Sugar consumption and type two diabetes

(mole person) #1

I recognize that this article is brought to us by our friendly neighborhood sugar company but I also recognize that at this point I can’t think of what the strongest lines of evidence refuting it are.

“In people, diets high in sugar have also been shown to increase weight as well as risk factors for cardiovascular disease. But these effects only seem to occur when calories are not being controlled; simply exchanging extra sugar with calories from another source won’t prevent these negative effects. Also, observational studies have failed to show a harmful association between dietary sugar and type 2 diabetes.”

and

“There is nothing special about sugar that sets it apart from other foods, and sugar does not cause type 2 diabetes on its own. Generally, people eating lots of sugar tend to have poorer diets and unhealthier lifestyles. These, as well as other factors including urban growth patterns, the built environment, the food environment, stressful jobs, poor sleep and food pricing probably contribute more to the rising incidence of type 2 diabetes than dietary sugar.”

I’d love to see what the best science is that links sugar consumption directly to disease.

Thank you!

(Omar) #2

are you serious ?

(mole person) #3

Yes, completely serious. I’d like to have the best evidence directly at my fingertips when I engage people on this subject as opposed to “read this book by Gary Taubes.” etc.

So they are making the claim that no study where calories have been controlled has shown a link, I really doubt this, but I’d like to know what the strongest lines of evidence are.

(Jack) #4

T2B comes from decades of consuming too many carbohydrates. Sugar is just one of them. Can you say the food pyramid? The actual disease (T2D) is really hyperinsulinemia, and then on to insulin resistance, and then the blood sugar rises. High blood glucose doesn’t come until much later in the disease progression, and is a symptom of hyperinsulineamia, although it has its own set of glycation end products to be concerned about.
With that beings said, lets get back to the question, is sugar causing T2D. Sugar is just one of the many excess carbohydrates consumed by T2 diabetics, but it is being singled out by the AHA, NIH, and many other institutions that have to find a way to backtrack from their colossal blunder of demonizing FAT as the offending culprit. Demonizing the carbohydrate niche of sugar is an easy way to ease the public back into eating the right way without having to admit their nutrition advice was wrong. The low carb way. Can you imagine the hit these institutions would take if they had to admit they were giving out bad nutritional advice for the last 40 years. There would be nothing left of them. All of their money resources would dry up. So in a nutshell, sugar is there, and it gives them an easy way to reduce the public"s consumpton of carbohydrates and evenually play down all carbohydrates,

(karen) #5

“In summary, population-level variations in diabetes prevalence that are unexplained by other common variables appear to be statistically explained by sugar. This finding lends credence to the notion that further investigations into sugar availability and/or consumption are warranted to further elucidate the pathogenesis of diabetes at an individual level and the drivers of diabetes at a population level”

(ETA - the opening statement about it being unclear is really weird, because the data presented in the study isn’t unclear at all, IMHO.

"we found that every 150 kcal/person/day increase in sugar availability (about one can of soda/day) was associated with increased diabetes prevalence by 1.1% " … No other food types yielded significant individual associations with diabetes prevalence after controlling for obesity and other confounders.

" Duration and degree of sugar exposure correlated significantly with diabetes prevalence in a dose-dependent manner, while declines in sugar exposure correlated with significant subsequent declines in diabetes rates independently of other socioeconomic, dietary and obesity prevalence changes"

Sorry this is a bit light on scientific explanation, but it does a good job of suggesting causality.

they also eliminated obesity as a confounding variable, which I understand but considering that sugar consumption plays such a huge role in development of obesity, which is such a huge predictor of T2D, I feel like a more useful study might have included pre-diabetics in the cutoff.

(charlie3) #6

I have a close association with an agricultural county in my State. It’s noticably productive for the upper midwest. It occured to me recently that the overwhelming majority of the crop land is used to grow corn, soybeans, wheat, and sugar beets. And the people I’m hanging out wiith and the food I’m eatinng doesn’t have a place for any of it. Then again, at the end of the day farming is demand driven. Farmers will grow what consumers demand.

#7

The two paragraphs you quoted simply omit the fact that sugar, and carbs in general, have an addictive effect, thus making it difficult for people to control said calories.

(mole person) #8

So it’s not uniquely bad in some respect? isn’t there was some fructose --> fatty liver --> T2D connection?

(GINA ) #9

I listened to a podcast some time back where Jimmy Moore was interviewing Gary Taubes about his book The Case Against Sugar. JM was leaning on GT hard to say all carbs are the problem but GT held fast and said that isn’t what the data show. He named several populations that were fine with their diets high in yams, or rice, or whatever, that took a serious decline 30ish years after the introduction of sugar.

I suspect if you never get metabolically deranged, a diet high in “real food” carbs won’t hurt you. But once you are, almost all carbs need to go.

(GINA ) #10

I think you are right about institutions being afraid of walking back their recommendations.

Add to that, “whole grains” are usually a delivery vehicle for sugar. So sure, that cereal bar has x grams of “whole grains and fiber” but it also has 15 grams of sugar. You might be fine if you just chewed on the wheat berries, but who is going to do that?

(mole person) #11

Oh, yay!..thank you. I will read this today.

(mole person) #12

I wonder if the introduction of sugar in those populations would have also had a similarly timed introduction of refined grain products though.

(karen) #13

I think it’s a good argument for causality but they’re not actually looking at a specific biological mechanism, they’re comparing the availability of sugar in the diet of a population to the prevalence of diabetes.

#14

The author rejects the following model:

Sugars/carbs --> weight gain --> diabetes

And instead embraces:

Excess calories --> weight gain --> diabetes

But the entire premise of why we all love keto is why excess calories happen in the first place. Excessive carb calories do trigger different mechanisms in the body from excessive fat calories (even if eventually either one can cause weight gain), and also we know how our hunger/satiety signals are derailed by carb calories.

(mole person) #15

Right. Thank you. That’s the crux of the problem and my mind was not hitting on it by itself.