Cutting Sugar From my Diet entirely

saheel97
saheel97 Posts: 15 Member
edited November 18 in Food and Nutrition
I'm considering cutting sugar completely out from my diet. For the past three weeks that I've been dieting, I've cut down a ton because I'm no longer drinking fraps and other junk *kitten* every day and it hasn't felt like that much of a burden. Has anyone else gone sugar-free entirely? What effects have you noticed? The only thing now I feel like would affect me is the fact that I would have to cut fruits out which is rather disappointing.
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Replies

  • Macy9336
    Macy9336 Posts: 694 Member
    AnvilHead wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    Start reasonably and cut refined sugars for 2 weeks and see how you feel. Make sure you are not replacing with a bunch of artificial sweeteners. Due to a health issue I had to cut refined sugars but still use honey agave and natural sugars in fruits and vegetables. My goal is to stay under 30g a day. Think that is about as close as I can get to "no sugar" and eat a complete diet. (2100 cal/day)

    How would cutting refined sugar help a health issue if you are replacing it with natural sugar?

    Your body doesn't care where it comes from. Sugar is sugar.

    Your body does care.
    Refined sugar is broken down by the body differently than natural occouring sugars.
    Refined sugars are made of bonded sucrose and glucose and when they are processed by the body it dramatically increases insulin production. Or in my case fuel for bacteria production. Consuming 30g +/- of sugar daily is pretty low considering a 12oz can of coke contains 40g.

    Got a link to some science on that?

    1) Refined sugar (table sugar, also called sucrose) is made of glucose and fructose. Guess what honey is made of? Glucose and fructose. Guess what high fructose corn syrup is made of? You guessed it - glucose and fructose.

    2) The body digests/metabolizes all sugars (refined or natural) into monosaccharides (chiefly glucose), regardless of their source. Sugar is sugar.

    How your body metabolises naturally occurring sugars is different from how it metabolises artificial or processed/refined sugars. They did a study of artificial honey versus natural honey where the artificial honey had exact same ratio of glucose to fructose molecules. What they found was that the body treated the two honeys significantly differently. Too, in studies of the Kuna people who get the majority of their calories from fruit, there are no sugar related diseases and their body mass remains lean. Further studies have shown that the same molecules of sugar are processed differently...for example the fructose eaten with fruit was processed differently from HFCS...and actually that pure fructose was toxic.
    https://chriskresser.com/is-all-sugar-created-equal/
  • Macy9336
    Macy9336 Posts: 694 Member
    Macy9336 wrote: »
    AnvilHead wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    Start reasonably and cut refined sugars for 2 weeks and see how you feel. Make sure you are not replacing with a bunch of artificial sweeteners. Due to a health issue I had to cut refined sugars but still use honey agave and natural sugars in fruits and vegetables. My goal is to stay under 30g a day. Think that is about as close as I can get to "no sugar" and eat a complete diet. (2100 cal/day)

    How would cutting refined sugar help a health issue if you are replacing it with natural sugar?

    Your body doesn't care where it comes from. Sugar is sugar.

    Your body does care.
    Refined sugar is broken down by the body differently than natural occouring sugars.
    Refined sugars are made of bonded sucrose and glucose and when they are processed by the body it dramatically increases insulin production. Or in my case fuel for bacteria production. Consuming 30g +/- of sugar daily is pretty low considering a 12oz can of coke contains 40g.

    Got a link to some science on that?

    1) Refined sugar (table sugar, also called sucrose) is made of glucose and fructose. Guess what honey is made of? Glucose and fructose. Guess what high fructose corn syrup is made of? You guessed it - glucose and fructose.

    2) The body digests/metabolizes all sugars (refined or natural) into monosaccharides (chiefly glucose), regardless of their source. Sugar is sugar.

    How your body metabolises naturally occurring sugars is different from how it metabolises artificial or processed/refined sugars. They did a study of artificial honey versus natural honey where the artificial honey had exact same ratio of glucose to fructose molecules. What they found was that the body treated the two honeys significantly differently. Too, in studies of the Kuna people who get the majority of their calories from fruit, there are no sugar related diseases and their body mass remains lean. Further studies have shown that the same molecules of sugar are processed differently...for example the fructose eaten with fruit was processed differently from HFCS...and actually that pure fructose was toxic.
    https://chriskresser.com/is-all-sugar-created-equal/

    Where are these studies?

    Your link is just to a blog by someone who clearly doesn't understand what he is writing about.

    The references with the specific studies backing up what he's reporting are embedded in the article. Just click on the end note numbers as they appear by the sentence they refer to. They are in blue font and are hyperlinked. Cheers!
  • RuNaRoUnDaFiEld
    RuNaRoUnDaFiEld Posts: 5,864 Member
    Macy9336 wrote: »
    Macy9336 wrote: »
    AnvilHead wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    1coolmofo wrote: »
    Start reasonably and cut refined sugars for 2 weeks and see how you feel. Make sure you are not replacing with a bunch of artificial sweeteners. Due to a health issue I had to cut refined sugars but still use honey agave and natural sugars in fruits and vegetables. My goal is to stay under 30g a day. Think that is about as close as I can get to "no sugar" and eat a complete diet. (2100 cal/day)

    How would cutting refined sugar help a health issue if you are replacing it with natural sugar?

    Your body doesn't care where it comes from. Sugar is sugar.

    Your body does care.
    Refined sugar is broken down by the body differently than natural occouring sugars.
    Refined sugars are made of bonded sucrose and glucose and when they are processed by the body it dramatically increases insulin production. Or in my case fuel for bacteria production. Consuming 30g +/- of sugar daily is pretty low considering a 12oz can of coke contains 40g.

    Got a link to some science on that?

    1) Refined sugar (table sugar, also called sucrose) is made of glucose and fructose. Guess what honey is made of? Glucose and fructose. Guess what high fructose corn syrup is made of? You guessed it - glucose and fructose.

    2) The body digests/metabolizes all sugars (refined or natural) into monosaccharides (chiefly glucose), regardless of their source. Sugar is sugar.

    How your body metabolises naturally occurring sugars is different from how it metabolises artificial or processed/refined sugars. They did a study of artificial honey versus natural honey where the artificial honey had exact same ratio of glucose to fructose molecules. What they found was that the body treated the two honeys significantly differently. Too, in studies of the Kuna people who get the majority of their calories from fruit, there are no sugar related diseases and their body mass remains lean. Further studies have shown that the same molecules of sugar are processed differently...for example the fructose eaten with fruit was processed differently from HFCS...and actually that pure fructose was toxic.
    https://chriskresser.com/is-all-sugar-created-equal/

    Where are these studies?

    Your link is just to a blog by someone who clearly doesn't understand what he is writing about.

    The references with the specific studies backing up what he's reporting are embedded in the article. Just click on the end note numbers as they appear by the sentence they refer to. They are in blue font and are hyperlinked. Cheers!

    Thanks, I was on my phone and they weren't showing up as hyperlinked. I'm on the laptop now so I can read.
  • GoldenEye_
    GoldenEye_ Posts: 330 Member
    You might still be eating a lot of sugar now. Why don't you eat a little less and see how that goes? Just cut out the high sugar, few nutrients stuff for now and keep some fruit and tons of vegetables in. I'm on 17 grams of sugar a day at the moment and still include them. Sugar is not the devil here! You can check todays food diary if you like (there's nothing else in there as I just wanted to check how I was doing exactly). Fruits are delicious and healthy. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited May 2017
    saheel97 wrote: »
    I'm considering cutting sugar completely out from my diet.

    As others have asked, do you mean added sugar or all sugar? Edit: oh, from your comment about fruit it does seem you mean ALL sugar.

    I think the latter is not a good idea, because sugar is in vegetables, fruit, dairy, and a variety of other foods (sweet potatoes, even a small amount in things like eggs). There are a small amount of people (so called carnivores) who eat only animal products and still are probably not sugar free (small amount in eggs, they may still consume dairy that has it), and some extreme keto-ers will consume 5 or so grams (NOT necessary to keto), but both of those require cutting way down on or out foods like vegetables, which again seems to me really counterproductive and not a good idea for the vast majority of people -- certainly not if you don't have specific health issues but merely are curious about not eating sugar or think if lower sugar is good lower still or none would be best. It doesn't work that way -- focusing on sugar is really beside the point, I'd focus on diet quality (amount of added sugar can be related to that). If you think it would be easy because you currently are not getting a lot of sugar from sources such as vegetables (you can check your diary and see), I'd actually recommend increasing those.

    I did cut out added sugar for a while. For me it wasn't really about adding sugar to things (I never do, and unless I'm baking often don't even own any -- this is just personal taste and habits), but cutting out mostly things that obviously had added sugar (ice cream, chocolate, mango chutney, dried cherries (maybe less obvious, but it's hard to find them without it added), and things that happened to include it (most smoked salmon, bread--although I rarely eat that anyway and wasn't at all at the time for other reasons, sriracha, variety of things that I bought even though it was pretty easy for me since I mostly cook at home--I basically started being better about always bringing lunch and not buying it for a while, even though I have a lot of healthy options for purchased lunches).

    Anyway, when I did it, it was because it was an experiment to see how hard it would be, and also because I was working on emotional eating and found it easier to just say "no sweets." I thought it was valuable for me as an experiment, and I learned that given the way I ate it wasn't very hard for me, but afterwards I decided to add sweets back in moderation and not worry about the relatively small amount of sugar I got by using sriracha and eating smoked salmon and buying an occasional (delicious) sandwich with french ham, gruyere, avocado, jalapenos, and mango chutney, on housemade bread or the like.

    So if you want to experiment with it, I'd just advise knowing what your goals are.

    I have cut out sweets for a period of time a couple of subsequent times and seen that my added sugar amounts became vanishingly low, but because I don't eat many packaged products with added sugar I saw 0 reason to worry about stuff like the sugar in sriracha. (I don't think hidden sugar is really a significant thing, and it's definitely not in my own diet.)

    Now I am actually quite low on sugar overall because I am trying very low carb, but even so it's not uncommon to have about 20-25 grams just from vegetables, dairy, a bit from nuts and eggs, and tiny amounts of added sugar from, again, things like sriracha, maybe balsamic vinegar. Getting more than 20 just from vegetables always feels like a positive to me, since I think eating vegetables is important.

    Anyway, TLDR version: for health reasons, I personally think it makes sense to limit added sugar, as if you are eating high amounts (relative to total calories) it probably comes from sweets or other lower nutrient foods, but I don't see a particular health reason to say ALL should be removed. I do think there can be personal reasons that it makes sense for an individual. (If you aren't eating much other than what you already removed and think it would be easy, that's probably not you, but if you want to understand where it is coming from, that might be interesting.)
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited May 2017
    Saying that fewer carbs is always better is what is not supported, at all.

    https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-for-eating-fruit/?_r=0 (quotes Lustig, among others).
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 9,281 Member
    I hope the people talking about the toxicity of fructose aren't eating apples then.

    oh yes- doh :s

    Perhaps I will edit my comment to "If they ate a grilled steak every day and it took them over their calorie level..... " ;)
This discussion has been closed.