Major Study Claims to Identify The Root Cause of Obesity: Fructose
Major Study Claims to Identify The Root Cause of Obesity: Fructose
Fructose, a new paper proposes, is the pernicious little demon driving so many human metabolisms towards obesity.
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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.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.
Yeah, the key word there is "calories out" -- as in, not all calories get absorbed equally well by the body, so some get excreted. "Calories out" does not just mean burning them with metabolism and exercise. "Eat less and exercise more" is a gross oversimplification.
Less efficient calorie conversion means you'd lose weight even easier . . .
Right: skinny people might have less efficient calorie conversion than fat ones.
. . . . but 99% of the time they just eat less
TLDR: calories in, calories out.
I've always personally believed in low-carb diets, but I still agree that calories in/out is the main factor for weight gain. That being said, some calories are not calculated right. I remember reading a study on Almonds that said something like 33% of the calories from Almonds are not absorbed, so "100-calorie" packs of almonds are only 66 calories. In this way, not all calories are the same because the way we calculate them isn't right all of the time. Also, calories in/out doesn't account for foods that are unhealthy for other reasons, or could cause you to eat more than you would otherwise, like HFCS.
Very true. I like to reduce the complexity of foods. Just getting someone to eat the correct amount of calories is more than 1/2 the battle. Getting them to eat healthier food is the next huddle.
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.