Lustig, R. H., Mulligan, K., Noworolski, S. M., Tai, V. W., Wen, M. J., Erkin-Cakmak, A., Gugliucci, A. and Schwarz, J.-M. (2015), Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome. Obesity. doi: 10.1002/oby.21371
As an aside, it's very strange that the article is not cited in the NYTimes post. A journalist should at least give the DOI at the bottom if there is not a link to the article in the body of the text.
Edit: I left this same comment on the NYTimes article and the text now links to the journal (though my comment was not approved). Seems like a win! NYTimes editorial staff: thank you!
Also, this very important piece of title is omitted: "...with obesity and metabolic syndrome". Sugar is getting too much bad press already (along with meat, white bread and computer games). Nothing is just black & white. </rant>
Newspapers usually don't cite their sources because they don't want to drive traffic away or get their facts proven wrong. Subarine PR and native ads are where sources get cited.
It constantly frustrates me how news articles never cite research articles, they always just mention "a study" and the author, leaving me to fumble around for 10 minutes to find the actual study. Does anyone know why this is SOP?
I completely removed added sugar from my diet for the past 6 months. It is hard to describe how my life changed.
I am much better at swimming, less tired, I eat a lot less. I lost weight the first 3 months and now my weight is very stable.
Cutting added sugar is not very hard but it requires some willingness.
The food producers put sugar everywhere: bread, red beans, smoked salmon, yogurt, etc. You just need to read the ingredients to avoid it. You will quickly learn which type of product is ok and which type is not.
Today I am more attracted to a fruit than a cup cake or an ice cream, and it feels good :)
I have become so wary of comments about lifestyle or diet changes that result in a bevy of subjective improvements. Like when people start running and they have all these wonderful side effects — more energy, better sleep, mood improvements, etc — where in my experience I really didn't experience any of it when I trained for a triathlon a couple years back. It just reminds me of infomercial testimonials. I need to see double-blind clinical trials that prove the effects outperform placebo at this point. It all sounds logical, because "sugar bad" but I have become far too skeptical these days.
I've sought out these types of experiences but never see the dramatic changes that other people do.
For a time, I cut sugar out of my diet. I didn't notice any changes other than my desire to eat sweet foods went away. I did experience the flu like symptoms for a few days, but that passed. Now, if I really binge on sugar, I get a headache, but consuming it moderation doesn't make me feel any different than when I had cut it out completely.
I've also experimented with cutting out caffeine, eating vegetarian, different sleep patterns, and different exercise routines. Only messing with my sleep had much effect (I need it, duh).
Being a minor pedant - the sugar in Smoked Salmon isn't really 'the food producers putting sugar everywhere', it's part of how the Salmon is cured before it's smoked. Rubs and cures are fairly typically a mix of salt and sugar along with herbs and spices - the sugar is a pretty integral part of the process rather than being an additional ingredient.
Sugar is added to cured salmon because it helps prevent the growth of microorganisms. When this process was originally developed, food spoilage was a huge problem (it meant the difference between survival and death) while metabolic disorders were rare.
I've cut it out for the most part as well, and I (as anecdotal as it is of course) completely agree.
I've also lost 35 lbs since the beginning of summer as well, with few other specific changes than learning to pass up sweet stuff.
Naturally, it's calories in vs. calories out for weight loss, but there seems to be a dangerous feedback loop when it comes to me and sugar. Easiest way to exercise will power for me is to just say no altogether.
I agree with you on the benefits, but I did find it quite hard to get rid of added sugars from my diet. As you said it's basically in 90% of products you find at the grocery store, so the only way is to buy raw foods only and do a lot of cooking.
I work remotely from home, so I have time to choose what to buy and time to cook everyday, but otherwise I don't think I could do it easily.
>> Today I am more attracted to a fruit than a cup cake or an ice cream, and it feels good :)
I had a buddy who has convinced me to do this as well and says everything tastes better when you re-align your taste buds so to speak. He says all his fruit tastes sweeter, vegetables and other foods have more flavor when he stopped eating processed sugar.
I tried this for about 9 months, and then a year later, for about a month and a half.
I can massively agree with this:
> It is hard to describe how my life changed.
I lost a load of weight, and felt much better. However:
> Cutting added sugar is not very hard but it requires
> some willingness.
Your mileage may vary. Having had strong to mild nicotine, alcohol, and benzodiazepine dependencies in the past, kicking sugar was much much more difficult than any of the others.
At least part of the problem was that it's virtually impossible to get away from sugar; you'll eat something you thought wouldn't be sweet, but it is, and suddenly you have chocolate smeared around your mouth sitting in a field of candy wrappers...
Watching my wife try and give up sugar was also an education. Wild mood swings, bargaining, secret consumption ... it was quite something. We're both pretty athletically shaped and very active, but giving up sugar was comfortably ... impossible.
I have had excellent results recently eating 90% of my meals from a paleo food delivery service. I don't think I can get behind any of the "science" the paleo community puts forward, but eating balanced and very high quality meals had made many parts of my body much happier.
I take issue with this because was it really the sugar or were you reducing and eliminating other bad elements from your diet? Cup cakes and ice cream, for example -- it's not the sugar -- it's the high fat combined with sugar causing you problems.
One way to improve your diet is just to pay attention to it. And you're paying a lot of attention to your diet. Unfortunately your anecdote isn't very helpful to learn specifically about sugar.
>The proposed changes have been strongly opposed by the food industry as unscientific. The Sugar Association, a trade group, said the F.D.A. was “making assertions that lack adequate scientific evidence,” and the Grocery Manufacturers Association criticized the standards the agency used to establish the daily value as being “inadequate.”
That's the tobacco industry smoke-screening evidence about the dangers of smoking all over again.
But also sounds like, for example, producers of vaccines arguing against that one study that vaccines cause autism. Just because they have an ulterior motive in defending their product doesn't mean they're wrong.
The obesity epidemic is clearly the new tobacco epidemic, but the health effects are worse, and unhealthy food is harder to avoid than smoking ever was. You can't abstain from eating like you can smoking, and ask any addict how hard it is to stay clean when everyone around you isn't.
Plus at least tobacco was attractive though right guys? /s
Throw in that two of the world's largest corporations are little more than glorified sugar pushers - Coke and Pepsi - and you have a replay of the 90's tobacco scene. Just Coke and Pepsi together represent a sugar ecosystem worth perhaps half a trillion dollars globally (their market caps + companies directly dependent on them + retail).
The upside is, those companies are slowly dying. Coke's sales the last three years:
$48 billion > $46.8b > $45.8b
We can add trash like McDonald's into this, their last three years of sales:
$27.5 billion > $28.1b > $27.4b
These types of companies will continue to bleed sales and struggle in the next decade as consumers seek alternatives.
I just watched a documentary [0] about sugar last weekend and they also compared it extensively to the tobacco industry. The sugar industry is just trying to spread enough FUD ("doctors agree, smoking is good!") so that while none of them can definitely prove that sugar is harmless, they can at least make sure that there isn't a common consensus on the issue which prevents further action.
Oh, and the "adequate scientific evidence" that they are looking for is something absurd like a study where you would give kids sugar and follow their daily lives for 40 years and then see if it has negatively impacted their health. We don't even have that strong scientific evidence against tobacco to date.
Note : the study selected children who were considered to be "particularly high risk of diabetes and related disorders. All the subjects were black or Hispanic and obese, and had at least one or more symptoms of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that includes hypertension, high blood sugar, abnormal cholesterol and excess body fat around the waist."
This article has all the hallmarks of poor science:
1) very small study size
2) very short study period
3) self reported consumption
4) marginal p-values
5) highly biased first author.
There's a very revealing and entertaining documentation about the rise of sugar in our lives, drawing parallels between the tobacco lobby and the sugar lobby: Sugar Coated (2015). Highly recommended. It was streaming on tvo, but somehow the stream does not work anymore. I only found a german version on arte.
In some ways, sugar is even harder to control than tobacco. Smoking is a choice, but sugar is essential for living. It plays a big role in our society. Remember the last birthday party/christmas/anything without sugar overdose?... Me neither.. And its hard to prove that over-consumption is unhealthy.
With all the discussion going on here, I would like to pop up a quick question:
How can one go about learning about nutrition?
I have tried many, many times to do this, but I always run into these problems:
1: I can't find a "big picture" overview of the field, and thereby learn which areas to focus on
2: Most of what I find seems to be anecdata, or poorly constructed studies "We followed these 7 people..."
3: The rest of which I find is always biased by what the author is trying to promote - Low Carbs! No Carbs! Water! Fruit fruit fruit!!! and suffers from points 1 and 2 above...
I would really like some good recommendations for books on learning nutrition science. From the ground (coffee) up.
I'm not sure how this is news to anyone these days. There are a billion and one places you could go on the web, see on TV, read in books, or even speak with neighbours and the same advice would be given. Lots of sugar = bad. Less sugar = generally good.
The human body is quite remarkable in it's ability to adapt, the only thing this article adds is the '10 days' portion (pun intended), but even that isn't too surprising!
I'm seeing a lot of reactions that seem to imply the current situation with added sugar is okay, and that this research can be dismissed as being too specific in terms of sample subjects.
Let's be clear, this research is specific, and all it does is add yet another point in a massive cloud of evidence pointing towards the current dietary disaster that is added sugar.
But don't take my word for it, please, do your own quick research on the subject. Look up terms like Sugar+Diet or Sugar+Nutrition on Google scholar. Go through the abstracts, the literature reviews. And stop spreading baseless opinions, especially when it's potentially very harmful to the people reading them.
When you see a comment that poorly defends a valid position, reply by defending it properly, not by pointing out the flaws and/or following up with FUD when you haven't done basic research on the subject.
My mother always told me how angry it made her to see obese children.
If you're an obese adult, it sucks and there are things to say, but whatever you do you. But kids don't know, kids need to be taught. And you're basically 100% responsible for any kind of extra weight on your child.
When experimenting with intermittent fasting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting) I have also observed that my lust for sweets and other "unhealthy" foods completely disappeared. Somehow after a grace period the taste (In my subjective experience) gets much more aligned to foods that we know are considered healthy. I think adjusting ones diet to minimise sugar and highly processed food can do wonders for ones general health and well-being.
I believe it (not having read the article). I went Paleo when my blood sugar finally went from borderline diabetic to your blood sugar is now diabetic, you either get results or go on pills at my doctors suggestion. Just had my three month bloodwork done and the reduction in blood sugar and cholesterol are staggering.
The first week I've been feeling odd and lethargic with the second day including flu-like symptoms. In little more than one week I've lost 1.5kg (~3 lbs). Now I start to feel more energetic and tomorrow I'll be hitting the gym for the first time since I started. If I manage to lose 10 lbs, I'll probably stick to the diet for some months more. (I needed to lose 40 lbs or so anyways)...
We're on almost the exact same timeline. The only added sugar I get right now is from about 2 grams in balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing. I've dropped roughly 10 pounds. My goal is to stay sugar free until Thanksgiving, then see how I feel after pigging out and the next couple days after.
Edit: btw I was already in good shape. A little bit of belly fat but I can still wear slim clothes. So for me at least the effect is there despite starting in the normal weight range.
I can almost understand why Soylent makes headlines here, but articles about sugar being bad for you and bacon being bad for you? There are a hundred other places online I can read about this.
I posted a comment earlier today describing my own experience. I never said that everybody should stop eating food with added sugar, I just said it worked for me.
One main thing we don't mention in this thread is that sugar is addictive. Cutting sugar was hard like quitting somking was hard. If you never got addicted like I was, I guess it os hard to understand the problem. But when you are addicted it is hard to just know if you are hungry or not. So I choosed to go on the other extreme which works better for me.
[+] [-] tomkinstinch|10 years ago|reply
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21371/abstrac...
PDF:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21371/pdf
Lustig, R. H., Mulligan, K., Noworolski, S. M., Tai, V. W., Wen, M. J., Erkin-Cakmak, A., Gugliucci, A. and Schwarz, J.-M. (2015), Isocaloric fructose restriction and metabolic improvement in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome. Obesity. doi: 10.1002/oby.21371
As an aside, it's very strange that the article is not cited in the NYTimes post. A journalist should at least give the DOI at the bottom if there is not a link to the article in the body of the text.
Edit: I left this same comment on the NYTimes article and the text now links to the journal (though my comment was not approved). Seems like a win! NYTimes editorial staff: thank you!
[+] [-] annnnd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plonh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasryaric|10 years ago|reply
I am much better at swimming, less tired, I eat a lot less. I lost weight the first 3 months and now my weight is very stable.
Cutting added sugar is not very hard but it requires some willingness.
The food producers put sugar everywhere: bread, red beans, smoked salmon, yogurt, etc. You just need to read the ingredients to avoid it. You will quickly learn which type of product is ok and which type is not.
Today I am more attracted to a fruit than a cup cake or an ice cream, and it feels good :)
[+] [-] marknutter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|10 years ago|reply
I've sought out these types of experiences but never see the dramatic changes that other people do.
For a time, I cut sugar out of my diet. I didn't notice any changes other than my desire to eat sweet foods went away. I did experience the flu like symptoms for a few days, but that passed. Now, if I really binge on sugar, I get a headache, but consuming it moderation doesn't make me feel any different than when I had cut it out completely.
I've also experimented with cutting out caffeine, eating vegetarian, different sleep patterns, and different exercise routines. Only messing with my sleep had much effect (I need it, duh).
[+] [-] elemeno|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasryaric|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thearn4|10 years ago|reply
I've also lost 35 lbs since the beginning of summer as well, with few other specific changes than learning to pass up sweet stuff.
Naturally, it's calories in vs. calories out for weight loss, but there seems to be a dangerous feedback loop when it comes to me and sugar. Easiest way to exercise will power for me is to just say no altogether.
[+] [-] zyb09|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|10 years ago|reply
I had a buddy who has convinced me to do this as well and says everything tastes better when you re-align your taste buds so to speak. He says all his fruit tastes sweeter, vegetables and other foods have more flavor when he stopped eating processed sugar.
Clearly, you've had the same experience.
[+] [-] magic_beans|10 years ago|reply
What about carbohydrates, which have "added sugar" (because they ARE sugar by default?)
What about high-sugar fruits like bananas, citrus, and red apples, which often have as much sugar as processed snacks?
Or do you mean that you eat low glycemic index foods?
[+] [-] peteretep|10 years ago|reply
I can massively agree with this:
I lost a load of weight, and felt much better. However: Your mileage may vary. Having had strong to mild nicotine, alcohol, and benzodiazepine dependencies in the past, kicking sugar was much much more difficult than any of the others.At least part of the problem was that it's virtually impossible to get away from sugar; you'll eat something you thought wouldn't be sweet, but it is, and suddenly you have chocolate smeared around your mouth sitting in a field of candy wrappers...
Watching my wife try and give up sugar was also an education. Wild mood swings, bargaining, secret consumption ... it was quite something. We're both pretty athletically shaped and very active, but giving up sugar was comfortably ... impossible.
I have had excellent results recently eating 90% of my meals from a paleo food delivery service. I don't think I can get behind any of the "science" the paleo community puts forward, but eating balanced and very high quality meals had made many parts of my body much happier.
[+] [-] ahallock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eliben|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremywho|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 001sky|10 years ago|reply
Given the amount of time wasted on diet/nutrition fads I'm starting to thing the US government should actually do some science on these issues.
[+] [-] iSnow|10 years ago|reply
That's the tobacco industry smoke-screening evidence about the dangers of smoking all over again.
[+] [-] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmalarky|10 years ago|reply
Plus at least tobacco was attractive though right guys? /s
https://36.media.tumblr.com/a31b0a77b878143a5f3b3904c2a012d9...
[+] [-] antsar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|10 years ago|reply
The upside is, those companies are slowly dying. Coke's sales the last three years:
$48 billion > $46.8b > $45.8b
We can add trash like McDonald's into this, their last three years of sales:
$27.5 billion > $28.1b > $27.4b
These types of companies will continue to bleed sales and struggle in the next decade as consumers seek alternatives.
[+] [-] joonoro|10 years ago|reply
Oh, and the "adequate scientific evidence" that they are looking for is something absurd like a study where you would give kids sugar and follow their daily lives for 40 years and then see if it has negatively impacted their health. We don't even have that strong scientific evidence against tobacco to date.
[0] http://sugarcoateddoc.com/
[+] [-] vox_mollis|10 years ago|reply
These are kids whose livers are already suffused with fatty tissue, not average kids.
[+] [-] sgt101|10 years ago|reply
I did not read that there was a control group.
[+] [-] dekhn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zubspace|10 years ago|reply
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4425138/
http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/054774-000/die-grosse-zuckerlueg...
http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/sugar-coated (not working)
In some ways, sugar is even harder to control than tobacco. Smoking is a choice, but sugar is essential for living. It plays a big role in our society. Remember the last birthday party/christmas/anything without sugar overdose?... Me neither.. And its hard to prove that over-consumption is unhealthy.
[+] [-] nekopa|10 years ago|reply
How can one go about learning about nutrition?
I have tried many, many times to do this, but I always run into these problems:
1: I can't find a "big picture" overview of the field, and thereby learn which areas to focus on
2: Most of what I find seems to be anecdata, or poorly constructed studies "We followed these 7 people..."
3: The rest of which I find is always biased by what the author is trying to promote - Low Carbs! No Carbs! Water! Fruit fruit fruit!!! and suffers from points 1 and 2 above...
I would really like some good recommendations for books on learning nutrition science. From the ground (coffee) up.
[+] [-] fomoz|10 years ago|reply
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/a-primer-on-nutri...
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/a-primer-on-nutri...
Then explore the rest of the site: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition
When you're ready, start reading LeanGains:
http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debun...
http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html
[+] [-] wizeman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fulafel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggregoire|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gloves|10 years ago|reply
The human body is quite remarkable in it's ability to adapt, the only thing this article adds is the '10 days' portion (pun intended), but even that isn't too surprising!
[+] [-] pierrec|10 years ago|reply
Let's be clear, this research is specific, and all it does is add yet another point in a massive cloud of evidence pointing towards the current dietary disaster that is added sugar.
But don't take my word for it, please, do your own quick research on the subject. Look up terms like Sugar+Diet or Sugar+Nutrition on Google scholar. Go through the abstracts, the literature reviews. And stop spreading baseless opinions, especially when it's potentially very harmful to the people reading them.
When you see a comment that poorly defends a valid position, reply by defending it properly, not by pointing out the flaws and/or following up with FUD when you haven't done basic research on the subject.
[+] [-] nichochar|10 years ago|reply
If you're an obese adult, it sucks and there are things to say, but whatever you do you. But kids don't know, kids need to be taught. And you're basically 100% responsible for any kind of extra weight on your child.
[+] [-] halotrope|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nemant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CIPHERSTONE|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sugarcube|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeyspn|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyeor3z9EdQ
The first week I've been feeling odd and lethargic with the second day including flu-like symptoms. In little more than one week I've lost 1.5kg (~3 lbs). Now I start to feel more energetic and tomorrow I'll be hitting the gym for the first time since I started. If I manage to lose 10 lbs, I'll probably stick to the diet for some months more. (I needed to lose 40 lbs or so anyways)...
[+] [-] drumdance|10 years ago|reply
Edit: btw I was already in good shape. A little bit of belly fat but I can still wear slim clothes. So for me at least the effect is there despite starting in the normal weight range.
[+] [-] ahallock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmalarky|10 years ago|reply
You are describing carb withdrawal symptoms to a T.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasryaric|10 years ago|reply
One main thing we don't mention in this thread is that sugar is addictive. Cutting sugar was hard like quitting somking was hard. If you never got addicted like I was, I guess it os hard to understand the problem. But when you are addicted it is hard to just know if you are hungry or not. So I choosed to go on the other extreme which works better for me.