Sugar is toxic

[Narz]

Isn't chocolate powder already chocolate? Why not just buy chocolate?

Chocolate bars have additional ingredients (namely white sugar or sometimes hydrogenated oils in some candy bars). Cacao powder (or cocoa powder, same thing) is just the chocolate & then you can mix your sweetner of choice & make it as sweet or as bitter as you prefer. Seeing as baker's chocolate is no more expensive than chocolate with sugar added I figure I may as well pay for the extra chocolate!

 

[innonimatu]

re: antioxidants: They're good for you, but not because they're antioxidants. They're a bit like a proxy for healthiness, really. The proxy can be gimmicked to deceive, but it's a decent rule-of-thumb.

That sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

 

[LucyDuke]

How do you mean it's "not a food"? Pretty much any human who can get their hands on it will eat it (and many animals).

Raw honey FTW!

Hmm, I make cookie dough where I used to use 1/2 cup of brown sugar & a 1/4 cup of white. I think I use about half the amount of honey now (by weight) but I can't be sure, I don't measure anything when I make stuff.

It might be interesting to people who suffer from allergies. I hate when people act like just because something hasn't been proven yet it's false. If everyone had that attitude no one would ever study anything or even come up with hypotheses & we'd still be in the dark ages.

You could be right though I still would maintain sugar is more addictive (though I can't prove it, I'd put money on the fact I'm right). Kind of like coco leaves are gonna be less addictive than cocaine. More refined stuff is usually more addictive.

You can't say they're unfounded absolutely. Probably overblown but I don't think a modest amount of honey in someone's diet is detrimental whereas I'd say a modest amount of table sugar in someone's diet is detrimental. I notice a big difference with even a little bit of sugar whereas not much with honey. You could call it placebo effect of course & I couldn't prove you wrong.

I don't agree & I'd be willing to put money behind my hypothesis (if anyone ever did a large scale study on people eating raw honey sweetened sauces & dressings & snacks vs. sugary ones, course this would never happen but if it did). I'm not saying honey is a wonderfood, just that it's not close to as bad as table sugar.

I think we'll just have to agree that a diet high in simple sugars without much fiber is a bad thing & agree to disagree (or we can argue some more, though I can't guarantee participation ).

Not really food either. I mean that if you're going to say table sugar isn't food, you don't get to say it's food once you put a bean in it.

I'm not saying honey can't possibly have any health-giving properties, just that the speculation isn't convincing that honey is somehow magic-food when 80% of it, in your words, "isn't really a food". Somebody should totally study any sort of medicinal properties honey might have, and whatever effective differences there are between it and table sugar, it would be awesome to know. But it could be nothing, so it's silly to exalt honey based on could-bes.

We can agree that simple sugars should be minimized and fiber should be maximized. I don't think a modest amount of sugar or honey is detrimental. I refuse to accept or let pass without comment your assertion that honey and sugar are substantially different.

 

[Takhisis]

That sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

I assume some sor tof placebo effect?

 

[Zelig]

Sugar is empty calories with nothing else in it. So yeah, that's bad.


It's not quite as concentrated and it's lower on the glycemic index. Humans have been eating honey since before we were humans but processed cane sugar is fairly new & is associated with a ton of health problems that honey is not. It appears to have some anti-bacterial, anti-microbial properties & generally doesn't seem as harmful as sugar. There's still alot about nutrition we're learning so why it's not as bad is not fully understood yet.

The only analogy I can think of on short notice to help you understand is coca leaves vs. cocaine. Coca leaves are less concentrated & probably have some positive attributes whereas cocaine is just the bad stuff.

Not the best analogy but the best I've got right now.

There's been alot of studies cane sugar vs. HFCS, I haven't seen any testing either of those against honey, if anyone comes across any feel free to share as it'd be much more edifying than the back & forth & disingenuous questioning.

This didn't really answer my question...

Honey and HFCS are basically 90% the same proportional mixture of glucose, fructose and water.

If you're claiming that honey and HFCS aren't equally healthy, it must be on the basis of the remaining stuff, right? So all we need to do is figure out how to either remove the bad 10% stuff from HFCS, or add the good 10% from honey into HFCS.

 

[Narz]

If you're claiming that honey and HFCS aren't equally healthy, it must be on the basis of the remaining stuff, right? So all we need to do is figure out how to either remove the bad 10% stuff from HFCS, or add the good 10% from honey into HFCS.

Sounds complicated. We could just eat honey instead.

Or avoid both if that's your preference.

 

[Narz]

Not really food either. I mean that if you're going to say table sugar isn't food, you don't get to say it's food once you put a bean in it.

Pretty arbitrary. Are you saying a bean isn't food now?

Seems like you have an arbitrary amount of measurable nutrients in a food before you call it a food. Where does one draw the line exactly? Olive oil has some nutrients (more or less depending on processing), is it still a food?

 

[LucyDuke]

Pretty arbitrary. Are you saying a bean isn't food now?

Seems like you have an arbitrary amount of measurable nutrients in a food before you call it a food. Where does one draw the line exactly? Olive oil has some nutrients (more or less depending on processing), is it still a food?

You're the one that's saying table sugar isn't food and honey is. What's the smallest fraction of a bean I can add to sugar to make it food?

 

[Narz]

You guys are funny. You don't need to add anything to sugar to make it a food, just don't take away all the food part (from the sugarcane or beet or corn or whatever).

You may as well kill a person & try to add microchips & silicone to reanimate them & ask when they're alive again.

Generally when you extract and isolate a tiny part of something that was once food it's considered a drug (many drugs are isolated chemical compounds originally found in herbs or other edibles), for example cocaine is a drug whereas coca leaves could be considered food. I'd consider sugar a drug rather than a food whereas honey is obviously a food, I don't know how anyone could call it not a "food" just because they've arbitrarily compared it to a bean & found it similar ( ).

 

[Narz]

Interesting fact about sugar, if you're starving, eating sugar is worse than eating nothing.

http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/sugar-problem/refined-sugar-the-sweetest-poison-of-all

Maybe I'll get some mice & test honey out to see if honey too is worse than nothing (whether honey fed mice die before mice fed nothing at all). I hypothesize that they'll live slightly longer than mice simply starved though I have no idea.

I wonder if I'd get in trouble for animal cruelty for doing unsanctioned experiments like this. I don't know the laws about that. I certainly would feel cruel.

 

[LucyDuke]

You guys are funny. You don't need to add anything to sugar to make it a food, just don't take away all the food part (from the sugarcane or beet or corn or whatever).

You may as well kill a person & try to add microchips & silicone to reanimate them & ask when they're alive again.

Generally when you extract and isolate a tiny part of something that was once food it's considered a drug (many drugs are isolated chemical compounds originally found in herbs or other edibles), for example cocaine is a drug whereas coca leaves could be considered food. I'd consider sugar a drug rather than a food whereas honey is obviously a food, I don't know how anyone could call it not a "food" just because they've arbitrarily compared it to a bean & found it similar ( ).

What about when you extract and isolate 80% of it?

 

[ParkCungHee]

Generally when you extract and isolate a tiny part of something that was once food it's considered a drug

You heard it here folks: Fruits, Vegetables, and Meats are drugs.

 

[Quintillus]

No, I've already known that binging on high fructose corn syrup and sugar isn't healthy. I haven't made efforts to avoid sugar, but I don't think it's a problem in moderation. If I were eating Twinkies every meal, I might be more concerned.

I do find that pizza sauce with too much sugar is untasty, but that's because it's simply too sweet, not because I think it's going to kill me. I guess I view ketchup similarly - it doesn't have much going for it tastewise. But, perhaps it's simply that, while I like sugar, I'm not necessarily a "sweet tooth".

There's also a problem with the article in that it's from Fox News. In this case, that comes through in the article saying, "sugar is also extremely addictive – similar to some drugs, like cocaine". Like that sounds fair and balanced. I'm not saying that people don't enjoy ingesting sugar, but that's a far cry from equating it with a powerful drug that causes chemical dependencies. Half the blame does lie with the scientist who originally made that statement, but more responsible journalism would not have quoted only his most dramatic sentence and left it by itself.

 

[warpus]

2 weeks after I significantly cut out carbs and sugars and bit into an apple.. it tasted 5 times as sweet as what I was used to.

I don't even want to know how sweet a coke would taste to me right now.. or some cake. North american cake is wayyyy sweeter than the Polish counterpart to begin with

 

[Zelig]

2 weeks after I significantly cut out carbs and sugars and bit into an apple.. it tasted 5 times as sweet as what I was used to.

I don't even want to know how sweet a coke would taste to me right now.. or some cake. North american cake is wayyyy sweeter than the Polish counterpart to begin with

You should be really careful about conflating the effects of cutting out refined sugars vs cutting out carbs from your diet.

It's trivially easy to drink too much cola, but it's quite difficult to eat too many lentils.

 

[warpus]

You should be really careful about conflating the effects of cutting out refined sugars vs cutting out carbs from your diet.

It's trivially easy to drink too much cola, but it's quite difficult to eat too many lentils.

I do that only because my body views them as the same thing - to a degree.

Here's an interesting article I just found (unrelated to your post, but relevant to the discussion):

High blood sugar levels make you look older, new research suggests

David Gunn, Senior Scientist at Unilever's R&D laboratories based at Colworth Science Park said: "This is the first time that a relationship between high blood sugar levels and facial ageing has been identified. While there’s an extensive body of research which shows that consistently high levels of glucose in people's blood stream is bad for their health, this study suggests that it's also not going to help them keep a youthful appearance.

As for my diet, I do seem a bit gung ho about it. I'm just excited because it works, and I've seen it work for a lot of other people. I am still learning about the nutrition/science/details behind it, so if anyone has an anti-bacon diet opinion I'm open to looking into it. I mean hey, it seems to be amazing, but if there's something wrong with it - I'll look into it.

 

[El_Machinae]

As for the carbs, and I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but fiber is an important part of this diet - you've got to consume it.. it doesn't count against your carb count.

boy do I know this!

When I was regularly weight-training, I went on a fad diet where I endeavoured to get 100 g of carbs from 'greens' each day, and then filled up the rest of my calorie needs (as calculated) with meat.

I got weaker, and weaker, and weaker as time went by.

Then I finally clued in that taking out the fiber from the total carb content was recommended, because the carbohydrate component of the food label included fiber! It's not completely wise to exclude all the fiber, because the total fiber is separated into soluble and insoluble components, and it's not always obvious if we get calories from the soluble fiber.

Once I started taking out the fiber aspect, and then ate 100 g of carbs from greens each day, I got much, much better.

 

[Ayn Rand]

Sugars and carbs and not fat are what are making people fat.

The food pyramid is a lie. Human stomachs aren't built to process as many carbs & sugars as we consume these days. For millions of years our ancestors were eating meats, fruits, berries, and nuts, and that's pretty much it - that's the sort of food that our stomachs have evolved to process the best. Breads, pastas, etc. only entered the picture 6,000 years ago or so - that's not enough time for significant changes to occur to our digestive systems via evolution.

Breaking down sugar is quite easy for the body to do. Why is a significant evolutionary advance of the stomach necessary to absorb sugar?

 

[CKS]

For millions of years, our ancestors were eating bugs and rodents with our fruits and veggies. Cows and pigs only recently entered the picture (maybe 10,000 years ago for cows). Trying to digest beef and pork must surely be difficult for us.

 

[Ayn Rand]

For millions of years, our ancestors were eating bugs and rodents with our fruits and veggies. Cows and pigs only recently entered the picture (maybe 10,000 years ago for cows). Trying to digest beef and pork must surely be difficult for us.

For billions of years, my ancestors lived in a primeval soup devouring volcanic ash, primitive bacteria and other refuse. Surely the truly healthy way to live is to immerse oneself in volcanically-polluted seawater that is infested with bacteria.

Spoiler :

I know you were joking by the way