"Sugar flu"

Has anyone at some point cut way back on sugar in their diet, and experienced headaches or anything? Or moving forward, any other dietary fluctuations that caused them? I read about this on Mark Sisson's blog (Primal Blueprint etc.)
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Are you cutting out just sugar or carbs all together? I've done a ketogenic diet (very low carb) at times and the first couple days can be kind of rough but after that you'll feel much better.
Lemon water + chicken broth (the sodium content is awesome) helped a ton.
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Actually this is something that I intuitively believe in, even though I hadn't read any science to back it up.
Protein, for example, sparks a significant insulin response, which means certain arguments I've read, which might or might not be wrong, are still non sequiturs. You know the type of people that get enraged when they year there are large concentrations of dihydrogen monoxide in our city water supplies.
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You have to do a lot of work to separate the wheat from the chafe, especially in a relatively "young" field such as nutrition research (where admittedly progress is retarded by extremely powerful and greedy corporate special interests.)
This cannot be understated. When it comes to fitness and health just "googling" is not a good strategy. Easily 85% of the research is questionable, if not flat out wrong.
Not sure about the sugar thing. You made the change a year ago and have been getting headaches ever since? Maybe there are other micronutrient deficiencies that have occurred as a result of the change?
One thing I can pretty firmly hang my hat on though is that for the average person, sugar is bad. Your not a body builder looking to take advantage of insulin spikes to shuttle nutrients into cells, or to use insulin-like growth factor to promote musclar hypertrophy. You aren't hitting timing windows, or balances your macros (I'm not a IIFYM's guy, that shit is bogus and stupid, but macro's are important to use as a concept, not as a bible). You just like how it tastes. And your energy requirements, meal composition, ect don't reflect using sugar's properties to your advantage. That being said, does it really matter for you? Probably not, but let's not pervert the research and bend it to justify our uses for it. Like I always tell clients, know it for what it is, and be comfortable accepting that. Stop trying to justify it. It's OK to like sweet foods, but like all things in life, moderation.
Also, protein does cause in insulin spike, but think of it in context. Look at the amount of insulin released, and then examine what insulin is designed to do specifically. To super oversimplify things, insulin in a transport hormone. Amino acids cannot cross the cellular membrane without the aid of insulin and other transport mediators.
The difference is, when glucose cannot be metabolized immediately or stored as glycogen, it has to be converted into triglycerides to be stored as fat. Further, protein loses about 1/3rd of it's caloric value during digestion, if amino acids cannot be used, the process of turning them into sugars is lengthy and energy consuming, and then turning those sugars into fats...adsfjoisaf enough. I'm done writing papers on this, they already exist. Sugar is bad. Jeff, you've already etched the neural path into your brain for the need for sugar. Those connections cannot be undone, since you've subsided on sugar for so long. Therefore, you will experience lifetime withdrawal, and very likely withdrawal headaches if that pathway doesn't receive that electrical stimulation. Putting 2 stevias into your coffee won't kill you. It won't make you fat. You'll be fine. It'll get rid of your headache, just "medicate" as necessary, not more. Be conscious of your sugar intake, and try not to mix sugar with fats, the ultimate in lipid storage.
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Your reduction of sugar and headaches could be caused by very many things. Most likely it's a blood sugar crash and lack of energy as your body attempts to transition over to using more appropriate fuels.
You could be dehydrated as well. You could be short on sleep as well. There are ALOT of things going on in the body and pinpointing the cause(s) of things ends up becoming a scientific experiment to keep certain variables the same while changing others.
It's like every scientific experiment conducted - only the subject is your body and you are the experimenter.
RTL
I have some background in biochemistry, and I have read a fair amount on evolutionary biology. One thing I've learned for sure is that this stuff is fucking complicated. There are few simple answers when it comes to our diet and differences among us.
On the one hand, our "advanced" evolution as humans has allowed us to get into trouble with our diet, beyond what evolution can cope with in the time required. (Given a few million years or so with a sugary diet we'd adapt just fine, albeit with a fair amount of suffering in the mean time. Evolution doesn't care about suffering.) On the other hand, it also might allow us to optimize our diet beyond what evolution can provide in the time required, beyond mere survival and reproduction. If we can figure it out.