> Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.
This statement reflects a glaring ignorance of both scale and science. First of all, sugar is a hallmark of a primate diet only in complex not in simple forms, which is not the kind being referred to here. By nutritional value do you mean has calories? So does Vodka. And what at all do the calories have to do with the scale of harm?
"Natural", in this context, is a weasel word that's whose key uses include making people feel more comfortable about buying junk food, so that junk food manufacturers can sell more junk food.
Chimpanzees, for example do eat a lot of fruit. I believe it's their primary source of calories. But the wild fruits that chimps eat are a very different beast from how humans in wealthier countries consume fruit. The fruits they typically eat haven't had their sugar content dramatically increased through centuries and millennia of selective breeding. They haven't been turned into juice, which removes all the fiber and essentially renders them a nutritional equivalent of Coca-Cola. They haven't been dried, which concentrates the sugar and increases the glycemic load. They haven't had extra sugar added as a ("natural"!) preservative in order to maximize the shelf life. etc. etc.
All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating. To it, C12H22O11 is C12H22O11. There is some stuff suggesting that processing affects how much sugar is extracted by your digestive system, though. It's not able to break down the food and get at its contents quite as efficiently when the food hasn't been mechanically ground up or macerated first, and your teeth are unlikely to grind it up quite so finely. In a nutshell, sugar that's inside a plant's cells is going to be less available (and, to that extent, "have fewer calories") than sugar that's on the outside of the cells.
> All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating.
To clarify I wasn't saying that the difference was how the sucrose is produced, but the actual metabolic process it takes to obtain it. It takes significantly more time for the body to break down sugars which are bound with fibers, something like today's epidemic simply would not be possible solely with whole fruits.
Sugar that occurs naturally in foods are often complex. Complex sugars are larger molecules that can be broken into simple sugars (lactose, fructose, glucose).
There is actually very little sugar in fruit, and they are full of vitamins and minerals which are good for you.
If you cut artificial (added sugar) foods from your diet you will likely find that other foods taste sweeter as your taste becomes more sensitive.
Whoever told you this did you a disservice, because it's completely untrue. I think coke is a pretty good posterchild for "a shocking amount of sugar", and an 8 oz bottle of coke has about the same sugar content as an apple or a navel orange (and the orange has half the calories, making the comparison even less favorable). The difference between the two is that the coke is (nutritionally speaking) nothing but carbonated, liquid sugar while a whole apple comes with a fair amount of fiber. The difference in speed of absorption is primarily what makes one healthy and the other terrible for you.
gram for gram Apples and coke are about the same, however an 8oz coke has over twice the sugar content of an apple.
Secondly, on the disservice, you are particularly correct. I have done myself a disservice by not correctly interpreting my own research. Two years back, when switching to become a vegetarian, I calculated macros for loads of foods. For sugar I used a calculation based on the food's glycemic index.
That's was what I was getting at in general: glycemic index is far more relevant than gross sugar content[1]. But my criticism still stands: It's good that that's what you yourself use GI (as do I), but it's misleading and inaccurate to phrase a low GI as "very little sugar". It's particularly confusing for those readers of your comment who might not be familiar with GI. Instead of falsely claiming that fruit has little sugar as a roundabout way of describing it's GI, instead one can say: "Fruit has plenty of sugar, but the attendant fiber content makes the absorption of said sugar better for you than mainlining it as liquid Coke".
As an aside, where are you getting your nutritional info? It's way off what I've found. I was using the nutritional info for a regular "medium apple", and in the sources I found it has 20g vs coke's 25g, and almost the exact same amount of calories. 80% of a coke's sugar, calorie-forcalorie and serving-for-serving, hardly qualifies ad "very little sugar".
I couldn't say this more. I had to cut everything[1] except raw food (meat, carrots, tomatos, salad) and it's true that within a few days you start to feel the sugar in these even in small forms. You also recognize how sugary processed food is, and how it affect your mind.
In all honesty since I was able to eat anything again, I surrendered to a junk food from time to time. I know how to keep it small; but I have to admit how hard is it when your body allows it.
[1] my brain / heart / veins reacted wrong to any fat, sugar, too much salt.. so I was highly driven into avoiding them. That made the need for will power irrelevant at the time. A bonus.
The word fructose comes from the word fruit, it literally means the sugar found in fruits. Most fruits have more fructose than other sugars. A banana has 14 grams of sugar, equivalent to 4 teaspoons of table sugar. If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it. You can argue that it's ok to eat fruit because it's balanced by the fiber and vitamins, but that's equivalent to saying that fructose is ok in moderation. Which seems to go against the current nutritional science understandings.
Yes, and no. If you drink straight apple juice, yes, that's bad for you. If, however, you eat an apple, that's good for you. The Apple has plenty of fiber that keeps the body from absorbing the fructose too quickly. Straight apple juice kicks your pancreas into high gear.
Where does this myth come from that fruit is high in fibre? It simply is not true. Some fruits are. Wild fruits certainly are. Domesticated table fruit is not. Google "fibre content of apple" if you don't believe me.
Animals are comprised of a huge amount of water and some other stuff. I think even meat is something like 80-90% water. But people don't usually say "man I'm thirsty, someone bring me a ribeye!"
When cells are made up so primarily by water saying "oh but this fiber is a trivial percentage" is very misleading. If all sugar is in the water which is contained in cells which are bound up by fiber then the fiber could make it much more difficult for your body to just absorb all the sugar wholesale.
that's incorrect. in fact drinking a glass of orange juice is similar to drinking a coke. just because its fructose does not mean it's any better for you.
There are many different kinds of sugars. It's worth understanding. Fructose is what harms you. Glucose is harmless. Sucrose is fructose plus a glucose. Lactose is harmless as long as you can digest it. Maltose is harmless. Etc.
Fruits contain varying amounts of fructose. Wild berries, not so much. An apple or grape, rather a lot. Apple juice, considerably more.
This is reductionist thinking, the same kind of thinking that led to the low-fat fad, which unfortunately lasted decades.
Fruits don't deliver just fructose, the also deliver nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down.
And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us.
>As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down.
When sugar is introduced to the body the liver begins to store/process the sugar. So it doesn't matter whether the sugar is from say coke (high fructose corn syrup) or an Apple.
What happens when the liver can't store/process the amount of sugar you ingest is the body triggers insulin production, and while insulin production will be linked to obesity the insulin itself is the real harm to the body. Insulin triggers the bodies production of fat cells to store the sugars it can't process. Also, Insulin has the effect of enlarging the bodies cells (fat cells, cancer cells, etc...) this can lead to enlarged organs (liver disease, heart disease, etc...).
There is something to be said that an Apple has nutritional value that the soda is lacking (plus fiber), and this can account for some people drinking multiple sodas a day (maybe even a 2 litter) but very unlikely to be eating 12 Apples a day; nevertheless, the underlying sugar is harmful vis-a-vis insulin spikes. The real difference is the person eating the apple instead of drinking the coke is likely to stop their sugar intake at 1 Apple and is more likely to incorporate some form of exercise. Personally, I go by a rule of thumb I try not to consume anything with more than 10g of sugar (a whole apple is almost double).
>And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us.
Humans develop traits and cravings for things that have detrimental side-effects quite regularly. It used to be that Type 2 diabetes was called adult onset diabetes, in fact in the UK kids weren't diagnosed with Type 2 until the 2000's. Despite hundreds of billions a year spent managing Type 2, in most cases it can be completely prevented and even controlled to the point people can stop taking any medication through proper diet.
+1. It's all about the insulin release. After a year or so on a zerocarb diet I'd allow myself an occasional feast of fresh fruit, but in the process my body has become so sensitive to insulin, a fresh spike of it would lead to an immediate loss of energy and sleepiness regardless of the time of day.
I've tracked my weight and did blood tests consistently, and most dramatic weight loss periods coincided with the minimal insulin presence.
Lol, our big brains developed long after we left our jungle environment, and are fueled above all by protein (meat, so hunting). Our taste buds love sugar because fructose is a drug that plants evolved to get our ancestors working as seed dispersal machines. And I believe if you eat grapes or oranges or apples, the juice (and fructose) is barely wrapped in fibre if at all. Chewing an orange, you have extracted the fructose almost entirely. Do you think the "nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants" slow down the digestion process?
Orange flesh is about 3% fibre. 97% juice. There is no significant difference between eating an orange and drinking a small glass of juice, except the work involved.
I don't think that changes "very easy" to "very very hard".
Even time to chew it all is a big difference. It takes several oranges to make a glass of orange juice, which I can down in about a minute.
It takes me quite a while to eat an entire orange. Since it also takes time for people to realize they're full, this also helps not to eat so much.
i stopped drinking oj when I moved to San Francisco and saw one of those novelty juicing machines with the orange hopper and exposed internals. it was like 6 or 7 oranges in a single glass!
also made me realize why fresh oj is insanely expensive at restaurants.
No difference between fructose in fruit and the fructose which the body splits from sucrose in refined sugar. Fruit sugar is fructose. It's reported that in some people a marked increase in blood pressure is associated with high fructose intake. That is certainly so in my case after eating more fruit than I should.
Personally I stopped buying jumbo massive apples and now usually only eat the small ones they say are for kids. I usually only est fruit with other things like in a salad or in a bowl of yoghurt nuts and seeds (tahini too) and maybe with coconut oil. I think this combo slows digestion to smooth out the sugar absorption.
I think it would be difficult to eat too much sugar from fruit in the same as from, say, soda just because it would be hard to eat that much fruit, but still possible to over do it.
When I was studying nutrition one of my lecturers was fond of telling a story about one patient he saw who, when asked what he ate, just said "apples", lecturer asked "and?" and the guy says "oh no, just apples". The guy was eating like a bucket of apples a day and nothing else. That could cause some problems.
This statement reflects a glaring ignorance of both scale and science. First of all, sugar is a hallmark of a primate diet only in complex not in simple forms, which is not the kind being referred to here. By nutritional value do you mean has calories? So does Vodka. And what at all do the calories have to do with the scale of harm?