Lo carb or low fructose?

(GINA ) #36

I think a good chunk of the problem comes from the fact that sugar and HFCS seem to be in every processed food these days. There was a time when if you ate sugar you knew it- a slice of pie, a cookie, candy- it was a treat and you knew what you were doing. Now we have sugar in foods not commonly perceived as desserts or treats- spaghetti sauce, lunch meat, oatmeal and other breakfast foods, yogurt- the list goes on and on.

It seems hard to imagine to people like us on this board that others don’t turn over the package of the food they are eating or giving their children and recognize it as a problem, but I genuinely don’t think they know/realize/ have the capacity to change.

#37

SO AGREE!

plus pace of life has become manic. Convenience/processed food is that darn convenience to feed 'em all at warp speed and be done…life on this planet is not as it was for sure and I get ya on that post!!

#38

I always knew I haven’t a really good imagination (I have my moments and it depends what is the topic) but now I feel my lackings as I try to imagine what is it like to be licked by a dried prune (isn’t prune already involved being dried? or is redundancy used for emphasis? probably that) - and I just can’t.
[EDIT: Wait… Is it the slang and not the fruit prune…?]

I have nice feelings towards prunes (the not plump plum ones :D) so I don’t get shocked. It’s a prune at least! So many dried fruit has added sugar (it’s dried. fruit. basically sugar in way too high density so they add more sugar… crazy!) but not prunes. It has a lot to begin with but this never stopped food industry from adding sugar.

I can’t wrap my head around adding sugar to canned fruit and jam either except in special, super sour/acidic cases. And the worst recipe I ever saw had jam (not jellied, a softer one, I don’t know if it has another word in English) with enough sugar to make it pretty solid… People are scary if you ask me. They can scare me with their recipes! One would think recipes are nice, mostly harmless things (not eating the result, just reading them) but of course not.

Fortunately there are processed items without sugar but they are truly horribly rare. I saw some shocking things, probably all of us did. When I went low-carb, I pretty much started to avoid all processed items but some came back or never went away completely. I eat super little of those items and can handle the tiny sugar in some of them. My mustard has no sugar, it has erythritol but pickles are impossible to find without sugar or sweetener (the last time I managed was maybe 8 years ago) - and after some on/off carnivore times, I reached the point that I simply can’t eat it without suffering from the overly sweetness. It’s fine as I lost interest anyway. I still don’t feel the sugar in sausages, it’s so very low (and my favorite, the pig farm one probably doesn’t even have any. no proper sausage has any, it’s just some crazy thing in food industry and well, we know sugar have some taste enhancing effect, not like a good sausage need that and if the meat and spices aren’t good, it won’t be good with sugar either anyway) - and the natural sugar in the spices (enough paprika to color the sausage red :D) may mask the sugar flavor anyway. If I get more sensitive, I will stop eating store-bought processed things. I hate all noticeable sugars in my meat.

#39

Prunes: from the net: run from this things, don’t even lick them HA

The dietary fiber present in prunes is responsible for their laxative effect and hence it is one of the best natural medicines to treat constipation. Many researchers have also shown that prunes contain significant amounts of sorbitol, which is a sugar alcohol found in fruits and plants with diuretic, laxative and cathartic property.

There ain’t nothing great about a prune in life truly :face_vomiting::clown_face:

(Tim Cee) #40

@Shinita
To be “licked” is an archaic Americanism in reference to a person, usually a child, who receives correction at the end of a blunt object such as a switch, wooden paddle, or leather belt—essentially a spanking.

(Tim Cee) #41

In Venezuela everything is a laxative if you’re from the states. Maybe Drs should prescribe a travel experience instead of a prune. Venezuela is a beautiful place with a toothsome culinary tradition and good people. I’d rather have dinner with a Venezuelan than eat a handful of prunes.

(Tim Cee) #42

@Fangs: if you don’t run from prunes they might run from you.

#43

Now that you say this, I remember hearing about licks in that sense… Only once so it’s nice to make this knowledge stronger!
But how the prune gets into the picture…?

(I still like prunes. Almost never eat them but I like them. If they are nice and sour enough, they usually aren’t.)

(Joey) #44

Rather than argue with the specifics of 45/55 being close to 50/50, the general principle upon which this logic relies is fraught.

Chemically speaking, there isn’t much difference between CO2 & CO, or H2O and HO. But their effects are severely different on the human body. :nerd_face:

#45

I’m confused. I was merely agreeing that on the surface the makeup of HFCS to sucrose is not materially different, 45/55 to 50/50 is seemingly very similar.

However, even chemical compounds with infinitesimally minor differences can effect a change exponentially different within the ecosystem that is our bodies. The sensitivity provided by two almost identical compounds can very well lead to very meaningfully variant results.

(Joey) #46

No confusion detected … I think we’re on the same page :+1: Sorry that I gave the wrong impression!

#48

Started by couldn’t finish yet, problem is I’ve seen this horse beat to death many times. There’s a handful of NIH listed studies showing that it’s near impossible to give yourself NAFLD from real fruit, I’ll try to find it. I should be able to watch the rest later once the kid passes out. Like everything else with the word science on it, it’ll show what the person presenting it wants it to show… which is the problem.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #49

There seems to be a prevalent and incorrect presumption that fruit is a natural food for humans. It’s not. We evolved over the course several million years not eating fruit. Pliocene and Pleistocene ‘fruits’ were very different from what we know as fruit today. Pliocene and Pleistocene fruits were very high in indigestible cellulose (90-95%) and very low in digestible fructose. In fact, most so-called fruit that we eat today did not exist a couple hundred years ago, and what actually did was very different from the sacs of fructose we have now. The fact that fructose and ethanol are metabolized by the exact same process in the liver should be enough to tell us that fructose is not better/worse than ethanol.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #50

Well, as even Dr. Lustig admits, the liver can handle a certain amount of alcohol/fructose/BCAA’s without damage; the problem comes when that rate limit is exceeded. If I understand him correctly, Dr. Lustig maintains that, because of the fibre in whole fruit, it is impossible to eat enough fruits in one sitting to do the damage that one glass of the equivalent fruit juice would do. His idea is that the fibre not only fills us up, it also slows down the absorption of the fructose to a rate that the liver can handle.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #51

The whole point of selective breeding has been to reduce the percentage of fiber and increase the percentage of fructose. Yes, juicing it makes the concentration of fructose much higher and hence more deleterious. I’m simply agreeing with Bruckner and Mason that fructose even in small amounts is a toxin and the fiber in fruit doesn’t make it any less so. Some folks eat fruit all day long and think they’re eating healthy.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #52

While this is certainly true, the assertion that fructose in any quantity is always toxic is not warranted. As for ethyl alcohol, a small quantity can be handled by the liver. Persons vulnerable to addiction may, because of that vulnerability, wish to avoid these substances altogether, but a significant portion of the population, not being vulnerable to addiction, can tolerate a certain quantity of them without damage. Furthermore, as Dr. Lustig notes, while ethanol has short-term toxic properties as well as long-term toxic properties, the toxic properties of fructose are only manifest over the long term.

Fortunately, the liver is highly resilient and can quickly recover from fairly significant damage, once exposure to the toxin ceases.

(Tim Cee) #53

I’m coming down on the side of counting fruit and fruit juices against my alcohol limit since the chemistry indicates they have the same affect in the same quantity. So, eating fruit with high fiber is the same as drinking beer with a plate of greens.

(PJ) #54

Try making lowcarb breadish with psyllium husks. This is likely to seriously change your mind about fiber not making anybody full. :slight_smile:

(PJ) #55

I have been on no eating plan for a long time, and a week ago just began a new plan I designed based on a few different factors including some relatively recent research, and some issues with my now fully menopausal old body.

One element of this is that it is two weeks in ‘reduction’ mode (2x 40+ hour fasts, the rest 17/7 IF, all keto, all lowcal {for me}); then two weeks in ‘maintenance’ mode (17/7 all, but no carb limit, a min/max calorie requirement, and a lot more milk, fruit, veggies and starch), then back again.

Since I carry a lot of water for carbs it’ll be crazy up/down from that I know, that’s the only part I’m worried about. For the rest though, it will be interesting to see how a sudden dive into the fruits-veggies-potatoes world will affect my attempts at fat loss. The water add/remove of going on/off full keto, may add confusion in the short term, but I think might make things clearer in the longer term (as weight should go down in both cycles, it’s just they can only be compared against the prior cycles of their own kind).

I have spent many years doing a lot of work to heal my liver, after meditative visions showed me it horrifically cirrhotic – given my size, for years, that is not even surprising. I love my liver. And I’m a liposomal silymarin fan which I think is hugely healing, I will continue that supplement. Here’s hoping the great widening of my menu is not destructive.

When I am not on an eating plan I mostly starve from lack of appetite, don’t move from lack of energy, then eventually freak out and eat everything horrible for three days because body thinks I’m starving. So I have to be on SOME kind of eating plan to keep my intake even halfway sane. Pretty sure even eating the carby side of the cycle would be better for me than no plan at all, but since both hard keto and high carb make me feel pretty crappy after a few weeks (this was never true for keto until well into menopause I might add, go figure), I’m hoping the back & forth might front-run those issues as well.

I am eating pineapple in my hot spicy thai-inspired stir fry whether it kills me or not. Hopefully it will not. :smiley:

P

#56

(I will do such things but my near perfect bread is carnivore… And my normal bread is full with gluten and has a piece of normal wheat bread as it makes it tasty. I rarely eat that but sometimes it’s that or the normal wheat bread I bake every week… And I don’t like the latter, it’s not eggy at all!)
I made a bread (buns, not a ton but a sparsely filled oven pan so significant) where the flour was half flax seed, half phyllium husks. I ate up the whole batch, it only satiated me as much as expected from the macros. I only remember that it was probably my most fiber rich day, way over the recommendations :slight_smile: Nope, I never care about fibers as they don’t matter to me. I ONLY get satiated by much protein and much fat, nothing else ever could do the trick.
(To be full, I need 2 liters, that’s another matter and I don’t care about that. I don’t have this strange fullness concept just “reaching the maximum capacity of my stomach” or “feeling totally satiated”. Sometimes I feel fullness but I usually am very well-fasted then and no idea what that may be. Probably sign from my body, “I am satiated and don’t you DARE to think about eating” even though perfect satiation is almost always enough for me.)

But I will make some experiments later. I guess. I want to try what happens when I consume extreme low-carb and extreme high total carbs (100g or something? whatever I can do borderline comfortably).
But maybe I wouldn’t get much info from it as my body starts to have Carni Satiation (it’s a very odd thing in my life, I never got satiated that quickly. I obviously still can’t consume tiny meals but I can pull off multiple low-cal days in row, that what comes naturally) even when I eat fruits and sweeteners, maybe a tiny bit nuts (and my other food is carnivore).
Now I suspect carnivore changed something and now I get my benefits even on a carbier woe if I don’t go overboard. At least short term. I noticed that a single very carby day after carnivore feels good. I just should drop my carbs drastically soon.
OR maybe it’s all about eating super little plants. Those may be all sugary, no problem…
I definitely feel very different when I eat 30g net carbs (and way higher total) on my original keto (no meat, lots of plants) vs on this weird mix, carnivore items with some carby extras (even if it has a significant amount of fruit. and my body always complained the most when that happened while it was more tolerant with starches). My rebellious self still need to try carnivore, that’s the right attitude but I won’t force it when it gets too hard. That never ended well anyway.

We are so complicated and change too.
Your plan is interesting, surely not for me, it’s so annoying to go back and forth too much (even if I have more relaxed weekends but that’s subtle and now I almost do it all the time. there is a way I call my default woe carnivore-ish, it’s hard and probably unnecessary for me to be too strict. oh and impossible too longer term. but I keep trying and it’s good or if I wouldn’t even try, I would relax more my relaxed way and that would be too much for me).
And I couldn’t enforce calorie limits unless my very life depended on it (maybe not even then, I never tried). But it’s your plan so I shut up. Eating quite differently on some days work for many people, it seems.

I trust you will tell your experiences on your new plan later! It’s interesting to see what works for someone else.