“Big Sugar’s Secret Ally? Nutritionists” (nytimes):
When it comes to weight gain, the sugar industry and purveyors of sugary beverages still insist, a calorie is a calorie, regardless of its source, so guidelines that single out sugar as a dietary evil are not evidence-based.
Surprisingly, the scientific consensus is technically in agreement. It holds that obesity is caused “by a lack of energy balance,” as the National Institutes of Health website explains — in other words, by our taking in more calories than we expend. Hence, the primary, if not the only, way that foods can influence our body weight is through their caloric content.
When scientists agree on climate change, science is good and the process of inquiry is one of pure intellect. When scientists agree on calorie consumption and weight, science is bad and the process of inquiry is tainted by “dogmatic belief.”
Humans don’t really have a lipogenic pathway, so in theory you can eat an absolutely zero fat diet and force down many thousands of sugar and starch calories while still losing fat. It’s been done in metabolic wards. The human metabolism ramps up to burn off the excess glucose and you get mitochondrial decoupling. Outside of the lab it’s just about impossible to eat a zero fat diet, though, so “a calorie is a calorie” is true enough in practice. But there’s also the caveat that polyunsaturated fats tend to slow the metabolic rate, so gorging on canola oil and soybean oil will tend to make you fatter than calories alone would suggest.
Reducing refined sugar has the single biggest impact on obesity, because it’s absorbed fastest & the amount of calories in a small mass is more than anything else. Still silly for the government to regulate human behavior at the drinking level, but we’ve been regulating foods forever.
Jack, none of that’s really true. Fat is much more calorie dense than carbohydrate. And speed of absorption doesn’t really matter. Your body will process any excess calories from dietary fat into adipose tissue no matter the digestion speed or meal frequency.
People find focusing either on sugar intake or focusing on fat intake helpful for losing weight because reducing either limits food palatability. It’s stuff like ice cream and cheese cake with the fat and sugar combo that makes it super easy to massively overeat. Nobody can sit there and eat scoop after scoop of cotton candy or dairy cream.
Jack: not technically true.
Sugar has about the same energy density (3,870 kcal/kg) as e.g. flour (3,640 kcal/kg) and protein (3,500 kCal/kg), and a little under half half the energy density of fat ( 8,800 kcal/kg) .
What is true is that sugary foods don’t make you feel as full as most other foods, and are also habit forming. So while a calorie is a calorie from an accounting standpoint, it is vastly easier to overeat by eating too many sugary foods/drinks than say, gorging on grilled chicken breasts.
Bobby for the win.
Agree, actually, with everyone. Jack’s first point — “reducing refined sugar has the biggest impact on obesity” — is probably right for the reasons Andrea mentions: satiety and habit.
Related:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/favorites.html
Patrick Winston, one of my old professors, describes his ‘General Patton Diet’.
I’ve never quite understood the calorie is a calorie theory until I went on an all lego diet, because a lego is basically oil, and well calories are calories. I ate my fill of legos everyday and in the end I was heavier than ever! Then I switched to eating wood, a high fiber high carb diet and you know, calories are calories or something but wood don’t have too much of them. So I lost all that lego weight I had put on.
My understanding is that caloric intake of food is measured by a bomb calorimeter but naively, I suspect we don’t have bomb calorimeters in our tummies but instead have a variety of ways of metabolizing different kinds of food. And yet, I’ve never seen it explained that though we do have a variety of different ways to metabolize say proteins from fat from carbohydrates, that the calorie intake depended on the efficiency of the path way.
Getting back to Phil’s point, the science is settled until it’s not settled.
Dietary science was settled until the 50s (original food pyramid), then it was re-settled in the 80s (carb heavy diets) and now it’s being resettled again (sugar is bad).
I guess the same is true with climate science.
Climate science is settled and will be until it’s settled again.
Mostly what this appears to emphasize is that science may be science, but that scientists are people and influenced the way the rest of us are, by money, titles, girls, homes, boats, prestige and travel, and media is the same way.
Is the author saying science is bad, or that his science is better than someone else’s science?
My subjective take — no scientific claims here just a couple of years of tracking my own food intake and weight — is that both are true. While the “hormonal milieu” may be significant, small effects accumulating over time (whether hormonal or energy imbalance) is probably the more significant factor.
But is a sugar calorie the same as a fat or protein calorie? I think yes in terms of energy imbalance, but no in other key ways like how full it makes you feel or how quickly and absentminded your intake. With sugar it’s super easy to take in a lot of energy really quickly without getting full or, even worse, wanting more. Or to quote Kimbal Musk, “it makes you fat and hungry at the same time.”
Of course humans have a lipogenic pathway (http://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-Lipogenesis.aspx). The liver converts glucose and other carbohydrates into fat.
I’m not sure what the target of Mr. Greenspun’s irony is supposed to be. The author of the linked article doesn’t mention climate science. And the consensus about energy balance, despite the other dangers to health of sugar, seems to be correct. If an extra calorie from dietary fat produces less body fat than an extra calorie of dietary sugar, what happens to the extra energy? Is it excreted?
Part of the reason sugars are bad, especially in liquid form, is that they cause more fluctuations in your blood glucose levels. You eat some sugar, your blood glucose spikes, you release insulin to lower your blood glucose level, then your lower-again blood glucose bottoms out and you feel hungry again, sooner than if you had eaten protein or fat which take longer to metabolize into sugars. That’s what makes sense to me, anyway, based on personal experience and observation of others.
Separately, someone recently found evidence that the sugar industry influenced scientific articles that downplayed the health risks of sugar by paying off a key researcher at Harvard back in the 60s. He was also instrumental in creating our food pyramid
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
Did your read your article or its citations? It explains that de novo lipogenis in humans is so minor it’s hard to measure and will only happen on very high carbohydrate diets bordering on force-feeding. The process is extremely inefficient.
Extra calories from carbohydrate in the context of a very low fat diet will tend to boost the resting metabolic rate. Tissues will run hotter, so to speak. Most fat sources contain quite a bit of polyunsaturated fats which interfere with mitochondrial respiration and so have the effect of lowering resting metabolic rate. At high fat diet will tend to be more fattening than a high carb + very low fat diet at the same calorie levels.
There is plenty of evidence that for the goal of weight loss a very low fat diet with plenty of protein is the best approach. They had it right in the 60s. Why people in the last 15 years got the idea that fat people should eat more fat and avoid carbohydrate is a cultural mystery that doesn’t really involve science. Probably more to do with book sales.
> You eat some sugar, your blood glucose spikes, you release insulin to lower your blood glucose level
This is a description of how your endocrine system is supposed to work, not of a problem. Major insulin variations are *supposed* to happen when you eat. That not happening is called diabetes. And anyway, fat and starch and protein are all more insulinogenic than sugar. So the whole line makes no real sense.
> There is plenty of evidence that for the goal of weight loss a very low fat diet with plenty of protein is the best approach. They had it right in the 60s. Why people in the last 15 years got the idea that fat people should eat more fat and avoid carbohydrate is a cultural mystery that doesn’t really involve science. Probably more to do with book sales.
There is plenty of evidence that for the goal of weight loss a very low carbohydrate diet with plenty of protein and fat is the best approach.
But I can see you are a keto-denier.
Well if there is a scientific consensus, there sure doesn’t seem to be a popular consensus based on the comments here. Opinions about diet are like certain orifices – everyone has got one. Based on what I have gleaned from this thread, in order to lose weight you should eat more or less fat and/or more or less carbs and/or more or less protein.
Anyway, the article author has an explanation as to why the scientific consensus is wrong:
“If the research community had been doing its job …..perhaps we would have found such evidence long ago.”
Next time one of your global warming friends pulls out the “settled science” card, try that line on him – I’m sure it will go over big.
Was “the primary, if not the only, way that foods can influence our body weight is through their caloric content” ever really “settled” in the same way that “obesity is caused by a lack of energy balance,” was/is “settled”? And yes, in the same way, when people say “The science behind global warming is settled” do they really understand which parts of the science are in fact “settled”?
“And anyway, fat and starch and protein are all more insulinogenic than sugar. So the whole line makes no real sense.”
I’ve never heard or read this before. How do fat and protein stimulate more insulin release than glucose?