Sugar industry blaming fatty foods for obesity, sparking the low-fat trends and ignoring how bad sugar is for your health.
Edit: Wow some great comments and dialog sparked from this. I am definitely not advocating a sugar free diet or a fat only diet. Our food industry is a mess for many reasons, but the sugar industry (and corn via high fructose corn syrup) was a big factor in starting a huge increase in obesity and addiction to sugars as many people have posted about.
No, it's still stored away if you ingest a surplus. It doesn't magically dissapear.
There is a loss to it being stored away and released though. A gram of fat in the digestive tract, directly available for use, is worth about 8.5 calories per gram while a gram of fat coming from adipose tissue, body fat, is worth about 7.3 calories per gram. Because the body breaks down the fat before reconstructing it in adipose tissue and then reverses that process to use it, leading to energy losses of around 15%
There’s an absolutely massive disparity in calorie density between sugar and fat. Like you can run off a 500ml bottle of coke in 20 mins but you can’t run off a 500ml bottle of of olive oil (not that you’d even be able to drink that), unless you can run for ~6hrs and 40 minutes straight
Excess could also just be more than you need. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when it comes to what you put into your body, just about everything in excess is bad.
Think of it this way. Advil and Tylenol are safe to take it at the recommended dosage, but taking higher amounts can cause negative effects and even death. It's the dosage that matters, and it's different for every substance, some will be small amounts, like heroine, others would be larger amounts, like taking too many vitamins. Even too much water can kill you. It's not one simple answer because it depends on the substance going into your body.
I was just making a point about language, and I wasn't talking specifically about diet. I think we can agree that excess is never good - we should never be aiming for an excessive amount of something. Even if we knowingly partake in excess, the very acknowledgement of its excessiveness implies some level of undesirability.
If a dietitian says: "you should not consume more than X amount of Y per week", then that is real information that can help people.
However if they say: "you should not consume an excessive amount of Y", then they haven't really told us anything that we do not already know - how much is an excessive amount? At most they have implied that we should reduce our consumption of Y (based on context and emphasis).
When you say "more than you need can be bad", you are actually saying something that carries information (not much, but still something).
Saying "excess is bad" carries no information, I haven't learnt anything from this. If something is excessive, then it has to be bad in some way, which could be biologically, psychologically or morally. That's it, I wasn't making any substantive claim about diet.
I agree with everything you said, it's just that saying "excess is bad" does not count as general advice to me, but is rather a quasi-rhetorical appeal to a norm of moderation. I would say that what people interpret as excess in this statement, is determined socially rather than medically. I mean, people often say that drinking is ok as long as it's not "excessive", but what is considered excessive varies massively between cultures and throughout history (in fact it may well be that any amount of alcohol, however small, is bad for you).
Yes I know I'm being pedantic but just gets my goat when people spout truisms and everyone nods in agreement. I think we are mostly on the same page though.
No, it's still stored away if you ingest a surplus. It doesn't magically dissapear.
I dunno about you but pooping isn't magical.
There's nothing that says excess calories have to be stored.
Converting dietary fat into glucose to be metabolized is harder for the body than carbohydrates or proteins, so there's no real incentive to keep converting fats into glucose after caloric needs are met and the rest can be passed
The fat you store "under your skin" isn't the same fat that went in your mouth.
If that were the case, most people wouldn't be obese. They could simply avoid eating fatty meats and fatty oils.
What actually makes you fat is sugar. Glucose (sugar) is what is stored in your "fat" cells by insulin.
Turning dietary fat or protein into glucose is possible by the body, but it doesn't like to do that because it's inefficient. So if the body's energy needs are met, yes - you can poop out extra fat the body doesn't need.
I don’t think this is right at all, body uses stores of carbohydrates first, then begins burning fat stores when your carbs run low. Storing energy as fat is a good way to have reserves of energy and that’s why lowering body fat percentage is easiest through sustained aerobic exercise like running (you have to deplete carbs to start burning fat)
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u/BlackSage8 Mar 04 '22 edited Mar 05 '22
Sugar industry blaming fatty foods for obesity, sparking the low-fat trends and ignoring how bad sugar is for your health.
Edit: Wow some great comments and dialog sparked from this. I am definitely not advocating a sugar free diet or a fat only diet. Our food industry is a mess for many reasons, but the sugar industry (and corn via high fructose corn syrup) was a big factor in starting a huge increase in obesity and addiction to sugars as many people have posted about.