to think it's not possible to give up sugar

[enifing]

I have heard people suggest this from time to time. It's not possible with DCs, is it?

We've given up most cereal, but porridge has to have sugar or some sugar substitute.

Stewed fruit can't be fine without sugar.

Home baking, absolute no-no.

How dull would life be? I would probably overdose on salt instead...

White bread, pasta etc do count as complex carbs as they are starches not simple sugars (and no fructose either). However wholegrains are better as they have a higher fibre content so are more slowly absorbed.

I don't have an issue with carbs although I make sure I weigh the portions properly when cooking as 70g pasta turns out a lot smaller than when you are just chucking some pasta in a saucepan I can't be arsed to have wholegrain pasta as I don't like it v much but do use brown rice and brown basmati rice as I find it has more flavour.

As with everything there's a bit of balance and common sense - don't eat to much, don't eat sugar without fibre, don't make your diet so miserable you can't sustain it

White bread has a GI level of 71, bagels 72. White sugar has a lower GI level of 65.
So to me that suggests that the processed carbs in bread have a higher impact on blood sugar levels even than sugar.

Diabetes shouldn't be really used as an argument for cutting carbs.
Whether your get diabetes is largely down to genetics. Being over weight also adds to to the issue ( with type 2 anyway)

Also saying about diabetics blood sugar levels after certain food is dodgey because they have a specific issue. Someone with a normal insulin response might react totally differently.

...and being overweight is caused by excess carbs. Sugar or refined carbohydrates!

Er, no it isn't. It's cuased by excess calories, or which some calories (sucrose) are worse than others.

Yy if I eat a lot of bread I absolutely pile on the pounds.

When I started trying to lose weight I went to weight watchers for a couple of months. They're high sugar/carb low fat diet is so bad I wondered how they had any success at all.. Until I spoke to a few people and found out most of them were limiting carbs as well.

Giving up all refined sugar is possible but unnecessary. Giving up all sugar is stupid and counter productive, humans need carbs both sugaring and not. Cutting out any food group completely should only ever been done on the advice of a medical expert and I do not class self confessed nutrition gurus as medical experts

I agree with Kundry.

It's difficult to identify causation from correlation in these things. While I agree cutting carbs/ sugar can help you lose weight, is it because carbs do something weird to your body which causes you to get fat or because if you reduce your carb intake from 200grams per day to 100grams per day without replacing those calories with something else, your reducing your calorie intake by 400.

Thanks - I'm currently making gooseberry fool for pudding tonight, with evil refined sugar, which I shall manage by having a tiny portion and adding sugar to taste, not as per the recipe. As you can see I am convinced that sugar does do something to your body that other calories don't but I can't do normal family life if sugar is gone completely. This is my compromise.

I've no problem with carbs but if we are having meat+ 2 veg for dinner, it's easy for me to have the same meal as DH if he has potatoes and I don't. No issues with the carbs, it's just losing the potatoes is a simple way to cut calories down. This way I haven't had to make a radical overhaul of the family diet but I'm still losing the weight.

The carb thing is simple. Carbs are the first thing our body chooses to break down to convert to energy. when the carb supply has been converted the body then goes to converting lean muscle mass. Hence quickly losing weight. But long term not any use because it's fat not lean muscle people want to lose. Obviously it's slightly more complex than that but that's the jist of it. The trick is finding the right level and type of carbs for your body and lifestyle.

Probably should add that carbs are also much easier to store as fat if you aren't using them for energy, so it really is about making sure you take in only what you need, not less and not more

www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/dan-hyde/11733724/New-government-sugar-advice-will-mean-extreme-diet-changes.html

Interesting - once you ignore the headline about 'extreme changes' they are effectively the same things we are talking about here:

No fruit juice or fizzy drinks
Way less sugar, regardless of whether it's 'refined' or not
V few food treats
More fruit and veg
Wholemeal carbs

I did not say 'cavemen all died at 30'. And I was not talking about life expectancy at birth.

I was talking specifically about the age - over 50 - at which cancer and heart disease becomes much more prevalent in modern western societies. And I was basing my comment on expert studies that suggest that life expectancy aged 15 (ie of the fittest men and women who had survived childhood) in early hunter-gatherer societies was +39 years, ie to around age 54. Here is an example:
www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf (see Table I, column 2 'forager mean')

While some people in the past did indeed live to a ripe old age - the Biblical 'three-score years and ten' tells us that - it's still true to say that, compared with modern industrial society, a much larger proportion of the population did not. Population pyramid graphs of stats from pre-industrial societies show this very clearly, for example, the top two here: lucy.ukc.ac.uk/jb6/archives/stause/poppyrs.html

This is also interesting: johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/age-specific-mortality-lifespan-bad-science-2009.html

I think there's still a lot of dust that needs to settle before we all truly understand the impact of the processed high carb diet we've been following in the western world for the last 30years.
Wait on the definitive overwhelming research backed up by every western gov if that's what you need to do - it's coming - it just takes a hell of a long time to filter down to the masses.

But if you look at the diet in the years of rationing, people weren't overweight as a rule. Which makes me think the high processed aspect, and lack of sufficient exercise for the quantity of carbs is the issue, not carbs themselves.

During rationing a lot of carbs were eaten mainly as potatoes. It was the ultimate low fat, low sugar diet. Processing generally means adding sugar.

Carbs are not the same as sugar, both easy to eat too much of

Lurked I think you are making a good point, it is overly processed carbs not carbs per say that is the issue. The Mediterranean diet, the Japanese island diet, the war time diet all involve carbs to a greater or lesser extent but have good outcomes. I think it is the amount of movement you do is vital, the war time housewife was slim but actually ate more calories than the average modern woman but everyday life was a lot more physical ( as is an Italian peasants or paleo mans)

I think bringing back sugar rationing would be fantastic, you could save it up for a much longed for cake, or let the kids have one tiny bag of sweets that they would really savour. Obviously democracy wouldn't allow this but I could run a cracking benign dictatorship

People during the war were rationed to small portions they'd have eaten more given the chance. Processed food is carbohydrate driven whether it's sweet or salty - carbs is the cheap drug of the nation. Granted if you eat only a rationed amount you won't gain but people don't eat a rationed amount because it's so cheap its so easy to over eat.
Try dropping starchy/sugary carbs and you'll really struggle to overeat.

Potatoes were never rationed!

If you could afford to buy them, my dads family were literally starving during the war - they couldn't aford to buy their allowance. There's little obesity where people are starving regardless of what they eat.

Have you read any rationing cookbooks - its 99% potato!

British peoples nutrition was never better than in WW11, poor people had access to food because due to national planning, the malnutrition of the 1920s and 30s ended. One of the reasons those born in the late 30's and 40' s are living so long is due in part to this dietary start in life.

Loaf are you saying that carbs are the problem or people over eating the carbs is the problem?

There are a couple of ways to look at food rationing and its massively influenced by the way you look at nutrition.

I'd say people weren't fat because they didn't have enough to eat. Or at least they didn't over eat. Someone who thinks carbs and or processed food cause fatness might look at it and think it's because a lot of food was unprocessed.

"Back in time for dinner" was a great insight into this.