5 ms·

Not only that but high intakes of added sugars and fast-acting, high-glycemic carbohydrates are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. E

Not only that but high intakes of added sugars and fast-acting, high-glycemic carbohydrates are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. Excess simple sugars, particularly fructose and sucrose, promote insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, and vascular damage that impair brain function and accelerate neurodegeneration. So with other words, you diet is a major contributing factor here. The medical establishment and big pharma simple ignores the fact that the biggest health risk for a human being is the "modern" high sugar diet that Kellogs introduced in the US and spread to the western world (even to Asia at some extent).

wolfy1993 1mo ago
I'm not sure how the medical establishment ignores this, from my understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not fact checking myself in this moment) - the association between the two is largely linked to vascular dementia (obesity, hypertension, yadda yadda). I think it's hard to argue "The medical establishment" ignores diet as an important factor. I think the reality a lot of the time is doctors prescribe something to help. They can't force a diet change on a patient, and they're not mutually exclusive interventions.
- eastbound 1mo ago
  You say force a diet change on a patient. OP certainly meant forcing a diet change in the input of American factories. Sugar can be found in fruits. That's the right place. If you need some, use fruits, maybe alcohol. Everything else can be slashed. No sugar in prepared meals anymore. No sugar in pasta anymore. And most of all, no sugar in water. Sugar input makes more damage than cocaine today. We can call it the Prohibition II. There will be underground bars with sick people binging on sugar. We can change the shape of sugar to prevent restaurants from adding it to food. We can make it bitter. Absolutely need sugar? Eat that lemon-tasting block. We can call it The War On Sugar.
  - brazukadev 1mo ago
    people are so addicted to sugar that you are getting downvoted and maybe even flagged. I like "The War on Sugar" idea (even tho I went out 1 hour ago to buy lots of chocolates and candies, as I'm an addict).
    - kulahan 1mo ago
      I think it’s more because it’s kind of a strange rambling rant? He didn’t make any good points, he just made an analogy between it and alcohol prohibition like 7 times. He didn’t even bother to bring the idea home in the end, he just left it free-floating there. It’s just not a great comment.
    - calvinmorrison 1mo ago
      Closed the gyms during COVID not the McDonald's
- bityard 1mo ago
  The medical establishment that I have familiarity with (in the US) pretty much only ever treats symptoms, not causes. Don't believe me? Next time you go to see your primary care physician, ask them what you should be doing to lower your risk of whatever malady tends to run in your family. (Diabetes, cancer, dementia, etc.) They're going to stare at you in blank confusion for a few seconds before making some vague suggestion about a better diet and more exercise. Guaranteed. The reasons are many, and detailed enough to write MANY books about, but the low hanging fruit is: we don't have a culture of monitoring and improving our own individual health, physicians are trained almost exclusively to solve problems not prevent them, modern nutrition science is a joke, omnipresent health insurance distorts incentives for everyone, doctors are too overworked to get to know their patients, private equity has captured a large chunk of health care, drugs are positioned as the first line of treatment for almost everything, etc.
  - Retric 1mo ago
    In my experience that’s wildly inaccurate. Dietary choices, weight loss, exercise, etc are often given as an effective means of avoiding and or controlling a wide range of conditions. People are instead blowing off such advice because they don’t want to hear it.
    - projektfu 1mo ago
      I never knew Kaiser Permanente was so "anti-establishment" but I get pages of recommendations for healthy eating and exercise every time I go and also randomly as part of my "Personal Action Plan".
  - conception 1mo ago
    Everyone pretty much knows how to be healthy- good diet (leafy greens, abstain frand exercise. Diets, fads, etc are all just ways people sidestep being slightly uncomfortable rather than limit what they eat and do. Lots of societal things male it harder, eg hyper-palatable foods/ads/overworked/food availability, but that’s the long and short of the root cause.
- ACCount37 1mo ago
  It's easy to say "just diet ez" and it's hard to "just diet". If you can administer a treatment as a simple one and done thing, that's alright. If it's a pill you got to take every day, that's pretty bad. More than once a day? Horrible. Why? Because a lot of patients just don't have it in them to take a pill 3 times a day consistently. If it's purely an "exercise willpower" thing or a "change your lifestyle" thing? You might as well give up. The medical establishment wants to do things that work. Telling people "go diet" doesn't work. Semaglutide, evidently, does.
  - nubg 1mo ago
    bro the problem is not eating burgers every time you see them. if eating a pill once a day will prevent somebody from having these urges people will easily make this a routine. fat people don't like being fat (body positive is the world biggest cope). if you give them something they gotta take once a day, takes 10 seconds, they will throw their money at you.
  - ed_elliott_asc 1mo ago
    You underestimate what people Will do to lose weight without putting in any effort or changing their lifestyle
llm_nerd 1mo ago
Fructose is blood sugar invisible, and plays no part in this conversation. Fructose can cause fatty liver and has been attributed with lots of voodoo, but the weird fructose focus of some is not evidence based. It's nonsense. "The medical establishment and big pharma simple ignores the fact " Do you really think the "medical establishment" hasn't been *screaming* about poor diets for decades? The fact that people ignored them doesn't give you an opening to suddenly spout horseshit. And big pharma has had an enormous focus on blood sugar for decades, and you're here yipping like they just want to sell you boner pills. What bizarre world is this? > the "modern" high sugar diet that Kellogs introduced in the US and spread to the western world (even to Asia at some extent). Kellogg? Did you know that white rice has a glycemic index significantly higher than table sugar (because, as previously mentioned, fructose is not a blood sugar)? Yeah, a lot of people have bad diets, but infinitely more pressing is sedentary lifestyles. The reason Asia gets away with a rice-heavy diet (which is almost pure glucose, in a very simple form), though this is turning the wrong way, was busy, active lifestyles. The biological reality is that eating a big bowl of frosted flakes is perfectly fine if you follow it up with high amounts of activity. Glucose is quite literally fuel for your body. And it's fine if you're actually using that fuel, but becomes a problem when often the overweight (and insulin resistant) and sedentary flood their blood with glucose, with nowhere for it to go.
- outworlder 1mo ago
  > Fructose can cause fatty liver It is also a large contributor to rising triglycerides levels and uric acid due to the way it is metabolized. Which in turn contributes to high blood pressure. It also makes Acetyl-CoA, which stimulates lipogenesis. It is not even true that it is 'blood sugar invisible'. 30-50% of the fructose is converted in glucose and that's visible. The rest won't be available until you start burning fat. > Yeah, a lot of people have bad diets, but infinitely more pressing is sedentary lifestyles. No, that's only part of it. And a small part at that. The world didn't suddenly decide to get less active all of a sudden. You can blame some of the sedentary behaviors on societal changes (like suburbs and car dependency in the US), but other countries are getting just as unhealthy, metabolically speaking, and fat. > The biological reality is that eating a big bowl of frosted flakes is perfectly fine if you follow it up with high amounts of activity. It has to be really high. We are talking about hours to burn up that bowl of frosted flakes. Spend an hour at a treadmill, calculate the calories you spent. Now check the nearest cereal bar nutritional information. You'll be in for a surprise. You cannot outrun a bad diet. Diet is most of what needs to be controlled for metabolic health. Resistance training will build muscles, and they are a good buffer since they will eat simple carbs even when you are inactive. Add cardio for cardiovascular health. But, unless you are an athlete or you are active the whole day, you should go easy on the frosted flakes.
Aurornis 1mo ago
> The medical establishment and big pharma simple ignores the fact that the biggest health risk for a human being is the "modern" high sugar diet The medical establishment isn’t ignoring this at all. They’ve been pushing for healthier diets forever. Primary doctors have always been pushing for healthy eating. That doesn’t mean patients welcome the advice or follow it. Everyone knows that eating high sugar diets and being overweight is unhealthy. There was some short-live resistance to the idea that being overweight was unhealthy, but that wasn’t coming from the medical establishment. That was an anti-science, anti-medicine movement that went mainstream under a misplaced desire to not make anyone feel bad in any way. That movement has lost steam quickly as an easier option has appeared for reducing appetite and inducing weight loss. I don’t understand how you’re trying to twist this into a claim that big pharma is ignoring the impact of unhealthy eating. GLP-1 drugs work by reducing unhealthy overeating and cravings for unhealthy foods.
- eapressoandcats 1mo ago
  There was a fringe that said being overweight was not unhealthy, but the more salient points were the following: 1. BMI was basically just pulled out of a hat, and it turns out that for many health concerns, the overweight class does better than the normal weight class, with the actual “clearly worse” outcomes really coming up as you trend into obesity. 2. Environmental and genetic factors are huge contributors to people being overweight. To some degree moralizing about weight loss is a bit like telling kids with asthma they should live in places with less pollution. Or telling someone with breast cancer to not have the BRCA gene. 3. Doctors would regularly miss health problems because they’d blame them on people being overweight / not exercising enough. Especially for difficult to diagnose issues, it’s easy to just point at the number you have that “looks bad”. 4. We still have no firm reason why people are gaining weight. The popular answer is sugar and processed foods but those very much already existed at scale in the 50s. The tragedy is that it turned into a morality play where fat people were blamed for it, despite in many ways being as genetic as getting breast cancer. The reality is people who actually study obesity know that basically GLP-1s are the only health intervention other than bariatric surgery that consistently works. At a population level no intervention has reversed fattening anywhere in the world.
RhodesianHunter 1mo ago
Guess what category of drug reduces the intake of large amounts of sugar?
- criddell 1mo ago
  Is it the one that also reduces the intake of large amounts of protein?
bitexploder 1mo ago
They controlled for BMI at least, so they knew that was going to be a common question. BMI is a pretty good proxy for that, and they still said that the majority of the effect came from the compound and not BMI.
epihelix 1mo ago
Diabetes is well known to be a massive risk factor for dementia - so no, people are not ignoring this!? More broadly, diet is a frustrating modifiable risk factor - there are lots of studies suggesting the (somewhat nebulous) "Mediterranean" diet is protective, and beyond that, omega 3s. But human diet is uncontrolled, highly varied, and reporting is difficult to obtain and unreliable (people don't want to admit what they ate), so a lot of these data are seen as interesting, promising but unconfirmed.

wolfy1993 1mo ago

I'm not sure how the medical establishment ignores this, from my understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not fact checking myself in this moment) - the association between the two is largely linked to vascular dementia (obesity, hypertension, yadda yadda). I think it's hard to argue "The medical establishment" ignores diet as an important factor. I think the reality a lot of the time is doctors prescribe something to help. They can't force a diet change on a patient, and they're not mutually exclusive interventions.

eastbound 1mo ago
You say force a diet change on a patient. OP certainly meant forcing a diet change in the input of American factories. Sugar can be found in fruits. That's the right place. If you need some, use fruits, maybe alcohol. Everything else can be slashed. No sugar in prepared meals anymore. No sugar in pasta anymore. And most of all, no sugar in water. Sugar input makes more damage than cocaine today. We can call it the Prohibition II. There will be underground bars with sick people binging on sugar. We can change the shape of sugar to prevent restaurants from adding it to food. We can make it bitter. Absolutely need sugar? Eat that lemon-tasting block. We can call it The War On Sugar.
- brazukadev 1mo ago
  people are so addicted to sugar that you are getting downvoted and maybe even flagged. I like "The War on Sugar" idea (even tho I went out 1 hour ago to buy lots of chocolates and candies, as I'm an addict).
  - kulahan 1mo ago
    I think it’s more because it’s kind of a strange rambling rant? He didn’t make any good points, he just made an analogy between it and alcohol prohibition like 7 times. He didn’t even bother to bring the idea home in the end, he just left it free-floating there. It’s just not a great comment.
  - calvinmorrison 1mo ago
    Closed the gyms during COVID not the McDonald's
bityard 1mo ago
The medical establishment that I have familiarity with (in the US) pretty much only ever treats symptoms, not causes. Don't believe me? Next time you go to see your primary care physician, ask them what you should be doing to lower your risk of whatever malady tends to run in your family. (Diabetes, cancer, dementia, etc.) They're going to stare at you in blank confusion for a few seconds before making some vague suggestion about a better diet and more exercise. Guaranteed. The reasons are many, and detailed enough to write MANY books about, but the low hanging fruit is: we don't have a culture of monitoring and improving our own individual health, physicians are trained almost exclusively to solve problems not prevent them, modern nutrition science is a joke, omnipresent health insurance distorts incentives for everyone, doctors are too overworked to get to know their patients, private equity has captured a large chunk of health care, drugs are positioned as the first line of treatment for almost everything, etc.
- Retric 1mo ago
  In my experience that’s wildly inaccurate. Dietary choices, weight loss, exercise, etc are often given as an effective means of avoiding and or controlling a wide range of conditions. People are instead blowing off such advice because they don’t want to hear it.
  - projektfu 1mo ago
    I never knew Kaiser Permanente was so "anti-establishment" but I get pages of recommendations for healthy eating and exercise every time I go and also randomly as part of my "Personal Action Plan".
- conception 1mo ago
  Everyone pretty much knows how to be healthy- good diet (leafy greens, abstain frand exercise. Diets, fads, etc are all just ways people sidestep being slightly uncomfortable rather than limit what they eat and do. Lots of societal things male it harder, eg hyper-palatable foods/ads/overworked/food availability, but that’s the long and short of the root cause.
ACCount37 1mo ago
It's easy to say "just diet ez" and it's hard to "just diet". If you can administer a treatment as a simple one and done thing, that's alright. If it's a pill you got to take every day, that's pretty bad. More than once a day? Horrible. Why? Because a lot of patients just don't have it in them to take a pill 3 times a day consistently. If it's purely an "exercise willpower" thing or a "change your lifestyle" thing? You might as well give up. The medical establishment wants to do things that work. Telling people "go diet" doesn't work. Semaglutide, evidently, does.
- nubg 1mo ago
  bro the problem is not eating burgers every time you see them. if eating a pill once a day will prevent somebody from having these urges people will easily make this a routine. fat people don't like being fat (body positive is the world biggest cope). if you give them something they gotta take once a day, takes 10 seconds, they will throw their money at you.
- ed_elliott_asc 1mo ago
  You underestimate what people Will do to lose weight without putting in any effort or changing their lifestyle

llm_nerd 1mo ago

Fructose is blood sugar invisible, and plays no part in this conversation. Fructose can cause fatty liver and has been attributed with lots of voodoo, but the weird fructose focus of some is not evidence based. It's nonsense. "The medical establishment and big pharma simple ignores the fact " Do you really think the "medical establishment" hasn't been *screaming* about poor diets for decades? The fact that people ignored them doesn't give you an opening to suddenly spout horseshit. And big pharma has had an enormous focus on blood sugar for decades, and you're here yipping like they just want to sell you boner pills. What bizarre world is this? > the "modern" high sugar diet that Kellogs introduced in the US and spread to the western world (even to Asia at some extent). Kellogg? Did you know that white rice has a glycemic index significantly higher than table sugar (because, as previously mentioned, fructose is not a blood sugar)? Yeah, a lot of people have bad diets, but infinitely more pressing is sedentary lifestyles. The reason Asia gets away with a rice-heavy diet (which is almost pure glucose, in a very simple form), though this is turning the wrong way, was busy, active lifestyles. The biological reality is that eating a big bowl of frosted flakes is perfectly fine if you follow it up with high amounts of activity. Glucose is quite literally fuel for your body. And it's fine if you're actually using that fuel, but becomes a problem when often the overweight (and insulin resistant) and sedentary flood their blood with glucose, with nowhere for it to go.

outworlder 1mo ago
> Fructose can cause fatty liver It is also a large contributor to rising triglycerides levels and uric acid due to the way it is metabolized. Which in turn contributes to high blood pressure. It also makes Acetyl-CoA, which stimulates lipogenesis. It is not even true that it is 'blood sugar invisible'. 30-50% of the fructose is converted in glucose and that's visible. The rest won't be available until you start burning fat. > Yeah, a lot of people have bad diets, but infinitely more pressing is sedentary lifestyles. No, that's only part of it. And a small part at that. The world didn't suddenly decide to get less active all of a sudden. You can blame some of the sedentary behaviors on societal changes (like suburbs and car dependency in the US), but other countries are getting just as unhealthy, metabolically speaking, and fat. > The biological reality is that eating a big bowl of frosted flakes is perfectly fine if you follow it up with high amounts of activity. It has to be really high. We are talking about hours to burn up that bowl of frosted flakes. Spend an hour at a treadmill, calculate the calories you spent. Now check the nearest cereal bar nutritional information. You'll be in for a surprise. You cannot outrun a bad diet. Diet is most of what needs to be controlled for metabolic health. Resistance training will build muscles, and they are a good buffer since they will eat simple carbs even when you are inactive. Add cardio for cardiovascular health. But, unless you are an athlete or you are active the whole day, you should go easy on the frosted flakes.

Aurornis 1mo ago

> The medical establishment and big pharma simple ignores the fact that the biggest health risk for a human being is the "modern" high sugar diet The medical establishment isn’t ignoring this at all. They’ve been pushing for healthier diets forever. Primary doctors have always been pushing for healthy eating. That doesn’t mean patients welcome the advice or follow it. Everyone knows that eating high sugar diets and being overweight is unhealthy. There was some short-live resistance to the idea that being overweight was unhealthy, but that wasn’t coming from the medical establishment. That was an anti-science, anti-medicine movement that went mainstream under a misplaced desire to not make anyone feel bad in any way. That movement has lost steam quickly as an easier option has appeared for reducing appetite and inducing weight loss. I don’t understand how you’re trying to twist this into a claim that big pharma is ignoring the impact of unhealthy eating. GLP-1 drugs work by reducing unhealthy overeating and cravings for unhealthy foods.

eapressoandcats 1mo ago
There was a fringe that said being overweight was not unhealthy, but the more salient points were the following: 1. BMI was basically just pulled out of a hat, and it turns out that for many health concerns, the overweight class does better than the normal weight class, with the actual “clearly worse” outcomes really coming up as you trend into obesity. 2. Environmental and genetic factors are huge contributors to people being overweight. To some degree moralizing about weight loss is a bit like telling kids with asthma they should live in places with less pollution. Or telling someone with breast cancer to not have the BRCA gene. 3. Doctors would regularly miss health problems because they’d blame them on people being overweight / not exercising enough. Especially for difficult to diagnose issues, it’s easy to just point at the number you have that “looks bad”. 4. We still have no firm reason why people are gaining weight. The popular answer is sugar and processed foods but those very much already existed at scale in the 50s. The tragedy is that it turned into a morality play where fat people were blamed for it, despite in many ways being as genetic as getting breast cancer. The reality is people who actually study obesity know that basically GLP-1s are the only health intervention other than bariatric surgery that consistently works. At a population level no intervention has reversed fattening anywhere in the world.

RhodesianHunter 1mo ago

Guess what category of drug reduces the intake of large amounts of sugar?

criddell 1mo ago
Is it the one that also reduces the intake of large amounts of protein?

bitexploder 1mo ago

They controlled for BMI at least, so they knew that was going to be a common question. BMI is a pretty good proxy for that, and they still said that the majority of the effect came from the compound and not BMI.

epihelix 1mo ago

Diabetes is well known to be a massive risk factor for dementia - so no, people are not ignoring this!? More broadly, diet is a frustrating modifiable risk factor - there are lots of studies suggesting the (somewhat nebulous) "Mediterranean" diet is protective, and beyond that, omega 3s. But human diet is uncontrolled, highly varied, and reporting is difficult to obtain and unreliable (people don't want to admit what they ate), so a lot of these data are seen as interesting, promising but unconfirmed.