This frankly scares me somewhat. I had a liver ultrasound where the radiologist warned me I had some signs of fat on the liver though not extensive yet.
I weigh 72kg at 178cm height. At peak, when I got tested I weighed around 86kg. I was barely overweight and definitely not obese and yet...
Knowing the weight alone is not enough though: you can be 72kg and fat or 86kg and very lean but also very muscular.
E.g. I'm 178cm as well but when I was 71kg I was visibly "fat", or at least skinny fat to be charitable. I'm currently 67kg but very lean and somewhat muscular.
At 86kg I had a bit of dad bod going on. Not a huge gut but somewhat pudgy here and there. Not hugely so and not overly visible as most of it was visceral fat. I haven't had an ultrasound since losing the weight. I hope the liver looks better now. I've been eating fewer calories, healthier calories and swimming. Hopefully that's enough to at least halt the damage done by my old lifestyle.
I had moderate NFLD and managed to get rid of it completely by just eliminating fried food, most dairy, and sugary snacks for about 6 months, I also almost never eat red meat. It's not so much about being overweight, but what you're eating.
Yep, the dietary recommendations have been consistent for decades at this point. Dairy, meat, sugars and excessive oils are not great for us. A little in moderation is fine, that is a lot lower than what most people think.
But it isnt pushed hard because it is difficult to steer the ship of humanity. Like how doctors will say "lose some weight" but they arent really expecting miracles on it as they know the battle that is.
I eat enormous amounts of dairy and red meat and recently I had abdominal surgery and the doctor afterwards confirmed I was in very good shape and had no signs at all of fatty liver and very little visceral fat generally.
I eat around a pound of beef a day, a gallon of yogurt a week, and almost everything (eg oatmeal) is made with copious amounts of butter.
I think unless you know something specific about your genetics, just eat plain natural foods people have been eating for millennia and you will be perfectly fine. Basically, buy plain meat, vegetables, grains, and dairy and prepare them yourself. Don’t eat preservatives, corn syrups, or novel vegetable oils like canola. Maybe they’re fine but there’s no reason to risk it. Also do your best to make sure what you eat followed the same rule; eg my beef was grass fed and finished and was not fed skittles in a feedlot. Diet affects animal meat as well, just as it does us.
This is good advise to get behind. I do feel like a lot of the optimal dietary advice is far to hard lined and that a better path really is just whole foods in moderation.
Dietary recommendations have fluctuated widely for decades, and still differ substantially between sources. So far there is zero direct evidence that meat consumption causes fatty liver disease; I mean it's possible but we just don't know one way or the other. The only real data we have comes from low-quality observational studies (basically junk science).
If someone wants to try limiting meat consumption as an "n=1" experiment to see how it affects their body composition and other biomarkers then go ahead. Just don't expect a major impact from that one factor.
Generally speaking, I actually don't think I recall much of a link between meat and fatty liver, it always seemed to be closer linked to highly refined sugars and possibly high levels of dairy but less of a link there.
Bmi is one metric but you need to combine it with a measurement of your belly circumference. I had similar numbers but the weight was al in the belly and got diagnoses as type 2 diabetic with high cholesterol etc.
HFCS isn't any meaningfully different from sugar. It's basically chemically the same as honey. And no, they don't put it in everything. It's in soda and certain sweets (obviously) and sweet sauces, but it's not like it's creeping into unexpected places in some huge way. Yes, there may be foods with a hint of sweetness that have a hint of HFCS, but then it's a negligible amount anyways. HFCS isn't some kind of bogeyman. It's essentially just sugar. Treat it accordingly.
HFCS is typically 42:58 or 55:45 fructose:glucose. Table sugar is 50:50. HFCS is only "high fructose" relative to unprocessed corn syrup, not relative to table sugar and other common sweeteners.
A small difference at small levels but one which obviously matters when it's shoved into countless foods without most people event realizing. It's not just in soda and candy; it's in bread, pasta, almost any processed food (crackers, ketchups and other sauces, canned fruit, applesauce, lunch meat, peanut butter, the list goes on) and many foods one might not considered processed.
It makes sense to try to eliminate it even though it's "only" a small difference. Might as well remove the difference at all and look out for things with no HFCS shoved in it for no reason.
>HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.
In other words, the type of HFCS that's "shoved into countless foods" has less fructose than table sugar, not more. If fructose is the villain here, that actually constitutes an improvement over table sugar.
Plain pasta almost never contains any HFCS. Maybe you can find some that does but that's not what most people are buying in their local grocery store. (The sauce is often a different story.)
Fair - I went back and re-edited enough times my original message got jumbled, and I had been thinking of pasta dishes you could buy, which almost invariably have HFCS, but absolutely correct plain pasta pretty much never does.
The point is, it doesn't matter if your ketchup is made with sugar or HFCS. If it weren't HFCS, it would be sugar, because ketchup is supposed to be sweet, and they have the same nutritional effect.
Similarly, it's not suprising when pasta sauce has some sweetness added -- grandma also likely added a bit of sugar if she found tomatoes too acidic, which many do.
The only thing that matters is that it's sugar. HFCS isn't somehow worse. If you're trying to eliminate sugar overall then sure, of course avoid HFCS. But if you're fine with a certain moderate amount of sugar per day, then the relatively small amounts of HFCS in things like pasta sauce and peanut butter are fine. The same way the sugar or honey in teriyaki sauces is. They count towards your daily allotment of sugar. For people trying to eat relatively healthily, avoid the soda but there's no reason to worry about the HFCS in ketchup or normal amounts of tomato sauce, for goodness' sake. The only reason to avoid HFCS entirely is if you're truly cutting sugar out of your diet entirely. Otherwise they're just substitutes for practical nutritional purposes.
That's another fair point that specifically tomato-based products often have sugar, but also kind of missing the forest for the trees. For various reasons, we have a slew of foods that one might not expect to have added sugar (like lunch meat, ham notwithstanding, or applesauce which is already sweet without extra sugar, to pick from my short list above), that do because of reasons. In any case it does pay to still look, because if you're not careful you could pick one random tomato sauce that has double the amount of sugar compared to the jar right next to it on the shelf (Bertolli Tomato & Basil, 11g per serving; Newton's Own Marinara, 6g per serving).
These choices add up, which is the point I was trying to make originally (though I agree I did not do a good job of it); I understand I was being pedantic so I understand the nature of the responses to me. The point is that small differences, isolated, don't matter, but in aggregate they absolutely do. We make arguments like this all the time in software when trying to write correct, performative code -- the milliseconds add up, and so do the grams of sugar.
The anti-HFCS movement, despite having its targets aimed for wrong reasons, is still aiming at the right thing: being more mindful of what's in the things we put in our bodies.
I would actually argue the anti-HFCS movement is not aiming at the right thing.
Because they make people think Mexican Coke is fine because it's made with real sugar, or that putting honey all over your toast doesn't count. Like, I know people who think these things, but avoid HFCS like it's the plague.
Unless you're trying to avoid sugar to an extreme degree, the sweetness in tomato sauce is not worth concerning yourself about. The small differences, when added up, don't matter that much. The sugar in your bread and peanut butter is nothing compared to a Coke. Again -- if you're concerned about sugar, then don't drink soda and don't eat dessert. No candies, no sweet drinks, no sweet juices. That gets you 95% of the way. Worrying about HFCS in bread is missing the forest for the trees.
> The government recommends that free sugars – sugars added to food or drinks, and sugars found naturally in honey, syrups, and unsweetened fruit and vegetable juices, smoothies and purées – should not make up more than 5% of the energy (calories) you get from food and drink each day.
> This means:
> Adults should have no more than 30g of free sugars a day, (roughly equivalent to 7 sugar cubes).
Like I said, it adds up. And as I pointed out above, the added sugar varies wildly in the "same" things you buy off the shelf, so it does pay to pay attention.
I don't see the same argument for adding more beneficial things to your diet like protein or fiber so it's curious to say the negative things don't also have some cumulative effect.
You can easily find peanut butter without added sugar, and applesauce without added sugar, and many more of the garden variety things without added sugar. Sure, there is naturally occurring sugar, but that's the point -- why add more, and why add that to your diet?
This is wrong. As another commentator pointed out,the body processes fructose differently from sucrose.
As for honey (and fruit, for that matter) - they are full of beneficial compounds that help your body regulate blood sugar.
To illustrate this, someone I know of with type I diabetes who ate natural honey didn't need to inject as much insulin as when eating commercially processed/heated honey - those beneficial compounds are destroyed during the process. Same for fruit vs fruit juice...
I cannot find the study at the moment (Google you used to be great at this!) but there was one seeing how diabetics blood sugar was impacted from just fruit consumption. Got to the point where even at 20 serves per day (4 times the recommended) in most people it didnt cause an issue. Bundling that sugar with fiber was a big part of regulating sugars.
Corn syrup might or not be different, Im no expert in that field, but simply having highly refined sugars without the filler is monocropping your diet in weird ways. In the same way soil is being killed by mono cropped agricuture, we are doing the same with our gut biome. The flow on impacts are still being discovered.
I weigh 72kg at 178cm height. At peak, when I got tested I weighed around 86kg. I was barely overweight and definitely not obese and yet...