Sugar consumption with Placebo?


(Jim) #1

Dear Forum members,

Last Monday I had a really weird experience with sugar in my diet. Sometimes (I know it’s potion, I do it really occasionaly) I buy a Cassis zero bottle and enjoy it. Now this time I did not pay enough intention and bought a real cassis :nerd_face:. Contains around 50-60 grams of sugar and I drank the bottle without even knowing it had sugar in it. I am doing strict keto for about 4 months now without consuming any sugar outside veggies and things like that.

Now here comes the weird part. No spikes, no cravings, nothing. I didin’t feel anything… After 1 hour or so I wanted to know what’s in the bottle to check some macro’s and then I saw that it was a real cassis. I was quite shocked that It just didin’t really do anything haha. Literaly 2 weeks before I was at a Turkisch restaurant and eat some meatballs that had some tomato sauce. They made it with some kind of sugar and trust me, it gave me alot of craving after. I Just wanted to binge on everything with sugar in it and it was a rought day.

Now at both times I had no idea I was consuming sugar. How is it possible that at the one restaurant with less sugar I had major cravings and with the cassis (50-60gram is insane) there was no problem at al? Both times without knowing I had consume any sugar.

Would love to hear you’re insights!


#2

No idea but we are complex. Maybe some other factor caused this.
Just like sometimes I eat 5g sugar and feels almost sugar poisoned and sometimes I eat 200g and about nothing (I always feel if I ate much carbs but it’s a subtle thing, not really uncomfortable). I had this with booze too.

So maybe you ate something before or after that helped? (If I consume sugar alone, a tiny amount can be unpleasant. Much more but some fatty protein afterwards and I am fine.)
Maybe how you ate in the previous days? Maybe something not even so purely physical, stress, sleep and yep, knowing about the sugar…? Who knows?

It’s so strange to me you didn’t feel the sugar. I don’t always feel it but that’s the <1% sugar in processed meat. Sugar is so obviously sugar to me, I can’t miss it if it’s significant.
And 50-60g sugar in a bottle, that must be super sweet, ew. But you probably didn’t change in the way I did yet. I can’t handle “normally” sweetened drinks at all (it’s easier with solid sweets but they aren’t good alone either). It seems some people are like this… When my family members stopped eating added sugar (still lots of natural sugar and even more carbs), they got very close to me regarding sweetness and it didn’t took a super long time. It happens to many but it seems, there are exceptions. Or you like your drinks very sweet. There are items I can enjoy in their original sweetness, just not many. While I prefer coffee and chocolate unsweetened or barely sweetened…

But I got carried away.


(Jane) #3

No idea but interesting!

Maybe you burned through the sugar in the drink pretty quick and the tomato sauce in the meatballs was processed slower because of the protein and fat along with it? Not sure why one would cause no issues and one triggered sugar cravings.

:woman_shrugging:


#4

Natural sugar isn’t the same as refined sugar. Refined sugar is addictive. No idea why. Just something I’ve noticed.


(Allie) #5

Sugar is sugar, all does the same thing.


#6

Natural sugar doesn’t cause cavities like refined sugar and it doesn’t have a neurological addictive effect. Quitting refined sugar was a real struggle while quitting fruit was effortless. Both are poison if we’d like to maintain our higher level of awareness.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

The sugar in sugar cane and the sugar in fruits are the same chemical, sucrose. Fruit also has a bit extra fructose.

A sucrose molecule is a molecule of glucose bonded to a molecule of fructose. However addictive the glucose part of sucrose may or may not be (it seems to vary from person to person), the fructose, once separated from the glucose, acts on the brain’s addiction centre, the nucleus accumbens, the same way that ethanol and heroin do. The only difference between the sugar in fruit and refined table sugar is that whole fruit contains fibre, which slows down the rate of absorption of the sugar to a more manageable rate. Fruit juice might as well be sugar from the sugar bowl, since the fibre gets destroyed in the juicing process.


#8

I’m answering @Jim ’ s question of why refined sugar caused an addictive effect while a drink with natural sugar and without fiber didn’t.

Fruit contains polyphenols which prevent advanced glycation end products and maintain neurochemistry to an extent but still prevent ketogenesis.


#9

Quitting refined sugar was the easiest thing EVER, even along with grains, dry legumes and potatoes, my big favs :smiley:
Quitting fruit is plain impossible, I eat them even on my strictest carnivore-ish style! Just in season and a tiny bit :slight_smile: I did my first carnivore trials in winter so I could not eat fruits then (only a super tiny bit as I met some during walking but I probably tried not to be tempted in the very beginning, I don’t remember). And I never actually desire fruits anymore, they are just there, being wonderful and they can’t even harm me…
People are different so of course but it’s funny :smiley:

But they are physically the same and my body agrees. My tastebuds agree (but as they feel all the epic flavors in fruits, it’s way better for them). Only I can’t ban fruits while banning added sugar almost completely (just for convenience’s sake, it wouldn’t be that hard to do it 100% actually, many people do it) is very easy… At least most of the times, many of us like our super rare exceptions even if we dislike sugar. It has no good taste at all, it’s just sweet, at least to me.

I don’t know what my body does but a tiny bit of fruit with the fiber and all can totally acts like pure honey sometimes. Maybe my body just got pissed when perceived the little fruit and overreacted to make me stop…? It rarely does this and never with certain fruits unless the amount is huge (bananas are very very safe for me, for example while apples and grapes not at all. I didn’t figure out why, it can’t be the sugar content itself, not even the amount of the various kinds of sugar). Makes little sense, actually…


#10

(Laurie) #11

I think there is some placebo effect. I’ve had similar experiences. Sugary things I’ve had by mistake didn’t have the same effect as sugary things I was aware of.

A sugary soft drink tastes similar to a zero sugar soft drink, so if someone serves you the wrong drink (or you buy the wrong drink), you can have sugar without knowing it. But sugar in tomato sauce is noticeable, so you know you’re eating sugar.


#12

Not to me but I admit I stopped drinking such things when I went low-carb, never was a big fan anyway so my experiences are super tiny. But I usually feel sugar. Maybe it’s super easy for me regarding soft drinks because I extremely hate most of the normally used sweeteners but xylitol and erythritol and sugar are all quite different tasting… Maybe the other flavors help masking it, I probably can’t tell apart the first 2 in every case despite the huge taste differences (amounts matter a lot, I sweeten things very lightly and if enough strong flavors are present, they may mask the differences. if I make things very sweet, I can’t miss erythritol, it’s awful then) but sugar usually makes itself known to me.
Carbs in general are very noticeable too. It’s very hard for me not to feel if something is carby, very carby or quite low-carb. It’s one reason carby stuff can’t be imitated well for me (to the point that it’s very similar to the original and can be mixed with it, I mean), just the lack of carbs make things very different (carby items tastes different from non-carby ones but carby things replaces with other, very different tasting things don’t have that thing I talk about). And that is usually welcomed. It’s not so easy for a carby thing to be nice enough to me, I dislike the starch flavor (it’s not always present but quite often) and dislike the sugar “flavor” too (not to the point of being annoying but I definitely prefer the way better taste of xylitol). Fruits are the big exceptions, many of them are among the tastiest things I ever had. Too bad they are packed with too much sugar, it works against the good taste - but they are still so, so good.


(Jane) #13

The yeast consumes most of the sugar added initially but those types of drinks are typically back-sweetened with sugar after fermentation ends, so it has the evil refined sugar in addition to the fructose.

Especially since they have a diet version he normally gets - back-sweetened with zero cal sugar substitute instead.


(Allie) #14

For me too.
Easy to ditch something with such obvious and near immediate negative health affects.


#15

That helped me too :wink: I am a health-conscious hedonist. Getting unwell is definitely NOT hedonistic… I plan a looooooooong, fit life! I may have good genes (mostly) but I want more than those alone allow… So I need a good lifestyle.
I have no problem with so many things in moderation but sugar, that is clearly bad. And pure added sugar? It has nothing good. It probably helped that I stopped eating store-bought treats at the same time. A candy has so many other problems besides sugar. Reading the ingredient list was a super effective ally of mine when my general rule about too processed stuff didn’t help.

But it seems some people really are addicted to sugar. I seemingly wasn’t. So I didn’t really need an effort.