You Really Shouldn’t Do This Diet

Coach Bronson

10 months ago

Yes, this is a thing. You may have heard of it, or you will in the near future. It’s been making the social media rounds, and more keto/carnivore influencers have begun to try it and share their initial results.

Remember the reason 50% of Americans are insulin resistant and 70% are obese? Remember what causes hypertension, dementia, and lipid dysfunction? Remind me what that was again..

You may have seen this image before. Did this all of a sudden stop being a thing?

Now we have people eating mostly sugar, trying to get healthy. I’m not making this up. In this article, I’ll briefly describe the sugar diet and the inaccurate claims about what it does. This article is going to focus on the biggest things I see that could cause damage to your health, almost immediately, if you follow this diet.

Consider the Source

First, I want you to know that the influencers promoting this diet have absolutely no knowledge or education in human biology, nutrition, or metabolic health. Yet, they are making videos titled, “Fastest and Best weight loss protocol for fat people”. I highly suspect that the entire thing is a marketing ploy to increase views and visibility for the characters promoting it. What else am I to think when I hear these influencers saying things like, “There is no better diet in the history of history on this planet, or anywhere else, than the sugar diet for fat people”.

That’s a direct quote. Seriously, that’s what they’re saying. (I don’t know where to even start with this.) The message being sent is more than irresponsible; it’s dangerous.

Another thing to understand about those pushing for sugar is that there are performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in the context of their experience. Immediately, this negates 100% of the advice they have for you and me. You cannot expect the same results as someone who is on PEDs. They have enough of a biological crap storm going on in their body already. Doing what they do will very likely not end well for you. That is not to say it’s going well for them either. There’s a reason bodybuilders live on average 15 years less than everyone else.

Thirdly, unless you are already very physically active, regularly lifting weights, and have a high percentage of lean mass on your body, none of this will happen the way you think it will. Physical activity and body composition can cover up a metabolic train wreck. When the focus is on appearance, the results are ALWAYS misleading. Being lean and jacked does not equal being metabolically healthy.

The sugar diet is dangerous.

There is nothing about it that aligns with proper biological function.

It is NOT based on science.

Everyone should try things and experiment on themselves. I recommend N=1 testing all the time. It is not my place, nor do I have the right to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do in their own journey. This is a rare circumstance where I strongly urge you to avoid this diet at all costs. That being said, there is no judgment if you jump on the bandwagon. This article aims to give you every bit of information I can so you know what could be waiting for you on the other side.

What is the Sugar Diet?

It’s the latest version of the fruit diet, just more sensationalized. Here are the guidelines:

Eat mostly fruit and some vegetables
No more than 30g of fat per day
.5g of protein x lean body mass per day (that would be 83g of protein for me)
Follow the diet every day or for a few days at a time
No need to track anything. Eat when hungry.

The recommendations for food choices get a little muddy when they say in one video that it’s a whole-food diet, but in other videos, they talk about table sugar, Gatorade, and candy.

Comment: You all know I don’t like using calories, but it’s something that can help you understand food quantity, so check this out. 1800 calories is about 8 pounds of apples. Chew on that for a bit.

That’s it. Eat a small amount of meat each day and then get down with all the sweet things you want. This is the new, illuminated way to lose weight and get healthy! It’s so amazing! Let’s talk about the supposed things the sugar diet can do for you.

Claims

The first thing to discuss is why it’s being pushed, according to the influencers making these claims. These are the main things I’ve heard mentioned. Let me know if you’ve heard any of these before:

Protein can mess with your insulin sensitivity, so keep it low
Fat makes you fat
Being skinny is the goal
Restriction isn’t sustainable
Sugar is the preferred fuel

I could write an article for each of these. Actually, I have made videos or covered all of these in my books. These points have been used and reused for decades to justify nutrition methods that have repeatedly failed. I would argue that:

Whole-food protein and fat in a meal help regulate insulin
Fat is not the cause of systemic obesity; carbs and industrial seed oils are
Skinny is absolutely not the goal; metabolic health and physical freedom is.
Restriction is required and ingrained into the human condition. It is inevitable.
Sugar is prioritized if you over-consume it. Priority and preference are not the same thing.

What does the Sugar Diet Do? (Supposedly)

Here are some of the benefits of the sugar diet and why they aren’t real.

It helps people binge less. Somehow, eating 8 times a day on sweet food with no nutrient value is empowering and enables people to maintain a healthy relationship with food.

It increases weight loss. Eating sugar doesn’t increase weight loss. Eating mostly sugar and not eating any real food causes weight loss that is likely 1. short-term and 2. purely a result of what amounts to self-starvation.

It works best on fat people. This is more scientific mumbo-jumbo. The sugar diet activates something called FGF21 that puts the body in “super fat burning” mode (so does keto btw). The only problem is that FGF21 is already highly active in obese people, and they have what is called FGF21 resistance. Their body doesn’t respond to it anymore. (Frontiers | Fibroblast growth factor 21 resistance is associated with body shape in patients with type 2 diabetes complicating hypertension)

It maintains muscle mass. There is no chance that an extreme low protein and fat diet, with minimal micronutrient bioavailability, high fiber content, and a resulting increase in oxidative stress, would do anything to preserve lean mass. The claim that muscle is preserved because eating sugar keeps the muscles full of glycogen is beyond ridiculous. But sugar increases insulin…. That only matters in the presence of abundant amino acids. No amino acids, no lean mass preservation. (The Truth about Building Muscle on a Ketogenic Diet | Coach Bronson)

It helps balance hormones. Long story short, we don’t want balanced hormones. We want properly reactive hormones. The sugar diet does not allow proper stimulation and homeostatic control of hormones to respond across various metabolic states. Everything is either extreme swings or complete inactivity. Chronic spikes of hormones and increased inflammatory responses will destroy endocrine function. This will negatively impact thyroid function, the immune system, muscle protein synthesis, thermo-regulation, and more.

It provides constant clean energy. Correction: It provides inconsistent, continually depleting, dirty energy. Sugar is the messiest fuel substrate besides alcohol. It doesn’t last. You must constantly eat more, and it absolutely impairs metabolic flexibility. Reducing fat intake and increasing sugar intake will wreck your ability to burn fat. Be prepared for the worst energy crashes of your life.

What Will Go Wrong

The one glaring issue I see in this diet is the sheer amount of food one has to eat to combat hunger. I can see someone easily eating 5-8 times a day to keep from crashing or feeling hungry all the time. That number of times per day significantly drives negative health outcomes. The amount of stress it puts on the body is massively detrimental to health.

More importantly, where is the nutrition? If you’re familiar with my latest book (Body Confident: Unlock the secret to strength, independence, and lifelong badassery using the F2 Method), then you understand the three tenets of good nutrition. These tenets give you something to measure your options against when deciding what to do for your nutrition.

Nutrient Density – How much nutrition is available
Bioavailability – How much of that nutrition can you access and use
Satiety – How well does the food you eat satisfy you naturally

If we compare the sugar diet to these basic requirements for good nutrition, how does it match up? Answer honestly.

…but mechanisms, FGF21, and other science gibberish

The sugar diet is not a biohack. It is a pseudo-science death trap. The minimum requirement for a biohack is that it doesn’t do more harm than good. The worst case for a biohack should be zero net gain. Anything that creates a negative return on your health is not a biohack; it’s a bad decision. Here are a few things to consider when weighing this diet against your overall health.

3 Biggest Risks

Glycemic Variability

What does eating sugar do to your blood glucose and insulin response? How does someone eating hundreds of grams of sugar a day, multiple times a day, maintain a steady blood glucose level?

They don’t.

Glycemic Variability (GV) is the measurement of shifts between high and low blood glucose that indicate the body’s ability to effectively manage it consistently. The higher the variability, the less functional your blood glucose management is.

In other words, if HbA1c is the average blood glucose over time, then GV tells us if that average is consistently in range or has lots of really high, highs and low, lows. The steadier your GV (lower number), the better your health.

Chronic conditions that are impacted by hyperglycemia and insulin resistance are exacerbated to a greater degree when GV is higher. GV has been shown to be a more accurate and predictive indicator of metabolic health than HbA1c.

This means it could be better for someone to be at an HbA1c of 6.0 with a low GV than someone with a 5.6 and a high GV. It’s that impactful. What happens when you start eating a bolus of sugar 8 times a day?

I have heard people talk about how low their glucose levels get on this kind of diet. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Hyper-activation of insulin to deal with intermittent bouts of high blood glucose is a horrible path to health.

Similar HbA1c, very different GV

Ref. (PDF) Characterizing Blood Glucose Variability Using New Metrics with Continuous Glucose Monitoring Data

Fructose and NAFLD

This is something I haven’t heard anyone talk about yet. Eating mostly fruit is a surefire way to give yourself non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Fructose is the main sugar in fruit. When you eat it, it bypasses everything and goes straight to your liver. The amount of fruit you’ll eat on this diet will greatly overload your liver’s ability to process fructose ,and you will very likely develop a fatty liver.

Ref. https://www.nutritionwithjudy.com/how-fructose-from-fruit-causes-fatty-liver

Oxidative Stress and Inflammation

Many people have become convinced that inflammation caused by the standard American diet is the root of just about every chronic disease in the world today. Taking that even further, the conclusion that many scientists and doctors have reached is that most inflammation in the body is caused by oxidative stress from excessive carbohydrate ingestion.

Inflammation is an immune response. When we eat food that causes damage, aka, oxidative stress, the body has to respond and repair the damage. When we are constantly doing damage, the body has to work overtime and eventually wears itself out. This is when things like insulin resistance, hypertension, hormone imbalances, auto-immune conditions, and many other ailments come from.

Ref. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1753-0407.70014

As a major part of the standard American diet, sugar is a direct contributor to oxidative stress. There is no better way to guarantee illness than to consume large amounts of sugar regularly. Increased aging, injury risk, cardiovascular disease, and a whole host of issues come directly from this action. There is no mechanism that somehow negates this damage and makes sugar consumption beneficial to health.

Want to kill the cells in your body faster? Eat more sugar. Cellular death, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and diabetic complications | Cell Death & Disease

Want constant joint pain and to increase your risk of arthritis? Eat more sugar. Added sugars and risk of osteoarthritis in adults: A case-control study based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2007–2018 – PMC

Want to develop gout? Eat more sugar. Recent advances in fructose intake and risk of hyperuricemia – ScienceDirect

Lipids (Triglycerides and HDL)

This shouldn’t be new information for most people reading my blog. One of the most immediate and damaging impacts of sugar in your diet, more so if it is your diet, is its effect on your lipid profile.

When you consume excessive sugar, especially fructose, your liver gets overloaded. It converts that excess sugar into fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis. That fat doesn’t just sit there; it gets pumped into your bloodstream as triglycerides. Elevated triglycerides are one of the most well-documented markers of increased risk for cardiovascular disease, pancreatitis, and metabolic syndrome.

High-Density Lipoprotein (HDL) plays a critical role in reverse cholesterol transport. It helps shuttle cholesterol away from your arteries and back to your liver to be reused or excreted. But when your diet is dominated by sugar and nearly devoid of healthy fats, your body downregulates HDL production. In other words, you lose your cleanup crew.

This pattern of high triglycerides and low HDL is a classic sign of insulin resistance and a predictive marker of cardiovascular risk. Ironically, the very people this diet claims to help (those with excess weight and metabolic dysfunction) are the ones who will suffer the most damage from this shift in lipid metabolism.

Gut Dysbiosis

I don’t want this to become a book just yet, so I’ll keep this one short. Chronic sugar intake causes gut dysbiosis (poor gut health, intestinal inflammation, and reduced microbiome diversity) and leaky gut. This can lead to numerous downstream health issues, particularly in the area of mental health.

What to Do?

I wouldn’t recommend a sugar diet, that’s for sure. It’s a distraction for people who insist on equating weight loss with health. If this were the story of Pinocchio, the sugar diet is Pleasure Island, and a lot of people are about to be turned into donkeys.

It’s Your Choice

This is what you’re looking at. Is the risk worth the reward? Is weight loss even a reward?

STOP FALLING FOR THIS STUFF

Stick with the basics, and you will always come out on top. Slow progress is better than screwing yourself up and adding more recovery time to your journey.