Sugar not so nice for your child’s brain development

I want recommendations of "don't eat sugar" to dig into the details, because sugar is everywhere. My mother-in-law "doesn't eat sugar" but constantly snacks on figs/dates, pours honey over everything, and drinks fruit smoothies daily. In my opinion, she has a very high sugar diet despite not adding any table sugar or corn syrup to anything. Many recommendations say to limit "added sugar" without explaining why naturally occurring sugar is okay.

Except it affects insulin levels. Rather than the brain.

You could maybe make an argument that the fruits we consume now are a result of hundreds of years of selective breeding and contain much more of it than indigenous plants.

The key is fiber. When you eat fruit, you consume fructose with fiber. Fiber hinders absorption of fructose. Many processed foods have a lot of fructose and no fiber, because fiber doesn't help the shelf life.

EDIT: here's a more expanded explanation from the same endocrinologist in another video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s5szfPYKY4&t=4924s

We are indeed well adapted to consuming fruit. Even though modern fruit is bred to be much more sugary than its natural predecessors (ever tried eating a wild apple from a tree on a hike? Insanely sour), there does not seem to be any kind of health problem associated with consumption of raw fruit. We have a lot of metabolically sick people around the world - over a billion probably - but few of them, if any, have gotten to that point by eating too much fruit.

Fructose is not fruit, though. Even very sweet fruit like mango has only 16 per cent of fructose per weight. Fructose itself is 100 per cent, it is refined, concentrated stuff, from which all fiber has been removed.

Fiber that naturally occurs in fruit and veg slows down processing of fruit and veg in the digestive system - it takes fairly long (hours) to extract all the fructose from an eaten piece of fruit. As a result, the liver isn't overworked - it receives manageable quantity of fructose over a long period.

Now compare a situation when you drink a litre of sweetened beverage. That is a lot of fructose - you just drank an equivalent of seven? eight? apples in half an hour or so. And all that sugar comes in liquid form, so it enters your blood very fast, producing a huge spike. The liver is overwhelmed. It can cope somehow, but do this ten thousand times and some negative outcomes are bound to follow.

There is a scientist (Robert H. Lustig, professor of endocrinology at UCSF) who, more than a decade ago, published a long video called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth". It is stuffed with various biochemical observations and longish, but I found the information useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Robert Lustig explains the issue here: https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/ and this [ https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/physrev.0001... ] provides a readable account of the problem if fructose consumption rises above a certain level.

That’s not memory, that’s hard disk (or I guess SSD for you youngins’). You definitely need good memory to be a good programmer because large problems require a larger working set to efficiently reference whilst problem solving.

While many problems in computer science that can theoretically be solved with a small amount of memory and a large amount of slower disk, many of them cannot be solved in what we’d consider a reasonable amount of time.

I feel like a lot of people don’t understand how continuous certain parts of biology are (and aren’t).

Imagine if they used cats instead, which are almost wholly carnivorous. Or cattle, which live mostly on the foliage of plants. How applicable to humans could the results be?