[cjpb]

I understand why the sugar industry does this, just fighting fire with fire. The meat, dairy and egg industries have far more to answer for in regards to the current health epidemic in the western world.

Do people really think it's the sugar in the soda with all the literature we now have on nutrition? What about the oil laden fries, and the burgers packed with cholesterol, fat and animal protein that seem to be so popular in the western world? Most westerners I know consume overt fat and excess protein at least 2/3 meals each day then wonder why they have health problems.

I've seen more obese patients than I can count eat nothing but refined sugar, white rice, fruit juice (The Rice Diet [1]) and come out months later weighing half their original weight while reversing most, if not all of their western disease. Yet the majority of medical professionals continue to ignore the literature and clinical results that work in the LONG term.

And I know this is anecdotal - but when I traveled rural Asia, all the leanest and healthiest people I met ate nothing but rice, fruit and vegetables - it's all they could afford (the poorest of the lot just eat rice). They also have bowls of refined sugar on the table instead of salt and drink cane juice/sugary drinks like it's going out of fashion.

I personally eat 3000-4000 calories of carbohydrates each day, whether I'm training or not (cycling) and I never put on weight - I'm certainly not scared of soda. Winter just passed here, I trained probably once a week due to rain and actually weigh less than before Winter when I was training daily - most likely due to Thermogenesis [2].

Note too that de novo lipogenesis is so severely inefficient in humans [3] (even when over feeding) that it's laughable to even correlate sugar with obesity or our current health epidemic - especially when the majority are eating excess fat and protein.

I for one certainly love having my glycogen stores packed full of ready to use energy and my body producing glucose derived ATP [4,5] on the regular. And I know when I start to conk out on my bike I can just whip out an energy gel (sugar concentrate) or drink some sugar water to keep rolling.

I also imagine most folks on HN use their brain for most of the day, so don't forget to get adequate glucose on the daily to keep it humming along optimally [6].

Sugar is your best friend if you haven't already damaged your pancreas. Just make sure to get some basic nutrients and minerals from plant sources and you're good to go.

[1] https://www.drmcdougall.com/2013/12/31/walter-kempner-md-fou... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenesis [3] https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2009nl/mar/passionate.htm [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_catabolism [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate [6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3900881/