to over consume it for it to be toxic. The whole point in this video was that sugar, specifically fructose converts to toxic substances. Glucose is fine, every cell in our body can utilize glucose, but fructose is unusable (insulin receptors aren't even aware of fructose when it enters the liver and thus never send the "stop eating" signal). The body is not meant to utilize or handle fructose effectively at all. Since sugar (sucrose) is 50% fructose this means that half of the sugar you eat is getting turned into toxins within the body. This is much different than say water where you have to drink a LOT before it becomes toxic. You don't have to eat a lot of sugar for it to be toxic, you just see the toxic effects more prevalently when you eat a lot of it (read as: American diet).
     
    Last edited: 28 Apr 2011
  13. Threefiguremini

    Threefiguremini What's a Dremel?

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    "Free fructose is absorbed directly by the intestine; however, when fructose is consumed in the form of sucrose, digestion occurs entirely in the upper small intestine. As sucrose comes into contact with the membrane of the small intestine, the enzyme sucrase catalyzes the cleavage of sucrose to yield one glucose unit and one fructose unit. Fructose is absorbed in the small intestine, then enters the hepatic portal vein and is directed toward the liver." - Wikipedia

    Fructose isn't unusable. You're right that uptake of fructose by the liver is not regulated by insulin.

    From Wikipedia - "The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Meira Field, Ph.D., a research chemist at United States Department of Agriculture, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic." While a few other tissues (e.g., sperm cells and some intestinal cells) do use fructose directly, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver.
    "When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose instead of glucose results in lower circulating insulin and leptin levels, and higher ghrelin levels after the meal. Since leptin and insulin decrease appetite and ghrelin increases appetite, some researchers suspect that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.
    Excessive fructose consumption is also believed to contribute to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

    This seems to suggest to me that fructose like other things is bad in large quantities and is not inherently 'bad' for you.

    Well.... humans have been eating fruit for millenia so I think it might be fine. :lol:
     
  14. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    Fruit has fiber, fiber slows and limits the absorption of sugar (including fructose).
    Crystaline fructose, HFCS, and sucrose don't have any fiber and so when you consume that, you're getting the full brunt of those sugars.

    You've said a lot of what the guy says in the video, but one of his key points is that even a small amount of fructose does all of this. "This is a volume issue" he says quite often during the video. A large amount of fructose is really a relatively small amount. All other sugars break down fairly cleanly but fructose converts almost entirely to fat. The body doesn't really "use" fructose so much as it handles it and tries to get rid of it as quickly as possible. That's just what the liver does with toxins.

    You really should check out the video, a lot of what you said get's talked about in excruciating detail.
     
    Last edited: 29 Apr 2011
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  15. Threefiguremini

    Threefiguremini What's a Dremel?

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    Fair enough. Although I am of the internet generation, if I see a video with a length of 1hr 29mins I tend to not bother lol
     
  16. Krog_Mod

    Krog_Mod Minimodder

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    lol :D
     
  17. paulp

    paulp What's a Dremel?

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    Sugar, How sweet it ain't

    As someone who has type 2 diabetes, I can tell you that lots of sugar and salt is in almost all of the processed foods that we buy. The whole consumer society is swamped with advertising to get us to eat more processed foods. Even when I try control what I eat, I still get a lot of sugar and salt and it can get to toxic levels.

    If we had the time , energy and money to eat naturally, then I am sure that a little sugar would not hurt. The society is set up that we should have too much of a good thing. Then we are addicted, we buy more, and big companies make more money. We need some personal and governmental reforms here. Why wait until people are sick?
     

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