sugar baddy
31Aug08
This preoccupation with refined carbohydrates and their exclusion from diet may look odd, but the evidence confirming the significance of removing or moderating their intake continues to mount. Nature, via Science Daily, has published research from Dr Zane Andrews of Monash University (and others) showing that appetite-control cells are damaged over time, with carbohydrates and sugars playing an important part in that damage process:-
Dr Andrews found that appetite-suppressing cells are attacked by free radicals after eating and said the degeneration is more significant following meals rich in carbohydrates and sugars.
‘The more carbs and sugars you eat, the more your appetite-control cells are damaged, and potentially you consume more,’ Dr Andrews said.
Interestingly, the effects start to occur from early adulthood:-
‘People in the age group of 25 to 50 are most at risk. The neurons that tell people in the crucial age range not to over-eat are being killed-off…
…A diet rich in carbohydrate and sugar that has become more and more prevalent in modern societies over the last 20-30 years has placed so much strain on our bodies that it’s leading to premature cell deterioration,’ Dr Andrews said.
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I think it will be really interesting to see what Andrews finds in the planned follow up research looking into the effects of a diet rich in carbohydrates and sugars on the incidence of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Right now the only motivation for people to give up refined carbohydrate is that they may lose a little weight, feel a little better etc. Most people don’t care enough about these things to give up refined carbs, so their money continues to go into the pockets of the food manufacturers, perpetuating availability and thus the problem. If refined carbs were suddenly linked to more serious consequences then we may see a seismic shift for the better in dietary habits.
Methuselah, you may well be right. BTW, I fell of the wagon yesterday and consumed an extraordinarily sweet banoffee pie. It really was a quite toxic experience. Shows what we cope with when we are used to it.
KH
Stop it now – you’re making me jealous.
I’ve spent the last week on holiday watching my other half work her way through every dessert on the menu (which is a long list in the US) and experiencing a strange mix of vicarious joy and deep resentment…
Tim, for the full horror of what some people eat, you can’t go much further into the world of wrong than this.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccaviness/2625223578/
Dave,
And their motto is do no evil…
The good news for competitors is that the Achilles’ heel (or coronary) has been located.
Methuselah I noticed that you refer to carbohydrates and then “refined carbohydrates” in your comment.
I also noted that most of the press releases also referred to carbohydrates.
Is this a conflation of terms or do all carbs really cause this condition? I ask because I’ve always included carbs in my diet and post performance putting carbs back in asap has always been recommended, especially if performing again the following day.
If the headlines are typically media hype then they should be corrected, if not then this is certainly going to affect the ethics of how coaches inform athletes about their diet.
Harebell – the article says:
“Dr Andrews found that appetite-suppressing cells are attacked by free radicals after eating and said the degeneration is more significant following meals rich in carbohydrates and sugars.”
Well done for spotting the inconsistency in my comments – it is indeed a conflation of terms resulting from my own assumption that it is refined carbohydrates that are the real bad guy.
My take on the implications is that there is probably no damage to the cells when carbohydrate levels are below a certain level; and that the critical level is whatever level we were accustomed to consuming as we evolved – i.e. lower than the modern diet. It may simply be that in order to train for extended periods every day it is necessary for humans to consume more carbohydrate than is good for the appetite regulating cells. The theory goes that our ancestors did not need to exercise that regularly because their food acquisition activity generally went in short intense bursts separated by periods of rest. Perhaps when training, athletes do not notice this because the effects are disguised by their lifestyle. Could this be why often retired athletes gain weight?
Having said all that, you may wish to check out Lauren Cordain’s website (http://thepaleodiet.com). He wrote a book called The Paleo Diet for Athletes in which he describes how athletes can eat a primarily low carb diet whilst still attending to the carbohydrate needs of an endurance athlete.
Harebell
It will be interesting to see if there is a widespread questioning of modern sports nutrition as this kind of research continues to appear, but I imagine that might take a very long time. If the public health message were to become one of moderating or removing bread, pasta, starchy carbohydrates and sugars because of insights into the way cells are damaged by even moderate over-consumption, it naturally raises the question whether diets such as those adopted by athletes like Michael Phelps for the purposes of performance make sense. But based on my own observation of people’s reactions and my own personal experience, it seems unlikely such a reversal will happen any time soon because the confusion about diet and health seems so deeply embedded within our public institutions, the media and the population as a whole, and this seems borne out by reading Le Fanu’s book and Taubes too.
Tim
Hi Folks
thanks for the feedback
I sent an e-mail to Dr Andrews and he replied. I was grateful that he found time out of his day to address my concerns and hold him in high regard because of this:
Q: Are complex carbs the issue?
A: This study suggests too many carbs could be the issue.
Q: If eaten as part of a balanced diet are carbs still a problem?
A: Not at all….its an important point.
Q: Is it mainly processed foods that cause the concerns and if you have a highly physical job does your body still suffer if you eat carbohydrates.
A: Highly processed food are extremely bad, you should avoid at all cost. Exercise is very important…especially aerobic….unfortunately a person with a highly physical job should still probablly try to do exercise….although i agree its much better than sitting in a office. Depends on physical nature of job too.
Q: I coach athletes and this could be an issue. Resupplying with a high carbohydrate meal as close to finishing training or competing has always been encouraged.
A: Yes, i would keep going with what works for you. We were using non exercised subjects…………..to avoid this complication
So as the experiment was set up to account for excess use of carbs it appears that there might be an issue later in life even for individuals who are active.
My reply top Dr Andrews included:
Maybe your research also throws light on a contributory factor as to why athletes tend to put on a lot of weight after they retire. It might not just be due to habit; stomach size and your findings could mean that athletes never feel full and so over eat. This combined with a more sedentary lifestyle could seriously upset the balance of input calories over calories burned.
A source of future research possibly.
Harebell,
Thanks so much for sharing that additional reporting here. I was really interested in the point you made about retired athletes. I had thought it might be a problem, but had never seen it mentioned. And the question of what is balanced is really important. Over the years I can see how the right balance can easily shift to the wrong one, for example, as we prefer the convenience of meals like pasta over more traditional fare, within which the carbohydrate mix might be lower.
But I’m still in the process of discovery, and obviously over halfway into that 25-50-year-old risk group. And I think this is the point. Without being overweight, or doing anything obviously wrong, I can have eaten more carbohydrate over time than the next person, and then, at a certain point, my appetite control deteriorates while that other person has no problem; my weight gain looks like a lack of discipline rather than a marginal difference in dietary intake in the past.
Tim
Hi Tim
Your use of the term more traditional fare is somewhat dodgy too, after all the far east and the Med all swear by pasta, but it must be combined with he correct ratio of protein, fats and fibre. Pasta is a great energy food but you have to use that energy usefully. If you don’t burn it it will cause issues in your body.
People need to understand that increased work needs more input and the issues raised by Dr Andrews mean that people will have to use their willpower to overcome a drive once their requirements drop.
Diet is really all about self regulation and that requires self discipline and self criticism, both of which are not popular in western life.
There is no easy way out and that will annoy a lot of people who pander to easy solution seekers.
Harebell
Fair point. My “traditional” was more an English diet which has been modified by quantities and frequencies of pasta and rice that might be quite different from their traditional use in their countries of historical origin and the balance of nutrients you describe. What Dr Andrews’ research and what Gary Taubes identify to me is that over a period of time you only need to get that out of balance a little bit for very negative long-term consequences to accrue. The most difficult thing is that we are each of us different and getting it right is difficult because there is so much media-generated and food-industry-generated confusion.
Tim
Very interesting!
I feel like coming into this, quite late, as the last comment above was sept 25th, and it is now dec 9th..
First of all, one geographical background detail: I am not American, not Brittish… I am in Belgium. Why is this important to mention? It is because Belgium is not really under the general Anglosaxon influence. We have more links with France, Spain… (Historically-culturally spoken) This goes for food as well.
Anyway, I had been in serious discussion some time ago, about the SEEMINGLY (I did not read the book) simplification from Taubes “it all is about carbohydrates”, just as simple as the other one “it all is about fat”.
I don’t like simplifications of any kind. The one thing I didn’t know at first was that the “fat thing” seems to be a very OFFICIAL simplification in the USA, and as such also in the UK ???? (National Health Service propaganda and such ???) And, that Taubes is attacking the one existing HYPE by promoting the other hype… just as this would be some kind of a “typical American discussion technique”?
Perhaps this technique is “healthy” in an American context where everything must allways be exagerated… to me it provokes averse from anything I read around the subject.
I want a CLEAR view. Not a simplified. (Those are not synonyms)
Obesity specialist doctors in Belgium don’t use clichés of any kind. NO pre-assumed conclusion at all. It seems logic to me.
After all: every single person is different. In all aspects: his diet (free will to eat what he effectively eats), his lifestyle, his personal (both) basic and basal metabolism, his possible physiologic defects… It is SO logic not to conclude anything before you know it all. Then, I hear about all these generalising “controversions”… It is just MAD.
Why are so many doctors/scientists from the Anglosaxon world go into, or denie controversions about the subject, when BOTH options are just the result of preliminary generalising/simplifieing in one way or the other !! ???? While the whole physiological process of metabolism is extremely complicated and a result of douzens of different factors at the same time ! ?? This is just the truth. That is why we NEED scientists/doctors. If it WOULD be that simple, we can do away with them. Best seller writers will do the job (on regularly changing hypes) until eternity… => In fact THAT is the feeling the whole Taubes-or-not-Taubes history is giving me.
The one thing that the Belgian obesity specialists agree about, is that very obese people (except for serious physiological defects) eat way too much in general ! Of everything bad, so to say, because it is TOO MUCH. As well too much carbohydrates, as too much fat, as too much proteins… and, additionally, that these real obese who finally come to look for professional help, are allways seriously underestimating their own daily intake of anything. (Ostich policy…)
So yes, I am talking about the obese who eventually go for help, not about those who just talk about it and read dietary blabla books. The specialists can only talk about their own patients, and not about people walking by along the street. At least, that is the Belgian specialist attitude… it seems. Are the US specialists talking more about those people walking on the street, whose condition they did NOT check themselves ??? Weird statistics ?? Just a question.
A lot of statistical studies from institutes, about “whether or not people underestimate or overestimate their daily food intake” tell: not very significant majorities of any kind, except that people wich are heavier tend to underestimate a bit more then people who are lighter…. => I was laughing with those studies as they were all done on a mixure of all kind of people… except for those who are really obese. There intervenes the experience of obesity specialists, who state that allmost all of their patients understimate. The statistics show the direction, the specialists can tell where it ends up: THEY EAT WAY TOO MUCH, of anything. (Repeated: except for persons with specific physiological defects, wich is examined thoughoughfully)
I guess Taubes concluded about one of the topics, that eating less was not making fat people thinner, unless it was virtual starvation ?? The obesity specialists say: these people eat SO incredible much, that an absolutely normal human diet resembles starvation for them personally! Illusion ! In reality it IS NOT, it is what they CALL it, because they just ate on avarage (2),3,4 times MORE…. and complain about the doctors diet “wanting to kill them becauce they cannot eat anything anymore”!??.. NO, just like “normal” people…
And then, there is the typical problem of the overgrown stomach, through years of eating-training… a so well known physical problem among the obese, and magically forgotten in the Taubes relates subjects!?
And so on, and so on…
Really, if you go down to the basic complexity of all this, there is much more then simple “controversions”… Anyway, those seem not existing among the Belgian specialists, who very often get patients from Holland where they are very pround having strong Anglosaxon ties…
Greets
Wig
Thanks for such an extensive comment.
Taubes has examined nearly all the literature, from what I can tell. And has paid a lot of attention to the European literature, specifically Austro/German from before the second world war, which, for obvious but bad reasons, was completely ignored. So Anglo-American research on the subject sort of started from scratch, or worse. That earlier research, and I would say common knowledge, that starches and sugars lay behind obesity was in effect lost.
I agree that, once you arrive into obesity, consumption of all calories becomes a problem, and I don’t believe Taubes is denying at all the complexity of the metabolic process, but rather trying to find the what is most important. It seems that insulin seems to play a fundamental role. Taubes is applying critical thinking to the research, and also to his own findings, and that is quite rare in my experience.
I think you can play fast and loose with carbohydrates until middle-age, as I have done in effect, and what the research above is saying. Then small differences in appetite and appetite control can cascade into a more serious problem.
Tim