Posted by aldarion 1/7/2026
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
… is a pushback of sorts on the sugar industry.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.
I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
Why neglect one aspect of our bodies digestive energy systems for just gluconeogenesis. Wouldn't you be better off eating a balanced meal of complex carbohydrates and unsaturated fats. Our bodies have multiple pathways to producing energy, focusing on using only one is silly and not the right approach because it wasn't designed to be that way.
Just because our bodies can survive doing a particular thing in the absence of another, doesn't mean that thing we're absent of isn't required.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid
Some other discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962750
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32978590
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183
and on and on...
A) Eating a pound/kg of fat
B) Eating a pound/kg of refined sugar
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
Unless your digestive system is hyperactive, a lot of this huge glob of fat will likely just pass right through without being absorbed into your bloodstrean.
The refined sugar is virtually guaranteed to fully hit your bloodstream and right now. It's enough to send some people into a life threatening diabetic coma.
After eating a pound of fat, you may want a nap but dying from it is extremely unlikely.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
Ketones can't be used for this purpose.
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
There lies the problem...
The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.
As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.
But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.
For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.
But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.
That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
But sadly, many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest. Which is why..
>Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built,
> rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take...
Capitalism does not imply public trading. Capitalism can work even when companies re-invest parts of their profits.
Oh no, that would be too slow. We want Speeeed...even if that means a quick descent into certain doom.
Blame them (the consumers) then. This is like that silly Reddit/Twitter stat about 10% of companies creating 90% of global emissions… which the companies are doing in the process of making the shiny cell phones and laptops all the consumerists lambasting them are posting from, plus all the plastic crap they buy every day from Amazon.
The consumers are the ones demanding unchecked expansion of their consumption. As long as that demand exists, companies will find a way to fill it, whether they’re doing so in America or other countries. Privately held entities can’t allocate capital fast enough to keep up with the consumerists.
America is one of few places that doesn’t.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
Why? You've never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag?
https://web.archive.org/web/20120629041358/http://www.ers.us...
Oh hey right after beef CAFOs started dominating the industry.