Science
General discussions about "science" itself
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...did we not already know this? I could've sworn we already knew this.
I don't know why y'all are arguing about fruit. I have a hunch that there's some fructose in high fructose corn syrup, which is in just about every processed sweet tasting thing made in the USA. That's probably contributing to obesity a bit more than peaches, ffs.
*in America
So, is this an open door to scare people away from fruit?
@qyron fruit is healthy.
The fructose in fruit isn't as easily absorbed due to fibre. Also there's a natural limit to how much we can consume, no one eats 20 oranges in one sitting.
no one eats 20 oranges in one sitting
Unless they are looking for a serious case of the runs.
But I admit to have over indulged on this particular fruit more than once.
@qyron grapefruit is my particular achilles heel!
Nevertheless we are physically limited by our stomach capacity and would be very unlikely to consume bioavailable fructose at the rates made possible by industrial fructose such as HFCS.
That sounds like a challenge to me...
@FleetingTit I'm still haunted by that scene in Se7en where the guy has "striations" in his stomach from being forced to over eat.
Regardless of method, weight always boils down to a balance of calories consumed vs calories burned.
Your control of calories burned is limited - outside of physical exercise, your body does a lot of crap on its own, and finding the number of calories you passively burn on an average day is a major hurdle.
To do that, log and calculate the caloric value of everything that goes into your mouth; and your weight. If your weight is trending up, reduce your intake and keep checking. Once it stabilizes, you've got your number. If your baseline is weird, something's fucking with your metabolism - see your doctor (for real, that could be a sign of some really bad shit).
From there, you can either further decrease calories consumed by eating/drinking less, or increase calories burned by cranking up the exercise, or a combo of the two. You'll be more comfortable/satiated if you limit things like processed shit, but you can literally eat nothing but Twinkies and still lose weight if you stay within your caloric budget (you'll also be starving all the time, pissed off, and unless you're a fucking robot, give in and eat some actual food, breaking your caloric budget and thus your goals, so don't actually try the Twinkie thing, but it's 'technically' possible).
Any and every diet that actually works does so via a caloric deficit. Maybe fructose is the biggest enemy; maybe it's other sugars; or fats; but keep your caloric consumption-to-burn ratio in the negative regardless of source, and you WILL lose weight.
Our bodies absolutely do not treat all calories equally
This.
It's crazy, the science on processed fructose vs glucose is clear
but people still cling to old ideas about all calories all being the same.
I think you’re arguing different things, or you don’t understand the top comment. They are explaining that gaining weight is a function of net calories. The article you linked is effectively explaining glycemic index, or the rate at which food can be converted into energy by the body. Both of these are compatible. It’s wise to eat low GI food so that you feel sated for longer, but you don’t have to. You can eat exclusively white bread and lose weight if your net calories are negative.
And for a very short summation of the small novella I've written in other comments, not every calorie has the same amount of nutrition in it.
There are non caloric nutrients in food that are absolutely vital for human health and happiness and when you are deficient in those nutrients your body will compel you to continue eating until you have met your baselines.
Solve the nutritional problem and you will most likely go a long long way towards solving the obesity problem.
I've had the theory that people in the US are a lot more malnourished than we realize. All that low quality food means they're probably missing something essential, or only getting it alongside a ton of sugar (aka HFCS).
HFCS is evil and outlawed in a lot of the civilized world. It's a known cause of cancer and tricks the brain into eating more.
It has such a high caloric density, a survival instinct inside the human brain kicks in. It says: wow this is really good, we don't get many opportunities to eat something this good, eat as much of it as you can. This makes sense in a cave man survival scenario, where you happen on some honey or sugary fermented fruits. Then you have a bigger chance of surviving if you eat as much of it as you possibly can. But in modern life where we have an infinite supply of these things it's a killer.
They don't, there's a million little things that depend on what you eat, but regarding weight this is how it works.
The thing that this perspective doesn't take into account is hunger. It's all fine and well to say control your calorific intake, but willpower is a finite and limited resource and if it's the mechanism used to manage calorific intake it will inevitably fail you. Especially when self-control relies on glucose levels in the blood and the aforementioned willpower is being used to reduce those glucose levels.
In the absence of fructose, fat consumption is controlled through the suppression of hunger by the CCK feedback loop. In the absence of fructose, carb consumption is controlled through the insulin/glucagon feedback loop.
Fructose just gets converted into fatty acids without any control loop, leaving you laden with excess fatty acids and still hungry.
Sucrose, which is sugar, is 50% fructose. So it's not just Americans with their high fructose corn syrup who are being bombarded with calories that our hunger can't see, it's anyone eating foods sweetened with sugar.
High fructose corn syrup, by the way, is up to 55% fructose, with the rest being glucose. So it's not thaaaat different than sucrose in overall composition. That's not saying anything about how it's absorbed though.
Ya mean… High Fructose?
As an old, I never heard of anyone getting pancreatic cancer when I was young.
Then all of a sudden pancreatic cancer is something that everyone gets.
Correlation is not causation, but there is correlation.
Well, part of that is also because we know more about pancreatic cancer now, enough to call it that. Just because diagnoses goes up does not necessarily mean that rate is going up.
Modern fruit plants are quite high fructose compared to their ancient ancestors.
And thanks to soil depletion, also less nutritious in regards to minerals. Still great for fiber, though.
It would be amazing if we found that just one ingredient could be traced to all the suffering from obesity.