A PSA On Sugar
This is originally from a post I made on Next Door.
If I missed something, or you think I'm wrong somewhere, I'm absolutely up for discussion! Just keep it civil (no ad hominem) please!
But first, some back story for everyone. Seattle passed a sweetened beverage tax and someone on Next Door made not one, but two, trolling posts about it. The sides are, as you might expect, 1) don't tell me what I can and can't do with my body and make my Coca Cola more expensive and 2) sugar is evil and people need to be saved from themselves.
As I say below, I don't particularly care one way or the other. But one of my soap boxes is people making scientific claims that aren't founded. This one I am addressing is mostly the trend of things like coconut or palm sugar and people saying "Use this instead of refined white sugar, it's way better for you!".
Begin original post:
TL;DR: Sugar, regardless of source, is ultimately broken down into glucose and/or fructose. Too much of either and your body stores it as glycogen in your liver or triglycerides in your fat, respectively, both of which cause problems. It's not inherently evil, but consume it in moderation, preferably from 'real' foods.
(Disclaimer: I have no stance on sugary beverage taxes. I haven’t done any research into them, so I don’t have proof one way or the other whether they are good in the long run. I don’t particularly care about them because I drink mostly water and milk, so am unaffected. I feel the same about it as I feel about the 25% hard alcohol tax, cigarette taxes, or any other unhealthy-habit tax: meh. Prolly won’t stop people drinking the drinks, but I don’t care if the drinks/alcohol/cigarettes/cannabinoids are more expensive. Let’s talk about net neutrality instead, I have WAY more research about that [COME AT ME, COMCAST!]…but I digress.)
On Sugar:
Okay, ya'll sugar (glucose is what I'm going to be referring to for this portion) is not inherently evil. You cannot live without it. Your body needs glucose to survive. It is essential in the glycolysis pathway, which converts glucose to pyruvate, in the process producing a net positive amount of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the energy molecule that powers your mitochondria, the power plants in each of your cells. In addition, ATP is a precursor to DNA and RNA, which allows your cells to keep replicating and to produce proteins. So glucose is really, REALLY essential. It feeds ALL cells, including cancer cells. But “all cells” is the main point. It's not giving MORE energy to cancer cells than others. It just provides energy (and glycogen, but I'll go over than in a sec).
Fructose is treated a bit differently. It first has to go through your liver to be converted into Glyceraldehyde-3-Phosphate, but that is also a key molecule in the glycolysis pathway. It's downstream of glucose, though, so you can survive without fructose. Like glucose, it is not inherently bad. Your body is hard-wired to save for a rainy, food-less day, and it does this by storing glucose as glycogen and triglycerides, and fructose as triglycerides. It’s a reversible process, so if you don’t eat enough to keep yourself going, it’ll get converted back into glucose and/or fructose and sent back into the glycolysis pathway. Eat more than you need and the extra gets stored: the glycogen in your liver, and the triglycerides in adipose tissue (fat).
This happens regardless of the source of glucose/fructose.
This. Happens. Regardless. Of. The. Source. Of. Glucose/Fructose.
The-Devil’s-Refined-White-Sugar == honey == maple syrup == pineapple juice == agave nectar == palm sugar == whatever new 'healthy' sugar ‘alternative’ people are crowing about these days. Just because it's not refined does not mean it isn't still glucose or fructose to your small intestine.
Fruit juices aren’t much healthier for you than soda, regardless of their vitamin content, because they contain far more sugar than one piece of the same type of fruit, and they have little to no fiber, which is what helps you feel full and stops you from eating an entire bunch of bananas in one sitting. Drinking one glass of orange juice is like eating several oranges and none of the fiber. Run a personal experiment and compare the grams of sugar in a fruit juice to those in a soda and you might be surprised how similar they are. Example: Bolthouse Farms’ Green Goodness Juice has 30g sugar per serving, Coke has 39g. If Bolthouse Farms is too far from nature for you, fine. Simply Orange 100% Orange Juice, High Pulp: 23g/serving. (and yet they have an American Heart Association ‘Certified Meets Criteria for Heart-Healthy Food’ label…but that’s really only because orange juice has no saturated fat and no cholesterol…not because it’s good for you.)
You can even get too much sugar just by eating too much Fresh, Organic Fruit (TM)(R)(C), which is why that "eat-only-all-fruit-never-work-out-ever-we-swear" vegan diet doesn't work. Not to mention there's little protein to be found in fruits. For every whole piece of fruit, you get about 10g sugar per 1g of protein. Eat some nuts or beans instead. In the event any vegans have been offended, please note I do not think all vegan diets are dumb. My favorite, sane, vegan is 'UnnaturalVegan', on The YouTube. She was a former un-researched vegan and she got really unhealthy, so she stopped, did some reading, and concluded that she could be vegan and healthy, but that most vegan YouTube evangelists are misleading people with non-science (or, most of the time, non-sense). Highly recommend if you want to vegan (yeah, it’s a verb now) in a way that is science-based.
My takeaway for you from all of the above is that too much sugar, source-agnostic, is bad for you. Consume it in moderation, don’t add extra sugar to your food, and don’t buy foods that add sugar where it doesn’t belong. Or if you do, just don’t go bonkers with it. Have a slice of cake occasionally. Make it a good, quality slice of cake. If you’re going to eat the sugar, by golly it had better be well worth the eating. Enjoy it. Don’t feel guilty about it. And then go back to eating veggies and protein.
As for high fructose foods, the science is split.
On the one hand, if you MUST sweeten foods (this goes back to my main thesis: just don’t add sweetening in the first place and you’ll get enough from the food you’re eating), fructose is actually better for people who have too-high blood glucose levels. Fructose doesn't elevate the blood glucose levels like...well...glucose, so using fructose as a sweetener is preferable to using table sugar, or glucose (or etc, see above list of sugar-substitutes-that-are-really-just-sugar). (Bonus fun fact: there are people who can’t absorb fructose in excess of glucose (in there’s more than 50% fructose to glucose), so it hangs out in their intestines, where their gut bacteria have a party and excrete hydrogen gas, causing bloating and discomfort and irritable bowels. So that sucks royally.)
On the other hand, fructose is made into triglycerides, which are stored in fat, and if you have too many of those, they leak into your blood vessels, causing you to have atherosclerosis (fat build up on your artery walls) and, ultimately, leading to heart disease, which is STILL the greatest cause of death in America.
So it’s not sugar that’s inherently evil. Consuming too much sugar-containing food is bad for you. Consume in moderation, and eat ‘real’ food whenever possible.
Also go exercise. And sleep. Those are both really important, too. Especially sleep. Stop bragging about how little sleep you got last night. It doesn’t make you a cooler person, it just means your body won’t last as long. Go to sleep. Yeah, you, reading this post on your phone in bed. Kick the phone out of the bedroom.
But don’t drink too much water. The water recommendations are way overblown. You can get too much of water. Don’t do that. Just drink when you’re thirsty.
End original post.
I then added the following comment because I tracked down some more info on cancer cells (backstory, someone had mentioned that sugar feeds cancer and, thus, it was bad, that's why it's mentioned):
Correction: some cancer cells don't complete the full glycolytic process, they stop before they start producing ATP. So it is true that some cancer cells get all of their energy from glucose and consume it at much higher rates than normal cells.
People have been pretty anonymous about the whole thing, which is what I expected, since it's not as controversial as other topics I may have chosen, but one person did reply with:
Bad information. There is a HUGE difference between refined added sugar and naturally occurring sugars. Many many misinformation in your write up. Way too many to correct each one.
Also, refined added sugar contributes to over 1/3 of all medical expenses, in the US. It causes more disease and death than all legal and illegal substances combined. The obesity and diabetes epidemic are the results of all this added sugar, as well as many nervous system, oral, and intestinal diseases. Why so much added sugar in everything? The sugar industry donates over 10 million per year to elected officials, and in return the sugar industry is one of the biggest corporate welfare recipient collecting over 3 Billion annually! B.S. anatomy and physiology, M.S. nutrition and human performance, PhD epidemiology.
To which I responded:
Since we're comparing lengths, I have a Masters in Biochemistry. Granted, that's less alphabet soup than you have, but it doesn't count to toss your cred on the table and walk away without any proof to back yourself up. There are plenty of people with fancy, shiny credentials who still have things wrong. Your CV does not inherently make you infallible and the source of all truth.
What's the point of a debate if you're just going to say, "I have more letters than you, so I'm auto-right" ?? I'm open to debate and being convinced I'm wrong, but that is not the way to do it, Ryan. In addition, it doesn't help anyone else reading. At least toss me a scientific paper to read if you don't have the time to do it yourself.
Unless you have many many more information or there are holes in mine, here is my understanding:
Refined and naturally occurring sugars are all made up of the same monosaccharides and all end up in the same place when biochemistry of cells is concerned. The manufacturing process of said sugars does not matter to your body.
I will admit that there are more sugars than just glucose and fructose, but those two are, ultimately, sufficient for the purpose of discussion of the cellular biochemistry. Of the monosaccharides, I missed galactose. Of the disaccharides, I missed maltose and lactose. And then, of course, there are oligo- and poly-saccharides, all of which are formed from monosaccharides.
Galactose is rapidly converted into glucose, which then goes into the glycolysis cycle.
Maltose is broken down into two molecules of glucose, which then goes into the glycolysis cycle.
Lactose is broken down into one molecule of fructose and one molecule of galactose.
Granted: saying eating a piece of fruit is the same as eating straight fructose is oversimplified. Fruits have vitamins and minerals and fiber and a bunch of other things in it that are good for you. To digest a piece of fruit, your body has to break all the fiber and things down, which causes your body to absorb the sugars more slowly, whereas if you ate straight fructose, it is readily and easily absorbed. But it is still true that if you eat too much fruit, you'll get too much fructose and it will go to the same place as it does when it's pure fructose...because it's fructose.
So I shall restate the crux of my thesis: sugar (regardless of origin) in moderation. Preferably from 'real' food than not, but in moderation nonetheless.
Do you have strong feelings about sugar?
If I missed something, or you think I'm wrong somewhere, I'm absolutely up for discussion! Just keep it civil (no ad hominem) please!
But first, some back story for everyone. Seattle passed a sweetened beverage tax and someone on Next Door made not one, but two, trolling posts about it. The sides are, as you might expect, 1) don't tell me what I can and can't do with my body and make my Coca Cola more expensive and 2) sugar is evil and people need to be saved from themselves.
As I say below, I don't particularly care one way or the other. But one of my soap boxes is people making scientific claims that aren't founded. This one I am addressing is mostly the trend of things like coconut or palm sugar and people saying "Use this instead of refined white sugar, it's way better for you!".
Begin original post:
TL;DR: Sugar, regardless of source, is ultimately broken down into glucose and/or fructose. Too much of either and your body stores it as glycogen in your liver or triglycerides in your fat, respectively, both of which cause problems. It's not inherently evil, but consume it in moderation, preferably from 'real' foods.
(Disclaimer: I have no stance on sugary beverage taxes. I haven’t done any research into them, so I don’t have proof one way or the other whether they are good in the long run. I don’t particularly care about them because I drink mostly water and milk, so am unaffected. I feel the same about it as I feel about the 25% hard alcohol tax, cigarette taxes, or any other unhealthy-habit tax: meh. Prolly won’t stop people drinking the drinks, but I don’t care if the drinks/alcohol/cigarettes/cannabinoids are more expensive. Let’s talk about net neutrality instead, I have WAY more research about that [COME AT ME, COMCAST!]…but I digress.)
On Sugar:
Okay, ya'll sugar (glucose is what I'm going to be referring to for this portion) is not inherently evil. You cannot live without it. Your body needs glucose to survive. It is essential in the glycolysis pathway, which converts glucose to pyruvate, in the process producing a net positive amount of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the energy molecule that powers your mitochondria, the power plants in each of your cells. In addition, ATP is a precursor to DNA and RNA, which allows your cells to keep replicating and to produce proteins. So glucose is really, REALLY essential. It feeds ALL cells, including cancer cells. But “all cells” is the main point. It's not giving MORE energy to cancer cells than others. It just provides energy (and glycogen, but I'll go over than in a sec).
Fructose is treated a bit differently. It first has to go through your liver to be converted into Glyceraldehyde-3-Phosphate, but that is also a key molecule in the glycolysis pathway. It's downstream of glucose, though, so you can survive without fructose. Like glucose, it is not inherently bad. Your body is hard-wired to save for a rainy, food-less day, and it does this by storing glucose as glycogen and triglycerides, and fructose as triglycerides. It’s a reversible process, so if you don’t eat enough to keep yourself going, it’ll get converted back into glucose and/or fructose and sent back into the glycolysis pathway. Eat more than you need and the extra gets stored: the glycogen in your liver, and the triglycerides in adipose tissue (fat).
This happens regardless of the source of glucose/fructose.
This. Happens. Regardless. Of. The. Source. Of. Glucose/Fructose.
The-Devil’s-Refined-White-Sugar == honey == maple syrup == pineapple juice == agave nectar == palm sugar == whatever new 'healthy' sugar ‘alternative’ people are crowing about these days. Just because it's not refined does not mean it isn't still glucose or fructose to your small intestine.
Fruit juices aren’t much healthier for you than soda, regardless of their vitamin content, because they contain far more sugar than one piece of the same type of fruit, and they have little to no fiber, which is what helps you feel full and stops you from eating an entire bunch of bananas in one sitting. Drinking one glass of orange juice is like eating several oranges and none of the fiber. Run a personal experiment and compare the grams of sugar in a fruit juice to those in a soda and you might be surprised how similar they are. Example: Bolthouse Farms’ Green Goodness Juice has 30g sugar per serving, Coke has 39g. If Bolthouse Farms is too far from nature for you, fine. Simply Orange 100% Orange Juice, High Pulp: 23g/serving. (and yet they have an American Heart Association ‘Certified Meets Criteria for Heart-Healthy Food’ label…but that’s really only because orange juice has no saturated fat and no cholesterol…not because it’s good for you.)
You can even get too much sugar just by eating too much Fresh, Organic Fruit (TM)(R)(C), which is why that "eat-only-all-fruit-never-work-out-ever-we-swear" vegan diet doesn't work. Not to mention there's little protein to be found in fruits. For every whole piece of fruit, you get about 10g sugar per 1g of protein. Eat some nuts or beans instead. In the event any vegans have been offended, please note I do not think all vegan diets are dumb. My favorite, sane, vegan is 'UnnaturalVegan', on The YouTube. She was a former un-researched vegan and she got really unhealthy, so she stopped, did some reading, and concluded that she could be vegan and healthy, but that most vegan YouTube evangelists are misleading people with non-science (or, most of the time, non-sense). Highly recommend if you want to vegan (yeah, it’s a verb now) in a way that is science-based.
My takeaway for you from all of the above is that too much sugar, source-agnostic, is bad for you. Consume it in moderation, don’t add extra sugar to your food, and don’t buy foods that add sugar where it doesn’t belong. Or if you do, just don’t go bonkers with it. Have a slice of cake occasionally. Make it a good, quality slice of cake. If you’re going to eat the sugar, by golly it had better be well worth the eating. Enjoy it. Don’t feel guilty about it. And then go back to eating veggies and protein.
As for high fructose foods, the science is split.
On the one hand, if you MUST sweeten foods (this goes back to my main thesis: just don’t add sweetening in the first place and you’ll get enough from the food you’re eating), fructose is actually better for people who have too-high blood glucose levels. Fructose doesn't elevate the blood glucose levels like...well...glucose, so using fructose as a sweetener is preferable to using table sugar, or glucose (or etc, see above list of sugar-substitutes-that-are-really-just-sugar). (Bonus fun fact: there are people who can’t absorb fructose in excess of glucose (in there’s more than 50% fructose to glucose), so it hangs out in their intestines, where their gut bacteria have a party and excrete hydrogen gas, causing bloating and discomfort and irritable bowels. So that sucks royally.)
On the other hand, fructose is made into triglycerides, which are stored in fat, and if you have too many of those, they leak into your blood vessels, causing you to have atherosclerosis (fat build up on your artery walls) and, ultimately, leading to heart disease, which is STILL the greatest cause of death in America.
So it’s not sugar that’s inherently evil. Consuming too much sugar-containing food is bad for you. Consume in moderation, and eat ‘real’ food whenever possible.
Also go exercise. And sleep. Those are both really important, too. Especially sleep. Stop bragging about how little sleep you got last night. It doesn’t make you a cooler person, it just means your body won’t last as long. Go to sleep. Yeah, you, reading this post on your phone in bed. Kick the phone out of the bedroom.
But don’t drink too much water. The water recommendations are way overblown. You can get too much of water. Don’t do that. Just drink when you’re thirsty.
End original post.
I then added the following comment because I tracked down some more info on cancer cells (backstory, someone had mentioned that sugar feeds cancer and, thus, it was bad, that's why it's mentioned):
Correction: some cancer cells don't complete the full glycolytic process, they stop before they start producing ATP. So it is true that some cancer cells get all of their energy from glucose and consume it at much higher rates than normal cells.
People have been pretty anonymous about the whole thing, which is what I expected, since it's not as controversial as other topics I may have chosen, but one person did reply with:
Bad information. There is a HUGE difference between refined added sugar and naturally occurring sugars. Many many misinformation in your write up. Way too many to correct each one.
Also, refined added sugar contributes to over 1/3 of all medical expenses, in the US. It causes more disease and death than all legal and illegal substances combined. The obesity and diabetes epidemic are the results of all this added sugar, as well as many nervous system, oral, and intestinal diseases. Why so much added sugar in everything? The sugar industry donates over 10 million per year to elected officials, and in return the sugar industry is one of the biggest corporate welfare recipient collecting over 3 Billion annually! B.S. anatomy and physiology, M.S. nutrition and human performance, PhD epidemiology.
To which I responded:
Since we're comparing lengths, I have a Masters in Biochemistry. Granted, that's less alphabet soup than you have, but it doesn't count to toss your cred on the table and walk away without any proof to back yourself up. There are plenty of people with fancy, shiny credentials who still have things wrong. Your CV does not inherently make you infallible and the source of all truth.
What's the point of a debate if you're just going to say, "I have more letters than you, so I'm auto-right" ?? I'm open to debate and being convinced I'm wrong, but that is not the way to do it, Ryan. In addition, it doesn't help anyone else reading. At least toss me a scientific paper to read if you don't have the time to do it yourself.
Unless you have many many more information or there are holes in mine, here is my understanding:
Refined and naturally occurring sugars are all made up of the same monosaccharides and all end up in the same place when biochemistry of cells is concerned. The manufacturing process of said sugars does not matter to your body.
I will admit that there are more sugars than just glucose and fructose, but those two are, ultimately, sufficient for the purpose of discussion of the cellular biochemistry. Of the monosaccharides, I missed galactose. Of the disaccharides, I missed maltose and lactose. And then, of course, there are oligo- and poly-saccharides, all of which are formed from monosaccharides.
Galactose is rapidly converted into glucose, which then goes into the glycolysis cycle.
Maltose is broken down into two molecules of glucose, which then goes into the glycolysis cycle.
Lactose is broken down into one molecule of fructose and one molecule of galactose.
Granted: saying eating a piece of fruit is the same as eating straight fructose is oversimplified. Fruits have vitamins and minerals and fiber and a bunch of other things in it that are good for you. To digest a piece of fruit, your body has to break all the fiber and things down, which causes your body to absorb the sugars more slowly, whereas if you ate straight fructose, it is readily and easily absorbed. But it is still true that if you eat too much fruit, you'll get too much fructose and it will go to the same place as it does when it's pure fructose...because it's fructose.
So I shall restate the crux of my thesis: sugar (regardless of origin) in moderation. Preferably from 'real' food than not, but in moderation nonetheless.
Do you have strong feelings about sugar?
I think a simple but important point that people don't seem to get is that refined sugar IS naturally occurring sugar. All sugar comes from plants. It doesn't matter if that plant was corn or barley or sugar beets or sugar cane or an apple. Do people think refined sugar is manufactured in a lab? Also, you should post that guy on r/iamverysmart.
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