The more sugar we eat, the fewer vitamins we get

https://news.yahoo.com/more-sugar-e...-141739473.html

Thanks for posting these - I have shared them on Twitter, hoping to get more visibility for the study

Why not a zero consumption threshold? The sugar provides no micronutrients and uses up what is in our bodies to handle it. Both sugar and alcohol are just empty calories that provide nothing that the body needs.

DOH........

It took a 20 yr study?

Only added sugar?

How does the body know what sugar is added, and what sugar is already in the food?

Example, an apple today has hundreds of times more sugar than it did when we first started cultivating them and choosing the sweetest to provide seeds for the next generation again and again and again and again for hundreds if not thousands of generations. Same for corn and so many other modern crops.

If you chew sugar cane as they do in the tropics, is it OK because you haven't added any sugar?

If you put honey in your tea instead of sugar, is it not added sugar anymore? After all honey is food so is it just food combining?

Then is putting sugar cane in your tea also food combining?

My question is this: Could it be all sugar, not just "added sugar"?

Just for the sake of conversation.

Bob

On the one hand, even starch gets converted into sugar by the body, so it doesn't seem to make a chemical difference in the end.

On the other hand, I do have a different reaction from the kind of sugar: like my body can tell the difference between 5 carbs of fruit sugar, and 5 carbs of processed sugar. One trips cravings, the other does not.

Interesting. My body can't tell the difference.

Fructose in corn or apples is as bad as fructose in soft drinks.

But since I went keto (back when they called it Atkins Induction) I rarely eat things with sugar in them - added or not.

Bob

So do I, which is how I tracked this down.

I checked the packages of dried fruit which had sugar in them. Dried fruit with no sugar: different reaction!

Upon further thought, I am thinking that sugar apparently needs nutrients for processing. And most people have a source of sugar that comes with all kinds of other things we know which uses up more nutrients they they provide, like being combined with grains, or even beans, which have plenty of anti-nutrients and require more processing to extract the protein.

I had read this basic idea decades ago, probably back in the 70's - I just have no idea where I read it, because of how long ago it was. Basically what it said was that the more sugar there was in your diet, the more vitamins and minerals the sugar would "steal" from your body's stores, just to process all that sugar, so that you could easily end up deficient.


I don't remember any actual explanation of it, just assuming it was mostly that when you eat a food with no added sugar, and only containing it's naturally containing sugar (fruit, veggies), then the nutrients already in that food help provide what you need to process the sugar in that food. That's not accounting for anti-nutrients, which the author didn't mention (perhaps didn't even know that they existed), but what it amounts to is that sugar is the biggest anti-nutrient of all - the nutrients it needed to process it doesn't just keep you from absorbing nutrients from the food you eat, it steals whatever additional nutrients it needs from your body's stores.

The thing I have a problem with is "added sugar" being bad as opposed to the sugar already in the food.

If it is because the vitamins in the food are there already, then taking a multi-vitamin with the added sugar, or eating those "fortified" cereals with vitamins and sugar in the ingredients would in my way of logical thinking be the same as the sugar in fruit.

It just makes no sense that sucrose and fructose built into a food and sucrose or fructose added to a fortified food or taken with a multivitamin should be different.

So an apple and fortified sugar frosted chocolate bombs should be the same.

And as we know, today's apples, corn and other fruits have hundreds of times more sugar than the variety that was wild before we started to use selective breeding to add more sugar into the fruit (genetically added sugar???).

I go for all sugar being the problem, added or not.

If my logic is wrong, please explain the flaw.

Of course this doesn't make much difference to my WOE since I'm keto and severely restrict all sugars.

Bob

Bob, unless a person is a history buff of the agricultural type, folks dont know that the last 50 years the corn is sweeter, the tomatoes are sweeter, the apples are sweeter, etc etc.

Me? I still like a tart sour apple--the unripe type. lol Corn tastes yickky sweet now and I wont buy corn on the cob for the family unless a special event. ( Sandhill Preservation has old varieties , pre hybridization, pre GMO.) Corn now has two "sweet" genes. Just too sweet imho.

In our low carb world, sugar is sugar. Natural or added. Dr Atkins talked about getting your vitamins worth via very low carb fruits and veggies. More bang for your buck....your carb buck.

Dr A would have agreed with you , Bob.

This makes a lot of sense considering why we have a "sweet tooth." I've been reading a lot about the seasonal cycle, where we stuff ourselves at harvest time to lay on enough fat getting through the coming lean months; the cold weather nearer the poles, and the dry seasons near the equator.

It took industrialized food to make this available all the time, and for us to eat it all the time.

Exactly, that's why we have the sweet tooth.

The fruit ripens right before the starvation season, winter in the temperate zones and the dry season in the tropics.

In prehistoric and pre-agricultural times those who had a sweet tooth and gorged on the fruit gained a lot of weight, and lived off the fat storage in their bodies during the starvation season. They passed their sweet tooth genes on to their offspring.

Those who didn't like sweet things didn't put on enough fat to make it through the starvation season and perished.

So we have the sweet tooth built in as a survival strategy.

Before agriculture, apples were more like crab-apples than today's apples, corn was about the size of a small toothpaste tube, just about every other fruit and vegetable was dozens of times smaller and more tart.

But with thousands of years and thousands of generations of plants, we have done some genetic modification through selective breeding.

This webpage illustrates it nicely

https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits...ed-food-natural

It's one reason why I don't eat fruit anymore.

Bob

Babies are born with the desire for "sweet". Milk is sweet. For example, It encourages baby lambs to come back for more. Applies to all mammalians.