[Johanx64]

> Meanwhile tribes of hunter-gatherers in Africa get 15-80% of their daily calories from honey during certain seasons; why aren't they obese and diabetic?

The fact you even have to ask this question is telling. Specifically you're talking about Hadza tribe that spends pretty much all of their waking hours outdoors hunting and tracking pray, day in and day out.

They quite literally track honeyguide birds, climb tall baobab trees, get stung repeatedly and then they eat freshest highest quality honeycombs whole, including larva, and not just extracted, industrially processed honey.

Westeners that show up to film hadza can barely keep up to them because just how fast, long and exhausting their hunts are.

This is akin to asking why do long-distance cyclists who spend 10-16hrs a day on bike on long cross country rides can drink liters of cola every day and be skinny like a fig.

I'm getting second hand embarrassment from just reading the question.

[462436347]

> The fact you even have to ask this question is telling. Specifically you're talking about Hadza tribe that spends pretty much all of their waking hours outdoors hunting and tracking pray, day in and day out.

Look up Pontzer's Constrained Total Energy Expenditure Model. His doubly-labeled water experiments show that Hadza and other hunter-gathers have--contrary to his (and your) initial expectations--roughly comparable TDEEs to sedentary western counterparts (controlling for lean body mass) due to metabolic compensation (i.e., the more they exercise, the more their bodies compensate by expending less energy elsewhere, on things like inflammation and thyroid/sex hormones): : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4803033/

Regardless, they're in energy balance, meaning they aren't gaining or losing weight, and despite their high-sugar diets, they aren't presenting any of the metabolic maladies that Lustig ascribes to sugar specifically, and not to weight gain--maladies that saturated fat seems to cause with no weight gain.

> This is akin to asking why do long-distance cyclists who spend 10-16hrs a day on bike on long cross country rides can drink liters of cola every day and be skinny like a fig.

Sugar has 4 calories per gram. Fat has 9. Are you arguing that sugar calories are more fattening than fat calories?

> I'm getting second hand embarrassment from just reading the question.

It's remarkable that I've had less derogatory and flippant comments than yours downvoted and even flagged in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=462436347

[ozgrakkurt]

Problem with sugar isn’t that is so bad chemically from my experience, it is super mega addicting, it is way more addicting than nicotine for me for example. I don’t crave some eggs and sausage but crave sugar like crazy. So I am very likely to over consume sugar compared to other things. This is what makes is very harmful to me at least

[Johanx64]

The depressing part is that there's a large subset of people that can't even begin to grasp just how extremely embarassing it is to attach accelerometers to tribesmen and then think it becomes a steam engine and can be modeled as such.

> Sugar has 4 calories per gram. Fat has 9. Are you arguing that sugar calories are more fattening than fat calories?

Show me a molecule called "calory". Make a blood test - or any other measurement involving actual human body and show me exactly where this "calory" is. Obviously that is a rhetorical question, as human body does not operate on "calories", in fact, they are nowhere to be found in the human body.

Human body however does recognize glucose - C6H12O6 - and when your glycogen stores are depleted (such as by running in the jungle whole day, climbing a tall baobab tree or doing long distance cycling sessions) - the monosaccharides you consume will first go directly to replenish glycogen stores in muscles and liver and other organs.

If however, you're big fat couch potato with minimal lean muscle mass and a low basal metabolic rate, your glycogen stores are maxed out easily and continued consumption of sugar will directly lead to insulin spikes that will directly trigger lipogenesis (fat storage) as the fat cells will convert excess blood glucose into triglycerides. Eventually you develop insulin insensitity and eventually diabetes. Which is a very natural progression.

Consuming fat however does not notably spike insulin and does not trigger lipogenesis in the same fasion, quite the opposite - breaking down stored body fat can only happen if you stop constantly spiking insulin and enter a catabolic state. And thus - yes - even though fat is more energy dense on paper, it is way less fattening that sugar. And most important of all - consuming fat and proteins increases satiety via peptide hormones such as cholecystokinin which is released when the gut has to digest proteins and fat.

Embarassment really is the only polite way to express myself when confronted with people that compare hunter-gatherers that eat everything that moves, animals, their guts and organs whole, beas, larva, beawax and honeycombs in their entirity - to sedentary cookie muncher diets and claim that not only are those diets comparable (both being "high sugar" diets allegedly), but have similar daily energy expendiatures.

I suppose - to reach parity - couch potatoes expand all their energy producing... sex hormones? This is some truly fascinating stuff.