Comment by Tarsul a day ago
I know from personal experience that eating sugar does induce more anxiety in me. This might sound weird but I can "physically feel" in my head a certain anxiety when e.g. I think about something awkward. This "physical feel" stopped being there when I stopped eating sweets for a few weeks. One reason why I try to keep my sugar intake down (the other being in danger of getting diabetes...).
Thus, I wholly believe this study.
The most direct substitution was cheese, lactose does not appear to have the same effect on me as fructose or sucrose.
I mostly eat kale for vegetables, this also helps with subclinical insulin resistance and inflammation. I think roasting vegetables may end up being too sweet.
I did an extended 5 day water fast to kick start the microbiome changes I undertook it as an experiment and the effectiveness in lifting brain fog suggested that it likely had a microbiome component.
It is important to note that extended water fasting will have adverse effects for some people. It is not recommended to do it for that long.
"" The water fast lasts for 24–72 hours. You should not water fast for longer than this without medical supervision because of health risks. "" https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/water-fasting
Would you mind citing which kind of cheese you eat? Because much cheese has little to no lactose, and also goat lactose does not necessarily have the same effect as cow lactose. Finally, the fats and proteins in cheese affect digestion and possibly sugar absorption.
Really depends on the cheese. Most has less than milk but for some like cottage cheese it's still pretty high. Other hard cheeses like parmesan it's basically zero.
You could use a rule of thumb that hard/aged cheeses are low lactose. But there's outliers like brie/camembert that are very low lactose even when relatively fresh.
Most of my adult life I've suffered from DPDR. In recent years I've been able to get somewhat of a handle on it.
While I never pinned down the cause exactly, my talk therapist and I came to the realization that some meals would trigger it. Usually those meals were obviously bad for my health, so I started avoiding them.
> This might sound weird but I can "physically feel" in my head a certain anxiety
Why I commented. DPDR is in the same box as anxiety and, yeah, I could literally feel this weird pressure in my head. An actual physical sensation. Seems like we had different cause and side effects but it's so good to read there's someone else out there.
Glad you found something that worked for you. There's so much we don't know about our bodies.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization-derealizatio...
You say sugar, but are you referring to glucose or fructose?
There is a meaningful amount of scientific literature connecting fructose and inflammation.
The AVERAGE human can only digest about 30g of fructose a day. Some substantially more, some substantially less.
A can of soda or three apples is about 30g of fructose.
Inflammation (high- and low grade)then being a second step linking to anxiety.
I have heard people say that eating fibers together with fructose(like when eating a apple) reduces the impact of fructose, as fibers create a lining on the gut wall reducing the absorption rate.
Sounds reasonable. But i have had a hard time finding evidence verifying that hypotesis.
I think you have to look for "glycemic index" and learn about its mechanisms, which in your defense is not an obvious term to search for.
Athletes consume 50g of fructose (and 50g of glucose) per hour. It's actually fairly easy to train yourself to this level.
> Athletes consume 50g of fructose (and 50g of glucose) per hour
...while actively competing in endurance events. They don't do this while sitting on the couch in the evening. And it's very specifically only endurance trained athletes who do this, sprinters would never need to consume that much sugar.
It's a valid point though, a sugary snack or sports drink directly before hitting the gym for a hard workout session is probably fine, as long as your blood wasn't already saturated with glucose from earlier sugary foods, and as long as you don't have insulin resistance.
Sugar? Why not caffeine?
I swear that a 4+ week coffee and caffeinated holiday improved emotional regulation and turns down OCD behaviours and anxiety.
Not sure if this is microbiota-related or related to down-regulation of neuroreceptors activated by coffee compounds.
I’ve heard arguments such as “well… caffeine is cleared within hours so a weeks-long effect is placebo”. Say what you want.
I recently started consuming relatively large amounts of fiber (standard daily dose of whole psyllium husks mixed with water) and I feel noticeably less anxious than on days when I don't take it. Fiber has been shown to interact somehow (I'm not super familiar) with the body's insulin levels. I wonder if it is related to what TFA is saying.
Yes same, my anxiety is completely gone on keto. It’s just really hard to constantly be in keto, so I limit my carbs which helps but isn’t quite the same
Heads up, I don’t think there’s a link between eating sugar and risk of developing diabetes. Obesity is a risk factor but not sugar itself.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S216183132...
There's a complicated relationship, according to this meta-analysis. Eating sugar in isolation from other sources of nutrition is a risk factor. Eating fruit, or eating sweetened foods with redeeming qualities like yoghurt and wholegrain cereal, is probably inversely correlated (with lower confidence). These seem to be true even when controlling for BMI.
Looking at the meta-analysis, it's hard to say there's no link. The authors suggest that fibre might mitigate the impact, and that adding sugar to otherwise healthy foods might encourage higher consumption of them.
I believe most people are not notability adversely affected by sugar and a small subset of the population, like myself, are acutely affected. The former does not invalidate the latter. Sarah Wilson of “I quit sugar” fame started off with a zero sugar crusade then later ameliorated her advice in an apparent effort to generalize her advice for a wider audience. I think advice should be tailored by conditioning on what category a person fits into. I would go further and suggest that a zero sugar diet should also have zero fruit. As a ADHD sugar addict I would generally substitute sugar with fruit and that prevented me from finding out that even my ostensibly healthy diet had too much sugar in it.