These are such interesting results. The plot only thickens.
- Sweetened beverage were linked to cardiovascular disease
- Table sugar, honey, jams, and marmalades were a little linked
- Pastries, ice cream, chocolate, and sweets were negatively correlated
Certain sugars were good for your heart. Obviously, this is not causation, but it's an interesting finding. I can't wait to learn more.
I wonder if this is more correlation with the “transport” medium.
Pastries, ice cream, etc are high in fats, and thick, so they may break down and get absorbed by the body slower while soda is just sugar water so it may flood the body faster.
Alternatively, maybe it’s a time-of-day thing? A dessert you eat after a meal means you’re consuming it on a full stomach while a snack is consumed empty.
> Pastries, ice cream, etc are high in fats, and thick, so they may break down and get absorbed by the body slower while soda is just sugar water so it may flood the body faster.
It's definitely not impossible this is the reason. Fat massively affects how fast sugar gets absorbed and this is something that seems to not have gotten much attention in terms of nutrition in general despite things like gi index (which just looks at individual foods in their own).
If the thing that makes sugar bad is spiking blood sugar too much, it could be that how/when people consume it isn't being considered enough because of the assumption that it's always bad and needs to be eliminated as much as possible in general and so there's no point in trying to identify situations where it's not as harmful.
But it could also just be some sort of issue with this study.
As a person who loves pastries and ice cream but drinks no sweetened beverages, while I have doubts whenever I see studies that say "XYZ food proven to be healthy", I'm going to hope this is true.
Last time I made ice cream myself it required an insane amount of table sugar. I tried less sugar and it didn’t have the right consistency. Sugar is needed to keep ice crystals from forming.
If you want GOOD ice cream, you need sugar. Or maybe antifreeze. But I’d rather have the sugar.
Yes. It has a massive amount of sugar but the “cream” in ice cream is fat. The fat slows the absorption of sugars enough to make it actually lie glycemic index
I use inulin fiber sweetened with stevia and monk fruit [1], which measures 1:1 for sugar with equivalent sweetness, and the results are excellent.
I know what you mean, though. Years ago I used to just use liquid stevia, and texture was never quite the same.
More to the parent comment's point, there's a big difference between ice cream and something like hard candy or soda. Calories being equal, ice cream (even with full sugar) is going to be much better for you due to the proportionally higher fat and lower sugar content. A friend of mine once lost a lot of weight by going on an "ice cream diet", which wasn't quite keto but I imagine likely a bit closer to it than a standard American diet.
Thanks! This nicely sums up an issue with these food-frequency questionaires:
> admitting to eating ice cream might correlate with metabolic health
That is, ice cream might well be bad for you but if you experience the bad effects, you might stop admitting that you eat ice cream and thus add an opposite data point in the study.
