When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac...
And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either.
I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university
Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?)
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
… it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one.
> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition.
That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.
I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
I think the real problem is that a food pyramid is an oversimplification.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
Eating nothing but processed foods, sugar, and heavily processed grains? That sounds like the opposite of what Kennedy recommends, which is a recipe for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
meme, noun. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another -- Wordnik
What annoys me the most is that sat fat is a huge way that sugary products are made more palatable to people. People love butter. It is every chef's 2nd favorite tool, just after salt.
I don't see anything extreme, but the primacy of proteins (and especially meat-based protein) and dairy seem suspicious considering the broader rhetoric coming out.
"The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke." PMID 32562735 - Jun 2020, Journal of the American College of Cardiology
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
> Protein serving goals: 1.2–1.6 grams of
protein per kilogram of body weight per
day, adjusting as needed based on your
individual caloric requirements.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
anyway, i don't find anything here that stands out or is obviously against the consensus, other than recommending tallow as a cooking fat. i don't see any signs of seed oil extremism or sat fat trutherism otherwise. there's even this line about limiting sat fat:
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal.
More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
The dumb marketing label lowers the credibility that I'll expect to find good science in it. It in no way defines what the actual scientific credibility should be though.
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
I have IBS, and what I did was literally that I kept a list of foods and symptoms they cause me.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
Recently I was diagnosed with autoimmune and had to follow AOP diet.
It was very promising in the exclusion phase - cutting gluten and dairy eliminated all the symptoms for 3 months. Per protocol I also excluded other things like nightshades, nuts/seeds, grains. But after 3 months, while adding things back, even in small amounts, one by one, got all the symptoms back, being more severe, and after excluding things again, symptoms are not going away completely. I think that our body is a very complex system, distributed in some sense, with delayed and cascade effects that are really hard to "debug".
To add another data point: I love sweet things and eat a lot of desserts and sugar. I'm in my late 30s, and I've never had a cavity or weight issues. My BMI is around 21.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
I have a family member with no cavities despite loving sweets. His dentist told he has extra thick enamel.
I wasn't that lucky and pure oral hygiene standards in eastern Europe didn't help as well. Had half teeth with fillings by age of 20. However, after eliminating sugars, no new cavities in unaffected teeth, just had to replace existing fillings and crown in 10 years.
I had to cut it all at once - i.e. if added sugars is > 0 on the label, I avoided it. I still was consuming naturally occurring sugars from fruits and other produce.
Hard to tell if it was gradual or not, I had one panel done 3 months later and it showed that all values are within acceptable range now, but very close to thresholds, and ~10 months later all values were just in the middle between min/max where applicable.
It's fairly basic nutrition education that cutting out or reducing refined sugar intake will reduce cavities and reduce body fat. It's all about the amount you consume them in amongst the rest of your diet.
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
But I see a significant fraction my friends, family and students in university to have no clue. I recently worked with a student who shared his struggle with extra weight and asked about my gym habits. To his surprise I can't exercise except daily walk and I told that eliminating refined sugars is low hanging fruit. The student was surprised (early 20s) and didn't know how to tell if yogurt in cafeteria had added sugars.
A good book that explains it all is The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, which came out the same year as this article.
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
These evil people want us sick and hospitalized with chronic disease from eating this crap. Now that it's political, hopefully people will see it for the bullshit it really is.
As a child of the 1980s, I feel so cheated that we were told to eat "5 servings of grains a day" pointing to bread and pasta -- when so many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar in the sauce.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
Bread with sugar in it is problematic, but that doesn't mean all bread is bad. That would be like saying that boiled potatos are as unhealthy as french fries. Or rolled oats vs. sugary industrial cereals. Whole grains are actually really healthy.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
3-2-4-4 / day, I was told in California. Excess grains made sense in the old days when food was more expensive. Grains are cheap and easily stored. They powered progress through the 19th and 20th centuries, and only became problematic for the majority when physical labor became less common, simultaneously with the low-fat craze.
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
If I were to design a warning label I would take inspiration from the Australian tobacco warning labels, quite gruesome medical imagery of rotted teeth. Restricting the form of advertisement would be a start, like USA tobacco regulations.
I did keto for a few months a long time ago (2010/2011). This was early in my career and long coding and debug sessions were a normal part of my day-to-day.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
Personal experience. Then I found many well known programmers shared the same experience online. It feels deliberate work without sugar. ie. if coding = work + fun. without sugar its just coding = work. It does not get any better after 3 days or so too.
Been coding while fasting on keto and it's absolutely amazing. Fasting is hard socially, being ketogenic puts a bit more stress on my kidneys, but for me (adhd) it's amazing.
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
That's addiction. You'll need time to get out of it.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
If you're addicted to cocaine, then cocaine is really important for focus. Same for sugar. If sugar is really important for focus for you, then you're likely heading for diabetes type 2.
This isn't really a correct narrative. Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with CVD. Sugar is also correlated with poor metabolic health which is also correlated with CVD. Both are bad.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Mediterranean diet is basically a lie, though. If you look at the healthiest Mediterranean populations, they eat a lot of saturated fat.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
I've been to the Mediterranean several times. They eat a ton of (delicious) super oily food, sausages, meats, eggs, fish (often fried or deep fried), salty cheeses, greasy stuff, tons of white bread, lots of wine. Fat chance to find someone eating avocados, kale, or quinoa, and proteins are not at all minimized.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
Countries in the mediterranean have been developing the same bad habits as elsewhere. People in the Mediterranean need to go back to eating a Mediterranean diet.
Not sure if this has been posted (I see stephenwoo has mentioned him further down), but it's a break-down of how sugary foods damage the body, particularly fructose.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
Sugar got into all the meal we have, and because it is so addictive, we went for it. Fatty meals are more healthy, especially for me, but will get you sick in no time, unless you eat healthy fats (olive oil, olives especially). The trans fats are carcinogenic
A) Eating a pound/kg of fat
B) Eating a pound/kg of refined sugar
Correct answer: B
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
At the same weight, fat contains way more calories than sugar, so the difference in difficulty of digestion is irrelevant at this level. It's true that if you were to consume 1000 Cal worth of sugar vs 1000 Cal worth of fat, you'd get slightly less fat from the fat - but this should be seen simply as one of many limitations on the "calories in" measurement. The same kinds of differences likely exist between different sugars, different fats, different proteins - and may well be affected by other aspects of how the food containing these nutrients is consumed; and it almost certainly varies a lot between people or even for the same person based on various factors such as age, activity level, time of day, etc.
> The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
And the muscles. You can’t fight or flight if you have to ask the liver to deliver glycogen. That’s how anaerobic exercise works. You have the fuel but not enough oxygen to burn it so you burn it fuel rich and oxidizer poor.
CVD requires a bunch of events to happen in sequence, I always felt like it was a combination of risk factors + luck that make a heart attack or aneurysm happen.
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
Consuming cholesterol doesn't normally change the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream - it simply leads to your body producing less cholesterol. Unless you're consuming gigantic amounts, or have some problems with your cholesterol regulation, dietary cholesterol is completely safe. It's only if your blood work shows elevated cholesterol levels that you need to start paying attention to cholesterol intake. This is in fact very similar to what happens to blood sugar levels, in fact.
Sugar causes inflammation, and inflammation damages arteries. It is this damage that then leads to accumulation of fatty deposits, as damaged arteries basically lose the protective layer (think of equivalent to a non-stick coating). But that doesn't mean dietary fat is what actually caused the plaque.
I feel like the same thing is happening now… processed foods have less sodium and I feel are more sugary. I don’t live a sedentary lifestyle…I need salt for hydration and muscle contraction. I find the new nutrition guidelines for sodium lacking.
The 2016 JAMA paper illustrates how funding sources can shape research focus, reinforcing the value of transparency and multiple lines of evidence in nutrition research.
I mean, anecdotal but I suffered metabolic syndrome. Cut out all carbs, increased my fat intake. This led to a loss of 50 pounds, my blood fat and blood cholesterol dropped, liver enzymes in the blood dropped, insulin resistance reversed, blood pressure dropped, and according to my blood, everything is now normal.
This is on HNs homepage because it confirms what we want to believe about our favorite foods: saturated fat = bad is just a sugar industry psy-op!
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
Sorry to say but I see a lot of ill informed takes here on sugar, fats and their 'correlation' with CVD.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
A casual look at where people live the oldest, what they eat, and what's recommended tell you all you need to know about food recommendations then and now.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
I think avoiding industrially processed food is wise, but it eliminates 99% of restaurant food and 90% of prepared food in almost any setting, only exception being about half the stuff at a salad bar.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
It doesn't have to be a religion. I don't care when I eat out. The point is not to be absolutely consistant. It's just the guideline I use regarding what I eat.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
> The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
For me avoiding processed foods is not that hard, I only eat whole foods like vegetables and fruits (where I live there are no labels on these whole foods). I know that this is not doable for most of you, but it can be done if you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_diet
This is a complete myth. Human populations are not homogenous, gene pools that relied on agriculture for the last 10k years are completely different than hunter gatherer populations. You have been lied to
Which myth? I have genuine trouble understanding what you disagree with.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
They’re out there. I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
Based on the history of the past 1-ish century, I trust Big Meat & Dairy to have less capability for and competence at evil than Big Sugar. Because otherwise we'd have been hearing far more "Fat is Fine, Carbs are Crap" messages.
Well, it's true that in the 17th century, sugar and rum production involved one of the most heinous forms of slavery ever to exist. What's not clear is that this necessarily has anything to do with the present; after all, slaves were emancipated a long time ago.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
Science isn't always "science". If it's not clear by now it never will be that there is a massive amount of fraud in the "scientific" community as a whole.
CVD and links to saturated fats is a long, long established phenomenon and has a lot of science behind it. A single study or even studies should not invalidate or discount it. Before people misinterpret what this is saying.
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Those studies however generally put beef and sausages into the same "red meat" category. So yeah... that science is, from what I've seen, basically worthless.
there are literally thousands of studies. there's no real scientific debate amongst people that know what they are talking about. Red meat, and any food high in saturated fats, are awful for your heart. full stop. that includes sausage, steak, ham, butter, etc.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
As a teen I was fooled for a short time, confused about fats, types, etc. But I was a feral child and as ignorant as any animal. It didn't take long to figure things out after I learned to read.
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
I thought that BMI did the opposite. I'm a naturally thin person who has also been vegan for over 20 years, so I usually have to pay attention to whether I'm eating enough. I recently did a BMI test and was surprised how average my score was. I've known people who appear healthy and active that inch into the "overweight" category. It really is a bad measurement system given the whole muscle mass factor.
depends on how fat you already are - if you are, 100% of it converts. For anyone that is addicted to sugar they are pretty much a fat person. The sugar industry is blaming themselves.
That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert. People should be lose their careers over this, at the very least imo.
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
Yeah, I completely reject nutritional science. Even without bribes involved, there are just too many complexities for them to draw useful conclusions. Ignored the food pyramid too.
When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
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> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C....
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
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The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
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> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
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But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
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> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
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Such "science" should be illegal.
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> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
But buying off a single congressperson is not going to change the worldwide discourse on a topic.
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It's really good to ask these questions.
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4
But is it the actual sugar, or the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?
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This is just the time that we caught. Who knows how many more times it happened and wasn't caught?
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
You're arguing for a pattern based on 1 data point.
They paid a total of 2 people...
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
The department of nutrition at Harvard was founded in 1942.
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Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac... And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either. I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
PR can be a lot of bang for your buck.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
You could buy a house and a 69 Charger for $25K in the 60's with a tidy sum left over.
$50k in 2016 dollars.
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I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university
And you probably earned under $10k/yr.
take me back
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Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
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No no, ice cream is good for you. It's fine.
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"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
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> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
In this specific case.
Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?)
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
Ah sorry, 10 years since the revelation about the funding. But yes, decades (over 50 years?) since the single (?) literature review.
I believe they're talking about this UCSF report of a "newly discovered cache of industry documents", which came out in 2016.
You're right to be skeptical, but:
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
Other way around. To quote the article:
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
… it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
No, that's already inflation adjusted.
The $50k is already adjusted for inflation.
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communication before the internet was very slow.
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
Correction: they paid at least 2 people, at least $50,000.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
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> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
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This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...
I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
Edit: The new guidelines are expected to be released today.
https://www.wfla.com/news/national/kennedy-wants-to-end-war-...
> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.
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I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
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"Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies"
Maybe adults, but probably not the people who were taught the food pyramid - children.
Edit: changed the tense to acknowledge this was in the past. Thought that was obvious since the food pyramid was a thing of the past.
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Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
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Source?
I think the real problem is that a food pyramid is an oversimplification.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
If you do the opposite of whatever Kennedy recommends, you probably wouldn’t be too far off doing the right thing.
Eating nothing but processed foods, sugar, and heavily processed grains? That sounds like the opposite of what Kennedy recommends, which is a recipe for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
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It's a "meme" that sugar is worse for you than fat?
Yes and also a true meme.
What annoys me the most is that sat fat is a huge way that sugary products are made more palatable to people. People love butter. It is every chef's 2nd favorite tool, just after salt.
Butter is only a favorite because Lard has been some demonized that no chef would ever use it anymore.
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The new dietary guidelines are much more sensible IMO, compared to the food pyramid or MyPlate.
https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
The scientific report is much more detailed: https://cdn.realfood.gov/Scientific%20Report.pdf
I agree with siblings that nothing jumps out (to my non-expert eye) as "very extreme".
EDIT: Removed long-winded snark after a more careful reading of the linked document.
I don't see anything extreme, but the primacy of proteins (and especially meat-based protein) and dairy seem suspicious considering the broader rhetoric coming out.
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It recommends eating more saturated fats from dairy and meat, both of which are very bad for CVD.
"The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke." PMID 32562735 - Jun 2020, Journal of the American College of Cardiology
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
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Saturated fat isn't bad for CVD, unless you eat it together with carbohydrates.
I guess avocados and coconuts aren't manly enough.
> Protein serving goals: 1.2–1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, adjusting as needed based on your individual caloric requirements.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
anyway, i don't find anything here that stands out or is obviously against the consensus, other than recommending tallow as a cooking fat. i don't see any signs of seed oil extremism or sat fat trutherism otherwise. there's even this line about limiting sat fat:
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
> To Make America Healthy Again, we must return to the basics.
Who knows, these guidelines might indeed be sensible, but anything labeled “Make America Healthy Again” has no scientific credibility.
The dumb marketing label lowers the credibility that I'll expect to find good science in it. It in no way defines what the actual scientific credibility should be though.
Do your own research, it's not that hard:
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
I have IBS, and what I did was literally that I kept a list of foods and symptoms they cause me.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
Recently I was diagnosed with autoimmune and had to follow AOP diet.
It was very promising in the exclusion phase - cutting gluten and dairy eliminated all the symptoms for 3 months. Per protocol I also excluded other things like nightshades, nuts/seeds, grains. But after 3 months, while adding things back, even in small amounts, one by one, got all the symptoms back, being more severe, and after excluding things again, symptoms are not going away completely. I think that our body is a very complex system, distributed in some sense, with delayed and cascade effects that are really hard to "debug".
To add another data point: I love sweet things and eat a lot of desserts and sugar. I'm in my late 30s, and I've never had a cavity or weight issues. My BMI is around 21.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
I have a family member with no cavities despite loving sweets. His dentist told he has extra thick enamel.
I wasn't that lucky and pure oral hygiene standards in eastern Europe didn't help as well. Had half teeth with fillings by age of 20. However, after eliminating sugars, no new cavities in unaffected teeth, just had to replace existing fillings and crown in 10 years.
How strict was your elimination of sugar? Did you find a gradual trend of your lipid profile over the course of a year, or was it more sudden?
I had to cut it all at once - i.e. if added sugars is > 0 on the label, I avoided it. I still was consuming naturally occurring sugars from fruits and other produce.
Hard to tell if it was gradual or not, I had one panel done 3 months later and it showed that all values are within acceptable range now, but very close to thresholds, and ~10 months later all values were just in the middle between min/max where applicable.
It's fairly basic nutrition education that cutting out or reducing refined sugar intake will reduce cavities and reduce body fat. It's all about the amount you consume them in amongst the rest of your diet.
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
I agree it's not new and known for decades.
But I see a significant fraction my friends, family and students in university to have no clue. I recently worked with a student who shared his struggle with extra weight and asked about my gym habits. To his surprise I can't exercise except daily walk and I told that eliminating refined sugars is low hanging fruit. The student was surprised (early 20s) and didn't know how to tell if yogurt in cafeteria had added sugars.
A good book that explains it all is The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, which came out the same year as this article.
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
> hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging
The one I like are the sodas that tout "made with real sugar" as if that's better for you than HF syrup.
Turns out the phosphoric acid breaks down the sucrose within a matter of months on the shelf.
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“… but hard to hear amongst all the noise …”
A well placed warning label makes it a little easier to hear:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
Yep. And thanks for the recommendation.
I am currently reading The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
That's a good one. Taubes also has a (more well known book) called Why We Get Fat.
Nina Teicholz is not who you should be getting your dietary advice from. She has no qualifications.
Here’s a gift link to a NYT article that was posted a few minutes ago:
Kennedy Flips Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/well/rfk-jr-food-pyramid-...
At the top of the pyramid there are also vegetables. For some reason that is left out in some of the media converge.
Kennedy said to avoid the sugary, processed foods that he labels as poisonous to health. (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Mr. Kennedy said (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
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These evil people want us sick and hospitalized with chronic disease from eating this crap. Now that it's political, hopefully people will see it for the bullshit it really is.
The food pyramid was published by the department of agriculture, it’s always been propaganda.
Thanks to the dedicated work of Edward Bernays... nephew of Sigmund Freud ... and the Creel Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
When Lucky Strike needed more women to smoke cigarettes in the late 1920s, it turned to Bernays.
So the dairy industry still hasn’t gotten its day in court.
For those like myself who didn't know, CVD = cardiovascular disease.
As a child of the 1980s, I feel so cheated that we were told to eat "5 servings of grains a day" pointing to bread and pasta -- when so many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar in the sauce.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
Bread with sugar in it is problematic, but that doesn't mean all bread is bad. That would be like saying that boiled potatos are as unhealthy as french fries. Or rolled oats vs. sugary industrial cereals. Whole grains are actually really healthy.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
3-2-4-4 / day, I was told in California. Excess grains made sense in the old days when food was more expensive. Grains are cheap and easily stored. They powered progress through the 19th and 20th centuries, and only became problematic for the majority when physical labor became less common, simultaneously with the low-fat craze.
> many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar
Presumably "5 servings of grains a day" assumes no added sugar, otherwise it would say "5 servings of grains and some sugar a day".
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
Aren't both sugar and saturated fat problemtic, and complementary in contributing to CVD?
High-fat high-carb diet certainly is. There is however no conclusive data that high-fat low-carb diet OR low-fat high-carb diet contribute to CVD.
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
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> There is however no conclusive data that high-fat low-carb diet ... contributes to CVD.
Have to be a little careful with this claim. Dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are problematic either way.
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Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
Sugar doesn't cause insulin resistance or (type 2) diabetes. Both are a result of being overweight.
Of course, you can get overweight by eating too much sugar, but it's really about not eating too many calories long-term, regardless of the source.
And of course, refined sugar isn't healthy at all and consumption should be kept to a minimum, outside of exercise.
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Needs (2016) in the title - and all big industry plays these games with "science".
to the point that sadly, science = f(economy)
One very minor side (art?) project I am doing:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
… is a pushback of sorts on the sugar industry.
If I were to design a warning label I would take inspiration from the Australian tobacco warning labels, quite gruesome medical imagery of rotted teeth. Restricting the form of advertisement would be a start, like USA tobacco regulations.
Has any one successfully code with same focus after cutting sugar? Seems sugar is really important for focus. Whats your experience?
I did keto for a few months a long time ago (2010/2011). This was early in my career and long coding and debug sessions were a normal part of my day-to-day.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
Personal experience. Then I found many well known programmers shared the same experience online. It feels deliberate work without sugar. ie. if coding = work + fun. without sugar its just coding = work. It does not get any better after 3 days or so too.
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Been coding while fasting on keto and it's absolutely amazing. Fasting is hard socially, being ketogenic puts a bit more stress on my kidneys, but for me (adhd) it's amazing.
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
That's addiction. You'll need time to get out of it.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
I have never heard of anyone using sugar to "focus," if you want to focus take amphetamines or cocaine.
I don't code, but I do know that not eating sugar significantly improves my focus no matter what I'm doing.
If anything focus gets better without sugar and excessive carbs for me - but those work well for outdoors or workouty days I find.
Definitely, carbs means alternating drowsy, hunger cycles with blood sugar level. While an even level enables the zone.
Why are you cutting out sugar, unless you mean reduce. But you shouldn't stop eating sugar, its required, just not in excessive amounts.
Not required to eat any sugar at all. Your body will actually produce its own glucose if and when needed through gluconeogenesis [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
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If you're addicted to cocaine, then cocaine is really important for focus. Same for sugar. If sugar is really important for focus for you, then you're likely heading for diabetes type 2.
This isn't really a correct narrative. Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with CVD. Sugar is also correlated with poor metabolic health which is also correlated with CVD. Both are bad.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Mediterranean diet is basically a lie, though. If you look at the healthiest Mediterranean populations, they eat a lot of saturated fat.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
I've been to the Mediterranean several times. They eat a ton of (delicious) super oily food, sausages, meats, eggs, fish (often fried or deep fried), salty cheeses, greasy stuff, tons of white bread, lots of wine. Fat chance to find someone eating avocados, kale, or quinoa, and proteins are not at all minimized.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
Countries in the mediterranean have been developing the same bad habits as elsewhere. People in the Mediterranean need to go back to eating a Mediterranean diet.
Fruit and veg can be contaminated with sprays as well unfortunately.
The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.
I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.
Sprays?
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Mediterranean diet is nonsense. Ill-defined, doesn't have clear evidence of a relation to CVD in hard studies. Bad that people still believe this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414510/
Not sure if this has been posted (I see stephenwoo has mentioned him further down), but it's a break-down of how sugary foods damage the body, particularly fructose.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Doesn't both sugar and saturated fat contribute to CVD if consumed in excess?
Sugar got into all the meal we have, and because it is so addictive, we went for it. Fatty meals are more healthy, especially for me, but will get you sick in no time, unless you eat healthy fats (olive oil, olives especially). The trans fats are carcinogenic
So most of these fat people today are a result of the low fat doctrine forged in the 70’s?
Many such cases.
Yes.
It would be cool if researchers weren't so easily bought. I thought the sciences attracted people of strong moral character but it would appear not.
Which will make you fatter?
Correct answer: B
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Note that a kg of fat contains about 9000 calories, while a kg of sugar contains about 4000 calories, so this is really a startling claim, if true
It's not given the ratios
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7598063/
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...
There's more nuance to this.
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
At the same weight, fat contains way more calories than sugar, so the difference in difficulty of digestion is irrelevant at this level. It's true that if you were to consume 1000 Cal worth of sugar vs 1000 Cal worth of fat, you'd get slightly less fat from the fat - but this should be seen simply as one of many limitations on the "calories in" measurement. The same kinds of differences likely exist between different sugars, different fats, different proteins - and may well be affected by other aspects of how the food containing these nutrients is consumed; and it almost certainly varies a lot between people or even for the same person based on various factors such as age, activity level, time of day, etc.
> The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
But it will always prefer glucose stores over fat.
And the muscles. You can’t fight or flight if you have to ask the liver to deliver glycogen. That’s how anaerobic exercise works. You have the fuel but not enough oxygen to burn it so you burn it fuel rich and oxidizer poor.
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My understanding was that atherosclerotic plaques are comprised of cholesterol or fatty deposits [1] and that these can lead to CVD.
The fat mechanism I understand, but what is the mechanism for sugar in CVD?
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...
CVD requires a bunch of events to happen in sequence, I always felt like it was a combination of risk factors + luck that make a heart attack or aneurysm happen.
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
And the liver produces triglycerides from fructose which is half of sugar.
Consuming cholesterol doesn't normally change the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream - it simply leads to your body producing less cholesterol. Unless you're consuming gigantic amounts, or have some problems with your cholesterol regulation, dietary cholesterol is completely safe. It's only if your blood work shows elevated cholesterol levels that you need to start paying attention to cholesterol intake. This is in fact very similar to what happens to blood sugar levels, in fact.
Pretty much every health authority will tell you that high blood sugar damages blood vessels, thereby enabling the formation of said plagues.
Healthy adults consuming some dietary sugar doesn't cause persistent high blood sugar, though. That's diabetes.
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Please can you provide a source for the above?
Sugar causes inflammation, and inflammation damages arteries. It is this damage that then leads to accumulation of fatty deposits, as damaged arteries basically lose the protective layer (think of equivalent to a non-stick coating). But that doesn't mean dietary fat is what actually caused the plaque.
Poor dental health also contributes and nothing pushes poor dental healthy like a high sugar diet.
Should make flour from it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266716032...
I feel like the same thing is happening now… processed foods have less sodium and I feel are more sugary. I don’t live a sedentary lifestyle…I need salt for hydration and muscle contraction. I find the new nutrition guidelines for sodium lacking.
The 2016 JAMA paper illustrates how funding sources can shape research focus, reinforcing the value of transparency and multiple lines of evidence in nutrition research.
I avoid sugar pretty thoroughly, but my cholesterol is high because I can't walk past a breakfast sandwich. This an n=1 observation.
What does "industry" mean. Which firms were involved? Were all firms involved?
I mean, anecdotal but I suffered metabolic syndrome. Cut out all carbs, increased my fat intake. This led to a loss of 50 pounds, my blood fat and blood cholesterol dropped, liver enzymes in the blood dropped, insulin resistance reversed, blood pressure dropped, and according to my blood, everything is now normal.
Big sugar exaggerated the skinny on fat?
This is on HNs homepage because it confirms what we want to believe about our favorite foods: saturated fat = bad is just a sugar industry psy-op!
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
Sorry to say but I see a lot of ill informed takes here on sugar, fats and their 'correlation' with CVD.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
Related (reason why OP submitted this today?):
Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529237
A casual look at where people live the oldest, what they eat, and what's recommended tell you all you need to know about food recommendations then and now.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
A casual look at where people live the oldest will tell you about statistical outliers and bad government recordkeeping.
Don't forget pension fraud and identity theft.
I think avoiding industrially processed food is wise, but it eliminates 99% of restaurant food and 90% of prepared food in almost any setting, only exception being about half the stuff at a salad bar.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
It doesn't have to be a religion. I don't care when I eat out. The point is not to be absolutely consistant. It's just the guideline I use regarding what I eat.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
> The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
For me avoiding processed foods is not that hard, I only eat whole foods like vegetables and fruits (where I live there are no labels on these whole foods). I know that this is not doable for most of you, but it can be done if you want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_diet
This is a complete myth. Human populations are not homogenous, gene pools that relied on agriculture for the last 10k years are completely different than hunter gatherer populations. You have been lied to
The diversity in individual micro-biome ecosystems now walks into the room
Which myth? I have genuine trouble understanding what you disagree with.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
Maybe I read too much history - but hasn't Big Sugar been known for "nothing that a slave trader wouldn't do" ethics for the past 300+ years?
It is beyond me how anyone can expect any business (especially public traded) to have any ethics whatsoever.
In strong democracies, regulations provide the incentive.
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We literally had a circular slave trade of slaves->sugar cane->rum->slaves
They’re out there. I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
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Sure, but do you trust Big Butcher?
And of course big sugar is these days just big corn which is happy selling to CAFOs.
Not when so much meat has sugar added to it.
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Based on the history of the past 1-ish century, I trust Big Meat & Dairy to have less capability for and competence at evil than Big Sugar. Because otherwise we'd have been hearing far more "Fat is Fine, Carbs are Crap" messages.
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Well, it's true that in the 17th century, sugar and rum production involved one of the most heinous forms of slavery ever to exist. What's not clear is that this necessarily has anything to do with the present; after all, slaves were emancipated a long time ago.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
I'm used to CAD as the acronym for this thing, but I'm just being pedantic
Anoy other greybeards remember this one?
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
By Gary Taubes July 7, 2002
It seems one should not always "trust the science"
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
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Science isn't always "science". If it's not clear by now it never will be that there is a massive amount of fraud in the "scientific" community as a whole.
I blame this book's incendiary title, was a fun read for sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure,_White_and_Deadly
HFCS is another beast. Everyone needs to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
(2016)
Some other discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733
>Sugar Papers Reveal Industry Role in Shifting National Heart Disease Focus to Saturated Fat
But sugar-sweetened foods contain saturated fat ... so ?
CVD and links to saturated fats is a long, long established phenomenon and has a lot of science behind it. A single study or even studies should not invalidate or discount it. Before people misinterpret what this is saying.
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Those studies however generally put beef and sausages into the same "red meat" category. So yeah... that science is, from what I've seen, basically worthless.
Why would beef and sausages not be in the same category? A large percentage of sausage literally is beef.
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there are literally thousands of studies. there's no real scientific debate amongst people that know what they are talking about. Red meat, and any food high in saturated fats, are awful for your heart. full stop. that includes sausage, steak, ham, butter, etc.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
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?
Every health authority mentions both cholesterol/saturated fat and blood sugar as contributing factors.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
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As a teen I was fooled for a short time, confused about fats, types, etc. But I was a feral child and as ignorant as any animal. It didn't take long to figure things out after I learned to read.
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
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I thought that BMI did the opposite. I'm a naturally thin person who has also been vegan for over 20 years, so I usually have to pay attention to whether I'm eating enough. I recently did a BMI test and was surprised how average my score was. I've known people who appear healthy and active that inch into the "overweight" category. It really is a bad measurement system given the whole muscle mass factor.
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"the only people that would care about a funding a study, funded the study! see! that's proof!"
no conflict == no interest
I agree about the need for more transparency and more peer review actually being done
Sugar and fat are the same thing. Converts
There are processes that convert, but it's typically only small amounts. They aren't interchangable in effect.
depends on how fat you already are - if you are, 100% of it converts. For anyone that is addicted to sugar they are pretty much a fat person. The sugar industry is blaming themselves.
That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert. People should be lose their careers over this, at the very least imo.
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
Er, how does putting your faith in literally vibes (MAHA) follow. Just complete rejection of expertise and science.
Yeah, I completely reject nutritional science. Even without bribes involved, there are just too many complexities for them to draw useful conclusions. Ignored the food pyramid too.
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Bc that "expertise" was bought and paid for which is why we have a food pyramid that does more harm good.
>That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert.
why? the state does not need you to live past your retirement age. in fact, it's preferable if you don't.