The FastDay Forum

Great insight by Roert Lustig who espouses that the world obesity pandemic is drived by sugar, not fat in diets:

The article that kicked off the 4 million you tube hit lecture:
http://www.connectwell.biz/pdf/comment_ ... _sugar.pdf


The you tube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Hi superfluity,
If you have good browse through here you will find lots of discussion on the evils of sugar and the work of Lustig and others. It's been quite a debate at times!

Thanks Alymoosh - For me it has been a revelation. Since I cut sugar out of my diet and increased my use of olive oil etc I have felt SOOOOOO much better. I feel alive , energetic and buzzing. I wish I had known this a decade or more ago. And the great news is I am not afraid of using a splash more olive oil in salads or frying and I losing weight at a rate of knots!

This post is interesting - and Superfluity your rate of weightloss is amazing!

I am a sugar addict in the form of sweet things like chocolate, biscuits and sweet puddings!

Not sure i could give them up - don't get me wrong i go without on fast days but really crave them on normal eating days and at my "time of the month" I'm obsessed with chooolate!

Any advice?
Thanks
T

That's funny, that's the same changes I made to my eating too. I haven't completely cut out sugar, but I try and minimise it wherever possible. Plus, I think olive oil has a lot to do with the mediterraneans' cardiovascular health. Cold showers now added to the mix!

Hi TracE.
Your palate readjusts when you stop, although this takes about a month apparently.
I still like the occasional square of really dark chocolate. It's not nearly as high in sugar and you get a proper hit of real chocolate!
Healthwise, the only way to take sugar is with lots of fibre as it slows it down. However, due to the nature of sugar it looks as though a portion of it cannot be properly metabolised and so you always end up with a bit of fat from it somewhere.
I think most people benefit from reducing sugar intake.

Hey TracE, Totally agree with Alymoosh.

I have a couple of female friends who no matter what diet find diets harder at that time of the month.

Allow yourself one or two squares of Lindt 70% chocolate or Oh So chocolate on your treat days.

I feel that this war against sugar is similar to the war against fat a few decades back and I think that it might yet again mislead people.
Can't help wondering if people will cut sugar and start eating fat the same way they stopped eating fat and started eating low fat and we all know where that lead.
IME from Greece, the constant growing of portions is the problem as well as the copying of the western way of eating but then again not all countries all the same and perhaps in other places an increased sugar intake might be the problem.
On the other hand, if a regular coke in the US was the size it was in the 60s, then sugar wouldn't be such a problem...

Do you not think that the research is improving all the time? Certainly the low-fat experiment failed, and people used to eat fat and not get fat. The old research about the dangers of saturated fat has been thoroughly discredited now, I believe.

I agree that portion size, and advertising food & drinks constantly, has a lot to answer for though...

Knowing how research works (and how it is funded), I tend to be very sceptic towards the results of ANY research. I trust only the research published -or not, in many cases- by scientists whom I trust, hence the fact that I still believe that saturated fats are bad for us.
So far, I haven't seen any credible proof that sugar is to blame for increasing obesity. On the contrary, seeing how portions are getting bigger and bigger, I strongly believe that this is why people in certain countries are getting more and more fat.
I'm also one of those few people who don't blame advertising but those who fall for it.

So you don't trust Peter Attia and his research/self experiments?

I didn't know him till you mentioned him. But it is only logical because you probably don't know the ones I know and trust because most of them are Greek.
Anyway, it's not important what I believe. We'll see how the low carb trend goes. So far, in Greece, it's been a failure but IMO it was condemned in the first place.

I tend to believe the evidence about the physical toxicity of sugar, but for me the killer is the effect sugar has on my brain. Evidently sugar induces your body to create the feel-good neurotransmitter beta-endorphin, but at the same time causes the body to metabolise it more quickly, leaving you on a mood rollercoaster that ends in a big downward jolt. There are huge variances in how sensitive people are, but because I am at the very sensitive end of the spectrum, sugar tends to wreak havoc on my sense of well-being.

Rick Bayless, Mexican cuisine guru, and that most rare of people, a slim, fit chef, said that a large part of the problem is that we are eating everyday of the week the way we used to eat only on weekends. We snack and eat sweets every day (all day).

I'm 65, and throughout my childhood and adolescence, we didn't have desserts or sweets unless someone made them from scratch on the weekend. We all scarfed (scoffed) them down and that was that for at least another week! Staying slim was a lot easier!

Taubes has been disproven by many different research.

Reading the carb- sane asylum web site is a must if you are interested in seeing the other side of that particular story.