(Leave the issue with teeth aside)
Yes, it can be unhealthy. Weight is one aspect of health. Excess sugar consumption has an impact on more than just your weight. Not all calories are created equally, regardless of what some will tell you.
One slice of cake per day in addition to a healthy diet would probably be fine.
Eating half a cake per day at the expense of hitting other vital nutrients would not be a good idea. Your body needs protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals to function properly and cake is pretty devoid of those.
One of the issues with cake is how easy it is for your body to digest. If you eat the same amount of sugar in the form of cake as you do in the form of apples, the cake will cause a spike in your blood sugar because of how quickly and easily your body digests the processed sugar. The apple, on the other hand, has fiber that will slow down the absorption of sugar and not cause as high of a spike in blood sugar. Spiking your blood sugar regularly is a great way to create insulin resistance and can lead to metabolic problems like diabetes.
I’m no dietician but this is how I understand it.
Sugar is inflammatory. In normal consumption of low-processed or whole foods it’s just fine, but more than that and you end up with additional problems.
Additionally, the sugar spike plus crash results in recurring hunger/cravings. Hangry.
Worth considering this article from The Conversation: Foods high in added fats and refined carbs are like cigarettes – addictive and unhealthy
Cake is high calorie with little nutritional value. I would suggest eating cake if you were looking to gain weight, not maintain or lose. What would you do to make sure you don’t gain weight? If you plan to exercise more, you will need to eat foods that fuel your system and support recovery. You won’t find that in cake. If you plan to limit your intake, you will not meet your nutritional needs and are bound to overeat or suffer from malnutrition. Cake is amazing, but it is a treat for a reason. Hope this helps!!
I highly recommend listening to “What the Fitness Industry Gets Wrong about the Obesity Epidemic” by the “Iron Culture” podcast. The episode is all about weight loss, but they go into great detail about how having a nice looking body composition is not the only type of “health.” You can look nice and lean, but be horrible metabolically. The podcast as a whole is great, and I believe this episode in particular would explain a lot to you.
Statistically, if you monitor your calories and can roughly estimate your adiposity, especially abdominal visceral adiposity compared to population measures or so you’ll b probably be metabolically healthier.
Other factors obviously like health histories or habits & exercise also definitely would influence this.
The danger of sugar comes from how much inflammation it causes in your body. Not to intentionally bring covid into this (opinions aside), but it’s a good example if you look at the connection between high sugar diets and mortality rate, even in young mostly healthy people. Your body is already inflamed from constant sugar intake, and can’t give any more fight to kick covid, or any other illness, just using covid as a relevant example. TLDR, sugar every day is bad, mmmkay
I’m not a professional but this is my opinin. Depends on how much cake, and if it’s homemade or store bought. If a person replaces a whole meal with cake in order to stay in maintenance calories, they’ll be missing out on nutrients. If it’s a small slice of homemade cake that doesn’t use a processed oil like canola oil, id just consider it something sweet at the end of the day. No harm there
Basically YES. Any excess glucose in the blood is turned into fat cells which can be stored in the liver. Over time, liver cells are gradually replaced by fat cells, leading to non-alcohol-related fatty liver disease which some believe will overtake alcohol-related liver disease in the next few years. So you may not be fat or look fat but your liver might tell you otherwise. Salt and sugar is killing the western world. Some consider sugar to be a toxin.
Honestly, you are going to get lots of different answers as it depends on so many factors (what is in the cake, how large the portions are, what the rest of your diet looks like, what your dietary needs are, what your definition of “healthy” is.)
My (non-professional) opinion is that cake is considered a “sometimes food” for a reason, but if it means this much to you then you can probably find a way to include it. For example you could have smaller slices, use recipes that are lower in sugar and/or include fruits and vegetables (zucchini, banana, carrot, apple, dried fruit), and ensure that the rest of your diet is balanced.
Sugar doesn’t just straight up turn into fat, excess amounts of sugar, or any foods will be stored as fat, but if you have a balanced diet, thats not a surplus of your bodies requirements you’ll burn off all the sugar/energy/nutrients throughout the day and maintain your weight, diet is all about balance and having the cake but also having other healthy foods as well throughout the day
People are being a bit over dramatic. Maintaining a specific healthy weight means if you’re consuming cake, you’re probably not eating a lot of it if you’re also consuming normal meals. If you’re eating 150-200cal of cake a cake, that’s a reasonable amount of sugar that won’t kill you or make a huge difference in your overall health. If you’re replacing meals with a cake of equal calories, then you’re likely not as healthy as someone who has a couple of forks of cake at the end of the night.
I would really recommend finding a healthier substitute if this is something you want to do everyday, and make it a smaller portion size. I love Flax 4 Life brownie bites and I usually eat one with some fruit like raspberries. Lowering the sugar, carbs, and portion size while upping the fiber will make this a much healthier option. I still wouldn’t eat it everyday but I would eat it everyday that box is sitting in my fridge!
Cake isn’t bad for you because it has sugar. Sugar doesn’t ‘turn’ to fat. Excess calories get converted by your body into bodyfat.
Eating some cake in a well-balanced diet which balances sufficient carbs, fat, and protein with the assorted necessary micronutrients won’t hurt you.
However, if half of your diet for the day is cake, that is basically just half your calories from butter and sugar, which have next to no nutritional value aside from big servings of fat and simple sugars. If 5% of your diet is cake, then you can easily manage to balance the rest of the nutrient profile with the other 95%, which should come from ‘real’ foods like meats, vegetables, ideally minimally processed grains, starches, etc.
Its easier to eat a cake a day if your caloric intake is 7000 cal/day than if its 2000 cal/day because you have more room to get the rest of what you need for health. Either way, I don’t recommend it.
Eating refined sugar everyday is in no way beneficial to your health. It causes an spike (or increase depending on when you eat it) in blood sugar, and has trace amounts of nutrients. I consider myself a healthy eater otherwise, but admit that I eat some form of sugar daily (sometimes a natural sweetener, but it’s pretty similar to the refined stuff). Obesity does carry health risks, but you can be slender and unhealthy. You could eat 1200 calories of cake a day and lose weight, but you’d be facing other issues at that point.If you choose to have cake everyday I’d recommend 2 things to minimize the negative effects:Make sure your meals are centered around Whole Foods - healthy fats, adequate protein, fibrous veggies, and small servings of a grain or starch if you want. Take apple cider vinegar about 20 minutes before eating cake. It’s known to reduce blood sugar spikes. There is real evidence of this in people who wear CGMs. Bonus:Eat sugar free or Keto cake. Lol.
So, I don’t know if I would call this common knowledge but yes some of the sugar does turn into fat when it’s beyond what or bodies can immediately use. Say hello to high triglycerides and an eventual fatty liver.
I had thought previously that getting fat on sugar was simply because of the calories. Then I looked the article below to confirm my belief and learned that it’s more than that. We should all be exercising extreme prejudice with eating sugar!
https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_7frg4jjd
To answer number 2:
Nobody should do this. Excess sugar consumption leads to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Not healthy.
Check this quick article:
https://healthmatters.nyp.org/how-much-sugar-is-too-much/
And finally, take the term overweight with a grain of salt. BMI and weight categories don’t reflect composition. At 6’1 and 220 lbs I’m categorized as overweight. At 12% body fat I am NOT out of shape or actually in danger of being unhealthy because of my weight. An athlete? Sure. A statistic that looks bad on paper? Yep. Eat that cake? No, I can’t remember the last time I ate an entire piece let alone the entire cake. Tastes? Absolutely but nothing more than a couple bites.
Sugar turns into glucose, if it’s not used it gets stored as glycogen. Your body has a limit to how much glycogen can be stored. The rest circulates through your blood stream in the form of triglycerides.
These triglycerides slowly get stored as fat. However, high levels of triglycerides in your bloodstream can clog your arteries and lead to heart attacks / strokes.
This is why exercise and hitting your general good food choices are important.
Are your 2000 or so calories a day coming from ham bagels and breakfast burritos, or is it coming from 2 liters of coke? The latter will spike your triglycerides extremely fast and cause more problems than the former. This is an exaggeration but it explains the concept in a basic way.
If you can’t work out due to work or logistical reasons, it might be a good idea to forego cake, cookies, etc and instead opt for oats and other carb sources which aren’t as quickly absorbed.
The complete contrast would be a military special forces or similar bootcamp. 2-8 hours of working out every day burns thousands of calories. If you aren’t eating sugary cakes, cookies, and fatty meats then you will lose weight and be dangerously underweight. Ideally you would want whole foods but to maintain at that level of exercise you would need too much volume. And at that point it’s survival and a mental test.
Calories are measured by burning stuff(including food) in oxygen and measuring how much it warms water. These days it is just calculated using a formula instead of burning every food. This is very different to how your body handles food. The important point is that a calorie is a reliable, repeatable measurement but a calorie measured from burning food has a very loose relationship to the energy you get when you eat food.