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The Surprising Facts About Diet and Nutrition
Donald Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services in his new administration, and the latter has declared that his mission will be to “Make America Healthy Again.” But even if Kennedy is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he faces a very stiff challenge in fulfilling that pledge.
Most Americans are probably not fully aware just how dramatically our national health has declined over the last few decades, and until very recently I was certainly included among the uninformed.
Yet much of this decline has been easily visible to our eyes. According to research studies, about 74% of all American adults are now overweight, while almost 42% suffer from clinical obesity, along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children. These rates have skyrocketed during the last half-century.
Our national obesity figures are not only far higher than those of any other developed nation, but they are nearly double those for Germany and almost four times the rates for France.
Obesity is closely associated with diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans now suffer from that serious medical condition, while another 115 million have prediabetes. Tens of millions have high blood pressure and other related illnesses. Once again, these rates have risen dramatically over the last generation or two.
These are huge numbers, with massive health consequences. Diabetes alone ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths. By contrast, the combined total of all our drug-overdose fatalities is a little over 100,000.
A study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted the risk of death, potentially by as much as 91%, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact has obviously been enormous. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, we spend much more on health care than any other developed nation, yet our life expectancy has generally been much lower, and stagnant rather than rising.
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Everyone who has looked into these very serious problems agrees that dietary issues are the main culprit. But the complexities of that factor may be seen if we consider two meals, each totaling around 1,000 calories but otherwise quite different, one of them reasonably healthy and the other extremely unhealthy.
Suppose that an employee at a local health-food shop returned from a long day of knocking on doors for Jill Stein. He sat down at the kitchen dinette of his studio apartment for three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.
Around the same time, a trucker stopped by a McDonalds on his way home from a Donald Trump rally, and proudly wearing his red MAGA cap ordered a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese along with some fries. Ignoring the soda fountain, he walked to the corner liquor store and bought a Budweiser beer to wash down his greasy fast-food meal, so heavy with animal fat and salt.
The contrast between those two hypothetical meals, one that maintains human health and another that seriously undermines it, played in my mind a few weeks ago after I published an article on nutritional issues, the very first time I’d ever investigated that topic.
Although dietary factors are mostly responsible for our health problems, there are some important aspects to this crisis that are not regularly presented in our media. These greatly surprised me when I discovered them, and I think they would probably surprise many others as well.
Thus, in our hypothetical example it was actually the McDonalds and Budweiser meal of the MAGA trucker that was reasonably healthy, while the dangerous dietary choices made by the Jill Stein supporter placed him at high risk of eventually developing diabetes and considerably shortening his life-span. But I’d suspect that more than 95% of educated Americans might automatically assume the opposite. Such a mistake would be the direct consequence of the last half-century of promotion for extremely damaging nutritional policies, whose total failure has been revealed by our devastating public health trends.
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I’d originally studied nutrition for a few weeks during my 10th grade Health class in the 1970s, but I hadn’t found the subject interesting and never paid any attention to it in the decades that followed. I would occasionally read high-profile articles on that subject in my daily newspapers, but I wasn’t too sure how seriously to take their often complex and conflicting claims, so all of those usually faded from my memory soon afterward.
However, earlier this year a prominent medical school professor happened to mention to me that our understanding of that subject had undergone a major upheaval over the last twenty years, and that sufficiently piqued my curiosity that I decided to read some of the relevant books and articles. A few weeks ago I’d published a provocatively-titled essay that summarized the very surprising but persuasive analysis that I’d absorbed.
Since I’d never had any interest in dietary or nutritional issues, I’d casually assumed that was equally true of most of the regular visitors to our website and I doubted that my piece would attract much readership. But as has so often been the case, I was entirely mistaken, and it instead drew a good deal of traffic and more than 600 comments, many of them quite long and detailed and far better informed than I had ever been on that topic.
Most of my newly acquired knowledge had come from the books and long articles of Gary Taubes, a very distinguished science journalist with academic roots in physics who had eventually developed an interest in nutrition. Beginning more than two decades ago, his major cover stories in the New York Times Sunday Magazine had heavily challenged our long-established official dogma on that topic, bringing the work of dissenting researchers and medical doctors to much wider attention. This played a crucial role in launching a major scientific debate on those important public health matters, all of which took place while I remained blissfully ignorant and unaware.
- What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • July 7, 2002 • 7,800 Words
Among his most surprising claims were that contrary to everything I’d always been told, fatty foods were neither harmful to our health nor caused obesity, but instead the true culprits were the carbohydrates that our medical experts had always encouraged us to eat in their place, with ordinary sugar being especially harmful.
So if Taubes and his many scientific allies were correct, for roughly the last half-century our official nutritional policies had been entirely upside-down and backwards. During all those decades, our government and our media had been urging us to replace relatively harmless high fat foods such as sausage, bacon, and eggs with far more damaging fare, including such supposed health foods as yogurt, granola, and fruit juice.
Although these striking claims almost seemed like something out of a satirical Monty Python sketch, Taubes’ credibility and that of his scientific sources appeared very solid, and the 67 page bibliography of his thick 2007 national bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories contained some 1,500 entries. As an ignorant layman encountering those surprising ideas for the first time, I hardly put great faith in my own judgment, but as far as I could tell, the case he made seemed a very solid and persuasive one, especially his arguments about the dangers of sugar.
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Taubes’ book had been reviewed in the Times by Gina Kolata, the newspaper’s longtime medical reporter, and while not entirely negative, her verdict was very mixed. The journalist was so casually skeptical of some of his sweeping conclusions that she even closed her piece with the dismissive sentence “I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced.” The byline mentioned that she herself had published Rethinking Thin earlier that same year, so I decided to read it in order to get her side of the story.
I wasn’t terribly impressed. Whereas Taubes had provided an exhaustive, massively-documented discussion of the history and science of nutrition issues, Kolata’s rather thin volume—perhaps one-quarter as long—was mostly just casual reportorial journalism. She told the personal stories of a group of volunteers trying to lose weight as participants in a scientific test comparing the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet with the standard low-calorie approach favored by the medical establishment, a test that ultimately yielded inconclusive results.
I did find some interest in her scanty coverage of the broader issues, especially her mention that Taubes’ original 2002 Times Magazine cover-story had provoked enormous secondary media coverage, producing a huge if temporary wave of renewed popularity for that Atkins diet. But I doubted that her book had attracted more than a small fraction of the publishing advance, sales, or attention of Taubes’ own, released that same year, so her criticism of the latter might have partly been driven by the professional jealousy that some had suggested. I also happened to notice that one of her very recent Times articles reported new findings that vindicated Taubes’ sugar analysis, so perhaps after a dozen years she had now substantially shifted over to his once-controversial position.
Taubes’ article had heavily discussed the eponymous diet of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, whose enormously popular regimen based upon a low-carb, high-fat approach had directly challenged the low-fat orthodoxy of our nutritional establishment during the 1970s and 1980s. So I decided to read the original Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which had sold a mammoth 6 million copies after its 1972 release, and found it much better than I expected given how heavily it had always been ridiculed and condemned by the medical establishment at the time it appeared.
Roughly one-third of Atkins’ pages were taken up with suggested meal-plans and I skipped those, leaving just a couple of hundred paperback pages of main text. These hardly provided the detail of Taubes’ thick volume, and the book lacked a bibliography or almost any source-notes. But it did provide much of the same scientific and historical narrative, explaining where and when our academic establishment had supposedly gone so terribly wrong, and Taubes’ exhaustive later research seemed to confirm nearly all of the trailblazing claims that Atkins had made 35 years earlier.
Sugar as a Dangerous Metabolic Toxin?
Much like Atkins, Taubes in his original 2002 Times Magazine article had warned of carbohydrates in general, comparing their potentially harmful impact on insulin secretion with that of relatively innocuous fats. But the science journalist then spent additional years of research before publishing his 2007 book, and by that point his focus had somewhat shifted to the particularly pernicious role of sugar, arguing that its fructose molecules might damage the liver, thereby leading to the disruption of insulin regulation and possible diabetes.
Taubes’ shift in emphasis became much more forceful in 2011 when he published another long cover-story in the Times Magazine focused entirely upon sugar. He drew upon the scientific findings of various medical experts to make the shocking case that this simple, common carbohydrate was actually a chronic toxin, whose widespread heavy use in processed foods probably explained many of our growing public health problems, notably including both obesity and diabetes.
- Is Sugar Toxic?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • April 13, 2011 • 6,500 Words
A few years later, he published The Case Against Sugar, his 2017 follow up volume on that subject, which I once again found very detailed and comprehensive, and I strongly concurred with his change in focus.
Following Atkins, his original article had suggested that our 10,000 year history of agriculture had probably been insufficient to adjust our digestive system to handle the large quantities of carbohydrates that had become the mainstay of our diet, and this explained so many of our dietary problems. But while I considered that theory possible, I was somewhat skeptical since 400 generations seemed a reasonably long time to produce the necessary digestive adaptations, and indeed half that length had been sufficient to spread the genes for lactose tolerance across most of Europe’s population.
But our heavy consumption of sugar was entirely different. Although that simple foodstuff had only become a significant component of our diet in the last couple of centuries, it now provided some 15-20% of all our daily calories, rendering it an obvious suspect as something that might injure our health.
Indeed, in one of his interviews, he suggested that sugar was likely more harmful than tobacco, and had probably killed more Americans than smoking ever had.
The notion that ordinary sugar was actually a chronic metabolic toxin seemed absolutely shocking to me. But the case Taubes made was so strikingly plausible and solidly documented that it became the central theme of my own article on nutrition.
- American Pravda: Is Sugar the Deadliest White Powder Drug?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 28, 2024 • 5,900 Words
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After I published my piece on the possibly harmful effects of sugar, several individuals pointed me towards a classic book from a half-century ago making exactly that same argument, prompting me to order and read it. Sugar Blues by William Dufty was released in 1975 and with 1.6 million copies in print had apparently become wildly popular and influential in certain nutritional circles, so much so that it has its own Wikipedia page. But my own careful reading left me very unimpressed.
The text only ran a couple of hundred short paperback pages, and much of it consisted of exactly the sort of nutritional crankery that I had always assumed dominated this subject. Dufty began by explaining that sugar consumption had terribly injured his own health, then suggested that sugar was responsible for a laundry list of various human ailments, including schizophrenia and other forms of insanity, the bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cancer, and scurvy, even identifying having a sweet tooth with heroin addiction.
Dufty was a musician by profession, with no medical nor scientific training, and none of his extreme claims had any solid evidence behind them. So if I’d read this book months or years ago, I simply would have rolled my eyes at the early chapters of his jeremiad and automatically dismissed all of his later material, much of which actually seemed to be correct and reasonable. Those flaws were so serious that despite the enormous sales, I wonder if his book actually did more harm than good by filling the public health case against sugar with so much nonsense that it alienated any medical experts who considered it.
Towards the end of his text, the author briefly mentioned a book entitled Sweet and Deadly originally published several years earlier by British physician John Yudkin, a longtime professor of nutrition at London University, and Dufty devoted a couple of pages to the latter’s claim that sugar consumption might be related to ulcers. But although Yudkin’s book—released in America as Pure, White, and Deadly—apparently sold only a small fraction of Dufty’s copies and had been out of print for decades, I discovered that it made exactly the evidentiary case that its much more popular counterpart had badly botched.
Prof. Yudkin had already become somewhat familiar to me from the articles and books written by Gary Taubes, who told his story. Yudkin had been one of the earliest important figures warning of the dangers of sugar, but despite his considerable academic stature and expertise, his analysis had largely been disregarded and his work ultimately forgotten. Reading Yudkin’s short but trailblazing book certainly confirmed his prescience on that vital subject, with so much of his material anticipating the same arguments much later made by his epigones, including his suggestion that the fructose component of sugar was probably responsible for the health problems.
Yudkin emphasized the enormous growth in sugar usage in the West and the rest of the world, noting that global production had increased by nearly a factor of 50 between 1800 and 1900, and then grew by almost another factor of 10 by 1982. If worldwide consumption of a food product rose nearly 500-fold over a couple of centuries and a variety of strange new health problems suddenly appeared, suspecting that those two trends might be connected hardly seemed unreasonable.
In the Introduction to his revised 1986 edition, Yudkin quoted a scientist strongly supportive of the sugar industry who explained that sugar now provided 10-30% of an American’s total daily calories, averaging around 15-20%, but characterized that as “moderate” consumption. According to a later study, most Americans got 18% of their calories from sugar but the figure was as high as 40% among Iowa teenagers. So a food product almost never previously eaten in significant quantities had suddenly become a very large part of our daily diet, surely rendering it a prime suspect in any new ailments.
Yudkin certainly believed that such high levels of sugar consumption were dangerous, citing various epidemiological and research studies suggesting that it resulted in liver and kidney damage, which in turn led to obesity and diabetes, as well as tooth decay and numerous other negative health consequences. He regarded all this evidence as being so strong that his first chapter contained a rather remarkable assertion that he italicized for emphasis:
…if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.
Although Yudkin was appropriately cautious about drawing a causal link, he also noted that certain types of cancer had become much more frequent in recent years alongside the heavy consumption of sugar, with the international statistics raising suspicions that those trends were directly connected. For example, the five countries with the highest rates of breast cancer deaths in older women were exactly the same five countries with the highest sugar consumption, ranked in almost identical order, while the same was also true for the five countries lowest in such deaths and sugar consumption, once again in similar order. Likewise, the incidence for cancer of the large intestine and breast cancer both had moderately high international correlations with sugar consumption.
Yudkin’s account also described the well-funded and very energetic lobbying effects of the sugar industry. These even included exerting financial pressure upon his own academic institution and launching media campaigns to dispute or discredit any accusations made against its product, such as those provided in his book. Big Sugar had also undertaken aggressive attempts to ban any competing artificial sweeteners such as cyclamates and saccharine.
Based upon the story he told, one might even easily suspect that in those pre-Internet days the obscurity that eventually befell Yudkin’s own important research findings may have partially been due this sort of concerted corporate pressure exerted on the media and the academic community.
Dr. Robert Lustig on the Dangers of Sugar
Gary Taubes’ 2011 Times Magazine cover-story on the harmful aspects of sugar attracted huge attention, and the following year Yudkin’s long-forgotten book was republished more than 35 years after its previous edition. The leading medical source that Taubes cited and relied upon had been Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist specializing in childhood obesity at the UCSF’s highly-regarded School of Medicine who had spent years researching the health risks from sugar. Lustig provided an Introduction to Yudkin’s new 2012 edition, explaining how surprised he had been in 2008 when he discovered that long-forgotten but prophetic work and the difficulty he had faced in even locating a copy, declaring that he had actually been a Yudkin disciple without ever realizing it.
In that handful of pages, Lustig explained that beginning in the 1950s, Yudkin’s Sugar Hypothesis of obesity and cardiovascular illness had been vigorously opposed by the competing Fat Hypothesis of Dr. Ancel Keys, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, leading to a bitter international academic feud. By the 1970s, several major research studies seemed to conclusively settle the question in favor of the latter explanation, contributing to the academic eclipse and occlusion of Yudkin’s theories on sugar. However, according to Lustig, later and larger studies ultimately deflated those earlier ones, but these came only after Yudkin had already left the scene and been largely forgotten.
That same year Lustig published Fat Chance, his own national bestseller, discussing all these same issues at far greater length, and I found it extremely informative and persuasive.
In his Introduction, the author explained that he only began to deal with the issue of obesity very reluctantly, fifteen years into his medical career. This book had appeared a dozen years ago in 2012, but by that time a full quarter of American children were already obese, indicating that something had obviously gone extremely wrong in our national public health policies.
According to the official narrative, obesity was a consequence of personal life-style choices, such as lack of exercise, but Lustig quickly noted that this condition and all the associated health problems had become widespread among children as young as five, with an obesity epidemic even among infants just six months old. So it seemed much more likely that some dietary factor was responsible.
The populations of other countries influenced by American eating habits such as fast food had been following that same unfortunate trajectory, with Britain, Australia, and Canada close behind us in the obesity of their children, while France, South Korea, and even China had also seen rapid increases in that condition.
Moreover, Lustig argued that obesity itself was less the real concern rather than merely being a highly-visible marker for a package of serious health problems that he labeled “the metabolic syndrome.” These included high blood pressure and diabetes, which together led to much higher death rates among adults. He claimed that the key factor behind all of these conditions seemed to be the malfunctioning of the insulin hormonal system, with the likely cause being liver damage due to heavy sugar consumption, exactly as Yudkin had originally warned decades earlier.
Digestible carbohydrates constitute our main food source, and they are classified either as starches or sugars. The former consist of long chains of the glucose molecules that all our cells burn for energy, and are therefore generally harmless. But sugars are half glucose and half fructose, and that latter, much sweeter molecule can only be metabolized by the liver, so ingesting too much overloads that organ and can result in a fatty build-up that damages the tissue, similar to the cirrhosis of the liver found in alcoholics. Such liver damage disrupts the insulin system, causing obesity and other associated health problems.
During the late 1970s, public concerns that our diet was too heavy in sugar had led food companies to begin replacing that additive with “High Fructose Corn-Syrup” (HFCS). The latter compound was slightly sweeter than ordinary sugar and only half the cost, thereby raising profit margins, so by the late 1990s it had become our main sweetener. But HFCS was virtually identical to sugar in its chemical composition except being slightly higher in its harmful fructose component and therefore even worse for human health.
Although Lustig drew heavily upon numerous academic journal articles and research studies to build his case, he boldly summarized their conclusions in a much more forthright and direct manner. He argued that fructose was both a mildly addictive substance and also a chronic human toxin, as were all the various types of sugars that contained it. And although fructose was chemically classified as a carbohydrate, the liver actually metabolized it as a fat, so it could be regarded as falling into both those different categories.
Until the last couple of centuries, the human intake of sugar had been completely negligible, so it was hardly surprising that our digestive system failed to cope with the enormous quantities we were now ingesting, resulting in our numerous health problems.
Once we recognize that sugar—or rather its fructose component—constitutes our main dietary problem, our evaluation of different foods and beverages is completely transformed.
For example, it has long been widely understood that heavily sugared soft-drinks are bad for our health, and in recent years the media has often portrayed Coca Cola and its rivals as a major source of our obesity problems. But I’d guess that at least 98% of the public regards natural fruit juices as an ideal alternative, with their consumption even being encouraged by government food programs.
However, Lustig pointed out that this was total nonsense. Although nothing might seem more healthful than freshly-squeezed orange juice, the unfortunate truth is that calorie for calorie or ounce for ounce, fruit juice is actually higher in dangerous fructose than sugary sodas and therefore worse for our health. Indeed, the author opened his first chapter with the story of a young boy from an impoverished Latino family whose extreme obesity was due to his very heavy consumption of orange juice, which his mother had naively encouraged because she assumed it was good for him.
According to Lustig, eating most whole fruits themselves—whether oranges, apples, or pears—is generally harmless because their fructose is surrounded by a thick layer of indigestible fiber, greatly slowing its digestion and therefore putting much less pressure on the liver. But using a blender to create the fruit “smoothies” so beloved by many health-food adherents shears away those cellulose fibers and allows the very rapid absorption of the fructose. So the result is something just as harmful as fruit juice itself, and for similar reasons, applesauce falls into the same dangerous category.
I’ve always liked natural orange juice and was shocked that Lustig described it as actually worse for our health than Coca Cola, but the endocrinologist made a very persuasive case.
Some of the statistics cited by Lustig were quite remarkable. He explained that by 2012 the average American was ingesting 130 pounds of sugar each year, amounting to more than a pound every three days, up from just 40 pounds per year in the 1980s, and that 33% of such sugar came from beverages, with sodas foremost in that category.
When the FDA first began to classify food additives in 1958, sugar had been declared entirely safe due to its natural origins and long use rather than as the result of any sort of testing or scientific analysis, while political pressure later ensured that the same “officially safe” designation was applied to HFCS, once again without any testing. As a consequence, those compounds could be added in unlimited quantities to any food product, and since they generally improved the taste, this was so widely done that of the 600,000 food items today sold in the U.S. fully 80% are laced with added sugar. So finding a food product without added sugar is actually much more difficult than not.
Lustig described the huge fiscal consequences. Our government spent $20 billion per year subsidizing corn and soybean crops, with much of the former used to produce HFCS. Meanwhile, the public health costs due to the resulting medical problems probably totaled another couple of hundred billion dollars per year. So taxpayers paid to produce more of the product that massively inflated our national health costs.
Lustig made the very useful analogy that sugar—or more precisely its fructose component—is actually quite a lot like alcohol, certainly not poisonous in the normal sense of the word or even harmful in limited amounts, but a chronic metabolic toxin when ingested in large quantities over long periods of time. Indeed, given that both fructose and alcohol must be metabolized by the liver, over-consumption of either typically results in similar damage to that vital organ. However, alcohol is also metabolized by the brain while fructose is not, so only the former results in drunkenness and some other particular health consequences are different. But otherwise the analogy is an apt one, and he noted that alcohol is produced by fermenting sugar, the main difference being that the analogous first-stage transformation of sugar itself instead occurs inside our bodies during digestive processing.
As described in such metaphorical terms, our food companies have spent decades quietly adding the equivalent of large quantities of alcohol to most of our processed foods and beverages, including those given to children and infants, and American health has severely deteriorated as a consequence. In somewhat exaggerated terms, the food industry has been secretly dosing most of our population from youngsters to the elderly with a pint of whiskey each day, so should we really be so surprised that our entire population has developed such serious medical problems?
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Lustig’s research had been a central source for Taubes’ writings on sugar, and the journalist explained that he had discovered it because of a very compelling public lecture that the endocrinologist had given on the subject in 2009, entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” By 2011 it had already accumulated some 800,000 views on YouTube, for the first time informing much of our public about those important issues.
In the years since then, that video has gone super-viral, with its 25 million views possibly ranking it as the second most popular academic lecture in the history of the Internet, only exceeded by Prof. John Mearsheimer’s famous 2015 presentation on the underlying causes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In his talk, Lustig covered much the same material as he did in his 2012 book, and I would highly recommend it to those who prefer absorbing their information in that format.
The year after Lustig’s book appeared, he gave a follow-up lecture on the same subject that has racked up 7.2 million views, and is also definitely worth watching.
Quite a number of Lustig’s later video presentations and interviews are easily available on YouTube, totaling many millions of additional views, and I’ve certainly benefited from watching several of these, including this one:
Decades ago, the important research analysis of a top nutritional expert such as Yudkin had been confined to a narrow circle of his academic peers, perhaps allowing its easy suppression by the media pressure of hostile corporate sugar lobbyists. But the creation of the Internet, together with its video platforms and social media distribution channels, has transformed our informational landscape, substantially leveling the playing field between a single determined researcher and powerful, multi-billion-dollar corporations.
Ironically enough, in one of his later talks, Lustig mentions that he had not even been aware that his original, super-viral lecture on sugar was even being recorded, so only chance circumstance brought him the enormous resulting public attention, which in turn probably prompted him to write his book and allowed it to become an influential national bestseller.
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The combined impact of best selling books, high profile articles in top newspapers, and viral video lectures can sometimes sway important political leaders. Probably as a consequence of all this media coverage, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a 2012 city-wide ban on the sale of large, sugary beverages as a means of countering the obesity epidemic. On many major health campaigns of the past such as restrictions on public smoking, our largest metropolis had served as an important bell-weather, so his political project soon inspired similar efforts elsewhere in the country. This greatly alarmed the soda industry, which feared the momentum of an unstoppable national trend, leading it to quickly mobilize opposition forces, including longstanding political allies such as the NAACP
Unfortunately for Bloomberg’s hopes, polls soon revealed that a large majority of New Yorkers were opposed to his proposal, and although the mayor’s hand-picked Health Board approved the ban, the order was struck down by a judge just before it was scheduled to take effect, with subsequent appeals failing.
The collapse of this effort took the wind out of the sails of many copycat campaigns around the country, while also demonstrating that even a multi-billionaire elected official faced huge difficulties in enacting such dietary measures. And if Bloomberg had been nutritionally consistent and included fruit juices in his ban, he surely would have faced a gigantic political revolt and never even gotten to first base with his proposal.
Although I’d casually followed the Bloomberg controversy in the newspapers, I’d been totally ignorant of the underlying nutritional science, so like most of the public I’d vaguely assumed that the soda ban was merely a typically foolish example of nanny-state overreach, while believing that our growing national obesity was mostly due to such personal sins as gluttony and sloth. This probably reflected the poor quality of the scientific coverage of that issue in even the elite liberal media, perhaps partly due to the influence of industry lobbyists.
The False Concerns Over Dietary Salt
Although the dangers of a diet high in animal fats had been the most frequent warning I had casually absorbed from the media over the decades, some other major dietary risks were often also mentioned. We were warned against consuming too much salt, which supposedly caused high blood pressure, possibly leading to strokes and heart attacks. Nutritionists and food companies seemed to agree about this danger, with the former often recommending a low-salt diet and the latter boasting that their products were low in salt or “low-sodium,” which amounted to the same thing since salt was sodium-chloride. But after I published my original article focusing on fats and sugar, a reader suggested a book on that other nutritional topic, and it provided a very different perspective.
The Salt Fix was published in 2017 and the author was Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a Cardiovascular Research Scientist working at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, who also served as associate editor of the medical journal BMJ Open Heart. These seemed like very solid professional credentials and the back cover of his book was studded with glowing endorsements by prominent medical doctors who focused on nutritional matters, reinforcing his credibility. The book was relatively short, running only a couple of hundred pages, but the author made a highly persuasive case that everything the media had always told me about the dangers of salt was almost entirely wrong, and indeed the opposite of the truth.
DiNicolantonio emphasized the crucial point that properly functioning human kidneys were extremely effective at eliminating excess salt from the body, so that even if someone ingested five or perhaps even ten times as much salt as the body required, the surplus would easily be flushed out in the urine, doing no harm at all to the human metabolism. Individuals suffering from serious kidney damage might need to be much more careful in what they ate, but they would obviously be facing numerous other health problems as well. So for ordinary people, concerns about too salty a diet made absolutely no sense, and indeed the author believed that the recommended daily allowance promoted by the government was far too low, perhaps half of what was necessary for optimal health, with too little salt raising the heart rate and therefore actually increasing the risk of a heart attack.
In my earlier readings, I’d discovered that a half-century of American nutritional policy regarding dietary fat had largely been based upon a tiny number of very doubtful research studies, and according to Dr. DiNicolantonio, exactly the same was the case regarding our widespread concerns about salt, with the opening sentences of his first chapter summarizing his dramatic claims:
For more than forty years, our doctors, the government, and the nation’s leading health associations have told us that consuming salt increases blood pressure and thus causes chronic high blood pressure.
Here’s the truth: there was never any sound scientific evidence to support this idea.
DiNicolantonio’s broader dietary views were closely aligned with those of Lustig and others, whose journal articles he cited, and the first page of his Introduction made this clear:
In fact, for most of us, more salt would be better for our health rather than less.
Meanwhile, the white crystal we’ve demonized all these years has been taking the fall for another, one so sweet that we refused to believe it wasn’t benign. A white crystal that, consumed in excess, can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease: not salt, but sugar.
Quite powerful circumstantial evidence supported his conclusion. For example, during the decades following the 1930s, salt consumption in America was probably stable or even declining while sugar consumption rose dramatically and during that period deaths from heart attacks had doubled, strongly suggesting which of the two white powders was likely responsible.
One very interesting aspect of the campaign against salt was that—just like the campaign against fatty foods—much of it seemed to have been quietly funded and orchestrated by the sugar industry, with the author arguing that this powerful lobby sought to minimize any attention given to the obvious dangers of its own product by secretly working to deflect public health concerns towards various other dietary components. One particularly striking 2013 academic review article revealed that over 80% of research studies having a food industry conflict-of-interest found no connection between sugary beverages and weight gain or obesity, while over 80% of unconflicted studies did.
Meanwhile, the evidence against salt seemed almost non-existent. The author made the telling point that in past centuries salt consumption in various European countries was probably far higher than today, perhaps a factor of 4-7 times greater, but without any evidence of major ill-effects on health. Meanwhile, the limited evidence indicated that hypertension in America had tripled over the last hundred years even though our salt intake had remained relatively stable during most of this period, hardly suggesting that it was responsible.
International comparisons told the same story. South Koreans ate a high salt diet but had some of the world’s lowest rates of hypertension, heart disease, and cardiovascular deaths. The lowest rates of death from coronary heart disease were found in that country along with Japan and France, all having very high salt diets, but with relatively little sugar.
Sugar as the Cause of Metabolic Syndrome Illnesses
Almost a decade after his earlier book, Lustig published Metabolical in 2021, which broadened and deepened his previous analysis, while incorporating years worth of additional research and data. Given his far greater prominence and the extent to which his claims about the massive health dangers from our heavy sugar consumption had gradually become accepted in many mainstream circles, I wasn’t surprised that the back cover of his book was filled with glowing endorsements by prominent medical writers and journalists. Meanwhile, the front cover carried similar praise by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, someone whose opinions I take very seriously.
With his reputation now much more solidly established and having become fully convinced of his own nutritional analysis, Lustig didn’t mince any words in his new volume. In the very first paragraph of his text he declared that the processed food that we eat amounted to “a plate of poison.”
While I’m not sure I would have put matters in such extremely dramatic terms, if his claims were correct that sugar was a chronic metabolic toxin responsible for so many of our serious health problems and that processed-food companies had quietly added it to 80% of everything that we eat, his basic point seemed not so unreasonable.
Near the beginning of his first chapter he emphasized that we have obviously been doing something very, very wrong in our public health efforts:
The US has the best doctors, hospitals, and medical technologies, the most innovative surgeries, the best and newest drugs, and spends the most per capita on healthcare of all the countries on the globe.
Are Americans healthier? Do we enjoy better healthcare? Do we live longer? The answer to each of these questions is an unequivocal and emphatic no. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; Americans have the worst health outcomes of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, the thirty-seven richest countries)…
No doubt, of all the OECD countries, the US is the sickest.
He illustrated this total mismatch between healthcare expenditures and health outcomes in the striking graph used near the beginning of this article, showing our own country’s complete divergence from most of the rest of the developed world.
Lustig argued that the main cause of America’s severe health problems has been a package of chronic, non-contagious illnesses that he calls “the metabolic syndrome,” including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all of which involved abnormal metabolic processing in various organs of the body.
Some of the trends he cited were striking. For example, when he attended medical school in 1976, diabetes had been a very rare illness, almost entirely confined to a small fraction of those over 65, with its total prevalence being just 2.5%. But the latest CDC statistics show that it is now found in 11.6% of all Americans, representing a rise of more than 350%, and a similar though much more gentle increase has also occurred worldwide from a much lower base.
In 1980, 30% of all Americans suffered from a chronic illness and today the figure was 60%. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, over the last half-century, the share of our GDP spent on healthcare had tripled from 6% in 1970 to 17.9% today.
Some of the main chronic illnesses he mentioned were very strongly associated with obesity, so it seemed obvious that they were diet-related. But much more controversially, he suggested that the same might also be true of others, including certain forms of obesity-related cancer, autoimmune diseases, dementia, and even some types of mental illness, all of which had increased enormously during this same period while striking much younger individuals. Although the mutations leading to the appearance of such cancers were probably random or due to other factors, he cited solid evidence that the subsequent cancerous growth may be due to metabolic malfunctioning caused by diet, and the very rapid worldwide increase of Alzheimer’s disease suggested something similar.
Lustig argued that insulin system dysfunction may be the primary factor behind this entire package of metabolic syndrome illnesses, with obesity merely being the most common, highly-visible marker of the condition rather than the underlying causal factor. Therefore, in his opinion obesity constituted a “red herring,” merely a symptom rather than the cause and focusing upon it had distracted us from the true factors responsible. In support of this controversial analysis, he noted that while 80% of the obese had those health problems, 20% were actually metabolically healthy, while 40% of those suffering from metabolic syndrome illnesses were not obese.
According to Lustig, the prevalence of these metabolic illnesses had reached absolutely alarming proportions, with a remarkable 88% of Americans afflicted with these conditions irrespective of weight. For example, non-alcoh0lic fatty liver disease had become the leading cause of liver transplants, and although it had been unheard of prior to 1980, 40% of all American adults now suffered from it. Dementia cost our country $290 billion per year, with attempts to find a drug to cure it resulting in 146 failed trials.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, Lustig angrily declared that “Modern Medicine is a racket,” with so many of the treatments and drugs it lucratively marketed being essentially aimed at treating these individual illnesses or symptoms rather than focusing on the fundamental underlying cause; and I think his point was a reasonable one. Insulin injections helped manage diabetes and various medications controlled high blood pressure, but these merely ameliorated such major health problems without addressing why the latter had increased so rapidly over the last couple of generations.
His book was published in 2020, and in the last several years our weight loss industry has been completely transformed by the release of GLP-1 injection drugs. Although their cost runs in the range of $1,000 per month or more, they are already being used by 12% of Americans, yielding an enormous domestic market worth nearly $50 billion per year. But although these drugs successfully reduce weight and may therefore alleviate some of the related health problems, Lustig has argued that they should not distract us from locating and removing the deeper underlying cause of all these health issues.
Lustig has become best known for his focus on the dangers of sugar, and he noted that inedible dietary fiber played an important mitigating role by preventing its rapid absorption, thereby cushioning any potentially harmful impact upon the liver. This explained why the fructose in whole fruit was relatively harmless while the fructose in fruit juice was not.
But he also emphasized that we needed to eat sufficient fiber in order to maintain the health of our microbiome, the trillions of bacteria that symbiotically coexist inside our intestines. He explained that these microorganisms normally feed upon the dietary fiber that we ingest, but if that supply is lacking, they may instead begin digesting the mucin layer that protects our intestinal cells, leading to severe health problems. So fiber is beneficial in both these ways, explaining its importance in our diet. Unfortunately, fiber also tends to make the long-term storage of food more difficult, and for that reason it is usually removed from processed foods, so many Americans now get much too little of it in their diet.
Our media and health advocates regularly denounce our diet for being so heavy in such “processed foods,” but to a large extent I think that term is merely shorthand for foods in which the fiber has been removed and sugar added. Those are the underlying problems, and obfuscating that issue with a vaguer and more general term can have negative consequences. For example, almost nobody would describe freshly-squeezed orange juice as a “processed food,” but according to Lustig it is just as harmful as the worst of those.
For decades our media has regularly issued dietary warnings and one reason I’d never paid much attention was that they generally seemed so diffuse and scattered, cautioning against so many different types of foods on a rotating basis without usually providing a simple focus. If we are told that a very long list of different nutrients are bad for our health, there’s a natural tendency to throw up our arms and simply ignore the entire problem.
For example, my local Palo Alto newspaper runs a syndicated Health column, and although I rarely glance at it, a few days ago I did so, with the subject being the prevention of strokes. Aside from describing the nature of strokes and suggesting reasonable exercise, some nutritional guidelines were provided. Readers were told that obesity and high blood pressure were important risk factors, and as a consequence they should limit their intake of fatty foods, cholesterol, red meats, saturated fats, and processed foods in general. The danger of consuming too much sugar was certainly included in that laundry list, but mixed in with so many other dietary warnings that the impact was greatly diluted, and in the past I never would have paid much attention to it.
On a far grander scale, this weekend’s Wall Street Journal devoted the first two pages of its weekly Review section to a long article on the unhealthy foods responsible for our terrible epidemic of chronic diseases, with the authors being two former high-ranking public health officials. Although sugar led their list of dietary culprits, numerous others were also named, including salt, red meat, processed meat, refined grains, and fats. Sugary soft drinks were a top target, with a soda tax offered as the solution, along with restrictions on ultra-processed foods. But once again I think that singling out so many different villains and priorities greatly lessened the impact, while no one reading the article would have ever suspected that natural fruit juices were actually higher in sugar than the regularly demonized Coke and Pepsi, and therefore worse for our health.
In sharp contrast, Lustig’s nutritional mantra, regularly repeated throughout his book, was a very simple one: “Protect the liver and feed the gut.” The leading source of liver damage is the fructose component of sugar, while dietary fiber both protects the liver and feeds the gut, so those seemed the most important items upon which to focus, a relatively simple action plan to take away from a book running more than 400 pages long and containing over 1,000 reference notes.
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Aside from diagnosing our public health problems, Lustig also effectively traced their origins. Although sugar has been eaten for thousands of years, he explained that it may have suddenly become dangerous just in the last couple of centuries due to purification processing. As he pointed out, Coca leaves are a useful medicine in Bolivia but can be purified into the concentrated drug of cocaine. Opium poppies have also had a medicinal role but heroin is a dangerous drug. Caffeine is harmless when taken in coffee, but can be concentrated into potentially dangerous weight-loss drugs. So in ancient times sugar was a lightly-sprinkled spice and still remained merely a condiment during the Industrial Revolution, but in its modern, highly processed and concentrated form, it had actually become a potentially dangerous drug, and a moderately addictive one.
Lustig also explained the important role of corporate lobbying and PR efforts in our public health disaster. He drew a clear and persuasive analogy between the nefarious activities of Big Tobacco and those of Big Sugar, noting that contrary to what one might assume, the former was actually modeled upon the latter rather than the other way round, with the tobacco industry hiring a top sugar lobbyist to launch its efforts in 1954.
As concerns over rapidly rising obesity and related health problems escalated, the sugar industry became very successful at deflecting the blame unto all sorts of other products such as fatty foods and salt, so those became the central villains of the standard nutritional narratives promoted by our government and media. Sugar-funded studies suggested that sodas or desserts ranked below French fries and potato chips as a cause of weight gain, but they omitted the fact that both ketchup and chips were actually very heavy in sugar. In fact, a more realistic study seemed to show that of all the items offered on the McDonalds menu, purchase of the sugary drinks correlated most closely with the added weight of the customers.
Researchers and investigative journalists eventually uncovered documents revealing that the Sugar Lobby had spent decades secretly funding scientific researchers whose studies pointed to all culprits except themselves.
An important point that Lustig emphasized was that although Big Food was huge and enormously profitable, the fiscal externalities it generated were actually far larger. The total gross annual revenue of the food industry, including groceries and restaurants, was $1.46 trillion per year with a 45% profit of $657 billion. But US medical costs were $3.5 trillion per year, and Lustig argued that 75% of these or $2.67 trillion were food-related chronic diseases. According to his estimate, if we could merely roll back our rate of those diseases to their 1970 levels, we could conceivably save 75% or $1.9 trillion each year.
However, such success would hardly be in the interest of much of our pharmaceutical industry, whose $771 billion in annual revenue with 21% gross profit heavily depended upon the existence of those chronic illnesses. As Lustig puts it:
You do the math: between food and pharma, you’ve got $2.1 trillion per year going down a rathole—into shareholder pockets—while the public gets sicker and healthcare is collapsing.
Evaluating Our Foods Based Upon the Sugar Metric
As an ignorant layman, I had begun my exploration of these nutritional issues skeptical that any of the science would be solid enough to convince me of anything dramatically different than my casual understanding that natural foods were generally healthier and that a balanced diet was better. But after reading ten books and numerous lengthy articles on the subject by knowledgeable experts who drew upon a vast quantity of scientific research, I have concluded that I was wrong.
The nutritional analysis of Dr. Robert Lustig, Gary Taubes, and numerous others seems solidly established, making a very strong case that the fructose component of sugar has been the central factor behind so many of our national health problems.
With both fat and salt generally exonerated, and sugar instead unmasked as our true dietary villain, many of the inescapable conclusions are quite remarkable and more than a few of them almost read like satire.
I discovered a handy website called Nutrionix.com that provides the standard nutritional facts for some 1.2 million common food items, and checking some of that copious information produced many surprises.
Probably no food outlet has been as heavily demonized in the media as McDonalds, whose ultra-processed burgers, heavy in animal fat and salt, are always portrayed as damaging to our health, with that fast-food chain and its many competitors widely blamed for our obesity epidemic.
Indeed, McDonalds food was considered so harmful that it became the subject of Super Size Me, a low-budget 2004 film by the late documentarian Morgan Spurlock that received an academy award nomination and grossed $20 million worldwide, and I recently watched it on Amazon Prime.
Spurlock spent 30 straight days eating only McDonalds meals, leading to a massive weight gain of nearly 25 pounds and numerous other health problems. The physicians who were regularly monitoring his condition were shocked by his rate of physiological decline, warning him that his liver seemed to be suffering the sort of rapid deterioration that might be expected in someone who was drinking himself to death.
All of this was attributed to his heavy diet of Big Macs and other McDonalds fast food but only at the very end were we told that he had been consuming a full pound of sugar each day. Those 450 grams were a mammoth quantity, three times the already dangerously high American average and almost an order-of-magnitude more than Lustig and others would regard as part of a safe diet. So under such circumstances, the damage his liver was suffering was hardly surprising. But when we investigate the source of that super-abundance of sugar, the answers we get are actually quite different than what Spurlock seemed to suggest.
Checking nutritional labels, we find that the sugar content of many of McDonalds’ most famous offerings is not high at all, including the Big Mac (9 grams), the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (10 grams), or a large order of fries (nil).
These large sandwiches run 520 to 590 total calories each, so eating four of them would total more than the 2,000 calories in a typical daily diet, while providing less than 40 grams of sugar, constituting exactly the sort of low-sugar intake that Lustig would strongly recommend. And since fries have almost no sugar, if they were included in the mix, sugar consumption would be further reduced. Even the much-vilified Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese only contains 10 grams of sugar.
All these McDonalds items are certainly high in fat and high in salt, but both those nutrients seem fairly harmless. Burgers and fries are too low in dietary fiber and may lack various vitamins, so they’re not nutritionally ideal and probably not suitable for individuals trying to maintain a strict diet, but they hardly seemed likely to damage anyone’s health. So the source of Spurlock’s massive daily intake of sugar and resulting health problems must be found elsewhere.
The culprit was the beverages with which Spurlock washed down his burgers and fries. His regular McDonalds meals came with large Cokes, each containing a whopping 77 grams of sugar, and since he often super-sized his orders, the 42 ounce Cokes he received totaled more than 100 grams of sugar, a huge amount. Nearly all of the other McDonalds beverages, whether lemonade, Sprite, or Orange Fanta, were just as heavily sugared.
If he sometimes drank a large chocolate milkshake, that came with a remarkable 106 grams of sugar, while the vanilla version was still 85 grams. Moreover, although fries are sugar-free, the ketchup most people slather on them is very high in sugar. So the dangerously unhealthy aspects of his McDonalds diet were probably somewhat different than he had assumed.
Exactly this same confusion comes up in the notorious McDonalds Happy Meals that Spurlock and so many others have denounced. Aimed at children, these typically include a hamburger, fries, and apple juice. Concerned parents might be very surprised to learn that although the hamburger and fries contain very little sugar and are probably healthy, the small container of apple juice totals 24 grams of that dangerous white powder, quite a lot for a young child. And if a health-conscious mother replaces the zero-sugar fries with the low-fat yogurt option, she may have made a serious mistake, adding another 12 grams of sugar to the meal.
A similar contrast between harmful and harmless items is found in the McDonalds Big Breakfast Meal, coming with scrambled eggs, sausage patties, hash browns, and an English muffin with real butter, totaling 650 calories but only 2 grams of sugar. However, if you add hotcakes with maple syrup, the latter is mostly pure sugar, so now your total increases by more than 20-fold to 48 grams.
Or consider that a breakfast Sausage McMuffin with Egg only contains 2 grams of sugar in its 480 calories, while the Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit has 3 grams in 460 calories. I’m sure both of these offerings horrify health-food zealots, but they seem almost entirely safe to eat. However, if you wash down either of those sandwiches with two cups of orange juice or heavily sugared coffee, you could easily add 40 or 50 grams of sugar, starting your morning by compromising your health.
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Let us now return to the hypothetical case of the two meals, one healthy and one unhealthy, with which I had opened this article.
If a young health-food-minded progressive ate a meal consisting of three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small granola bars, and two glasses of natural orange juice, his 1,000 calories would come with 169 grams of sugar, significantly more than the already dangerously high amount that the average American eats in a day, and that sort of diet would raise huge red flags about his future health.
But if a blue-collar worker contemptuous of health-food issues devoured a McDonalds Big Mac or Quarter Pounder with Cheese, an order of fries, and washed it down with a Budweiser beer, his 1,000 or so calories would only include 9 or 10 grams of the dangerous white powder, exactly the sort of very low sugar diet that Lustig and all those other nutritional experts would consider ideal.
So those two meals were indeed healthy and very unhealthy, but exactly the opposite of what our media would suggest and what nearly all Americans would assume.
Although I’ve never watched it, one of Woody Allen’s early films was Sleeper, a 1973 comedy in which the owner of a health-food shop called “the Happy Carrot” is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 200 years in the future. Among other things, he learns that science has discovered that all the foods he considered beneficial were actually dangerously harmful, while eating deep fat or steak was ideal for one’s health, as was smoking cigarettes. Although only 50 years rather than 200 years have elapsed, probably more of that reality has come to pass than Allen would ever have expected. Indeed, although carrot juice is almost the archetypical health food beverage, it’s certainly rather bad for your health, with one 16 ounce glass containing considerably more sugar than two Big Macs.
Focusing on the sugar content of foods completely transforms our understanding of everything we eat, and I’m providing a listing of various items so that readers can see the implications of adopting this particular nutritional metric:
- McDonalds Big Mac • 590 Calories • 9 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese • 520 Calories • 10 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Large Fries • 480 Calories • nil Sugar
- McDonalds Big Breakfast • 760 Calories • 3 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit Meal • 605 Calories • 3 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Sausage Biscuit with Egg • 530 Calories • 3 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Large Coke 32 fluid oz • 290 Calories • 77 gm Sugar
- McDonalds Large Chocolate Shake • 800 Calories • 106 gm Sugar
- Pepperoni Pizza slice • 570 Calories • 4 gm Sugar
- 7-Eleven 1/4 Pound Big Bite Hot Dog Sandwich • 570 Calories • 7 gm Sugar
- KFC Chicken Sandwich • 650 Calories • 6 gm Sugar
- Chili’s Classic Nachos • 1120 Calories • 8 gm Sugar
- Cinnabon Classic Roll • 884 Calories • 57 gm Sugar
- Pecan Pie Slice • 470 Calories • 29 gm Sugar
- Fruit Yogurt 6 oz • 162 Calories • 32 gm Sugar
- Oats ‘n Honey Crunchy Granola Bars • 190 Calories • 11 gm Sugar
- Orange Juice 12 fluid oz • 167 Calories • 31 gm Sugar
- Carrot Juice 16 fluid oz • 160 Calories • 22 gm Sugar
- Budweiser Beer 12 fluid oz • 145 Calories • nil Sugar
- Gatorade 20 fluid oz • 140 Calories • 34 gm Sugar
- Coffee 10 fluid oz • 3 Calories • nil Sugar
- Steak 8 oz • 614 Calories • nil Sugar
- Corn Chips 4 oz • 604 Calories • nil Sugar
- Costco Peanut Butter Chocolate Protein Bar • 190 Calories • 6 gm Sugar
- Peanut Butter 2 teaspoons • 188 Calories • 2 gm Sugar
- Rice 1 cup • 205 Calories • nil Sugar
- Reuben Sandwich • 745 Calories • 9 gm Sugar
- Nongshim Spicy Shin Noodles • 380 Calories • 3 gm Sugar
- Turkey 12 oz • 642 Calories • nil Sugar
- Stuffing 10 oz • 550 Calories • 6 gm Sugar
- Mashed Potatoes 1 cup • 237 Calories • 3 gm Sugar
- Cranberry Sauce 1 cup • 440 Calories • 88 gm Sugar
- Pumpkin Pie 1 slice • 745 Calories • 25 gm Sugar
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Over the years, the extensive reading and research for my long American Pravda series have provided numerous enormous surprises that have completely reshaped my understanding of our history and our political system. But none of those much impacted my ordinary day-to-day life. However, my recent investigation of nutritional issues has done exactly that.
I’d never paid much attention to dietary matters, vaguely assuming that most of the supposed science was too ambiguous or disputed to be worth taking seriously. I had accepted that the fifty years of continuous warnings about dietary fat were probably correct, but since I’ve always been pretty slender and didn’t usually eat fatty foods, it hardly seemed very relevant to me. In recent years, I’d encountered a continuous outcry in the media denouncing the dangers of sugary soft drinks, but since I almost never drank any of those, I paid little attention.
However, I’ve now read ten books presenting strikingly strong evidence regarding the harmful properties of sugar, coming from credible medical experts and scientific researchers, and this has been reinforced by many articles and video presentations. Taken together, this enormous body of material has completely cut through my inherent skepticism and convinced me to examine my own regular diet under this new framework.
Since I don’t like soft drinks nor eat too much fast food or sweets, I’d assumed my sugar consumption was rather low, but was surprised to discover otherwise, with the sugar contained in all sorts of processed foods being far different than I would have expected. For example, I often drank Gatorade, which I’d always assumed was a healthful sports drink, but instead discovered it was actually very heavily sugared, with roughly two-thirds the amount in Coke or Pepsi. So although my daily sugar intake was below the American average, it was still probably twice as high as the limits recommended by the medical experts I’d recently been reading.
Fortunately, fixing the problem wasn’t too difficult. I start each morning with three cups of coffee, but I’d always heaped a great deal of sugar into those, and instead minimizing that probably reduced my entire daily intake by almost one-third. Along with cutting back on Gatorade and a few other small changes here and there, I found it easy to get down to the appropriate recommended limit.
Our government and our media have spent decades prioritizing a dozen different nutritional factors, both positive and negative, some of them correct and some of them incorrect. But the very number of those different warnings and suggestions means that they become a blur and many people pay little attention. But focusing upon the single metric of sugar, a quantity easily determined for almost all food products, makes it relatively easy to improve our diet and benefit our health.
A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump Jr. ironically Tweeted out a photo of Kennedy eating a McDonalds burger and fries, suggesting that the latter had temporarily deferred his planned campaign for a nutritional diet, and that striking image drew more than 16 million views. While it’s possible that the proposed Secretary of HHS bent his dietary principles, it’s also possible that he had carefully researched that crucial issue and already discovered some of the same surprising facts I have presented in this article.
Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024
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Per the photo above the title, orange juice is bad for you as well as apple juice. Fruits are mostly healthy although they have more sugar than vegetables. But fruit juice is not fruit! They crush out the juice with all the sugar and discard the healthy remainder to create tasty sugary drink.
And a Bud is much healthier for you than a Pepsi, just don’t drink too much.
RFK Jr. has mentioned that he will battle “big sugar” i.e. Coke, Pepsi, Breyers Ice Creme, and the other sugar kings. You can’t use SNAP (food stamps) to buy alcohol or cigarettes or even diapers, but you can buy sugar foods because you are poor (yet often obese). He wants to fix this obvious problem. If you want to buy poisons to kill yourself, get a job! It is simple to limit exact items for purchase as the federal WIC program does.
This will be an epic battle since 95% of Americans will support RFK Jr (assuming they understand the truth) while the sugar kings face losing 20% of sales. I predict our corrupt Congress will side with the sugar kings and the “rights” of the poor.
Metabolic derangement can cause an overreaction to carbs of all kinds. Doesn’t anyone look at the overall picture anymore?
Our ancestors consumed sugar, plenty of it, in various forms, and most were not fat. Neither were large numbers of them getting diabetes. It wasn’t because they were supposedly exercising up a storm. It was because they were metabolically healthy and could withstand refined sugar and carbohydrates in general.
The question should be: why has the entire population become so degenerated and weak that they are now allergic or oversensitive to countless foods, both refined and unrefined? I’d look to overall toxicity, the main (though not only) culprit being endless vaccines, which for many years now has been inflicted on the most sensitive beings – babies and growing children. These poisons will mess you up in ways that no amount of sugar could.
This “blame (just about) everything on sugar or diet in general” is classic misdirection. Get people fixated on trying to change their diet – while still ingesting poisons a hundred times worse. Sugar – what an easy target.
Thanks for reading.
A million words to defend McDonalds? You’ve got to be kidding me.
TLDR.
And your example is loaded. Nobody, and I mean nobody, eats “three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.” Gah. I can feel my teeth rotting away just reading it.
You should have said “steamed vegetables and rice,” or “a mung bean sprout sandwich and lentil soup” with plain yogurt for dessert. The kind of meal hundreds of millions across the world thrive on every day.
McDonalds. Sheesh. Do you know how many vile chemicals are in their meat. Hundreds. Do you know how many bits from how many cows it takes to make one hamburger? 300.
This article is total nonsense.
RU, the expert in theoretical physics, retrovirologist extraodinaire and now the nutrition guru. Wow!
I think our Santa Clara dwelling host might be interested in this. I know that there is nothing new about old people dying but it does provide an inkling as to the damage caused to the life-expectancy of the younger.
Santa Clara County non-COVID all-cause mortality increased 50% over baseline in elderly in Q1 of 2021
All carbs are sugars, end of story.
You can get diabetes(2) or fat from eating potatoes, bread, grains and rice –just the same as from sweets like candy or fruit.
All these products greatly increase blood sugar.
RFK photo at the end, eating the meal for retards:
French Fries= starch which is glucose–pure sugar! Cooked in poison seed oil.
Hamburger bun= starch is glucose–pure sugar again!
Coke= corn syrup, sugar
That meal is entirely sugar except the one nutritious item, the miniscule hamburger patty.
My point is, all carbs add to your sugar intake.
Take a closer look at his face, which suggests an expression such as yuck – what am I supposed to with this? Notice that his hamburger has not been bitten into. I doubt there is any evidence that he actually ate it. It was apparently a coerced photo opportunity that underscored the effectiveness of Trump’s prior publicity stunt at a McDonalds outlet to mock Harris and her cheap rhetorical fabrications.
Advice on assessing bad processed foods or beverages at the grocery store: Read the label of ingredients and as a precautionary measure avoid anything with the word extract, including beer (hops extract). Since there are various means of extracting such contents, one cannot know which method was used. The result of a healthy process would use a term like cold pressed instead, for instance with regard to virgin olive oil.
You do comedy now? I laughed just a little:
When using carbs for energy – a big fat intake on top will probably also lead to obesity.
I just got back into ketosis day four. High fat/protein with less than 50g carbs per day. Plus some other magic ingredients and exercise. You burn way more fat when the liver switches over to producing ketones for energy. Probably preaching to the choir but isn’t it hilarious – the best way to lose fat is by eating unlimited fat (just less sugar/carbs) LOL.
Maybe spurts of ketosis might be good for you and your brain function plus getting rid of some of that internal organ fat.
Also – molasses the precursor to sugar, molasses on its own, unprocessed black stuff…. I thought that was actually pretty good for you as an alternative coffee sweetener for example.
Jesus usually gives out pretty good health advice btw – stay salty was one and eat plenty ocean vegetables aka fishes was another.
Just before I go: Look into the nutritional content of parsley – it will blow your mind.
And don’t forget to feed that endocannabinoid system with uh…. Cannabinoids.
By accident while at the local library trying to find a book on ants that I needed, I turned around and saw a book Eating Right To Your Blood Type, by Peter D’Adano. I picked it up and quickly scanned the chapter on Blood Type A since being a soldier, I knew my blood type. There it explained that those that have Type A and are eating wrong, have Thick Blood, gastric problems, fatigue, and chronic joint pain.
I was stunned–I had ALL of that! I gave blood at Red Cross Blood drives all the time and nurses would complain to me about how thick my blood was!!! I was sucking down Tums like mad and had terrible gastric reflux at night. I many occasions during the week of this trying to sleep. And now in my sixties, I had tremendous fatigue. And trouble breathing!
So, I checked out the book, read it and put its dietary recommendations to heart. I completely stopped by old eating habits—Everything, and I mean Everything that I loved to eat—-Was Harmful!!!! Steaks, Pork, Lobster, Shrimp, Spaghetti, mashed potatoes, Tomatoes, Vinegar—ALL was harmful. I had to do a 180.
This diet SAVED MY LIFE! I lost some three pant sizes and no weight! I could see my ripped stomach muscles! (I do hard manual labor.) The Type Blood A diet is the DEVIL’s diet! It is NO fun but I got used to it! The ONLY beneficial ‘meats’ are Fish and only certain kinds of fish–Salmon, Cod, Trout. Only Amaranth and Buckwheat.
I lost pant sizes; I have NO gastric problems whatsoever; my fatigue has lessened. (For a year, my body has gone thru shock in the change of diet, waves of fatigue that disappear.) I used to enjoy V-8 juice–that was the devils drink for me. Not anymore. Just the littlest vinegar and I feel it bad. I can stand straighter because I don’t have inflamation. My breathing is 100% better. (I used to struggle to breathe.)
I recommend this WHOLEHEARTEDLY! Type Blood A is a disease in and of itself!!! Hahahaha (because I can’t eat anything I used to enjoy) But I’m NOT going back. Occasionally now, I eat a little of my old forbidden food but I’m sticking to my Buckwheat and Salmon!!!
Equally as harmful is the replacement of animal fats with highly processed seed and vegetable oils.
There’s all kinds of shocking dietary news if you delve into it enough. Just like fluoride seems to have been foisted on people as a food additive by companies needing some way to get rid of it, and then by the dental field, there is likewise a widening array of evidence that vitamin A, including its precursor beta carotene, is also a poison.
Engineer Grant Genereux has written several fairly thick books on his findings and has also been using himself as a test subject for many years. What he writes is fairly convincing and he does detail it. Last I looked, his books were still available to read online at his website. ggenereuxdotblog.
Ron, you should do a year of McDonalds and Budweiser diet and report to us all the health benefits after. And get 3 or 4 COVID vaccine booster shots while you’re at it.
Wow. This article might be the most retarded piece of writing on this website.
Is Ron trying to dupe the goyim into killing themselves quicker?
Next in the series on health should be screens and mental health
All the focus on sugar misses the mark
It is not sugar but unsaturated fats that are implicated in the obesity.
“Following Atkins, his original article had suggested that our 10,000 year history of agriculture had probably been insufficient to adjust our digestive system to handle the large quantities of carbohydrates that had become the mainstay of our diet, and this explained so many of our dietary problems”.
In the first place, the “10,000 year” figure is widely cited as the beginning of agriculture in the Middle East. It spread very slowly, and arrived in some parts of Western Europe, for example, many thousands of years later. Not to mention the large areas inhabited by hunter-gatherers and nomads – most of the latter essentially carnivores. The tidal wave of processed flour didn’t really peak until relatively recently.
As for adjustments to the digestive system, I recommend a quicky read of Dr William Davis’ “Wheat Belly”, which explains that almost all grains are loaded with a variety of toxins. While mild – not the sort to cause dramatic instant death – these toxins gradually harm the people who eat grains for decades. Evolution would take a long time to confer immunity to them.
If one recognizes that social primates always have a dominance hierarchy, then suspicion early in primate evolutionary history, and conspiracy theories in our species, have been a sensible guide to making existential choices. What corporations put on the market for us proles to eat can be assumed a priori to be profitable for them and harmful to us. That is why the counter culture of the 1960s advocated unprocessed food and vegetable gardening.
The Big Mac has its own risks. Cancer for one.
These are results for high fat diet and cancer risk
AI Overview
A high-fat diet, particularly one rich in saturated fats, is considered a potential risk factor for several types of cancer, including colon, breast, prostate, and lung cancer, as research suggests that excessive fat intake can promote inflammation and disrupt hormonal balance, potentially leading to tumor development; however, the type of fat consumed is crucial, with unsaturated fats from plant sources generally considered less harmful than saturated fats from animal sources.
Key points about high fat diet and cancer risk:
Saturated fat is the main concern:
Studies consistently link high intake of saturated fats to increased cancer risk, especially when it comes to breast and colon cancer.
Mechanism of action:
A high-fat diet can trigger inflammation in the body through various pathways, which is considered a key factor in cancer development.
Impact on gut microbiota:
High fat intake can significantly alter the gut microbiome, potentially creating an environment conducive to cancer cell growth.
Importance of fat type:
While total fat intake matters, the type of fat is critical. Monounsaturated fats (like olive oil) and polyunsaturated fats (like omega-3 fatty acids) are generally considered protective against cancer when consumed in moderation.
“Digestible carbohydrates constitute our main food source…”
Not if we know anything about food and have any regard for our own health. As far as I personally am concerned, carbs are an occasional treat – just as alcoholic drinks are. And if over-indulged, their consequences are just as harmful.
Moreover, no human being ever needs carbohydrate as a food. All that perfect health requires is good quality protein and fat – which Nature has thoughtfully provided for us in a tasty package called “meat”.
Unfortunately, there is hardly anything that greedy liars cannot spoil, and much modern meat has been degraded by factory farming. To stay healthy, eat meat from happy animals allowed to live in their natural habitat – for cows and sheep, open grassland with essential shelter during frosts, etc. For pigs and chickens – and fish – whatever natural food they instinctively choose when in their natural environment.
“…you can buy sugar foods because you are poor (yet often obese)”.
May I clarify that a little?
You can buy sugar foods because you are poor (therefore often obese). Poor people have to buy the cheapest foods, which are almost always carbs, predominantly grains and sugar. And of course vegetable and seed oils, which are just as harmful. You want healthy fat? Eat butter or lard.
To make matters much worse, current government policy in many countries (such as the USA and the UK) is to stop us eating meat altogether (unless you count insects as “meat”) and force us to rely on cheap refined carbs. Our own governments are deliberately seeking to make us sick and shorten our lives.
I wonder what they eat in private?
Here is the story of the role of Ancel Keys in warping the science around Fats
IT’S THE INSULIN RESISTANCE, STUPID: PART 1 By Prof. Timothy Noakes
https://thenoakesfoundation.org/news/its-the-insulin-resistance-stupid-part-1
there is a complete series
And the problem withpoly unsaturated fats
https://singjupost.com/nina-teicholz-the-big-fat-surprise-at-tedxeast-full-transcript/?singlepage=1
The problem is that in the processing, polyunsaturated fats become heavily oxidised, as also happens when you fry with them.
The german scientists in the 30’s discovered smoling was bad for you and that metabolic diseases was caused by eating sugar. After the war all german science was considerred verbotten and hence the big companies and scientists wanting to make a name for themselves moved into that opening.
The obesity index is a bit of a joke though. I’m 6’2” 225, and I would qualify as overweight even though I have a 36” waist.
Those super-size sugary beverages are not only toxic, but also the highest-markup items on McDonalds’ menu. Back in the 1980s a friend and I discovered that rather than just boycotting McDonalds, we could conspire to put them out of business by ordering nothing but their discounted sandwiches. (They always had the Big Mac or fishwich or some other sandwich on sale.) By skipping the high-markup fries and desserts, and astronomical-markup sugary drinks, and buying only loss-leader sandwiches, we could slowly bankrupt them.
It was a great plan, but unfotunately the two of us just couldn’t eat enough discounted burgers to destroy their bottom line.
I would like to thank you for everything you do. Every week you present us with outstanding articles that can compete with specialist journals in terms of research and scope, and surpass everything in terms of originality and breaking taboos. Many people can only read articles with information that is illegal in large parts of the world thanks to TUR.
My interest in topics such as USS Liberty, sugar, Talmud, etc. was first piqued by reading here on TUR. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Most of all, I love how you always provide links to articles, books and videos in your articles. This allows everyone to delve deeper into the topic, depending on their taste, time and interest.
There are so many interesting authors on TUR that you can’t find anywhere else. In that respect, I’m glad to see your ideas, directly or indirectly, slowly finding their way into the mainstream. Dan Bilzerian at Pierse Morgan is the best example. You are a national treasure. Thanks Ron.
Is all yogurt bad, or just the sugary fruit laden stuff.
Being a big consumer of plain, full fat yogurt, should I check into detox?
On the link between sugar and cancer, here is a recent interesting scientific study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9775518/
“Understanding the Link between Sugar and Cancer: An Examination of the Preclinical and Clinical Evidence”
Non sequitur of the day?
WOW, WOW AND WOW, WHAT A GREAT ARTICLE, AND NOT ONLY A GREAT ARTICLE, I WISH THAT AMERICAN PRAVDA WAS MY BROTHER AND FAMILY !!
BY THE WAY I VOTED FOR JILL STEIN (THE GREATEST AND BEST OPTION FOR US PRESIDENT 2024-2028, BUT HOW EVER MOST US VOTERS ARE THE TOTAL OPPOSITE OF MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE, WHICH IS A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE OF MENTAL, PHYSICAL, SPIRITUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS FOR THE 8 BILLION HUMANS !!
I am so compatible with the feelings, thinking and philosophy of life of the writer of this article, that I even voted for Jill Stein. We the intellectual cream of this country voted for anti-war third parties, while the mind-controlled majority voted for oligarchic-plutocratic politicians who will them poor, enslaved, fat, taxed to death, over-worked to death and billed to death.
I wish that comrade Robert Kennedy Jr. might change the high-carb food-pyramid of this country into a lower-carb food-pyramid. I have exchanged a couple of comments with Robert Kennedy in Twitter, he is a very friendly person, I think his voice problem was caught by an evil vaccine, that’s why his revolution against vaccines.
Robert Kennedy personally is also into fitness. The whole Kennedy family which were a suis generis family intellectually aristocratic were also into fitness
That’s why I hope that under the next Trump administration and Robert Kennedy Jr in the Health Department, the low-carb, ketogenic diets, carnivore diets might rise in popularity. People like Dr. Mercola, Dr. Eric Berg, Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Shawn Baker, Dr. Jockers, the Youtube carnivore diet influencer Mikaela Peterson and her dad Jordan Peterson might rise in popularity, while the hegemony of those all corporations that are mass-murdering people like IHOP Pancakes, Kellogs, Nabisco, Sara Lee Cakes, Duncan Hines, Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, Mayfield Ice Creams, The Cheesecake Factory, Dunkin Donuts, Mcdonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Hersheys Chocolates, Wendys, Taco Bell, Sonix, Golden Corral (All you can eat buffets where people eat 10,000 calories in a buffet), Cicis Pizzas Buffets, Chucky Cheese Pizzas, Little Caesars, Dominos etc. will go down all, after Robert Kennedy from a position of government political power will open the minds of the masses about how evil a high-carb diet is and about how eating a high-carb diet can kill more people than all world wars combined
NOTE: In fact i have a box of Pillsbury Golden Butter, rice, bread, potatoes and Instant Cake mix and I think i will throw them away. Because both of my parents died from eating a high-carb diet that caused them cancer, heart disease, leukemia, diabetes, and glaucoma. I am also in a sort of informal war against things that kill humans (sports cars included)
We all must wage a war against every thing that kills people in this world (specially evil neoliberal corrupt plutocratic governments)
Something has to give !!
I’m glad to see you’ve come around to this point of view, Mr. Unz, and thank you for a very informative article. My recent retirement and move to rural Midwest America has been very eye opening. While the locals are friendly and certainly much more likely to lend a hand than city folk, the obesity here is shocking, especially among the young. In summer, it’s quite easy to spot the remote sugar monitoring patches on the arms of young adults who are quite obese.
These problems will be very difficult to rectify. The medical establishment makes enormous profit with chronic disease. So there is definitely no incentive for it to change.
too much sugar and too much seed oils is killing north americans, nevermind all the estrogenic chemicals in all our processed foods.
RFK could benefit every north american by banning HFCS and the hateful eight seed oils
Video Link
RFK must forget who’s boss. The profits from “big sugar” go to bankroll Israel’s mass murder of women, children, journalists, medics, aid workers and rapists. All talk, no balls.
It is appropriate to share a short interview clip with Ray Peat Phd. relative to Dr. Lustig’s portrayal of fructose as toxic and evil.
Video Link
Fruits might have been mostly healthy whe they were eaten in season or as jam, but that was long ago.
I’m diagnosed this year with Metabolic Syndrome, Leaky Gut and Fatty Liver yet haven’t used sugar on food in over 50 years, but I did eat much more more fruit than I did starchy vegetables for the last 35 years.
I agree in part, the photo and the title are not appropriate with what is stated in the article. Strictly speaking, there are no dangerous foods. The dangerous thing is the diet, that is, the dangerous food habits that exist. It’s all about balance and moderation in life.
thanks ron unz for writing on this very important topic
the drain on the medicare/medicaid system that’s happening in the US because of these issues is huge. bring on the dollar crisis already, all the pepsi drinking and doritos eating fat fucks need to die and be composted.
So, it’s not the gun lobby killing America so much as it is the food lobby and sugar industry. And now we know the real story.
Consider that the pasteurization process, i.e. heating to 145 degrees or more for varying periods of time kills the natural enzymes in fruit juices, and therefore most of it’s nutritional value. Enter “fortification”, the reintroduction of synthesized replacement nutrition for what was cooked out. Look for added sugar, it’s common.
In the “Get ’em while they’re young” department….https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/11/05/Beech-Nut-accused-of-selling-fake-apple-juice/1300531550800/
What a fckn joke this country is. A perfect example of how the mixture of capitalism, joo banking and large lobby interest are pivotal in doing things only in the name of profit, regardless of the necessary deception they must implement. One thing is for sure, and that is the american people have been deceived, preyed upon, and murdered due to incompetence and profit-driven goals for the past 50 years.
Capitalism will never work on this planet with a devolving, selfish and parasitic species like the human. This article highlights a major corrupted mess that no one will be held responsible for, and abuse of taxpayer dollars continue and more wil be needed to clean up another gov mess.
The US system is a failure, and the rich and powerful will continue the raping of amerika before our eyes, as our government, military and people sit on their thumbs thinking this is a transient event and we just need to ride it out.
At least 95% of our gov leaders could be jailed and interrogated with what we now know, or face a firing squad.
Another brilliant article — thanks, Mr. Unz! What makes articles like these even more special is that you take into consideration some of the comments on this site and incorporate them into future articles, an example being the mention of Ancel Keys, which a few commenters referenced in “Is Sugar the Deadliest White Powder Drug?”. There is so much to chew on (*wink*) in this article that I’ll probably be digesting it for a long time. I especially liked this part:
Your estimate that 95% of the educated Americans would consider the yogurt and fruit juice lunch healthier than a McDonalds lunch is a rather bold statement. Do you have any references, such as surveys, to back it up? Not that I disagree: on the contrary, I think the estimate is probably accurate, just going to show you how topsy-turvy our world has become. This upside-down view may be just another example of the fact that the “media creates our reality”, as you so often write: because of this, Americans are actually living in a false, inverted reality, the vast majority blissfully unaware that the “healthy” food they are ingesting is actually poison and may end up killing them.
The McDonald’s example is quite egregious and I was misled by that SuperSize Me documentary you mention to believe that McDonalds was super unhealthy, when I watched it soon after it came out in 2004. Your revelation that Spurlock, the director and star of the documentary, “had been consuming a full pound of sugar each day” shows that the real culprit behind his deteriorating health was not the Big Macs, but rather the amount of sugar he was ingesting.
I had already come to the same conclusion, years later, after I watched the McDonalds: McSnake Diet Movie (link below) by Cole Robinson, a “fasting coach” who is famous for his Snake Diet protocol. Cole has been maligned by the media for being a “quack”, and you probably won’t give him much credence yourself, since his credentials are not up to Harvard scientific standards. But I do hope you will give him a chance, since his conclusions about McDonalds are similar to yours above, as per these excerpts:
The reason I mention Cole Robinson is because, just as you changed your mind about the importance of changing your diet to reduce sugar — a decision that influenced your daily life — Cole and others have changed my lifestyle as regards one of the most important topics in health in general, perhaps just as important or more than your sugar discovery: FASTING. You would do your readers a great service if you could devote some time — using your unparalleled rogue academic acumen — to the study of this crucial topic: FASTING.
Video Link
Very true it is better to stick with extra virgin olive oil or butter it’s much healthier. 😊
Fucking Jews, making us eat sweets.
It’a all the garbage and snack food, along with the lack of exercise, that’s the cause of all the blubber.
When I was a kid growing up in Southern California in the 60’s and early 70’s we only drank soft drinks on birthday’s and at Christmas; fast food was only once in a blue moon, usually while on the road trip to or from some far away campground. My little brother and I ate a lot and my mom was able to feed a family of five on $20 a week. This was only possible to do her buying regular (cheaper) food basics: potatoes, dried rice & beans, meat on special, pasta, tomato sauce, onions, carrots, hot dogs, etc. and making every single meal from scratch. There was no Lucky Charms or Froot Loops for breakfast, and a lot of boiled oatmeal with raisins and maybe walnuts instead. Whatever sweets we got were the cookies, cakes, and pies my mother baked, also by scratch. As for exercise: all we kids ever did in our non-school free time was play; there was a lot of running around with our dog, climbing trees, hide & seek, football, basketball, and, when I finally got one, riding around on my bike.
I compare my extremely active childhood and healthy diet to that of today’s kids and there is no comparison. The diet and exercise of my childhood is closer to that of an American boy growing up 150 years ago, in 1874, than it is to an American kid growing up today. I have, without thinking about it, stuck to the healthy life pattern/diet my parents raised me in out of necessity; consequently, as an adult now in my sixties, I have the leaner build most of our great grandpa’s had when they were my age.
Today’s kids, especially today’s American kids, have no idea how crappy their junk food-eating, video game-playing childhood is. My idea of great fun is hiking to the top of Mount Whitney – or to the bottom of the Grand Canyon – and back in a single day (it’s still California and Arizona as I remember it); most American teenagers would consider those hikes to be some form of terrible punishment, as bad as taking their video games/smart phone away from them.
I still go old school because I live in an environment that allows me to. Meat(beef, pork, mutton, chicken, venison, hake, etc). Plus the standard vegetables, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes in various forms, cabbage, butternut, tomato, beetroot, mushrooms, etc. Plus grains and pastas, and a variety of fruits and nuts. Africa is not bad everywhere.
hey good for you that book is a game changer isn’t it! i’m type O and went back to basics after reading it, no more processed wheat, corn, potatoes, alcohol, and lots of other things. plenty of red meat, fish, nuts, garden salad, fruit. everyone should read that guy’s book and give it a try.
I like your story. It’s wonderful how, by a pure-chance moment, your whole life can be changed for the better. I’m glad, for your sake, that you had the willpower to do what was needed to be done.
Excellent article, thanks Mr. Unz.
there’s another dietary/lifestyle issue lurking out there in the world, and that is the one about the importance of having a healthy well trained gut biome. for example, a lot of young people are being fed antibiotics which degrades the bacteria living in the intestinal wall. this causes all kinds of problems for these individuals that manifest themselves in strange ways particularly mental health issues. people need to learn how to maintain their gut biome .it should be manditory teaching in all high schools in my humble opinion. here is a link to a website that explains how to promote a healthy gut biome:
zoe.com
i am not affliated with them in any way, i just watched some of their videos and got a fuckton of helpful info that has definitely helped me feel great.
as our jewish friends say, “Enjoy!”
As we have come to know, the cult of the “expert” has been greatly overblown. My favourite definition: “An expert comes from at least 100 miles away, and brings slides”. (Nowadays, PowerPoint or whatever).
An intelligent, educated, open-minded person should be able to learn about almost anything given time and patience. As Lord Kelvin said,
“You can understand the physicists’ reasoning perfectly if you give your mind to it”.
But that’s really not correct. Until the last couple of hundred years, sugar consumption was absolutely negligible, and it’s only become very large during the last century or so, especially since WWII.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that our digestive systems wouldn’t have evolved to properly handle it. In particular, there seems a great deal of direct evidence that when digested in large quantities, its fructose component damages the liver, leading to all the associated health problems caused by insulin regulation problems.
AFAIK, plain unsweetened yogurt with the natural amount of fat is very healthy. The trouble is with the low-fat high-sugar types that you see stacked sky-high in supermarkets.
One proviso – some people believe dairy can cause problems. If you are one of them, yogurt would not appeal. I’m not; I eat cheese and butter, and use double cream in my coffee instead of milk. The only thing I avoid in dairy is the milk sugars.
Ok, sugar bad but you’re not discussing the other trend in food, that being seed oils. The linoleic acid is a killer and like sweeteners are in everything. There is nothing fried nowadays in good oil, it’s all seed oils. Lard will make a come back, after 50+ yrs of slander. If you want to eat healthy, eat what your grandparents ate.
Well, I’ve always heard yogurt described as a “health food” and that’s certainly true of granola. Don’t most people regard all-natural orange juice as being “healthy”?
I’m certainly not saying that’s correct, but as a naive outsider who had never paid attention to health food matters, that’s always the impression I’d gotten from the news and entertainment media.
But the books and articles I’ve cited and emphasized in my article made a very persuasive case that the fructose component of sugar was what was responsible for the health problems. Unlike sugars, the starches you’re discussing are quickly decomposed into glucose, which isn’t a problem. Since those other carbohydrates you mention don’t contain any fructose, they’re probably entirely safe.
From an evolutionary perspective, people have been eating very large quantities of starches for many, many thousands of years, so it’s likely that our digestive system has adopted to handle them properly.
One of the first thing you learn about cancer cells is that they just LOVE sugars. That alone would go some way to suggest that ketosis should slow down cancer growth.
“The dose makes the poison”
I think the average American is certainly consuming too much fructose for optimal health
I’d bet that typical consumptions of glucose & PUFAs (especially the latter in high-temperature cooking) are also injurious to health
Look, as I’ve strongly emphasized that until the last several months I’d never paid any attention to nutritional issues and my knowledge of them was almost nil. So I’m hardly claiming to be a huge expert on that complex topic.
In fact, I began by being pretty skeptical that nutritional science had much validity and doubted that the material I planned to read would convince me otherwise.
But after reading almost a dozen books plus many articles and reviews, and watching a number of long presentations, I concluded I was mistaken and found the Lustig-Taubes nutritional model, pointing to the fructose component of sugar as being the main culprit in our dietary problems very convincing. Along the way, they largely exonerate fats, salt, and most of the other nutrients endlessly denounced in our media.
One very nice aspect of having a single source of our dietary problems is that much easier for us to address rather than if three or four different factors were responsible.
Plain yogurt is somewhat high in sugar, but only about one-third the huge amount in fruit yogurt. Greek yogurt is much lower.
That’s why I found that NutritionIX.com website so very handy. It contains the nutritional summaries of well over a million different foods:
https://www.nutritionix.com/food/plain-yogurt
https://www.nutritionix.com/food/fruit-yogurt
https://www.nutritionix.com/food/greek-yogurt
https://www.nutritionix.com/search?q=yogurt
Oops wrong video!
Here is Ray Peat Phd
Video Link
Mr. Unz
I would encourage you to write a sequel about how nearly all plant food have 10,000 times more natural toxins than any industrial pesticide. These natural pesticides protect plants from bugs and worms. Oxalates, lectins, tannins, etc. Bruce Ames, Phd, U. of California, who invented the Ames Toxicity Test, found that about half of the natural toxins in fruits and vegetables were rat droppings mostly from storage of grains in silos.
See: Bruce N. Ames, Margie Profet, and Lois Gold, Dietary Pesticides (99.99% all natural), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 1990. LINK https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.87.19.7777
Abstract-The toxicological significance of exposures to synthetic chemicals is examined in the context of exposures to naturally occurring chemicals. We calculated that 99.99% of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals the plants produce to defend themselves (half of which are rodent carcinogens). We conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant (such as Glyphosate).
October 1, 2024 THE SKELETON IS AN ENDOCRINE ORGAN AND SUGAR DESTROYS IT
Scientists have known for years that sugar is highly addictive. It is also factual that, despite being in almost all products consumed today, the body needs no added sugars—meaning those that aren’t naturally occurring—to survive. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies added sugar as “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS).
https://thehighwire.com/editorial/the-skeleton-is-an-endocrine-organ-and-sugar-destroys-it/
Apr 1 2024 My family’s from the Greek island of longevity, where people often live to 100: The 12 foods we always eat
In 2009, Greek physicians and researchers found that 13% of Ikarians in their study were over 80, compared to about 1.5% of the global population and about 4% in North America and Europe. People on the island were 10 times more likely to live to 100 than Americans.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/01/what-we-eat-on-ikaria-greek-island-of-longevity.html
Metabolic syndrome has for decades been linked with Alzheimer’s disease:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1568163710000334
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11011-013-9406-2
The link is fairly easy to document, although the exact causal factor is unclear. Perhaps the leading candidates are inflammation and oxidative stress on neural tissue.
Note that AD prevalence has been increasing alongside the other chronic health problems that were discussed in this excellent article.
The people, the oppressed should thirst for justice and liberate themselves from all these food corporations that are mass murdering the masses. Like in the words of the anarchist Malatesta:
“The oppressed masses who have never completely resigned themselves to oppress and poverty, and who … show themselves thirsting for justice, freedom and wellbeing, are beginning to understand that they will not be able to achieve their emancipation except by union and solidarity with all the oppressed, with the exploited everywhere in the world.” -Malatesta, Anarchy, p. 33]
Something has to give !!
.
The lecture posted below is right up your alley, Ron.
Ben Bikman, Ph.D. is highly credentialed and explains complex metabolic systems, particularly that of insulin/fat, rather astutely.
Try a pat of butter in your sugar-free coffee; it takes the bitter edge off.
Regards..
Video Link
Agreed, any carbs we eat are decomposed into glucose, but glucose then spikes insulin which is the hormone that stores fat in our body. A Big Mac may have only 9 grams of sugar but it also contains 46 grams of carbohydrates!
The USDA food pyramid is a particularly egregious example of bad science. They were encouraging eleven servings a day of carbohydrates in the form of bread, pasta and grains. No wonder everyone got fat and sick.
Though sugar is quite toxic, see Dr. Richard Bernstein’s experiment where he demonstrates how a slice of whole wheat bread will spike your insulin faster and higher than a Snickers bar.
Too much sugar + too many carbs = obesity and diabetes. Natural saturated fats were never the problem.
our understanding of that subject had undergone a major upheaval over the last twenty years
“Our”? “OUR”? Mine hasn’t, though I’ll grant you that those admitted to by a prominent medical school professor might have done.
Mine has been pretty much unchanged. I based it on the views of (i) my old Mum, (ii) Jeeves (iii) assorted medical and nursing bloggers, British and American.
Am I really saying that a fictional valet was wiser in these matters than the propagandist governments of the Western world? You betcha! Wiser than the medical faculty at Harvard? Of course!
I am not yet sure about the demonisation of sugar. The argument against this new cult is that governments and the medical trades have lied to us repeatedly for a couple of generations: why should I assume that they’ve suddenly become honest and competent? The argument for the cult might lie in evidence – but how can I bring myself to believe evidence advanced by proven liars?
I therefore hope for evidence from those who have proved themselves to be consistently sceptical thinkers about diet and dietary “science”.
Declaration of interests: As a precaution I gave up sugar in tea and coffee decades ago. I have never been an aficionado of brown sugar water, finding the notion that adults would boast of having the palates of seven year olds baffling.
As for beer, I like it – though not Bud of course. Even better there are now decent beers on sale which contain little or no alcohol so I can enjoy their thirst-quenching propensity without consuming more alcohol than I’m happy with. Hurray for a pint of beer followed by two pints of alcohol-free: they are delish, I am sociable, and I remain unimpaired.
A healthy diet is not difficult, simply emulate proven healthy diets like the traditional Mediterranean or Japanese diets. Unfortunately unadulterated whole foods are expensive now.
Was it Plato who said: Let food be your medicine.
After tossing the hundreds of empty gallon apple juice bottles my late father had accumulated over several decades of drinking the stuff, I figured it had contributed to his fatal prostate cancer.
Complex gets his apple juice from eating an occasional apple.
Complaining about salmon, cod and trout? Good Lord! I expect to eat smoked salmon at least once a week, and trout pâté ditto. Cod I eat less but I am fond of fish’n’chips, the fish being either haddock or cod.
Do you eat sardines much in the US? In Britain tinned sardines make a wonderfully cheap and healthy lunch though, as I understand it, the Portuguese are the real experts on sardines.
Trick movies are much more dangerous. They render you not fully human.
Somewhat similar to a zombie, or to the Blue Pills in “The Matrix”.
Any suggestion on a diet against trick movies ?
Carbs are sugar. The original poster is correct. Starch is as dangerous as pure sugar. I am diabetic and monitor my sugar intake daily (=zero) and my carb intake (<20g.) Over 15 years of doing this I have thousands of data points for my own body that show there is a clear straight line correlation between carb intake and fasting blood sugar. I am not saying fructose is not a problem. It may be your problem. But carbs are also a problem.
When I retooled my diet seven years ago I was surprised to find sugar in almost everything. It’s a cheap preservative and our brains love it. Takes a lot of looking to find sugar-free bread but it’s out there. The crap they put in bread is incredible.
One more comment. The data for McDonalds’ products are misleading. 9g of sugar (a carb) but what about the total carb level of 45g? That would send my following day’s fasting glucose soaring.
Fiber is also a sugar – an indigestible sugar. So what do you do for fiber?
Bring back Fen-Phen and make it OTC. That will solve the obesity crisis almost overnight. Oh but it damages the heart you say. So do mRNA vaccines but we’re told to shut up and take them aren’t we?
Thanks …
however I noticed – P. Alexander (Atomic Radiation and Life, 1957) cites a
Danish study that the number of diabetics (Type1 = genetic) increased from 12 in
1927 to 43 per 10,000 in 1946 as the textbook example of “increasing genetic load”
through the availability of insuline.
How much of the current predicament is leaping and bounding medicine
supporting a progressively more leprous populace?
Growing up in Southern California the 1960’s and 70’s there was ALWAYS a large can of Crisco in our kitchen; it was used by my mom in her everyday cooking. Back then Crisco was made of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, churned out of some Procter & Gamble processing plant back in Ohio; it was a heavy can of solid, artery-clogging, trans fats; it was a heart-attack-in-a-can. And my mom probably went through a thousand cans of the stuff before I left home soon after high school.
Back when I was a kid everyone’s mom used Crisco and nobody’s mom ever had a bottle of healthy olive oil in the house. Crisco was a cooking staple, no one knew how horrible hydrogenated vegetable oils were for our health; yet all of us kids who daily consumed Crisco in our diet were lean, energetic, healthy, and strong.
That being said, after later hearing all the bad news about Crisco, I have never once in my entire life bought even a single can of Crisco while, instead, buying many scores of one & two-liter bottles of extra virgin olive oil.
1960’s Crisco advertisement:
Complex recycles his comment from October.
“If you eat too much sugar you’ll get sugar diabetes” proclaimed the second and third grade kids in the neighborhood.
“They should know,”
thought this then 4 year old,
“because they can count to one hundred.”
Folk wisdom circa 1961
Polymarket is currently showing rfkj at .69 probability confirmed.
https://polymarket.com/event/which-trump-picks-will-be-confirmed
If I was inclined to gamble I would bet on not confirmed. Is Donald Trump Jr receiving payola from McDonalds?
So, which is better for my health; a Rum and Coke (Cuba Libre) or a Screwdriver?
I can go with either one, like ’em both …
Robert Atkins died at age 72 of heart disease. Robert Lustig looks a little chubby from the few pictures I have seen online and hasn’t hit 70 yet. Gary Taubes looks fit, again from online photos. Besides life expectancy, one should look at quality of life, which requires regular exercise. Look around and you will see very few fit looking people anywhere, whether young or old. But fit old people do exist, including me. Eat less, exercise more. Eat lots of fruit, the natural food for humans.
“Uh, wouldja repeat that agin, and more slowly this time?” “Now, uh, sugar does wot?”
I’ve even read that dairy products, like milk and yogurt, turn into sugar just like the carbs.
Of course. Most sugar comes from tropical plants, like fruits and sugar cane. Northern fruits like apples, pears, and berries are seasonal. The plantations of the Caribbean Islands, Brazil, and the “East Indies” were in large part cultivators for sugar. Oranges and pineapples have large percentages of sugar. Sugar from beets were cultivated back in the mid 20th century, but that was a relatively small amount. Rum is made from sugar cane.
Sugar, because it had to make an ocean voyage to European markets was expensive as an import item.
Before sugar, there was honey for confectionery items and tea and coffee, etc.
While it’s true that sugar consumption is corelated with adverse outcomes like obesity and diabetes, it’s also true that the relationship between sugar and those outcomes is not necessarily 1:1. Taubes has T.L. Cleaves’ graph in Good Calories, Bad Calories that shows an apparently near-1:1 relationship (with a few year delay) between sugar consumption and mortality in the UK, sort of like the graphs that purport to show a correlation between environmental lead and violent crime (with a 20 year delay) in the US. While the Cleaves graph holds up to close scrutiny better than the leaded-gasoline-causes-murder graphs, there are still some infelicities:
• UK sugar consumption was high (except during the two big wars) during the entire 20th century, yet epidemic obesity and diabetes only appeared toward the very end of the century.
• Since the turn of the millennium, US sugar consumption has actually been going down, but obesity continues stubbornly to rise.
• There are tribes such as the Hadza of Tanzania, the Mbuti of the Congo, and the Kuna of Panama who derive a huge portion of their calories from sugar, but without any apparent adverse outcomes.
While it’s almost certainly better to consume less sugar, that does not seem to be the whole story. Very likely there are one or more late-20th century environmental factors aggravating human health. The unconscionably enormous childhood vaccine schedule is one candidate, but there are others too.
eat less
move more
that’ll be 40 dollars please… and you didn’t even have to read a book.
thank you very much!
Maybe not safe for lunch
Japanese supermarket launches drinkable mayonnaise which you can sip through a straw leaving foodies horrified
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14145659/Japanese-supermarket-launches-drinkable-mayonnaise-sip-straw-leaving-foodies-horrified.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
Unz says that fast food is greasy and loaded with animal fats. That is the first statement in the article that is false. Nearly all fast food that is fried, is fried in vegetable oil. Vegetable oil is considered worse than animal fats by most nutritionists these days but it is not animal fat. Lustig is quoted often by Ron but his statistics are cooked to arrive at his conclusions. Just because most researchers do that does not make it right. I tend to agree that we haven’t found the real culprit yet and it is probably a lot of different factors. Leaving vaccines out of the research to find out what is wrong will not help us have better health.
Complex carbs vs. simple carbs. One supplies important nutrients and energy and the other is mostly junk food. Avoid or severely limit simple carbs (processed sugar, honey, candy, colas, etc.). Complex carbs from foods like legumes, fruit, sweet potatoes, whole grains are essential to a balanced diet.
damn son you are right on target. will Amerika ever wake up? i doubt it.
Sean Hannity viciously attacked Bloomberg proposed 2012 city =wide sale of large sugary beverages.
What he fails to understand is that the government is paying for the treatment of most of the people who are getting sick from sugar. And this treatment is one of the biggest reasons for the 36 trillion dollar debt. In other words, people like Hannity would rather the country go bankrupt, than deny them a cup of poison.
Sure, but I was very persuaded by the argument that it’s actually the fructose component of sugar that’s responsible for the overwhelming majority of the problems, and other carbohydrates don’t contain fructose.
In Taubes’ big original article he focused on carbohydrates in general just as you are doing, but he subsequently changed his mind as new evidence came forth. Here’s a passage from one of his 2017 interviews:
https://chatelaine.com/health/sugar-gary-taubes/
It’s partly a matter of terminology. I’ve been persuaded by the arguments that fructose is the problem, and it’s contained in sucrose (ordinary table sugar) and HFCS, but not lactose, maltose, or glucose. So when I say “sugar” I’m referring to the former two nutrients. Since starches quickly break down into glucose, they’re also reasonably harmless. Glucose is also known as “blood sugar” but I’m obviously not including in my category.
As I just noted in a previous comment, Taubes has changed his own mind over the years.
I’m certainly no nutritional expert myself, but I was fully convinced by all these books, articles, and lectures by people who are.
Mr. Unz, You are walking in a minefield of nutrition lore which is more like a pond full of red herrings. Your astute observation that something’s terribly wrong is a correct one.
You obviously like Gary Taubes – who doesn’t? His red herrings are sugar and low carb/insulin.
The carbohydrate/insulin model of obesity is attractive and elegant but, alas, debunked. Doesn’t work in real life. Taubes tried to prove it worked with his NUSI (Nutrition Science Initiative) but failed miserably. Prof. David Ludwig and a few others are still fighting fanatically a loosing fight.
The fructose/sugar liver toxicity is probably part of the explanation of the Metabolic syndrome and obesity epidemic, in my humble opinion.
The internet is full of semi-literate diet gurus who each have their favorite red herring to sell: keto, seed oils, sugar, additives, anything really.
Serious people are looking on ultraprocessed foods which seem to stimulate eating and fattening but they still don’t know what it is about these foods which is so dangerous.
I would suggest you took a look at the critics of low carb/keto because they have a point. It is not the amount of carbs which provokes insulin resistance but the amount of calories. If you pack fat cells and liver with fat, they respond with insulin resistance, independent of what caused it: carbs or fat.
The Holy Grail seems to be: how to make people eat fewer calories while feeling satiated and happy.
Yes, you are right. You picked sugar-filled commercial heavily advertised “health food” for your example in order to stack the deck to make your point.
And I do not deny for a second the deadliness of sugar. You are right on the money there. And it’s so hard to avoid.
But it’s the meat I’m not so sure about. And, more importantly, the way Americans eat meat–big globs of it, dripping with processed cheese. I once saw a restaurant where you could get a Bucket o’ Beef. The Chinese traditionally eat meat. But little bits of it, chopped up and mixed with vegetables and rice. And anyhow, the American meat-processing industry is a horror. Watch Fast Food Nation, just for starters.
No, I was just objecting to your characterization of vegetarians. In San Francisco, as I remember, a bean sprout sandwich was the equivalent of McDonalds. You could get one at any corner store. Or a falafal. Both vegetarian, both protein-filled, both with no sugar added. The thing is, there are cultures all over the world that have traditional, well-developed vegetarian cuisines, and they do just fine. Even some Christian monastics practice it, and live to great age. Not to mention George Bernard Shaw. Who died from climbing ladders to prune trees at 94.
Well said.
Great article. Added sugar is definitely a major culprit in America’s obesity/diabetes epidemic. But only half the problem. Added fat (predominantly seed oils) is just as responsible for the epidemic.
Calories per gram of fat: 9
Calories per gram of carbs: 4
Calories per gram of protein: 4
Processed foods are cheap, taste great and calorie dense.
Below is the nutritional label for a pack of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes. 320 total calories, with 126 calories coming from added fat and 132 from added sugar.
https://assets.syndigo.cloud/cdn/aeda3f73-1936-47a6-b605-232f5aacdfd3/fileType_jpg;size_600x600/aeda3f73-1936-47a6-b605-232f5aacdfd3
Diets high in lean protein and starch free vegetables (peppers, squash, greens) are the key to weight loss. Use spices to improve flavor. Avoid processed foods and limit eating out to 1 time per month.
Another consequence of the obesity epidemic is the huge increase in knee replacement surgeries. The extra 50 to 100 lbs wrecks the knee cartilage.
Phew
This is a very hypochondriac article.
🫨
“Try a pat of butter in your sugar-free coffee; it takes the bitter edge off”
If you hate coffee so much that you have to mask its taste and flavor with, of all things, butter, why not give it up and drink tea instead?
Someone asked me once for Coke to put in her glass of wine to make it more “drinkable.” A gross insult to wine. Since we never have Coke in the house I offered her sugar with the promise it was a guarantee for a headache later. I never wasted wine on this person again.
Follow the Money. The Food will improve when Lobbying Money is banned. The Food Industry and its FDA —-is just like Big Pharma and the CDC / NIH. There is a revolving door of corrupt shit heads that sell out all of America for profit.
I guarantee you, the Trillion Dollar Food Industry will be pouring hundreds of millions into Lobbying Efforts over the next 4 Years.
This is a very deep pocketed lobbying group. The American Farmers that supply the Food Industry will also be Lobbying to maintain their Government Subsidies.
There will be a huge conspiracy involving various food businesses lobbying Congress to NOT PASS LAWS that will damage their income.
You can also Bet Big Pharma will be pouring hundreds of Millions of Dollars into efforts to block Dietary Laws.
The Food Industry creates the health tsunami that floats Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex.
Change can only come from the Individual. We as consumers must reject SUGAR and assume 100% responsibility for our own bodies and what we consume.
Perhaps the best thing Trump can do is establish new Dietary Education Programs in High Schools.
Here is a video that will back up what you are saying: McDonald’s Secret Ingredients You Never Knew About
Where’s the “GROSS!” button?
Just thinking about sipping mayo through a straw repulses me. Yuck! Mayonnaise, the American kind that comes in a clear glass jar: its consistency, its color, its freaky-weird taste, it’s mouth feel, has always disgusted me. I’ve never bought a jar of mayo in my entire life. For me, when it comes to putting a spread on a meat and cheese sandwich, it’s mustard all the way.
Decades ago my then girlfriend, and now wife, said she was going to make “mayonnaise” to go with the French fries she had made. I told her I hated mayonnaise (one of the very few foods that I hate), but what she made was completely different to American mayo. Her mayo was made by slowly whisking a thinly poured stream of olive oil into raw egg yolks, until it stiffens, and then mixing in Dijon mustard, salt, and spices.
It was “mayonnaise,” and it was delicious.
Peanut Butter 2 teaspoons • 188 Calories • 2 gm Sugar
what peanut butter? peanuts have no sugar in them. if your peanut butter has sugar it’s been added.
or is ron calling all carbs “sugar”?
if ron’s new kick is “diet and health” he might use his superpowers on alcohol. alcohol is not a carb, protein, or fat, yet it is a source of calories for pen tailed tree shrews and humans, especially europid humans.
and whether or not alcohol in some amount can have beneficial effects for some people is still a matter the medical establishment hasn’t decided on.
ron didn’t mention that atkins and taubes don’t have the patent to their diet. robert cameron (photographer) does.
Thanks for the very inspiring words of wisdom. Next time I’ll be sure to check if and when Einstein pushed for the consumption of pop soda and junk food.
Ron, there’s a lot of academic publication on this, as Taubes et al have gone though.
Short and sweet, it’s the fructose, as you’ve been saying.
“Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2673878/
“Fructose, but not glucose, impairs insulin signaling in the three major insulin-sensitive tissues”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27194405/
“Dietary Fructose and Glucose Differentially Affect Lipid and Glucose Homeostasis”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2682989/
A companion piece on dietary oils would be useful. Omega-3 fish oil and flax oil (and the difference), contrasted with omega-6 soybean oil, corn oil, etc would be useful. Important to note that the fatty acid composition of an animal’s feed shows up in the composition of the animal’s tissue fatty acids. Thus soybean fed animals have higher omega-6 containing tissues, than e.g. grass fed..
You are what you eat…
Another consequence of the obesity epidemic is the huge increase in knee replacement surgeries. The extra 50 to 100 lbs wrecks the knee cartilage.
Absolutely —-I read an article on carrying extra weight —-it is a ratio of 1:4.
For every pound of excess weight, your knees experience an extra four pounds of pressure. For example, if you’re 10 pounds overweight, your knees absorb 40 pounds of extra pressure.
So, a person 80 pounds overweight puts and incredible 360 pounds of additional pressure on their knee with each step.
If you are 90 pounds over weight —think about lugging two 45 lb Dumbbells’ with every step you take, every rotation of your spine, every stoop, laying in bed, bending over to tie your shoes, getting in and out of your car —-90 pounds of weight is very very heavy to lug.
It is insanity when you think about it. The slow gradual cumulative effect of Obesity is insidious.
Biochemist and food scientist: The article has many errors, for example about fructose metabolism, etc. A healthy diet should be varied and include minimally processed products (80% of processed foods sold in supermarkets are harmful), a moderate food intake proportional to energy expenditure. Natural simplicity…
Yes, they are called preservatives and additives.
Google:
2024…….Hmmmm, sugar industry promotes product that is actually eventually unhealthy, evidence becoming clear.
2034…….Hmmm, pharmaceutical industry promotes vaccine product that actually eventually unhealthy, evidence becoming clear.
I agree.
A good rule of thumb that I use is that all carbs are sugar, and all sugars are carbs.
Even fiber is sugar, albeit too tightly bound together to dissolve in the digestive tract.
Even a whole wheat cracker turns into a sugar(glucose) upon being digested.
No, our ancestors didn’t eat very many carbs at all. Most of their calories came from animal sources
You better believe it’s a racket – and a deadly one at that. There are so many scams that it’s difficult even keeping track of them. Big Medicine feeds off of Big Food big time: all the doctors should know damn well that most chronic disease and even mental illnesses are caused by bad nutritional choices, but instead of advising their patients about nutrition, they just prescribe some expensive drug like Ozempic to get their cut from Big Pharma. It’s a satanic relay tag team: Big Food passes off the baton to Big Medicine and the next hand-off goes to Big Pharma, and the damn finish line is always Big Bucks – and the health of the patient be damned.
These scamming doctors know full well the quote attributed to Hippocrates: “All disease begins in the gut”. But these bastards have been shitting on the Hippocratic Oath for ages: instead of upholding “First, do no harm”, all they think about is “First, make some bucks.” It’s grotesque – the whole profession is one filthy scamming racket. The only scum lower than doctors are lawyers, and both are a longtime favorite professions of Jews. In all probability, it was the Jews who pushed the already-low level of morality in these professions to unfathomable depths.
What is also unfathomable is that, despite all the evidence that nutrition is The Key to health, doctors still negate this truth and end up letting their cancer patients have ice cream between chemotherapy sessions – true story! It’s beyond comprehension. But when we look at what they teach during all those years in medical school, this all starts making more sense:
Unbelievable! 11 hours only! That’s about as much as Unz had in 10th grade, for God’s sake! So how the hell is Kennedy, the future Health Czar, going to tackle all these problems? They are all interlinked and with (mostly Jew) Big Finance interests behind them: Big Food, Big Medicine, Big Pharma. Is there one magic bullet that he can use? If he used the principle behind the book The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, what would Kennedy’s one-point program for the Health Department be? It would have to be something like what Unz is proposing above, that is, avoiding too many different tactics that might confuse the public – more than it already is – and at the same time waging a full-frontal attack on the number one killer in the US: chronic disease. Below the more tab is such a proposal (by ChatGPT), summarized as follows:
The Great War on Sugar: A Bold Crusade for Public Health
In an ambitious and controversial move, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Health Secretary under Donald Trump’s administration, launches the Great War on Sugar, a nationwide initiative to combat the devastating health impacts of excessive sugar consumption. Drawing parallels to historical campaigns like the War on Drugs, this hypothetical program targets sugar as a primary culprit behind America’s chronic disease epidemic.
Objectives of the War on Sugar:
Reduce Sugar Consumption by 50% in 5 Years:
Aggressive targets aim to slash the average American’s sugar intake, currently estimated at 77 grams per day—more than double the recommended amount.
Educate the Public:
A massive awareness campaign, “Sweet Lies,” exposes the hidden sugars in everyday foods and the manipulative marketing tactics of Big Sugar.
Regulate the Sugar Industry:
Hefty taxes on sugary beverages and processed foods mimic successful policies from countries like Mexico and the UK.
Mandatory front-of-package warning labels akin to tobacco warnings are implemented.
Subsidize Healthy Alternatives:
Redirect farm subsidies from corn (high-fructose corn syrup) to fruit, vegetables, and other whole foods.
Provide incentives for companies developing low-sugar or no-sugar food options.
Empower Schools and Communities:
Ban sugary drinks and snacks from schools, replacing them with healthy, nutrient-dense alternatives.
Fund local programs teaching nutrition and cooking skills.
Implementation Strategy:
Step 1: Build a Coalition
Kennedy galvanizes support from healthcare professionals, activists, and public health organizations while fending off fierce opposition from the sugar and processed food industries.
Step 2: Legislation and Taxation
New federal regulations place limits on sugar content in products, increase taxes on sugary drinks, and restrict advertising targeting children.
Step 3: Community-Level Engagement
Grants fund grassroots initiatives in low-income areas, empowering communities disproportionately affected by sugar-related illnesses like diabetes and obesity.
Big Sugar Pushback:
Lobbyists from sugar and processed food industries launch counter-campaigns, framing the initiative as government overreach. Kennedy faces lawsuits and a fierce media war.
Cultural Resistance:
Many Americans see sugar as a harmless indulgence, and cultural ties to sweet foods complicate efforts to change behavior.
Economic Impact:
Small businesses and farmers dependent on sugar production feel the economic strain, sparking protests and debates about job losses.
Outcomes:
Despite resistance, the campaign begins to yield results. Studies show a decline in sugar-related health issues, such as Type 2 diabetes and childhood obesity. Early adopters of reduced-sugar lifestyles report better energy and improved health. Critics grudgingly admit that the nation’s overall healthcare costs have started to stabilize.
Legacy:
The Great War on Sugar is remembered as one of the most polarizing but transformative public health initiatives in U.S. history. Kennedy’s tenure as Health Secretary becomes synonymous with his crusade to save America from its sweet addiction, forever changing the way the nation views food, health, and corporate responsibility. If Kennedy did that One Thing, chronic illness – the number one killer in the US – would take a nosedive.
Sugar is definitely part of the problem but the added fats (predominantly seed oils) to processed/fast foods is a major culprit.
Remove added fats from our food supply and obesity rates plummet. Fats have over twice the calorie content as carbs and protein. The obesity epidemic is still all about daily caloric consumption.
A plain McDonald’s biscuit has a whopping 270 calories with only 8 calories coming from sugar and 108 calories from added fat. Nobody serious about weight loss should be eating at McDonald’s.
Plain biscuit: 270 calories, 12g total fat, 36g total carbs, 2g dietary fiber, 2g total sugars, 5g protein, 5mg cholesterol, 770mg sodium, 60mg calcium, and 2.7mg iron
And the simple answer to that is meat: rib eye steak; 1/3 fat, 2/3 lean.
I believe Ron means well but he has just no clue. He now has discovered that sugar/fructose is problematic and so he jumps to the conclusion that McDonald’s and Budweiser are healthy. Nope: the reason fructose is fattening is precisely because it’s metabolized in the same way as alcohol (via the liver, not muscles). And the reason McDonald’s is unhealthy is not because of the beef (if it were from grass-fed animals, that is), but because of the sugary coke and the toxic seed oils in the buns and on the fries. It will Ron probably take a few more years to realize and digest all of this…..
amazing video, thanks for posting! this guy is super knowledgeable and entertaining.
The truth of ‘liberal democracy’ in a nutshell, or nut-house. The ONLY REAL power in all capitalist economies is the money power of the rich owners of the economy. Politics, democracy, elections, opinion polls, debates etc-ALL sham. ALL ‘divide and rule’ tactics utilised by the Real State-the rich.
If you can make money out of killing people by cigarettes, pollution, junk food, junk medications, armaments, fossil fuels etc, you simply need to buy enough politicians and MSM vermin, and you’re off to the races.
Time for a humorous interlude, this song is inching up on five decades- entertaining food snobs of all persuasions.
“I’m a Junk Food Junkie”
No. It was Hippocrates, the horse doctor.
I do wonder if Ron is aware that these ideas are old to the right-wing sphere. This is the main argument made by most people who are into the carnivore diet, with Jordan Peterson and his daughter being the biggest advocates of that. Maybe he is aware, and he is sort of investigating the RW fad.
There is nothing wrong with “seed oil,” this has been debunked thousands of times. This is the problem with right wing people. You guys judge truth by what “feels about right” to you. For some reason, the seed oils thing feels wrong to some people, so you assume that the criticisms of them are right. Unfortunately, this system of finding truth has proven, many times over history, to be flawed. Eating “seed oil” (which really just means eating part of the seed) is fine.
Indeed, although carrot juice is almost the archetypical health food beverage, it’s certainly rather bad for your health, with one 16 ounce glass containing considerably more sugar than two Big Macs.
I say:
SKIP THE SUGARY CARROT JUICE — GO FOR THE CARNIVOROUS CAVEMAN DIET
James William Buffet was a famous expert on dietary matters, and he wrote extensively on dietary experiments he had conducted using himself as the chow down specimen, as it were.
Mr Buffet wrote a quite popular song about these experiments in 1978. In 1978 the population of the USA was about 220 million; now the population of the USA is 330 million or so. POPULATION OBESITY is on the exploding upswing just like the massive rear bumpers of the walruses waddling around Walmart.
Cheeseburger in Paradise — by James William Buffet — (partial lyrics):
Tried to amend my carnivorous habit
Made it nearly 70 days
Losing weight without speed, eating sunflower seeds
Drinking lots of carrot juice and soaking up rays
But at night I’d have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini fettucini or bulgur wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat
Cheeseburger in paradise
Heaven on Earth with an onion slice
Not too particular, not too precise
I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise
I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well, good God almighty which way do I steer?
Cheeseburger In Paradise by James William Buffet:
“All carbs are sugars, end of story.
You can get diabetes(2) or fat from eating potatoes, bread, grains and rice –just the same as from sweets like candy or fruit.”
True, all carbs look like sugar to the body, the difference is the time it takes to break it down. If you take straight sugar, it gives your pancreas a shock because the digestive system calls on the pancreas to produce insulin immediately, this is opposed to raw fruits, vegetables or grains in their pure state where there is lots of fiber to slow down the digestion process where the pancreas is called on gradually to produce insulin.
Morgan Spurlock admitted to being a long term alcoholic when he confessed to sexual misconduct during Me Too. He drank heavily for decades including the year he filmed Super Size Me. All the problems with his liver can be attributed to that, and so can his spontaneous vomiting. No one who has tried to recreate his experiment got the same results. It is a wonder McDonald’s has not sued him.
People go for diet drinks cuz sugar is bad but apparently those are bad too.
RFK says McDonald fries should be fried in tallow.
https://carnivorebar.com/blogs/carnivore-bar-blog/did-you-know-that-mcdonalds-fries-used-to-be-cooked-in-beef-tallow
RFK fries his turkey in tallow.
I wouldn’t say no to this, although the precise proportion of fat and lean can be discussed. Also, I can’t imagine having to live without pancakes, pasta, rice, my sourdough bread and many other foods I love. But the steak is the backbone, so to speak, of a good weight loss diet for sure.
The Hadza and Mbuti do not eat refined sugar, but raw honeycomb, which is high in fiber. So perhaps that is similar to eating whole fruit, which people like Lustig say is OK. Not sure about the Kuna, that seems like a more interesting case.
The lithium/environmental toxin hypothesis you linked is indeed fascinating though.
I wonder if there are any examples of populations that have high rates of diabetes and metabolic syndrome that do not consume sugar.
Sainsbury’s Future of Food report envisions a highly technologized food system that prioritizes corporate control over cultural and social aspects of food. Critics argue that it promotes lab-grown meat and synthetic foods while neglecting the realities of hunger and malnutrition. The report risks creating a two-tiered food system where only the wealthy access optimized nutrition, further consolidating power in agribusiness and tech companies. Ultimately, it advocates for a future disconnected from nature and local food traditions, calling for a return to agroecology and food sovereignty as a more sustainable path forward.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/12/02/war-on-food-manifesto-for-corporate-control-and-technocratic-tyranny/
There has been no other time in history when it has been easier and cheaper to consume a healthy diet. This is no conjecture. I have done it for decades and have the grocery receipts and medical test results to attest to it.
This “blame the government” attitude over issues that are the exclusive responsibility of every adult is the very cause of the problem. Outsourcing any aspect of our lives to bureaucrats will always be detrimental.
By the way, Kennedy is a kook, a Marxist one at that, even if Marxism is so perversive nowadays that it seems impossible to walk without stepping on it. Take, for example, the proposed limitations on CC debt interest. What do these people think is going to happen other than many (most?) people will not be eligible for CCs? This might be a good thing, but it’s government overreach at the expense of personal accountability.
What of bunch of bs. Telling fat people that diet soda is just as bad a regular soda is retarded.
Reduce calories anyway you can. Tell the water purist snobs to pound sand.
There’s a lot of fat people who drink Diet Soda. I could almost go for a TAB right now, I remember as a little kid looking in Grandpa’s mini-fridge while he had the game on, and there was a TAB in there.
While I’m not going to say it’s good for people to get a large percentage of their calories from sugar, I’m still inclined to be skeptical to believe that is the reason that people are so fat. I suppose if sugar was not available in these foods people would not eat as much, so that the sweetness plays a role in the overconsumption of food.
I’m persuaded the real problem is the overconsumption of low-grade food, throughout the day, without limit, insufficient walking, the demise of regular home-cooked family meals for most people, and the absence of fasting discipline. Before the 1960s fasting, like fish on Friday, was a cultural practice throughout much of the Western world and it influenced Protestants no matter how much they might scoff at that notion.
It depends how far back you want to go (and thanks for replying). By ancestors, I am referring to the civilized era, i.e., after agriculture came about. During those 10,000 years, most humans (not aboriginals) adapted to carbohydrates, i.e., grains, legumes and vegetables. Of course they consumed animal products, too.
In Europe, only aristocrats consumed an animal-heavy diet. The rest of the population consumed a greater variety of foods, including fat, protein (meat & dairy) & carbohydrate.
Alcohol in its earliest forms (beer and wine) does contain carbohydrates and has been a popular addition to the diet for a good long time.
People today are not obese, prediabetic and mis-shapen (huge abdomen) in large numbers simply because they overeat sugar. They want sugar because their hormones are in disarray and can’t help themselves. They will kill for chocolate and other high-sugar “foods”. You need to be in a toxic state to get this far. Consuming chemicals in your food is one, bad-enough, thing; having it injected into you when you are a growing child is quite another and much worse.
What does the medical doctor offer these poor folks? Bariatric surgery & ozempic. What a world.
raw fruits
Sorry, but it strikes me as ridiculous, the idea that the sugars in fully chewed oranges, mangoes, grapes, cherries, berries, pineapples, etc, are not immediately available because they’re “sticking” to the fiber or “trapped” by it. Just does not compute in my mind. Those things go chewed (how is that different than a blender or a juicer – reminds me of people who say ground beef, just because it is ground, is less nutritious than a solid cut) right into the acid chyme, and the sugar is right there to be used.
If fruit is better than fruit juice, it is because fruit juice represents the sugar content of many times as much fruit as is normally eaten.
Even so, bananas have a lot of calories. Fiber in the banana is not preventing those starches and sugars from being absorbed rapidly.
Sugar is awful for your health, but it does taste good, and a sugar high feels really pleasant until you crash. Sugar is the only substance that I find addictive. I mostly like sodas, chocolate, and ice cream. Otherwise, I have a pretty healthy diet of mostly unprocessed meats, fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables. I’ve never cared much for breads or dairy. I do saute and fry a little more than I should, though.
I’ve never had a weight or body fat issue, but my bad cholesterol has always been a little high, which I decided to do something about because I was tired of my doctor trying to push statin drugs on me. My first step was cutting out as much processed sugar as I could, because most of my empty calories came from sugary foods, and the sodas really seemed bad for my stomach. What I noticed is that without the sodas, I had no taste for much of the fast food and junk food that I would sometimes eat for the sake of convenience. After the change in diet, I sleep and wake easier, and have steady energy throughout the day. I no longer crave chocolate, desserts, or sodas, either.
The good part is that my bad cholesterol dropped 60 points to within normal in less than 6 months with no increase in physical activity, and I still eat most of my favorite foods in the amount that I like. After the craving went away, I don’t feel like I’m dieting at all.
$20 it is then?
Of course it would be counterintuitive to think a confirmation will take place in reality.
But RFK the younger basically handed the presidency to Trump – by pulling out of the race. A deal may have been done. And he’s already ticking the all important pro Zion box. Plus he bent the knee to Mickey dees.
Bet me. Take my money please.
Fructose (HFCS) consumption in the US increased from less than 1% of caloric sweeteners in soft drinks in the 70s to 42% in 1998, it has decreased by about a third since then, but is ubiquitous as a food additive sweetener. Unlike glucose levels which are carefully regulated by insulin in the body, fructose levels are not regulated.
Sucrose (sugar) is a di-sugar of glucose and fructose; lactose (milk sugar) is a di-sugar of glucose and galactose; both fructose and galactose can be converted into glucose and stored in the liver as glycogen, however their metabolisms into energy (ATP levels) are very different. Glucose stimulates both aerobic (oxygen-requiring, the most efficient) and anaerobic production of ATP. Galactose stimulates mostly oxidative metabolism and ATP from oxygen requiring pathways (in mitochondria). Fructose metabolism is largely anaerobic and ATP levels generally fall if fructose is the sole or main sugar provided.
The Warburg Effect has been long known. Unlike most normal healthy cell metabolism, cancer cells largely grow anaerobically, and grow well in high fructose but not in high galactose. Unfortunately, galactose, fructose and (the main sugar) glucose levels and their interactions in metabolism are poorly understood. Simplistically galactose (milk sugar metabolite) would seem preferable to fructose in the diet. However fructose is the sweetest of these three natural sugars, and even though fructose was discarded as a waste product until the 1980s, high fructose corn syrup is now an important part of the American diet, and more importantly, the economy. (Ethanol is produced anaerobically. Perhaps fructose should be shunted to EtOH production?)
There are lots of foods eaten in the old days that you may be overlooking, that were high in sugar. Jams, jellies, apple butter, were extremely common. Consumption of canned food was extremely common, and canned fruits usually had added sugar.
Old fashioned candies were often made of caramelized sugar right at home.
Molasses was practically a staple, eaten in large quantities with breakfasts. Cornbread with molasses. Even Yankees eating their beans were putting lots of brown sugar into it. Then you have foods that people don’t eat much any more, like gelatins. And people made plenty of cakes.
Finally, you have all the mixed drinks made with sugar syrup (or even just iced tea!). The consumption of alcoholic beverages with added sugar or with naturally high sugar levels had to be at least on par with what people consume now.
Not to mention trips to the Soda Jerk or candies at the movie theaters, where people went all the time.
The overall COST of food could be one of the main factors, food is simply much cheaper and people have far fewer inhibitions about eating like pigs.
Europeans smoke more, and have better tasting healthy food, more food culture, that’s why they’re not as far along on the path to slugtopia.
white sugar is not natural and can only be made in a lab.
There’s a lot of fat people who drink Diet Soda. I could almost go for a TAB right now, I remember as a little kid looking in Grandpa’s mini-fridge while he had the game on, and there was a TAB in there.
Trump says:
As you continue to tunnel through the rabbit hole of the role of diet in disease, you should look into Dr. Thomas Seyfried’s work on “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease”. He makes a strong case that cancer arises from damaged cell metabolism and mitochondrial damage that arises largely or entirely due to excess sugar and carbohydrates in the diet, and not due to genetic factors. He has shown some dramatic results in treating cancer via a ketogenic diet (i.e. one where no glucose is available for cell metabolism) plus inhibiting glutamine, since glucose and glutamine are the only fuels that a cancer can utilize to grow.
It’s all about the calories. Most of us were not fat as kids or young adults. We started gaining weight in our late teens/early 20s. A few pounds a year for 20, 30 years next thing you know you’re obese with pre diabetes and high blood pressure. It’s extremely difficult to change eating habits after decades of eating the high calorie foods we get from restaurants and food processors.
There is no quick solution. We didn’t get fat in one year and we are not going to get to a healthy weight in one year.
Every little bit helps. Replacing soda with diet soda. Choosing fat free and sugar free options. Only eating out on special occasions. Tracking calories daily. There are huge differences in total calories in the options we have at the grocery store from spaghetti sauce, bread, margarine, ketchup, salad dressing etc. The first step is to stop gaining weight.
I have found eating lean meat (we eat a lot of venison) and lots of vegetables helps. Protein has half the calories of fat and stays with you longer. I grow a lot of peppers and add heat to every dish I eat. Makes me eat slower.
I still crave a McDonalds Big Mac, but settle for a bowl of venison chili loaded down with peppers and a powdered peanut butter sandwich on keto bread. I love mashed potatoes but have started using Greek plain yogurt instead of butter when blending them up and I regularly replace half the potatoes with butternut squash.
I wish I would have started good eating habits as a kid.
Fiber creates a physical barrier, slowing down sugar digestion and absorption in the stomach and small intestine, reducing the peak blood sugar level and insulin response.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/fiber/art-20043983
“Used as an extract, stevia leaves have been used traditionally in Paraguay as a women’s contraceptive, administered as a daily drink. The effect has been tested in rats, finding a 57–79 percent reduction in fertility compared with the control group, the lowered fertility continuing after withdrawal of the drug for up to two months.[51][52]”
Some other sweeteners are dangerous too.
Until I saw it mentioned in this article, I didn’t know that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock had passed in May of this year of Cancer, at the ripe old age of 53. Apparently in 2021 he tweeted about getting his covid shots and encouraged others to do the same. I wonder how many he got?
A bone-in well marbled ribe-eye steak, about a inch and a half thick from a lazy cow (I mean well-marbled, plenty of fat), done medium with just a little char, salt and pepper, with a side of asparagus, and some tea.
It just doesn’t get any better than that.
There’s a whole lot of anti-sugar people out there, and there always have been. While I’m sympathetic to the idea of eating more traditional foods, be careful to avoid jumping into the anti-carb cattle car.
Please take this with a grain of salt, I have close to zero background in any of this except for my mostly forgotten toe tipping into organic chemistry long time ago that accounts for nothing.
I just want to point out the central argument Mr Robert Lustig is making. I watched this video few weeks ago and found it very interesting.
Let me share what I consider his main point – basically the same as our host Mr Unz fleshes out in his article. It’s about Fructose.
In this interview Mr Lustig says:
In my layman understanding he is saying if one consumes too much fructose the result is (or can be) ‘fatty liver’ and/or insulin resistance causing diabetics. So basically the metabolic control system goes haywire and has severe problems dealing with carbohydrates once this has occurred.
If Mr Lustig is correct this could explain why your blood sugar levels behave like they do, rising in similar fashion when you consume sugar, starch or even any carbohydrates.
As a side note, but likely important, it follows, it’s almost impossible for us to isolate or understand what Fructose does to us when it’s part (50%) of the sugar we consume. Without considerable knowledge and careful diet the average person is unlikely to have any clue.
I suggest you watch the video and decide for your self. Mr Lustig stories about his experiments on children are striking.
Were you serving your friend “Two Buck Chuck,” the $1.99/bottle Charles Shaw wine you get at Trader Joe’s?
Maybe she noticed.
At the Youth Hostel in San Francisco we all drank Coke with red wine and lots of ice, but we only used the cheapest red wine you could buy – Two Buck Chuck. Nobody adds coke to the good stuff.
The coke/red wine/ice combination is very popular in the Latin world. It started in Spain where it’s called Calimocho; in Basque Country, where I once lived, it’s called Kalimotxo. All the South American countries (Argentina, Chile, etc.) have their own name for the same coke/red wine/ice drink. It’s a great way to make cheap red wine much more palatable; the Chicas sure enjoy drinking them.
On the chart showing amount spent on medical care and life expectancy, with US income roughly 1/3rd greater then the richer EU nations and double, or more, quite a few of the rest, it could just be that Americans have more money to spend on health care.
Not that money spent on BBLs, forehead smoothers, tummy tuckers, or lip fillers (the infamous fish lips) can be expected to have much of an impact on life expectancy, except negatively.
According to some studies the best thing to do, for increased life expectancy, is to avoid doctors. In other words … just pretend that they are all on STRIKE! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18849101/
The articles analyzed five strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003. The strikes lasted between nine days and seventeen weeks. All reported that mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. None found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods.
Okay, I’ve read the practically book length article and a lot of the comments and everybody’s got an opinion. I’m going to give anyone who makes it this far down the comment section the answer. It’s as old as civilization itself, “moderation in all things”. That’s it. You want a couple of beers, go ahead, but just a couple. A piece of birthday cake, okay, but just one piece once in a while. Life is for living, just don’t be a pig and you’ll be okay.
Pizza! I love pizza, made from scratch. It tastes great and its fun.
Congratulations on purposely missing the point of the article. Go away, commie.
I agree with you Dr. Acula, about The Unz Review being a treasure! It surely is.
In that vein, I wish to share this favorite bookmark of mine which I have had for many, many years now: Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Database:
https://phytochem.nal.usda.gov/
From the site: “Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical databases facilitate in-depth plant, chemical, bioactivity, and ethnobotany searches using scientific or common names. Search results can be downloaded in PDF or spreadsheet form. Of interest to pharmaceutical, nutritional, and biomedical research, as well as alternative therapies and herbal products.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Duke
Sure sugar is clearly a culprit in the obesity epidemic. However, it is clearly NOT the primary culprit in contemporary obesity. The primary fact overlooked by those who blame the crisis on sugar is the fact that sugar has been around for hundreds of years. Donuts, cakes, cookies, pies, ice cream and many other glucose-spiking sweets, likewise, have been around for at least a couple of centuries.
Only identifying, and banning, the true primary culprit of modern obesity can ever Make America Healthy again. And what is that primary culprit? … Those in the know about the crisis know that the real cause of metabolic syndrome are TOXIC, RANCID INDUSTRIAL SEED OILS. … Yep, all of those so-called “heart healthy” FRANKENFATS, like soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil and peanut oil, that we began substituting for good old butter, lard, tallow, and suet a little over 100 years ago. It was only after this toxic indigestible slime made it’s way into our diet that all of the current plethora of metabolic diseases, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s disease, etc., etc., started to gradually appear and, afterward, increasingly magnify in our lives.
If you think you are surprised about the role of sugar in obesity, you will be completely shocked when you read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, and listen to her You Tube videos describing the evils of seed oils. Also read Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, and listen to You Tube videos by Dr. Paul Mason, Dr. Chris Knobbe, and Tucker Goodrich and Sally Fallon describing the havoc that these toxic and rancid oils have reeked on the health of the human race.
The most important concept to grok in the food/eating issue is :
Only animal proteins supply sufficient quantities of the Ten Essential Amino Acids necessary for cellular growth, maintenance and repair. Thus, the healthiest living entity (all other things being equal) is the one that receives sufficient quantities of the Ten Essential Amino Acids on a regular, recurring basis.
Nothing else in eating, or food science really matters.
[And to clarify, those vegan gobbledygook concoctions of beans, rice, corn, squash and other magic boiled and stewed and soaked in lime and ostrich piss and lizard gizzard and chanted over, and danced around for days will NOT provide the Ten Essential Amino Acids living entities require for optimal cellular growth, maintenance and repair. No how, no way!
A helluva lot easier and far more enjoyable is to just eat a small 3 oz. portion of fresh Rib Eye Steak – 1/3 fat, 2/3 lean – regularly.]
Incidentally, the Rib Eye has the exact proportion of fat and lean espoused by Dr. Blake F. Donaldson, M. D.
>Glucose … it’s so important if you don’t consume it your body makes it.
Yeah, but here’s the thing: you don’t need to consume it — your body can synthesize glucose from fat and protein (gluconeogenesis) — you can eat a nearly carbohydrate-free diet and be perfectly healthy — but if you consume a diet very high in carbohydrates, and very low in fat and protein, you will have metabolic problems, regardless of whether you consume fructose or not.
Consuming too much fructose is not good for you — neither is a diet too rich in carbohydrates — the latter is fundamentally what this whole discussion is about: metabolic diseases caused by a diet too rich in carbohydrates — consumption of fructose is only one part of that.
It’s true that complex carbohydrates have a less immediate and dramatic effect on blood sugar (glycemic index) — bread is an example of a complex carbohydrate — I once heard the following analogy: if you take a piece of bread, and scrunch it down to a very small ball, eating that piece of bread has roughly the same metabolic effect as consuming a lump of sugar the size of the scrunched piece of bread — this analogy is designed to make the point that complex carbohydrates are still carbohydrates, and thus consuming too much of them (compared to fat and protein) is not good for you, metabolically.
I was a regular consumer of sugary foods, including soft drinks and candy. My exercise routine— running 6 to 8 miles daily— kept me from getting fat. But my sugar intake stopped totally after I got stage 3 colon cancer.
I soon learned that sugar is a major cancer catalyst and many foods unexpectedly have sugar in them. It got so tiresome to figure out sugar content, or which foods metabolized into sugar, that I just switched to a strict vegan diet and minimized eating processed foods.
My oncologist, a top cancer doc, recommended regular consumption of tree nuts (raw walnut and almonds) saying that they’ve been shown to be cancer fighters even though the reason for their efficacy is not yet known.
I did research on my own with the assistance of Dr. Google.
Reading through articles on studies regarding the benefits of nut consumption, they all seem to suggest that the magic of tree nuts lies in their ability to regulate blood sugar.
Well, as I cited from one of the books by an academic expert, world sugar consumption increased by a factor of 500x since 1800 and a factor of 10x since 1900. People were certainly consuming sugar products a century or two ago, but the increase has been absolutely enormous, especially in the last couple of generations.
One of the key factors was that fats were mistakenly declared harmful to health, so removing them from the diet led t0 a large increase in carbohydrates to take their place, including sugar.
Also, since food companies were pressured into removing fat from their products, which had improved the taste, they decided to add sugar as a replacement.
It really seems undeniable that there’s been a gigantic increase in sugar consumption during the 20th century.
But that really isn’t correct, at least if all those books and articles by seemingly very knowledgeable experts are right. That’s the key point made by Taubes, Lustig, and many others.
Large weight gain is primarily due to the malfunction of the hormonal system involving insulin. When your insulin system isn’t working properly, weight gain is likely to occur. And there seems to be a very very persuasive case that fructose damage to the liver is the main factor responsible for insulin malfunction.
You really should read some of the articles I linked or watch some of the lectures. Perhaps even consider ordering one of the Taubes or Lustig books. I actually focused much more heavily on the weight-gain issue in my previous article, so you might want to take a look at that one:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-is-sugar-the-deadliest-white-powder-drug/
At 58 years old I adapted carnivore diet. Been at it almost a year. The biggest revelation was, that I don’t need fiber at all. I wish I new this lifestyle earlier. Feel & look fantastic.
Mr Unz:
I recall when we were discussing the Covid and vaxxing issue couple of years ago. When we took a deep dive into total death statistics in order to try to separate Covid deaths from vaxx related deaths. One of the strange issue that came up was how badly the U.S. fared through the pandemic v.s. most European nations. Even in the working age group, even worse, in teenagers and children.
You pointed out the correlation between obesity vs bad outcomes from Covid. And we agreed it was likely a kind of a proxy for host of other health related issues. Looking at the stat’s you show it’s like we are back to the same point. At this point it’s tempting to assume diet plays major role in all of this.
He’s reading it off the label, genius. Your issue is with the manufacturer, Nature’s God. Peanuts contain sugar, as does your blood you stupid fucking idiot. Jif and so forth do have added sugar.
Alcohol is a carb but not a calorie source, it gets metabolized to fat which might or might not get burned.
From my conventional understanding I mostly agree – but again I point to Robert Lustig central argument – it’s the Fructose that’s a serious problem because it’s not ‘carbs’ like any other. It’s in a class of it’s own and we can only deal with it in very limited amounts. Actually way below what the average person in the U.S consumes.
A chart for you to consider:
https://fitaudit.com/food/123585/amino
And also this:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201%3A29&version=KJV
I switched to MSG for everything.
All food turns to sucrose when it transfers into the blood in the small intestine. But if we have a leaky gut wall it will also allow non-nutrient metabolites like potentially poisonous oxalates from foods or oxalates made in our liver when yeast fungus combines with Vit. C ascorbic acid. Oxalate is a razor sharp crystal that forms or binds with calcium and can cause kidney stones, breast cancer, and even heart attacks when it blocks arteries. So we are not merely what we eat as the cliche says, but what our small intestine allows into our blood stream. Sugar or Carbs are perhaps not the biggest problems of metabolism. Molasses is a product of industrial sugar manufacturing but has a low glycemic index and doesn’t cause any significant reaction. But when non-nutrients get into the bloodstream where they are not supposed to be (called translocation) it triggers the adaptive immune system to send white blood cells, T killer cells, and antibodies in what is called a cytokine storm or autoimmune reaction. This reaction can be deadly and is called metabolic sepsis, which means that fecal matter is getting into the bloodstream. How is this possible? Well, fecal matter backs up in the big bowel when the ileocecal valve doesn’t block back flow because of alcohol, drugs, nicotine, caffeine or chemicals ruining the valve. Researchers have found that fecal matter incredibly backs up the entire 25 to 30 feet of the small intestine and starts to spill into the bloodstream, often called Small Intestinal Bowel Overgrowth – SIBO. If the small intestine has had its good bacteria compromised that would push the fecal matter back into the big Bowel due to antibiotics or chemicals, then the small intestine becomes a disease chamber. In sum, refined sugar is a problem when it gets into the bloodstream undigested and unbuffered by good bacteria. Then sugar becomes toxic. Sugar is not like say Strychnine that kills quickly but needs the gut lining to be porous and good bacteria wiped out by antibiotics to become toxic. Again, molasses itself is not that much of an immune system trigger. Fungus, like Candida yeast, can create oxalates in the liver, so it isn’t solely refined sugar but fungus.
If a fruit is grinded up and the whole thing is consumed, it is better than if only the juice is consumed?
Fruit juices in stores remove the pulp, so you only get the sugar and liquid.
But suppose one blends an entire apple and drinks the whole thing, pulp included.
Would that be as bad as juice without the pulp?
No, you’re getting sucrose confused with glucose. Both sugar (sucrose) and starches are broken down into glucose, even beginning in the mouth, but the other half of sucrose is fructose, which the body has a hard time metabolizing, leading to all the health problems.
True, but there are lots of problems associated with exercise as well, especially given the ‘extreme’ kinds of activities popularized by social media.
I wonder how many people hurt themselves badly by doing crazy stunts with skateboards. When I was young, people mostly rode them. Now, they try to do all sorts of crazy stuff and get hurt bad. Stunts with the bike is another.
And then there’s ‘parkour’ and crazy stuff like wingsuits.
While some people suffer from lack of exercise, others tend to push it to the limit and hurt themselves badly as a result.
Weight lifting and related injuries. Climbing enthusiasts.
Television and now the internet, welfare, sedentary lifestyles, lack of exercise, and (it is never mentioned) profoundly dysgenic trends driven by immigration and welfare of the low-IQ and conscientious use of birth control by the high-IQ combine to explain a huge portion of not only obesity but most other negative trends (educational performance, crime, family breakdown etc etc).
Most adults have a mental image of America (who Americans are, what our neighborhoods and culture and lifestyle are like etc) that corresponds to their childhood and young adulthood, which persists in pervasively instinctive and unconscious form. So when we see comparisons of the America of today vs the America of decades ago, we think we’re comparing apples and apples.
But we’re not, because every single year America becomes browner, blacker, and above all, DUMBER.
And the dumber you are, the less impulse control you have, the less ability you have to put long-term well-being above short-term gratification, the less ability you have to even imagine and understand counter-factuals (what would happen if I did THIS instead of THAT?)
With the bounties of capitalism and the welfare state enabling cheaper food, less physical work, and more passive entertainment than ever, combined with this massive (and universal) dysgenic trend, there need be no specific scapegoat foods or compelling narratives of sinister corporate machinations to explain why people are getting fatter.
So you’re not a Jew after all!!!! Just misled. LMFAO! A case of Mistaken Identity…eh?
ariadna’s house guest was probably nostalgic for his/her (likely) days in the SF hostels or suchlike and (not usual to her) missed the subtlety of his/her (otherwise) crass choice.
Here ‘the youth’ used to consume ‘goon’ /flagon wine or, later our proud domestic product for mass consumption, ‘Chateaux Cardbord’, which is now sold abundantly.
Me? I like a heavily rezined, thickly vinted rezina, which, alas, is increasingly hard to come by, though abundant in days of yore.
Add to that, the fact that fruits today have been bred and cultivated to maximize the sweetness and sugar content. Anyone remember oranges prior to the 1970s?
Fascinating. My local library has a copy and I’ll be going down there tomorrow to check it out. Literally. Thank you.
Here’s another one…
Video Link
Alcohol is most certainly NOT a carb.
Carbs have 4 calories per gram, alcohol has 7 calories per gram.
Chicken Provencal is a great recipe with lots of tomato and capsicum/bell peeper and it’s not too fussy like some French recipes.
Don’t go too far the other way.
Real orange juice was put here by God and is a perfect food, just like milk. A person stranded on a deserted island could survive if magically provided with unlimited orange juice or milk. Orange juice even has a decent quantity of protein. It is a superfood.
Sugarcane is also provided by God and is good. The problem with how most people get their sugar is the oils, fat, and chemicals in the cakes and cookies.
Americans are fat from drinking 7 diet cokes a day. None of the obese people drink any orange juice at all. Their health would improve if they did.
You are correct that red meat as a whole food (a steak) with some fat is healthful, as is, of course, fish, chicken, and other meats.
Vegetables, which don’t provide much energy or nutrients, are overrated. That’s why they are hard to eat. Think asparagus.
Kings eat meat; slaves eat plants (vegetables). But fruit and fruit juice is good. (Fiber is also overrated. Healthy people poop just fine.)
McDonald’s burgers have a ton of sugar — the bun and the condiments are all sugar. And bad chemicals. I want to know where you got your figures for sugar in the McDonald’s products.
It is proven that eating only McDonald’s will destroy health in a matter of months.
What people need is to eat whole foods in the form of cuts of meat, fruits, nuts, and the more edible vegetables, such as spinach and broccoli. It’s expensive to eat healthily. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store–eat only things that require refrigeration or go bad after a week (bananas).
But again, fat people are fat from drinking 10 cokes or diet cokes a day, not orange juice.
And yes, metrofag sheep products in a colorful package that don’t spoil, such as granola bars and “nice” bars and other sheep Democrat food, is also bad.
Personally I don’t think a ton of sugar or a ton of fat is healthy, but you’re nominating extremes, constructing stupid meals nobody eats to make the point in 10,000 words. When you strip off the excess, you’re left with a set of claims or a model of nutrition which we can debate in different ways.
Insomuch as sugar might have ‘addictive’ aspects and impacts on the liver for example, and poor uneducated people with low self control can’t stop eating a ton of crap or sophisticated liberals drinking gallons of orange juice and oat bars loaded with extra sugar may be liable to find some health consequences, ok. Breaking News: Dietary extremes have the potential to be unhealthy.
I can’t stand this guy, he makes me puke, and I can’t comment on the quality of the studies he’s presenting, but it represents a response to some of Lustig’s claims. If you drill down on a lot of exciting claims coming from the mouth of some expert, and go to look for hard science and it’s not necessarily there, it could be this person, while they have expertise, are also cruising along as something of charismatic figure.
I see Lustig is making claims about cholesterol too. If the criticism of these claims is a fair assessment of them, then it’s not a good look. I’ve this before about reverse causality. Lustig’s massive misrepresentation of a study, if that’s true, is also not a great look.
The point of posting this, again, is not to endorse this particular content creator, but to point out these biological subjects are complex. There’s a cascade of complex, unintuitive processes, often contradictory going on in an organism as a response to food in the acute phase and over time. To throw oneself into an overall novel understanding about the whole thing and with crude extreme examples doesn’t articulate much.
Not saying Lustig or Taubes have nothing of value to say, but this is another health subject you’re coming at in a certain way, like HIV/AIDS. And although that was an interesting topic, this disregard of details was an issue with the HIV/AIDS coverage, and I think it’s an issue here. It looks like you’re being impressed by any charismatic rebel with a book who sounds right and screw everything else.
Ron, eat only McDonald’s three times a day for a month and you will gain 20 pounds of fat and feel like shit. Watch Supersize me.
lolzozozzozoo imagine thinking diet soda is good for you in late 2024.
found the boomer
why hasn’t one diet soda drinker noticed that they have a spare tire belly?
Have em drink tea… without sugar of course.
We don’t get fat in a year but we can get back to a healthy weight in a year. I did it in about seven months. It is about the calories if you mean total calories but the source of those calories matters. I got rid of most of the processed foods in my pantry and fridge and ate a lot of whole foods, leaning on legumes and lean meat. Otherwise I could still eat most anything, bread and pasta included, but exercising portion control strictly. And regular exercise is essential. Weight training and HIIT. Good luck.
Surprised the article never mentioned stevia. It’s a natural sweetener that comes from a plant in south america and is a healthy substitute for sugar. Been used for centuries down there. I’ve been using it for 20 years; I buy it an amazon. Very concentrated. Per ounce it’s much more expensive than sugar but per serving, the cost is the same.
I haven’t had candy or a soft drink in 20 years. Seldom drink fruit juice.
Dairy sugar is lactose.
For babys only.
But we grown ups and kids can eat full fat yogurt, because the bacteria have eaten most of the sugars. (Very low carb).
Butter is great, zero lactose.
Cream is good. Very low lactose.
Milk is way too high in lactose for anyone over eight years old.
Regarding Ron’s suggestion that our health problems are largely due to obesity, he’s hitting the nail but not firmly on the head.
The main cause of growing world level unhealthiness is called…
Metabolic Syndrome!
Metabolic Syndrome includes five dangerous condions:
1 high blood sugar
2 high blood pressure
3 low high density lipoprotein (HDL)
4 high triglycerides
5 visceral adiposity, (abdominal obesity)
Ron noticed #5.
The average person today has a ridiculous dangerous swinging blood sugar. Our ancestors, for millions of years, never had high blood sugar.
I don’t know, I’m just highly skeptical that squeezing oranges in your mouth and spitting out the pulp is going to cause a higher blood spike than swallowing the pulp, capisce?
The mouth is a juicer. LOL.
I hope some will learn from your cogent points. Sweet tastes are addictive and we struggle and make make excuses for our desires.
If a TT diabetic eats more fiber, nothing will happen to them.
If they stop eating carbs, diabetes will disappear. How can you beat that?
I’d be very careful about trusting statistics and their interpretation by popular nutritionists, academic or not. You’ll find most people writing books seem to show as much curiosity about what people really ate in the past as a typical modern women has about an old cookbook. The key to maintain popularity in such a field is to be À LA MODE, insofar as the contemporary housewife conceives it. Remember that sugar has always been a huge business, very large numbers of slaves were brought from Africa to produce it, the industry did not grow up over night.
I don’t know about consumption, but Google says that global sugar production was
188 million tons in 2023-2024. (not sure how much is used to make ethanol)
Sherman’s Food Products (a book I picked up used many years ago)
https://archive.org/details/foodproducts00sheriala/page/n19/mode/2up
On page 423 it gives statistics for world sugar production in 1912 (with Germany leading the world – maybe the sugar made the Germans hyper-aggressive) at
18.145 tons. So, approximately a 10-fold increase, whereas world population was 1.7 billion at the time. Approximately a 4.7 fold increase.
Undoubtedly far more of that sugar was being consumed in the Western World than outside of it. I cannot imagine the peasants of China and India consuming large quantities of sugar.
The books says that the per capita consumption of sugar in the USA was 85 pounds per capita in 1912.
Only England and Denmark show an apparently larger per
capita consumption of sugar than the United States. Since
England exports considerable quantities of jams and marmalade,
and Denmark of sweetened condensed milk, and the sugar enter-
ing into these products is not deducted in estimating the apparent
per capita consumption, there is some doubt whether the actual
per capita consumption is larger in any other civilized country
than in the United States.
Here is the google “AI overview” of American sugar consumption:
The average American consumes more than 100 pounds of sugar per year, or about 34 teaspoons a day. This is more than twice the amount recommended by the World Health Organization, which is about 50 grams per day for someone of normal weight.
Here are some other facts about sugar consumption in the United States:
In 2021, the per capita sugar consumption in the US was 33.7 kg.
In 1972, the US reached its all-time high of 44.9 kg per capita.
In 1985, the US reached its all-time low of 26.6 kg per capita.
In 1999, total sugar consumption peaked at 111.0 grams per day.
After 2002, total sugar consumption declined due to a decrease in HFCS consumption.
In 2016, total sugar consumption was estimated to be about 92.5 grams per day.
Interesting about 1985 – that was when they came out with New Coke.
Of course this is just sugar, and doesn’t tell us the stats about syrups.
People in the old days ate a lot of sugar and syrups with their meals, especially breakfast. Pancakes and waffles and molasses were heavily consumed. If they didn’t drink soda they ate and drank other sweet foods and drinks and they consumed other high calorie foods – there were taverns on every street corner before prohibition.
When it comes to the level of fat one simply can’t ignore the fact that homes in the past were less well heated, people worked and walked outside, and in the US they generally lived in more northerly climates. The heating has effected many changes – even the age of menarche is said to have decline significantly not only because of nutrition but because of indoor heat.
In fairness to Mr. Unz, he’s simply reporting what other “true experts” have said.
There were a lot of very intelligent “AIDS DENIALISTS” as the pink triangle people call it.
Do they have their own ADL, or is it one and the same with the ADL?
I would say “a key.” The key is self-discipline, the lack of which is ultimately responsible for all of America’s problems.
Go to 1161
By no means do I suggest that the Alexis Tremblay family was a typical 1940s family. But this sort of life was not so uncommon, especially in rural areas. If people like these ate sweets and cakes, candies, made maple syrup, drank large amounts of cider, sweetened their breakfast cereal, if they lived like the Amish to today (who often drink two liters of soda in their family meals), would they be fat? A few might be, like my Great Great Uncle Franz, who was a big Saxon farmer who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast, but most would not be. Before WWI, Germany led the world in sugar production, it wasn’t enough to keep them fat, that’s for sure.
Go to 97
For the entire growing season and over many years, my diet has contained substantial quantities of home-grown fruits with no effect on either my insulin level or weight.
Mr. Unz’s foray into nutritional science appears to be biased, and in a way that has been easily demonstrated. That is an unfortunate misstep for someone who has dedicated so much effort to exposing official conspiracies. His credibility suffers from it.
Apparently, fructose is more likely to cause metabolic damage when its consumption is temporally concentrated.
The Gut Shields the Liver from Fructose-Induced Damage
“What we discovered and show here is that, after you eat or drink fructose, the gut actually consumes the fructose first—helping to protect the liver from fructose-induced damage,” said the study’s corresponding author Zoltan Arany, MD, PhD, a professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Penn. “Importantly, we also show that consuming the food or beverage slowly over a long meal, rather than in one gulp, can mitigate the adverse consequences.”
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/june/the-gut-shields-the-liver-from-fructose-induced-damage#:~:text=When%20large%20quantities%20of%20fructose,stored%20in%20the%20liver%20cells.
The fact that so many people in the US do consume a McDonald’s/Budweiser diet should be enough to say that this isn’t the problem. If the US population was heavily made up of people consuming granola bars and avoiding Big Macs, then it might make sense to think that this is the problem. But such is not the case. I’m sure that a lot of “health food” diet plans are spurious. But the main issue is simply eating less in proportion to reduced physical labor.
Any moron can do a ten day fast [after getting the body used to fasting by building up tolerance with shorter fasting], but the damage done to the body by its dragging elemental substances out of the muscles, bones and organs just to stay alive means the person is worse off afterwards even though they might be may many pounds lighter.
Ditto for intermittent fasting.
Raw honeycomb isn’t full of fibre, the comb part is waxy stuff that the bees make. After chewing and swallowing, it’s just a sugar rush in the form of honey.
Beeswax is, I am pretty sure, not digestible, just goes in one end and out the other.
I agree evidence indicates fructose is uniquely harmful — toxic even — and the increasing prevalence, one could say concentration, of high fructose corn syrup in processed food is undeniably associated with the accelerated development of diseases of modern civilization seen over the last 75 years or so.
I think there is also a significant genetic component, both in the metabolic robustness of a person, as well as in making dietary choices, e.g. there is evidence that the prevalence of obesity is inversely correlated with IQ.
Take carrots.
I eat very little because i’m losing weight [slowly].
12 oz. a day of carrot juice is okay because even though it’s naturally sweet, the carbs are in the pulp, which is discarded.
The juice of orange carrots contain a lot of vital substances – apples, pineapples, oranges don’t have that offsetting benefit.
https://www.drlwilson.com/Articles/CARROT%20JUICE.HTM
Enlightening article as always! Would be interesting if you would look into seed oils so many alternative nutritionists demonize. My understanding is that these plant based oils oxidize faster and so they are inflammatory. Not sure if there is clear evidence that animal based fats are superior.
Kewpie mayonnaise (and its copies) in Japan is a very unnatural food.
It has a very long shelf-life without refrigeration, and even after opening, so it is from a chemical plant.
However, it is popular as a pizza (avoiding) base and even in some types of sushi. I must admit to buying a small bottle every two years or so, with added chili powder, works as a dip for raw vegetables in summer.
Lawson’s is not a supermarket but a convenience shop. I am about 30 metres away from one now, will check if they have it in stock in the next twenty or so minutes.
Have made, as your other replier’s comment, mayonnaise from egg, mustard (hot), vinegar, oil, and herbs. Good flavour.
The U.S. mass-produced versions in jars, have tasted them, but no they aren’t much good, also not bad.
Kewpie, though, is even worse.
Perhaps they are catering to very young men daring each other to drink something revolting. Much like that is about as the end of the year approaches.
nailed it.
haven’t we all, at some time, gone to an older relative’s or friend’s home, usually not long before they ended up in a nursing home or worse, and found a half empty clear plastic container of “Vegetable Oil” in their cupboard? that stuff should be labeled unfit for human consumption and banned from the marketplace. i get tendonitis just looking at it. you know it’s rancid sitting there in the kitchen cupboard over the hot range half full OXIDIZED and RANCID.
AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
i eat plenty of raw nuts too, mainly almond, walnut, and pecan. always soak them overnight in water before placing them in a dehydrator, after which i put them in a tupperware type container and leave em in the fridge. when doing almonds i peel the skins off after soaking. lately i’ve been using a food processor to make my own almond milk. just put a quarter cup of almonds and a quarter cup of water in the processor and grind away. it goes great on top of oatmeal, quinoa, raisins and cinnamon.
Retsina, with its pine-resin flavor, tastes too much like how turpentine smells. I once “had” to drink retsina – I kinda got used to it – because it was the cheapest booze available and was what I could afford to drink at the time. It was when I was broke in Greece one winter in the early 80’s, only making $6/day picking oranges from sun up to sundown in the Peloponnese.* With that crappy pay, the 75cl. bottles of Amstel beer, which I greatly preferred, were financially out of reach.
Thank God I haven’t touched retsina in forty years, not since that time in Greece. I couldn’t imagine anyone actually liking the way retsina tastes. But the Greeks seem to like it – to each his own.
* [The town in the Peloponnese was Nafplio. The winter oranges we picked were for the USSR, the wood crates within which these oranges were shipped were stamped with the Soviet Hammer & Sickle. A fellow orange picker, a young East Berliner who had escaped to the west, told me how they’d get two oranges a year at Christmas. These oranges we were picking were for that same purpose, to be handed out as Christmas gifts to the people living under Soviet control.
Those Greek navel oranges were delicious: large, juicy, flavorful, easy to peel. The East Berliner and I would eat four, five, or six of them every morning for breakfast as we picked together. He’d laugh about eating in one morning what would have been two or three years worth of oranges “rations” back home.
As for that $6/day pay. At that time in Greece, with roommates, drinking retsina, eating lamb souvlaki, etc., I could live well-enough on $3 per day. So it wasn’t too much of a hardship, but it was enough of one that I never allowed myself to be in that precarious financial position again. The following summer I hitchhiked to Alaska, the money started flowing, and I never looked back.]
I was a teenager in 1982, and I remember that most people were skinny and generally healthy. Just look at photos of that era. Sure, there was a fat kid here and there, but I remember quite well that my female peers were thin and very beautiful.
The dramatic explosion of obesity and health problems is a 21st century problem. This is depicted well in the above graph “Number and Percentage of US Population With Diagnosed Diabetes.” However, sugar consumption has levelled off or declined slightly since the 1990s. Meanwhile consumption of processed elements such as seed oils, high fructose corn syrup, and grain-fed meat has skyrocketed along with obesity & diabetes.
Sugar is getting a bad rap.
Dear Sir!
For me it really looks as if I am living proof of the assumptions made by the sugar critics.
From the end of September 2023 to March/April 2024, I got down from 185kg to just under 120kg, … still counting.
All I did (and still do) was follow the easy to follow “low carb diet”:
Just avoid all types of sugar and carbohydrates.
My only deviation from the rule is that I don’t give up milk and other dairy products – I enjoy them too much for that.
I no longer take metformin.
I no longer take beta blockers.
I don’t need any more medication.
I’m not saying it works for everyone, but I do not know.
On the other hand, I don’t care about scientific evidence – I can personally see and feel the results, physically and mentally.
I can only recommend anyone who is interested to give it a try – it costs nothing and is safe.
I suggest to anyone who wants to try it not to switch to sugar substitutes and replacement products.
You’ll never change your eating habits and will too easily fall back into old, comfortable habits and then experience the yo-yo effect.
Good Luck and Success!
With excellent regards,
Klaus
In Siam and Vietnam in particular, the food has much sugar, but people don’t tend to be too fat.
I sometimes wonder what the food was like before the introduction of chili from the Americas, including in what are now India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and Korea. In Korea, from regional dishes (from the north, and places now in China), it is easy to see that mustard was the main spicy ingredient.
Who could imagine kim-chee without chili now?
In Japan, though, we have pickled cabbage that is much the same as kim-chee, but without chili.
In India, I would guess peppercorns. Perhaps paprika.
lusig is 100% right. book peddlers – not so much.
and it *is* gluttony and sloth – how on earth can one consume over 20% of ones calories in sugar/hfcs? all their knowledge and consideration has to be limited to what is tasty and convenient – so, sloth, gluttony and stupidity.
keep it below 3% and its virtually harmless, separate it from fats by significant time distance (to minimize double whammy of insulin mediated fat absorption response) and it is harmless, alternatively allowing to safely double the consumed amount
I checked two Lawson’s shops since my previous post, neither had that thing in stock, I suspect that it may be a hoax.
Really, who wants to drink liquid faux mayonnaise from a chemical plant?
Will continue to check tomorrow, it may be a seasonal product to dare drunk young men to drink it as stated earlier.
Thanks for the excruciating enertainment.
I travel a bit for work and McDonalds is actually the healthiest way to eat on the road. You can order the quarter pounder patties by themselves and eat them that way. These patties are 100% beef and cooked in their own juices. I avoid the fries, buns, and anything else as they are cooked in seed oils (soy oil, I think) and the ingredients lists can be sketchy.
For years (?decades) I have given up buying even the apparently healthier, and more expensive, squeezed orange juice offerings at the supermarket and gone over entirely to getting my OJ from oranges which I cut into quarters and apply my teeth to, thereby getting fibre/roughage as well. It offers the additional benefit of material for the compost heap (for which I add the additional benefit of peeing into it as a by product of the symptoms of aging).
Thanks
Again, Mr. Unz, unless you recognize a distinction between Types I and II diabetes, your figures are meaningless.
Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease, closely tied to DNA and probably triggered by Vaccine requirements, as RFK, Jr. has pointed out in his various writings.
Type II diabetes is caused by the excess of sugars and artificial fats in the diet of careless and obese people.
Please educate yourself a little more precisely before you continue publishing articles upon subjects on which you are woefully uninformed.
In some respects, perhaps my long article was sometimes too repetitive. But given that you obviously missed what I’d written, perhaps it wasn’t repetitive enough. Here are a couple of my statements:
You obviously didn’t bother reading my long article. Not only did the last section mention that I’d watched Super Size Me, but I focused on some of its very misleading elements and the actual nutritional statistics on McDonalds offerings:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-dangerous-foods/#evaluating-our-foods-based-upon-the-sugar-metric
Unz writes:
“According to Lustig, eating most whole fruits themselves—whether oranges, apples, or pears—is generally harmless because their fructose is surrounded by a thick layer of indigestible fiber, greatly slowing its digestion and therefore putting much less pressure on the liver. But using a blender to create the fruit ‘smoothies’ so beloved by many health-food adherents shears away those cellulose fibers and allows the very rapid absorption of the fructose. So the result is something just as harmful as fruit juice itself, and for similar reasons, applesauce falls into the same dangerous category.”
Lustig is right that, in sugar terms, fruit juice is virtually the same as sugary sodas. This is hardly a new observation. However I think he errs in comparing a fruit juice with the whole fruit equivalent in a smoothie.
Equating a smoothie to extracted juice is overly simplistic. In the first place, they are not the same substance. Juice by definition has had the pulp and other non-liquid materials discarded. But let’s consider the claim the pureed fruit (smoothie) is as “bad” as its juice would be. The cellulose fibers have NOT been “sheared away”; they have merely been chopped into tiny pieces, quite smaller than would have resulted from normal chewing.
Note: Perhaps Lustig was thinking of freshly made juice, which would then indeed discard the non-juice components. But his argument is weak if a chopped-up whole fruit is the topic.
One of the claimed benefits of whole-food juicing is that it makes nutrients easier to digest. That would necessarily include sugars, and in our example that’s “bad.” So Lustig is to be credited, IF one considers solely the sugars: Yes, they will be finer particles and thus easier for the digestive system to process. But all else equal, they are uniformly distributed among the other materials that made up the fruit. In fact…
Fiber slows down digestion, and that’s probably true whether the fruit is chewed or finely chopped in a blender. In the case of a smoothie, there are almost always other ingredients added, fats and proteins, and these will tend to slow down digestion even further.
Using applesauce as an example is disingenuous: It’s always cooked (= lost vitamins) and with added sugars.
Here’s a real-world example. Using data obtained from the Atkins website:
One fresh orange supplies about 62 calories, 3 g. fiber, and 12 g. NET carbs (presumably, mostly sugars).
12 oz. of fresh squoze OJ supplies 167 Kcal, 1 g. fiber, 38 NET carbs.
Reminder: the net carbs are the carbs (mostly sugars here) that impact blood glucose levels.
In our simple example above, a single glass (and a fairly small one, I might note) of OJ must be made from the juice of more than THREE oranges. In contrast, a 12 Oz. smoothie would likely contain only one orange plus other ingredients (milk, nuts, etc.) At a minimum, the smoothie also has the pulp and, optionally, the other parts of the fruit that’d be absent in the refined juice.
It’s nearly certain that a smoothie will not only have less carbs (unless sugars are added, of course) than a comparable serving of fruit juice, but even if the net carbs are the same, that the smoothie’s carbs will be digested slower, resulting in slower changes in glucose and insulin, which is usually desirable.
In conclusion, it seems to me that – at worst in the case a pureed fruit – that its sugar would be absorbed quicker than a chewed fruit, but surely much slower than a refined juice. In any case, to equate a smoothie with extracted juice is an invalid comparison, not apples vs. oranges, but apples vs. apple juice. I’m assuming Lustig is a reputable researcher, but even being the best doesn’t exempt one from making erroneous claims.
How is it enough to say that this isn’t the problem? Are these people who consume a McDonald’s/Budweiser healthy? Are they healthier than, say, average Italian who doesn’t eat any fast food?
The only way to make sense of Ron’s claim that McDonald’s/Budweiser diet is “reasonably healthy” is to say that it’s healthy relative to eating rat poison. Any kind of normal died from anywhere in the world outside Amerimutt Fatlands is more healthy than disgusting McDonald’s goyslop. It’s something so obvious and generally understood around the world, at least in my experience, that there’s really othing to discuss. Nobody thinks that McDonald’s/Budweiser diet is “reasonably healthy.” Maybe Americans just have no understanding of what normal food is anymore?
I would never waste good sugar by putting it in wine. I enjoy a glass of coke with ice and a little salt added on a summer evening.
It’s so “healthy” it can stay fresh for over 20 years.
I think some people digest and metabolize fructose without difficulty just as some people digest and metabolize dairy products without difficulty.
There are many potential factors involved in the health equation, making it difficult to identify what is causing what, but according to iAsk, about 40% of the population in Western countries has a condition known as fructose malabsorption.
Does the gut have a hard time breaking down fructose?
And of course, your gut may vary.
I wish I was a boomer. Then I could be drawing way more s.s. than I ever paid in along with a fixed benefit pension while burning through my kids inheritance.
It was so very thoughtful of Kelloggs to put gmo in all of their breakfast bars.
Well, Ed, Case in point: you’re certainly right about the need to get the body used to longer fasting by doing short fasts first. It’s like weightlifting: you’re not supposed to squat 100kg if you haven’t practiced a lot with 50kg beforehand. You do indeed have to build up resistance, or “tolerance”, as you put it. That’s why it’s called “resistance training” and something similar should work with fasting: let’s call it “resistance fasting”.
But I don’t think “any moron can do a ten day fast”. I’d bet that less than 1% of the population has done that. There are several psychological as well as physical hurdles, sometimes the latter being even harder. I started slow myself, doing intermittent and then one or two days, but over the past several years I’ve been doing a one seven-day fast a year, after reading some of dr. Thomas Seyfried’s work, especially the following:
So you see, your statement that fasting ends up “dragging elemental substances out of the muscles” is not shared by some of the top scientists in cancer research. Quite on the contrary, fasting actually removes all the old, senescent cells, and does a sort of “spring cleaning” of your whole body. It’s one of the best things you could ever do for your body.
Think about it: it just makes sense. Imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors: do you think they always had something to eat? No! They would have to spend days without eating. And what’s interesting is that fasting, by forcing the body to use ketones instead of glucose for energy, actually makes the brain work with better clarity. That also makes sense: we needed our minds to be sharper, so we could go out and hunt the mammoth and not starve to death. So our bodies were adapted, over thousands of years, to survive even through longer periods of fasting. So it is perfectly natural to fast. What is unnatural is to always have something in our digestive system, as in “three meals a day” (another farce the PTB shoved down our throats).
Fasting has been practiced for thousands of years all across the world in different cultures. If it were so harmful, like you say, I doubt that the practice would have continued. In Muslim countries, for example, where people practice intermittent fasting during Ramadan, there is a lower incidence of cancer rates (ok, correlation is not causation, but…):
Now if even this type of “easy” intermittent fasting can do wonders for whole populations, imagine what a more “difficult” regimen could do. I learned a lot from Cole Robinson (see my comment above), who is in-your-face abrasive — so not for everyone — but especially from dr. Jason Fung and his book The Complete Guide to Fasting, but more recently I have progressed to dry fasting, a more radical approach since besides not eating you also don’t drink anything, not a drop of water.
The promises of dry fasting are incredible: some say that it can produce new stem cells if you do it long enough (at least 5 days). If you were to do stem cell therapy (allogeneic) in the US it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars, whereas dry fasting is free. Sounds like a good deal to me. Here below I’ll give the link to a book that I read on the subject and a few quotes, as well as an introductory Youtube video by the author:
A hell of a lot of words to say that too much sugar is bad for us. Which I already knew.
I’d like to see a one paragraph elevator presentation explaining how liver damage affects the insulin game.
There was a guy who left a McDonald’s sandwich sitting on his porch to see if the critters would scavenge it and none touched it for days. This might not work with the french fries though. I used to wait for a bus at a littered bus stop across a busy intersection from a McDonalds (in traffic from 50 yards off it still stunk of cooked grease most days); the crows ripped the McDonalds bags apart and delighted to find an overlooked french fry.
RFK also advocates for elimination of fluorine/fluoride from drinking water, it having been added to over 70% of public water supplies in the US (and toothpaste) since the 1970’s. Until the 1950’s, fluoride was used to treat hyperthyroid conditions. It functioned to replace iodine in the thyroid with fluorine, essentially disabling/destroying the thyroid (the more modern alternative is either radioactive iodine or surgical removal (obviously more profitable)). It was also used in pest control (as sodium fluoride). Bromine works similarly against the thyroid, this also having been known for many decades. Iodine was previously used to stop the fermentation process in commercial baked goods and wine production, but was replaced with bromine also in the 1970’s. Bromine is used in thermal printed cash register receipts as well. As we all know, one of the more obvious symptoms of hypothyroidism (low thyroid) is weight gain via disturbed metabolism. A constant long term barrage of fluoride and bromide ions displacing heavier iodine is bound to damage the thyroid (so many now gain weight as we age). Low thyroid is now diagnosed primarily by TSH number, a pituitary hormone, which may not reflect the quality of T4 and T3 hormones delivered throughout the body. Could this have anything to do with the epidemic of obesity? Why do we never see this question asked? Explains why people 75 years ago could eat anything, including Crisco (cottonseed oil). It seems too obvious….
Actually the sugar industry starting after Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish Inquisition has been dominated by Jews. As a consequence, the negro slave industry was also dominated by Jews.
Conversos and Marranos got control of the sugar industry in Brazil and spread it to the Caribbean, along with the negro slave trade. These Jews imported sugar into Europe, and got white Europeans addicted to sugar centuries ago, and are still doing it today.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-ways-of-the-jewish-slave-traders/
This Jewish control of sugar has remained in Jew hands ever since. So today, when the “food industry” corrupts the US government to allow them to poison the goyim, it is not much different than the Sackler family controlling the FDA to allow them Oxycontin on the goyim across the south and the rest of flyover country.
Jews have been poisoning the goyim with alcohol, opium and sugar for centuries, if not millenia.
The sad irony here is that RFK Jr. doesn’t even know that as head of HHS he will fighting the same Jews who killed is uncle and his father.
Yes, we Yanks do indeed eat sardines, but they’re a sort of niche product. I’m among the minority of Americans who love sardines and eat them regularly. I would guess the vast majority of Americans either have tried them and found them disgusting, or find them disgusting without having tried them, or have never given sardines a second thought. But, as I say, they do have a devoted following. There are YouTube channels devoted to sampling and evaluating various brands (“ooh, excellent spine action!”) and a popular addition to the low-carb / keto craze is the sardine fast — three or more days eating only sardines. Personally, I consider them to be a near-perfect food. The cat agrees. (Seriously, the occasional addition of sardines to your pet’s din-din will do wonders for the skin and coat.)
My wife and I check every thing we buy to eat for added sugar. One item that we have found very difficult to find that has no sugar added is bacon. Oscar Mayer bacon has always been one of our favorites for a Sunday brunch. Oscar Mayer bacon has sugar added, and it is extremely difficult to find any manufacturer of bacon that does not add sugar.
Trivial tidbit re: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, aka Crisco. When the product was first developed in the early 1900s, one of its best salesmen was Huey Long. He sold it door-to-door and soon learned that his best customers were Jewish housewives — it made compliance with kosher cooking rules so much easier.
Nonsense. If you chuck a Snickers bar into a bomb calorimeter it’ll give the same result as a fatty hamburger patty, but the effect on the human metabolism is worlds apart.
If you like things sweet, use Stevia. If you like fat, cook with animal fats (butter, lard) or coconut oil, which are the healthiest. Olive oil is good if you want unheated fat. The underlying nutritional problem is that the industrial farming system, which produces an enormous amount of unhealthy food, also contaminates that food with huge amounts of toxins and antibiotics. It would require a thorough overhaul to switch from industrial farms to regenerative agriculture. The industrial agricultural interests are wealthy and politically powerful. Their lobbyists routinely write the bills in Congress that affect their interests.
You are repeating the contemporary FDA consensus–that is radically flawed. Our nervous system is encased in saturated fat, which is a dietary essential. Saturated fat is good for you.
LOL. That’s exactly what he’d said in his book, namely that world sugar consumption had roughly increased by a factor of 10x from 1900.
When a prominent academic writes a book about sugar and cites global production statistics of that community I think we should assume that his figures are correct until proven otherwise.
Another LOL. As I’d repeatedly emphasized in my article, ordinary sugar and HFCS are chemically almost identical, except that HFCS contains a slightly higher ratio of fructose and therefore is worse for your health.
Moreover, no human being ever needs carbohydrate as a food. All that perfect health requires is good quality protein and fat – which Nature has thoughtfully provided for us in a tasty package called “meat”.
Thanks for this succinct summary of dietary sanity.
I love sardines, and eat them quite often.
They are one of the healthiest things you can eat.
My mother (German) made sardine sandwiches with butter on pumpernickel bread (carried in the grocery store run by our local Lithuanian Jew) for me to take to take to school in the local one-room school house.
The other children teased me about this . . . Of course I wanted one of their peanut-butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches, but we were not allowed to eat white sugar in our family.
This was in the fifties.
I believe that my American grandmother also prohibited white sugar in her family in the 19-teens.
My father lived to be 102 and could have lived longer if not obliged to go to a nursing home—because his caregiver had early=onset dementia!! My mother also lived to 99. My mother loved chocolate and ate plenty of it, but only bittersweet.
A good way to prepare the sardines is to make a kind of pate.
Get the filets, mash them, add mayonnaise, garlic, some chopped onion, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Eat with Triscuits (classic version).
Delicious!
No sugar anywhere there, I think, except in the lemon juice.
Try making your own yogurt with Lactobacillus Reuteri culture for a healthy gut biome. It is delicious and easy to make.
It it’s good for the cat’s skin and coat, can’t hurt mine, either—I mean, my hair (which I must say is still pretty nice, considering my age)!!
Food to me is more about pleasure than health, I’m just lucky I have a fast metabolism and I manage a reasonably active lifestyle I do think I’m too hard on my liver though. Here’s some dangerous food, or is it food made from a dangerous animal?:
I probably was unclear. I meant that eating too many granola bars is not a problem, and it won’t be helped by going to McDonald’s more often. There are too many obese people who eat very often at McDonald’s for that to be true. I think a person can follow a healthy diet while eating at McDonald’s (though I haven’t gone there in ages). But they have to eat in moderation, no matter where they go to eat.
Sure, a 4 oz 80% lean hamburger pattie has about the same calories as a snickers bar, 287. Both get 1/2 their calories from fat.
If you are trying to loose weight, both should be avoided. A 94% lean hamburger patty has half the calories. The key to loosing weight is watching the fat content of food, period.
Protein: 4 calories per gram
Carbs: 4 calories per gram
Fat: 9 calories per gram
I agree with Ron’s analysis that sugar is bad. A waste of calories especially when artificial sweeteners are good options. But the obesity problem in this country is as much if not more an added fat (predominantly seed oils) as it is added sugar. Just look at food labels, the high calorie processed foods get twice as many calories from added fat as added sugar.
The human body metabolizes around 2000 calories per day. If you only consume 1500 calories per day you will loose weight even if you get all your calories from sugar.
The “I can’t loose weight because my thyroid, hormones, etc is out of wack is stupid. When those same people actually count calories, they are consuming 3500+ per day. Fat is added to most processed foods, just like sugar except fat has over twice the calories as sugar by volume. Replace fat with protein and you can eat more volume, feel fuller and not loose as much muscle when cutting weight. Add some starch free vegetables to the diet and the weight will come off.
Hempler’s makes a sugar-free bacon:
“Our uncured bacon is naturally cured with no nitrates or nitrites added and completely FREE of: Sugar, phosphates, artificial color, chemical preservatives, allergens, gluten and MSG.
Slowly smoked over natural Applewood, providing a rich aroma and savory flavor.
Thick gourmet cut for a meaty bite.”
We get it at Safeway.
If you bothered reading my article, you’d see what I was saying about McDonalds.
The burgers, fries, and many other items are low in sugar and probably therefore harmless.
However, the sodas are extremely high in sugar and the milkshakes are even higher. The ketchup people put on their fries is high in sugar and the same is true for the juices and the maple syrup.
So it all depends what products you eat at McDonalds. Since most people probably drink the sodas, they’re getting enormous quantities of sugar. For example, Morgan Spurlock was ingesting a full pound of sugar each day during his McDonalds diet, which is an astonishing, probably almost lethal amount. The physicians monitoring him said his liver looked like that of someone drinking himself to death.
Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that you see lots of obese people at McDonalds, which is entirely consistent with the sugar analysis I described in my article.
I think that people need to separate processed sugar, and processed foods in general, to understand the bigger picture. “The Zone”, (and the resulting Zone Diet) by American biochemist Dr. Barry Sears, was published in 1995. It explains that the body doesn’t care if you are eating a chocolate bar or peas, the body processes what is ingested in the same way. Peas are considered a “sugary” vegetable for the body to process.
Another book, “Dying For a Hamburger” by Dr. Murray Waldman and Marjorie Lamb looks at modern meat processing as a cause for Alzheimer’s – now a common “disease”. An extension of that are studies that have shown E. Coli in ground beef is predominantly from cattle in feed lots. Earlier this year, studies showed that E. Coli from feedlots can contaminate leafy green vegetables downwind.
In short, it’s the entire factory farm system that is the problem. About a dozen years ago I was at a Health Benefits Conference. Some of the speakers were dieticians. Their ideal diet was organic, whenever possible, including “free range” meat. When dealing with packaged food, it was no more than 4 ingredients, and if there were any words you could not easily pronounce, don’t buy it. Food additives, beyond sugar, are killers as well.
Once again, I must emphasize that I am not a nutrition expert and until a couple of months ago, my views were vaguely the same as yours based upon what I’d gotten from the media.
But all the books, articles, and lectures from those nutritional experts have persuaded me that my naive views were entirely incorrect.
The extra “empty calories” of sugar have absolutely nothing to do with the weight problem or the cause of obesity.
Instead, the fructose component of sugar damages the liver, leading to insulin dysfunction. That’s the cause of obesity.
Maybe all those experts are entirely wrong. But I’d strongly suggest that you read some of the articles or books that I linked, or listen to the public lectures of Dr. Lustig or others. You’ll discover that your naive views on these issues are totally different from their analysis.
One reason our public policies on obesity have been so unsuccessful is that the media presents the issues in an entirely wrong-headed way, never focusing on the fructose component of sugar as being responsible for nearly the entire problem.
That might possibility be due to the powerful influence of the sugar lobby, whose strategy has been to argue that “calories are calories” and that sugar is therefore no worse than any other such source.
Note that I said the quarter pounder patties are 100% beef. The regular patties you find on a hamburger or Big Mac are not so and what appears to be in the video.
Also, I’m sure the ingredients list and/or process has changed since 1996….
Sugar contains fructose, which can damage the liver, resulting in fatty build-up similar to the cirrhosis of the liver found in alcoholics. The liver regulates insulin, so a damaged liver results in chronic dysfunction of the insulin regulation system. A malfunctioning insulin system leads to obesity, diabetes, and many other health problems.
Suppose that the average American was drinking a pint of whiskey each day. Would we really be surprised if we had all sorts of serious health problems?
Readily available figures should always be checked and their relevance evaluated, that’s annotations and lists of sources are for.
It’s very telling that you did not address the fact there has only been a marginal increase in per capita sugar consumption in the USA, nothing like “10 times,” especially in recent times, relative to a hundred years ago. The problem is that he is using that figure to over-awe the audience, and not adding “the necessary context” (only per capita consumption in the USA is relevant) as the “fact checkers” say. The global population has increased by about 5 times. And the sugar consumption in the backward countries like China has undoubtedly increased drastically. Remember that the seventies were already fifty years ago, and sugar consumption was at its peak. I bet people ate more waffles and sweet breakfast cereals back then, and they drank Quik, Ovaltine, Kool-AID, maybe more than they do today.
Isn’t the whole point of your article that the domineering sugar and syrup industry managed to suppress or ignore criticism from the nutritionist “mainstream” (if there is such a thing)? Judging by your other articles, it would be absurd to trust the figures used by academics. Food Products, I trust. The USA had the largest sugar consumption in the world in 1912. Until that point a marked increase in fatbodies had not been noticed?
Corn syrup wasn’t invented recently, and other syrups were heavily used in the past. There was huge consumption of sugar in the USA over a 100 years ago, enough to affect people’s health significantly, if sugar is as dangerous as it is alleged. The chief difference is in PRICE. And the price of ALL FOODS. Consider that a dozen eggs cost forty cents in the winter time in 1912, if large family spends that much a hundred times a year that’s 4% of your income just for eggs. (fasting in Lent was economical too, not just healthful and spiritually beneficial). Recall my Uncle Franz from New Vienna, who was a farmer, ate a dozen eggs for breakfasts, typically scratch cakes and pound cakes called for up to a dozen cakes
The crucial difference between then and now, and it is transparently obvious, when you think about it, is that a typical slightly above median family income in the the 1912 era was nearly 50% dedicated to food (if you weren’t a farmer). Now that food is not a pressing expense, it’s not hurting the pocketbook to eat a lot of junk food. (THREE SQUARE MEALS A DAY – how many people today eat three solid meals at home today? One undoubtedly with dishes containing substantial sugar like pancake syrup, ice cream or fruit juice – in the old days it was common in small towns for the father to come home to a family dinner at lunchtime) People have no social pressure to fast or fit into decent clothing. In the old days, the social and psychological pressure to dress appropriately was such that common people spent between 10 and 20 percent of their income on clothing, the same pressure to dress appropriately (and to present a decent, respectable appearance) would come into play for the fat-bodies.
Isn’t it much more likely that cheap food, very reliable and strong heat (old people love cranking up the thermostat) and hours and hours of time spent in front of screens at work and at home as opposed to physical movement and labor, in addition to a COLLAPSE OF SOCIAL LIFE FOR THE so-called “middle class” is the reason for the fat-bodies, rather than Coca Cola? I’m not absolving Coca Cola of blame, but you could probably blame smoking cessation at least as much as you could blame Coca Cola.
OK, I agree that the term “fat head” appears to apply to you. But in most people only the axons of neurons are encased (actually wrapped) in a myelin sheath that contains some lipid components. The only portion of the myelin sheath that can be considered “saturated” is the tail of the cholesterol molecule. See the diagram linked below.
The non-cyclic portion of the cholesterol molecule pointing off to the upper right consists of 8 carbons linked to hydrogen without double bonds, so this non-cyclic “tail” is saturated with hydrogens, but is not one of the saturated fats because it is not long enough (minimum of 12 carbon atoms to be a saturated fat) and does not have a carboxyl group on its terminus.
The diagram linked below shows what a saturated fatty acid looks like. Such lipids do occur in the CNS but excess amounts apparently cause neurological diseases. See quoted material in next paragraph.
https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/American_River_College/CHEM_309%3A_Applied_Chemistry_for_the_Health_Sciences/11%3A_Lipids_-_An_Introduction/11.01%3A_Fatty_Acids
Impact of Dietary Fats on Brain Functions
“This highlights, the importance of dietary lipids to preserve and maintain the specific molecular systems and mechanisms that regulate neuronal functions and the possibility to prevent or to treat brain diseases via diet manipulations. For instance, it has been recognized that dietary n-3 PUFAs have “antiaging” effects that support cognitive processes and maintain synaptic functions and plasticity [8, 22, 23]. In turn, diets that are high in saturated fats negatively impact brain functions and increase the risk of cardiovascular and neurological diseases.” [24].
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6120115/
Once I thought I was fat because of eating at restaurants. And it’s quite possible it contributed to being overweight when I was younger. But eventually I grew disgusted with restaurants, and almost never eat at them. I grew disgusted with corn syrup flavored soda, and stopped drinking soda until I came across Mexican Coke back in 2012. I still fattened up after significant weight loss. I’ve lost at least 40 lbs at least 5 times, I’ve lost 50-70 lbs three of those times. When I lost 70 lbs, going from 255 to 185, it was by eating one meal a day. That was ten years ago, and I now weight 110 lbs more than 185, but I do a lot of strength training it’s not quite as bad as it sounds although it’s quite bad. I warn my little brother that when I was his age I was lighter than him (I can still lift him up about a foot off the floor and carry him around), he’s become a health nut since taking the vax three times to keep his job seems to have resulted in health emergencies. The vax is far more deadly than sugar folks. Anyone blaming sugar is trying to distract us from the vax. Not defending sugar though. I’ve been getting to the point where I’m trying to cut back on sugar. However, I don’t believe sugar is the chief culprit. When I would fast during Lent I would keep myself going by having a Mexican Coke, which allowed under the fairly lax 50s rules, you will still lose weight drinking a coke everyday – it’s everything else that is the real problem. If you have to cook your own meals, you’ll likely lose weight.
Joining the gym has not improved the situation, in fact, it’s worse, because I eat more. Just ate a large bowl of grits and cheese, after having a had a hamburger, a brat, two or three glasses of milk, and a couple tall glasses of apple cider. Not to mention some 72% pound plus chocolate.
Just remember, if WWIII hits us, you’ll envy the fat-bodies with hoards of sugar!
Pretty sure people don’t eat cotton seed nor rapeseed. (But do NOT let me stop you.)
Whoops! Did that slip past your lefty senses?
Great point, and great post.
Government still needs to go. Off with their heads.
Actually the sugar industry starting after Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish Inquisition has been dominated by Jews. As a consequence, the negro slave industry was also dominated by Jews.
I say:
JEW MONEY-GRUBBER SUGAR MERCHANTS WERE EVIL SLAVEMASTER SCUMBAGS
Emma Lazarus’s Jew father was a money-grubber sugar shyster of the worst sort!
Emma Lazarus’s father was a Jew sugar merchant and we know how frigging shady the sugar shyster business is. Florida knows about shady shyster sugar dealings and that former Mexican president Vicente Fox was a sugar water shyster boy for a cola corporation.
Rich girl Sugar Jew propaganda scribbler Emma Lazarus scratched out a nasty poem about so-called ‘huddled masses’ and how these ‘huddled masses’ should be flooded into the USA to be used as demographic weapons to attack and destroy the European Christian ancestral core of the USA.
Jews Organized Globally(JOG) violently and vindictively re-purposed the crappy poem by Sugar Jew Emma Lazarus and they rudely hammered and nailed that poem to the Statue of Liberty!
That cruddy poem from plutocrat Sugar Jew tart Emma Lazarus must be removed from the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence and also to remember the war support provided by France to assist in the English colonies winning the American Colonial Secessionary War from the English Empire.
The FIRES — Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, Sugar — scam sector of the money-grubber system is shady and sneaky and crooked from top to bottom. The fatty bottoms are ballooning out like bastards, and the SUGAR business is just as shady and crooked as it was centuries ago.
It’s so “healthy” it can stay fresh for over 20 years.
The same thing would happen if you added a small amount of salt to some hamburger meat and let it dry.
I’m all for eating less fast food and sugar but it’s pretty easy to preserve meat if it is indoors.
I’ve had an interest in Huey Long for decades: from first hear about him while working in the Louisiana oilfields as a teenager in the late 70’s; from later preforming Stanley Kowalski’s line: “Just remember what Huey Long said, that ‘every man’s a king’ and I’m the king around here” out of a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire as my final in acting class; and finally from slowly reading and savoring Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men while hitchhiking around Spain one winter 40 years ago.
There can’t be too many Jews in Louisiana; I was there off and on for a few years and didn’t see a single one. But they wouldn’t be working in the oilfields. Huey probably hit every synagogue in the state and sold a few cans to every Jewish household. I’ll remember this “trivial tidbit.” Thanks.
Otto Warburg named sugar a prime candidate in the process of cancer in his book Ravenous.
This epidemic of health issues shows you how much the “elite” and their owned government care about their citizens…they don’t, they never have, and the media are the liars they hire to promote the lie they do care.
Smoking, asbestos, stone benchtops, plastics, diet, you name a problem to our health and you can trace it up the food chain to a few mega wealthy individuals who knew their product was toxic but it made them wealthy and powerful beyond their wildest dreams.
My father, born in England in the 30s, had health issues due to sugar all his life. Lost his teeth early, suffered from Sarcopenia earier than is natural and then, developed man boobs after giving up smoking and consuming more sugar to compensate the nicotine fix…most men don’t understand the feminising effect of sugar. He finally died, after a long life, from the effects of Alzheimer’s, not a nice way to go.
You can tell if something you are consuming is doing you harm in the way your body reacts, it will tell you it doesn’t like what you’ve eaten if your attuned. Gurgling stomach or hives, a quickening heart rate a sudden onset of sleepiness…are all signs. So after Christmas lunch when the children are hyperactive and the adults just want a nap…it maybe due to what you just ate.
So lets return the favor to Coke and all those big food companies, and show how much we care for them, like they have done for us, and send them broke.
“…it’s worse, because I eat more…” And pasta, I bet.
That’s why. The calorie per day thing is so fucked! Today, we sit on our asses, all day, dammit! Twenty minutes of exercise = useless, for almost everybody (see below).
SUGAR:
Did you know: 65 years ago, when men did hard grunty sweaty physical work 40 – 60 hours a week, a sugar-sweetened Coca Cola was 7 or 8 oz! Read that again. What’s in that tub of sugar sweetened pop you guzzle maybe 3X a day today? 20 oz, even 32 oz. I’ve seen fatsoes toting a 64oz. Gasp! No wonder you’re fucking fat. And what about those “power” drinks? how much sugar in those? You guzzle it and then sit on your ass doing nothing physical. “Workers” now have power tools that were almost absent in the days of the 8 oz pop bottle, to boot.
COMPLEX CARBS:
Then this pasta thing. Did you know: Pasta is a dish created basically for ditch diggers. And if you ever went to Italy 50 years ago, you got maybe 1/4 the amount of pasta on that plate that you see on the plate today in the US. Pasta leavings don’t just stick like glue to the shithouse bowl – it also is real fattening! (I don’t know why, it just is!) But from what I can see, pasta (oh, and pizza, too, “Chicago style” [actually a Detroit invention] essentially a half loaf of bread per ‘serving” + everything else you put on it) is just the entree of that guy who sits on his ass all day? And he wonders why he’s already fat at 25 years old.
“EXERCISE”
Then this “gym” thing. Did you know: you burn no “fat” at all until you break a sweat. For me, that was after 8 – to sometimes 15 minutes on a treadmill at a moderate trot with a 4% incline [I only did what I could tolerate for a whole hour – the rule: if you ain’t got an hour, skip it] It took an additional 40 minutes (non-stop after breaking a sweat) to burn off about 450 calories, which is required to even begin to undo sedentary days and too much caloric intake for a sedentary life. I had to hit myself in the head to get my eyes back facing forward when I saw that sign on a treadmill, in a gym on Seinfeld that read “20 minutes maximum” LOL Even more ridiculous was the fat tub climbing on a treadmill running it at 8 mph and she (covertly) almost dies (and they don’t show her jumping off) in some moronic treadmill advertisement on TV. How many of you Tubbies have a treadmill in the basement collecting dust? Looking around, I bet more than a few.
And this “Low Fat” meat thing. Whatta crock. So, today they’ve turned beef and pork into flavorless goat meat. But, nonetheless, everybody is fatter than ever! And short of larding the stuff, it’s inedible to this Westerner (5’7″ 132# 70 y/o). Pffft!
And then there’s “genes.” Some people will pudge out for any little excuse. If that’s you, everything above goes triple. I don’t know – get a tapeworm if that’s the case and it really matters to you.
It all boils down to DISCIPLINE.
If you have normal health, normal intelligence, AND strict discipline you’ll go farther than those who are naturally smarter and stronger but lack the discipline. I knew star football players in high school, they were in excellent shape, phenomenal athletes, and now they’re dead. They stopped exercising in their twenties and thirties, continued eating like pigs, and kicked the bucket before they reached sixty.
I knew these guys as teenagers, they were fun, energetic, full of life. They must have hated looking down and seeing their fat guts but they had lost the discipline to reverse course, and eventually gave up. When it comes to fitness, both heart & lung and overall body strength, it’s a whole lot easier to maintain it than it is to lose it and then have to gain it back.
In 1960 Americans spent three times more on food to prepare at home than they did for eating in restaurants. Sixty years later eating out represented 55% of the food budget and food from supermarkets 45%. So Americans largely lost control of the nutritional quality of what they eat and also of the quantity because non-chain restaurant meals are excessively large. The links below provide evidence of increased caloric intake over a half century.
Somehow Mr. Unz believes that these changes in eating habits have no causal efficacy on the epidemic of high BMIs. Astounding.
“Food at Home” vs. “Food Away from Home” market share
Scroll to see the graph of changing American location for eating.
https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/food-at-home-vs-food-away-from-home-market-share/
Energy Contents of Frequently Ordered Restaurant Meals and Comparison with Human Energy Requirements and US Department of Agriculture Database Information: A Multisite Randomized Study
This study proved that restaurant meals contain roughly twice as many calories as should be eaten at one meal.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5746190/
Eating out of Home: Influence on Nutrition, Health, and Policies: A Scoping Review
This study showed that “A high rate of eating out of the home led to poorer diet quality, characterized by higher intakes of energy, total and saturated fats, sugar, and sodium, as well as lower intakes of fiber, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and micronutrients.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8953831/
Bloomberg went about tackling the obesity epidemic the wrong way…banning never works…you have to make people want to voluntarily give up the poison.
Bloomberg would of done better by mandating health warnings on soda labels, by giving access to information at point of sale on the health effects of a high sugar consumption diet.
If you offer the information in convenient places then people will have a look because of humans curious nature, and women are the best targets because they want what is best for their children.
Bloomberg also had to increase the availability of a free alternative throughout the city in the form of clean drinking fountains.
my gut can kick your gut’s ass son.
if you live by the ocean the mcdonald’s parking lots are covered with sea gulls lol we used to try and run them over with our cars.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-is-sugar-the-deadliest-white-powder-drug/?showcomments#comment-6841998
I don’t eat all that much pasta. On Sunday, I made a large-sauce pan full of soup out of the turkey stock I’d made the night before. Put about 5 medium potatoes in there, onions, barley, carrots. I ate about five bowls of that for “lunch” – and for dinner I cooked .75 pound flank steak rare. For breakfast I’d finished off the pumpkin pie. And of course I drink tall glasses of whole milk. I get home baked whole bread I’ll go through half a loaf easy in a day. Pop (like Coffee, but I’ve given up Coffee) is actually a kind of stop gap for when I’m NOT EATING. I was loving the Mexican coke but it’s gotten too much of a hassle to get, too expensive, 10 years ago when it was for Mexicans you could get a crate cheap. Energy drinks (Red Bull) are great in a pinch (like driving up to see the eclipse and driving back in the heavy traffic) but definitely I wouldn’t make a habit of those things. Now when I need a sugar fix I’ll have Root Beer float. Not everyday, but often enough, not as much as I’d drink that Coke though. At nearly $2 a bottle it’s a bad habit.
TAURINE is an extremely cheap supplement and quite beneficial for those reaching the age (reading glasses age) when the body starts producing less and less of it.
I’m actually feeling somewhat healthier, have more energy from the weight training, the problem is that fasting to lose weight kills the energy level, makes it hard to work out. I intend to do a lot of walking and when Lent rolls around I should drop 20 lbs or so.
People underestimate the degree to which cheap restaurant food, cheap pastries, junk food like potato chips etc, vitiate the sense of taste.
It’s the sense of taste that is really key to good nutrition. That is the real difference between the American diet and the European diet. Patient preparation, patient eating, and patient waiting between meals. American style fast food is more expensive in Europe, or at least it was in the past few decades, at any rate.
I forgot to mention that on Sunday I finished off dinner with a cheap bottle of Chilean “cabernet sauvignon.” – not usual, I usually don’t drink. The reality is that sugary soft drinks are a replacement for the hard drinks people were accustomed to drinking in the past (which often contained sugar).
When people needed a stimulant in the past, they would smoke. Now they drink a Red Bull or pop an adderall.
Post on twitter by the notorious Anatoly Karlin who thinks semaglutides are going to massively reduce obesity and RFKJ is going to take credit.
Only in your fevered imagination. Jeez, what an ego!
I’m 78 – Baby Boomer 1st Class – lean and muscular, and in great shape. I neither need nor take any medications. I did quit drinking booze almost 15 years ago.
Apparently I’m one of those people who can digest milk and sugar without problems as I’ve enjoyed dairy and natural sweets my entire life, and I’ve never been fat, heavy or overweight at all, not even close, and so I’ve never been motivated to go on a diet, pop pills, or adopt strange practices to get physically fit.
I’ve always been fit and in good shape no doubt due to my almost constant and intense physical activity as a youth running in the woods, swimming, bicycling, and especially playing baseball and basketball.
None of us get to choose our parents or our time, place and circumstances of birth. It’s just random chance. Some are handsome or beautiful, tall or talanted, and many are not. As far back as I’ve been able to research, all of my ancestors are N. Europeans, which is no doubt why I have blonde hair. It’s the luck of the draw to get good genes, but exercise and physical labor build attractive bodies.
Happily, the opposite sex finds athletic bodies attractive, or maybe it was really that English Leather cologne I wore back then that drew the ladies in.
I would disagree with Lustig on this. Have a look at this paper, for example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36364827/
BTW I consider blackberries to be a “superfood,” in part because they are a good source of cyanidin glucoside, which has an anti-aging effect:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36490326/
I often make a blackberry smoothie with organic frozen blackberries, some almond milk, some Organic Traditions Sprouted Flax Seed Powder and some NOW Foods Sports Nutrition, Soy Protein Isolate.
I’ve never seen any evidence that orange juice (in moderation at least) was unhealthy. Most papers I’ve seen suggest at least modest health benefits, e.g.:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36383179/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34060162/
I usually have some orange juice with breakfast but I also add a few grams of prebiotic soluble fiber to it. I like Healthy Origins Healthy Fiber , which is partially hydrolyzed guar gum.
You should try it Ron.
Interesting lecture about vegetable oils. He shows lots of graphs from Japan, Australia, the U.S. indicating strong correlation between increased consumption of those oils vs obesity, diabetes, strokes, etc. Much stronger correlation than sugar consumption.
The markup on soda in restaurants can be in the 500%-2000% range. It’s basically just syrup mix and CO2, which cost pennies, and they sell it in dollars. So, eliminating or significantly reducing soda sales at fast-food restaurants would be disastrous for franchisees’ business model.
McDonald’s is essentially a real-estate business, and franchisees pay the company rent from sales of the licensed products. The majority of the profits come from non-food items such as soft drinks, due to the enormous profit margin and constant sales. Without the profits from soft drinks, they would have to dramatically increase the prices on the burgers and fries, which would make the restaurants unappealing to consumers.
So, it would be really surprising if the fast-food industry had not been in cahoots with the sugar lobby for all these years in keeping consumers ignorant of the dangers of sugar.
Very interesting.
There is one part of “conventional” nutritional advice that is not discussed: the idea that consumption of saturated fats causes cholesterol plaques to build up in the coronary arteries. Advice varies from cutting out fats, to replacing saturated with unsaturated fats, or simply eating essential unsaturated fats in addition to saturated fats. This was the basis for a decades-long advertising campaign for Unilever’s Flora, an unsaturated-fat margarine intended as a substitute for (saturated-fat) butter.
Was any of this backed up by science?
It reminds me of Theme Park on PC. You can increase the amount of sugar in the drinks and add more salt to the food to get people hooked and buy more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game)
For a critical review of Lustig’s opinions I strongly recommend the two part article ‘Sweet Stupidity’ by the Australian independent researcher Anthony Colpo – especially part 2.
I believe sugar is a red herring, In the exhaustive article on metabolic health, it’s surprising that there is no mention about the single dangerous so called “essential nutrient” viz., PUFA while fat consumption is generally glossed over as harmless. No attempt has been made to differentiate the salutary effects of coconut oil and the opposite effect of unsaturated oils.
Without mentioning thyroid health which is the master gland for metabolic health just demonising sugar which is just a bystander while other factors adversely attack health, appears naive. Apparently Mr.Unz or any of his mentors are not aware of Randle cycle.
I strongly urge that the author should study writings of Dr.Ray Peat on the role of fructose and other carbohydrates on health before jumping to the conclusion that fructose is harmful and metabolised only by liver. I am sure you will drastically change your views on health and diet by understanding the physiology as described by Dr.Ray Peat.
Study of Dr.Ray Peat (Raypeat.com) is not an easy job. It takes several readings to understand the full meaning. With your superior intelligence this will be something special and not to be missed in your life time. Do not dismiss this comment as irrelevant.
Some say white flour is almost as bad as sugar.
Some defend honey, others say it’s just sugar with a bit of nutrients.
Klaus, thank you for your personal experience. I too went low-carb two years ago and lost 20-30 Lb. Klaus’s claimed loss (65 Kg = 143 Lb.) in 7 months is unusual, but so is his claimed avoidance of all carbs. My loss and carb restriction were much more modest (with Atkins 100 plan, more or less). Klaus makes a very important observation: Unlike a whole lot of health or other interventions that are claimed to be beneficial, going on such a diet for most (but not all) will product easily verifiable results that can be seen over a period of weeks and months. The scale doesn’t lie. Neither do the lipid, glucose, insulin level blood tests. Are there downsides to low-carb? Perhaps. Taubes addresses this topic in his books. There are few, if any long-term studies showing the results of such a diet. But there aren’t any such studies for any long-range effects including of recommended diets.
Individual results will, of course, vary. For example, I’m a big fan of sugar substitutes. Yes, they have their potential risks. But on the other hand, I’ve not fallen back into my old bad diet habits. Quite to the contrary. I’ve learnt new eating habits and I stay within 4 Lb. of my goal weight without even trying.
Homemade yogurt/kefir/whatever: Of couse one could use recipes and proper cultures to achieve specific results. I, on the other hand, seem to be happy with what we might call a generic fermented milk product. I began with a kefir starter. I added in regular whole milk and let it sit at room temperature for several hours. I judge when it’s “done” by tasting it. Slightly sour is my setpoint. I keep it in the refrigerator. When it runs low, I merely add new whole milk and again let it ferment for several hours at room temperature.
I want him to launch a thorough investigation into big pharma.
I do not want him telling me what to eat.
Coca-Cola with real sugar: I’ve been a diet cola drinker for 40 years or so. Since I drank several cans a day, I was concerned about the amount of sugar and/or HFCS I was taking that was the main reason that made me switch. I can taste the difference between artificial and regular but here’s what’s odd: I’ve tried several times in my life and can’t reliably taste a difference between HFCS and sucrose. That’s not surprising, since HFCS for sodas is specifically formulated to be as close to sucrose taste as possible. Despite that, some folks claim to be able to discern the difference.
Much to the chagrin of the anti-Semites here, in addition to Coke Mexicano another option is the seasonal Kosher Coke sold during Passover, which if I recall correctly, has yellow caps. Jews apparently are smart enough to avoid the dangers of HFCS and seed oils, even if it’s only for one week per year.
Loved the article. Very informative. Loved the comments, too.
My take-aways from both: Eating bad fats makes your cells (which are made of fat) more susceptible to invasion. Eating sugar (or whatever type) feeds the invaders.
Let’s talk about the invaders! It’s not germs. Depending on the type, they may or may not be microscopic.
It’s parasites. Parasites target acetylcholine and/or nicotinic receptors, deactivating the immune system. That’s akin to burglars cutting the cable lines to a house, so the residents cannot contact emergency services (and get the immune system to fight the invader). The body lets its guard down, some pathways are blocked, communication lines are down.
Eventually–esp with a diet rich in parasite-loving sugar–cancer or other chronic disease develops.
What disease develops appears to be somewhat random. With cancer, areas of previous injury appear more vulnerable to parasite infestation. Otherwise, why MS and not ALS? Why Alzheimer’s? Why is the patient experiencing these particular sensory problems and not those? Why paralysis of these nerves and not those? Don’t know. The parasites have to be small enough to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, but otherwise, they could go anywhere.
Treatment with antiparasitics (nicotine [use a patch instead of smoking chemically-laden commercial cigarettes], ivermectin, wormwood, fenbendazole, pyrantel pamoate, etc.) unblocks the receptors, freeing nerve signalling, restoring communication among the immune system, central nervous system, etc. If the disease IS the parasites (e.g., cancer), then health should improve quickly after antiparasitic treatment. If the disease progression resulted in a loss of cells/tissue (ms, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, etc.), then there should be a halt to the disease progression, but not necessarily complete recovery/reversal of the disease.
Parasite treatment is an ongoing process. Some people re-treat once a week, once a month, or every 6 months. Depending on the species, parasites, once “destroyed” are not really destroyed. They disintegrate into bits that simply revert to an immature state of development, waiting (in ‘remission’) favorable conditions to initiate development back into mature/reproducing organisms. Eggs can hang around (protected in their cyst-like structures) for decades. Parasites are detectable in feces only if a batch has died and was eliminated into the colon. So testing may not be worthwhile, esp considering how benign and inexpensive antiparasitic treatment is.
Are there parasites in the jabs? If so, then that could be why ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were denigrated so thoroughly. Interestingly, smokers were the least likely to contract covid and/or be hospitalized with covid (per the French study published in May, 2020). Within a month, public health “stop smoking” campaigns were ramped up (‘there is no better time to quit!’).
Venoms – as many as 36 types identified in the jabs – appear to do the same thing as parasites, blocking receptors. Venomous animals want their prey paralyzed, helpless, and unable to breathe (e.g., the nerves blocking the diaphragm slow breathing without any respiratory residue.) Venoms can be harvested directly from the animal (messay and dangerous) or grown in a lab (on yeast or bacteria, like some strains of e coli). One strain of e coli is very contagious – perhaps that is the one responsible for the shedding?
Venoms are treatable with antiparasitics, too, particularly nicotine, or monoclonal antibodies. I learned a lot about this in Bryan Ardis’s new book, “moving beyond the covid-19 lies”. I learned that venom has to be displaced from the receptors (step 1) and then broken down further (step 2) with supplements like vit c, edta, NAC, etc. I learned that companies make and sell venom, there are patented drugs with venom (ace 2 inhibitors! oxempic!), make up, pesticides, and probably other things. Not surprisingly, Amazon seems to be permanently “out of stock” of this book. But you can buy the book on BA’s website (‘drardisshow [dot] com’).
TMI? Sorry.
Correction: Amazon now sells the Ardis book. My apologies.
Parasites? How do we get them? Do you have pets? Do you garden? Do you interact with other humans? They are ubiquitous. Until mid-century, de-worming was a normal part of life.
Mr Unz, a pleasure and a privilege to walk by your side down the various rabbit holes your calm and reasoned curiosity leads you.
This does seem to focus far too much on sugar as the culprit for all health-related issues. While I am as equally convinced that it is a significant driver of disease, there are many other factors at play which don’t seem to have been considered (in any meaningful depth) above.
Take the example of McDonald’s: to say that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese “hardly seem[s] likely to damage anyone’s health” is misleading. Consider the fact that the animal slaughtered to make it was probably not kept in its natural surroundings or fed on its natural diet; then think of the bread used (modern wheat treated with glyphosate and having been hybridised so as to be highly toxic), the “cheese”, which is anything but…and we haven’t even looked at the seed oils used to cook French Fries. Just because it contains little sugar (bearing in mind that a freshly made REAL hamburger patty would contain no sugar at all) clearly does not mean it’s not a threat to health.
The main message needs to the public needs to be: learn to f***ing cook for yourselves, and stop outsourcing the putting of food on your tables each day. People need to be incentivised to buy fresh food and cook. Real food as sold in markets should be pushed as much as possible – even if that means government subsidy for a short time, or a massive duty applied to all these processed food and beverage companies.
Then, away from nutrition, you need to consider the lack of physical activity that many people undertake today, especially walking. That’s obviously a topic for another day, but the main point is that sugar on its own is not going to cure all disease. The author should really have been keen to reiterate this throughout.
However, the sodas are extremely high in sugar and the milkshakes are even higher. The ketchup people put on their fries is high in sugar and the same is true for the juices and the maple syrup.
So it all depends what products you eat at McDonalds.
I agree and McDonalds does not have some nebulous “get fat chems” that wouldn’t exist if you remade the same meal at home.
The main problem is indeed the sugar. A large Coke fills your stomach will liquid calories that are quickly converted to energy/fat. A hamburger takes much longer to process.
Your body doesn’t react the same to 32 ounces of liquid sugar vs a Big mac. The Big mac also comes with 25 grams of protein which is the same as a protein shake.
Sure you can get obese from extra value meals with a water but the soda makes it easy to overload what was already a caloric excess.
Until I saw it mentioned in this article, I didn’t know that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock had passed in May of this year of Cancer, at the ripe old age of 53. Apparently in 2021 he tweeted about getting his covid shots and encouraged others to do the same. I wonder how many he got?
Had nothing to do with COVID.
He was a known alcoholic.
That is actually why he was showing liver damage in the film.
You can’t get liver damage that quickly from daily fast food.
Dear Mr. Unz
You write: “Large weight gain is primarily due to the malfunction of the hormonal system involving insulin.”
This is not true and I can’t blame you for being seduced by Taubes. He is an intellectual Casanova of low carb.
How about: “weight gain is usually associated with elevated insulin levels”? Or maybe even: “weight gain usually leads to elevated insulin levels”?
The good Gary did a really decent attempt to prove the causal relationship, through the NUSI (Nutrition Science Initiative) but failed.
It looks like it is not the carbs in and of themselves that cause insulin resistance and chronic elevated insulin. No matter what the cause, the fat cells and fatty liver cells, when overloaded with fat, develop insulin resistance. Which is why people who undergo gastric bypass or other such procedures, and who thus radically and suddenly start consuming fewer calories, experience a sudden normalization of insulin resistance and their insulin levels normalize too. Even diabetes type 2 goes usually into remission. No matter what they eat after the operation.
A medical doctor deeply interested in nutrition myself, I have the impression that nutrition science slowly moves towards the recognition of the role of food structure in moderating food intake and absorption. In good old days, most foods were minimally processed and it took a lot of effort on the part of the teeth, stomach and gut to digest it. It took a long time to empty the gastrointestinal tract and feel the hunger again. Nowadays, everything we put in our oral cavity is pre-chewed and pre-digested, almost totally decomposed and ready to be absorbed.
That said, I believe that Robert Lustig is right about the toxicity of fructose. The question is, whether fructuse is just as toxic in the context of moderate or low calorie intake, as opposed to high intake.
The Mexican Coke (when it first showed up in the gas stations – I had the first one at a Casey’s in Iowa) reminded me of what I drank as a kid. Not just the bottle (which is only a 12 oz bottle as opposed to the 16 oz bottles that were standard when I was a kid), but the flavor, the sweetness seemed to be like rock candy. Yeah, I was loving that Mexican Coke. Not good for you, but seeing as I was able to lose seventy pounds without giving it up, seems like it’s not the cause for being fat. I’m not defending the drink or pretending it’s healthy or even OK.
Recently I haven’t been able to enjoy it without adding lemon juice, but I’ve finally decided to more or less give it up. Will still drink root beer and orange soda though.
You are right about the Royal with cheese, as they call the quarter pounder in France, allegedly. But for the wrong reasons, in my opinion.
Everything the QP contains is pulverized foodstuffs, reconstituted to resemble real food. Why? Because it is cheaper and easier to do this way, and people love it.
The same macros in the form of a solid chunk of beef with some heavy duty rye bread and some vegetables would be a healthier choice and would satiate people for much longer. Alas, this would be too expensive to make and not so attractive to the average Joe.
We are stupid animals who are driven by likes and instincts. Some of us are smarter than that: eat with moderation and exercise religiously, and it really works. Those are stupid in other areas, on a bit higher level, but not a qualitative difference, sorry to say.
Sugar is half of it, highly processed seed oils the other, as in most fried foods, mayonnaise, margarine, etc. So if McDs fried in tallow as they once did, used butter instead of mayo, real cheese, and a whole wheat or rye bun it would be fairly healthy.
RFKjr should also declare a nuclear ban treaty on microwaving food since it kills whatever nutrients beneficial to a healthy metabolism. Even microwaved water is known to kill houseplants.
These vicious attacks on the human body perpetuates an endless cycle of compromised medical conditions that only benefit big pharmaceutical companies and medical care industries (doctors, hospitals, testing and imaging, etc).
Pepsi now has a soda shop version that uses sugar but it is still too sweet for me.
The only one I can stand is the Mexican coke and I haven’t seen it at costco for a while.
We need extensive studies on corn syrup vs sugar. In any case I think the era of cheap corn needs to end. Obesity is costing us billions.
It depends on which sugar is concentrated on.
The liver captures fructose and converts it into fat for storage.
High fructose corn syrup should require a warning label, but that would involve almost everything in a box or bag, which would be fine.
Kindly cite a scientific source for an apparently specious premise.
It should be noted that the McDonald’s quarter pounder pattie is fresh instead of frozen meat, FWIW.
Thanks for the programmed commercial AI approach. Great research!
This article is actively harmful and is thus worse than a garbage article.
I don’t want to waste lots of time refuting the many wrong statistics, the woolly thinking, confirmation bias and the bizarre conclusions in the article. The confirmation bias is amazing, btw, e.g., Unz has read 10 nutrition books but they all said sugar was the worst thing in food- huh??
For anyone interested in a balanced view of ALL the scientific evidence, I recommend Dr Greger’s website: nutritionfacts.org.
I also recommend watching the free film, Forks Over Knives, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZGs0XsS_lI. It shows people curing themselves of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., by eating only healthy foods. Their excellent website is at forksoverknives.com.
The healthy foods are whole plant foods, i.e., potatoes, grains, beans, fruit and vegetables. Everything else causes inflammation and is unhealthy.
“Whole” means unprocessed or minimally processed. E.g., olives are healthy, olive oil is not; brown pasta and rice are healthy, white pasta and rice aren’t so much (but are not terrible, either). Minimise or eliminate foods which aren’t whole plant foods.
Oh, and finally, Unz banged on a lot about diabetes (type 2), and persistently claimed it’s caused by eating too much sugar! But it isn’t, we know the cause of type 2 diabetes – it’s too much saturated fat in muscle cells (which comes from our food and body fat). In fact, sugar isn’t healthy, but it at least cleans the body of saturated fat a bit and thus sugar is anti-diabetes (T2). Here’s Dr Greger’s video explaining how we know, via MRI scans in the 1990s, what causes diabetes (T2): https://nutritionfacts.org/video/what-causes-insulin-resistance/.
Here’s Dr John McDougall explaining that almost no sugar gets turned into fat in the body, and that “sugar does not cause type-2 diabetes”: https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2006nl/sept/sugar.htm. One of his favourite phrases was “The fat you eat is the fat you wear.”
Due to the extreme confirmation bias and complete lack of scientific approach / reality-checking displayed in the article above, I have no option but to question all of Unz’s other articles, especially those in the American Pravda series. I’m thinking that either he’s completely lost it recently, or everything he’s ever written has been mostly wrong?
Women – Moms – working outside the home made that happen, though not for all.
I was born in Los Angeles in 1960 and, as a kid growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s, our family ate out maybe twice a year, and when we did it was a big GD deal.
Normally everything we ate for the first 18 years of my life was cooked from scratch by my mom, who was on a strict budget – no cake mixes, TV dinners, or anything like that. My mom was an excellent cook, yet I would have liked to eat at McDonald’s like so many other kids did. Little did I know back then that my parents necessary frugality was a blessing in disguise. To this day, thanks to my mom’s hearty & healthy home cooking and the lifestyle it ingrained, I’m still in excellent health as I push towards 65.
Didn’t know he was an alcoholic, but that makes sense. His liver already had been compromised.
I can’t disagree with your suggestion that “food” containing HFCS should have a warning label. When I talk about “sugar” not being the worst thing contributing to poor overall health, I mean carbohydrates of all kinds excluding HFCS.
Why should unrefined legumes, grains, coconut sugar or winter squash be poisonous to us – unless we are so toxic that our bodies don’t know the difference between good and bad foods anymore. Yet that’s where millions of people are now.
There was this book by Sherry Rogers, MD which came out years ago titled Detox or Die. It made sense, though I think it needs updating as the health of the general population has gone downhill in the past 20 years. Some folks are in such bad shape that the only thing they can eat anymore is meat. Just meat. And then they try and tell us that they do well on this restricted diet because it’s our “ancestral diet”. Well, living a total paleolithic lifestyle and consuming the entire animal (raw) is also ancestral, but I don’t see anyone wanting to do this.
Yes and that undermines the entire experiment and the results.
He admitted to drinking heavily since 13. So we don’t know how many calories were from alcohol.
https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/morgan-spurlocks-alcohol-abuse-explained/
It’s a shame since he makes a lot of fair points about the industry.
In your comment, Adam, I see STRONG echoes of the late John McDougall’s numerous videos. And you seem to be a diligent disciple of him and of Dr. Greger’s.
The cantral talking point of McDougall: “The fat you eat is the fat you wear” does not apply, not just to cows but to humans as well. Whereas under normal circumsances de novo lipogenesis is not significant in the human body, it increases on predominantly carbohydrate diet. If I were to coin a catchphrase in this style, it would be:
“The fat that you wear is what you ate too much of” or something like that.
Neither the church of LowCarb nor the church of HighCarb is The Solution. There is no Solution other than eating low processed foods.
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 2,385 kJ (570 kcal)
Carbohydrates 21 g
Sugars 0.0 g
Dietary fiber 9 g
source: USDA
McDonalds Large Fries • 480 Calories • nil Sugar
ron needs to look at glycemic index and glycemic load.
peanut butter 7. roasting may increase the sugar content?
french fries 31.
how much glycogen is in meat?
Thanks, that brings back memories of growing up in a similar household. The only aspect of it that I didn’t care for was being dragooned into shelling peas and shucking corn for several days each summer after my mother had scored bargains at the farmers’ market. We had a large freezer, but our country cousins kept a basement pantry full of home-“canned” vegetables. All those people lived into their late 80s or 90s.
I came to the same disturbing question.
Vaccines is the most obviously correct factor that should be leaping into the forefront of any decent person’s mind the instant *ANYONE* thinks *ANYTHING* about health issues.
Since when did people inject toxic garbage repeatedly into human beings – starting the DAY THEY ARE BORN and repeatedly, dozens of times? Ever? The decaying residue of foetal lung cells soaked in formaldehyde? Over and over and over? If you don’t know what that is (that is what a vaccine is, generally speaking) you should probably kill yourself out of the deep sense of shame that you didn’t know what a vaccine was, samurai-style. You brought shame on your ancestors and deserve death – by your own hand.
“Anti-fertility vaccines”
You need to start there. It is well-understood how injecting random antigens containing a variety of epitopes can cause your immune system to “react badly” to said epitopes. This could – quite obviously – cause food allergies, autoimmune issues, or otherwise.
There is something approaching a 0% chance that you would ever have “immunity”, as “immunity” is an inherently idiotic concept. I mean, “immunity” as vax-ophiles (like pedophiles but with vaccines) really just means “activating a portion of your B and T cell repetoire”. I mean, why would anyone think that makes you “immune” unless you were a brain damaged 50 IQ subhuman moroon? I mean it’s just stilly.
But, it can definitely permanently fuck you up.
Thank Louis Pasteur for this garbage-schlop crap concept, and Robert Koch. What an incredibily idiotic idea.
But, you know, I’m sure that it’s that people have too much fried food in canola oil or, like whatever. It’s definitely not 50-70 injections in your body. NOOOO WAY.
“Anti fertility vaccines” “phase II clinical trials India”.
Try learning some day.
Thinking about it further, perhaps a confirmation bias is a necessary component of any project to refute an entrenched orthodoxy. Could Darwin have succeeded without such a bias, at least early on? My own personal experiences and analyses are in agreement with Mr. Unz’s overall thesis regarding the events of the last 150 years, so I will categorize this fructose mania as the inevitable occasion mistake.
95% of Americans support a Democrat Lawyer in charge of HHS–LOL. I was thinking an MD, rather than a corrupt Democrat lawyer selling his book, just might be more qualified. Ron, a physicist by training, bases his opinion on a book written by another physicist–LOL again. There are some statements of evidence-based science here, and excess sugar in the diet, and the direct and verified connection to development of type II diabetes–JI Rodale pointed this out in the early 1960s. The high fat diet being obliquely promoted, has serious adverse consequences–not all fats are the same and high fat diets lead to gallbladder problems and pancreatitis.
I’m willing to consider viewpoints of any sort, and so have a question. What is the experience of Spain, Italy, Israel, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, France, Norway, etc. — all the other counties having data presented in the graph of Life expectancy vs. health expenditure graph — relative to vaccine use? Are these countries significantly less vaxxed than the U.S.?
Wow, no remarks meant to insult your betters–I’m shocked. Vegetarians are not always so healthy. Check out the queers in San Fransicko. Fact is, raw fruits and vegetables are frequently contaminated with Salmonella spp, Listeria, and pathogenic E. Coli.–at a rate that far exceeds recalled meat. Eating raw is not always so wise and africans are the most malnourished people on the planet. Humans have been eating lean meat for quite some time–long before agriculture was in practice. There is a genetic link involved in longevity–many of my relatives have consumed meat their entire lives living routinely and healthy from 95-105.
LOL!
I shucked corn, but only 10 at a time so it was fun. I shelled peas only once, and that was when I was working on a small, 35-passenger, cruise ship in Alaska. I shelled a box of them outside on the back deck in record time (the chef couldn’t believe how fast I was) because we were in Glacier Bay for only a few hours and the faster I shelled those peas the sooner I’d be on land, on my time, looking around.
This is like my mother and father-in-law, they live in the city but the food, for decades, came straight from the farm. Even now everything is bought fresh and, being Portuguese, fresh ocean-caught fish is eaten every day. They never exercised, took vitamins, or followed any fitness rituals and are both alive and kicking and in their 90’s.
Ron,
Great article. I would point you in the direction of the carnivore diet, which avoids all plant foods in favor of simply protein and fat. As it turns out the human body needs nothing other than those two macronutrients.
Also, regarding your dependence on the actual sugar content of various foods, you would be better served to focus instead on total carbs. Simple carbs are easily converted into glucose in the human body and have the exact same effect on metabolism as sugar and results in the same insulin response as sugar.
Again, great article.
Michael
Yep, and we/they butchered their own beef and pork too. Cured hams in a smokehouse. A fair number lived past a 100. They managed to live through very hot and dry times in 1934 and 1936. They all grew large gardens and canned everything not eaten in the summer. During the drought they had to cut down trees to keep the cattle alive, and hauled water twice a day from a very large river since all the ponds, and wells went dry. This was a serious time of “climate change.” As farm kids we learned to work at a young age.
The process also kills infectious agents that kill people and some animals.
You mean the lab studies by BIG Microwave manufacturers showing how their partners in BIG Processed Foods are safe to nuke in microwave ovens?, those same folks who said Vaccines are safe, Floride is heathy to drink and you will “eat ze bugz”?
Those scientific sources?
I mean seriously?
Yours and the sources you listed are just biased opinions. Your one hats fits all solutions are just that.
By using that methodology you suggest we question everything Unz have written, regardless of its subject matter and factual sources referenced.
I suspect your bias runs much deeper than this one article.
[This is Why Black Women Are Obese and Unhealthy! Thanksgiving Edition]
Ron’s latest works have given great value for my time spent. I went on a pre-1900 diet 4 years ago to try to get off pharma drugs and correct health issues with better than expected results. I really didn’t do my homework on sugar though since I just conceived of it as a base form of energy. The types of sugars and how they metabolize was unknown until now. Thanks for making the next phase of my mission clear.
Thanks for the kind words.
But as I discussed in my article, all the nutritional experts whose books I read had emphasized that glucose was completely harmless and that all the health problems came from the fructose component of sugar, also found in HFCS, which can damage the liver. Since other carbohydrates don’t contain any fructose, they’re also harmless.
I’m not enough of an expert myself to necessarily say that they’re correct, but that was the scientific argument that all of them were making.
The FDA allows products infused with HFCS to be labeled 100% all natural.
Obama appointed a Monsanto lobbyist, Michael Taylor, to head up the FDA:
[my emphasis]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor
I think what most people don’t understand, is that the government is working hand-in-hand with the big corporations.
This very telling chart Mr. Unz published
is not a source of concern for our ‘public servants’ in the fecal government, but rather proof that their policies are working as planned.
The medical establishment is awash in lucre, the processed foods corporations are profiting in the endless billions, and they both work together to scratch each other’s backs. The processed foods poison the consumer, and send them to the medical establishment to milk the last drops of cash out of them, before they die early, and save the fecal government trillions in additional Social Security payments.
It’s all working perfectly. What’s not to like?
I avoid HFCS like the plague, but they’re getting sneaky. I also avoid seed oils, particularly canola and soy.
Olive oil is okay.
God speed to RFKJ
I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But it should not be too hard to find out how many vaccines the children in other countries have to receive until they are, say, 18 years of age.
To me, it is not a simple matter of who lives longer – Americans or Koreans or Japanese, etc.
There are just too many factors and variables involved in how many years anyone lives. At least until recently, some of those countries are pretty much mono-racial and that would determine how they would react to these many factors. One of the major ones, though, is – how many people in any given population are being kept artificially alive, i.e., through excessive life-prolonging measures, instead of allowing nature to take its course. I have visited nursing homes (and long term care hospital) and I am still sickened with what I saw.
Any opinions? Is it just about length of life? What about quality? No, I’m not pushing assisted suicide.
Yikes. I love your righteous rage; but whether it’s your fiery method of trying to wake people up, or a more moderate one, it doesn’t seem to work all that well. Some things do not penetrate. Some say it is because we don’t have the proper credentials, but, as you know, there are doctors who are warning against vaccination, though it is the Corona 19 one most of them are fixated on.
“I go for the Science!” is what my acquaintances say and line up for their next booster. Well, sutureself. Matthew 7:6. Sometimes my bible does come in handy.
My favorite book (not perfect, but fairly close) is the one by Suzanne Humphries MD & Roman Bystrianyk – Dissolving Illusions – Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History 10th anniversary edition.
Thanks to Ron Unz for letting me speak my piece.
One bourbon; one scotch; one beer
Apologies to George Thorogood!
I am no medical professional or dietary expert. I am a 73-year-old retired industrial electrician.
I am of the belief that our entire food chain has been adulterated. Any more, one sees hundreds of dietary supplements available in the stores. Is our food so bad that we require dietary “supplements?” Apparently so. I see in advertisements that they now have supplements to rid the body of aluminum substances. And what is in the supplements? ALUMINUM COMPOUNDS. Also, they are now marketing “dietary supplements” TO INFANTS – like the supplements marketed to older individuals.
I was visiting my cousin awhile back. She is a retired registered nurse and we like to talk about controversial subjects. I told her that I was going to make a statement and I wanted her to let me know whether or not she agreed with it and that I’d get a truthful response. She said, “OK,” and my statement to her was that the United States is spending MORE money on healthcare than ever before and that they are now SICKER than they have ever been. She told me that my statement was COMPLETELY CORRECT.
Thank you.
Interesting discussion about the evolution of the gene for salivary amylase, taste receptors, and starch metabolism:
👍👌
https://news.sky.com/story/shocking-rise-in-sugar-and-salt-in-mcdonalds-burgers-in-last-30-years-11287119
Abstract : “The burgers had 2.6 grammes of sugar per serving in 1989, but that figure has now risen to 10 grammes per serving.”
Let’s say 9 to 10 gr and 3 gr 30/40 years ago, what means the triple.
Admittedly, we’re still well below the recommended limit of 45g, but it’s a shame.
What could be the reason for this increase? Lobbying? Perhaps because sugar is a preservative.
Conclusion: dietary issues aside, I may consider buying McDonalds stock now😁😂
👍👌 I’m going to read this book.
Vitamin pills and capsules of powder often contain silica powder also. Which is nutritionally inert. They use it to make the vitamin blend puffier or less dense. Therefore on the label in NZ it only has to legally state ‘tableting aids’ or ‘encapsulating aids’ on the ingredients list. The thing is – ‘some’ of those vitamins are great for you – but the silica will kill you. Sometimes tab/cap aids mentioned are only magnesium. If the label doesn’t mention tab/cap aids at all – then it might be safe to eat.
If you breath too much silica dioxide powder into the lungs – silicosis can occur. It’s basically the same as asbestos and asbestosis. And why would anyone in their right mind consume asbestos into the gut. Same as glassy little shards of silica – it should be illegal.
You are an idiot. Not even wrong. Just a complete idiot.
I thought Mr. Unz might like this thread: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1409462/
Very good article!! Browsing through the comments though, I think some mistook what you were trying to to relay and literally thought you meant eat McDonald’s and drink beer for a wholesome diet, but the simple message was we need to reassess our perception of what is “healthy” and what isn’t.
I’m on board with you, I do believe sugar is toxic and dangerous. The exception being, I think sugar is a correlation of the health ailments that plague Americans and not a direct causation. We can’t neglect to mention the other dangerous chemicals put in foods as a preservative, GMOs, steroids used in meats, aluminum in our soil, unnecessary vaccine regiment placed on our children, the FDAs continuous attack on natural/holistic remedies, etc…….
….but as you said in your article too much information at one time can be a system overload to many, and cause people to give up before even trying, so we have to start somewhere and alerting people to the dangers of sugar is a pretty good place to start.
Your failure to acknowledge seed oils is the elephant in the room.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14161029/how-buy-new-pepsi-gingerbread-flavour.html
It looks like there is a large number of consumers out there who have not yet read the memo.
If fruit is ok because it has fiber, couldn’t people simply take fiber supplements before they eat sugar? This seems like a hypothesis that would be especially easy to test scientifically.
Z,
I worked for many years in a foundry that provided molten aluminum for casting wheels. The all-knowing management kept the foundry closed up, even in the summer. The melting furnaces contained insulating refractory, which I imagine had a lot of silica content. Also, the ladles, which were used to transport molten aluminum to the casting machines via fork lift, also had insulating refractory, which I also imagine had a lot of silica content.
The fork lift operators that moved the molten aluminum from the melting furnaces to the casting machines, also used to remove the “dross” from the surface of the molten aluminum in the melting furnaces. They used these “scrapers” which also scraped the refractory and much of that went into the air, which the workers breathed.
After that place had closed up permanently and retiring from my next job, I was diagnosed with “COPD” (similar to emphysema). I had gone to an emergency room because I would continually “get out of breath.” The nurse told me what the diagnosis was and asked me if I smoked. I told her that I smoked a pipe. She asked me if I inhaled the smoke from the pipe, to which I answered “no.” She then asked me if I had worked in factories that had very dirty air. I told her that I had worked in a factory in which a lot of welding went on and also in which there was sometimes mist from hydraulic leaks. I also told her that I had worked in a foundry that had very dirty air. She told me that the cause of my COPD was most likely by the dirty air at my places of employment.
I was at my doctor’s office after that and asked him about the origin of my COPD. He said exactly what the ER nurse told me. I am now 73 years old and have tried many inhalers, none of which proved to be effective. I get tired easily and sometimes get “winded,” but I just put up with it and continue to do what I can do.
Thank you.
Generally not a fan of Nick Fuentes, but he’s in the right here for calling out the increasing crankery on the right and its obsession with seed oils, raw milk, vaccines, etc. and its fetishization of stupidity and knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism. Let’s stay on the side of sanity and focus on sugar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabolism
EtOH goes through enzyme mediated combustion in the liver. it is turned DIRECTLY into energy, calories.
EtOH —> acetaldahyde —> acetic acid —> CO2 + H2O
it is NEVER turned into fat.
it does cause fatty liver in some heavy drinkers. but the source of this fat is NOT the EtOH itself.
don’t know why ron is such a hater of duh chroof regarding EtOH.
the claim many in the medical establishment would still defend sometimes stridently is that:
for those with very efficient acetaldahyde dehydrogenase moderate EtOH consumption can lower all cause mortality be reducing the rate of atherosclerosis and/or the incidence of atherosclerotic disease by means which are still unknown afaik.
BUT EtOH would never be prescribed because its “side effects” are (maybe) obviously way worse than most drugs.
the famous J-shaped curve(s):
https://time.com/archive/6597597/why-do-heavy-drinkers-outlive-nondrinkers/
the various non-europeans and baptists who now make up the american medical establishment explain this very consistent epidemiology by the greater propensity of rich pipo and high IQ pipo to drink.
EtOH is the bourgeoisie’s drug of choice.
Thank you for all your reading and writing. Here is a recent article…thought of you when I read it.
https://source.washu.edu/2024/12/research-reveals-how-fructose-in-diet-enhances-tumor-growth/
So predictable. Aren’t you clever?
Farmers also have a high incidence of COPD–mostly from working and breathing dust filled air during various Ag operations like haying and combining.
Iron deficiency is common in people with Type 2 diabetes. Iron deficiency gives you EXACTLY the same symptoms that diabetes does, including the poorly controlled blood sugar.
The primary source of iron in the diet is red meat, and Americans used to eat more of it than they do now. Allowing 100 million foreign invaders (read immigrants) into the US since the 1980s has driven up the cost of living to the point where red meat on the dinner table is becoming a luxury. When you’re playing a minimum of 10 dollars a pound, it’s hard to feed enough to your family to keep your iron levels up through diet alone, and you need an iron supplement.
What’s most, the new Chinese middle-class that has developed since the 1980s imports a massive amount of American beef to feed itself, and they are also driving up meat costs for Americans at home. The Chinese thrive on a vegetarian diet. That’s what they ate thousands of years ago and what they evolved to eat. But Northern Europeans ate almost nothing except meat thousands of years ago. Northern Europeans evolved to eat a plentiful meat diet, and that’s what they’re healthiest on. They do not thrive on grain, sugar, or large quantities of vegetables with almost no meat.
A lot of people don’t realize that the American frog has been gradually brought to a boil since the 1980s, because of foreigners trying to grab US wealth and goods one way or the other.
I wish I could help to heal your lungs.
Nebulizing GCMAF could be a solution. Although the pricetag is fairly huge.
https://saisei-hawaii.com/blogs/blog/how-is-gcmaf-administered
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7513798/
The second link also ties into the HIV discussion. Sorry I just quickly found those links. No direct option to purchase – but I know that some European suppliers sell the stuff.
Regards
Let’s be rational adults and see what actual study of seed oil consumption, vaccine injury, etc., shows. If they’re not proven harmful, great. What we don’t need to do is regress to ‘Murica right or wrong, if we’ve always done it that way then it must be right. Pass the fluoride.
Mr Unz has made a complete moron of himself by publishing this article. Take a look at all the low carbers, they’re all fat and slow. Ask an athlete like a pro cyclist or a runner what they feed on to get their energy. They don’t drink liquified butter or olive oil but eat tons of carbs. What do they patients on life support at the hospital ? Lard and bacon ? Or glucose ?
I suggest you study basic human physiology and the production of energy in the body. Carbohydrates are essential to life and to sustain a human body. Suggesting otherwise is not only stupid but detrimental. This low carb nonsense needs to die right now.
The trimmest people on earth high carb diets, that’s an indisputable fact. Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, they all feast on rice and sugar and they will outlive all lowcarbers.
“There is no Solution other than eating low processed foods. ”
This is a good general rule. Doing so will likely reduce the amount of refined carbs, which I think are the major driver of metabolic syndrome, etc. a la Taubes. However, even here nuance is required. As I pontificated elsewhere, for example, I would argue that even raw, fresh squeezed fruit juices are “refined”. And beyond all doubt the juice is very high in carbs, even if refined sugar or HFCS was not added.
Of course one could still eat low- or unprocessed foods and still obtain a huge amount of carbs. But frankly that seems unlikely: E.g. most people do not drink honey or molasses by the glassful, no matter how bad a case of sweet tooth they may have.
All too often we muddy the issues or fall victim to similarly bad “evidence.” For example, it has been observed that much of the early “research” claiming that a high-fat diet was harmful failed to remove the confounder that in nearly all cases a “high-fat” diet is also high in refined carbs.
The American “farmer” will not be plagued by dust & COPD much longer. The super-huge corporate owned mega-farms are rapidly making family farming extinct, kind of like mom & pop grocery stores. The equipment used by these mega-farms utilizes cabs that have filtered, heated air and air conditioning, minimizing exposure to dust. So that they can more effectively grow and harvest UNTESTED genetically modified organism (GMO) crops.
Anyone saying that agriculture here in the USA operates in a “free market” is a liar or is grossly misinformed. The entire farming business is RIGGED – the price (and “quality”) of seed, the cost of diesel fuel, the corporate-run grain elevators and the commodities “markets” – everything in U.S. agriculture is controlled by the corporations and the financial wreckers. Everything.
There is no more “competition” in agriculture than there is in other businesses – ATT vs. Verizon; Burger King vs. McDonalds; Coke vs. Pepsi, etc.
Thank you.
Great article Ron. I think most people should be avoiding sugar as it is highly caloric and unsatiating causing people to go over their needed daily calorie intake and hence gain weight. But it should be said that sugar is only fattening independent of calories, and when you control for calories it is not fattening in and of itself. There is much research and data to support this.
Simply stated: Does sugar contributed to the obesity epidemic as a dependant variable? Yes. Is sugar fattening independent of its caloric content? No.
As a former athlete I had considered these issues for some time as nutrition is foundational to training. I think the article below written by Nutritional Sciences PhD Layne Norton spells out the false dichotomy well.
https://biolayne.com/articles/nutrition/why-sugar-did-not-cause-the-obesity-epidemic/
alcohol + fructose is a double whammy on liver.
Try Rum and Diet Coke if you insist on drinking like a teenager.
Great article with an impressive amount of academic bulldozing thru books and lectures. I had no clue about fructose being an extra burden on the liver.
I enjoy a pop of OJ in the morning – thinking I am helping out my energy level and boosting immunity with vitamin C. I will explore foods/drinks with vitamin C that are not sugary. But I recall the old song, “A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Any ideas?
a swig of grapefruit juice in the morning is just the ticket
all the vitamin C you need with significantly less of the sugar/fructose of orange juice, and a nice way to cleanse the palate and jump-start the morning to a great day.
The Chinese are massive carnivores. They also eat a lot of processed food as a trip to Beijing will confirm. They are also very active. They get up early and go go go all day, from children to the old. They do eat a lot of healthy raw food and have a very varied diet. Their meat skewers are wonderful and many many restaurants have tanks of live any aquatic creature you can dream of, for your consumption. You might be thinking of Buddhist SE Asians?
Hi,
Detrimental health effects of not having blood glucose in the optimal range:
https://www.lifeextension.com/search#q=glucose&t=coveob1f40832&sort=relevancy
https://www.lifeextension.com/protocols#glucose-management-amp-diabetes
Medical advisory board: https://www.lifeextension.com/featured-articles/special/medadv/medical-advisory-board
Scientific advisors: https://www.lifeextension.com/featured-articles/special/advisory/scientific-advisory-board
Re the claimed increase in amount of sugar in McDonald’s beef. Yes it is true that sugar is used as a preservative, but that would mostly be foods that are not refrigerated. It’s more likely that sugar in such a product is added for flavor.
If you’d bothered to try and learn something and read the Dr McDougall link I provided, you’d have found out that de novo lipogenesis is almost 100% from eating fat, the human body ALMOST NEVER converts carbohydrates into fat.
The scientific evidence indicates that a carbohydrate (starch) intake of around 80%-90% of one’s calories is optimal for human health. Protein and fat should be around 5%-10% each, probably more towards the 5% than the 10%.
You’re a great example of someone who will never be right because you never look at the evidence.
My statements of fact and the sources I listed were all strictly scientific and entirely correct according to more than a century of the best nutritional science. So you can safely bank on what I said.
Both the plant-based doctors I mentioned are highly accurate and honest when it comes to nutritional science, as are other well-known, plant-based doctors such as Dr Caldwell Esselstyn (1956 Olympic gold medal in the rowing eights), Professor Colin Campbell (author of the biggest-ever, nutritional-science study – The China Study) and Dr Neal Barnard (founding president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)).
It’s not my fault that the healthiest foods are whole plant foods – potatoes, grains, beans, vegetables and fruit – and that you don’t enjoy eating those foods as much as the crap you usually eat. 😀
I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou – I eat my share of crap foods – it’s just that I’ve taken the trouble to find out which foods are healthiest and I’m not willing to lie to myself about it, unlike the vast majority of people including Unz.
The vast majority of the American Pravda series is good, in my view. Unz has a habit of misleadingly magnifying things which bolster his argument and minimising or ignoring those which go against his thesis, but generally the series is positive.
But with these two, new, completely-wrong, even aggressively-anti-scientific articles on nutrition in support of the keto nuts, I feel that, at best, Unz is finally jumping the shark – maybe he’s run out of steam and is just not doing the reality-checking any more, maybe he’s rushed into this new arena without sufficient consideration.
Or maybe, as I said, Unz has always been mostly wrong. I’m still considering the possibilities. It’s probably a combination of both of those.
My grandfather was an accountant at a ready-mix (lots of silica dust in the air), his second job, that he continued with after retirement.
He should have quit, he died at 70 of a lung inflammation disease.
Most people lack objectivity about certain topics, even a new or compelling topic might blow someone over.
In the case of the sugar articles, it could be a result of trying to deal with his own or a relative’s health problems.
You yourself don’t sound the most objective. People have different points of view. There’s no law that says someone can’t be right about one thing and wrong about another, or vice versa.
I suspect the vax has created a whole new generation of health nuts. Health problems will often lead to desperate measures or a feverish search for remedies.
Sugar is an easy target, after all, I really don’t think it’s the most healthy thing to eat, that seems to almost be simple common sense. Seeing as it is highly purified, it is pure carbohydrates being delivered without other nutrients.
Another thing to consider is our food is increasingly polluted with pesticide residues, especially glyphosate which is in nearly everything (have your tap water tested: the test will include glyphosate as standard procedure). Glyphosate kills the microbiome in the gut so what is its part in the chronic disease epidemic?
As farmers, 40 years ago we sprayed our wheat once during the growing season for weeds with fairly innocuous chemicals; now I watch my neighbors routinely spray 4 to 6 times and oftentimes with chemicals that are banned in many countries.
“FAT HEAD” Is a nice counter point to “Super Size Me.” In it, Tom Naughton (who is still alive) doesn’t trust Spurlock’s math so repeats the experiment without the soft drinks and sweets; all his biomarkers improved after a month. Well done, entertaining and worth watching. On youtube.
Given your hypothesis that it was the sugary soda drinks that were the true culprit in the health problems presented in Super Size Me, do we know for sure that he drank regular Coke as opposed to Diet Coke? Is that stated in the film?
Also, do you think that Diet Soda, which uses artificial sweeteners as opposed to real sugar, are actually better for you or not? I haven’t researched this subject in detail, but I do know that aspartame and other artificial sweeteners have gotten a bad rap over the years. Or maybe Big Sugar has propagandized against those as well?
“de novo lipogenesis is almost 100% from eating fat, the human body ALMOST NEVER converts carbohydrates into fat.”
Three times I’ve lost significant blubber whilst consuming a high-fat high-protein diet. Three times I re-gained the blubber because I reverted to a higher-carb diet. Two of those three weightlosses included binge drinking large quantities (8+ servings) of vodka almost daily; one did not. Vodka consumption is orthogonal to my weight, except it makes me crave fatty salty complex carbs – viz potato chips. Fat and protein consumptions are also orthogonal to my weight. Only carbs reliably pile on the jiggly wiggly pounds. What’s your explanation for me? How do you explain away my lived experience?
Starch is not a problem in the way fructose is, however it does have a high “glycemic index” compared to meat, fat, nuts, cheese, etc.� A food’s glycemic index is a number that indicates how quickly it causes your blood sugar to rise.� I understand that changes in blood sugar (glucose) should be gradual, that sharp changes are harmful.
Foods having a low glycemic index should be eaten along with starchy foods – bread with cheese for example.� I gather that lowers the index of the combination more so than just averaging it down.
Xylitol – a sweet substance that looks like sugar (I wrote about it in a comment to your previous nutrition article) – has a very low glycemic index, no fructose, and is good for your teeth.
The “I understand I gathers” are there because this is not my field.� I’ve read popular articles about the subject that were convincing.
Allow me to add one thing to the medical discussion – upon graduating from high school in 1969, I got a job at a chrome plating factory. The chrome was “hard chrome” and not the decorative chrome that one sees on car bumpers, etc.
We plated the insides of cylinders for chain saw engines, the insides of big sleeves for US Navy diesel engines, shock absorber shafts, etc. They had very poor ventilation in the plant and the air just above the tops of the tanks would be ORANGE in color. If one had the slightest nick on one’s skin, contact with the chrome plating solution would cause a “chrome sore,” a non-painful festering of the wound which would NOT heal until one was permanently away from the chrome environment. I had scars from chrome sores and it took many years for the scars to not be noticeable.
The chrome fumes did other damage. They ate out the insides of one’s nostrils, so that if one were to go outside in the winter, one’s nose would run profusely. My nose, the middle part, which separates the two nostrils, has a hole about 1/4″ in diameter and 1/4″ in from the outer edge of my nose. The chrome fumes ate out the skin. I can actually take a wire and put it in one nostril and have it come out the other.
I was applying for a job at a factory some years later and the doctor giving the exam peered up my nose and said to me, “You used to work in chrome plating, didn’t you?” I asked him how he knew and he gave me a medical name for the condition of my nose and told me that it was a dead give-away of someone having worked around chrome plating.
I am 73 years old and my nose still runs when I go from a warm area to a cold one.
Thank you.
If you eat a lot a calories of not dangerous foods then your body will manufacture fructose, which is the main deleterious part of sugar.
I don’t think that’s correct. For some reason, the nutritionix website doesn’t mention the sugar content, but when I googled it, it looks like grapefruit juice is about as high in sugar/fructose as orange juice. But it’s probably worth double-checking that.
Hard to say. Obviously, it doesn’t contain sugar/fructose, but in his books Lustig seemed very skeptical about it, and thought it might be bad for your health in other ways.
I’m absolutely no expert on these things, so I don’t really have an opinion on that question.
Apparently, Big Sugar did launch dishonest propaganda campaigns against other artificial sweeteners, so maybe that’s a factor in our perceptions.
Are you sure about that? None of the books I read ever suggested that, and if so, it would have certainly impacted their analysis of the health factors involved. All of them seemed to say that the only fructose we had came from sugar or HFCS, which was why they were harmful.
Yes, your body makes it for various purposes and too much when you overeat, it says so in the vid in the same comment. Overeating ordinary food leads to greatly increase production of fructose. I’ll try to find the bit in the vid I posted where he says that later (busy for a few hours now). But I did try to link to the bit where he says stopping excess manufacture of fructose from over eating is why you should drink lots of water. It’s an extremely informative video and he is a reliable well qualified source IMO.
Always fun and provocative following Ron’s intellectual adventures and discoveries.
Folks here might enjoy this YouTube channel, short videos by a guy who eats various foods and then notes their effect on his blood-sugar levels:
https://www.youtube.com/@insulinresistant1
And I recommend the documentary “Fat Head” by the very smart comedian Tom Naughton. It’s a response to Morgan Spurlock, it’s very Atkins and Taubes-friendly, and it’s interesting and amusing.
Thanks. I certainly wasn’t going to watch a two hour video by someone unknown to me to find the bit where he makes that surprising claim, but I’ll gladly do so if you can locate it for me. However, I’m really pretty skeptical that it’s a significant factor. If that were the case, it’s very strange that all the long, detailed books I read never mentioned it.
I did Google a journal article saying that it was possible, but seeming to suggest that it was a rare occurrence and hardly significant for human metabolism:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6684314/
I don’t have the expertise to evaluate these questions, but based upon this I tend to doubt that internal fructose synthesis is a significant factor.
For example, the books I read emphasized that except that it can (with some difficulty) be metabolized for energy, fructose is useless for our body, so it’s not clear to me why our human system would ever want to produce any of it.
Yes, the evidence is clear that processed sugar isn’t a healthy food. However, it’s not one of the worst foods either. Demonising carbs and promoting fats, as Unz does, is harmful because it’s an almost exact inversion of what is healthy.
I agree that Unz could be wrong about food and right about everything else. But his two articles about food have certainly at least caused me to greatly lower the amount of respect I had for him.
For the food issue is not a question of “different points of view”. We have copious scientific evidence that whole plant foods are healthiest (and really the 1990s was the last period anyone could reasonably say otherwise). This is the only objective/scientific/realistic point of view.
So Unz must be incapable of assessing the evidence in nutrition or he is lying in his two articles – I don’t think he’s lying. He said he’s read 10 books and various other things which is a significant investment of time – if he can’t come to a reasonable conclusion due to cognitive distortions on food/nutrition, I think it’s reasonable to question his judgement in general.
The scientific evidence is clear that keto diets, such as those you went on 3 times to lose weight, work almost as well as whole plant food diets for losing weight, and that those two are the most successful weight loss diets.
Keto is extremely unhealthy, though, and you’re likely to die younger if you stay on keto than on the standard, very unhealthy, American/Western diet. Happily, it’s extremely difficult to impossible to stay on keto for longer than a few years, though that can be long enough to cause permanent damage. Keto works by tricking your body into turning your appetite off / greatly reducing it.
Whole plant food is very healthy, and is easier to stay on in the long term. Appetite stays normal, and you are satisfied by the large amounts of low-calorie food you eat filling your stomach up – the natural way to eat.
Basically, the scientific evidence, which I’m certain you’ll never look at, is clear that eating too much fat is what makes people fat.
8+ shots of vodka “almost daily” isn’t healthy, of course. I don’t think that you’ve been following any kind of scientific method in your weight losses, nor do I think your personal observations are reliable.
‘ 300 fold higher than fructose in blood’
Thanks, that’s interesting. It does sound like the body might sometimes synthesize fructose, but probably only under rare and unusual conditions.
I’d think that the total amount needed for semen is so small even eating just a very small amount of daily sugar would provide all that was necessary, maybe an occasional fruit or something, assuming that it was directed to that purpose rather than separately created.
Similarly, I’m not sure h0w frequently the fructose is needed for that other purpose.
But it does seem that fructose occasionally is needed for something rather than just being a less useful version of glucose or even harmful.
It starts talking about high blood glucose stimulating conversion to fructose at at 45:51. Experiments with knockout mice and glocose to fructose being the pathway to obesity at from 49:40 Key findings from 50:00 to 51:40. There isn’t cast iron evidence that it is the major mechanism of obesity in humans but high carb diets can lead to 25 grams synthesis of fructose a day, likely more.
Keto is like permanent winter. Plant and fruit based diets are permanent summer (sucrose is the height of summer mating frenzy time without end); neither one of them is particularly healthy or comfortable to follow for years.
I also got some conflicting information, but on the whole, grapefruit has less sugar than orange juice.
https://foodstruct.com/compare/grapefruit-vs-oranges
Other websites may vary on that, but I’m reasonably certain grapefruit is better in that regard.
Since this is a thread about health, I’ll also offer some empirical and anecdotal experience with getting health information off the Internet. In this case, vis-a-vis cancer and Chemo.
I knew someone with cancer, and she was concerned about taking Chemo, and we both scoured and poured over the Internet and asked friends and family and so forth, but the information we got was contradictory, even from friends and family. Some said they knew someone who was cured by Chemo, and some said they knew someone who had died from Chemo.
Ditto the websites, who either considered Chemo a prudent thing for some cancer patients, vs. others who considered it a scam for the medical community to get rich poisoning people.
But eventually she went on Chemo, and what I can attest to, is that it killed cancer cells, because I literally could see it doing so. One day a small spot on the skin, and the next day it was the size of a silver dollar, because the spot was dead cancer cells that the Chemo was killing.
So in some cases, Chemo actually works. That’s my empirical testimony.
fwiw
Harold,
I also disagreed with Ron here but I believe that he was accidentally equating juicing (as in fruit juices) with blending. The entire purpose of juicing is to extract the juice and leave the fiber behind. However, when blending to make a smoothie the entire fruit would be processed: fiber, rind, and all. In the latter we would still be consuming all the fiber. I believe that these processes belong in distinct categories.
It would be like equating drinking apple juice to eating an apple.
They probably could have used vitamin C as a better preservative for part of the sugar load if preservation was really the target. Human cells transport ascorbate like glucose but without the adverse glycemic impact.
How about an American Pravda on so-called chemtrails? It would be great to hear from a source that it least tries to be balanced. Conspiracy theorists treat anyone who doesn’t buy into every bit of their theories as a moron, while mainstream sources refuse to even consider the possibility the official story isn’t 100 percent true.
Well, the claims made by Lustig are different than that. It’s not the fiber that cushions the body from the ill-effects of the fructose, but the fact that the fructose is so tightly bound with the fiber, forcing the digestive system to take much longer to extract it, thereby spacing out its impact on the liver.
He says that the blending process fragments the fiber into very small pieces, thereby allowing the fructose to be easily extracted, just like would happen with apple sauce. Therefore, the sugar contained in a fruit smoothie has the same impact as the sugar in fruit juice.
Again, I’m absolutely no expert, but that’s what he claims.
The next entry in the American Pravda series should be on how head chopping terrorists in Syria became moderate diversity-friendly rebels. It’s so in your face right now.
Thanks, but I’m afraid my current impression of “chemtrails” is much more on the “mainstream” side.
As I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, something like 90-95% of all the “conspiracy theories” I’ve looked into have turned out to be incorrect or at least unsubstantiated, with my long American Pravda series merely representing the residual 5-10%.
For that reason, I rarely bother spending time on something unless and until I come across at least a bit of solid evidence behind it. All I know about chemtrails is that Alex Jones has supposedly been touting them for years, alongside with his claims that the Communist Chinese control Hollywood, the rest of the media, and most of the Biden Administration.
Perhaps you could point me to a couple of the most solid articles supporting the conspiratorial case for chemtrails, so I could get a sense of what’s behind it.
The headaches are primarily caused by dehydration from winos that drink heavily–alcohol inhibits ADH (ie Anti-diuretic Hormone). Cars kill, airplanes kill; ETOH kills millions and people ingest it freely. Alcohol is responsible for 3% of the world’s cancer, and death by accident are also high on the list. It is in fact, the world’s #1 drug problem. It is legal and makes money for govt and ethanol drug vendors.
The claim against it is complete BS driven by a corrupt, California legal system. Roundup has been used for 40 years and tested 100s of times in a dozen species and is about as toxic as table salt. This baseless lawsuit happened in CA where everything is labeled a potential carcinogen. Yes in CA, where the wine industry is a 100 billion dollar industry and alcohol, a proven carcinogen in a dozen species, is responsible for 3% of the world’s cancers in humans. Where are the lawsuits for this PROVEN carcinogen, not to mention the accidents and lives ruined from addiction.
It is clear you know little about farming and hate the capitalist system. Do you grow a garden? What constitutes your idea of a family farm? Do you live in a CHFOs—Confined Human Feeding Operation? We call them cities. Many cities have in excess of 25,000 people/square mile living on top of each other similar to the way poultry are raised.
Where is your citizenship? Govt supported cheap-food policies have been in effect since the 1940s.
If you shut off the switch and say, ‘No more GMOs tomorrow,’ you need an additional 300 million acres to make up for the crop-yield advantages lost. Farmers need places to tap those acres. Where? Wetlands? Rain forests?” How many 100s of millions will starve?
>If you shut off the switch and say, ‘No more GMOs tomorrow,’ you need an additional 300 million acres to make up for the crop-yield advantages lost.
There is no yield advantage, there is a labor advantage. GMO crops are simply resistant to glyphosate so they can spray to kill weeds. The alternative is not “lose yield because of weeds”, it is “cultivate to kill weeds”. This is what every corn farmer did pre-WW2. Of course, you could also simply grow a cover crop and mulch it then no-till through it for seeding, which increases yield while reducing labor, but that doesn’t fit the agrocorp narrative that you need them.
Holy fuck Ron, come on. You are smarter than this. Taubes is a fraud, try actually looking at his citations, they don’t support his claims at all. His books are worse than wikipedia articles for fake citations. This whole sugar demonization nonsense is easily dismissed by simply looking at the data. Sugar consumption in the UK in 1890 was 90 lbs/person/year. Graph obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and sugar consumption over the last 100 or so years. Notice how sugar consumption goes down while the other 3 go up? That means they aren’t caused by sugar.
This is even more disappointingly lazy because we know how type 2 diabetes is caused, and sugar and insulin are not involved at all. Type 2 diabetes is caused by 4-HNE (a byproduct of polyunsaturated fat peroxidation) damaging pancreatic islet cells that produce glucagon. The result is constant glucagon production, even in the presence of insulin (which is supposed to suppress glucagon). It has absolutely nothing to do with “insulin spikes”, which are the normal, healthy response to eating. Preventing insulin release causes electrolyte deficiencies, which is why ketards are always shilling some overpriced electrolyte drink or another.
Finally, we have plenty of people who have 100% eliminated their type 2 diabetes on a diet consisting entirely of white rice and refined white sugar. We’ve known this for 50 years. You reverse type 2 diabetes by ELIMINATING LINOLEIC ACID.
WITH THE HELP OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD, I HAVE JUMPED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT LOW-CARB DIETS MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL AND ATHLETIC. AND HIGH CARB DIETS MAKES YOU UGLY AND FAT!!
I have done research on the internet, in several bloggers, and on book review pages. And i’ve noticed by personal observance that most people who support low-carb diets are athletic and fit, while those people who are supporters of high-carb diets look overweight, fat and bloated. In that personal study i’ve also checked with my own eyes, few beautiful celebrities’s personal diets as well.
So i have jumped to the scientific conclusion that the right way to lose weight and get pretty is the low-carb diet, because I’ve noticed (by oserving the photos of the profiles and avatars of the people who follow high-carb diets like the book “The Starch Solution” by Dr. Richard Mcduglas are fat, wrinkled and bloated and ugly. While most people who follow low-carb diets are very pretty and very athletic.
This personal research has been based by relying on the Scientific Method, the Rationalist Empirical Method of great thinkers, the philosophers and scientists like John Locke, Emmanuel Kant, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Feuerbach, Fredrich Nietzsche, Hegel, etc. How good science and philosophy are, because science and philosophy can give people the tools they need to know who is good and who is bad. What is true and what is a lie. What works and what doesn’t work. What is false and what is reality. And thanks to science I have determined that high carb diets don’t work, they make people ugly and fat while low carb diets like keto diets, carnivorous diet, zero carb diets, low-carb diets can make people look more athletic and beautiful
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Little point in discussion with someone who is clearly not a farmer.
Quote:
“It is clear you know little about farming and hate the capitalist system.”
One needs to be very careful when making blanket assertions. In your case, you are WRONG on both of the assertions that you made.
I spent my teenage years in Belvidere, Illionois, which is 75 miles west of Chicago. As a youth, I belonged to 4-H and some of my school friends were members of the Future Farmers of America group (the FFA). I did not join FFA, because I did not live on a farm.
Belvidere is located in Boone County, which, at one time, had many social groups called granges. These were groups of farmers who socialized and looked after each other. They put on dinners for the public, which were very popular with city people. Nowadays, the granges in Boone County have dwindled down in number and I believe that there is only one left in the county.
My mother’s sister’s husband’s parents were farmers, who farmed outside of Marengo, Illinois (about 60 miles west of Chicago). My uncle would take me to his parent’s farm and I would get to “see the sights.” My uncle’s father, even though he had a decent sized farm, could not derive enough income from farming and he also worked for his local school system as a janitor. He was NOT the kind of person who would sit in taverns, wasting his time and money. He WORKED. But he did not make enough money from farming to even pay his bills, so he also did janitor work.
I lived most of my adult life north of Rockford, Illinois – 90 miles west of Chicago. A farmer that was about 1-1/2 miles south of me operated a hog farm that was located on a hill. At times, when the wind was in the right direction, I could smell the hog farm. But that didn’t bother me in the least. I knew that it was because of that smell that the farmer was raising livestock and earning an honest living.
Fast forward to today – the year 2024 – family farms, as I have stated, are practically things of the past. Nowadays, huge corporations have bought up tens of thousands of acres of farmland and large corporations do most of the growing and harvesting. Add to that the individuals, such as Bill Gates, who have bought up tens of thousands (millions?) of acres of farmland.
These days, a farmer has only ONE grain elevator that will accept his crops. The corporation owned grain elevators DICTATE the prices. There is NO “free market” at play here any more. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, even small towns like Belvidere had small grain elevators. The one in Belvidere was referred to as “the grist mill.” That place closed up many years ago.
I am very much aware of corporate owned and run concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and their propensity for polluting the environment. Unlike the family farmer, they do not care about the environment; their only concern is to maximize profits.
And, no, you do not have to tell me about “confined human feeding operations” (cities). I have not lived in a city since 1982, when we had a house built “out in the country,” on a 2-1/2 acre piece of land. I am now 73 years old and will NOT move back into a city unless I am forced to in my remaining years.
Regarding your second assertion that I “hate capitalism” – I HATE the “capitalism on steroids” that we now have here in the USA. I spent my entire adult life working as an industrial electrician (United Auto Workers Journeyman Electrician) in INDUSTRY – factories that produced high quality, needed products for which there was a demand. I know EXACTLY what makes a business profitable.
Nowadays, most of the production here in the USA has moved to foreign countries, in search of ever-higher profits – the American labor force be damned! The company from which I retired, had been in existence in Rockford, Illinois for over 100 years. Before I began my work there, it was a family-owned business, who treated their employees with the utmost respect. Back when it was family owned, they had a top-notch cafeteria for all of the employees. My immediate supervisor had been there for over 37 years.
When I hired in there, it was no longer a family-owned business, the family having sold out to a large corporation. The company cafeteria had been shut down before I began my employment there. They had a very “curious” profit sharing system. I laughed to myself when I discovered how it was operated. To use a hypothetical example, using round numbers, if the business sold $10 million and made $1 million in profit, they would pay the employees a “bonus.” If, in the next year, if they also sold $10 million and made $1 million in profit, THERE WOULD BE NO BONUS. That was because the corporation stipulated that there had to be an INCREASE over the previous year. The $1 million profit being good enough to pay a bonus one year and $1 million profit the next year not being good enough to pay a bonus literally dampened any enthusiasm on the part of the employees to do their best. Of course, the employees could see right through this and it was actually in their own interest to have an “off year,” so that they could again see an increase and a bonus.
You talk about the millions of acres of land being needed to feed PEOPLE. What you don’t mention is the millions of acres that are devoted to the production of corn, for the production of ethanol, as a supplement for gasoline. There is absolutely no need for any ethanol production in this country. The USA EXPORTS crude oil and there is widespread belief that “crude oil” is NOT a product of decomposed plants and animals – it is generated as a natural geological process deep inside the earth (the abiotic theory).
The world is pumping more crude oil than ever before and there is NO end in sight. It is my opinion that the term “fossil fuel” is the biggest scam ever foisted on the people of the world. Many books have been written by very learned individuals putting forth the abiotic oil theory. Among them were books written by Antony Sutton, Ph.D. (now deceased) and Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.
In summary, it is not true that I “hate capitalism” – what I hate is all of the rigged markets that operate here in the USA and throughout the so-called “civilized” world. I am FOR CAPITALISM – capitalism with a level playing field for all participants; not capitalism in which the major corporations, the financial “industry” and the politicians of BOTH political parties run rough-shod over the citizens.
Thank you.
>objective facts don’t exist unless you are the profession I want to talk to
You are in luck, I am a farmer. You can present an argument now.
Mr. Unz:
Quote:
“Perhaps you could point me to a couple of the most solid articles supporting the conspiratorial case for chemtrails, so I could get a sense of what’s behind it.”
I believe that I have done this before for you, but possibly you missed it. So, I will try again.
In regard to chemtrails, let me share a personal experience with you. A few months ago, I had to drive to Kingsport, Tennessee for a medical test. On my route there, I passed through Blountville, the county seat of Sullivan County, where I live. I brought my laptop computer with me, as I wanted to stop in at the sheriff’s office, to show the sheriff pictures that I had taken of the sky at my residence.
I stopped at the sheriff’s office on the way home, but was told that he was “unavailable.” Two young female sheriff’s deputies came out into the waiting room and inquired as to the purpose of my visit. I told them that I had some pictures on my computer that I had wanted the sheriff to look at. One of the deputies asked me what the pictures were of and I simply said “the sky.”
Upon hearing this, one of the deputies said to me, “Oh, you mean the chemtrails?” I replied in the affirmative and asked them what they could tell me about the matter. I was told that it was “a federal matter” and that “it was under investigation.” I then asked them WHO was doing the investigating. I was told that it was “above their pay grade” and if they discussed it any further, they would get into trouble. So, I thanked them and left.
The state of Tennessee has recently passed legislation prohibiting the aerial spraying of any chemicals or substances in the air over Tennessee, except for agricultural purposes. Obviously, some Tennessee legislators consider chemtrails to be an important matter. Since the passage of the legislation, the aerial spraying has continued unabated.
Up until the year 2022, I had never seen any chemtrails. I was coming back from a trip into town and after parking my pick-up truck and getting out of it, I happened to look into the sky. I saw with my own eyes many chemtrails that had filled the skies. I went into the house, grabbed my digital camera, went back outside and took pictures of them, which I still have.
There are many websites that cover the subject of chemtrails. I will share a few with you —
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
https://americans4acleanatmosphere.com/
https://truthcomestolight.com/chemical-poisoning-of-our-skies-the-secrets-of-majors-field-in-greenville-texas/
Some time ago, I was in Elizabethton, Tennessee. I was at a Walmart and a Carter County constable was sitting in his county vehicle, waiting to pick someone up. I walked up to him and asked him if he was familiar with chemtrails. He answered that he was indeed familiar with them and had an acquaintance who lived in another Tennessee city who told him that the sky over his locale was sometimes filled with chemtrails, to the point of partially obscuring the view of the sun.
Apparently, you have not noticed chemtrails, but they are completely different than CONtrails. Contrails sometimes occur when jets are at very high cruising altitudes and atmospheric conditions are favorable to their formation. They are usually very thin and dissipate rapidly. CHEMtrails, on the other hand, are produced by jet aircraft that are flying at much lower altitudes. Their “trails” are usually much wider than contrails and they have a tendency of spreading out across the sky. They also sometimes linger in the air for a very long time.
I have seen many instances where the chemtrails cross each other at 45 degree or 90 degree angles. Commercial passenger jet aircraft very seldom “cross paths” like that. They fly in specific “corridors” and these corridors are usually parallel to each other. I am not talking about when jets are on an approach to an airport. I am talking about jets at cruising altitudes.
Personally, I cannot prove what is being sprayed in the skies. But others have investigated this and have found that the ground in the vicinity of chemtrails has been shown to have higher than normal residues of aluminum, barium and strontium compounds – all poisons to the human body. Mr. Dane Wigington, of Geoengineering Watch, has investigated this extensively.
I may be wrong, and please correct me if this is the case, but you, like so many others, seem to take great delight in making disparaging comments about “conspiracy theorists.” Again, as I have said to you before, I submit that MANY of the so-called “conspiracy theories” are indeed conspiracy FACT. Many have been proven to be true and there is strong circumstantial evidence that many others are also true.
I have been as forthright as possible in this communication to you and I sincerely hope that it was not a waste of my time. Thank you.
Great interview of Dr. Lustig
What crop do you grow that is not genetically modified?
Where is the factual information on “no yield advantage”–utter BS or ignorance. Which is it?
Emulsifier BVO (bromine) in drinks may irritate skin or mucous membranes, undermine coordination or memory, etc.
Some others have claimed here that burger and other industrially produced meat is safe. But
– the industry is the major source of resistant pathogens
– hormones fed to the dairy cows may cause cancer in people
– feeding the animals substances dangerous to people continues right up to slaughter; those unaffected by cooking include heavy metals, certain medicines and sedatives
– dirty abattoirs, and the great increase in surface area of meat due to mincing, promotes a great increase in the speed of proliferation of microbes, some deadly
– the meat contains untested additives simply classified as “generally regarded as safe”
– consuming the meat is linked to heart diseases, diabetes and dementia; consuming over 200g/week of meat is strongly correlated to cancer
– the scale of operations is beyond supervision by honest regulators.
Okay, I clicked on the links, but two of them were just to chemtrail-conspiracy websites and the third was to a very long and rambling article that didn’t seem to make any clear points that I could see.
The whole chemtrail thing seems like typical crackpot conspiracy-nonsense. From what I’ve heard, Alex Jones promoted it for years along with his claims that the Communist Chinese control Hollywood. So it’s hardly surprising if some of the random people you talked with watched Alex Jones and heard about it from him.
To repeat myself, if someone wants to point me to the most solid and credible couple of specific articles on chemtrails, I’ll take a look at them.
Otherwise, I just assume it’s typical conspiracy-nonsense like about 95% of the other claims people hear on the Internet.
You seem like a perfectly sincere fellow, but I’d guess that almost all of the things you believe just aren’t true.
All synthetic sweeteners are dangerous, not just potentially so. Though gluttony (large servings) led by marketing is important, such sweeteners should be a far greater focus that fructose per se.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/artificial-sweetener-neotame-damage-gut/5861125
The courtesy of a response is sometimes difficult and may offend, but take it for what it is worth. I’ve been a scientist for most of my 7 decades of life, from chemist to bio-scientist. At the same time I have lived on a farm for 5 decades growing livestock and food. Furthermore I am a stock market investor–an easy way to add to the income stream. The Uncle I was named after, was a mechanical engineer and with my aunt as business manager, made parts for all the Big Auto makers, that are now fading fast. Unions have been a horribly destructive force, driving industries out of the country for better, cheaper, laborers that are grateful for their jobs, and aren’t taught to hate their employers. I realize this feeds your hatred for corporations now, but the union extortion racket is fading fast too. May we all live long enough to see the dead heap of union corruption. If not for unions, the US auto industry would have continued to lead the world. Same with the steel industry. I have never been a member of a union and enjoyed the abundance of opportunities to work and make plenty of money. Mechanization and robots will soon put all unions out of business, once the rotten democrats are out of power.
And BTW, no one ever forced you to work for those evil companies, yet you did for how many years?
I wish I had not been forced to pay a dime into SS. I could have made a fortune with the invested money, now, I get some paltry check that is worth about 10% of what I was forced to pay in .
Mr. Unz:
Please re-read what I wrote about MY OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, especially meeting with the sheriff’s deputies of the Sullivan County, Tennessee Sheriff’s Department and also with a constable who was serving in that capacity for Carter County, Tennessee.
Those links that I sent you are links to legitimate websites. What do you consider “credible” – articles originating from mainstream sources? If so, you are NOT going to find any that will meet your criteria as being “credible.”
I can see right now that my communication to you was a complete waste of time on my part.
Brad Anbro (REAL name)
The claims for GMO Frankenstein organisms have all been falsified. The claims were
– For crops and farmed animals: viability in hardiness and productivity.
– For crops: (a) more nutrients (b) crop, produce and agro-chemicals safe for people, other farms and biomes (c) less need for agro-chemicals.
Apart from the failed crops, polluted farms in the area and resistant weeds, the produce itself is infused with the poisonous agro-chemicals, with no scope to remove them.
From the Green Revolution onwards, the meddling in farming has been exploitation and scam.
Your post is about 50% nonsense. I worked at those factories because they were a way of myself attaining some semblance of fiscal “success.”
Quote:
“I’ve been a scientist for most of my 7 decades of life, from chemist to bio-scientist. At the same time I have lived on a farm for 5 decades growing livestock and food. Furthermore I am a stock market investor–an easy way to add to the income stream.”
How could you be living on a farm, growing livestock & food and at the same time hold positions as a chemist and bio-scientist? Regarding farming, the USA now is being inundated with bio-engineered crops 0f genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which have NOT been tested on human beings.
You said in one of your posts that Roundup® has been “tested hundreds of times” – by whom? The pesticide companies? On humans?
In regard to your diatribe on unions, if it were not for the companies treating their workers with such contempt in the first place, there would never have been any need for unions. If it were not for the unions, we probably still would not have any benefits, such as paid vacation, sick leave, profit sharing, etc.
As a former member of the United Auto Workers union (the UAW), I am very sorry about all the corruption that has overtaken that union, with many union officers now serving jail sentences and others under indictment. When Walter Reuther was president of that union, there was ZERO corruption in that union.
In regard to your statement about the unions being responsible for the decline of American auto manufacturers – that is utterly preposterous. The unions were not the ones responsible for the diminishing amounts of capital being devoted to research & development, the huge salaries of the auto company executives or the continual company stock buy-backs. These were MANAGEMENT decisions.
When Alfred P. Sloane was CEO of General Motors (GM), he went around the country and sat down with owners of GM dealerships, writing down on paper what their concerns were, and after getting back to Detroit, he ACTED on those concerns. Sloane had the utmost respect for Walter Reuther, as he knew that Reuther was a man of his word and that Reuther completely understood what it took to make the auto companies profitable. When was the last time you heard of an auto company CEO doing this?
Quote:
“I have never been a member of a union and enjoyed the abundance of opportunities to work and make plenty of money. Mechanization and robots will soon put all unions out of business, once the rotten democrats are out of power.”
I have a little “story” for you, in regard to robots and automation. Years ago, a prominent Ford official was escorting a prominent UAW official around one of Ford’s production facilities. I do not know if it was in a stamping plant or some other facility; that does not matter. What DOES matter is that the Ford official expressed his pride in the installation of the robots and told the UAW official that the robots didn’t take breaks, call in sick or pay union dues. Upon hearing this, the UAW official agreed with the Ford official in his statements about the robots and then told him that the robots DID NOT PURCHASE FORD VEHICLES, EITHER!
You might not be aware of this, but Walter Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970. It was the second plane crash that he had been involved in. The previous one was in 1969. “They” wanted him out of the way, because he was an incorruptible person, who looked out for ALL workers, not just union workers.
Some of the more recent “casualties” here in the USA in regard to the removal of production of some or all of their production from our country are: Carrier refrigeration, Hershey’s chocolate, Rawlings & Wilson sporting goods, and Levi & Wrangler jeans. Why did they move production out of the USA? Were they unprofitable or were their workers inefficient? Was it the unions? NO, it was because of the parent corporations insatiable thirst for PROFITS. These corporations do not give a damn about the communities or states in which they are located, nor do9 they care about the long-term future of the USA or its citizens.
In regard to you stating that you were a “stock-market investor” – all I can say about that is good for you. In my senior year in high school, 1968-1969, I took an elective class in economics. The teacher was a very sharp older lady, who, in the course of her lessons, explained to the class how the stock market worked. She said that the reason individuals (and institutions) purchased stocks was because they paid a higher rate of return on investment, as compared with what banks paid on savings accounts. She said that people invested in concerns that had a proven “track record” of profitability.
It is now 2024 and all that has “gone out the window.” (Rich) people and institutions now purchase stocks with the intent of re-selling them at a later date and in the process, making a lot of money. The stock market has been turned into a GIANT CASINO. And all kinds of financial concerns have sprung up, pushing their “financial instruments” whose sole purpose is to rip people off. That is the main industry here in the USA now – ripping people off. And no one is better at it than the banks and the “financial industry”
I will give you one more example of the FRAUD that takes place here in the USA and I draw on this from my own experience. Just over 7 years ago, I relocated to NE Tennessee from northern Illinois, where I had worked my entire life. After months of searching, I finally found a MODEST house that I wanted to purchase. The house was listed at $300K; I think that I “bought” it for $295K. I could have bought the house outright, except that I’d have incurred a huge (unconstitutional) income tax liability for redeeming some IRAs.
I put down $150K CASH, from the sale of my house in Illinois and obtained a mortgage for approximately $145K. In the 7 years that I’ve been here and making payments on the house, the amount of money that has been applied to the principal has totaled to roughly $20K – all the rest has gone to INTEREST – on “money” that never existed in the first place! But that’s not the worst of it. If I miss some payments, the mortgage company can foreclose on the property and take possession of it. I will be out everything that I have put into the house and they will end up WITH AN ASSET. This would be the result of a mortgage originating from the creation of FICTITIOUS “money.”
The point that I am trying to make is that the entire economy of the USA and those of the rest of the so-called “civilized” world ARE BASED ON FRAUD – the fictitious creation of money out of thin air. The banks and other individuals use this DEBT to “get one over” on their fellow citizens.
I have worked my entire life being gainfully employed, going by the rules and living in a responsible manner. Where has it got me? Absolutely NOWHERE. What money I have left keeps decreasing in value every day. The food that I eat is poisoned by chemicals and other means of adulteration and even the air that I breathe here in NE Tennessee is being poisoned by the chemtrails that I see on a regular basis.
You, “Carney” and “John Johnson” seem to be the resident apologists on this website for the United States. None of you fool me, nor does anyone in the “mainstream media.”
Like all the Econ 101 cubicle coolies you’re just jealous if the unionized workers who made double or more your income. AND you’re a farmer. The business most responsible for flooding America with tens of millions of illegal Hispanics. Who work on your farm for less than a generation. Then their kids either steal a good affirmative action job from a White American. Or remain where they were born and drift into crime idleness and dependency on their kids and baby mommas welfare.
I drive up and down the Ca big AG valleys several times a year. I see those towns and farms. Miles of angus beef cattle grazing with no humans in sight. The fruit and vegetable farms only need human workers about 6 weeks a year for planting and picking. The fruit trees and bushes only need humans about 3 or 4 weeks for picking. The fields are empty of humans. Except in strawberry picking. Lots of people then. Tiny little Asians. The Japanese American farmers probably bring
them for the short seasons from Cambodia or Burma or somewhere. Rent a slave economics.
How I despise the petty bourgeoisie who are so jealous of truly skilled unionized workers. You think you’re a step above the skilled unionized workers. But you make half their income. And the elites have no respect for you at all. You too can be replaced by Asian and Indian cubicle coolies who will make half of what you make. And live 25 people on bunk beds in a small 3 bedroom house.
You brag about making money on the stock market. Most of the men I know make money on the stock market. Nothing special about that. It’s what men do.
I suffered the misfortune of living in CA for 6 years. Your attitude about “unions” is driving your diatribe. I have never had a hispanic on my farm in the middle of the country. I know people that have and see them mainly in cities here, but the problem for the union slugs, is the hispanics work circles around them. And I get it, the job of the union bosses is to make the workers hate the “big corps” they work for.
The Democrat Party is composed mainly of three types of people 1) welfare bums who want to be paid for doing nothing; 2) union workers who want to be paid a whole lot for doing very little; and 3) blood sucking career politician lawyers who are willing to steal from hard-working people to buy the votes of the first two groups. If these “skilled union workers” are so talented, why would 3rd world workers outperform them–they must be more skilled, right?
If you wish to put your money where your mouth is; we can place a wager through Las Vegas agents that hold the betting money? How bout it union bot?
As I said before–you have never been a farmer. I asked one simple question — what crop do you know of that has not been genetically modified?
I imagine that there are some harvested crops that are not GMO; probably damn few. As I said before, GOM crops have not been tested on any humans, just like 5G. Any time I go grocery shopping, I try to avoid all foods that indicate they’re of GMO origin.
That took some real effort on your part to reply to my long post that dealt with unions, etc. I hope that you didn’t tire yourself out too much.
The Russian (very frequently the best and more thoughtful choices and policies) regarding GMOs.
https://crispr-gene-editing-regs-tracker.geneticliteracyproject.org/russia-crops-food/
As I said before–you have never been a farmer.
You can’t name a single one that has not been genetically modified? Answer the question please. You can’t any because all food in grocery stores has been genetically modified. Please consider volunteering for the testing of any new technology you fear. haha
Unions were once needed, like the democrats also needed slaves. The time for both is past.
Post the article if you wish. I don’t like to click on links when I know nothing about the origin. Don’t get me wrong; the Russians have some top notch scientists, but I see you last name is Marx. I am not a gene jockey, but I have several friends that are.
You don’t see anybody in the fields so there’s nobody there. Women’s logic 101. Only somebody who thinks like that would express contempt for a farmer’s occupation.
Show us cost vs. life expectancy stats from 2020 on, cause the older trends could have changed.
Barley, wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, fodder beets, flax, hemp and sunflowers. Are you going to present an argument now or just keep kvetching? What do you mean “which is it”? Which is what? Speak english you dumb kike.