#361 - AMA #74: Sugar and sugar substitutes: weight control, metabolic effects, and health trade-offs

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you’re probably aware of all the conflicting advice about what you should eat. Should you go on a low-carb diet, a low-fat one, or a liquid one? Eat one large portion in the morning, smaller portions throughout the day, or practice fasting?

In How Not to Diet, Michael Greger, physician and best-selling author of How Not to Die, adds a much-needed voice of clarity to the world of weight loss. He draws on extensive scientific research to explore the healthiest and most efficient way to lose weight and keep it off.

This guide explores Greger’s advice, covering:

• How eating processed foods and animal products leads to weight gain
• Why eating plant-based foods and legumes reduces the calories your body stores as fat
• What dietary changes will help you shed excess pounds and keep them off

Additionally, we’ll expand on each of Greger’s ideas with research, advice, and actionable ideas from other health practitioners and weight-loss specialists.

Do you struggle with bad habits? Do you try to create good habits that will bring positive changes to your life, but have trouble making them stick? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that adopting the right habits will drastically improve your life—but to do so, you must understand how habits work and how you can change yours.

In this guide, you’ll discover why habits matter and the three mindsets you can use to create them. You’ll then learn how habits form and the four keys to changing yours. Finally, you’ll learn how to continue improving habits you've implemented. Along the way, we’ll examine how other psychologists and experts approach habit formation, and we’ll explore how Clear’s theories either align with or differ from theirs.

Humans evolved to seek comfort, but has modern society made us too comfortable? In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter argues that the cozy conveniences of the Western world harm our health and happiness by depriving us of challenges that our ancestors regularly faced. He explains that crucial discomforts like spending time in nature, fasting, and regularly exercising are becoming increasingly obsolete in our temperature-controlled, indoor world—where all of our slightest desires can be remedied with the click of a finger.

Michael Easter is an author, science journalist, and professor. After personally experiencing the life-changing benefits of embracing discomfort during his journey to sobriety, he began researching how physical and mental challenges can counteract the negative effects of modern-day comforts. In this guide, we’ll discuss the comforts that Easter says are most problematic and share his tips to make discomfort your friend. We’ll also compare his research to that of other experts and offer additional advice to quell the harmful comforts in your life.

Do you often get hungry soon after eating? Do you feel tired and out of sorts throughout the day? If so, you may be experiencing glucose spikes. In Glucose Revolution, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé explores glucose’s role as our body’s primary energy source while also examining the adverse consequences of too much glucose. She argues that glucose spikes are at the center of most common health issues and offers a collection of strategies for taking control of your health by stabilizing your glucose levels.

In this guide, you’ll learn the basics of where glucose comes from and how it works in the body. We’ll also explore various diseases and conditions that can result from repeated glucose spikes over time and Inchauspé’s strategies for preventing these negative effects by stabilizing your glucose levels. Finally, we’ll examine alternative methods for managing glucose levels and take a closer look at some of the medical advancements Inchauspé references.

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you’re probably aware of all the conflicting advice about what you should eat. Should you go on a low-carb diet, a low-fat one, or a liquid one? Eat one large portion in the morning, smaller portions throughout the day, or practice fasting?

In How Not to Diet, Michael Greger, physician and best-selling author of How Not to Die, adds a much-needed voice of clarity to the world of weight loss. He draws on extensive scientific research to explore the healthiest and most efficient way to lose weight and keep it off.

This guide explores Greger’s advice, covering:

• How eating processed foods and animal products leads to weight gain
• Why eating plant-based foods and legumes reduces the calories your body stores as fat
• What dietary changes will help you shed excess pounds and keep them off

Additionally, we’ll expand on each of Greger’s ideas with research, advice, and actionable ideas from other health practitioners and weight-loss specialists.

Weight loss—all it takes is eating less and moving more, right?

Not according to Jason Fung, author of The Obesity Code and head of the Intensive Dietary Management Program. For decades, experts have believed that obesity was a matter of excess calories—that is, that people get fat from overeating. Fung challenges this view, laying out a comprehensive theory of obesity as a hormonal disorder that causes overeating, rather than the other way around.

In this guide, we unpack Fung’s theory of obesity, which he developed after observing the weight gain that insulin caused in his diabetic patients, along with his solution for overcoming it. In this guide, we’ll show why dieting doesn’t work and why exercise actually has little impact on weight loss. We’ll explore how the body processes food, learn why not all carbs are bad, and discover which foods to avoid at all costs. In addition, we’ll compare Fung’s ideas with perspectives from similar books on obesity, including Why We Get Fat and Salt Sugar Fat.

In Western culture, you may find yourself overwhelmed by food industry ads, diet fads, and popular science articles about the latest superfoods. It can be difficult to keep up with what foods are “good” and “bad”—especially when these labels seem to change every week. Despite these mixed messages about nutrition, many experts agree that if you want to improve your physical health, eating well can be boiled down to two simple guidelines:

• Adopt a largely whole-food, plant-based diet.
• Avoid highly processed and high-sugar foods.

In this master guide, we’ll cover a range of expert advice on why eating plant-based whole foods can help prevent chronic illnesses, why processed and sugar-added foods contribute to modern health conditions like Type 2 diabetes, and why supplements don’t work the same way as the same nutrients delivered via whole foods. We’ll also touch on why you might need to account for nuanced factors, such as the source of your food and your unique body composition.