Comment by loeg
1 day ago
> Do not give yourself diabetes by eating vast amounts of sugar.
This can help sustain a high level of exercise (the more the better). Certainly don't if you're sedentary, but the sugar during exercise is really helpful for getting in 10+ hours/week of exercise.
I think the recent stance (not really recent in terms of assumptive idea, but now there is evidence) is that not all forms of sugar intake are equal. For instance, habitually drinking beverages with sugar in them (what are called sugar-sweetened-beverages in literature) is associated with a risk of developing T2D, where getting sugar from normal foods isn't really.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13668-026-00740-w
Associative population-level sugar trends are basically meaningless for 10+ hour/week exercisers, who are a tiny minority of the population.
(When I say sugar, I mean things like gummies, gels, and sugar-sweetened beverages. If sedentary people habitually eat these, it does increase their T2D risk.)
in that paper, the author hypothesizes that these risks (based on the understanding of the biochemistry and animal experiments [0]), probably only appear when you consume a large amount of sugar (>1g/kg of fructose in that study), or when people use these fast absorbing sugars chronically (based on epidemiological surveys).
overall, it sounds like some of the concerns about sugar metabolism aren't necessarily buffered because you metabolize it faster or exercise more, but the evidence isn't really there to know anything much.
0. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(17)...
Interesting, thanks!
> habitually drinking... sugar-sweetened-beverages
Yes, terrible idea, avoid!