My understanding is that naturally occurring fructose found in whole fruits is accompanied by fiber, vitamins, and minerals, which help mitigate any negative effects of fructose when consumed as part of a balanced diet.
However, it sounds like we should maybe be avoiding excessive amounts of certain fruit. See: A Definitive Guide to Fructose Content in Fruit [1]
There was a recent episode from Diary of a CEO with a cancer expert. He seems to have some really sound advice. One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells [2]
> One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells
“We did indeed see that the ketogenic diet suppressed tumor growth — but we also saw, surprisingly, that it promoted tumor metastasis,” says Gu. “That was really a shock to us.”
I think there's a misunderstanding here, my fault for not being clearer. I think I should have used the phrase 'when the body enters a state of ketosis' i.e. the state you get to when fasting when your body starts burning core fat. I believe the word ketogenic refers to the type of meat heavy diet. Thanks for those links, the fact that eating a lot of meat can promote tumor metastasis does not surprise me.
Going to go out on a limb here and say you probably shouldn't get any scientific advice about nutrition -- or really any scientific advice at all -- from anyone on Diary Of A CEO.
I don't like the interviewer, but just three weeks ago, Eric Schmidt was on the podcast and he is obviously very smart and knowledgeable about technology and business.
If you're going to make a bold claim like that, shouldn't you provide some support? Otherwise you're expecting us to just take an anonymous person's word for it... and particularly a throwaway account.
You're saying "discount science based not on facts, but on the form in which such science is published" which is utterly unscientific
In general yes, but there are some good guests that were there. For example, in case of nutrition, Dr. Layne Norton called him out on having a guy that was talking nonsense on the podcast and then they got in touch with Layne and had him on the podcast where he explained many of the misinformation about nutrition currently in wild.
It would still be net beneficial for anyone consuming industrial fructose to switch to fresh fruit of any kind. However, yes, if you’ve already withdrawn added fructose in processed foods and drinks from your diet, you could certainly optimize further on which kinds of fresh fruit you consume. It won’t make any difference if you still drink fructose soda, though.
HFCS is 42-55% fructose whereas table sugar (sucrose) is ... 50-50 glucose to fructose. You will still get roughly the same total exposure to fructose (maybe even more) by switching to table sugar.
The only difference is that sucrose has to be broken down into glucose and fructose by sucrase, so the exposure is somewhat smoother instead of hitting you all at once, although humans have more than enough sucrase to make it a pretty quick process.
I thought levels of fructose weren't as important as other qualities, like fiber content. For example, Dates are often referenced as a good fruit option due to the high fiber content but that guide doesn't mention fiber at all and has dates in the high fructose category. This seems like standard operating procedure in anything dietary where it is more about a specific aspect of the food and less about communicating well rounded advice.
> I thought levels of fructose weren't as important as other qualities, like fiber content.
> Dates are often referenced as a good fruit option
fyi, 100gr of dried dates it like 3 to 4 times the average amount of sugar recommended per day. Just 2 medjool dates and you hit your daily sugar recommendation.
At the end of the day your body will have to process the stuff you ingest, if it comes with fibers the digestion will be slower, but if you eat too much of X Y Z day after day it's just a matter of time before your body gives up
Fruits are very low density thanks to all that water and undigestible fibre. You would get hella bored eating enough fruit to make it problematic. There's 9g of sugar in an orange, and a can of coke has 39g. You'd have to eat a pound or so of oranges to equal a single can of coke. The issue isn't the fruit.
The rankings are a little off... I mean, you don't eat one prune, or one apricot. You tend to have a few, and that would put them right up next to, say, an apple, in the "medium" ranks.
That's the same as that "Serving Size" trick on nutrition information guides where the "serving size" is 5 potato chips instead of the entire bag.
Fruit has changed dramatically over the last Century. I imagine there was a time when it was much smaller, less sweet, and only available seasonally. In this new world, we have 24/7/365 access to as much and whatever we want.
There are Cherries along with every type of fruit you could want at Costco today and it's December.
Except the fruit in the past was often available out of season but as pickling or preserves, via either excesses of salt or sugar. For several centuries. Let alone the parts of the world that don't really have four seasons, instead having only two, wet and dry seasons. The point being I'm not sure how much relatively recent norms will actually be able to tell us about health.
Cherries out of season are wrinkly and weird tasting, unless Costco has solved that. Cherries and pomegranates are my two most "seasonal" fruits, in contrast to the always-available ones. I feel like mangoes and cantaloupes have seasons too, I just don't know how to detect them since they keep selling them even when they're not good.
I don't know about that, but there does appear to be a tradeoff between nutrition and fertility. When you eat less, you're less fertile. When you're less fertile, you live longer. A lot of what appears to allow us to live longer is lower rates of cancer, but the data I've seen there isn't rock solid and it isn't something I've dug deeply into. I only mention it because it's certainly studied and a question worth pursuing, with very interesting papers available if you look.
Something I read recently was about eunuchs living something like 25% longer than intact counterparts. However, the data was limited (15 each of eunuchs and intact as I recall). There were very few confounding factors, however. Really interesting stuff.
Are there any culture that fast in a way that would matter here ? Most of fasting traditions are mostly performative. The average joe probably fasted more by default a few thousand years ago than most people do now
Diary of a CEO should not have the proxy-BBC approval Steven enjoys. He regularly has quacks and misinformation pedallers on there shamelessly, and his willingness to fall under their spell demostrates concerning levels of naivete or (worse) willing negligence for engagements sake.
> "one way in which high levels of fructose consumption promote tumor growth is by increasing the availability of circulating lipids in the blood. "
Glad to see more research on this. Until recently, people trying to sound the alarm with regards to high fructose consumption (mainly high fructose corn syrup) have been dismissed.
Excess fructose consumption increases tryglicerides, uric acid. Just uric acid alone causes a lot of issues, from heart disease to erectile dysfunction(inhibits NOX), even before gout starts. The range that's considered 'normal' has changed over time, but I feel it's too high.
Note that fruits are unlikely to be an issue (except perhaps as fruit juice). Most people don't eat enough of them and they have plenty of nutrients that are beneficial.
EDIT:
> “Interestingly, the cancer cells themselves were unable to use fructose readily as a nutrient because they do not express the right biochemical machinery,” Patti said. “Liver cells do. This allows them to convert fructose into LPCs, which they can secrete to feed tumors.”
Forgot about this. Non alcoholic fatty liver disease has been on the rise for a while now, and it's mostly the high fructose corn syrup again.
It should be pointed out that contrary to what many people assume, "high-fructose" does mean that it has more fructose than sugar. Sugar is 50% fructose, and many widely used HFCS formulations contain less fructose than sugar (e.g. the 42% fructose formulation used in most processed food). Even the formulation used in soft drinks is only 55% fructose, marginally more than sugar.
If you replace HFCS with sugar in your diet it is basically a no-op in terms of being healthy and in many cases will increase your fructose intake.
I was recently diagnosed with fatty liver disease. The liver-related numbers in my blood work were slightly elevated. An abdominal ultrasound confirmed it.
Liver problems have historically been caused by excessive alcohol consumption (leads to cirrhosis, etc.) But I'm a teetotaler. The other version of fatty liver disease - the non-alcoholic kind - can be caused by excessive fructose consumption. Since I have been drinking diet sodas for years, that likely isn't it either (Diet Dr Pepper uses Aspartame as a sweetener).
But there are hints that artificial sweeteners trick the body into thinking they're getting the real thing and it will store those calories as fat. So I have started a fat-loss program where the first thing to go has been soda. And I'm down 15 pounds so far.
Many thanks to the "LoseIt" app developers for making it easy to track my calories. And please get your numbers checked at your next doctor visit.
Fatty liver here as well. Not a big consumer of sugar or alcohol though so I suspect something else is the cause. My liver doc ordered a couple dozen obscure blood tests to see if we can find the cause. I take a lot of supplements and vitamins, but the doc didn't see anything that should have caused it. My parents and siblings, despite being more obese and consuming more sugar, also do not have it.
Thing I read that's a bit fascinating and possibly important is your digestive system has taste buds and it's own nervous system. I wouldn't be gobsmacked if it responded to artificial sweeteners. And that causes issues.
Other thing I read is fructose is processed by the liver via some of the same paths that alcohol does. Would surprising if they didn't share some of the same negative health outcomes.
Fructose is primarily processed in the liver and shares some processes with alcohol processing with toxic byproducts. Fructose processing yield triglycerides contributing to the less ideal fat in blood. When I cut my fructose consumption down for a while to less than 10g/day my triglycerides in my blood dropped considerably - my GP did not believe it was my diet. It is shocking how little some doctors know about fructose influence on the body despite the considerable amount is is consumed.
FYI, high fructose corn syrup has only slightly more fructose (a single digit percentage) than normal sugar, which also has a fuckton of fructose in it.
Yup. ~5% more fructose than table sugar in its most common formulations, actually lower content than table sugar in some formulations (e.g. HFCS-42). The 'high fructose' moniker is derived from a reference to 'pure' corn syrup which is nearly 100% glucose, not a reference to table sugar as commonly assumed.
Right. The main issue with HFCS is that it's really cheap so it gets added to a lot of things that wouldn't normally contain sugar or it is added in greater amounts than other sugars.
I've heard the issue with high fructose corn syrup is that the levels of sugar in it does not correspond to its sweetness level. Corn syrup on its own is not very sweet, so to make it taste sweet you have to add much higher levels than if you had used other types of sweetener.
Went though a cancer journey with a loved one a few years ago. I was quite surprised at the complete lack of specialized guidance on nutrition. It was basically ‘eat healthy’, which isn’t bad advice but it seems like there are probably optimizations to be had there.
(Of course there’s no end of it on the Internets, but as part of heathcare it was absent)
We tend to emphasize diet a lot, I think because it's something we can control, but it might not help as much as we hope.
Eating a healthy, plant-forward diet while minimizing alcohol and red meat might give us most of the benefit we can squeeze out of diet for cancer risk reduction.
You cannot stop cancer with diet alone. Full stop. If you could, then starvation would stop cancer before the patient dies. Or a radical diet would cure a patient. It doesn't.
This has been debunked so often, yet people really want to believe that food diet can cure everything!
Totally agree, but it seems likely to me that diet can make a body more or less hospitable to cancer, which in turn could lend less or more effectiveness of targeted therapies.
The first half of her book talks about nutrition and health but the second half talks about her company that offers services to give people personal guidance on nutrition and monitoring their health, so there are some attempts to do this.
https://www.caseymeans.com/goodenergy
I don’t know why this is downvoted. The lack of profit motive is a big reason that nutrition and supplements aren’t as well studied through rigorous trials as drug therapies. The ones that are run are funded by grants. Rather than just “more funding” I think there needs to be more systemic ways at reducing the cost of clinical trials or using alternate methods of getting high quality scientific data for answering these questions.
For example, there is a good trial running now on ketogenic diet in glioblastoma patients, NCT05708352, I think with a NIH grant and maybe the NCI as well. Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31kR0MzyRA
With low fructose content (less then carrots per 100g), it's not a stupid choice. Naturally, if you don't binge on it, otherwise 2-3 slices daily won't kill you. I mean wholegrain, sourdough bread, to be precise.
They also will gladly prescribe you statins for life without mentioning that losing your excess 30kg and walking every now and then would likely greatly improve your cholesterol issues (or even solve them) and improve your general health. You can apply this to pretty much any modern wide spread disease.
I think doctors don't even bother because they assume people already do as much as they're willing to do, the problem is that the interests of capitalism are diametrically opposed to your well being so most people start with quite a disadvantage, just look at supermarkets: the alcohol, candies, coke, cakes aisles are all bigger than the healthy food aisle, together they're like 80% of the building
"Doctors won't mention that losing weight and exercising more will make you healthier" is quite a take.
I've heard exactly the opposite from any number of people: that if you're overweight at all, many doctors will tell "lose weight and exercise" and then usher you out the door, rather than pay attention to the specifics of your medical problems - sometimes missing serious issues as a result.
There is a particular type of kidney disease called Polycystic Kidney disease which is genetic. Essentially cysts grow all over your kidneys, they swell up, and eventually fail (usually over many years). There is emerging research that glucose contributes to the growth of these cysts and early research suggests ketogenic diet can have a measurable impact on the growth of these cysts and improve kidney function.
> "We were surprised that fructose was barely metabolized in the tumor types we tested... We quickly learned that the tumor cells alone don’t tell the whole story... one way in which high levels of fructose consumption promote tumor growth is by increasing the availability of circulating lipids in the blood. These lipids are building blocks for the cell membrane, and cancer cells need them to grow... Over the past few years, it’s become clear that many cancer cells prefer to take up lipids rather than make them
Guess what? Glucose limitation helps protect cancer cells! Gee, so much research on diet, and still no answers, tells me that diet research might not be the path to go down on stopping cancers.
>> Most cancer cells rapidly consume glucose, which is severely reduced in the nutrient-scarce tumour microenvironment. In CRISPR-based genetic screens to identify metabolic pathways influenced by glucose restriction, we find that tumour-relevant glucose concentrations (low glucose) protect cancer cells from inhibition of de novo pyrimidine biosynthesis, a pathway that is frequently targeted by chemotherapy.
The books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms" seems worth plugging.
Sugar is not safe, even though it is ubiquitous.
For many reasons avoiding meat seems reasonable, too. I used to be full vegetarian, for years, and then eventually re-added salmon and sardines.
It's a tiny step to full-on vegetarian keto, which is as good for you as full-on fasting is, I think.
I don't eat breakfast, veggie omelette for lunch (sautee some mushrooms and zuccini, or broccoli, perhaps, crack some eggs in once they cook down, give lots of olive oil and a side of something like kimchi, cabbage, or a pickle.
Usually eat whatever I want for dinner, including icecream, sometimes, but I spend most of the day in a low-sugar state of being, and if I 'clean up' my dinner(s) it's easy to eat a zero-added-sugar, extremely-low-carb, no-animal-protein, extremely-satiating form of food intake.
I really like it for me, and when I cook any of my foods, either when trying to be 'keto' or adding things like sweet potato, banana bread, ice cream, pizza, whatever, it's always well-received and considered delicious.
Readit News
However, it sounds like we should maybe be avoiding excessive amounts of certain fruit. See: A Definitive Guide to Fructose Content in Fruit [1]
There was a recent episode from Diary of a CEO with a cancer expert. He seems to have some really sound advice. One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells [2]
[1] https://iquitsugar.com/blogs/articles/a-definitive-guide-to-...
[2] https://youtu.be/VaVC3PAWqLk?feature=shared
As with everything, mileage will vary.
Pro: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6375425/
Contra: https://www.cancer.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-keto-diet-c...
“We did indeed see that the ketogenic diet suppressed tumor growth — but we also saw, surprisingly, that it promoted tumor metastasis,” says Gu. “That was really a shock to us.”
Deleted Comment
Generally vitamins aren’t helpful unless you were deficient, which is uncommon in western diets.
You're saying "discount science based not on facts, but on the form in which such science is published" which is utterly unscientific
HFCS is 42-55% fructose whereas table sugar (sucrose) is ... 50-50 glucose to fructose. You will still get roughly the same total exposure to fructose (maybe even more) by switching to table sugar.
The only difference is that sucrose has to be broken down into glucose and fructose by sucrase, so the exposure is somewhat smoother instead of hitting you all at once, although humans have more than enough sucrase to make it a pretty quick process.
> Dates are often referenced as a good fruit option
fyi, 100gr of dried dates it like 3 to 4 times the average amount of sugar recommended per day. Just 2 medjool dates and you hit your daily sugar recommendation.
At the end of the day your body will have to process the stuff you ingest, if it comes with fibers the digestion will be slower, but if you eat too much of X Y Z day after day it's just a matter of time before your body gives up
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/15/world/europe/uk-zoo-monke...
That's the same as that "Serving Size" trick on nutrition information guides where the "serving size" is 5 potato chips instead of the entire bag.
There are Cherries along with every type of fruit you could want at Costco today and it's December.
Something I read recently was about eunuchs living something like 25% longer than intact counterparts. However, the data was limited (15 each of eunuchs and intact as I recall). There were very few confounding factors, however. Really interesting stuff.
Are there any culture that fast in a way that would matter here ? Most of fasting traditions are mostly performative. The average joe probably fasted more by default a few thousand years ago than most people do now
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gpz163vg2o
But sadly it's true of many YouTube podcasts today.
Glad to see more research on this. Until recently, people trying to sound the alarm with regards to high fructose consumption (mainly high fructose corn syrup) have been dismissed.
Excess fructose consumption increases tryglicerides, uric acid. Just uric acid alone causes a lot of issues, from heart disease to erectile dysfunction(inhibits NOX), even before gout starts. The range that's considered 'normal' has changed over time, but I feel it's too high.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7352635/
Note that fruits are unlikely to be an issue (except perhaps as fruit juice). Most people don't eat enough of them and they have plenty of nutrients that are beneficial.
EDIT:
> “Interestingly, the cancer cells themselves were unable to use fructose readily as a nutrient because they do not express the right biochemical machinery,” Patti said. “Liver cells do. This allows them to convert fructose into LPCs, which they can secrete to feed tumors.”
Forgot about this. Non alcoholic fatty liver disease has been on the rise for a while now, and it's mostly the high fructose corn syrup again.
It should be pointed out that contrary to what many people assume, "high-fructose" does mean that it has more fructose than sugar. Sugar is 50% fructose, and many widely used HFCS formulations contain less fructose than sugar (e.g. the 42% fructose formulation used in most processed food). Even the formulation used in soft drinks is only 55% fructose, marginally more than sugar.
If you replace HFCS with sugar in your diet it is basically a no-op in terms of being healthy and in many cases will increase your fructose intake.
In high fructose corn syrup they are disconected.
This cange a lot of things like how fast they get to the blood and how fast cells can use them.
I'm skeptical of a lot of good/bad reported health effects, but it's not obviously a nop.
Liver problems have historically been caused by excessive alcohol consumption (leads to cirrhosis, etc.) But I'm a teetotaler. The other version of fatty liver disease - the non-alcoholic kind - can be caused by excessive fructose consumption. Since I have been drinking diet sodas for years, that likely isn't it either (Diet Dr Pepper uses Aspartame as a sweetener).
But there are hints that artificial sweeteners trick the body into thinking they're getting the real thing and it will store those calories as fat. So I have started a fat-loss program where the first thing to go has been soda. And I'm down 15 pounds so far.
Many thanks to the "LoseIt" app developers for making it easy to track my calories. And please get your numbers checked at your next doctor visit.
Other thing I read is fructose is processed by the liver via some of the same paths that alcohol does. Would surprising if they didn't share some of the same negative health outcomes.
Corn syrup is a red herring.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
You are glad to argue for exactly the opposite of what the research found?
Fructose is metabolized to lipids in the liver and that counts fruit juice, too. And the whole fruit.
(Of course there’s no end of it on the Internets, but as part of heathcare it was absent)
Eating a healthy, plant-forward diet while minimizing alcohol and red meat might give us most of the benefit we can squeeze out of diet for cancer risk reduction.
could you provide the evidence that convinced you that red meat is detrimental to health?
This has been debunked so often, yet people really want to believe that food diet can cure everything!
For example, there is a good trial running now on ketogenic diet in glioblastoma patients, NCT05708352, I think with a NIH grant and maybe the NCI as well. Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31kR0MzyRA
Food and nutrition is a big business though.
Even the more educated members of family believe this.
I think doctors don't even bother because they assume people already do as much as they're willing to do, the problem is that the interests of capitalism are diametrically opposed to your well being so most people start with quite a disadvantage, just look at supermarkets: the alcohol, candies, coke, cakes aisles are all bigger than the healthy food aisle, together they're like 80% of the building
I've heard exactly the opposite from any number of people: that if you're overweight at all, many doctors will tell "lose weight and exercise" and then usher you out the door, rather than pay attention to the specifics of your medical problems - sometimes missing serious issues as a result.
There is a particular type of kidney disease called Polycystic Kidney disease which is genetic. Essentially cysts grow all over your kidneys, they swell up, and eventually fail (usually over many years). There is emerging research that glucose contributes to the growth of these cysts and early research suggests ketogenic diet can have a measurable impact on the growth of these cysts and improve kidney function.
A bit of a red herring, but still interesting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-024-01166-w
>> Most cancer cells rapidly consume glucose, which is severely reduced in the nutrient-scarce tumour microenvironment. In CRISPR-based genetic screens to identify metabolic pathways influenced by glucose restriction, we find that tumour-relevant glucose concentrations (low glucose) protect cancer cells from inhibition of de novo pyrimidine biosynthesis, a pathway that is frequently targeted by chemotherapy.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6375425/
No diet has been conclusively shown to slow or stop cancer. I guarantee cancer cells can mutate to survive a keto diet.
Deleted Comment
Sugar is not safe, even though it is ubiquitous.
For many reasons avoiding meat seems reasonable, too. I used to be full vegetarian, for years, and then eventually re-added salmon and sardines.
It's a tiny step to full-on vegetarian keto, which is as good for you as full-on fasting is, I think.
I don't eat breakfast, veggie omelette for lunch (sautee some mushrooms and zuccini, or broccoli, perhaps, crack some eggs in once they cook down, give lots of olive oil and a side of something like kimchi, cabbage, or a pickle.
Usually eat whatever I want for dinner, including icecream, sometimes, but I spend most of the day in a low-sugar state of being, and if I 'clean up' my dinner(s) it's easy to eat a zero-added-sugar, extremely-low-carb, no-animal-protein, extremely-satiating form of food intake.
I really like it for me, and when I cook any of my foods, either when trying to be 'keto' or adding things like sweet potato, banana bread, ice cream, pizza, whatever, it's always well-received and considered delicious.