[soco]

Extreme sports is definitely nothing "normal" - whether I define "normal" as a today's statistic, or as evolutionary history. Your needs and metrics are nothing Joe Regular can use in his daily life, which the OP pointed very clearly and you don't need to refute. Your body is a completely different beast and we would be comparing apples with oranges, only confusing an already confused domain. Because I don't believe that any of your guidelines about guts training is coming from "general surgeon advice" - you are using specialized forums and special indications, while this discussion here is on a general forum, about general indications.

[tpm]

There is nothing extreme about doing a 100km ride from time to time, I don't even have the body of an athlete. That bit about training the guts was an aside and clearly marked as such. I don't do it.

'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.

[overflow897]

Arguing that a 100km bike ride is not an edge case seems disingenuous. Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives. "Added sugar bad" is generally good advice for most the population which statistically is fairly sedentary and doesn't require a huge amount of immediately available, low fiber energy.

[tpm]

> Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives.

I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?

"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.