While I am all for reducing sugar consumption, this one sentence lead me to completely distrust this paper:
> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why. More research is needed to test the sugar-depression effect in large population samples.
There is literally no further comment on why this effect was not observed in women. Why? To me, this means it's possible that some confounder is at play here.
I'm also with Xeoncross (another commenter here) who observed that this study took place from 1983 to 2013. Quoting him:
> Sugar consumption has gone up, so has US inflation, less overall exercise, social media consumption, and a variety of other possible negative factors.
So you're telling me that the link was not observable in women, AND that many social/economic realities changed in the course of the study, and we're supposed to believe there was little room left for confounders? This reeks.
IIRC the study that led to people carbo loading for endurance events was first only done with males and that follow up studies found no effect in women. So we don't know the reason for the gender response difference but it exists. For a separate semi tangential on gender differences, the presence of testosterone in males appears to increase the red blood cell count and oxygen carrying ability slightly (versus testosterone deficient or females who doped in a prior era without testing versus clean females) so there is definite precedent for there being a difference in response to diet/ability due to gender/gender specific hormones.
I'm with you there -- it's possible there could be some gender difference and it could be environmental/genetic/etc. But the author spent no more than a single sentence on what is a very glaring issue. That's sketch.
I guess you are talking processed, adultered meat. If you have normal organic meat there is no problem at all. Likely we have been eating meat from the beginning of our existance. The problem is that the anti meat lobby like peta or sugar-bread industry want us to buy more of their products.
Keto is a really good healthy diet its just that requires that you educate yourself and also is really hard to mantain because we are really very addicted to bread, flour and sugar.
Look, you can be on a ketogenic diet and not eat meat at all. I eat a few ounces a day. I could easily not eat any at all and still maintain a high fat ketogenic diet, but I enjoy the flavor.
I also have read plenty of studies that contradict the ones above. I'm not saying they are necessarily wrong. But I find medical statistical studies very hard to interpret because they don't control for all the factors and the data is not super reliable. Often the conclusions seem excessive given the data that is actually there.
> Look, you can be on a ketogenic diet and not eat meat at all.
For sure, but I doubt most people doing Keto are eating very little to no meat.
> I find medical statistical studies very hard to interpret because they don't control for all the factors and the data is not super reliable
Ok so you are suggesting we throw out all studies because they may or may not control for all the variables? That seems like a zero sum proposition that is a bit overkill. Of course there are some studies that are less rigorously controlled than others, but to conclude that no studies can be trusted because "medical statistical studies very hard to interpret" and "the data is not super reliable" just seems like an excuse to ignore what is very compelling evidence.
1. The study you referenced included 28 participants and utilized food frequency questionnaires. Maybe you have something more substantial? Because that is pretty weak on multiple levels.
2. Nobody is referencing the China Study here. It is also 12 years old. Not sure what critiques you are referring to (as you didn't reference any), but I highly doubt they would discredit the information I referenced just because they have to do with "dismantling" the "red meat is bad point of view."
Here is yet another huge meta analysis of the correlation between red meat and Type 2 Diabetes published just 2 years ago:
I really hate this argument. On one hand Keto advocates cry about the grain and sugar lobby, on the other they don't even consider the massive outreach the livestock lobby has and their interest in pushing this diet.
Even organic meat and animal products don't come without health risks and it comes at substantial cost to our environment.
You don't have to eat a lot of meat on this diet. I've been on the diet for years, have read a lot of information on it (fortunately it's been used for medical purposes for over 100 years so there is plenty of material). I personally eat a few ounces a day because I enjoy it. But it could easily be left out, I'd just have to get my protein elsewhere.
nurtitionfacts.org is run by Michael Greger who is a vegan animal welfare crusader. Many of the articles have a factual basis but there is cherry picking to promote animal free diets so it is not an unbiased source.
Yeah this website is definitely to be taken with a grain of salt (even though Greger wouldn't be happy about the sodium intake), but at least he thoroughly cites his sources.
Websites advocating for a Ketogenic diet feel just as biased and most of the time don't have half the research backing it.
This is an ad hominem and quite unfair. Michael Greger states himself that he does not like the term veganism, and he also writes that it was the health benefits of a plant based diet that led him to promote that diet. To call him a "vegan animal welfare crusader" is a bit hyperbolic to say the least.
From Greger's book How Not to Die he writes in the Introduction to Part 2:
> From a nutrition standpoint, the reason I don’t like the terms vegetarian and vegan is that they are only defined by what you don’t eat. When I used to speak on college campuses, I would meet vegans who appeared to be living off french fries and beer. Vegan, technically, but not exactly health promoting. That’s why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition. As far as I can discern, the best available balance of evidence suggests that the healthiest diet is one centered on unprocessed plant foods. On a day-today basis, the more whole plant foods and the fewer processed and animal products, the better.
And from the Preface of How Not to Die he writes:
> True, I have biases of my own to rein in. Although my original motivation was health, over the years, I’ve grown into quite the animal lover. Three cats and a dog run our household, and I’ve spent much of my professional life proudly serving the Humane Society of the United States as the charity’s public health director. So, like many people, I care about the welfare of the animals we eat, but first and foremost, I am a physician. My primary duty has always been to care for my patients, to accurately provide the best available balance of evidence.
He backs up all his claims with extensive citations from recent, peer reviewed studies. The link between meat and heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer is very well established now.
Anecdotally, keto diet did absolutely nothing for me except make me feel even worse, whereas I’ve noticed dramatic improvements in mood and health after three weeks of a purely plant based diet.
The site is very good at sourcing articles and it is an excellent resource as long as you realise he is probably ethically inclined not to promote any study which might increase the suffering of animals.
I don't think that makes him a bad person or the website valueless but it is hard to argue it does not have a strong ethical vegan bias.
At the moment I would claim that overconsumption of highly processed, mostly plant based foods is the real nutritional disaster. Meat consumption is falling in many places but obesity and related diseases are still getting worse.
If you don't have ethical concerns I think low to moderate consumption of animal protein as part of a balance diet is still probably sensible. You probably want to avoid processed meats and charring. But we are all going to die from something and statistically it probably isn't going to be from eating an occasional steak.
I always thought that heart disease was something I might one day have to worry about but could ignore in the meantime while I enjoy eating what I want. But I'm only 46 now and over the last year I've been experiencing increasing tightness and discomfort in my chest and strong heart arrhythmia. That's what motivated me to take a closer look at my diet. After only three weeks of eliminating animal products from my diet those symptoms have disappeared.
As for growing obesity, there is a lot of evidence that points to toxins in our food as an important factor:
> The link between meat and...diabetes...is very well established now.
There is a group of Type 2 diabetics in remission who are doing just fine on meat-based and keto-based diets, with no medication. If meat was a causal contributing factor to diabetes, I wouldn't expect to see that. We do eat a lot of leafy greens, it isn't like all-meat-all-the-time. But fresh meat, simply prepared, eaten to the protein macros appropriate for your body, does nothing to exacerbate these already-diagnosed Type 2 patients from going back into Type 2.
A contributing factor to diabetes is surplus calories creating excess body fat. You can do that with meat, vegetables, fruit, and breads. Harder to do with vegetables if you eat the veggies raw; if you eat only leafy greens for vegetables, I'd say it is nearly impossible.
There are vegan/vegetarian Type 2 patients, but I have yet to run across one in remission on no medication, for two years or longer, so they might be rare. It is much harder to get your proteins while carb restricted to manage blood sugar levels, eating only vegetables; I'm sure there are vegetarian Type 2's in remission out there, likely using soy-based products and protein powder to get their protein, it's just not as popular a method of going into remission.
Personally, I switched to preparing meals using as unprocessed as possible foods. If I could eat raw beef (like a tartare), I would; I don't because it is too time-consuming to prepare. This rules out tofu and other soy-based products, and protein powders as well, for me personally. I can manage to build muscle and keep my blood sugar markers in a normal non-diabetic range as long as I keep my daily net carbohydrate intake to 20g or less. If you are familiar with vegetarian diets and can suggest a way for me to switch to a vegetarian approach that observes that, supports about 2500 calories per day, and is made from unprocessed ingredients, then please let me know, thanks.
> But the links between diabetes and animal products are pretty well established
How was the link determined? I'd like to see the number of studies that studied people with low carb diets. Carbs is in pretty much everything nowadays, and it's really difficult to find people that consumes <5% that are not doing some low carb diet on purpose.
Does your plant-based diet include bread/carbs, and did you stick with the keto diet for more than a few days?
Usually when people feel like crap (initially) on keto it's their bodies switching over from primarily burning sugar to primarily burning fat, but it subsides after a few hours/days depending on the person/diet (look up "keto flu").
Note that keto does not necessarily include meat. You'd get the same effect eating nothing but raw vegetables for a week.
I eat complex carbs like brown rice. I avoid refined carbs. I did keto for two weeks and finally had to stop because I felt worse and hated what I was eating. To be clear I was eating the kind of keto diet I usually see people endorse which is very heavy in animal fat and protein.
In contrast I’ve been purely plant based for three weeks now and I’ve noticed dramatic improvements in my mood and energy levels. I’ve lost a bit of weight and I really enjoy what I’m eating. The numbness and swelling I’ve struggled with for over a year as a result of surgery for a broken leg has also massively improved, which I didn’t expect.
Yeah that would be the difference. I'm not really technically "keto" at this point given my cheat days, right now I'm doing a 16/8 daily fast, but my typical diet is about 2/3 fruits and vegetables 1/3 meat, and I've never felt better. By contrast I once tried eating something like 90% meat for weeks and also felt like crap (although I did lose weight). The lack of fiber was particularly palpable. :P
My personal theory is a lot of prescribed keto diets have lax regulations on meat, so everyone who goes for them immediately maxes out the tastiest item available. The meat, assuming it's high quality/minimally processed isn't a problem directly, but eating more meat means you're eating fewer vegetables/fruit/nuts to balance things out.
I'd still say meat is more than a luxury in moderate doses. Zinc/B-Vitamins/Omega-3s and a lot of other good stuff is very hard to find naturally in non-meat form, and given the lack of regulation in the supplement industry I'd rather get such things through food.
I've switched to a diet that is mostly plant based with small portions of meat occasionally and low carb intake. I don't agree that "plant based" is the reason you feel better but I do think not eating huge quantities of meat and carbohydrates/sugar causes your body to be a little more accommodating.
The link between consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol with cardiovascular disease is extremely well established so I don't think it's a coincidence that I feel this much better after cutting them out of my diet.
The vast majority of the studies mentioned in those videos are old, where most researchers could get away with hacking the P values [0]. A lot of studies done in the last decade contradict the older ones (the article I linked earlier is full of sources). Also correlation is not causation. In how many of those studies controlled the amount of carbs? Because the combination is very important [1]
Edit: Looking at the last link of your first video, it acknowledges low carb diets are beneficial short and medium term, but there's very little literature for long term. It concludes low carbs are bad long term... but you must see the table on page 13 to see how they reached that conclusion. The "low carb score" group still had a crazily high 37-42% of carbs (compared to LCHF diets which are usually 5% carbs), it had more smokers and all of them had trans fats (very dangerous but can be easily avoided altogether).
There are plenty of studies from the last few years that back all this up in detail. If you go to nutritionfacts.org you'll find more references than you can handle.
Did you search enough within those sources to refute the ones of the article I linked? I barely find any in nutritionfacts made in the last 10-15 years, and of those I can't find even a single one that points to fat and cholesterol as the main cause of heart disease.
I'm fairly sure that "diets" are not scientifically proven in any way. I just said I disagreed with you on your conclusions (which are anecdotal). I was suggesting that over-consumption of anything (but especially things that are harder to digest, process, store) MAY cause your body to feel like shit.
It might be just as well that increased sugar intake is caused by mental disorders, as a form of self-medication.
In my case for example, my sugar consumption fell drastically since I received ADHD medications. It turns out I was using sugar as a stimulant/calming agent for years, and no doctor properly figured it out.
> Although previous studies have found an increased risk of depression with higher consumption of added sugars, none examined the role of ‘reverse causation’. If people with anxiety and/or depression tended to consume more sugary foods and drinks, this could be the real reason why a link between sugar intake and poorer mental health is observed. Although the study looked for this link, it was not seen in the data: men and women with mental disorders were not more likely to consume more sugar. As a result, the evidence that mental health is adversely affected by a high sugar intake is strengthened.
> This might also be another avenue for causation.
If people with mental disorders were more sleep-deprived and then consumed more sugar, wouldn't that also show up in the data?
> Although the study looked for this link, it was not seen in the data: men and women with mental disorders were not more likely to consume more sugar.
A causal A > B > C link would look similar (data-wise) to a A > C link.
You wanted a doctor to figure out you ate too many donuts and candy because of your ADHD?
That's pretty tough considering most people eat too much sugar just because.... it is good. Also it is easy as hell for EVERYONE to give up sugar once you are ADHD meds because they have a great appetite suppression effect.
Without a doubt I have used sugar as medication, many times in my life.
My hypothesis: people that had a lot of sugar as a young person, perhaps in particular ways or situations, has trained their brain to release dopamine in response to sugar. Everyone I know that had little sugar as a young person doesn't get the medicinal value of sugar.
My hypothesis: people are not trained as a young person to seek pleasure, they're genetically programmed to do so; many (most?) modern "foods" are engineered and designed to short-wire various naturally evolved systems by introducing artificial stimulus, thus creating closed feedback loops. The baseline is amended upwards with each iteration, and what was normal yesterday is under stimulating now.
> [...] Scientists call this phenomenon, “supernormal stimulus.” It is what happens when an exaggerated version of what appeals to evolutionary instincts can cause some one or some thing to engage in behavior counterproductive to its own survival (or the survival of its genes).
I'm curious if this includes unprocessed fructose, glucose, lactose, etc. I eat quite a bit of fruit, but my refined sugar intake is much lower than it used to be due to making an effort to cut sugary things out of my life (unless eaten with intention).
The more refined the source the faster it enters your bloodstream. That said, You should eat the fruit rather than consuming a juice.
At any rate the glucose uptake is generally lower with fruits, even if juiced (but whole fruits with fiber still intact are best). The rate at which simple sugars enter the blood is considered one of the primary problems, as this leads to a number of metabolic problems and higher generalized oxidation of body tissue.
Unlike added sugars fruits also have antioxidants and a number of other compounds and nutrients that do a swell job at negating these effects and even providing benefits (i suppose because a lot of fruit has surplus of Anti-Oxidant to Sugar Burn.
> At any rate the glucose uptake is generally lower with fruits, even if juiced
Fruit is typically a source of fructose, which uses a different metabolic pathway to glucose. Fructose is processed via the liver and converted into glycogen for energy storage.
That said, juice is definitely worse than whole fruit as you typically use several serves of fruit for a single serve of juice. Rarely would anyone eat 3-5 whole oranges in a single sitting. The sugars in a serve of fruit are also locked in a cellulose matrix (fibre) which limits the rate of release, whereas juice is effectively predigested food lacking the slow-release mechanism of the fibre. You're going to be loading your liver with an unnatural amount of sugar, not unlike pouring a jar of honey down your gullet.
It's a reason you should avoid mixing strong alcohol and juice or fructose-heavy soft drinks - you're hitting your liver with both barrels. Add paracetamol to the mix, which in even relatively low doses is toxic to the liver, to cure the morning headache and you're going to feel very unwell.
The ratio of glucose to fructose in HFCS, honey, and most fruits is about the same. Some fruits have more glucose than fructose, some have less, but the ratio for almost all of them is less than 2:1.
What bothers me is there's no magical "processing" that does anything to these simple sugars. Fructose is... a 20 atom molecule? There's no magical processing that makes that molecule any different inside a fruit or in honey or in corn syrup.
So either the problem is the characteristics of a single food item (ratio of sugar, fiber, fat, etc.), some magical byproduct of processing that makes up a very tiny fraction of the food, or (more likely correct) the ratios that make up the diet as a whole. Carb/fat/protein ratio seems important as does the ratios of which carbs. Demonizing sugar or "refined" sugar seems ridiculous, encouraging proportional consumption makes sense.
Yep, fructose is exactly the same in an apple or in candy. It's not "processing" it what makes it bad. Unless by "processing" you mean isolating it so you eat it without the fiber of the apple.
Fructose doesn't satiate, while fiber does, and it slows down absorption of fructose as well.
For the same reason, fruit juice is pretty much liquid candy with vitamins.
One factor that may be in play here is speed of absorption. "Non-processed" sugars are often inside the cells of the plants and take time to digest and absorb. The result is lower peak sugar concentration in the blood which does not require strong insulin response by the body.
As others have already pointed out, it's the extraction and concentration of fructose (which is what is meant by "processing" in this context) that is so bad.
The perfect example is that it's unlikely you'd have the appetite for eating 15 apples, but it's not difficult to drink 15 apples worth of juice.
I've never really heard anything to suggest fruit is a risk. The fiber slows absorption in the gut, so you don't get the blood sugar spike, and it seems like many issues tied to added sugar consumption trace to the blood sugar spike & insulin response.
Heuristically, eating actual fruit (like a normal healthy primate) seems to be fine, but our metabolism isn't as ready for the man-made sweetened foods (e.g. juice, cake, bread, soda, etc).
Seems like a pretty worthless study that indicates almost nothing. Lazy journalists, who are honestly worse than worthless, pick these lame correlation studies up and propegate weird misconceptions about increasing "risk factors". It's intellectually dishonest to even call the correlation increased "risk" when the cause of the link cannot be feasibly confirmed.
The sane assumption from this study is that depression or addiction prone people are more likely to look for satisfaction in glutany. Unfortunately that doesn't generate as much fear/ad rev.
I think you worded it a bit strongly, but I tend to agree with you.
Science: Aspartame consumption is correlated with weight gain.
Journalists: Does aspartame cause weight gain?
Readers: Aspartame causes weight gain.
I know it's up to the readers to draw the correct conclusions, but it feels a little bit dishonest for journalists to "let the cards fall where they may" so to speak.
You're right my comment was a bit brusque. By "worse than worthless" I meant actively detrimental to the public's knowledge.
Personaly I'm just getting a bit tired of sloppy journalism causing me to waste time with these bait pieces. IMO journalists are the ones who are supposed to be wading through the crap to find me the valuable information instead of shoveling the crap onto me.
> "The report, published today in Scientific Reports used data from the Whitehall II cohort and analysed the sugar intake from sweet food and beverages and occurrence of common mental disorders in over 5000 men and over 2000 women for a period of 22 years between 1983 and 2013"
I don't eat refined sugar because it is harmful. However, I wonder how the study accounted for the MANY changes that took place between 1983 and 2013. Sugar consumption has gone up, so has US inflation, less overall exercise, social media consumption, and a variety of other possible negative factors.
I don't understand this complaint. The study didn't look at a total rise in sugar consumption and a total rise in mental disorders over this period and just lazily guess that they were linked.
The claim is that, within the sample, those who consumed more sugar were more likely to have mental disorders, "independent of health behaviours, socio-demographic and diet-related factors, adiposity and other diseases".
> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why.
This, plus the fact that many socio-economic realities changed over the course of the study, makes it hard to believe there aren't other confounders at play here.
Can someone explain to me how you can find that people with mental disorders are no more likely to consume high sugar than people without, but also find that people with high sugar intake are more likely to develop mental disorders?
This sounds like a snarky remark, but it does have a point. Many large-scale nutrition studies rely on surveying thousands of people about their diet and lifestyles.
Unfortunately, this works best for detecting very dramatic health effects, like the link between smoking and lung cancer. For smaller health effects, any meaningful signal in the data can be overwhelmed by other correlations. One famous example is hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women: https://www.med.uottawa.ca/sim/data/EBM_Study_Bias_e.htm
Conversion to dumb american: 16 teaspoons of sugar per day was considered high.
(If you don't enjoy cooking from scratch, try a mass-based recipe instead of a traditional volume-based recipe. It is so much faster and more convenient.)
> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why. More research is needed to test the sugar-depression effect in large population samples.
There is literally no further comment on why this effect was not observed in women. Why? To me, this means it's possible that some confounder is at play here.
I'm also with Xeoncross (another commenter here) who observed that this study took place from 1983 to 2013. Quoting him:
> Sugar consumption has gone up, so has US inflation, less overall exercise, social media consumption, and a variety of other possible negative factors.
So you're telling me that the link was not observable in women, AND that many social/economic realities changed in the course of the study, and we're supposed to believe there was little room left for confounders? This reeks.