Science
General discussions about "science" itself
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
...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.
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.
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.
No, the study is talking about other sources of fructose:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/oby.23920
The study is not saying that fructose is the root cause of obesity from what I see (search doesn't work properly there). I'm not sure if in such a complex mechanism as a human body a single cause of obesity can exist. Additionally, our bodies differ and a single mutation can change the outcome of the whole process from what I know.
The title is so misleading that it borders on lying.
The root cause of all obesity everywhere is not fructose. That implies that if you don't eat fructose or generate fructose, you will not be obese. Fructose might be contributing factor to obesity, but it is hardly a root cause or "the" root cause.
I overstepped on my comment but after years of being vehiculated as an healthy sugar, this is the kind of title capable of triggering that sort of thought.
And agreed. It may be a part of the problem but it is risky to say this or that is the root of the obesity problem.
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.
Basically our bodies are good at dealing with 50/50 G:F ratios, but HFCS is more like, 40/60 so it doesn't know what to do with that excess F which is known to cause all sorts of health problems. This is why fruit and table sugar are fine but most processed food is not. If you know how to avoid it you can end up a lot healthier overall. And no, the meme of "the fiber of the fruit prevents absorption" that doesn't stop it, just smooths down the sugar spike over a larger time. All of it that was diversion tactics to distract people from the real source of health problems: HFCS and overconsumption, because health science in the US is notoriously bought and paid for and they're not about to blame capitalism.
Basically I wanted to see if it would be possible to survive off of nothing but energy so I experimented on myself and short of some minor issues (malnutrition and something I learned about called protein starvation) it caused me to be healthier and happier once I knew what I was doing.
EDIT: Have to explain protein starvation because google's dogshit algorithm thinks you mean protein toxicity which his the literal exact opposite of what protein starvation is and because it's so confident that's what you want to see it won't actually tell you: So like humans need protein and we can generate it from energy, but the rate is way too low for our bodies to function so you're only getting like a 10th of what we need, meaning you can starve to death while having more than enough calories otherwise.
Also while I'm here I may as well also go further into what I meant by "good at dealing with G:F at a 50/50 ratio" on the cellular level we have little factories pumping energy across a barrier so that it can later spin a literal turbine and generate ATP, and they're built out so that sugar comes in, gets broken into Glucose and Fructose and like Factorio the ratios are set to fit that. Start producing too much Fructose and now you have an imbalance and like Factorio causes things to back up a bit. This is also why I was at half energy when I did Glucose-only; I had all the energy I needed but the rate I could access it was half of what it should have been. TL;DR Our cells are designed to reverse the effects of photosynthesis, converting sugar into energy, everything else is on top of that is ultimately in service of that goal.
Takeaway: Sugar is good, potatoes and PB toast are great, HFCS are bad, and capitalism is to blame for the health problems in america.
Ya mean… High Fructose?
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.
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.
It would be amazing if we found that just one ingredient could be traced to all the suffering from obesity.