Thoughts on Sugar, Layman's Science
NY Times Article about Sugar being potentially "Toxic"
(not literally a fast-acting toxin, because sugar is a normal part of our diet and is not bad for us in small quantities, but the term is used more figuratively)
I've been wanting to write this for a while, but I was prompted recently by a dinner conversation that started with, "I will give anyone here that can explain to me why corn syrup is bad $10, because everyone seems to hate it, and no one seems to be able to explain why."
I am not one of those people that thinks High Fructose Corn Syrup is actually that different from sugar. Both are bad. The only difference for me is that HFCS is even more processed and also comes from genetically modified corn, and the more humans have changed an ingredient, the more chances we've fucked shit up in ways that we won't understand for years to come. I believe that eating things with added sugar in general is bad (versus naturally occurring sucrose in things like fruits and vegetables), because above maybe 50 or so grams a day, we don't really need, nor do we fully understand, what sugar does to our bodies. Beyond weight gain and those ill-effects, the key difference between sugar, all sugar, and glucose, another sweet compound, is that sugar is processed only in our livers, while glucose can be broken down by any cell in our body. I think that I'm already pretty rough on my liver (glug glug), so I want to try to minimize the amount of dietary sugar I have. Fruits and vegetables basically all have fructose and glucose (two simple sugars which together form the sucrose compound), though they also have free floating fructose and glucose molecules in varying amounts and some have really high overall amounts of sugar (figs, for example). Also, while I think that the more we have messed with stuff, the more we've potentially effed up in ways that we've yet to discover, conversely, I believe natural things like meat and produce have health advantages that we've yet to measure, understand, and slap a name on. Flavanoids? Antioxidants? These ideas just cropped up recently, and it's only when we've learned to quantify properties in western science that we seem to believe they're real.
The big thing societally about HFCS is that it is extremely cheap because of corn subsidies, and so we are making a cornucopia of manufactured garbage ingredients in processed snacks and meals both delicious and the cheapest option available, so people are getting fat and diabetic.
I didn't study molecular biology, but I do closely follow
news regarding nutrition and do research on my own and I have studied the philosophy and history of science. I like to look at
overall trends in research, because there is a sort of "dark matter"
in science that pulls research in certain directions and there is a
certain feel for what we don't understand and what is probably not
currently reflected by studies that have been completed. There are
also historical trends, I believe, in how lobbyists and politics and
results-driven scientists manipulate information that goes from being
"yellow journalism" to "common sense" and back to being the nonsense of a previous era. (I also honestly believe that people that work in
science lose sight of this.) It really seems to me that research is being led towards understanding that all sugar is bad.
To be honest, I am interested in a combined East/West approach. This is basically Chinese medicine and healing techniques that are undergoing Western clinical trials, but with an underlying understanding of "energy flow" (which could be described in Western terminology as the interplay of several different body systems), a deeper feeling that everything in the body is influencing everything else, and that healing is about prevention (increasing that energy flow).
In Eastern medicine, there is also more of a sense of the "shen" state, or emergent state, of problems. The methods used by Eastern medicine to determine where there are imbalances in energy flow are unconventional by Western standards, but are used across many other cultures. For example, there's pulse reading, looking at what foods people crave, and analyzing really descriptions of menstruation or defecation (understanding our body via the byproduct of our processes). I believe that these techniques that have been used for thousands of years do give significant insight into emergent problems, more so in some cases than a cursory checkup once a year. Obviously new technology, such as MRIs, chemical testing of urine, blood, etc., are wonderful tools to use alongside Eastern methods, but they give more of a picture of the shit that's already hit the fan.
Nurses used to be highly regarded in the West. [Nursing us back up to health, versus doctoring problems that have already emerged] But since the advent of new medicinal cures, doctors have taken to the forefront. Now Western medicine is all about "cures." I think Eastern medicine has a much more holistic approach, and yes, some of the techniques and herbs that have been used for thousands of years will prove to be garbage through clinical trials. However, when I'm taking something for preventative reasons, there just isn't a western equivalent, because that's not how healing has been conceived in the west. I also trust Western herbology a lot less than Eastern, but that's just the bias speaking. Our medicine, in my opinion, was much more advanced much earlier, and China had access to a crazy range of geographical zones over different periods of time, with a massive variety of potential medicinal ingredients.
Saying you are into Eastern medicine these days is like saying you believe in magic and witchcraft to solve problems, and somehow it's practically like saying you don't "believe" in evolution. It's really annoying and I wanted to get out my thoughts so that I can more readily explain to people what exactly I mean.
(not literally a fast-acting toxin, because sugar is a normal part of our diet and is not bad for us in small quantities, but the term is used more figuratively)
I've been wanting to write this for a while, but I was prompted recently by a dinner conversation that started with, "I will give anyone here that can explain to me why corn syrup is bad $10, because everyone seems to hate it, and no one seems to be able to explain why."
I am not one of those people that thinks High Fructose Corn Syrup is actually that different from sugar. Both are bad. The only difference for me is that HFCS is even more processed and also comes from genetically modified corn, and the more humans have changed an ingredient, the more chances we've fucked shit up in ways that we won't understand for years to come. I believe that eating things with added sugar in general is bad (versus naturally occurring sucrose in things like fruits and vegetables), because above maybe 50 or so grams a day, we don't really need, nor do we fully understand, what sugar does to our bodies. Beyond weight gain and those ill-effects, the key difference between sugar, all sugar, and glucose, another sweet compound, is that sugar is processed only in our livers, while glucose can be broken down by any cell in our body. I think that I'm already pretty rough on my liver (glug glug), so I want to try to minimize the amount of dietary sugar I have. Fruits and vegetables basically all have fructose and glucose (two simple sugars which together form the sucrose compound), though they also have free floating fructose and glucose molecules in varying amounts and some have really high overall amounts of sugar (figs, for example). Also, while I think that the more we have messed with stuff, the more we've potentially effed up in ways that we've yet to discover, conversely, I believe natural things like meat and produce have health advantages that we've yet to measure, understand, and slap a name on. Flavanoids? Antioxidants? These ideas just cropped up recently, and it's only when we've learned to quantify properties in western science that we seem to believe they're real.
The big thing societally about HFCS is that it is extremely cheap because of corn subsidies, and so we are making a cornucopia of manufactured garbage ingredients in processed snacks and meals both delicious and the cheapest option available, so people are getting fat and diabetic.
I didn't study molecular biology, but I do closely follow
news regarding nutrition and do research on my own and I have studied the philosophy and history of science. I like to look at
overall trends in research, because there is a sort of "dark matter"
in science that pulls research in certain directions and there is a
certain feel for what we don't understand and what is probably not
currently reflected by studies that have been completed. There are
also historical trends, I believe, in how lobbyists and politics and
results-driven scientists manipulate information that goes from being
"yellow journalism" to "common sense" and back to being the nonsense of a previous era. (I also honestly believe that people that work in
science lose sight of this.) It really seems to me that research is being led towards understanding that all sugar is bad.
To be honest, I am interested in a combined East/West approach. This is basically Chinese medicine and healing techniques that are undergoing Western clinical trials, but with an underlying understanding of "energy flow" (which could be described in Western terminology as the interplay of several different body systems), a deeper feeling that everything in the body is influencing everything else, and that healing is about prevention (increasing that energy flow).
In Eastern medicine, there is also more of a sense of the "shen" state, or emergent state, of problems. The methods used by Eastern medicine to determine where there are imbalances in energy flow are unconventional by Western standards, but are used across many other cultures. For example, there's pulse reading, looking at what foods people crave, and analyzing really descriptions of menstruation or defecation (understanding our body via the byproduct of our processes). I believe that these techniques that have been used for thousands of years do give significant insight into emergent problems, more so in some cases than a cursory checkup once a year. Obviously new technology, such as MRIs, chemical testing of urine, blood, etc., are wonderful tools to use alongside Eastern methods, but they give more of a picture of the shit that's already hit the fan.
Nurses used to be highly regarded in the West. [Nursing us back up to health, versus doctoring problems that have already emerged] But since the advent of new medicinal cures, doctors have taken to the forefront. Now Western medicine is all about "cures." I think Eastern medicine has a much more holistic approach, and yes, some of the techniques and herbs that have been used for thousands of years will prove to be garbage through clinical trials. However, when I'm taking something for preventative reasons, there just isn't a western equivalent, because that's not how healing has been conceived in the west. I also trust Western herbology a lot less than Eastern, but that's just the bias speaking. Our medicine, in my opinion, was much more advanced much earlier, and China had access to a crazy range of geographical zones over different periods of time, with a massive variety of potential medicinal ingredients.
Saying you are into Eastern medicine these days is like saying you believe in magic and witchcraft to solve problems, and somehow it's practically like saying you don't "believe" in evolution. It's really annoying and I wanted to get out my thoughts so that I can more readily explain to people what exactly I mean.