After all the salt uproar over the last year or so, perhaps it was inevitable that other public health consensus items would also come under scrutiny. Here’s Ace having a bit of fun with the latest New York Times report on fat and carbohydrates in the modern diet:
One day there will be a book written about this all — how a “Consensus of Experts” decided, against all previous wisdom and with virtually no evidence whatsoever, that Fat Makes You Fat and you can Eat All the Carbohydrates You Like Because Carbohydrates Are Healthy.
This never made a lick of sense to me, even before I heard of the Atkins diet.
Sugar is a carbohydrate. Indeed, it’s the carbohydrate, the one that makes up the others (such as starches, which are just long lines of sugar molecules arranged into sheets and folded over each other).
How the hell could it possibly be that Fat was Forbidden but SUGAR was Sacred?
It made no sense. A long time ago I tried to get a nutritionist to explain this to me. “Eat more fruit,” the nutritionist said.
“Fruit,” I answered, “is sugar in a ball.”
But the nutritionist had an answer. “That is fruit sugar,” the she told me.
“Fruit sugar,” I responded, “is yet sugar.”
“But it’s not cane sugar.”
“I don’t think the body really cares much about which particular plant the sugar comes from.”
“Sugar from a fruit,” the nutritionist now gambited, “is more natural than processed sugar.”
“They’re both natural, you know. We don’t synthesize sucrose in a lab. There are no beakers involved.”
“Well, you burn fruit sugar up quicker, so it actually gives you energy, instead of turning into fat!”
“Both sugars are converted into glycogen in the body. There can be no difference in how they produce ‘energy’ in the body because both wind up as glycogen. I have no idea where you’re getting any of this. It sounds like you’re making it all up as you go.”
“This is Science,” the nutritionist closed the argument.
Eh. It’s all nonsense. Even cane sugar contains, yes, fructose, or fruit sugar, and fruits contain sucrose, or cane sugar.
