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Science

Study: Cutting Sugar From Diet Shows Immediate Health Benefits (wiley.com) 428

turp182 writes: As reported in TIME and other news sources, a recent study found that reducing sugar intake in obese children caused several biological health markers to improve over a short period of time (9 days). Summarizing the results: "Overall, their fasting blood sugar levels dropped by 53%, along with the amount of insulin their bodies produced since insulin is normally needed to break down carbohydrates and sugars. Their triglyceride and LDL levels also declined and, most importantly, they showed less fat in their liver." The full study is available online.
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Study: Cutting Sugar From Diet Shows Immediate Health Benefits

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:03PM (#50812591)

    Putting sugars in everything! You can't even buy prepackaged meats without sugar added!

  • Causes cancer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:08PM (#50812625)
    What does it do for me if I'm not an obese child? Or, should we file this in the "causes cancer" [slashdot.org] circular filing cabinet?
    • Re:Causes cancer (Score:5, Informative)

      by fwarren ( 579763 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:16PM (#50812703) Homepage

      The Warburg Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Cancer loves sugar. Cancer cells consume sugar at 8 times the rate of normal cells. Warburg won the Nobel prize for this discovery.

      Yes both sugar and flour are bad for you. There is thing called "Diseases of Western Civilization" and they come along when sugar and flour start showing up in your diet.

      • Re:Causes cancer (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:40PM (#50812887) Homepage

        Since flour and sugar pretty much coincide with civilization in general and the ability to record anything, the idea that "disease suddenly appears" is a pretty obvious thing. Whether or not it's anything to get hysterical about is another matter.

        It still beats the alternative.

        • He didn't say "Diseases of Civilization" he said "Diseases of Western Civilization". As in the modern late 20th century American diet.
          • Flour is part of pretty near every civilization in the world.
        • Since flour and sugar pretty much coincide with civilization in general [...]

          Don't forget power and women. [youtube.com]

    • by mspohr ( 589790 )

      If you can't figure this out, I don't think we can help you.

    • You don't have to be obese or overweight to develop type 2 diabetes.

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Not getting shot and killed in WW2 at the age of 22 causes cancer. Also not dying of smallpox before your 12th birthday.

  • by Zargg ( 1596625 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:10PM (#50812635)

    My fiance has cut sugar out of her diet and found that her general mood is much happier and more consistent. After a day of eating sugar she would be really depressed and down, low energy and such, but now she has more physical and mental energy on a normal basis. That sugar crash really is killer!

    • I've been dealing with metabolic syndrome for years, and so far, my blood sugar remains in normal range, weight, cholesterol, etc. is normal, though I do still take some pills to reduce hypertension. I started with The Diabetes Diet by Dr. Bernstein [diabetes-book.com] which laid out the relationship between sugar, blood sugar, and diabetes decades ago. Bernstein is literally the guy who changed the treatment of diabetes in the 1970s and at least doubled the life expectancy of diabetics.

      If I keep my diet to simple meats and ve

  • We're now not supposed to eat meat of any kind, or sugar, or alcohol, avoid carbs, avoid fat.. would someone like to point out some peer-reviewed University studies that show that drinking water will actually kill you? Then we can all be totally healthy and just kill ourselves in 3 days from dehydration, rather than having to wait out the several months it takes to die of starvation.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      The risks of dihydrogen monoxide are pretty well publicized.

      http://www.dhmo.org/ [dhmo.org]

    • by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Actually, just don't eat meat or sugar.
      This study substituted starchy carbs for sugar to show the beneficial effects of eliminating sugar.
      Fat is OK... just not animal fat... vegetable fat is fine.

      • by moeinvt ( 851793 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:10PM (#50813089)

        "Fat is OK... just not animal fat... vegetable fat is fine."

        Completely backwards. Homo Sapiens evolved on a diet containing animal fat. The vegetable oils and especially the hydrogenated vegetable oils are heavily processed and totally unnatural. Factors such as shelf life, not human health drove the development of these substances. The fats that you actually find in nature such as animal fats and unsaturated fats from various seeds and nuts are much healthier than the processed stuff.

        • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:11PM (#50813465) Journal

          The vegetable oils and especially the hydrogenated vegetable oils are heavily processed and totally unnatural.

          No that's silly. Plain vegtable oil is entirely natural and unprocessed and exists to a greater ot lesser extent in a lot of vegetables, especially seeds. Lumping plain vegetable oil and hydrogenated vegetable oil together as "unnatural" is completely nonsensical.

    • by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:36PM (#50812863) Homepage

      We're now not supposed to eat meat of any kind

      If you want to misrepresent what was said, that's your prerogative. The WHO didn't recommend not eating meat, only not to eat processed/smoked meats, and to limit red meat. As usual, the concept of moderation goes *woosh* over people's heads as they furiously go about constructing their strawmen ..

    • I live with the belief that alcohol beats fat, so it's OK to have a beer with your burger.
    • by Faust6 ( 4161211 )
      Another case of throwing our hands up in the air over lazy misrepresentation of the consensus today. No, "everything" is not bad for you. Published research is not prescriptive - no reputable source states we ought not consume ANY level of sugar to be healthy, nor alcohol. It's possible to be healthy by choosing a diet lower in carbs OR fat, and it's widely thought essential to include both in our diets. To say nothing of the fact that not all carbohydrates and fats are created equal.
    • by PuckSR ( 1073464 )

      I get it. All of this is confusing.
      How about we don't get caught up in food trends?

      The link between processed meat and cancer has been known for almost 100 years. One of the first two things the FDA did was regulate nitrates in sausage and ban sarsaparilla. We can be pretty confident that both of those things will kill you.
      Alcohol? We banned that for nearly a decade because of rampant alcohol abuse and death.

      Sugar? Fat? Red Meat? Who knows at this point. Don't worry about it too much.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by internerdj ( 1319281 )
      I heard a segment on America's Test Kitchen who presented a general summary of his research that essentially said that the people with the longest lifespan tend to have the lowest lifetime caloric intake. He noted clearly there is a cut off point to the benefits of eating less, but eating less of everything over a lifetime is indeed a positive as long as you aren't starving your cells of what they need. At this point, I've forgotten the author, so you can take it with a grain of salt if you don't mind ris
      • I heard a segment on America's Test Kitchen who presented a general summary of his research that essentially said that the people with the longest lifespan tend to have the lowest lifetime caloric intake. He noted clearly there is a cut off point to the benefits of eating less, but eating less of everything over a lifetime is indeed a positive as long as you aren't starving your cells of what they need. At this point, I've forgotten the author, so you can take it with a grain of salt if you don't mind risking your heart health with an increase in your sodium intake...

        This is the most sensible, and rational thought on nutrition I have ever heard. It's basically what I said above. Eat just enough of whatever you want to keep you alive, and nothing more.

        • by JMZero ( 449047 )

          This actually doesn't hold as well for humans as it does for mice - overall, humans tend to live longer if they're moderately overweight. This - http://healthland.time.com/201... [time.com] - is kind of a fluffy article, but it's a good summary of the research.

          Nothing in diet/health is simple (despite 95% of the comments in this thread saying that "it's obviously X").

      • by vovin ( 12759 )

        Excessive sodium is completely harmless, provided it comes with the requisite fluids.
        Too little sodium is however quite deadly. Only control for sodium if you are in fact suffering from hyper tension. Otherwise err on the side of more rather than less sodium in your diet.

    • 100% of people who have died have consumed water at some point in their lives.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:31PM (#50812831)

    For over a decade now, Dr. Eades clinic has done years of diet research with their patients and have been able to reduce and even eliminate in many cases Type II diabetes with mere diet change. (tl;dr; paleo-ish). They've done bloodwork on thousands of patients and have shown that in as little as two weeks and even sometimes less, switching to their recommended diet allowed nearly all blood markers to return to within normal, healthy ranges, including cholesterol.

    Yudkin's book "Pure, White, and Deadly" was published in 1972 advising from the then already-currently-known-studies how dangerous sugar was in the human diet--and this was *before* sugar consumption in the West increased 5-10-fold, and before the advent of the even-worse HFCS experiment on the entire population began.

    The body is a remarkably self-regulating and healing machine. It's amazing we can survive for as long as we do with continued toxin intake (and even the chronic effects for the vast majority are manageable)--and yet not surprising to me in the least that the body can return itself to a much healthier state so quickly after the toxins cease to be ingested. Our bodies want, really badly, to regulate into a healthy state.

    Getting people to understand that our modern diet consists of slowly poisoning ourselves is the real battle to fight.

    • by vovin ( 12759 )

      The news here isn't that it is a new revelation which it is not. The news here is that this is mainstream media publicity. It means that something will be done. Of course the first thing something will be the sugar lobby maligning the study and spinning it every direction. If the sugar lobby is successful this will be forgotten and never brought up again. If the sugar lobby fails then several things may happen. Such as public support for sugar subsidies could finally fall. Processed foods could reduce sugar

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:35PM (#50812857)

    Can confirm. Have dropped 90 percent of sugar & carbohydrates (Grains, Rice, Potatoes) from my diet, as a result of having been diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Too late to recover Pancreas, however attendant diseases (Eye damage, kidney damage, Gout & arthritis are no longer giving me grief. I am down to one cold or less per Canadian winter, and my weight drops about a kg (2.2 lb) per month. Almost down to normal BMI.

    Yes, it is also a genetic predisposition, but if I had known what not to eat 40 years ago, I might still have a pancreas.

    Time to revise the food guide. Grain & Cane are not food for people.

  • by trout007 ( 975317 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:41PM (#50812897)

    I gave up sugar and I became very angry as I went through what can only be described as withdrawal symptoms. Eventually I started eating again after a few months. I noticed almost everything we eat is super sweet. Fruit tastes like candy and soda was not palatable. Health benefits was everything mentioned except LDL which stayed high. Still a fun experiment.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Had a similar, but not too similar experience when dropping sugar.

      I aimed for 28 days without carbs unless I was working out, but only made it 17 before I couldn't handle it anymore. I was not lethargic or moody or angry, though it pissed me off when at lunch I was eating home-cooked chicken (no seasoning, yumm) and I could smell pizza being brought into the building over 100 feet away. It was so overwhelming I could name the toppings without looking. I'm not talking whole pizza's either, nobody else could

  • carbohydrates? glucose? fructose? galactose? sucrose? maltose? lactose?

    If you cut them all, what would you eat? Meat causes cancer. [npr.org] Where would you get the calories necessary to survive?

    Seems to me we have spent thousands of years to come to the same conclusions as the ancient Greeks. [wikipedia.org] "Nothing to Excess."
  • Film at eleven.

    What's remarkable is that we actually need to be told this.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I made a real effort this past summer to cut out sugar. For about three weeks I wasn't taking in white sugar. I was still eating some carbs like white flour but much reduced. I wasn't eating canned or premade grocery store food. My intake consisted of eggs from our chickens, beef (hamburgers mostly), chicken (although fried with white flour), popcorn (no white flour crackers and no candy of course) and protein shakes that had 1 or 2g of carbs per. (sugar...)

    I even stopped drinking diet pop and went with

  • by pubwvj ( 1045960 ) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:47PM (#50813319)

    "reducing sugar intake in obese children"

    Small Details Matter - Consider the study group. They started out with abnormal people, the obese. Sugars are a normal part of our diet. The problem is not sugars but overconsumption.

    • by vovin ( 12759 )

      Selecting only for sugar, regardless of calorie intake, makes for a massive shift in health indicators.

      Humans simply have not evolved to handle the amount of sugar that is available in our diets today. Modern diets and processed foods, even honey and fresh juices, just have far more bio-available sugars that can be metabolized for an extended period of time. Add fat to the sugar it because a deadly combo so controlling for fat will extend the amount of time you can maintain a high sugar diet. Kill the sugar

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