Artificial Ingredients... UGH.

After viewing the whole sweets situation over many years, I have come to several conclusions that are valid for me.Honey is good stuff - in small doses. Corn syrup is yummy stuff that practically causes instant diabetes; high fructose corn syrup causes fatty liver and obesity even among the young. I ditched brown sugar because I got mad when I found out it was merely white sugar given a molasses tan. White sugar, as found in icing, used to taste better than the cakes it adorned. Also very fattening, causing sugar comas when eaten. After I decided I can live w/o sugar, along came sucralose and other oses miraculously transformed into diet foods. But alas, after several years, not only did they not help with weight loss, they actually contributed to adding weight since they triggered all the same bodily reactions as sugar itself.
It seems you cannot fool nature itself. If it tastes sweet, ergo, it must be sugar. The only cure for a sweet tooth is extraction. My sugar intake now is low enough that stuff I used to gorge on repels me, if it doesn't also make me sick to my stomach. Paleo doesn't use substitute sweets; it kills your cravings.

Paysan, I am so with you on your sugar intake last paragraph.

srinath_69 wrote:Fermented in large intestine actually is good, its the function of all prebiotic and fiber based foods to ferment in large intestine and produce butyrate, which is actually calorie dense for all intents and purposes, but its got the fun side effect of increasing your calorie burn rate during its presence and shortly thereafter, that it nearly negates itself.
I am not a big honey consumer, it wont work in tea for me, its got too much of a flavor, its dayummmmm delicious, but I cant drink it @ the 3-5 a day I down tea. So an identical to sugar is a good option, but its over $30 for 3lb and its 70% the sweetness of sugar, so its like a $2 cup of tea, so I am not touching it for now atleast.

Not all gut bugs are created equal. Some you want. Some you don't. Lumping "all" in the "beneficial" category isn't wise. I'd want to know which bacteria prefer allulose before jumping on the bandwagon. Moderate use of sucrose and fructose is my preference still.

Paysan wrote:
It seems you cannot fool nature itself. If it tastes sweet, ergo, it must be sugar. The only cure for a sweet tooth is extraction. My sugar intake now is low enough that stuff I used to gorge on repels me, if it doesn't also make me sick to my stomach. Paleo doesn't use substitute sweets; it kills your cravings.

Agreed! Well said!

John Caton wrote:
Not all gut bugs are created equal. Some you want.  Some you don't. Lumping "all" in the "beneficial" category isn't wise. I'd want to know which bacteria prefer allulose before jumping on the bandwagon.  Moderate use of sucrose and fructose is my preference still.

The gut bacteria not all being good is true, however Sucrose does feed the bad ones preferentially, and feeds yeast as well. Low-moderate depending on your situation always is wise.

ONTARIO wrote:

Paysan wrote:
It seems you cannot fool nature itself. If it tastes sweet, ergo, it must be sugar. The only cure for a sweet tooth is extraction. My sugar intake now is low enough that stuff I used to gorge on repels me, if it doesn't also make me sick to my stomach. Paleo doesn't use substitute sweets; it kills your cravings.

Agreed! Well said!

I am pretty certain this isn't the case. If it is, its miniscule, its negligible, atleast in the case of sucralose. Whatever other problems it causes, I am sure it does not by itself cause weight gain. My n=1 is below.
I drink anywhere from 2-8 coffee+Tea a day. Of late due to the situation with my HWC going bad @ office etc, I drink it with sucralose.
I have done that same thing for a year+. Jan 08 2017 I bought a bottle of sucralose on ebay. It was 25% strength, and I have 4-5oz left in that bottle.
In 1 yr I have consumed 12 oz or less of 25% sucralose. Basically 3oz total.
It does keep you addicted to sweet, it causes cravings for other stuff (maybe) it keeps you confused etc etc etc - I'll say maybe to all of those ... however it does not cause a weight gain situation unless aided by other calories/carbs etc etc. Even if its got a insulin reaction similar to dextrose (highest one in the scale if I recall @ 130) its for 3oz in a year.
It could very well make some people want to eat and eat more, I dunno, not for me, but it can do for others. For me its the appetite suppressing power of coffee and the sucralose just makes it sweet and forces me to slow down the rate @ which I down it. Cos it has that washout effect, I wait 3-5 mins between tiny sips, and its heaven. Helps me fast and doesn't hurt that I can see so far.

...a teaspoon of sugar makes the medicine go down, makes the medicine go doooown..

I am pretty certain this isn't the case. If it is, its miniscule, its negligible, atleast in the case of sucralose. Whatever other problems it causes, I am sure it does not by itself cause weight gain. My n=1 is below.

Does this comment supposedly make a reference to the stuff you quoted, which was all about seeing your sugar cravings diminish on Paleo? I see no connection.

Rig D wrote:

I am pretty certain this isn't the case. If it is, its miniscule, its negligible, atleast in the case of sucralose. Whatever other problems it causes, I am sure it does not by itself cause weight gain. My n=1 is below.

Does this comment supposedly make a reference to the stuff you quoted, which was all about seeing your sugar cravings diminish on Paleo? I see no connection.

Sorry what you mean ?
My sugar cravings never diminished much, but its likely that since I fasted for extended periods and when I ate, I ate 1 massive meal and went right into the next fast and most of those big meals had fruit and other sweet foods as desserts, I guess my sugar cravings didn't go. My food cravings went down when fasting, and with that the sugar cravings were also down, but past that no. So its like, when I eat, I want to eat sweet foods in addition to non sweet foods. My preference for non sweet compared to sweet hasn't changed much. I can just skip all food easier.
In a way fasting teaches you nothing except that you can live without food.

That comment was in relation to Srinath's comment that a bit of sweetness makes his coffee tolerable. Sorry if I was obscure, but my main point is that continuing a sugar habit perpetuates sugar cravings, even in everyday things like medicines, cough drops, coffee, tea, loads of fresh fruits and/or juices.

Paysan, i understood the reference. I think Rig was referring to what was quoted Srinath but then what he commented on was different than the quote he pulled.

I agree that my sugar craving was completely eliminated after doing W30 and even the slightest sweetness was intolerable. That’s my 2 cents

Narrowminded wrote:Paysan, i understood the reference. I think Rig was referring to what was quoted Srinath but then what he commented on was different than the quote he pulled.

I agree that my sugar craving was completely eliminated after doing W30 and even the slightest sweetness was intolerable. That’s my 2 cents

Exactly. Not only that, it was funny too. Good coffee needs no sugar.

However,

sharperhawk wrote:Would someone like to make a case against moderate use of sugar (e.g., to sweeten coffee)? The case I heard several years ago seems alarmist now. Sure, if you overeat baked goods and drink several sugary beverages per day, you'll have problems. But if that's your issue, a non-calorie sweetener just puts a paleo veneer on it.

I don't see an issue with an occasional moderate sweetened coffee/tea. And neither does Mark Sisson.

Not by using any sugar substitutes though. As much as high glucose levels are detrimental, the body can actually handle real sugar better than it can any of the manufactured or isolated substitutes. JMHO.

Sorry what you mean ?

I'm totally clueless on this response. But that seems to be normal for me in trying to interpret a lot of your stuff.

Srinath, with your highly unusual, strange eating programs and experiments, like fasting so much, drinking lots of alcohol and eating nuts, I am firmly of the opinion that nothing you say about your body's reaction to any foodstuffs is translatable to anyone else.

I think you are way over on the bell curve of human metabolism, maybe 4 or 5 standard deviations.

Narrowminded wrote:I agree that my sugar craving was completely eliminated after doing W30 and even the slightest sweetness was intolerable. That’s my 2 cents

The first problem is - I never did w30 or even a pure atkins, I may do it now, but 30 days of finding and making all new food to all new guidelines in my life will happen when my wife and son are in India not any other time. I did atkins with the shakes and bars and after it produced no effect, I went to 24hr fasting, and then onto longer ... and after the 8 dayer I broke a planned 13 @ day 6 due to cramps, purposefully ate myself out of ketosis by eating a lot of apple pie filling, found no problem with that cos I nicely re-entered ketosis ~45 min later, so I fasted long periods and ate normal SAD on the break-fast meal, and went into the next long fast.

The second problem I have with this sentence is that - well I want to eat sweet things, especially fruits. Worse - some veggies to me are super sweet, carrots and zucchini and squash for sure as well as some others.

I think I am at the right spot for my diet and sweet foods possible. I eat carbs mainly as veggies and fruits, and those sweetness are good to my tastes, sucralose in the tea/coffee, so I don't eat sugar 10X a day.

The bottom line is, fasting only teaches you "fasting" nothing to retrain or do anything else.

I'm going to think about your statement that fasting retrains nothing for a while longer, Srinath, but I will remark that at the end of a longer fast, your body/appetite/cravings have been reset. It's a clean slate. What you eat from then on, whether it's same old, same old, or a major lifestyle change is up to you. Your sugar cravings should be at their lowest level, and can be managed at that point ...IF you break your fast with the right stuff. (Apple pie filling?? A sugar bomb! Definitely!)

Here's a little gem I just picked up regarding c.difficile outbreaks and sweeteners , originally sourced from Nature.
"To us, trehalose is an indistinguishable sweetener. It’s about 45 percent as sweet as table sugar (sucrose) and breaks down to simple glucose. But, according to the authors of the new Nature study, we’re not the only consumers. In a sugar-eating screen, the study authors noted that two C. diff. strains (out of 21) could happily survive on just a dash of trehalose. Those strains were RT027 and RT078."
Those are two of the most deadly strains out there. And the sweetener makes them even more formidable in very small amounts. Back to sugar, guys! Or no sweeteners whatsoever. Here's the source:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-a-boring-sugar-that-may-have-unleashed-a-savage-plague/

Paysan wrote:I'm going to think about your statement that fasting retrains nothing for a while longer, Srinath, but I will remark that at the end of a longer fast, your body/appetite/cravings have been reset. It's a clean slate. What you eat from then on, whether it's same old, same old, or a major lifestyle change is up to you. Your sugar cravings should be at their lowest level, and can be managed at that point ...IF you break your fast with the right stuff. (Apple pie filling?? A sugar bomb! Definitely!)

I break a fast with greens, and I crave meat, I eat meat and I crave sugar. EOM. Oh, there is no meat course, there's a huge salad with ACV and chia/flax as dressing, no worries, I still crave sugar.
I could resist that sugar craving and see where that goes, but I cant tell you how much that knowledge that I will get back to ketosis in 20-45 min means.
To make it worse, I fell into ketosis while still eating (cos I went back to meat because that item was out when I was on the meat course @ my office potluck) ...
Fasting partially teaches you nothing because mentally you know - oh, "you can just fast"

BTW, I broke a temp molar crown and the 2 temp crowns have all broken or fallen off ... so I'm fasting till the correct crown is in ... so I am back to my usual tricks.

"the dose makes the poison."

Any and all sweeteners have upsides and downsides. Just don't use ANY of them a lot. I use honey, sucralose, molasses, depending on what I'm doing. Never much.

Some comments on the comments I read:

1. The first refining of sugar leaves it brown. The molasses is centrifuged out. I can believe that it's easier for "them" to make all the sugar white and then add the molasses back, but it's the same result as if it came from the first refining. Beet molasses is the feed stock to obtain MSG (technically, it's a natural product) and is not suitable for human consumption. It is given to cattle. How do I know this stuff? I worked in a sugar refining plant in the winter of 1973 in Colorado. Coal handler, C shift! Funny what we can remember.

2. Corn syrup, the old fashioned pecan pie kind, is just glucose and water. Not sure why it would cause diabetes beyond the fact that it is, of course, high carb. Not much difference than eating a starch.

3. I read on WAPF once that HFCS has the same molecules as sucrose, but it is the mirror image. Hence, problems. That's the theory, anyway.

4. Agave "nectar" is made by the same process as HFCS. In fact, it's HFAS, so to speak. Sounds like a natural product, farthest from it. Best use for agave is to make tequila!

FWIW, I find the taste of molasses very addicting; so I can actually handle white sugar better than brown. Ditto corn syrup. A couple of tastes, and my taste buds are away. I like the milder more refined molasses, but even blackstrap revs my motor. By the time agave syrup came along, I was already a low carber who viewed sweet stuff with great suspicion. My FiL was diagnosed diabetic the one and only time in his life after a snack that consisted of bread and corn syrup, the old fashioned kind.

As far as I understand, our bodies can handle certain patterns  of molecules (more or less), but reversing the pattern makes them unrecognizable. This is the difference between natural vit E d-alpha tocopherol and its reverse, DL-alpha tocopherol. Not being competent enough to tease out the differences, I stick with the natural product over its mirror image.

srinath, W30 is essentially strict Paleo. If you eat primally, it would. Or be making all new meals. You would just leave out the sugar and alcohol. And rice and dairy if you use those. It’s not hard. But it something you would need to want to do. Just like you experiment with alcohol and low carb

Lets see, alcohol available by opening bottle. Not that I have opened much of it of late. Low carb available by not eating 1/2 the stuff my wife makes.
Maybe she makes W30 - and I may have eaten a few W30's. Usually I don't have the need or the death wish to tell the lovely lady - I want this and this for dinner. She's doing an extraordinary job of making food for kiddo I am just happy I don't have that responsibility.

Really America is built around over eating bad food. I would love nothing more than to pay $10 to walk into a buffet and really lay waste to the place, and the next week, not bother even thinking about food. Any of these paleo/primal type diets require effort in finding and buying and making and storing and what not, I have no ability to cook, no desire to pay 3X for "organic" or spend 3 hrs making something. It has to be easy, convenient and inexpensive. I am not fasting because I have will power, I fast because I have "wont" power.
I wont learn, I wont cook, I wont clean, I wont spend more $$$. Hence I hit the buffet, and I fast.

OK, now we can see where you're coming from ,Srinath. One statement in Fung's book, made the point that the author really dislikes using fasting as an excuse for overindulgence the rest of the time. Her (or his) point was that fasting should not be used to counteract gluttony the rest of the time. Heheheh.

Paysan wrote:OK, now we can see where you're coming from ,Srinath. One statement in Fung's book, made the point that the author really dislikes using fasting as an excuse for overindulgence the rest of the time. Her (or his) point was that fasting should not be used to counteract gluttony the rest of the time. Heheheh.

Gluttony, sloth, ignorance, laziness (is that different form sloth ????) cheapness, etc etc ... all of it are reasons to not eat IMHO, I am just glad I am not in the position to make food for anyone else. Is that some other type of cardinal sin ???? maybe, and I want to be guilty of that too.
Seriously, I go by all you can eat 10X a day all in under a block of where I sit @ work or on the road back home, every 3-4-5th day I walk into one and essentially shut them down, make them refill "srinath food" and shut them down again. I like that my weekly grocery bill is $10-20 and I got no work except to eat it.

Sounds like you're in an ideal place to practice both your techniques. I'm almost envious.

Rig D wrote:I think you are way over on the bell curve of human metabolism, maybe 4 or 5 standard deviations.

LOL, Srin is definitely marching to his own beat!

Srin, whatever happened to your alcohol experiment? Weren’t you going to have blood work done after an extended period of heavy alcohol assumption? I forget what you were testing. Weren’t you trying to prove heavy alcohol consumption is healthy?