The fogginess that the author describes sounds like the 'keto-flu'. But if he was eating carbs from vegetables and fruits, he shouldn't have noticed this.<p>I also found this odd:
"I missed the sugar and milk in my coffee "
Wait, why were you eliminating milk? Sure it contains some sugars naturally, but they aren't "refined sugar" that the article is demonizing.<p>The mental clarity and focus he describes are very likely due to the increased quality of sleep. I have no explanation for why his sleep improved.<p>My own anecdote is that I ate a high fat, super-low carb diet for about a year, and one of the primary motivations was that one of my friends couldn't stop talking about the mental improvements (calmness, focus, short-term memory). Sadly, I experienced none of that. It makes me think that either it is placebo, or sugar/carbs really does affect <i>some</i> people badly, but others not so much. I will say that I found loosing weight to be effortless when eating that way (in fact I had to go off it when I wanted to gain some weight).<p>Finally, I hate it when people point out things like "(a large Big Mac meal deal has 85 grams of sugar—236% of your daily allowance). That means if I were to escape refined sugar, I was going to have to spend more time at home cooking fresh foods than I was used to. " but then ignore the breakdown:<p><pre><code> Big Mac: 9g of sugar
Medium Fries: 0g of sugar
Large Coke-classic: 76g of sugar.
</code></pre>
In other words, you don't need to cook more fresh foods, you could just get diet coke and double down on fries to get the calories you need without the sugar.<p>None of this is meant to say "No, we should all eat lots of sugar". I get that in the quantities that most people eat sugar, it's way too much. But I'm frustrated that we can't have an honest conversation about sugar and how it ought to be consumed. My personal opinion is that people should in general just stop drinking regular soda. If people did that, I suspect a fair amount of our sugar-consumption problems would just stop.