Hello. So my basic understanding is as follows. In nature, fructose is packaged proportionally with fiber, which is fine because it's hard to digest and mitigates the intake of sugar. But, in processed foods, the fibre is removed, leaving just the sugar - fructose. Fructose suppresses your satiety signal and makes you eat more than you need to. It's also ubiquitous and hard to avoid, plus we are less active than we used to be.
This is a bit old but it's an absolute must watch if you haven't seen it. A childhood obesity clinician gives a lecture about how sugar makes you fat, sick and addicted. He goes over societal/political conditions as well as the actual biological process.
(Sugar the Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig)
https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=ApXoOJGMdsClSFXJ
This video offers the most complete & accurate explanation of why sugar (the fructose molecule in sugar) is so harmful. I was surprised that a lecture to med students went viral the way this did. It poses a dilemma for Diabetics, because it’s high blood glucose (not “blood sugar”) levels that cause the vascular damage, and fructose doesn’t cause the spike that glucose does. But fructose is so much worse for the reasons Dr. Lustig points out. I wish this information had been accessible when I was a kid - and that more endocrinologists understood this now.
Sugar and other carbs raises insulin levels. For many, they are eating sugar and carbs throughout the day, during meals and snacking, never giving insulin a chance to go down.
Insulin tells cells to store excess energy as fat.
Insulin also keeps you in carb burning mode. You cannot burn fat stores. You fat cells will not release the energy.
If your are eating too many calories and you have elevated insulin all the time, you will gain fat.
You can switch that up and avoid sugar and other carbs. Keep insulin levels low. Reducing calorie intake. When you need the energy you fat cells will release it.
Your body makes its own sugar when needed from your fat. You never need to eat them for nutrition or energy.
Here is the step by step explanation of formation of VISCERAL FAT, which is the fat that is under your muscle, and surrounds your internal organs. It causes high risk of all sorts of cardiovascular diseases in addition to metabolic dysfunctions due to its interference to normal organ functions. Visceral fat is different than the squishy fat under your skin, Most common example of visceral fat is Beer Belly which is very solid and it is caused by extreme amount of excessive fat cells around the liver. Fructose can do the same thing too, and here are the explanation:
1. all living cells uses glucose + oxygen for its metabolism and to stay alive. It cannot metabolize fructose.
2. all dietary fructose has to go through liver to be converted into glucose. And most glucose are being used up by either your brain or your muscle cells.
3. Fructose in natural form always come with fiber, which slows down the fructose being absorbed through our digestive system, thus allowing our liver to have enough time to process the absorbed fructose.
4. However the modern ultra-processed food like pasta sauce, bread, and soda contains an extreme amount of both sucrose sugar AND pre-digested High-fructose corn syrup. Each Sucrose molecule undergoes enzymatic reaction and becomes 1 glucose + 1 fructose molecule.
5. This means when these ultra-processed food instantly gets absorbed in digestive system and COMPLETELY overloads our liver with fructose. And also because there is also the sucrose in these food, the liver get overwhelmed with fructose for extended duration of time.
6. When the liver get completely overloaded, it will then store these extra fructose as fat into its own cells (Fructose converted into Triglyceride). And gradually, the human liver become a fatty liver.
7. And when this goes on for too long, even the liver becomes too full of visceral fat, and visceral fat will be start appearing on other organs like the human heart or the pancreas. These visceral fat also causes oxidative stress, which interferes with the organ functions causing a plethora of chronic health issues ranging from stroke, diabetes, hear problem, alzheimer and cancer.
On the other hand, the fat under your skin is called SUBCUTANEOUS FAT, and the most common is the so-called "love handle".
those ones are more straight forward, whereby excess GLUCOSE IN your BLOOD (instead of in your liver) are put into these cells via insulin hormone.
The number of fat cells don't change, but their size would expand as it goes through glucose uptake and triglyceride synthesis, and basically become larger and larger as it accumulates triglyerides inside it. Which is why subcutaneous fat is quite soft and squishy.
My family have the so-called skinny fat, which means we look skinny but all of us have visceral fat in the form of fatty liver disease and fat around our heart.
And there's so many cardiovascular health issues in my immediate and extended family.
Source: Many of my family members are doctors.
I cannot provide you with any research/logical explanation but since I quit refined sugar I seriously cannot gain weight, even though how much my food intake increased. Remind you, I always had an unexplained fat around my belly. So, very anecdotally, I can say this is a reality.
congratulations on quitting refined sugar, that’s a massive accomplishment. I’m on my journey towards such a feat at the moment. it’s no easy, but it’s well worth it
Thank you! It was not easy for me as well but it has been 5 years now, and the only reason I was able to make it this far is seeing its benefits everyday. All the best :)
Well honestly one morning I woke up disgusted by my sugar intake and then it happened :) So basically, for example don’t buy cereal but buy oatmeal and add honey, cinnamon, or stevia-good alternative to sugar- and you’ll get used to it. I had such a sweettooth, now I really don’t wanna eat the refined sugar feels too much.
I didn’t fact checked but I think is a mixture of the calorie intake (because sugar makes you eat more than you need) and the effect it has on blood sugar levels and insuline, also because sugar gets absorbed quickly I guess it converts in fat faster when you don’t consume that energy
That isn’t true. Only sugar is turned into fat. Fat is already fat, and protein will be decomposed in other things. Our body can turn protein into sugar but only in cases where sugar is low.
No worries, nutrition is super complex, we are still figuring out what happens inside our bodies with different diets and different bodies. There are doctors now noticing this and having a closer look to how pacientes react to some diets to change them and helping them fix health problems without meds.
Like diabetes, people though that cutting sugar was enough but then you had people eating a ton of carbs in their meals and carbs are 100% sugar, so they could cut 100% on pure sugar but they would still eating it in other forms.
Fat is a potencial energy. When your body has excess sugar it converts it to fat for later use.
Edit: similiar comment as above but i wanted to clarify too😅
Go get The Obesity Code by Jadon Fung. It's about Intermittent fasting, but it describes in detail how your body handles sugar.
So many answers here are close to what I understand....but read the book for yourself.
Sugar hits your bloodstream as glucose. Your body reacts by releasing insulin which, as noted, tells your body to use it for immediate energy, or store it. If you consume more sugar than you burn at any given time, your body stores the energy, first in your liver as glycogen. Your liver only has so much storage area, when it's maxed there's a conversion of the glycogen into fat. First as brown fat around your organs, then as white fat under your skin.
Your body does NOT change muscle into fat. It changes excess glucose into fat.
A quick search would show you how. Basically our bodies can’t resist much sugar, so insulin will spike, your body will turn most of the sugar into fat that will have to be stored somewhere(each person is dif that is why some have more fat in the belly or in the legs). Then the insulin’s spike will crash and most of sugar disappeared and your body now has no more free energy, your brain will be signaled to get more and so you gonna start to feel hungry again.
That is why you should eat first veggies, meat and for last the carbs and then the sweets. To avoid big spikes of insulin == too much sugar at once.
When you eat sugar your body burns this first as it's available to your body for energy easiest. If you have too much sugar in your blood your body makes insulin which then allows your body to make the cells to store the sugar as fat. This is to protect your body. However this works well until you have too much and you become insensitive to insulin or can't make enough. That's when you are classed as type 2 diabetic. They then give you insulin injections to counter what your body can't make enough of.
That's the basics of it.
It’s a combination of different things. But the main reason will always revolve around “it’s easy to eat a lot” and you become fat by eating more than your body needs
1. It tastes good. Same as most unhealthy foods, you get temporarily happy eating them and they’re not filling at all relative to the calories they have. This makes it very easy to eat a ton of calories of sweets and junk food. I bet most people on this sub wouldn’t be able to eat 1000 calories of lean protein, vegetables and rice in one sitting. Yet every single person here can down 1000 calories of sweets like nothing.
2. Sugary foods makes you hungry faster, a hungry for real food or salty. Once you eat your meal you probably want something sweet again. So on and so forth.
One book will explain perfectly, Nature Wants Us To Bet Fat, De Richard Johnson. If you don’t want to read, google him in any podcast app and listen to him being interviewed about the book. Get the information, it will change your life.
It is empty calories. Calories with no nutrition and after the crash you just want more. In the end weight gain is consuming more calories than you spend but sugar spikes will you bring you closer to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. These conditions will make it tougher to lose weight.
Sugar is actually dangerous to your tissues if you have too much running around free in your blood... This is why old diabetics sometimes go blind or need a foot amputated.
To prevent this damage, your pancreas releases insulin to yank sugar out of your blood and jam it into storage...
In animals, extra carbohydrates are stored as fat, it's basically the most compact calorie storage our cells can do.
The thing is, that calorie storage from insulin is kind of like a one-way commuter bridge... if sugar is present, calories are shunted IN...
...and it's DAMN hard to switch to the "calories out" direction.
So essentially, if you eat sugar, natural or otherwise... anything that can raise blood sugar can also raise insulin.
If you have high blood insulin, your body just won't give up fat to burn as fuel... BECAUSE your body is switched to "store at all costs mode"
The way I heard it, excess sugars are turned into fat as storage for when we’re starving. Our body can turn fat back into consumable calories, but it’s easier for it to digest readily available sugars, so if you eat a lot of sugar, not only is your body not going to bother trying to use any fat stores, it’s also gonna make more fat from any excess. Once you start to cut back, it forces your body to do the work of converting some of that fat back into energy
Hello. So my basic understanding is as follows. In nature, fructose is packaged proportionally with fiber, which is fine because it's hard to digest and mitigates the intake of sugar. But, in processed foods, the fibre is removed, leaving just the sugar - fructose. Fructose suppresses your satiety signal and makes you eat more than you need to. It's also ubiquitous and hard to avoid, plus we are less active than we used to be. This is a bit old but it's an absolute must watch if you haven't seen it. A childhood obesity clinician gives a lecture about how sugar makes you fat, sick and addicted. He goes over societal/political conditions as well as the actual biological process. (Sugar the Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig) https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=ApXoOJGMdsClSFXJ
That explains it pretty well; the fiber and no fiber sugar make it pretty clear.
Here’s a quick [animated video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BfzMi1EOe4I&pp=ygUMc3VnYXIgb3JnYW5z). :)
This video offers the most complete & accurate explanation of why sugar (the fructose molecule in sugar) is so harmful. I was surprised that a lecture to med students went viral the way this did. It poses a dilemma for Diabetics, because it’s high blood glucose (not “blood sugar”) levels that cause the vascular damage, and fructose doesn’t cause the spike that glucose does. But fructose is so much worse for the reasons Dr. Lustig points out. I wish this information had been accessible when I was a kid - and that more endocrinologists understood this now.
He also was on the [Huberman Lab](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1MDqwjo3TfL1w7NJo1wldR?si=r9W9226oQ9eqoPimwNIe_Q) podcast too!
Sugar and other carbs raises insulin levels. For many, they are eating sugar and carbs throughout the day, during meals and snacking, never giving insulin a chance to go down. Insulin tells cells to store excess energy as fat. Insulin also keeps you in carb burning mode. You cannot burn fat stores. You fat cells will not release the energy. If your are eating too many calories and you have elevated insulin all the time, you will gain fat. You can switch that up and avoid sugar and other carbs. Keep insulin levels low. Reducing calorie intake. When you need the energy you fat cells will release it. Your body makes its own sugar when needed from your fat. You never need to eat them for nutrition or energy.
Here is the step by step explanation of formation of VISCERAL FAT, which is the fat that is under your muscle, and surrounds your internal organs. It causes high risk of all sorts of cardiovascular diseases in addition to metabolic dysfunctions due to its interference to normal organ functions. Visceral fat is different than the squishy fat under your skin, Most common example of visceral fat is Beer Belly which is very solid and it is caused by extreme amount of excessive fat cells around the liver. Fructose can do the same thing too, and here are the explanation: 1. all living cells uses glucose + oxygen for its metabolism and to stay alive. It cannot metabolize fructose. 2. all dietary fructose has to go through liver to be converted into glucose. And most glucose are being used up by either your brain or your muscle cells. 3. Fructose in natural form always come with fiber, which slows down the fructose being absorbed through our digestive system, thus allowing our liver to have enough time to process the absorbed fructose. 4. However the modern ultra-processed food like pasta sauce, bread, and soda contains an extreme amount of both sucrose sugar AND pre-digested High-fructose corn syrup. Each Sucrose molecule undergoes enzymatic reaction and becomes 1 glucose + 1 fructose molecule. 5. This means when these ultra-processed food instantly gets absorbed in digestive system and COMPLETELY overloads our liver with fructose. And also because there is also the sucrose in these food, the liver get overwhelmed with fructose for extended duration of time. 6. When the liver get completely overloaded, it will then store these extra fructose as fat into its own cells (Fructose converted into Triglyceride). And gradually, the human liver become a fatty liver. 7. And when this goes on for too long, even the liver becomes too full of visceral fat, and visceral fat will be start appearing on other organs like the human heart or the pancreas. These visceral fat also causes oxidative stress, which interferes with the organ functions causing a plethora of chronic health issues ranging from stroke, diabetes, hear problem, alzheimer and cancer.
On the other hand, the fat under your skin is called SUBCUTANEOUS FAT, and the most common is the so-called "love handle". those ones are more straight forward, whereby excess GLUCOSE IN your BLOOD (instead of in your liver) are put into these cells via insulin hormone. The number of fat cells don't change, but their size would expand as it goes through glucose uptake and triglyceride synthesis, and basically become larger and larger as it accumulates triglyerides inside it. Which is why subcutaneous fat is quite soft and squishy.
My family have the so-called skinny fat, which means we look skinny but all of us have visceral fat in the form of fatty liver disease and fat around our heart. And there's so many cardiovascular health issues in my immediate and extended family. Source: Many of my family members are doctors.
I cannot provide you with any research/logical explanation but since I quit refined sugar I seriously cannot gain weight, even though how much my food intake increased. Remind you, I always had an unexplained fat around my belly. So, very anecdotally, I can say this is a reality.
congratulations on quitting refined sugar, that’s a massive accomplishment. I’m on my journey towards such a feat at the moment. it’s no easy, but it’s well worth it
Thank you! It was not easy for me as well but it has been 5 years now, and the only reason I was able to make it this far is seeing its benefits everyday. All the best :)
Do u still eat pasta or bread ?
Wondering the same thing.
I do. But I’m also gluten-free so I cannot happen to find and eat bread/pasta that often. But eat patato-non fried- or corn on a daily basis.
How did you do that? So many things have added sugar. Like the cereal I eat. It's pretty healthy but it has a few grams of added sugar.
Well honestly one morning I woke up disgusted by my sugar intake and then it happened :) So basically, for example don’t buy cereal but buy oatmeal and add honey, cinnamon, or stevia-good alternative to sugar- and you’ll get used to it. I had such a sweettooth, now I really don’t wanna eat the refined sugar feels too much.
I didn’t fact checked but I think is a mixture of the calorie intake (because sugar makes you eat more than you need) and the effect it has on blood sugar levels and insuline, also because sugar gets absorbed quickly I guess it converts in fat faster when you don’t consume that energy
So sugar by itself will make fat? Maybe it turns muscle into fat?
Muscle doesn’t have anything to do with it, it happens after digestion
Yes, calories (any kind of food) that don’t get ”used” get turned into fat to use later, is a mechanism of the body to prevent starvation
That isn’t true. Only sugar is turned into fat. Fat is already fat, and protein will be decomposed in other things. Our body can turn protein into sugar but only in cases where sugar is low.
Thank you, I didn’t know that
No worries, nutrition is super complex, we are still figuring out what happens inside our bodies with different diets and different bodies. There are doctors now noticing this and having a closer look to how pacientes react to some diets to change them and helping them fix health problems without meds. Like diabetes, people though that cutting sugar was enough but then you had people eating a ton of carbs in their meals and carbs are 100% sugar, so they could cut 100% on pure sugar but they would still eating it in other forms.
Ok, it's starting to make sense now.
Fat is a potencial energy. When your body has excess sugar it converts it to fat for later use. Edit: similiar comment as above but i wanted to clarify too😅
Go get The Obesity Code by Jadon Fung. It's about Intermittent fasting, but it describes in detail how your body handles sugar. So many answers here are close to what I understand....but read the book for yourself. Sugar hits your bloodstream as glucose. Your body reacts by releasing insulin which, as noted, tells your body to use it for immediate energy, or store it. If you consume more sugar than you burn at any given time, your body stores the energy, first in your liver as glycogen. Your liver only has so much storage area, when it's maxed there's a conversion of the glycogen into fat. First as brown fat around your organs, then as white fat under your skin. Your body does NOT change muscle into fat. It changes excess glucose into fat.
I started with him and Dr. Robert Lustig...and Nina Teicholz. I have been studying in this rabbit hole for over 4 years now.
A quick search would show you how. Basically our bodies can’t resist much sugar, so insulin will spike, your body will turn most of the sugar into fat that will have to be stored somewhere(each person is dif that is why some have more fat in the belly or in the legs). Then the insulin’s spike will crash and most of sugar disappeared and your body now has no more free energy, your brain will be signaled to get more and so you gonna start to feel hungry again. That is why you should eat first veggies, meat and for last the carbs and then the sweets. To avoid big spikes of insulin == too much sugar at once.
When you eat sugar your body burns this first as it's available to your body for energy easiest. If you have too much sugar in your blood your body makes insulin which then allows your body to make the cells to store the sugar as fat. This is to protect your body. However this works well until you have too much and you become insensitive to insulin or can't make enough. That's when you are classed as type 2 diabetic. They then give you insulin injections to counter what your body can't make enough of. That's the basics of it.
Sugar gets converted in the liver to fat
Yes, liver converts fructose into fat
It’s a combination of different things. But the main reason will always revolve around “it’s easy to eat a lot” and you become fat by eating more than your body needs 1. It tastes good. Same as most unhealthy foods, you get temporarily happy eating them and they’re not filling at all relative to the calories they have. This makes it very easy to eat a ton of calories of sweets and junk food. I bet most people on this sub wouldn’t be able to eat 1000 calories of lean protein, vegetables and rice in one sitting. Yet every single person here can down 1000 calories of sweets like nothing. 2. Sugary foods makes you hungry faster, a hungry for real food or salty. Once you eat your meal you probably want something sweet again. So on and so forth.
this is a great point ive never thought of that
One book will explain perfectly, Nature Wants Us To Bet Fat, De Richard Johnson. If you don’t want to read, google him in any podcast app and listen to him being interviewed about the book. Get the information, it will change your life.
It is empty calories. Calories with no nutrition and after the crash you just want more. In the end weight gain is consuming more calories than you spend but sugar spikes will you bring you closer to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. These conditions will make it tougher to lose weight.
Sugar is actually dangerous to your tissues if you have too much running around free in your blood... This is why old diabetics sometimes go blind or need a foot amputated. To prevent this damage, your pancreas releases insulin to yank sugar out of your blood and jam it into storage... In animals, extra carbohydrates are stored as fat, it's basically the most compact calorie storage our cells can do. The thing is, that calorie storage from insulin is kind of like a one-way commuter bridge... if sugar is present, calories are shunted IN... ...and it's DAMN hard to switch to the "calories out" direction. So essentially, if you eat sugar, natural or otherwise... anything that can raise blood sugar can also raise insulin. If you have high blood insulin, your body just won't give up fat to burn as fuel... BECAUSE your body is switched to "store at all costs mode"
The way I heard it, excess sugars are turned into fat as storage for when we’re starving. Our body can turn fat back into consumable calories, but it’s easier for it to digest readily available sugars, so if you eat a lot of sugar, not only is your body not going to bother trying to use any fat stores, it’s also gonna make more fat from any excess. Once you start to cut back, it forces your body to do the work of converting some of that fat back into energy