Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

abtinf

I've posted these numbers before, but I'll post them again because they are so low as to be totally unintuitive:

Normal human blood sugar [1]: 70-100 milligrams per deciliter of blood.

Blood volume of average human [2]: 5.5 liters

Thus, total blood sugar in non-diabetic human: 3.85 to 5.5 grams

Density of glucose: 1.54 grams per cubic centimeter

Thus, total volume of sugar in average human: 2.5 to 3.6 milliliters

Volume of teaspoon: ~5ml

Your body does its best to cap the amount of sugar flowing through you at about one-half teaspoon. A 12 ounce can of coke has 39 grams of sugar, or 7-10 times what the human body considers normal. It's a tremendous shock to the system - the resulting insulin response sends your body on a roller coaster of hormone regulation.

[1] https://www.virginiamason.org/whatarenormalbloodglucoselevel...

[2] http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=21...

View on HN

This is hilariously wrong. This is like saying the average human body contains twenty to thirty pounds of fat so you should eat 10,000 times more fat than sugar.

>This is like saying the average human body contains twenty to thirty pounds of fat so you should eat 10,000 times more fat than sugar.

You should eat substantially more fat than sugar, yes. But if you don't your body turns excess Sugar into fat.

It is not possible to calculate the ratio of fat-to-sugar you should eat, as it would require a divide by zero.

That's interesting but the rate at which sugar is metabolised is more relevant. If it's not consumed fast enough, then yes you have a problem. Drinking a coke while at rest is definitely a problem.

> the rate at which sugar is metabolised is more relevant

It's not "more relevant", but it is deeply related and important. A low glycemic index food will spike your blood sugar much less than a high GI food.

And the relation of a food to blood-glucose is not fully intuitive. Sure, soda is obvious because it contains pure sugar. But carrots have roughly the same impact as soda.

I don't think the usage of "rate" here meant the ease of converting sugar from some particular source into blood glucose, but rather how much of blood glucose is used up by the body per unit of time.

The issue wouldn't be so much that a coke has a large amount of sugar compared to expected blood glucose levels, but rather whether that can of coke puts a person in a caloric surplus. At any point in time there might be some glucose either coming in or coming out of our bloodstream. Expected blood glucose levels don't tell us much about that. For instance, two people might have the same blood glucose levels but two completely different energetic requirements due to differing levels of physical activity.

At least, that's what I get from the post you're responding to. Mind you, I don't think that a calorie is a calorie: consuming shitloads of sugar might be bad for anyone for other reasons besides inducing caloric surpluses, so energy sources aren't perfect substitutes for one another. But I don't see what insight is to be gained from the relationship between the amount of sugar in a coke can and average blood glucose levels either.

Carrots are fairly high in GI, but their glycemic load is very low, so they have little impact on blood sugar.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...

>"A 12 ounce can of coke has 39 grams of sugar, or 7-10 times what the human body considers normal. It's a tremendous shock to the system"

Is it still a "tremendous shock" for someone in their 80's who's been drinking 5 per day for decades, like Warren Buffet?

That's interesting. I regularly drink soft drinks, and written on the can is the government-mandated notice of how much of my "daily recommended intake" is in the can. For sugar, it says 40%. How does that figure relate to your one-half teaspoon metric? Does it mean that one of the figures is wrong?

Disclaimer: I do not know what I'm talking about.

Assuming both numbers are accurate (I haven't double checked any of the numbers above), the discrepancy could be with time.

Your body doesn't just have sugar in its blood. It uses it. At any given moment "Average blood sugar" needs to be 5grams. However throughout the day your body burns up 97.5 grams (I.e. 39 grams is 40%).

Just an observation, but if a soda has 10 times more sugar than you need in your body, and it is about half the daily value of sugar you need, then I suppose it is a rate problem. Drinking a whole soda at once puts way too much sugar into your system, but it may be possible to drink a sip an hour.

Only the glucose part of the sugar would end up in the blood stream though, the fructose part gets converted into liver fat directly. So you'd need to keep the time between sips long enough to start converting that liver fat into glucose, and that could take longer than a day.

its a huge fallacy that the amount of food you ingest = the amount of food you absorb. we pee and poop out a lot of what we don't need. some of the stuff we sweat and even breath out (like alcohol). I wouldn't give much credence to someone putting up mathematical figures up like that.

going to the first point, when I decide i want to loose weight, i start with increasing my daily fiber. that alone is often enough for me to loose a few pounds

Government recommended intakes are notoriously political and not science-based.

The current World Health Organization recommendation is less than 6 teaspoons of sugar per day. One softdrink essentially hits that limit all in one shot.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-guid...

Blood sugar isn't the right comparison; glycogen is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com