My understanding is that naturally occurring fructose found in whole fruits is accompanied by fiber, vitamins, and minerals, which help mitigate any negative effects of fructose when consumed as part of a balanced diet.
However, it sounds like we should maybe be avoiding excessive amounts of certain fruit. See: A Definitive Guide to Fructose Content in Fruit [1]
There was a recent episode from Diary of a CEO with a cancer expert. He seems to have some really sound advice. One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells [2]
> One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells
“We did indeed see that the ketogenic diet suppressed tumor growth — but we also saw, surprisingly, that it promoted tumor metastasis,” says Gu. “That was really a shock to us.”
I think there's a misunderstanding here, my fault for not being clearer. I think I should have used the phrase 'when the body enters a state of ketosis' i.e. the state you get to when fasting when your body starts burning core fat. I believe the word ketogenic refers to the type of meat heavy diet. Thanks for those links, the fact that eating a lot of meat can promote tumor metastasis does not surprise me.
Ketosis occurs when your body switches from consuming glucose as its primary fuel source to consuming ketones which are generated from the breakdown of fatty acids, either from the diet or endogenous.
Almost all body tissue can run on ketones instead of on glucose, except for certain important tissues like red blood cells, 30% of the brain, retina, some kidney tissue, etc.
For the rest, your body synthesizes the glucose it needs via gluconeogenesis from some protein substrates and from glycerol backbodes from triglycerides. These inputs can be either from the diet or from your fat stores.
Fasting for a few days causes your body to enter authophagy through the inhibition of mTOR in addition to ketosis, so that could account for some of the difference.
Can you comment on the efficacy of intermittent fasting (IF) to get into ketosis? Does fasting have to be undertaken in the order of days in order to be any effective, as opposed to 16 or 18 hours per day by way of IF.
For context, I've been following IF for a couple of years. I can definitely see myself losing my resident body fat, which is encouraging. I had tried keto diet before that - I found it very difficult to sustain, especially when you're away from home or are at work. So, part of my motivation to do IF instead of keto is, well, that I can achieve some level of ketosis via IF, and without following a strict keto diet.
You can get into ketosis on any kind of diet or eating schedule, it mostly relies on avoiding dietary carbohydrates. If you're curious you can get ketone urine sticks, ketone breath tests and even a non-FDA-approved continuous ketone monitor (SiBio). IF can help because it gives you a long period without carbs so you're naturally getting less of them in a given period, unless you then load up on like white bread.
It's mostly a function of what you eat when you do eat.
Dr Thomas Seyfried, the guy in the Diary of a CEO interview, stated that intermittent fasting is beneficial and achieves the desired 'cell repair' effects.
There are plenty of vegetarian ketogenic diets. A ketogenic diet is one that contains very few, or no carbohydrates to maintain the ketosis - just high in fats and medium in proteins. Meat is a convenient form of food with those properties, so often people maintaining such a diet eat a lot of meat.
Just as an aside, as a complete rat lover and obsessed fancy rat freak, I always find it somewhat sad we could probably come up with some great drugs for them (they notoriously die very easily), just, well, who cares about rats???
Vitamin B (thiamine) deficiency is also common among alcoholics. Lots of heavy drinkers out there. While obviously drinking less is the preferred solution, if they aren't willing to do that then supplements can reduce the harm.
Vitamin D from supplements isn't anywhere near as good as getting actual sun exposure because you get a combination of both D3 release mediated by UVB exposure in addition to NO release mediated by UVA. The fact is that unless you're on the express train to Rickets town, it's probably the NO that's most beneficial as it reduces blood pressure and improves cardiovascular outcomes.
Before you go all in on the supplements (a) get measured for vitamin D levels first and (b) if you're anywhere in the ballpark of replete (you probably are) then make an effort to get outside, often, and without sunscreen. To the extent you don't get burned of course.
I didn't downvote, but I can imagine that most people weren't aware of that claim. I'm skeptical of it as well since I'm not aware of any research that shows fructose in fruit increasing over time.
Commercial incentives are to engineer varietals for contemporary aesthetics (sweet, unbitter, colorful, unblemished, large) and crop turnover (rapid growth, tolerance for depleted soil), nutrition has been way down on the priority list for nearly a century now.
If you don't believe food is sweeter and less nutritious, you're firing a shot at many-billion-dollar industries that have been earnestly been trying to optimize the above for all that time.
It's not a pleasant thing to believe, but its hard to refute.
IIRC, You should be able to do your own deep dives here:
The food industry, like any other industry, focuses on numbers. Consumer spending favors new varieties of fruit with sweeter taste (e.g., increased glucose/fructose content). This process has led to our current comical situation where fruit, which is perceived as natural, has become unfit for consumption by animals.
>Fruits have gotten too sweet for some animals and zookeepers have had to find alternative foods.
There is a large and wealthy segment of the population concerned about food health and quality, and large companies who market to them. Are their values not being met? Or are you just describing the quality received by the average consumer.
Based on my experience of having moved countries, I can tell you that many types of fruit in this new country(AU) is definitely a lot more sweet than what I am used to. This is not scientific research of course and it could be attributed to many things(soil, environment, fertilizer etc) besides favoring the sweeter lineage but I have noticed that it made me stop eating them.
Now a Granny Smith apple here may be different to the Granny Smith apple I used to eat but this is just to illustrate that I am not comparing two different kinds of apples.
If you're older I think some of this is obvious. Biggest example for me is grapefruit, they used to be barely sweet, when I was a kid they were mostly bitter and we used to add sugar to them, now they're always extremely sweet.
This may differ based on location, as my grapefruit (non organic normal supermarket bought) are still quite bitter. I'm located in Europe so these might be Spanish grapefruit, though not sure.
Your palette changes pretty significantly over time, especially between childhood and adulthood. Grapefruit may not have changed at all, and you might still find them sweeter at 30 than you did at 8.
My parents' generation used to add sugar to everything because they considered sugar a source of energy.
I remember eating strawberries directly from the plant, and they were sweet. However, my aunt would serve the same strawberries with sugar as an afternoon snack.
Because it's not a factual statement. It's a "truthy" sounding statement, but the person making it didn't actually go and look it up, which they could've done in seconds on the device they're currently using.
It's practically the definition of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). Based on no evidence "I think there's a danger because it's feels like there's a danger!"
Going to go out on a limb here and say you probably shouldn't get any scientific advice about nutrition -- or really any scientific advice at all -- from anyone on Diary Of A CEO.
I don't like the interviewer, but just three weeks ago, Eric Schmidt was on the podcast and he is obviously very smart and knowledgeable about technology and business.
If you're going to make a bold claim like that, shouldn't you provide some support? Otherwise you're expecting us to just take an anonymous person's word for it... and particularly a throwaway account.
You're saying "discount science based not on facts, but on the form in which such science is published" which is utterly unscientific
Not only does that also not make sense, but guests on the show are not strictly CEOs, which further supports the view that this shallow dismissal is indeed unsupported by evidence.
It's a podcast. They're only useful for entertainment. If you take advice from them in a meaningful way you're effectively rolling the dice on tabloid grade slop factories.
In general yes, but there are some good guests that were there. For example, in case of nutrition, Dr. Layne Norton called him out on having a guy that was talking nonsense on the podcast and then they got in touch with Layne and had him on the podcast where he explained many of the misinformation about nutrition currently in wild.
Norwitz and Layne differ on the lean mass hyper-responder phenotype. Norwitz likes referencing his meta-analysis of 41 RCTs, but pay attention to its conclusion:
> A substantial increase in LDL cholesterol is likely for individuals with low but not high BMI with consumption of an LCD, findings that may help guide individualized nutritional management of cardiovascular disease risk. As carbohydrate restriction tends to improve other lipid and nonlipid risk factors, the clinical significance of isolated LDL cholesterol elevation in this context warrants investigation.
"warrants investigation"??? Come back when you have hard outcomes, i.e. reduced MACE. His meta-analysis of RCTs concludes that some people on keto have increased LDL! Norwitz admits in another video: "No, I'm not going to say that high ApoB is fine... ApoB is necessary but not sufficient [to cause ASCVD]" https://youtu.be/270ZyfSGLkE?t=484
So, what "humiliation"? If high ApoB (synonymous with LDL for our purposes) is bad, why would you go on a diet that causes it?
Layne has a large lay audience, and he has to stick to his main message: that w/r/t diet, calories are all that matter. Lowcarb/lowfat/vegan/whatever is fine. Platforming someone who's obsessed with LMHR is going to be too much biochemistry for Layne's audience. And for an effect that's relevant to perhaps only 2% of people? Low-carb advocates have their own YouTube channels; there's no reason Layne, as a center-aisle scientist, needs to engage.
Until the LMHR has been shown to have reduced MACE, which Norwitz admits we don't have evidence for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxRLRYEQaEs&t=971s I don't see the point of Layne platforming him to just talk about biochemistry and confuse people.
Okay, but the parent was implying that would discredit the interviewee. One thing I've observed with people that have an important message to disseminate is they are not fussy about what the medium is
If you have significant financial interest in a product or service you're not going to bring on someone who will meaningfully oppose that product or service. Therefore anyone who goes onto that podcast, or whatever media, would be selected for.
It absolutely does matter?? If you're trying to do reference class forecasting and your class is "a person who is not a CEO" and then you're forecasting based on anecdata of "people who are a CEO" you're not going to get good predictions.
people on the show aren't strictly "CEOs" in the truest sense of that word. just to pick an obvious counterexample, Robert Greene is an author, not a CEO, and he was a guest
It would still be net beneficial for anyone consuming industrial fructose to switch to fresh fruit of any kind. However, yes, if you’ve already withdrawn added fructose in processed foods and drinks from your diet, you could certainly optimize further on which kinds of fresh fruit you consume. It won’t make any difference if you still drink fructose soda, though.
HFCS is 42-55% fructose whereas table sugar (sucrose) is ... 50-50 glucose to fructose. You will still get roughly the same total exposure to fructose (maybe even more) by switching to table sugar.
The only difference is that sucrose has to be broken down into glucose and fructose by sucrase, so the exposure is somewhat smoother instead of hitting you all at once, although humans have more than enough sucrase to make it a pretty quick process.
I thought levels of fructose weren't as important as other qualities, like fiber content. For example, Dates are often referenced as a good fruit option due to the high fiber content but that guide doesn't mention fiber at all and has dates in the high fructose category. This seems like standard operating procedure in anything dietary where it is more about a specific aspect of the food and less about communicating well rounded advice.
> I thought levels of fructose weren't as important as other qualities, like fiber content.
> Dates are often referenced as a good fruit option
fyi, 100gr of dried dates it like 3 to 4 times the average amount of sugar recommended per day. Just 2 medjool dates and you hit your daily sugar recommendation.
At the end of the day your body will have to process the stuff you ingest, if it comes with fibers the digestion will be slower, but if you eat too much of X Y Z day after day it's just a matter of time before your body gives up
I believe you'll meet the "Added or Free sugar" recommendation with 2 medjool dates, but AFAIK, the guideline isn't as strict on naturally occurring sugars, if there is any guideline at all aside from general carb consumption. Dates also have a surprisingly low glycemic index for how sweet they are.
Dried fruits have the same amount of sugar as fresh, but all the fiber is removed so you absorb all of that sugar. When discussing the nutritional value of fruits and why sugar from fruits isn't "bad" for you, it should be assumed you're discussing fresh and not dried fruit.
Fruits are very low density thanks to all that water and undigestible fibre. You would get hella bored eating enough fruit to make it problematic. There's 9g of sugar in an orange, and a can of coke has 39g. You'd have to eat a pound or so of oranges to equal a single can of coke. The issue isn't the fruit.
The rankings are a little off... I mean, you don't eat one prune, or one apricot. You tend to have a few, and that would put them right up next to, say, an apple, in the "medium" ranks.
That's the same as that "Serving Size" trick on nutrition information guides where the "serving size" is 5 potato chips instead of the entire bag.
Fruit has changed dramatically over the last Century. I imagine there was a time when it was much smaller, less sweet, and only available seasonally. In this new world, we have 24/7/365 access to as much and whatever we want.
There are Cherries along with every type of fruit you could want at Costco today and it's December.
Except the fruit in the past was often available out of season but as pickling or preserves, via either excesses of salt or sugar. For several centuries. Let alone the parts of the world that don't really have four seasons, instead having only two, wet and dry seasons. The point being I'm not sure how much relatively recent norms will actually be able to tell us about health.
Cherries out of season are wrinkly and weird tasting, unless Costco has solved that. Cherries and pomegranates are my two most "seasonal" fruits, in contrast to the always-available ones. I feel like mangoes and cantaloupes have seasons too, I just don't know how to detect them since they keep selling them even when they're not good.
I don't know about that, but there does appear to be a tradeoff between nutrition and fertility. When you eat less, you're less fertile. When you're less fertile, you live longer. A lot of what appears to allow us to live longer is lower rates of cancer, but the data I've seen there isn't rock solid and it isn't something I've dug deeply into. I only mention it because it's certainly studied and a question worth pursuing, with very interesting papers available if you look.
Something I read recently was about eunuchs living something like 25% longer than intact counterparts. However, the data was limited (15 each of eunuchs and intact as I recall). There were very few confounding factors, however. Really interesting stuff.
Obviously yes, so is most chronic disease, but bring up people being healed by lifestyle & diet intervention and prepare for relentless attacks from both doctors and laypeople.
Life expectancy also goes up as lives get westernized, so people live long enough to become adults and die from cancer, rather than Malaria, diarrhea, etc
Are there any culture that fast in a way that would matter here ? Most of fasting traditions are mostly performative. The average joe probably fasted more by default a few thousand years ago than most people do now
Diary of a CEO should not have the proxy-BBC approval Steven enjoys. He regularly has quacks and misinformation pedallers on there shamelessly, and his willingness to fall under their spell demostrates concerning levels of naivete or (worse) willing negligence for engagements sake.
> "one way in which high levels of fructose consumption promote tumor growth is by increasing the availability of circulating lipids in the blood. "
Glad to see more research on this. Until recently, people trying to sound the alarm with regards to high fructose consumption (mainly high fructose corn syrup) have been dismissed.
Excess fructose consumption increases tryglicerides, uric acid. Just uric acid alone causes a lot of issues, from heart disease to erectile dysfunction(inhibits NOX), even before gout starts. The range that's considered 'normal' has changed over time, but I feel it's too high.
Note that fruits are unlikely to be an issue (except perhaps as fruit juice). Most people don't eat enough of them and they have plenty of nutrients that are beneficial.
EDIT:
> “Interestingly, the cancer cells themselves were unable to use fructose readily as a nutrient because they do not express the right biochemical machinery,” Patti said. “Liver cells do. This allows them to convert fructose into LPCs, which they can secrete to feed tumors.”
Forgot about this. Non alcoholic fatty liver disease has been on the rise for a while now, and it's mostly the high fructose corn syrup again.
It should be pointed out that contrary to what many people assume, "high-fructose" does mean that it has more fructose than sugar. Sugar is 50% fructose, and many widely used HFCS formulations contain less fructose than sugar (e.g. the 42% fructose formulation used in most processed food). Even the formulation used in soft drinks is only 55% fructose, marginally more than sugar.
If you replace HFCS with sugar in your diet it is basically a no-op in terms of being healthy and in many cases will increase your fructose intake.
Fructose can't be used by cells directly - it does not effect blood sugar levels, because it has to be processed by the liver into glucose first.[1]
The potential issues with fructose are related to the matabolic processes which convert it into glucose, which is what your cells actually use.
So eating say, straight fructose in fact won't spike your blood sugar since it has a much more convoluted metabolic path to consumption. Something like HFCS is more likely to be a problem because the glucose content is not in the dissacharide form of sucrose and can be directly absorbed.
It's basically a nop. You've got a ton of sucrase in the gut that breaks it down. There is a small difference in the rate of release as a result but it's not clinically meaningful.
I was recently diagnosed with fatty liver disease. The liver-related numbers in my blood work were slightly elevated. An abdominal ultrasound confirmed it.
Liver problems have historically been caused by excessive alcohol consumption (leads to cirrhosis, etc.) But I'm a teetotaler. The other version of fatty liver disease - the non-alcoholic kind - can be caused by excessive fructose consumption. Since I have been drinking diet sodas for years, that likely isn't it either (Diet Dr Pepper uses Aspartame as a sweetener).
But there are hints that artificial sweeteners trick the body into thinking they're getting the real thing and it will store those calories as fat. So I have started a fat-loss program where the first thing to go has been soda. And I'm down 15 pounds so far.
Many thanks to the "LoseIt" app developers for making it easy to track my calories. And please get your numbers checked at your next doctor visit.
Fatty liver here as well. Not a big consumer of sugar or alcohol though so I suspect something else is the cause. My liver doc ordered a couple dozen obscure blood tests to see if we can find the cause. I take a lot of supplements and vitamins, but the doc didn't see anything that should have caused it. My parents and siblings, despite being more obese and consuming more sugar, also do not have it.
Thing I read that's a bit fascinating and possibly important is your digestive system has taste buds and it's own nervous system. I wouldn't be gobsmacked if it responded to artificial sweeteners. And that causes issues.
Other thing I read is fructose is processed by the liver via some of the same paths that alcohol does. Would surprising if they didn't share some of the same negative health outcomes.
You can get NAFLD from fructose yes, but it's not the same as alcohol. Alcohol is metabolized in the liver but the pathway is very different.
Alcohol dehydrogenase (and in alcoholics CYP2E1) breaks it down into acetaldehyde. Aldehyde dehydrogenase breaks it down into acetone. Acetone is one of the ketone bodies that's then utilized as a fuel directly. Acetone is a natural ketone, but it's also toxic at high levels.
Fructose undergoes fructolysis. Fructose is phosphorylated to fructose-1-phosphate by frucotkinase. It's then broken down by aldolase B into glyceraldehyde and dihydroxyacetone phosphate (DHAP). Glyceraldehyde is converted to glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and enters mid-way through the glucose metabolism pathway. DHAP is used to synthesize fat. Since it happens in the liver, you can get fat build-up in the liver, and NAFLD.
I wouldn't think so, as alcohol, fructose, and/or being overweight seem to be the main factors. I would ask your doctor to look at your blood work with relation to that the next time you get a physical.
Oh, and at least in my case, it's not related to cholesterol or diabetes. I'm fine there. {shrug}
Fructose is primarily processed in the liver and shares some processes with alcohol processing with toxic byproducts. Fructose processing yield triglycerides contributing to the less ideal fat in blood. When I cut my fructose consumption down for a while to less than 10g/day my triglycerides in my blood dropped considerably - my GP did not believe it was my diet. It is shocking how little some doctors know about fructose influence on the body despite the considerable amount is is consumed.
FYI, high fructose corn syrup has only slightly more fructose (a single digit percentage) than normal sugar, which also has a fuckton of fructose in it.
That link has a bit of nuance. Some HFCS has lower fructose content:
"HFCS 42" and "HFCS 55" refer to dry weight fructose compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being glucose. HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.
Yup. ~5% more fructose than table sugar in its most common formulations, actually lower content than table sugar in some formulations (e.g. HFCS-42). The 'high fructose' moniker is derived from a reference to 'pure' corn syrup which is nearly 100% glucose, not a reference to table sugar as commonly assumed.
Right. The main issue with HFCS is that it's really cheap so it gets added to a lot of things that wouldn't normally contain sugar or it is added in greater amounts than other sugars.
I've heard the issue with high fructose corn syrup is that the levels of sugar in it does not correspond to its sweetness level. Corn syrup on its own is not very sweet, so to make it taste sweet you have to add much higher levels than if you had used other types of sweetener.
Went though a cancer journey with a loved one a few years ago. I was quite surprised at the complete lack of specialized guidance on nutrition. It was basically ‘eat healthy’, which isn’t bad advice but it seems like there are probably optimizations to be had there.
(Of course there’s no end of it on the Internets, but as part of heathcare it was absent)
We tend to emphasize diet a lot, I think because it's something we can control, but it might not help as much as we hope.
Eating a healthy, plant-forward diet while minimizing alcohol and red meat might give us most of the benefit we can squeeze out of diet for cancer risk reduction.
You cannot stop cancer with diet alone. Full stop. If you could, then starvation would stop cancer before the patient dies. Or a radical diet would cure a patient. It doesn't.
This has been debunked so often, yet people really want to believe that food diet can cure everything!
Totally agree, but it seems likely to me that diet can make a body more or less hospitable to cancer, which in turn could lend less or more effectiveness of targeted therapies.
The first half of her book talks about nutrition and health but the second half talks about her company that offers services to give people personal guidance on nutrition and monitoring their health, so there are some attempts to do this.
https://www.caseymeans.com/goodenergy
I don’t know why this is downvoted. The lack of profit motive is a big reason that nutrition and supplements aren’t as well studied through rigorous trials as drug therapies. The ones that are run are funded by grants. Rather than just “more funding” I think there needs to be more systemic ways at reducing the cost of clinical trials or using alternate methods of getting high quality scientific data for answering these questions.
For example, there is a good trial running now on ketogenic diet in glioblastoma patients, NCT05708352, I think with a NIH grant and maybe the NCI as well. Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31kR0MzyRA
With low fructose content (less then carrots per 100g), it's not a stupid choice. Naturally, if you don't binge on it, otherwise 2-3 slices daily won't kill you. I mean wholegrain, sourdough bread, to be precise.
They also will gladly prescribe you statins for life without mentioning that losing your excess 30kg and walking every now and then would likely greatly improve your cholesterol issues (or even solve them) and improve your general health. You can apply this to pretty much any modern wide spread disease.
I think doctors don't even bother because they assume people already do as much as they're willing to do, the problem is that the interests of capitalism are diametrically opposed to your well being so most people start with quite a disadvantage, just look at supermarkets: the alcohol, candies, coke, cakes aisles are all bigger than the healthy food aisle, together they're like 80% of the building
"Doctors won't mention that losing weight and exercising more will make you healthier" is quite a take.
I've heard exactly the opposite from any number of people: that if you're overweight at all, many doctors will tell "lose weight and exercise" and then usher you out the door, rather than pay attention to the specifics of your medical problems - sometimes missing serious issues as a result.
When they have to turn patients over at the rate of 10 per hour due to the policy of the private equity group that owns their practice, they will be inclined to offer blanket advice that, while actually good and applicable for 80% of people, will tend to miss the edge cases.
There is a particular type of kidney disease called Polycystic Kidney disease which is genetic. Essentially cysts grow all over your kidneys, they swell up, and eventually fail (usually over many years). There is emerging research that glucose contributes to the growth of these cysts and early research suggests ketogenic diet can have a measurable impact on the growth of these cysts and improve kidney function.
> "We were surprised that fructose was barely metabolized in the tumor types we tested... We quickly learned that the tumor cells alone don’t tell the whole story... one way in which high levels of fructose consumption promote tumor growth is by increasing the availability of circulating lipids in the blood. These lipids are building blocks for the cell membrane, and cancer cells need them to grow... Over the past few years, it’s become clear that many cancer cells prefer to take up lipids rather than make them
Guess what? Glucose limitation helps protect cancer cells! Gee, so much research on diet, and still no answers, tells me that diet research might not be the path to go down on stopping cancers.
>> Most cancer cells rapidly consume glucose, which is severely reduced in the nutrient-scarce tumour microenvironment. In CRISPR-based genetic screens to identify metabolic pathways influenced by glucose restriction, we find that tumour-relevant glucose concentrations (low glucose) protect cancer cells from inhibition of de novo pyrimidine biosynthesis, a pathway that is frequently targeted by chemotherapy.
The books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms" seems worth plugging.
Sugar is not safe, even though it is ubiquitous.
For many reasons avoiding meat seems reasonable, too. I used to be full vegetarian, for years, and then eventually re-added salmon and sardines.
It's a tiny step to full-on vegetarian keto, which is as good for you as full-on fasting is, I think.
I don't eat breakfast, veggie omelette for lunch (sautee some mushrooms and zuccini, or broccoli, perhaps, crack some eggs in once they cook down, give lots of olive oil and a side of something like kimchi, cabbage, or a pickle.
Usually eat whatever I want for dinner, including icecream, sometimes, but I spend most of the day in a low-sugar state of being, and if I 'clean up' my dinner(s) it's easy to eat a zero-added-sugar, extremely-low-carb, no-animal-protein, extremely-satiating form of food intake.
I really like it for me, and when I cook any of my foods, either when trying to be 'keto' or adding things like sweet potato, banana bread, ice cream, pizza, whatever, it's always well-received and considered delicious.
He's not a prime example of anything to do with fruit making things worse. His chosen therapy just as likely had no worsening impact on his cancer; the problem was it had no positive impact either and he put off surgery.
He had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that grows from the tip of the pancreas and can sometimes be snipped out without consequence early enough that it doesn't spread.
He presumably freaked out about it all nevertheless (because it's terrifying), avoided surgery for too long and ended up having a Whipple procedure, which is fucking brutal.
But there's still a pretty good chance he would have had early surgery and still ended up needing a Whipple procedure and still have passed away on roughly the same timescale. Because pancreatic cancer is a stealthy thing, and the Whipple procedure comes with its own frightening future.
It's really sad he freaked out, it's really sad he didn't listen. But it's not that unusual. He's far from unique in making irrational decisions in the face of terrifying diagnoses. Should it have been a slam dunk decision? Yeah. Of course. But there we are.
He was following "fruitarianism" on and off even before his diagnosis, I think it's reasonable to suspect it had something to do with his cancer, but I wasn't aware of those details, so thanks for providing them.
I mean... in terms of our scientific understanding at this point, sporadic pancreatic cancer just comes from nowhere. We don't know why. In the case of the parent I lost to it, it could have been triggered by a response to inflammation from previous surgery. It seems plausible. But nobody knows.
I just think people snarking or factoiding about Steve Jobs' panicked response to an awful disease comes across as projection of other judgements more than anything else. He was a complicated, self-reliant person who made a bad decision when he was scared. And it probably (but by no means certainly) cost him a few years of health. And now he is gone. And it's still sad for the people who lost him and for the wider world.
I didn't mean to dunk on Steve Jobs, but I'm sure even he would agree he had an eccentric and extremist personality and the bit about fruitarianism seems very relevant esp with happenings like [Ashton Kutcher being hospitalized when he tried to mimick it](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/28/ashton-kutcher-...)
relevant quote:
> "First of all, the fruitarian diet can lead to, like, severe issues," Kutcher told USA Today. "I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie.
I was like doubled over in pain. My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying … considering everything."
steve jobs was known to be an asshole. i wonder how much that had an impact on dealing with the condition.
on the other hand, I wonder what kind of steve jobs would the world have had, had he survived.
would he have pushed cancer research further, somehow? maybe by getting involved and providing funding and technology, maybe novel technology, for cancer research? or would he have gone full-cynical and focused on something else entirely?
anecdata is no substitute for controlled studies. This study says fructose may have cancer implications, and Steve Jobs did focus on consuming fruit before he died of cancer. That there were treatments available that he forwent is immaterial, he's still a fructose datapoint in this context.
i hate nerd tunnel vision. "I know a lot about some related things so I must know the answer.
With respect, it's absurdly more specious and naive to go from
"mouse study suggests contigent relationship between fructose and cancer cell behavior as seen in the specific limited models of the study, inviting further research"
to
"Public figure with especially agressive and entirely unrelated cancer reportedly ate something that happens to contain fructose and eventually died! Same thing!"
That still doesn't inform us in any way that directly relates to the study.
In the big picture of cancer research, there are countless caveats and idiosycracies because most cancers are more different from each other than they are similar. This is only amplified when you're trying to make inferences about dietary consumption, where interactions between coincident foodstuffs have large chaotic effects and species (and individuals) often have different digestive behavior on the way from dietary food to some intracellular interaction.
Ignoring all that inherent, acknowledged, complexity so that one might harp on some dead punching bag whose story is only known through the lens of commercial media is about as anti-scientific as you could be.
nobody here was drawing vast conclusions from Steve Jobs eating fruit; there is nothing for you to deflate
Just as celebrities with diseases can draw attention to that disease, for the good with regard to other sufferers, a study about fructose and cancer can draw attention to "Steve Jobs diet was fructose".
Attention drawn. There's nothing you can do about it.
And you are not debunking anything because nobody asserted anything except a single fact; you're just shouting in a mirror about how clever you are.
calling people names won't change the fact that his life-long diet caused his cancer and killed him. You should read what the research is saying in place of being here offending people that by their personal experience agrees with the finding that "fructose in diet enhances tumor growth".
You are not the only person with experience with this kind of cancer in the family and have no compassion for the many sugar addicts going through cancer getting served fruit juice when they go to the hospital, which is poison for them.
> calling people names won't change the fact that his life-long diet caused his cancer and killed him.
Steve Jobs was not a life-long fruitarian. He dabbled in all sorts of different diets. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography he seems to have generally lived as a pescatarian. Interestingly enough that diet is considered one of the healthier ones.
Obviously Steve Jobs should not have delayed his surgery. I understand that people are angry that a man with his means was still able to get a transplant and all the medical care that is unavailable for the rest of us. I understand. However to assume that his disease (and death) was the result of a diet choice when there is no credible evidence for it seems rather absurd.
> Are you angry because Steve Jobs got a transplant?
I am not angry however that was a sentiment often linked to the fact that he delayed his surgery.
> Have you tried reading the research in the post before commenting?
Unless I missed a comment there was absolutely no serious research shared that credibly connects let alone confirms that his death was connected to this diet choice.
Fructose in fruits is trapped inside webs of fiber, the gut can more capably deal with fructose in this form vs. fructose found in candy or soda. GP is more right than wrong.
> Fructose in fruits is trapped inside webs of fiber, the gut can more capably deal with fructose in this form
that's bro science. With or without fiber, fructose will be separated and metabolized by the liver and go through the cycle described by the research. Read the thing.
This comment is a perfect example of what the origin of complete nonsense with sticking power looks like on the internet: a couple insults and denigrations, a refutal without substantiation, and a confident suggestion for one to do their own research (of course without providing a reference study from a journal of consideration) and calling it a day.
Fructose from whole fruits is processed and metabolized differently. Indeed fructose trapped inside fiber will take some time to be digested, and a sharp blood spike is prevented. Sugar from fruits is not bad in the way sugar from soda is bad.
But his was actually one of the most treatable forms and he could have potentially had many many years added to his life had he initially listened to his doctors.
Jobs' fruitarianism meant he didn't eat eggs, meat, dairy, or other sources of selenium. Fruit doesn't contain selenium. One of Selenium deficiency's side effects, well established in the literature: pancreatic cancer.
He was lucky to get a rare, slow moving form of the cancer that can be cured with surgery if caught early enough. Unfortunately he waited nine months before getting surgery.
Another comment mentioned that the mechanism by which fructose promotes tumor growth is that it increases circulating lipids. But I'm wondering, doesn't keto (which seems to fight cancer) also do that?
I feel like I came across some similar research years ago.
It brought up a question that I'm hoping someone in this field could answer:
Does it make sense to speed up cancer cell replication while providing chemo drugs?
It seems like this would result in greater discrimination between fast-replicating cells (cancer) and normal cells. In turn, this would allow faster chemo treatments, or less collateral damage.
I'm not in the field at all, but this also sounds slightly dangerous in a way. Chemo isn't instant and constant, so you'd have to time this well i suppose.
Nonetheless this is a take from someone who has limited scientific knowledge, so I'm curious to see responses on this question!
I’m a biologist (but not a cancer biologist). A lecturer in college explained that this is how chemo works. It impacts actively dividing cells. Your own stem cells divide but not as fast as tumor’s. So this seems right in theory.
An obvious question that isn’t answered (in this article - not sure about the paper itself) is whether feeding fructose results in MORE tumor growth than feeding glucose (or other sources of calories)
Without knowing this, it doesn’t make any sense to assume that there is anything inherently bad about fructose, at least other than the mechanistic arguments mentioned in the article (which are weak if not backed up by empirical evidence)
Fun fact: Sucrose, from our friends cane sugar and beet sugar, is a glucose/dextrose molecule tied to a fructose molecule. And when you digest it, you get the effects of some of each.
Another fun fact: The "H" in HFCS stems from the fact just plain "corn syrup" is defined as 0% fructose. Fast food restaurants push the percentage to 58%+ fructose to turbocharge the sweetest taste in their sodas.
Maybe worth noting that you have to eat a pretty large dose of fructose for it to make it all the way to the liver. More than in a few pieces of fruit. The small intestine converts up to 1g/kg (of bodyweight) fructose to glucose and other metabolites before it enters the liver portal vein.
I suspect it's because diets like keto say it's OK to eat loads of meat and basically don't require any sacrifice. Fuck the environment and fuck other animals right bros?!
It's hard to find tech jobs that aren't in support of some activity which is making the world a less pleasant place to be. So you're starting from a pool which has already has some cognitive dissonance momentum going. I don't think it's too surprising that that momentum would carry over into dissonance re: the side effects of your diet.
Pointing out that other groups have the same problem doesn't make it any less of a problem. Besides, money is an information technology, if anybody is going to recognize its bugs as such and fix them, it's going to be us.
However, it sounds like we should maybe be avoiding excessive amounts of certain fruit. See: A Definitive Guide to Fructose Content in Fruit [1]
There was a recent episode from Diary of a CEO with a cancer expert. He seems to have some really sound advice. One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells [2]
[1] https://iquitsugar.com/blogs/articles/a-definitive-guide-to-...
[2] https://youtu.be/VaVC3PAWqLk?feature=shared