Quote:
Originally Posted by bletso
....One thing hard to eliminate on the other hand is the high fructose corn sweeteners we find in almost everything we consume. Big business isn't really concerned with our health, just their bottom lines.
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We don't have high fructose corn syrup even in fizzy drinks here, but they're still a huge driver of obesity in NZ, where the Polynesian population have the misfortune not to be able to metabolise added sugar as an immediate energy source, but instead lay it ALL down as fat, much of it around their vital organs where it does the most harm. If you remove them from the data, we don't have an obesity problem here; if you put them back in, we're second only to the US!
I had a request to expand on my previous post, so here goes:
When in the 1980s dietary fat was found to cause high LDL, and high LDL was found in turn to lead to cardiac disease, it seemed like an open-and-shut case.
Unfortunately, now that we understand the nature of LDL better, it turns out to be a catch-all for several subtypes.
So the true situation appears to be more like this (at least, for most animal fats, including dairy fats):
These dietary fats cause high levels of a SUBSET of LDL, and A DIFFERENT SUBSET of high LDL leads to cardiac disease.
(The first subset is often described as "small dense", and the latter as "large buoyant")
So, without malice aforethought, it seems that the MASSIVE campaigns against dietary fats in the 1980s took us in a very bad direction for
health in general and obesity in particular.
For one thing, that is when
kids here stopped drinking plain milk, because with the fat removed, it did not appeal. So ... we saw the
introduction (at least, here in NZ) of flavoured (and, more importantly, sweetened) milk, to win the
kids back. That only partially worked; many kids switched to fruit juice and/or fizzy drink, both with prodigious amounts of added sugar. And that was the beginning of the end for their prospects of appetite control, and consequently, a trouble-free life.
As it now turns out, but I've always suspected, added sugar is single-handedly capable of hijacking our appetite control mechanism.
I'm not sure to what extent it gets irreversibly damaged, so I'm talking about someone who (like me) has
not had a long
history of consuming excess added sugar:
In its absence, the control mechanism is phenomenally reliable and requires ZERO self control.
But avoiding added sugar means avoiding cookies, donuts, fruit juice, soda, most processed
food (especially in the US where savoury foods like bread and peanut butter are almost inedibly sweet to someone from elsewhere) etc etc
I was mis-diagnosed as a celiac some years back, and despite my misgivings about the diagnosis (eventually proved well founded) I was scrupulous about avoiding gluten.
I used to love baked goods like slices, brownies, etc, but I love plain bread (European style) even more, so to celebrate being reacquainted with the latter, I've given up added sugar almost absolutely, as an
experiment. Since about a year back. (NB: I never drank fizzy drink, and never bought sugar, and ate negligible processed
food and no fast food, so I was never a big sugar consumer)
I've always been trim/wiry (after a puppy fat stage pre-puberty) but I've always had to fight my appetite every inch of the way, sometimes unsuccessfully, particularly being prone to inexplicable food cravings (particularly between meals), even when I KNEW I didn't actually need more food.
Also I had a pattern of 'therapeutic' eating: for a treat on meeting with a disappointment, etc etc...
Now that I'm off sugar altogether, I eat as much as I want, which turns out to be, frankly, buggerall! My food intake has dropped between 20 and 30% (it wasn't that high before) and I enjoy what I do eat more than ever. I've substituted quality for quantity, rather than reducing my spend.
I'm the healthiest and strongest I've been for years, and I virtually always have that great feeling I used to only get briefly after taking a dump.
I guess my digestion is not working away full time, processing food I didn't actually need, but which my brain told me I needed, because my sugar intake was buggering up the signals which would normally cry "Hold - Enough!"