Comment by jqpabc123
2 days ago
Which will make you fatter?
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.
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 is about more than just the calorie content of the food.
Unless your digestive system is hyperactive, a lot of this huge glob of fat will likely just pass right through without being absorbed into your bloodstrean.
The refined sugar is virtually guaranteed to fully hit your bloodstream and right now. It's enough to send some people into a life threatening diabetic coma.
After eating a pound of fat, you may want a nap but dying from it is extremely unlikely.
It's not given the ratios
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
> 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.
Not quite. The body will just enter ketosis if glucose and glycogen levels are too low.
2 replies →
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.