I came across this video about 3 years ago. I cannot remember what lead me to it, except for a general interest in health (at the time, I was most interested in radioactive heavy metals in tobacco). Now that I have begun experimenting with my diet (a low carbohydrate, high fat, adequate protein diet with intermittent fasting - more on that in future Physical posts) I would like to share some of the important pieces of information about diet and nutrition I've come across the way, and this video was what started me on my intellectual journey.
The conventional wisdom is that eating fat is bad for you, so if you want to lose weight, eat less of it. Even if you have never had this said to you, you are probably aware of it - on food packaging, "low fat" is marketed as if it were synonymous with "healthy," and the same is true on most restaurant menus. And vaguely, it makes some sense - if you have too much fat on you, you should put less fat in you, right?
How did this come to be? In the early ’70s, we discovered LDLs. In the mid ’70s, we learned that dietary fat raised your LDLs. In late ’70s, we learned that LDL correlated to CVD (Cardiovascular Disease). The thought process was that dietary fats led to heart disease, but this premise is incorrect. The logic is faulty.1
Dietary fats raises your large buoyant Pattern A LDL (VLDL) and carbs raise small, dense Pattern B LDL.2
Essentially, scientists made a mistake, and we haven't realized it yet. The result? An increase in obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other related diseases.2
It's not just increases in carbohydrates, however, which are contributing to these ill health effects. We've also all been told that we should eat more complex carbohydrates from whole grains and avoid simple ones like sugars. However, just like you you might be surprised to know that there are two types of LDL, with one of them being unhealthy and the other benign, there are also two types of sugars, and one of them is much worse than the other.
It's been two strikes against conventional wisdom, but it redeems itself here: HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is bad for you, and the reason is for it's second term, "fructose." Food processing companies and the agricultural industry would have you believe HFCS is no worse for you than regular table sugar or cane sugar - and they're right! Both are bad for you! The reason is that whereas HFCS consists mostly of monosaccharides (little glucoses and fructoses floating around), sucrose consists of disaccharides (little glucoses and fructoses bonded together). The very first thing your body does to sucrose is to split the bond between the two sugar molecules, meaning the body perceives them as essentially the same thing.
The way your body metabolizes fructose is very different from what it does to glucose. It doesn't trigger the release of insulin, which means that leptin doesn't get released, either, and this is the body's "I've eaten enough" chemical. It also doesn't suppress grehlin, which is the body's "I'm hungry" chemical. It gets worse - when your body goes to store fructose as fat, it can only be metabolized in the liver, and in doing so the liver suffers several ill effects.
In comparing chronic ethanol exposure to chronic fructose consumption, they share 8 out of 12 phenomenon. Why? Because they do the same thing. They are metabolized the same way. They ARE the same because they come from the same place. Alcohol is made by fermenting sugar. They have all the same properties because it’s taken care of by the liver in exactly the same way and for the same reason because sugar and ethanol ARE the same.2
To wrap this up, it's worth mentioning that while HFCS and sucrose are about the same in terms of health impact, HFCS is much more insidious for economical reasons. Corn is subsidized by the America government, making corn products very cheap. As a consequence, HFCS is in a ridiculous number of processed foods, and so cheap that it's hard for families of lower incomes to avoid eating.
1: I'm not going to go through the details here. The video and the website do much better than I could.
2: http://www.live-pure.com/2012/01/sugar-the-bitter-truth-by-dr-lustig-a-summary/
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