I’m specifically talking about sugar and added sugar. If you eat 100g of added sugar how much would that actually harm you?
I know with trans fat the fear is clogging your arteries, but what about with carbs (specifically sugars)?
And are there any “bad” proteins or are they are basically the same?
Yeah that is the insane part. Sugar and even all carbs have been demonised to hell. Turns out there is nothing dangerous about them, especially when people who demonise it also praise fat.
Fat Is the Cause of Type 2 Diabetes
>Studies dating back nearly a century noted a striking finding: If you take young, healthy people and split them up into two groups—half on a fat-rich diet and half on a carbohydrate-rich diet—we find that within just two days, glucose intolerance skyrockets in the fat group. The group that had been shoveling fat in ended up with twice the blood sugar. As the amount of fat in the diet goes up, so does one’s blood sugar.
>Fat in the bloodstream can build up inside the muscle cells, creating toxic fatty breakdown products and free radicals that block the insulin signaling process. No matter how much insulin we have in our blood, it’s not able to sufficiently open the glucose gates, and blood sugar levels build up in the blood. And this can happen within three hours. One hit of fat can start causing insulin resistance, inhibiting blood sugar uptake after just 160 minutes.
>We can also do the opposite experiment. Lower the level of fat in people’s blood and the insulin resistance comes right down. If we clear the fat out of the blood, we also clear the sugar out. That explains the finding that on the high fat, ketogenic diet, insulin doesn’t work very well. Our bodies become insulin resistant. But as the amount of fat in our diet gets lower and lower, insulin works better and better—a clear demonstration that the sugar tolerance of even healthy individuals can be impaired by administering a low-carb, high-fat diet. We can decrease insulin resistance, however, by decreasing fat intake.
That is just fat part of fat, any fat. Majority of people also poison themselves with cholesterol, trans fats, saturated fats, endotoxins, hormones, heme, antibiotics from animal products and so forth. And each portion of fat you consume takes away from healthy food, especially the ones high in fiber. Be wary of any person telling you beef is healthy and cheap.
Fat also has 9 kcal/gram compared to 4kcal/gram in protein and carbohydrates. Another reason not to be a fat glutton, because obesity is a pandemic in Westernised nations. Fat does not offer you fiber, it spikes your blood sugar level and stores up as fat in you. Fiber is satiating but not fat. It is a lose-lose situation to live on a high fat diet.
Quality matters for health.
100 g/day of sugar probably isn’t ideal but your health status is way more than just what you eat. Very active populations could definitely live in great health with 100 g/day of sugar, if they consumed it around their workouts (it could actually be beneficial, in that sense).
I wouldn’t say there are bad proteins but there are proteins with better amino acid profiles than other proteins, like we commonly see with animal versus plant proteins (aside from soy, which is a quality plant-based source of protein).
Sugar doesn’t matter. The whole idea of public advice to limit added sugars is due to the fact added sugars typically = low fibre, nutritionally low quality product. Stick to natural sugars and it’s quite difficult if not near impossible to get an abundance of vitamins/minerals along with it. Fibre is a huge factor. 100g of added sugar in the right context can actually be a great thing. Athletes need it for energy. Ultra marathon runners literally drink flat coke instead of water after a certain point. Sugar = calories with very little satiation. So eat a lot of added sugar & you’ll struggle to stay low enough on calories through the rest of the day as that sugar’s done very very little to stave off your hunger. You can eat your 100g of added sugar a day, as long as you stay at maintenance calories then you won’t gain weight, but you probably won’t have gotten all your vitamins/minerals or protein/fat/fibre recommendations for that day as you ate the sugar instead. Sugar doesn’t cause diabetes, it’s actually added sugar often results in overconsumption of calories, which leads to obesity, which in turn massively increases your risk of diabetes.Basically sugar in moderation as part of a balanced diet is fine. It’s just when intake of it goes up, you either increase daily calories or else cut out ‘healthier’ food you would have had instead.
On the sugars/processed carb front, I would recommend taking a look at That Sugar Film. The film-maker decided to follow along with what the average Aussie eats in a day in terms of added sugar. Despite eating an equivalent number of calories as he did before, metabolically he took a nose-dive in the 2 months he ran the experiment. His energy level was all over the map - he had manic energy spikes followed by nasty crashes. His visceral fat deposits went up. He developed a fatty liver. I would also recommend Metabolical by Dr. Lustig, if you want to get a sense of what those processed carbs can do in your body.
Yes, added sugars/processed carbs aren’t great for you. Has to do with how the sugars are processed in your body.
As for proteins… there are no ‘bad’ proteins that I’m aware of. Your body processes protein the same way regardless of source - it doesn’t store the whole protein. It breaks the protein down into its composite amino acids, and pulls from that pool when it needs to fashion a protein for some purpose in your body. That being said, you’ll hear about ‘protein quality’ differences, which really comes down to how bio-available protein is. I’m plant-based, personally, but there’s no denying that if you get your protein predominantly (or in my case exclusively) from plants, given the fiber that comes along with the food, you won’t absorb 100% of the protein. Or any nutrient for that matter. The fiber, while really beneficial metabolically does block some of the protein absorption. How much, I would think, depends on how high a fiber diet you normally eat. If you normally eat a high fiber diet (like I do) you would have a pretty large microbiota that can handle the fiber. But even with that, some will be blocked.
Is that a big deal? In most case, no. The way you make up for ‘protein quality’ is protein quantity. Just eat a bit more protein every day. The RDA for protein for me, given my body weight is about 50 grams per day. I generally get more than double that, so any reduction due to the high fiber nature of my diet isn’t a concern.