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Major Study Claims to Identify The Root Cause of Obesity: Fructose
(www.sciencealert.com)
...did we not already know this? I could've sworn we already knew this.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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*in America
Uhhhhhhhh. Okayyyy. Or maybe eating too much. Goddamn how is there money for these studies and we still can't feed everyone in this country.
Also, the study says that fructose is the problem but they have no idea how to deal with it. So this is just so you know that maybe something else instead of eating too much makes you fat.
"No, no it isn't that you didn't apply the brakes through that intersection, it is one wire leading to the calipers that is made of the wrong material. What is the correct material? I dunno."
Just hit the brakes.
I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record at this point.
Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning.
That I believe we can all agree on.
There is a bigger question than that though. Too many people assume that by default that it is the obese person's I don't know moral failings that lead to their obesity and that a simple rectification of their moral weakness would reverse the obesity.
And that is what I take umbrage with. It's not a moral failing to become obese in a society where all of the food that is available to you has two or three times as many calories as the version your ancestors ate did while simultaneously providing less nutrition per serving size then the food that your ancestors ate did.
There is more to food than calories.
There is more that your body needs out of food than raw calories.
Your body needs nutrition and it will tell you to continue eating until it has met your nutritional needs.
If you shore up the nutritional deficit in the average Western diet then a large percentage of obesity would be dealt with. The way to do that is different from person to person because the nutritional needs of each person is slightly different.
For instance, if you are deficient in magnesium your body may tell you to eat potatoes because potatoes have plenty of magnesium in them.
But if you are eating potatoes that have been turned into potato chips and french fries to try to get the magnesium content out of them you're going to eat way too many fucking potatoes that are also deep-fried in oil and doused with salt.
Multiply this by the number of nutrients that your body needs and the number of foods that have the nutrients in them and the number of ways those foods can be processed to turn healthy foods into unhealthy foods.
If you do that then you may start to understand that the obesity epidemic is not just about fat people stuffing their greedy gullets.
Our ancestors ate, in flush times, 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day while working hard and met their nutritional needs and now we have obese people who do not work as hard as our ancestors did trying to make it on 2500 or 3500 calories who are not getting the non-caloric nutrients they need to satisfy their nutritional needs.
And the nutritional drop off per calorie of the food available in the 1940s versus the food available today is not in a straight line with the decrease in caloric intake.
You may get 30% to 80% of the non caloric nutrition out of the calorie that your ancestors did, so even though you were eating fewer calories than them you are getting vastly fewer non caloric nutrients then they did, things like potassium, and magnesium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, molybdenum, selenium, all of the various trace elements that all life on this planet subsists on.
To add to that, there's no good way to determine what nutrition your body currently has or that it might need other than spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars at the hospital to get a full blood draw and panel done.
If you want to solve the obesity crisis you must first solve the issue of what nutrition a body needs and how to provide that to not just one person but to every person all 8 billion of us on the entire planet.
I apologize for going into a rant about this but I've spent a good while learning how to lose weight and I've lost over a hundred pounds.
I've dealt with being obese my entire life.
I was given poor instruction as a child.
I was told to continue eating when even when I was already stuffed because my mother grew up in a poor household and she didn't understand that when a child says they are full that you do not need to feed them anymore and you do not need to manipulate them into thinking that they are bad people for not eating until they physically cannot eat anymore for every single meal.
I've been dealing with the compulsion, the almost OCD unwilling desire mandate that I have to eat all of the food in front of me every single time I sit down to eat for my entire life.
And while I have been working and struggling and striving to break that compulsion I've also been trying to learn what it is about food that leaves me so unsatisfied when I eat.
And so I get a little upset when I hear people say any variation of, "put down the fork fatty" even when the concept is couched in an inoffensive phrasing, because every single person that says this has no idea what the actual struggle of being obese is.
It's not an issue of one specific chemical in the food that makes people obese.
It's an issue of the entire available Western diet
combined with the entire Western ideology about food
combined with the post world war II necessity of feeding as many people as possible using the new fertilizers that change the structure of the plants that they are sprinkled on, causing them to grow far faster than they ever did in nature
Combined with the selective breeding of plants to get the largest size and most fat protein and carbohydrates that you possibly can out of every single grain and every single animal that is grown
combined with food companies hiring scientists running an entire industry to make food as unsatisfying as possible so that you never get tired of eating it
combined with the nutrition of food decreasing even as the calories in food increase
combined with every single minor drop of comprehension about food itself and the foods effects on the human body being amplified all out of proportion by the news empire looking for a click-worthy headline
Combined with the fact that tasty food releases dopamine even as being obese causes you to be depressed and therefore want to eat more food to get more dopamine to deal with the depression that eating the more food caused
And once again I apologize for going on a rant about this but I wish I could just shake every single person on the planet until they understood that there is far more going on than just the inability of putting the fork down that causes obese people to be obese.
I just wanna give you a huge hug of support. I'm in the 100lb club too (and still well overweight personally) and so much of what you said is very familiar. Thank you for saying what I wanted to say better than I could say it.
You're mixing obvious truths(nutrition is important) with materially irrelevant anecdotes and easily disprovable absolutes(if you want to solve the obesity crisis, you must...).
Nope. Some countries have obesity "crises", and others do not.
We know the basics of nutrition and the basics that people can avoid, and while metabolisms and hormones and gut health depend on a nutritional spectrum and so many other factors, that is a different matter entirely than an obesity "epidemic".
Those people are eating too much.
To solve obesity, eat less.
You can figure out the holistic solution to obesity(TLDR: apparently it's "fructose") on your own time, but if anybody wants to solve obesity, they have the solution.
I am not talking about any holistic nutritional grail and neither is this article, I'm speaking to the useless nature of a study that suggests a significant result is "Ackshually, this one sugar is ackshually the real reason you are fat", which is a counterproductive and insignificant claim that money and time was wasted on.
You say to solve obesity eat less. What you're actually saying is that people should starve.
And not starve on a calorie basis, you're fine with meeting the calories they need to function, you're telling them to starve nutritionally.
You're telling them to ignore their bodies number one desire, which is to live, in order to meet an aesthetic.
I'm telling you that that will not work.
That will not work because the food that is available in the caloric amounts available is nutritionally insufficient to survive on for many people.
And you ignore the mind body connection, assuming that it's simply a matter of thought to tell your body that no you have eaten enough food and you're not going to eat anymore that's all you fucking get when your body is telling your mind that it is starving and it needs more food and it's not going to function until you provide it for me
The human diet is not a solved equation.
If all food were the same then how can you starve to death with a full belly of rabbit meat?
If all food were the same, how can you die of malnutrition eating only fish?
I'm telling you the root cause of modern-day obesity is that obese people have either a natural predisposition or a genetic requirement for a different nutrient profile than the foods that are commonly available in the western diet provides.
The foods of the last 80 years are vastly different than the foods of the hundred thousand years available prior to that.
The crops that we grow have been optimized to grow quickly and to provide a lot of calories. Our grandparents would get one crop of corn per year. Modern Farmers May grow two, three or four crops of corn in the same field per year.
It takes time for plants to absorb nutrients from soil.
Even when you supplement with fertilizers, not every fertilizer is optimized to perfectly recreate ideal soil substrates.
Fertilizers typically prioritize nitrogen as nitrogen causes plants to grow quickly.
So the fast food that is grown in the soil does not have the same nutrient profile as the slow food grown in the soil.
We then feed our cows and chickens the fast farmer food and then we eat those cows and chickens and the fast farmer food but we further break those down and reconstitute them into things that do not spoil easily.
Canned foods, for instance, we're developed so that the beans that you harvested in October could be eaten in February. Now, canned foods are meant to be one of the primary Staples of the western diet. Everything about whatever was put into those cans has been sterilized and optimized for shelf longevity.
I'll stop that rant to start a different one and this one will be quicker. The best meal I've ever had in my life was at a farm to table restaurant.
I was out visiting this place with my girlfriend at the time and she saw this little restaurant by the side of the road and we decided to stop in.
It was fairly pricey but reading their menu they mentioned that all of the food that they were serving there that day that could be grown locally was harvested this morning and prepared for you today.
I spent $100 for the two of us to eat. I had meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans and it was $40.
I thought that for $40 I would get a gargantuan portion and instead it was actually a very small portion compared to what I would normally eat. The serving of meatloaf was about the size of a deck of cards. The mashed potatoes were about the size of my fist, and I probably got maybe 25 green beans.
I was somewhat upset because my expectations based off of my normally available foods would say that a dinner of meatloaf would cost less than $20 and would fill the plate but there was a lot of plate available and visible on this $40 serving.
But, I said fuck it we ball worst case I can go and get some other fast food elsewhere if I still feel hungry afterwards.
And let me tell you, I honestly cannot remember the last time I was so satisfied with a meal. The taste was not twice the price worth but when I finished eating I kind of felt tingly.
My stomach was sending waves of pleasure through my body, it was a sensation that I have never felt before.
My stomach was telling my entire body that I was full, and I was satisfied, and that I had eaten exactly the right amount of food and that feeling continued for the remainder of the day.
We had this meal at like 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday and I did not want to eat again for the rest of the day.
The freshness of the food. The nutritional quality of that meal was so far above the available nutritional quality of any other food that I can personally locate that I got physically high off of eating fucking meatloaf.
I am not rich.
I cannot afford to eat $40 meals for every meal. I do not have access to a farm to provide me with fresh vegetables to eat every single day.
But that one experience highlighted to me how important nutrition is when fighting obesity.
That is why I feel confident in saying that obese people are not obese because they just love eating so much and they are fat little piggies that can't control themselves.
I feel confident in saying that the grand majority of obese people who eat the Western diet are obese because the food that they have available does not have the nutritional profile that their body is craving, and because of that, their bodies compel them to continue eating until they meet their nutritional baselines.
If that is the case the best solution for obesity is to first nourish the body and then allow them to eat whatever they want on top of that.
And you can say it's all calories in calories out that you want but not every calorie is the same because once again, if they were, how can you starve to death with a belly full of rabbit meat?
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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?
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.
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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.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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