This guy is a great presenter. The hypothesis behind the damages of fructose actually gets worse than what is presented here, as fructose is implicated in the creation of toxic AGE. For a more in depth overview of the science behind fructose that is accessible, I would recommend Good Calorie, Bad Calorie by Gary Taubes. Aside from fructose, I would actually recommend that book to anyone concerned about their health.
I think it is important to differentiate between normal (hunter-gatherer) levels of fructose consumption (< 5% of total calories, normally closer to 1%, except perhaps in the summer when fruit is more abundant) and the amount we are eating today. That is, if fructose is harmful, the dangers only seem to manifest at the high levels of intake seen today.
Pragmatically, we may not need to be concerned about fructose at all, as eating refined sugar is obviously bad for health, so it should be eliminated anyways. (You need vitamins and minerals, and refined sugar doesn't have any!). Unrefined sources of sugar are not very good nutritional resources either.
I have to second this recommendation. Everybody concerned about nutrition should read
* Good Calorie, Bad Calorie;
* The Omnivore's Dilemma
* The End of Overeating.
In order: the science of fat and weight, as best as can be explained today; what's in your food, and what you should be eating; and how companies influence your eating decisions and how to take control of them.
In particular, the last book summarizes research showing that, for certain people, there is a reward conditioning feedback mechanism in the brain triggered by the intake of fat, sugar, and salt. see http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/end-of-overeating-th.ht... for a longer review. In particular, if you have lots of willpower elsewhere in your life but struggle controlling your food intake, I can't recommend this book strongly enough.
In any case, I think everybody should read the above 3 books; you'll be a long way closer to being a well informed consumer of food and of it's effects on your body.
The natural health community has been screaming this for decades. Few take heed.
My family has spent many years studying human health. The well-researched conclusions are so far from mainstream American beliefs that the ignorant dismiss them as absurd.
I'll get down voted, but in the interest of countering groupthink, here are some examples anyway:
- Food basics: Avoid hydrogenated oils, sodium nitrite, MSG/yeast extract, artificial colors, high fructose corn syrup, all artificial sweeteners, all grains that aren't whole. Replace sugar with agave nectar or stevia. Know the smoke points for the cooking oils you use an don't exceed them.
- Any multivitamin which packages B12 solely as "cyanocobalamin" is cheaply manufactured. Quality vitamins package hydroxocobalamin. You'll probably have to look online or at health food stores to find good quality vitamins. Many of the options sold at pharmacies are little better than candy.
- As much as 60% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. The body makes it in response to skin exposure to direct sunlight (not through glass.) Sufficient vitamin D reduces risk of nearly all cancers by around 70%. Why isn't the American Cancer Society screaming this message?
- A cup of blueberries a day is more effective at reducing cholesterol than current pharmaceuticals. Tastes better, too.
- Eating refined carbohydrates depletes the supply of B vitamins. For women, this contributes to the discomfort of menstruation.
- A number of plants have strong cancer prevention or anticancer properties. Examples: turmeric with black pepper, maca root, garlic.
If you have ever tried going low- or no- carb, it is exactly like withdrawal. You feel awful and then just a taste, just a little, won't affect the diet, and you feel OK again...
The whole video is about how fructose is toxic. Many, many plants are rich in fructose. It's not as simple as "eat plants." A modern variety apple or orange is a blast of fructose.
It's also perfectly healthy to eat predominantly meat, organs, and dairy if the animals are properly pastured. So the "mostly plants" claim makes little sense without a lot of qualification.
I watched it a while ago but I did not understand what was the key idea that he wanted to say.
Okay, the corn syrup is just fructose, and as I understood from the lecture it's equivalent to poison so we should avoid it.
But then sugar from plants and fruit also contains fructose! For every gram of natural sugar there is half a gram of fructose. If we eat natural sugar it seems equivalently bad? I don't get it.
So what does the lecture tell? Does it say we shouldn't be consuming sugar at all? Or should we only be consuming glucose part of sugar? Or what?
IIRC T-nation had an article on this. Fructose in an apple is OK because the fibre etc means it is absorbed more slowly. The body isn't designed to have a huge amount of fast-digesting carbs dumped into it in one go - even if the total calories are the same.
I think what he means is that the amount of fructose you get from eating fruit is much less as a proportion of beneficial nutrients than if you were drinking fruit juice or stuff with high fructose corn syrup added.
I think the main message is to avoid fructose in all forms. The rest is basically ABC analysis. Identify where most of your fructose intake originates from and cut down on that source.
This was really very interesting. I for one was mostly ignorant to the big difference there was between glucose and fructose. Also the bit on ethanol was quite interesting in itself.
The fact that HFCS is made from normal corn syrup (almost 100% glucose), which is processed into fructose seems almost ironic.
If you want the jist of this lecture, around 1:15:00 is a good place to start, he rants about Gatorade and McD's. Otherwise, it's O-Chem(?) up to that point. Very interesting stuff. Less Fructose, more Fiber. Less Frankenburgers, more Fruits.
Wow. I just read a lot about sugar last night. I wanted to know if glucose was truly the only sugar the brain needed. I found that processed sugars are used almost immediately by the body; whereas, the sugars from natural sources are released at a later time in smaller quantities. I read an article that stated that these large doses of sugar cause a sudden, large increase in insulin which can actually starve the brain from getting all of the sugar it needs as the body tries to dispose of excess sugar. It was a very interesting series of articles that I might hunt down again and post on HN at some point.
So this is another odd failure case for science, where researchers from many areas selectively ignored (since the 1970s, let's say) a roughly-worked-out biochemistry. Add political chilling effects and mix.
Given that there aren't particularly impervious ties in either political party to sugar/carbs (activists being health advocates on the left and anti-subsidy advocates on the right) I hope this set of research pathologies gets a kick in the pants when sugar support detonates.
The sugar lobby is the corn lobby, because that's where most refined sugar comes from. In other words, Midwest farmers, particularly in Iowa. See the problem now?
If you are going to see grandparents this holiday, a good discussion might be to ask them about their sugar consumption, prevalent health problems now and then, and compare those to your own. Bet there is a big difference.
I watched the whole video. I thought he was going to explain why they put salt in coke, but it seems he never did. Was he just implying that they are trying to get people to drink more?
salt is hygroscopic - it sucks water from your body making you thirsty / sets off a mechanism which makes you feel thirsty. This is why beer and coke etc have salt in them (also explains free peanuts and pretzels in bars)
[+] [-] gregwebs|16 years ago|reply
I think it is important to differentiate between normal (hunter-gatherer) levels of fructose consumption (< 5% of total calories, normally closer to 1%, except perhaps in the summer when fruit is more abundant) and the amount we are eating today. That is, if fructose is harmful, the dangers only seem to manifest at the high levels of intake seen today.
Pragmatically, we may not need to be concerned about fructose at all, as eating refined sugar is obviously bad for health, so it should be eliminated anyways. (You need vitamins and minerals, and refined sugar doesn't have any!). Unrefined sources of sugar are not very good nutritional resources either.
Tragically, the damages of fructose may have been multiplied by the government recommendations to replace saturated fat intake with polyunsaturated fat. http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/12/cirrhosis-and...
[+] [-] imd|16 years ago|reply
What about blackstrap molasses? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Blackstrap_mo...
[+] [-] MikeCapone|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earl|16 years ago|reply
* Good Calorie, Bad Calorie;
* The Omnivore's Dilemma
* The End of Overeating.
In order: the science of fat and weight, as best as can be explained today; what's in your food, and what you should be eating; and how companies influence your eating decisions and how to take control of them.
In particular, the last book summarizes research showing that, for certain people, there is a reward conditioning feedback mechanism in the brain triggered by the intake of fat, sugar, and salt. see http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/end-of-overeating-th.ht... for a longer review. In particular, if you have lots of willpower elsewhere in your life but struggle controlling your food intake, I can't recommend this book strongly enough.
In any case, I think everybody should read the above 3 books; you'll be a long way closer to being a well informed consumer of food and of it's effects on your body.
[+] [-] pg|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|16 years ago|reply
My family has spent many years studying human health. The well-researched conclusions are so far from mainstream American beliefs that the ignorant dismiss them as absurd.
I'll get down voted, but in the interest of countering groupthink, here are some examples anyway:
- Food basics: Avoid hydrogenated oils, sodium nitrite, MSG/yeast extract, artificial colors, high fructose corn syrup, all artificial sweeteners, all grains that aren't whole. Replace sugar with agave nectar or stevia. Know the smoke points for the cooking oils you use an don't exceed them.
- Any multivitamin which packages B12 solely as "cyanocobalamin" is cheaply manufactured. Quality vitamins package hydroxocobalamin. You'll probably have to look online or at health food stores to find good quality vitamins. Many of the options sold at pharmacies are little better than candy.
- As much as 60% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. The body makes it in response to skin exposure to direct sunlight (not through glass.) Sufficient vitamin D reduces risk of nearly all cancers by around 70%. Why isn't the American Cancer Society screaming this message?
- A cup of blueberries a day is more effective at reducing cholesterol than current pharmaceuticals. Tastes better, too.
- Eating refined carbohydrates depletes the supply of B vitamins. For women, this contributes to the discomfort of menstruation.
- A number of plants have strong cancer prevention or anticancer properties. Examples: turmeric with black pepper, maca root, garlic.
...a few thousand more little details.
[+] [-] chipsy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregwebs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdouble|16 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJVEPB_l8FU
[+] [-] nearestneighbor|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nunb|16 years ago|reply
Human digestive tracts are made for high-quality (bio-available energy/mass) nutrition-dense foods, unlike ruminants, or large apes like the gorilla.
And most people get plants confused with seeds. No other animal eats seeds in the quantities we do, especially as Omega-6 rich seed-oils.
Pollan has become a touchstone for many, but imho he's fairly wrong.
[+] [-] kingkongreveng_|16 years ago|reply
It's also perfectly healthy to eat predominantly meat, organs, and dairy if the animals are properly pastured. So the "mostly plants" claim makes little sense without a lot of qualification.
[+] [-] pkrumins|16 years ago|reply
Okay, the corn syrup is just fructose, and as I understood from the lecture it's equivalent to poison so we should avoid it.
But then sugar from plants and fruit also contains fructose! For every gram of natural sugar there is half a gram of fructose. If we eat natural sugar it seems equivalently bad? I don't get it.
So what does the lecture tell? Does it say we shouldn't be consuming sugar at all? Or should we only be consuming glucose part of sugar? Or what?
Can anyone explain?
Thanks!
[+] [-] gaius|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|16 years ago|reply
I think the main message is to avoid fructose in all forms. The rest is basically ABC analysis. Identify where most of your fructose intake originates from and cut down on that source.
[+] [-] voidpointer|16 years ago|reply
The fact that HFCS is made from normal corn syrup (almost 100% glucose), which is processed into fructose seems almost ironic.
[+] [-] dustineichler|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustineichler|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcurtis|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freebytes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyw|16 years ago|reply
Given that there aren't particularly impervious ties in either political party to sugar/carbs (activists being health advocates on the left and anti-subsidy advocates on the right) I hope this set of research pathologies gets a kick in the pants when sugar support detonates.
[+] [-] camccann|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nearestneighbor|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onoj|16 years ago|reply