Discussion - Fat vs. Sugar

segovm

Alright, so I was watching a BBC Horizon show the other night about Fat vs. Sugar and was actually sort of surprised by one of the propositions it made in it and was wondering if anyone else had noticed this to be true for them.

In the show they did the usual is sugar worse than fat sort of comparison in a 30 day diet that would make any of our parents cry and came up with the obvious conclusion that one should eat neither an all sugar or all fat diet or they would quickly fall over and die.

But in one of the segments they had this guy talking about his rats and he said he could feed them all sugar or all fat and by and large they really did not put on a ton of weight. However, whenever he fed them foods that were MIXED fat and sugar the poor little rats would just eat until they exploded. The idea being that in rats at least, their little brains can roughly establish how many calories they needed when those calories were from pure fat or pure sugar but when you mixed the two (i.e. cheesecake) the brains self regulation just sort of shut down.

To me, it actually sort of made sense. I hardly ever find myself craving a bowl of sugar or the fat off a side of bacon but man do I fall for cakes, doughnuts and cookies. I've always considered that a sweet tooth but really all those things, the way I eat them, are about 50% fat too.

Curious if other people have noticed this too? It seems like it might be sort of the point of those fad diets that drop out one thing or another and have some short term success. If we do drop all the fat or all the carbs for a while at least our brain has a chance to let us know we have simply had enough. For me, what I got from it was, you don't even need to drop one or the other to have success, just stop swirling your fats and sugars together and it might help us get back in touch with a built in system we already have to keep ourselves in check.

Anyway, not trying to start a flame war about how calories in and out are all that matter. I get that. I'm more curious to find if other people notice they are more satisfied with the calories they eat when they avoid the mixed sweet / fat combinations and go with more lean proteins or healthy carbohydrates in their more natural forms.

If there are already threads discussing this any links would rock.

fredman2

That's because we are not 'wired' to eat a bowl of pure sugar or a plate of pure fat, nobody was brought up that way.

Let me say: I have no problem taking a swipe of chocolate frosting out of the bowl or off the edge of a cake, but I have no desire to take a swipe of powdered sugar out of the bowl used to make that chocolate frosting.

segovm

That's because we are not 'wired' to eat a bowl of pure sugar or a plate of pure fat, nobody was brought up that way.

Let me say: I have no problem taking a swipe of chocolate frosting out of the bowl or off the edge of a cake, but I have no desire to take a swipe of powdered sugar out of the bowl used to make that chocolate frosting.

Yeah I actually think that is sort of the point, we actually have "wiring" for dealing with fat and sugar but maybe not so much to deal with fat AND sugar since, as a rule, the combination, in a 50-50 mix anyway, doesn't exist anywhere in nature.

NotJustADieter

Also, we as hunter gatherers want to fill up on those high calorie, high fat, high sugar foods- nutrients were more scarce then, and so eating those ensured calorie dense intake.

Side note- your body needs fats, don't hate on them!