My mother (1973, Edinburgh) bought "Pure, White, and Deadly," and we all read it. I was ten or so. Yudkin attacked white flour, white (processed) fat, and above all white sugar. It made perfect sense to us all, and cutting back on sugar became a slow, yet consistent part of our lifestyle. We never ate that much anyhow. I stopped eating sugar entirely at 15. I still recall the book's cover.
Edit: it took me a lot longer to cut fruit juice from our diet. I was so convinced by that "natural" label. Until I realized my daughter, who'd drank a lot of juice growing up, was addicted to sugar. Then we cut it out. My other kids, not addicted. I was fooled for so long...
The sugar industry has a lot to answer for. It is IMO comparable to the tobacco industry's suppression of cancer studies. Yet worse, because the effects of high-sugar diets are doing more damage, to more people, and last generations.
Think of the hundreds of millions of children who have eaten high sugar diets since they were babies... lifelong damage to their health. A hundred years of damage, these executives and corrupt scientists caused.
I tried arguing the dangers of concentrated fruit sweeteners not so long ago.
There was some debate about whether candy prices were too low.. But the truth is folks get much more sugar from supposedly "healthy" items in the form of fruit juice and concentrates. It is in the bread most folks eat (and sometimes whole grain bread is higher to make it more palletable), they put it in savory foods, and fruit juices and people put it in their coffee and tea. Granola bars and yogurts and a myriad of other supposedly healthy things? High sugar. It would be one thing if the sugar was simply what was contained in the fruit, but often it is above that.
It is much better to eat the piece of fruit than drink some juice - and I think if folks started drinking non-sweetened drinks and quit adding it to so much food (expecially commercially prepared food) it would help quite a bit. Personally, I lost weight after doing the adjustment. My only normal, daily beverages are black coffee or water and have been for years.
The thing is that you do somewhat miss the sugar at first, but I didn't find it any worse than missing some foods after moving countries. Over time, your tastes adjust and it isn't a bad thing.
I wonder if the tolerance, and then the love, of highly sweet things is acquired. And mostly probably, it is acquired when one is a child.
I have met and worked with many East Asians and Europeans who came to American in their 20's or older. Almost everyone of them thought American pastry and deserts are unbearably sweet. Most of them shun from soda drinks and other "food" containing high amounts of sugar. If they drink soda, they choose low- or zero-sugar kinds.
Related or not, a big percentage of American look overweight when compared to Europeans and East Asians.
When you say you don't eat sugar, what does that mean? Do you eat fruit? Bread? Things that metabolize to sugar -- potatoes, squash, tomatoes, grapes, watermelon, barbecue sauce etc. Do you ever indulge in chocolate cake? What about wine or beer?
I just find the term "sugar" to be extremely vague when 50% of foods metabolize to sugar...
well the lie has recently morphed into the laws slowing and prohibiting soda sales in schools and such all the while promoting juice which can be worse in many cases because people assume its healthy and you cannot over drink because of that
I don't get this argument. What do you expect the sugar industry to do, argue for consuming less sugar?
It is not the industry's obligation to care for your nutritional well-being. It is the obligation of parents and teachers to be informed and teach kids what good food is. That starts with stopping to watch commercials. Avoiding processed foods in the grocery store and cheap restaurants. Not buying products that have more than 5 ingredients, and above all contain high fructose corn syrup.
Buying vegetables and fruit at farmer's markets. Learning again that there are seasons, and that there is no need to buy apples in spring or summer (when they have to be kept in coolers for half a year, or imported from the other hemisphere). Learning again that good products can often be recognized through the nose rather than the eye. Spending time on small-scale farms. Reducing meat intake to 1-2 a week. Consuming fresh water rather than salt water fish (which are harvested beyond sustainability and have led a multitude of fisheries to go extinct already). Preparing food by hand, even if it is "unhealthy" food like french fries (made from potatoes, e.g. in an oven with a bit of olive oil), pancakes (milk, egg, flour - no need to buy this as a product) or cakes (made just with flour, yeast, milk, eggs, and sugar).
Just switch off television to get back common sense.
It's only lifelong damage if you don't change your diet and lifestyle. The world is filled with people who were morbidly obese and have made the changes necessary to reverse the damage and live far more healthy lives now.
The way you put it, it sounds like an irreversible course akin to a death sentence, which it most certainly is not.
If you ask people to this day, they'll say Atkins died of his own diet. That was actually a total lie run by Harpers magazine. They corrected the mistake in the following edition, but the damage had been done.
Although there is little evidence to support it, the running conspiracy theory is that PR people in various arms of the food industry paid for that article.
Edit: Adkins died because he slipped on a piece of ice during a snow storm and cracked his skull.
Ancel Keys was certainly wrong when it came to sugars vs fats. However, he did live to be 100... so there's got to be at least some merit to his ideas, such as the Mediterranean diet, etc.
Isn't the merit of the Mediterranean mainly about increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids through increased consumption of high-fat low-carb foods such as fish, green leafy vegetables, olives, cheeses and olive oils?
Which is the complete opposite of low-fat high-carb diet recommended by Keys?
I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind.
Recently in the last 3 months I gave up sugar, hard core, it's hard but the benefits are out of this world.
I was healthy and active. I ate healthy, or so I thought. Boy was I wrong and mis informed.
I had heard theories so I decided to check them out. I went all out to avoid sugar for a couple of weeks just to see. It was amazing.
I have lost 20 pounds that I didn't think was possible, I think better, I sleep better and I eat way less. I have way more energy, like I drank 5 cups of coffee all the time. I don't fade in the afternoon.
Those of you looking for a way to get more energy and focus at work, especially those working long hours in startups. I encourage you to go all out to reduce sugar intake to as little as possible. Of course eat whole fruits those are ok.
Best thing I have ever done in my life.
There's a saying "those on high sugar diets don't know what it feels like to be sugar free." It feels amazing. Try it. At least once in your life. You won't go back .
A really smart guy said to me once something like, “if you are smart and have money and you don't eat well then you are not smart”. I can't remember the exact quote but the sentiment really stuck with me.
Look I'm no expert but I'm telling you the results are outrageous. Please do your own research as I only really have a school boy understanding of how this affects the body.
My skin cleared up, my ailments all disappeared, I no longer snore, my wife says I radiate energy and my skin glows. People notice that my eyes are white and bright. My thinking is clear and alert.
I run up a big hill occasionally, a massive one, I did it yesterday, I broke a sweat but my body was working and I got to the top in record time with minimal effort. I had been training for years and never could match that performance. It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.
What do I eat?
I will lose some people here, but honestly, whole fruit, salad, no dressing, chicken,steak,salmon and WATER. That's it. I said it was hard but I went 100% zero sugar. Real Food. Nothing in a box nothing processed. I now love this food more than anything.
Why is whole fruit ok?
My understanding is the fibre tells your body when to stop eating. It's a natural way to tell you that you've had enough. If the grapefruit it too sweet, don't eat it. Your body is telling you something. Listen to it
Sugar inflames your body, it gives you a rush, then a crash, then it makes you hungry. Sugar makes you eat more. It makes you swing up and down.
Getting off sugar is hard, you will have withdrawals. They are not pleasant.
My appetite and palette has changed for the better, I love food now, I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable, that's a massive change for me. I eat way less I'm spending less money.
Medically all the little things I was thinking of going to the doctor about have completely gone.
3 months in, a lifetime ahead of positive changes.
sorry if this was long and ranty and a bit smug :-)
And just to show that the other way works as well:
Your diet would be havok for my insides. I simply cannot digest fat from meat very well. I'm mostly vegetarian, and eat a lot of legumes and dairy and grains and bread, vegetables and the occasional fruit. I eat fish (trout, usually) once a week for health purposes. I usually only drink water or black coffee. My main mode of transportation are my feet.
I also generally skip breakfast, possibly have a small snack or two during the day, and eat most of my food late in the day when I'm most hungry. I eat candy occasionally. I cook with butter and cream.
And it is strange that I find much of the same benefits as you. I still snore (obviously not due to weight loss). My skin had no change, but I lost weight. I feel physically better. I now like more 'healthy' foods. Soda is really syrupy most of the time - I can occasionally have some when eating, but not by itself (been like that for years).
I'm years into this lifestyle. It took years to tweak it to where it is now - and each tweak had weight loss. I found you can get over cravings for certain sorts of foods (outside of hormones, that is, but even that gets changed some), and you can learn to like new ones. It is basically exposure, though I still dislike eggplant.
I really like this response and I do truly believe that cutting out or minimizing sugar is a truly beneficial thing.
But when I got to this:
> I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable
I had a hard time taking the rest of your comment seriously. I can understand it being too sweet to your now adjusted taste buds, but calling it the most disgusting thing imaginable is just plain wrong.
Given that you call it 'soda', you're probably American... in which case, American sodas are disgusting, because they're made with HFCS instead of sugar. :)
It's still 'sugars', but it's not 'sugar' as the public calls it. I'm someone who eats too much sweet, sweet sugar, and I can't drink an American soda.
+1 to this. I recently just started toying with the idea of going sugar free and ketogenic... so I started trying foods without many carbs but wasn't even committed to it. All of a sudden I noticed I had lost 5-7 pounds in 3-4 weeks. So I got excited and kept it up... I'm not losing weight at the same rate but now about 2-3 months in and I'm down about 25 pounds. It's ridiculous.
I haven't noticed the energy or clarity improvements in myself and my wife hasn't seen that in me either. That may be due to sleep as I'm going to school full-time, training for the Chicago Marathon, and working full-time. Given all that maybe it's just great that I can function. :)
Either way! The changes have been amazing and dramatic. My biggest problem now is that I need to buy a whole new wardrobe but I can't yet because I think I still have another 15 pounds I'll blow through by Christmas. I finally feel in control of my weight and it's the best.
No, man, it's important to share these ideas. My energy levels jumped when I changed my lunches from carbs&protein (pasta, potato etc) to salads with protein.
You can put vinegar, salt and a dash of olive oil as seasoning into a salads - still no sugars.
I have had some pretty nasty neurological symptoms due to invasive intracellular infections of the CNS, and been whole-food paleo-like keto diet for more than 1 year now with no exceptions, and I feel damn great, compared to before that is.
>It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.
Can't say I agree with this part. If you're doing any kind of intensive cardio work sugars are essential if you want to keep doing it for any long period of time. The harder you're going the quicker you'll want to start eating carbs, be it in gels/fruit (Dates are fantastic for this).
You might actually just have got better, or maybe just might be well rested after a period of over training.
I weaned myself off sugar once too. It was hard. It took about two weeks before the intense cravings subsided, and then everything tasted sweeter. I was getting a sugar high from eating carrots. It was awesome.
Later, though, I started working at tech companies that had catered food, so I didn't control my diet anymore. It's funny how much better I feel when I can choose my own diet. I think I'll make a point of avoiding sugary foods again.
Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery? I just had a slice of a lovely honey dew melon. It was like drinking sugar syrup. I'm pretty sure it was bad for me. Surely the advice should be to not eat too many sugary fruits either, especially not the modern breeds that are much sweeter than more traditional varieties.
> Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery?
In principle it's not, except perhaps for a glass of water. Most sweet fruits tend to have much more moisture than celery.
An unstated assumption that may come with your question is that just like eating fruit is equivalent to eating sugar + celery, it would also be the same to eat sugar, then celery. This is not the case. The fiber and water in the fruit make for phisical barriers that slow down digestive enzimes from reaching the sugar molecules in it. This makes for a steadier release of energy over a longer period of time; the exact opposite of the well known 'sugar rush' phenomenon. [1]
Then there is the issue that most people, left to their own devices, will eat too much of sugar and too little of the other two.
[1] I don't have the appropriate literature at hand, but this was explained to me by a really close person who's been a Diabetes-I survivor for 21 years and counting. His report is that foodstuffs with identical glycemic indexes do cause different, noticeable physiologic responses based on the amount of fiber in them.
Generally, the advice is that fruit is good for you primarily because of the quantity of fibre it contains. I seem to recall Robert Lustig discussing this point. Fibre keeps sugar in your gut longer, which in turn means it's broken down by bacteria there rather than having to be broken down by your liver. It was in this talk he gave, at around 1hr 13min 52sec or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
There's something to be said about eating whole foods rather than eating their refined components individually. Something about the reactions that occur when things are consumed in the form your body expects, together, rather than purified and separated. Some things we call "antioxidants" have the opposite effect when purified and eaten separately from the foods the occur in.
>It just seems like it's everywhere.
That is precisely the problem, actually. It isn't so much that folks are eating pounds or kilos of sweets daily, it is that we find sugar in everything - even if we wouldn't guessed there was added sugar. Food companies do this for a myriad of reasons, usually backed with research on taste. It is really hard to avoid.
I'm not as low-sugar as some of the people here. I figure if I'm eating chocolate, I'm eating chocolate occasionally and damn the sugar. I know there is sugar in that. Occasionally I'll have some daily, but it doesn't make up much of my diet, and that is what I'm much more concerned about. My base diet being fairly healthy.
I simply don't eat much flavored yogurt except as an occasional snack. Many people, however, solve this by buying plain, unsugared yogurt and simply adding in fruit.
Red sauces and other such things - make what you can at home and freeze some of it for later use. Or start reading ingredients lists carefully. It would be helpful if nutrition labels specified the amount of sugar added (regardless of source), but until then, labels and a lessened reliance on pre-made foods.
Natural yogurt should be relatively easy to find. Add some real fruit if it's too dull for you (after a while it's not).
Basically try not to eat processed stuff. Sure, you're not going to die if you eat a pizza here and there, but the baseline should be to eat as much real food as possible, as opposed to processed food. Even for pizza, you could find a place which uses fresh ingredients as oppose to a big franchise where everything is heavily processed and frozen. Finally, give it a try to make your own pizza/yogurt/etc. It can be a lot of fun.
For an average height, the span between the lowest non-over-or-underweight weight and the highest is a lot more than 20 pounds, and being a bit into the overweight range doesn't automatically make you unhealthy either.
That's not quite correct. The CDC recommends a body fat percentage between 18% to 25%, and it's generally acknowledged that athletes can drop down to around 5%-6% without adverse effects. So, given those numbers, most healthy adults are carrying at least 20 pounds that they could safely lose.
Have you cut back on carbohydrates too? I'm just curious, since I've eliminated sugary drinks, but I find it harder to cut back on bread, pasta and so on.
Well, we do know that fructose is worse than glucose in terms of its effects on your body because it takes an extra processing step that can cause other complications.
This is anecdotal, but I personally feel better when I eat rice than when I eat wheat, though I don't have celiac disease. It would be nice if nutritionists looked into carbs as much as they've looked into fats.
What kind of sugar were you eating? Like cookies, cake, pop, ice cream? I don't have any of those foods in my home. I don't buy high sugar foods. So, I'm kind of confused what you consider to be a high sugar diet. How did you get that much sugar in?
Most likely pop. If you eat out a lot, cheap restaurants will shame you into buying huge unhealthy drinks, unless you want to drink water from a tiny dixie cup.
It's pretty easy to get a lot of sugar in your entre if you eat at Chili's or Panda Express or anywhere else that uses excessive BBQ sauce.
And then there's the fact that Snickers would like you to think it will satisfy your hunger. At least it has peanuts in it...
* Avoid processed anything. Most especially soft/fizzy drinks, baked goods, candy, fruit drinks, jams, jellies, syrups, most processed cereals.
* Eat fresh vegetables, some fruit, legumes. Whole grains for breakfast (rolled or steel-cut oats). Meat, eggs, and dairy if they're in your diet.
* Check breads and other products for added sugar, in all forms: sugar, molasses (often added to "rye" breads as colouring), caramel colour or flavour, honey, rice syrup, agave nectar (nearly pure fructose), corn syrup, HFCS, concentrated apple juice, etc., etc.
Generally, Michael Pollan's guidance in The Omnivor's Dilemma is good: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Many strength training books have good guidance on nutrition (contrast with cardiovascular fitness, though there are exceptions). I'll recommend The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Schuler, Cosgrove, & Forsythe) specifically as it includes a large section on nutrition and meal planning. The fitness advice is also generally applicable to men, though there is a companion title on that topic specifically -- its nutritional advice is similar though briefer.
I agree, especially industrial sugar is bad food, and artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes are even worse.
Sugar and its derivatives are massively overused in todays cheaply processed food chains.
Scientists paid off by industry to make people look the other way, who then become head of some Governmental departments and agencies advising the world on whatever it was they were paid off for or have a conflict of interest in and the door keeps revolving...
It's a wonder we believe anything at all after the amount of lies and propaganda we're fed only to find out it's false... or are they lying now? Now we're being fed information that it's the sugar industry at fault and not the fat industry, while we have fad diets that are high fat, low carb, low sugar, because carbs and sugar are bad and fat isn't bad at all allegedly. Who is making the money from the increased fat sales and decreased sugar sales? Is it because sugar is cutting into their bottom line too much and fat is in cheap supply?
Why do we continue to believe the shit that pours out of the mouths of big agriculture and the nutrition agencies as if they haven't been feeding us bullshit for the past 50 years in aid of increasing profit. They don't give a shit about the consumer, they give a shit about whatever fuels the greatest growth in profits.
So this is why I have issue believing anything that any of them have to say about anything because it's all underhanded subterfuge and manipulation, with no end in sight.
As far as the actual food sales, most of the money winds up in the same small set of hands regardless of which fad is currently popular. They'll resist trends that switch from high-margin to low-margin foods, but only until they've figured out how to alter the low-margin food to make it high-margin.
The secondary money-grab is from the food-fad industry. All of the books, all of the websites, all of the memberships, all churning out recipes and advice and misinformation, depends on constant change in what's considered "good". Without constant change, their markets would dry up to a trickle. It's just like the fashion industry; if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed. So instead we have a constant rotation of the fashion trends. (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)
The longer I live, the more I value the lessons I learned from my Grandparents:
- Don't listen to the shit you hear in the media, it's all self serving. Do your own research, that way it serves your need, not anyone elses.
- Stay out of the centre aisles at the grocery store. Buy simple ingredients. Make it yourself. If you can't grow it yourself or kill it, you probably shouldn't be eating it.
- Do the research, buy it once, buy it right. Quality will always beat quantity in the long run. Buy something you can repair yourself over something replaceable.
> if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed
A few of us got stuck at a moment in time and never really updated... a decent pair of hard wearing jeans and an endless supply of decent t-shirts that last more than a few months of continuous wear and a decent pair of solid, dependable boots. You may be able to tell that the fashion industry doesn't make a whole ton of money out of me. Don't care, lol.
It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.
Sometime I wonder if chemicals from bottled water, radiation from Cellular/Wifi/Bluetooth pose health risks and we will find it out decades later.
There are a lot of unknowns. Chances are it's not going to be Bluetooth, but some toothpaste additive, cellphone case sealant, or something else nobody really thought about that we are going to look back and cringe.
About 9 months ago I stopped using toothpaste (my Dentist said it was fine) because I read the canker sores I had been getting for years and years were caused by an additive in tooth paste: Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). Sure enough, I have not had a single canker sore since I stopped using tooth paste!
I always assumed it would be the opposite: something that a lot of people already recognize as being dangerous, but which lacked concrete evidence demonstrating how dangerous it is. So my candidates for a future "omg we have to stop this" are:
- bad posture at office jobs (probably mandated adjustable standing desks in the future)
- stress from a long, high-traffic commute
- insufficient sleep
- per the article, high-sugar foods. EDIT: technically, a high-sugar diet. Part of the problem is that no one unit of sugar by itself is the problem, so you can't point to any one food as the culprit.
Agreed! But we cannot ignore potential visible risks while worrying about unknown risks.
I use organic/natural exclusively. Try to model my life closed to simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back. I also diversify things I consume. Someone once posted on HN: His grandpa told him everything is poison, so use everything in moderation. I really liked this recommendation.
However it is very difficult to prevent all the radio waves in today's world as much as you try. Maybe it's not harmful but we won't find out for decades.
Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk. You can stand inside the path of a microwave communication dish and receive many orders of magnitude more radiation, and what it'll do is make you warm. That's it. Soviet soldiers used to do that in Siberia to keep themselves warm, and the only risk is the dish outputting too much power and cooking you instead.
The first day in radar class the instructor put a piece of steel wool in front of a small dish and it instantly melted white and dropped molten metal onto the floor.
It always made me nervous when the class goofballs turned the horns on other people so you could feel the microwaves.
Goofball 1: 'accidentally' radiates goofball 2
Goofball 2: What? What are you doing? Oh, I'll show you - just watch me increase the power on this baby...
It turns out your testicles and eyes are a bad place to receive microwaves.
I submit to anyone thinking of attempting this: you are probably going to get the power calculations wrong and cooking human cells is not fun at all.
I mostly agree with you. There are edge cases with microwave towers that can lead to vision loss as your eyes heat up, but don't dump heat very well. Further, modern cellphones don't operate in the same bands as old radio-waves.
However, this stuff is very likely to be safe at cellphone usage levels.
Some people wonder if one of our cells have a process to check the DNA runs an electric current through the molecule. There is a possibility that electromagnetic fields could distrupt this. This might obviously be bollocks but to say it's only heat output is also wrong...
Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.
I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.
If the past is any indiction, we probably interact with several things on a daily basis that people 100 years from now wouldn't go near for anything short of crazy amounts of money, or with protective gear.
I think it's more likely that the behavioral patterns created by our constant engagement to mobile devices will carry more adverse effects to our mental and physical health than any mobile device radiation.
Fortunately we completely understand light; if you actually wonder about radio and want to bring it out of the realm of mystery potentially hiding dark magic, learn some basic quantum mechanics. As to what you ingest, learn how its made and understand the basic chemistry of the end product. No label gives insight into that, its just alot of research.
Sure, systematic disinformation campaigns are real, but in 2016 those don't eliminate the also very real and verifiable scientific knowledge.
I am sorry to inform you that we don't completely understand anything at all. We barely understand the world and universe around us. To say that we completely understand anything is a fallacy. Also with the scientific method, nothing is set in stone as fact. Anything can change our understand at anytime.
It's going to be smartphone usage itself, especially among children. We are going to look back and cringe at kids screen-holing (this is the term me and my girlfriend use to describe it, similar to k-holing, and in social settings, assholing) at will. A whole generation's minds unprotected from the screen! It's gross.
You can count flurochemicals as one. Ubiquitous in the water supply. No good way for water treatment nor the human body to remove them. Proven harm. Not much discussion today.
Also re toothpaste additive: Colgate Total still uses triclosan, which has been removed from pretty much every other product already and declared harmful by the FDA.
"For some consumer products, there is evidence that triclosan provides a benefit. In 1997, FDA reviewed extensive effectiveness data on triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste. The evidence showed that triclosan in that product was effective in preventing gingivitis."
There are so many things that we already have fairly strong evidence to worry about in our foods alone: Trans fats in all of our food (finally will be banned in a couple years), BPA all over our food containers, BPA-like mystery substances in all the BPA-free food containers, BPA gets absorbed in our skin when we touch receipts, constant listeria outbreaks, constant e coli found in factory farmed beef, homogenized milk damages the fat molecules, fracking chemicals in our drinking water, artificial sweeteners and their effects on our gut bacteria, preservatives and their effect on our gut bacteria, dyes like caramel coloring, glyphosate all over our fruits and vegetables.
The documentary "Fed Up" is about sugar and was the first time I was made aware there is no daily RDA % for sugar on nutrition labels. They just have the grams. They lobbied very hard to make it that way, because having "4700%" for a daily RDA wouldn't look very good!
The WHO recommends a 50g daily limit of sugar (the FDA's RDA for total carbs is 300g). A single 16oz Coke will put you over the limit. Even as someone who eats relatively clean, it's hard for me to stay under 50g over the course of an entire day.
True, but there is carb count and percentages on labels and it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.
The point isn't that it's hard to figure out. It's that it's harder than everything else that might cause health issues. They deliberately hid things that might look bad to line their own pockets.
How many people know how many carbs are recommended daily? How many know how much sodium is recommended daily? Which of those 2 can you look at a package and be reasonably informed about with no other information?
It's apparently a trick question, as the new labeling is at least partially addressing this.
> it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.
You are probably getting more sugar from things you don't think should be full of sugar than you think. US tastes have skewed to sweet so far that sugar is stuffed in everything.
I imagine people also get insensitivized to such labels. It can be quite hard to comprehend that a big soda can contain more than a meals worth of energy, especially given how you can drink one with lunch and still be hungry at dinner.
My wife and I rewatch the obligatory Lustig lecture about once a month to re-anger ourselves at sugar. Nothing motivates like a bit of biochemistry mixed in with political intrigue.
My wife is having kidney issues which she believes is associated with her nearly daily intake of Advil, but I had no idea that fructose was also a major potential factor in kidney disease. She consumes about 24 oz of soda per day, which is about 60% fructose. So it looks like it was a double-whammy, Advil + fructose has destroyed her kidney function.
This lecture is amazing. I sort of put some of it in the background the first time I watched it, but now I want to delve deeper into it, so thanks for bringing this up. For people who haven't seen it, IMO, it's a real eye opener. I intend to verify a lot more of the science he explains myself as the industry--and let's face it, it's certainly not alone in this--is hardly trustworthy. Interesting how most--if not all--issues of science and technology boil down to trust.
The problem is Lustig is on the far end of the spectrum on anti-sugar. No added sugars? Sure, I buy that. Labelling fructose as a poison simply because it is directly metabolized in the liver is stretch. I'm not going to worry that my kids are eating berries because of their fructose content.
In nature, fructose is almost always found in conjuction with fiber. For example, fruits and vegetables. This combination of sugar and fiber tempers the impact on the body. In contrast, many processed foods have added sugar and reduced fiber content.
Clearly you didn't fully understand what lustig is saying. Its not the fact that fructose is metabolized in the liver that is problematic - its the effects of the process that are horrible and poisonouos.
Fructose and sucrose are chemically identical (as in, the same) except that sucrose has an extra glucose attached, which breaks off in the stomach. Fructose tends to come in fruit, surrounded by fibre, which arguably reduces its cost to our bodies. Arguably, I say, because modern fruit is so extremely high in fructose, and because the sugar then hits the lower intestine where it messes up your bioflora, which affects your immune system and so on.
Would you be that sanguine about your kids tossing back a shot of vodka every day? If you take Lustig's analysis of fructose's effect on the liver at face value, you should treat them the same.
I think after the last few years of these kinds of things coming out, the takeaway is pretty simple: be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
Don't eat too much food. Limit processed foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Eat a large variety of foods. Be active.
These rudimentary guidelines are clearly difficult for a lot of people to follow, but I think it's pretty easy to avoid negative diet effects by just doing what most people intuitively know as the right thing, even if we consume some of all types of food. It seems to me this is more about self-control and effort level than any scientific knowledge, at this point.
Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently. Similarly, there was never a wide range of foods available. I'm not sure we've got enough evidence to say that changing our diet to include lots of fruit and a wide variety of foods is safe. The encouragement to do this is coming from large governing bodies.
I'm off to eat nothing but turnips for a year and get scurvy :-)
not to mention most fruits have been selectively bred/genetically engineered to have much higher sugar content than they did when we evolved to eat them seasonally
> be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
I agree with the latter part, but what's wrong with health institutions recommendations? they look pretty sensible to me. I'm much more skeptical of advice from 'health gurus' that seem to have increasing influence.
“be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible”
That's terrible advice. "Common sense" is what happens when popularly accepted ideas escape proper scientific scrutiny, and that's exactly how we wound up here.
I wonder if this has anything to do with my observation that it's ridiculously hard to find whole fat yogurt, especially whole fat Greek yogurt (!), in most grocery stores in the Boston area. Only specialist and high-end stores such as Whole Foods keep them in stock, whereas the proles get stuck with the sweetened, low-fat versions that contain up to 30 grams of sugar per serving.
Boston area? Oh, I may be about to make you very happy then, especially if you like real Greek yogurt. Sophia's Greek Pantry in Belmont makes the best yogurt I've had outside of Greece. You have to enjoy a good, tangy yogurt, and it will ruin you for all other yogurts. It's best (IMO) with a little bit of good honey drizzled on top.
I mean, this stuff is so thick that you can hardly shake it off the spoon, no sugar, and not too much fat; just a nice protein gel as the yogurt gods intended.
Counter-anecdata: I am able to find plain, whole milk yogurt pretty much at any grocery store I visit out in the Natick area (Natick + adjacent towns). Occasionally they are sold out but it's rare. I certainly don't think it is ridiculously hard.
Maybe my observation has another plausible explanation: everyone is buying the whole fat yogurt, so they're constantly sold out! If true, brings up another question though...why do Shaw's and Stop & Shop keep stocking items that don't sell?
Try making it yourself. I use a variety that ferments at room temperature (Caspian Sea): just add some left-over yogurt from the last batch to a fresh carton of milk, stir, and wait 12 hours.
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive.
Good thing there is no collusion between big industry and paid off scientists like Willie Soon to direct the narrative around things these days.</sarcasm>
"It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion"
Has the acceptance policy for prominent journals improved that we're sure this is not happening now? I have suspicions that this is likely still happening more frequently then we might expect (i.e. pharmaceutical trials, etc.).
The basic issue is that reviews are just looking for glaring problems in the presentation. To really test an article one has to replicate the experiment from the ground up. And these days thats damn hard and expensive to do.
As indicated in the article, journals at the time often didn't require scientists to disclose their sources of funding, whereas they're now extremely strict about full financial disclosure. You can still get published in a prominent journal with a tricky source of funding, but it will be a matter of public record, and your results will (in theory) be more heavily scrutinized.
What if this backlash against Sugar is as extreme as the initial marketing? What if 50 years on, people come back to say, "the generation that endlessly promoted tasteless food and took away the sweetness". Is there a proper study on the effect of eating a sweet chocolate everytime you feel like it, to some kind of happiness? Everyone just sees to be treating this as a magical wand... while still irrationally giving in to a lot of other hyped up food.
Possible but unlikely. For one, you can get lots of tasty food by reintroducing more dietary fat. One of the main culprits for the over reliance on sugar for tastiness in the first place was the focus on reducing fat intake.
In my experience, tasteless food and sweet food are positively, not negatively correlated. The blandest food (lowfat yogurt) is often the sweetest while the tastiest food (ribeye steak) has no sweetness at all.=.
Follow the money and you will find the motive for what you're being told. There is a reason you're being told what you are and don't believe that it's for your own good. These industries and agencies don't care about what's good for you, they are self serving and only care about what's good for them. You're just the vessel supplying the cash they're after.
I wonder that sometimes about seat belt laws and stop smoking campaigns. Is it the insurance companies that lobbied for and promote these ideas, or is it some altruistic group that actually cares about my well being instead of profits?
There have been studies showing that one, roads that "Look hard" instead of the wide & straight & obstacle-free variety make drivers slow down and pay more attention. I forgot what the influence on accident rate is. Two, same without seat belts, people drive more slowly.
That said, I think overall seat belts are better to have, and we can't redo our highways in a manner that makes people drive more carefully. Instead we need to and do turn the wheel of progress faster and head towards AI drivers on even "cleaner" roads. The planet is way too crowded for idyllic driving pleasure, especially since humans gravitate towards population centers. We can't have the "free driving" of former days back in most places.
From the article I can't tell if the sugar industry hid or falsified data.
There are at least two ways you can look at this. Imagine if the sugar industry thinks they are getting a bad rap about heart disease, and want to get researchers to study the link and show that they aren't to blame. Conversely, maybe they knew there was a link and were paying researchers to downplay it (or worse).
I feel like this article just points out that the sugar industry funded research, but it never points to actual misinformation that resulted from it -- or did I miss it?
Of course this happened. Duh. It's still happening today. I'm not saying where because I don't know where. But if you do the simple math about how many people are working as scientists, it's not hard to figure out that there are companies who could benefit from positive scientific findings--no matter how wrong--and realize that some of what we're reading in original research was paid for and not really true.
I wish people would keep that in mind when they get all worshippy about science being self-correcting and a great system.
It's not a particularly great system if you are looking, for example, for certainty. If you want absolute certainty, a good dose of syllogist reasoning will serve you better than any inductive method.
The problem is that syllogistic methods break down very quickly in real world applications because you have to find ways of classifying all the objects that may or may not fall into your category of "all", "some", or "none".
The scientific method is not a bad method, but it's not great. And it's weak in ways like this. It is not even close to the best method. But it's the only one we've found that's generally applicable to the human endeavor.
That's all it is. Better at being more general. I wish we'd get over ourselves and be honest about that.
It doesn't help when most of the information you hear regarding nutrition has been to underwrite the profits of multi-billion dollar corporations that are only out for one thing: Your money... and they don't care what means they have to use to get it. For instance buying exclusive access to resources that you had free access to for pennies on the dollar so that you don't have access to it any more and then selling it to you for gross profits... and I don't mean that in a taxation sense of the word gross. I mean that it's quite literally disgusting.
I'm looking at you Nestle, but realistically, you're just one example of the systemic corruption and propaganda that is pervasive across the entire nutrition market.
The less political the subject, the better the science about it. That's why I love maths. Nobody bribes a set of mathematicians to incorrectly claim the Collatz Conjecture has been proven.
This is the definition of chutzpah: "The [sugar] association also questioned the motives behind the new paper.
“Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research,” the organization said. “We’re disappointed to see a journal of JAMA’s stature being drawn into this trend.”
Yes, the dubious ethics and research quality at issue here are clearly JAMA's, and not the lobbyists' who, by their own admission, paid scientists to publish a journal article to exonerate their own industry.
CTRL+F to see if anyone posted it, and sad to see it so far down. This is the #1 video to show anyone that thinks sugar is fine. It's literally, at a biological level in high doses, poison to our bodies. Watch the vid. It will open your eyes. Too bad the food industry fabricated their lies decades before we had the internet to share information like this. The damage is done and will take decades to undo.
The biggest problem with our health, however, is still Obesity. Just as the fat were mislead by being made to believe that "low fat == healthy" these people will be similarly think "low carb == healthy" and proceed to get obese on low-carb foods.
Face it, if you're a healthy weight, by body-fat percentage, you don't have to worry about fructose vs glucose or fat vs carbs.
Americans need to put their forks down. We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.
> We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.
Ha, that's a good one. The answer you'll get is that nobody is responsible for their expensive lifestyle choices, and everyone is a victim of the system. People are fat? Not their fault; they live in food and exercise deserts and/or are trapped in the poverty cycle where they can only afford garbage calories. What, they are middle class? Genetic, then. Their parents are fat and it takes an overwhelming amount of effort to break the cycle.
The only solution is to change the system, not people. Which, unfortunately, can have adverse effects on healthy weighted people that like the current system.
On the other hand, I think the low carb/keto people have taken the pendulum too far in the other direction. A lot of research seems to suggest that a plant based diet heavy on whole fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts is healthier than one consisting of animal fats and protein. It makes sense when you look at the diets of the healthiest people on Earth. Just because excess processed sugar is bad for you doe not mean all carbs are unhealthy.
Low carb and keto is consistent with a vergatable, plant and especially nut diet.
> Whole fruits
What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural - neither oranges nor apples have historically been as sweet as they are now.
There's a world of difference between something fresh off a plant and something ... not fresh out of a (chemical processing) plant, as most processed foods are.
Yes, ag breeding has created foods which are far removed from their ancestors. But get this: effectively none of the foods eaten by humans today existed in anything resembling their current form as little as 10,000 years ago.
Wheat ... was a wild grass occurring in the Mesopotamian valley. Corn was ... teosinte, a small, hard-kerneled Central American plant. Rice was a wild marsh grass found in the Yangtse river valley. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, horses (probably initially hunted for meat, only later exploited for draught), were bred from ancestors only distantly similar to today's major breeds. Apples were wild fruit tree from Turkey which didn't breed true. Etc., etc.
There's an online "tree of life" showing the evolutionary history of plants and animals, and what was shocking to me was the recency of most of humans' major ag and animal foods -- they're literally younger than our species, by far.
That's not to take away entirely from your point. But humans have been relying for much the past few thousand years, and certainly centuries, on foods far removed from their origins.
Well I don't agree that modern fruit is "unnaturally" sweet. If anything, the fruits you get in supermarkets today are watery and bland compared to locally grown stuff. Compare a strawberry bought at a farmer's market to one you buy at a grocery store, for instance.
Obviously it's possible to overdo anything, but fruit gives you a whole assortment of fiber and nutrients that you don't get from processed sugar. In moderation it's extremely healthy.
>What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural.
I am slightly skeptical. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% on the no added sugar train. But I regularly go and pick wild blackberries from a thicket that has been there for about 100 years and they are like pure sugar. Easily sweeter than any storebought berry.
Whole fruits are pieces of fruit from a tree, that you bit into, as opposed to fruits that have been chemically mechanically/processed to extract some molecules (sugar) and discard others (especially the pulp/fiber)
Modern meat is also unnnatural, engineered by the agriculture industry.
A diet of animal parts (i.e. ALL of the animal, not just muscle) and leafy, non-starchy plants, is perfectly keto-compliant. Who says that a low-carb diet excludes plants?
I'm pretty sure that's why low carb/keto diets work: they force you to avoid most processed junk food. However I don't think it has to do with carbs. I'm pretty sure you could get the same results eating potatoes, corn, beans, rice, etc.
There seems to be increasing evidence that high blood sugar over a long period of time is very bad for you. That insulin response keeps this under control mostly... but that it was probably never meant to be active all day, every day. So eating lots of sugar (and carbs in general) at every meal is probably long term, not the best thing you can do.
The sugar industry was also the main driver of the African slave trade. When you have strong selection bias against morally principled people joining an industry (as there must have been in, say, 1850) it's hard for an industry to ever recover a moral compass.
Maybe you have a lot of information that I don't (I'm hardly an expert here), but describing it as the main driver seems like a stretch. In the Caribbean, I can see your statement being true. But in the US, as I understand it, it was more general agriculture / cotton. And so far as I know, a huge proportion of slaves were sold into the Middle East, and I assume they didn't have a huge sugar trade there.
This teaches among many lessons, one in particular: We can't take anything for granted. A lot of people use research studies in arguments as it was the absolute truth. The papers can be wrong, or even true but for a narrower sample, or even worst, faked.
You realize the absolute number is virtually meaningless? Inflation adjusted is the best number, with the caveat that your inflation index needs to be good.
This is the kind of thing I think of when people here on HN try to convince me that glyphosate is safe. When so much money is at stake, corporations naturally try to influence the science, and unfortunately, there are plenty of poorly-paid and/or dubiously-ethical scientists in the world who will take their money.
Under such circumstances I think we have to be massively skeptical of any result that aligns with the business interests in question. When public health is at stake, the burden of proof should fall very heavily on those claiming their product is safe.
Honey is a strange alternative to sugar. For the past 2 decades, I have used honey as the sole sweetener, though the rest of the family continues to patronize sugar :( The trouble with honey is that it's seriously pricey, and the community is a something of a cult - you have to know a lot of the terminology, otherwise you'll walk out with sugar-water.
I take an empty 1 gallon jar to the honey store in Sac, and pay $100 to fill her up. I have experimented a lot with the cocktail over the years. Generally, avoid anything"American" ie. sweet light colored honey. Go for the raw unfiltered darkest thickest broth you can find. They have gigantic jars of various colors, so I sample from the darkest ones. Then add a few grams of propolis and a few scoops of nectar and a few combs. Top it off with manuka and part with $100. Lasts 3 months.
It tastes weird and too thick and gooey, but it's an amazing product. All the debris floating around on it is supposedly packed with enzymes etc.
Sugar is sugar, but honey is interesting in the flavors and aromas it can provide outside of your standard white sugar.
Just to add if anyone is interested in honey as a sweetener - What dxbydt was saying with honey being ~$8/lb is a good price for identifiable flower honey. Wholesale is roughly $4-5/lb, depending on varietal.
There's a significant range in flavors and aromas depending on what type of flower produced the bulk of the honey. Don't need to avoid anything on colors, it's primarily based on what type of flower is used to produce the honey. Try a sampler, most apiaries/honey specialty shops will sell you a small container of each varietal they have. Avoid heat treated honeys, heating the honey to have it pass through a filter will get rid of a lot of the aroma. You'll see a lot of "raw, unfiltered" at specialty shops.
If you're interested, you can ferment meads with a minimum of ~1.5 pounds per gallon, depending on how strong you want the resulting beverage.
Let's not forget how WW2 propaganda shifted blame to sugar. Where the fictional notion of a "sugar high" was invented to connote an illicit character that will get your children that much closer to the reefer madness. All to manipulate the public into conserving sugar needed for the war effort.
A sugar high is not fictional. I do in fact get a sugar high. Just ask my co-workers. I sometimes use a threat of eating a candy bar, which will make me hyper before I crash.
Is there a "fat industry"? Sugar production is very industrialized, just a few companies with a strong lobby.
Fat is much more diverse. Sure, there are a few giant soybean oil producers, but it's not their only product, and individual companies don't dominate their market.
What? Where do you think soybean, corn, Canola/rapeseed, peanut, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, olive, coconut, and palm oils come from?
Animal fats are rather expensive in comparison, but I can also buy pork lard, beef suet, and butter rather easily.
The problem there might just be fragmentation. Growers of cane and beets (and sorghum, too, I guess) have basically just one major homogenized end product: refined sucrose. There are a few related products, like molasses, brown sugar, and confectioners' sugar, and the stuff like bagasse, that tends not to be seen by consumers, but refined sucrose is the moneymaker. Corn growers can also side with the sugar lobby thanks to corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.
There's definitely an industry ($800M/year?), but it isn't one that has a great common marketing association around, to collect dues and pitch catchy slogans that play well on television and radio.
The soy and Canola/rapeseed growers might come together to promote B20 biodiesel, though, while simultaneously bashing palm oil plantations. I can't currently imagine anyone trying to convince me to eat more fats and oils in my diet, at the expense of sugars. Low-carb is still largely seen as an irresponsible, unhealthy, fad diet in the mainstream.
The dairy industry is backing all these sugar bad, and implicit or explicit fat good. In particular discrediting valid research warning on saturated fats. Against the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and even NHS.
I watched this documentary titled "That sugar film" [1] a year or so ago. It was quite an eye opener. Although I knew processed foods had a lot of sugar (like we expect sodas and colas to have), what was shocking was the amount of sugar added even in foods where you would never think of sugar as an ingredient. Of course, this varies across different geographies and cultures, but if people consuming processed foods spend some time reading the ingredients in whatever they buy and learn more about them and the proportions, it could help in bringing some changes (I realize this is a rather simplified view). We also need more education and awareness to be spread around to effect a change in people's habits.
see also the really well done movie "That Sugar Film" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/) where exactly this connection is laid out in the first part.
First of all, there is no daily recommended value on sugar because that value is 0.
Then, a can of regular Coca-Cola (and most sodas) has about 38g of sugar. 38g doesn't sound like a lot, but would you take a cup of coffee with 8 teaspoons of sugar? That's what 38g is, 8 teaspoons, for a single can. Many kids drink multiple cans a day, with sugary cereals, pancakes with syrup, snacks, and adding all that up they end up consuming over 100g and end up severe obesity and diabetes.
So food with sugar but also a decent amount of fiber is fine? Like vegetables, certain fruit and whole grain bread?
What should the fiber:sugar ratio be? Broccoli has 1.7g sugar and 2.6 fiber per 100g. Bananas have 12g sugar and 2.6g of fiber. I guess you should avoid food that goes below 1:1?
pure gold comment by Eduard Fischer (in Reader's pick section):
"Last week while traveling in the US, I witnessed a mother place a cola soft drink in front of a young child. The girl began to sip on the drink, the volume of which I estimated to be about twice the size of the girl’s head. I was tempted to make a remark, but remembered that I was in a foreign country where the citizens are famously well armed and roughly half the folks eligible to vote have lost their minds..."
Sugar industry is guilty in that case, but let's not put all blame on them. It is the whole society that wanted to believe that mass consumption of sugar is OK.
> One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.
But truth be told, I only drink black coffee. Now. I used to put lots of sugar and cream in coffee. I simply started cutting back slowly. I got rid of the cream first, and when it got to the point I was wanting less than 1 package of sugar in a McDonald's large coffee, I just stopped using it, though I could have cut down a little more.
For the first week or two, the coffee seemed a bit bitter, but in the years following, it has been just fine. And much easier to order.
The scientific consensus is that weight gain is caused by saturated fat. Anybody who disagrees with the consensus is anti-science and a fat-denier. Any scientists who disagree with the consensus must have being paid off by Big Fat.
Even Crisco agrees that their products are the cause of Global Fattening and is working on alternatives to oil. Companies that produce saturated fat products should have to buy Fat Credits and fat skeptics should be thrown in prison!
But what about all the actual scientific evidence that a low-carbohydrate high-saturated fat diet results in weight loss? Well, I never said that weight gain causes weight gain or a Global Fattening. What I said was it causes "Body Change".
Body Change means eating saturated fat will make you become deathly skinny or morbidly obese or grow a tail or get cancer or contract herpes or go blind or a million other medical problems.
Basically, if something is wrong with your body, it's because of Body Change. Child falls off jungle gym and breaks its leg: Body Change. Man dies of heart attack in China: Body Change. Conjoined twins: Body Change. Down's Syndrome: Body Change. Hot flashes: Body Change. Wet dream: Body Change. Body change hides under your bed at night waiting to murder you with saturated fats.
Some people say that Body Change is idiotic and unscientific! I guess they believe bodies never change. What morons!
When in fact nothing can be blamed but our overconsumption of almost everything but vegetables and fruits.
I eat about 70% from my calories in carbs (some are refined), but it's just 2500kcal calories per day. I'm pretty sure the fact that average US citizen eats 3500kcal daily has more to do with anything than what particular ingredient one eats.
edit: some irrational unscientific and anegdotal statements require me to remove myself from discussion. thanks.. for the downvotes, I'm outta here boys! :wink:
Then the question is why do they eat 3500kcal? The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more. A calorie is not a calorie.
I didn't check the science, but I'm pretty confident that "feeling full" is a matter of volume and not of calories. At least in my personal experience a really dumb and easy way to lose fat without feeling hungry was to eat food with a low calorie density.
> The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more.
They still eat about 1500kcal of fat and protein - of which I eat about half the amount.
If you were really talking about feeling full, nothing makes you feel more full than a belly and guts filled with lovely starch/fiber from fruits and vegetables, which an average US eats little if not any.
I think that fruits have an issue too.
The fruit we get today has been bred to contain a lot more sugar than they did originally. I'm not convinced that lots of fruit all the time is as good for you as it ought to be.
There hasn't been a study showing that calorie controlled fruit diet will cause you any harm (except potential malnutrition if fruit selection is not as varied).
Just like excessive consumption of protein (but with a calorie cap) in healthy people shows no harm, or similar studies on healthy, physically active people.
Diet is just a part of a healthy lifestyle and a huge variety of diets can be healthy. This blaming of particular ingredient or macronutrients is unscientific, I as a skeptic dislike it very much.
Fruits are rich in fiber which slows down the absorption of their more "potent" sugars, not to mention that digestion of that fiber is far more taxing than digestion of something else.
Of course, if I were to eat excessive amount of calories it's quite probable I'd get the same symptoms as those people consuming the equivalent in refined sugars.
I agree. People always spam the "eat fruits and veggies" meme but come on, what is in fruit? Sugar and some fiber, maybe some vitamins. You are still just eating useless sugar. Let's not delude ourselves that fruits somehow contribute to fulfilling daily macros in a significant way. I consider them a treat, not a staple.
and don't forget about vegetables, I swear every year carrots get sweeter and sweeter, it feels with some carrot cultivars they are nearly as sweet as corn used to be (now corn often just tastes like candy basically to me, some varieties I can't stomach due to them tasting way too sweet)
note I do not eat any sugar or sweeteners and haven't for years, so maybe that's why I am more sensitive to this
This is one aspect of sugar and fat that I find confusing. Is sugar in and of itself bad? If I like to eat sugar but am otherwise healthy (healthy weight, plenty of fruits and vegetables, plenty of exercise, etc.), am I still damaging my cardiovascular system?
Are apples bad because they contain cyanide in seeds you can accidentally consume?
Is red meat bad because it causes cancer?
Is alcohol bad because it causes cancer?
If you feel you're living a healthy lifestyle, you can easily check that by doing some medical tests. No diet related disease is going to invisibly attack you at a random moment in life.
Atherosclerosis is fairly visible. Diabetes too. With regular checks you can be sure you're fine.
Those shows that sugar on it its own is OK, what is problematic is mixing it with fat. I.e. as long as fat is less that 10%-15% of calories, sugar and carbohydrates are fine.
For the record I up-voted you for sensibly pointing out that the amount of food one eats matters (in regards to health) more than the particular ingredients. I guess it will take another 50 years before people begin to realize this.
this is almost certainly wrong. (That nothing can be blamed.) I can't eat much sugar for medical reasons, so that means that entire aisles are basically unavailable to me. things like cereals, cookies, cakes, lots of delicious stuff. But there is something or someone (or some process or some state of affairs) to blame here.
Because check it out: stevia is delicious, and with splenda and all sorts of other zero-calorie artificial sweetener choices (going back to saccharine) it would be trivial to make almost all of those food choices in varieties that are artificially sweetened. what do you want to bet that the high fructose corn syrup or sugar industry has a say in directing the conversation that leads to these foods simply not existing? They literally don't exist in supermarkets: you make them at home.
why the fuck would an expensive premium food like this - https://www.specialk.com/en_US/products/protein-cereal.html have 20% by weight in sugar! Generally speaking what I've just linked is a great food, and it's premium and expensive and for those who are very health-conscious. It hardly has any calories, converting by multiplying the suggested serving by 3, it has only 360 calories in 100 grams, which contains 30g of protein (so that if you further multiply by three to get to your daily intake, you get to 90g of protein, enough for just about anyone, reaching only 1080 calories - so it seems great to me. you could literally consider this diet food.)
I realize that stevia might be expensive compared with sugar, but some people would likely pay for that. You can't get foods made that way though, unless you make it yourself.
why is that? There is someone to blame here. It's a dichotomy: you eat the 21 grams of sugar, or you don't eat the 100 grams of Special K Protein. It's not about overconsumption: it's about a lack of choice. Why doesn't the artificial-sweetener version exist, at all? There is something, or someone (or an abstract economic process, or something) to blame here. While "blaming" an economic process (or a lack of FDA mandate, or ... whatever) might sound bitter due to the phrasing, we can still ask what leads to this state of affairs. I don't usually like to play the "blame game" or put things in those terms, but in this case, I'm missing out on a lot of foods, so yes, I'll do it. If Coca Cola can do it, and get it everywhere, why can't dessert "foods" like oreos or breakfast cereal, do it? They simply don't exist in artificially sweetened versions. Why not?
I also get headaches, fever and joint pain from taking in any sugar. It would be so nice to find cereals where I can add sweetener as needed. In theory they should be cheaper since they don't have to add sugar but in reality they don't even exist.
When cooking, sometimes the taste of the ingredients isn't everything. Have you ever forgotten to put salt to something you were cooking, and then tried to add salt after cooking to correct it? It doesn't taste the same because in addition to just tasting salty, the salt was supposed to participate in some chemical reaction while it was being cooked.
Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.
As an experiment, I would try saturating the cereal with water and fermenting with Saccharomyces and Acetobacter to get the sugars out.
I have a hunch that it would taste absolutely horrible, though. I'm not sure there would be enough stevia in the world to bring it back to palatable.
Personally, I would probably prefer to just eat some chicken eggs if I wanted protein for breakfast. That's 160 kcal/100g, with 1g sugar and 13g of protein--as 100% complete protein. And eggs are about $5/kg or less in the US.
I'm not even certain why anybody health-conscious would ever bother with boxed cereals at all, for exactly the reason parent points out--sugar. If I wanted complex carbs in my breakfast, I'd boil a potato, cool it overnight, and heat it back up with the eggs in the morning. No flakes or nuggets are necessary. No sweeteners are necessary. If desired, ketchup is plenty sweet enough for that potato.
But crap.... why can't they make ketchup with stevia, or just unsweetened ketchup? It's back to the same problem. If you can't eat sugar, the American grocery store is mostly a colorful wasteland of foods you just can't touch.
Munchies, munchies, everywhere, and all the cupboards creak;
Munchies, munchies, everywhere, nor any speck to eat.
To be honest, I don't like the taste of stevia. It tastes a lot like other sugar substitutes (like aspartame) to me. That being said, I've had it used in cooking (without knowing it) and thought it tasted OK. Maybe in commercial foods they make it taste more like existing sugar substitutes because thats what is expected by people who already seek out sugar free foods?
I'm a diabetic and I eat 70% of calories in carbs. I make sure they are all low GI.
My statement was mostly about average people, not sick people. I'm fairly sure diseased individuals are an exception and have to make sure to put their disease in remission (or to meet their genetic predispositions) with proper diet plans.
Coca Cola has a stevia version that seems to be very niche. I rarely see it, nor have I tried it. But I wonder why it hasn't been pushed more, especially in a market where your product is increasingly demonized because of the 30 - 40g of sugar each serving contains.
RIP: British Scientist John Yudkin - The man who tried to warn us about the perils of sugar..
Source(s) : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/diet/10634081...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin
Edit: Lest we not forget his arch-enemy Ancel Keys
My mother (1973, Edinburgh) bought "Pure, White, and Deadly," and we all read it. I was ten or so. Yudkin attacked white flour, white (processed) fat, and above all white sugar. It made perfect sense to us all, and cutting back on sugar became a slow, yet consistent part of our lifestyle. We never ate that much anyhow. I stopped eating sugar entirely at 15. I still recall the book's cover.
Edit: it took me a lot longer to cut fruit juice from our diet. I was so convinced by that "natural" label. Until I realized my daughter, who'd drank a lot of juice growing up, was addicted to sugar. Then we cut it out. My other kids, not addicted. I was fooled for so long...
The sugar industry has a lot to answer for. It is IMO comparable to the tobacco industry's suppression of cancer studies. Yet worse, because the effects of high-sugar diets are doing more damage, to more people, and last generations.
Think of the hundreds of millions of children who have eaten high sugar diets since they were babies... lifelong damage to their health. A hundred years of damage, these executives and corrupt scientists caused.
I tried arguing the dangers of concentrated fruit sweeteners not so long ago.
There was some debate about whether candy prices were too low.. But the truth is folks get much more sugar from supposedly "healthy" items in the form of fruit juice and concentrates. It is in the bread most folks eat (and sometimes whole grain bread is higher to make it more palletable), they put it in savory foods, and fruit juices and people put it in their coffee and tea. Granola bars and yogurts and a myriad of other supposedly healthy things? High sugar. It would be one thing if the sugar was simply what was contained in the fruit, but often it is above that.
It is much better to eat the piece of fruit than drink some juice - and I think if folks started drinking non-sweetened drinks and quit adding it to so much food (expecially commercially prepared food) it would help quite a bit. Personally, I lost weight after doing the adjustment. My only normal, daily beverages are black coffee or water and have been for years.
The thing is that you do somewhat miss the sugar at first, but I didn't find it any worse than missing some foods after moving countries. Over time, your tastes adjust and it isn't a bad thing.
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I wonder if the tolerance, and then the love, of highly sweet things is acquired. And mostly probably, it is acquired when one is a child.
I have met and worked with many East Asians and Europeans who came to American in their 20's or older. Almost everyone of them thought American pastry and deserts are unbearably sweet. Most of them shun from soda drinks and other "food" containing high amounts of sugar. If they drink soda, they choose low- or zero-sugar kinds.
Related or not, a big percentage of American look overweight when compared to Europeans and East Asians.
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When you say you don't eat sugar, what does that mean? Do you eat fruit? Bread? Things that metabolize to sugar -- potatoes, squash, tomatoes, grapes, watermelon, barbecue sauce etc. Do you ever indulge in chocolate cake? What about wine or beer?
I just find the term "sugar" to be extremely vague when 50% of foods metabolize to sugar...
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well the lie has recently morphed into the laws slowing and prohibiting soda sales in schools and such all the while promoting juice which can be worse in many cases because people assume its healthy and you cannot over drink because of that
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"The sugar industry has a lot to answer for."
I don't get this argument. What do you expect the sugar industry to do, argue for consuming less sugar?
It is not the industry's obligation to care for your nutritional well-being. It is the obligation of parents and teachers to be informed and teach kids what good food is. That starts with stopping to watch commercials. Avoiding processed foods in the grocery store and cheap restaurants. Not buying products that have more than 5 ingredients, and above all contain high fructose corn syrup.
Buying vegetables and fruit at farmer's markets. Learning again that there are seasons, and that there is no need to buy apples in spring or summer (when they have to be kept in coolers for half a year, or imported from the other hemisphere). Learning again that good products can often be recognized through the nose rather than the eye. Spending time on small-scale farms. Reducing meat intake to 1-2 a week. Consuming fresh water rather than salt water fish (which are harvested beyond sustainability and have led a multitude of fisheries to go extinct already). Preparing food by hand, even if it is "unhealthy" food like french fries (made from potatoes, e.g. in an oven with a bit of olive oil), pancakes (milk, egg, flour - no need to buy this as a product) or cakes (made just with flour, yeast, milk, eggs, and sugar).
Just switch off television to get back common sense.
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>> lifelong damage to their health.
It's only lifelong damage if you don't change your diet and lifestyle. The world is filled with people who were morbidly obese and have made the changes necessary to reverse the damage and live far more healthy lives now.
The way you put it, it sounds like an irreversible course akin to a death sentence, which it most certainly is not.
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Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.
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Another good discussion of Yudkin's work and how it was received: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...
Along with Robert Atkins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Atkins_(nutritionist)
If you ask people to this day, they'll say Atkins died of his own diet. That was actually a total lie run by Harpers magazine. They corrected the mistake in the following edition, but the damage had been done.
Although there is little evidence to support it, the running conspiracy theory is that PR people in various arms of the food industry paid for that article.
Edit: Adkins died because he slipped on a piece of ice during a snow storm and cracked his skull.
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A story every scientist should now. For its own sake.
Ancel Keys was certainly wrong when it came to sugars vs fats. However, he did live to be 100... so there's got to be at least some merit to his ideas, such as the Mediterranean diet, etc.
Isn't the merit of the Mediterranean mainly about increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids through increased consumption of high-fat low-carb foods such as fish, green leafy vegetables, olives, cheeses and olive oils?
Which is the complete opposite of low-fat high-carb diet recommended by Keys?
There are also heavy smokers and drinkers who live to 100 and more.
No, there doesn't
I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind.
Recently in the last 3 months I gave up sugar, hard core, it's hard but the benefits are out of this world.
I was healthy and active. I ate healthy, or so I thought. Boy was I wrong and mis informed.
I had heard theories so I decided to check them out. I went all out to avoid sugar for a couple of weeks just to see. It was amazing.
I have lost 20 pounds that I didn't think was possible, I think better, I sleep better and I eat way less. I have way more energy, like I drank 5 cups of coffee all the time. I don't fade in the afternoon.
Those of you looking for a way to get more energy and focus at work, especially those working long hours in startups. I encourage you to go all out to reduce sugar intake to as little as possible. Of course eat whole fruits those are ok.
Best thing I have ever done in my life.
There's a saying "those on high sugar diets don't know what it feels like to be sugar free." It feels amazing. Try it. At least once in your life. You won't go back .
sorry that was long :-)
A really smart guy said to me once something like, “if you are smart and have money and you don't eat well then you are not smart”. I can't remember the exact quote but the sentiment really stuck with me.
Look I'm no expert but I'm telling you the results are outrageous. Please do your own research as I only really have a school boy understanding of how this affects the body.
My skin cleared up, my ailments all disappeared, I no longer snore, my wife says I radiate energy and my skin glows. People notice that my eyes are white and bright. My thinking is clear and alert.
I run up a big hill occasionally, a massive one, I did it yesterday, I broke a sweat but my body was working and I got to the top in record time with minimal effort. I had been training for years and never could match that performance. It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.
What do I eat? I will lose some people here, but honestly, whole fruit, salad, no dressing, chicken,steak,salmon and WATER. That's it. I said it was hard but I went 100% zero sugar. Real Food. Nothing in a box nothing processed. I now love this food more than anything.
Why is whole fruit ok? My understanding is the fibre tells your body when to stop eating. It's a natural way to tell you that you've had enough. If the grapefruit it too sweet, don't eat it. Your body is telling you something. Listen to it
Sugar inflames your body, it gives you a rush, then a crash, then it makes you hungry. Sugar makes you eat more. It makes you swing up and down.
Getting off sugar is hard, you will have withdrawals. They are not pleasant.
My appetite and palette has changed for the better, I love food now, I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable, that's a massive change for me. I eat way less I'm spending less money.
Medically all the little things I was thinking of going to the doctor about have completely gone.
3 months in, a lifetime ahead of positive changes.
sorry if this was long and ranty and a bit smug :-)
And just to show that the other way works as well:
Your diet would be havok for my insides. I simply cannot digest fat from meat very well. I'm mostly vegetarian, and eat a lot of legumes and dairy and grains and bread, vegetables and the occasional fruit. I eat fish (trout, usually) once a week for health purposes. I usually only drink water or black coffee. My main mode of transportation are my feet.
I also generally skip breakfast, possibly have a small snack or two during the day, and eat most of my food late in the day when I'm most hungry. I eat candy occasionally. I cook with butter and cream.
And it is strange that I find much of the same benefits as you. I still snore (obviously not due to weight loss). My skin had no change, but I lost weight. I feel physically better. I now like more 'healthy' foods. Soda is really syrupy most of the time - I can occasionally have some when eating, but not by itself (been like that for years).
I'm years into this lifestyle. It took years to tweak it to where it is now - and each tweak had weight loss. I found you can get over cravings for certain sorts of foods (outside of hormones, that is, but even that gets changed some), and you can learn to like new ones. It is basically exposure, though I still dislike eggplant.
Much luck on your continued success :)
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I really like this response and I do truly believe that cutting out or minimizing sugar is a truly beneficial thing.
But when I got to this:
> I can't even drink a soda, I spit it out as the most disgusting thing imaginable
I had a hard time taking the rest of your comment seriously. I can understand it being too sweet to your now adjusted taste buds, but calling it the most disgusting thing imaginable is just plain wrong.
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Here's a rather detailed lecture on the biochemistry (and history and everything) about sugar (and why the sugar in fruit is not problematic).
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" by Robert H. Lustig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
> I can't even drink a soda
Given that you call it 'soda', you're probably American... in which case, American sodas are disgusting, because they're made with HFCS instead of sugar. :)
It's still 'sugars', but it's not 'sugar' as the public calls it. I'm someone who eats too much sweet, sweet sugar, and I can't drink an American soda.
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+1 to this. I recently just started toying with the idea of going sugar free and ketogenic... so I started trying foods without many carbs but wasn't even committed to it. All of a sudden I noticed I had lost 5-7 pounds in 3-4 weeks. So I got excited and kept it up... I'm not losing weight at the same rate but now about 2-3 months in and I'm down about 25 pounds. It's ridiculous.
I haven't noticed the energy or clarity improvements in myself and my wife hasn't seen that in me either. That may be due to sleep as I'm going to school full-time, training for the Chicago Marathon, and working full-time. Given all that maybe it's just great that I can function. :)
Either way! The changes have been amazing and dramatic. My biggest problem now is that I need to buy a whole new wardrobe but I can't yet because I think I still have another 15 pounds I'll blow through by Christmas. I finally feel in control of my weight and it's the best.
I'm sold, it's no/low sugar from now on.
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sorry...
No, man, it's important to share these ideas. My energy levels jumped when I changed my lunches from carbs&protein (pasta, potato etc) to salads with protein.
You can put vinegar, salt and a dash of olive oil as seasoning into a salads - still no sugars.
I have had some pretty nasty neurological symptoms due to invasive intracellular infections of the CNS, and been whole-food paleo-like keto diet for more than 1 year now with no exceptions, and I feel damn great, compared to before that is.
>It's all SUGAR. I hit the wall because of sugar. I finally cracked the magic code, NO SUGAR.
Can't say I agree with this part. If you're doing any kind of intensive cardio work sugars are essential if you want to keep doing it for any long period of time. The harder you're going the quicker you'll want to start eating carbs, be it in gels/fruit (Dates are fantastic for this).
You might actually just have got better, or maybe just might be well rested after a period of over training.
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I weaned myself off sugar once too. It was hard. It took about two weeks before the intense cravings subsided, and then everything tasted sweeter. I was getting a sugar high from eating carrots. It was awesome.
Later, though, I started working at tech companies that had catered food, so I didn't control my diet anymore. It's funny how much better I feel when I can choose my own diet. I think I'll make a point of avoiding sugary foods again.
> Of course eat whole fruits those are ok.
Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery? I just had a slice of a lovely honey dew melon. It was like drinking sugar syrup. I'm pretty sure it was bad for me. Surely the advice should be to not eat too many sugary fruits either, especially not the modern breeds that are much sweeter than more traditional varieties.
> Why's that any different from eating say table sugar + celery?
In principle it's not, except perhaps for a glass of water. Most sweet fruits tend to have much more moisture than celery.
An unstated assumption that may come with your question is that just like eating fruit is equivalent to eating sugar + celery, it would also be the same to eat sugar, then celery. This is not the case. The fiber and water in the fruit make for phisical barriers that slow down digestive enzimes from reaching the sugar molecules in it. This makes for a steadier release of energy over a longer period of time; the exact opposite of the well known 'sugar rush' phenomenon. [1]
Then there is the issue that most people, left to their own devices, will eat too much of sugar and too little of the other two.
[1] I don't have the appropriate literature at hand, but this was explained to me by a really close person who's been a Diabetes-I survivor for 21 years and counting. His report is that foodstuffs with identical glycemic indexes do cause different, noticeable physiologic responses based on the amount of fiber in them.
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Generally, the advice is that fruit is good for you primarily because of the quantity of fibre it contains. I seem to recall Robert Lustig discussing this point. Fibre keeps sugar in your gut longer, which in turn means it's broken down by bacteria there rather than having to be broken down by your liver. It was in this talk he gave, at around 1hr 13min 52sec or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Apparently you take longer to absorb the sugar from fruits. You don't get a blood sugar spike that triggers an insulin response like with table sugar.
The same can't be said for fruit juice. Maybe infusing the sugar into to celery somehow would be healthier than eating them separately.
That won't work. The sugar in inside fruit is generally wrapped up inside the fiber of the fruit and has to be broken down to access it.
That's why apples, that have a relatively high amount of sugar, have a lower gly index than you might expect.
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There's something to be said about eating whole foods rather than eating their refined components individually. Something about the reactions that occur when things are consumed in the form your body expects, together, rather than purified and separated. Some things we call "antioxidants" have the opposite effect when purified and eaten separately from the foods the occur in.
I keep finding edge cases when I try this.
How do you handle sugar in yogurt? How about pizza sauce? Is 5 grams of sugar in super dark chocolate ok? It just seems like it's everywhere.
>It just seems like it's everywhere. That is precisely the problem, actually. It isn't so much that folks are eating pounds or kilos of sweets daily, it is that we find sugar in everything - even if we wouldn't guessed there was added sugar. Food companies do this for a myriad of reasons, usually backed with research on taste. It is really hard to avoid.
I'm not as low-sugar as some of the people here. I figure if I'm eating chocolate, I'm eating chocolate occasionally and damn the sugar. I know there is sugar in that. Occasionally I'll have some daily, but it doesn't make up much of my diet, and that is what I'm much more concerned about. My base diet being fairly healthy.
I simply don't eat much flavored yogurt except as an occasional snack. Many people, however, solve this by buying plain, unsugared yogurt and simply adding in fruit.
Red sauces and other such things - make what you can at home and freeze some of it for later use. Or start reading ingredients lists carefully. It would be helpful if nutrition labels specified the amount of sugar added (regardless of source), but until then, labels and a lessened reliance on pre-made foods.
It's everywhere - in the US.
Natural yogurt should be relatively easy to find. Add some real fruit if it's too dull for you (after a while it's not).
Basically try not to eat processed stuff. Sure, you're not going to die if you eat a pizza here and there, but the baseline should be to eat as much real food as possible, as opposed to processed food. Even for pizza, you could find a place which uses fresh ingredients as oppose to a big franchise where everything is heavily processed and frozen. Finally, give it a try to make your own pizza/yogurt/etc. It can be a lot of fun.
If you had 20 pounds to lose, you weren't healthy. You were fooling yourself. Healthy people aren't carrying around 20 extra pounds of fat.
> You were fooling yourself.
I think that's the entire point of his story.
He said he lost 20 pounds, not 20 pounds of fat.
The interesting thing about sugar is that it also causes your body to retain a lot of water. Same with salt.
So losing 20 pounds in a short time is totally possible for someone who is tall.
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For an average height, the span between the lowest non-over-or-underweight weight and the highest is a lot more than 20 pounds, and being a bit into the overweight range doesn't automatically make you unhealthy either.
chart: http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/Images/body-mass-inde...
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I'm 10 pounds heavier now than I was 3 years ago and I assure you I'm much healthier. So your sweeping generalization is entirely incorrect.
That's not quite correct. The CDC recommends a body fat percentage between 18% to 25%, and it's generally acknowledged that athletes can drop down to around 5%-6% without adverse effects. So, given those numbers, most healthy adults are carrying at least 20 pounds that they could safely lose.
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Have you cut back on carbohydrates too? I'm just curious, since I've eliminated sugary drinks, but I find it harder to cut back on bread, pasta and so on.
Well, we do know that fructose is worse than glucose in terms of its effects on your body because it takes an extra processing step that can cause other complications.
This is anecdotal, but I personally feel better when I eat rice than when I eat wheat, though I don't have celiac disease. It would be nice if nutritionists looked into carbs as much as they've looked into fats.
What kind of sugar were you eating? Like cookies, cake, pop, ice cream? I don't have any of those foods in my home. I don't buy high sugar foods. So, I'm kind of confused what you consider to be a high sugar diet. How did you get that much sugar in?
Most likely pop. If you eat out a lot, cheap restaurants will shame you into buying huge unhealthy drinks, unless you want to drink water from a tiny dixie cup.
It's pretty easy to get a lot of sugar in your entre if you eat at Chili's or Panda Express or anywhere else that uses excessive BBQ sauce.
And then there's the fact that Snickers would like you to think it will satisfy your hunger. At least it has peanuts in it...
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So what did you actually eat? It seems like sugar is everywhere these days.
Not OP, but:
* Avoid processed anything. Most especially soft/fizzy drinks, baked goods, candy, fruit drinks, jams, jellies, syrups, most processed cereals.
* Eat fresh vegetables, some fruit, legumes. Whole grains for breakfast (rolled or steel-cut oats). Meat, eggs, and dairy if they're in your diet.
* Check breads and other products for added sugar, in all forms: sugar, molasses (often added to "rye" breads as colouring), caramel colour or flavour, honey, rice syrup, agave nectar (nearly pure fructose), corn syrup, HFCS, concentrated apple juice, etc., etc.
Generally, Michael Pollan's guidance in The Omnivor's Dilemma is good: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Many strength training books have good guidance on nutrition (contrast with cardiovascular fitness, though there are exceptions). I'll recommend The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Schuler, Cosgrove, & Forsythe) specifically as it includes a large section on nutrition and meal planning. The fitness advice is also generally applicable to men, though there is a companion title on that topic specifically -- its nutritional advice is similar though briefer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481699
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I'm not the OP but I'd guess it's mostly vegetables, nuts/non meat proteins, and/or meat. Maybe some of the less processed grains like flax or quinoa.
Amen to that--what is 8g of sugar doing in a serving of /pasta sauce/?
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The easiest way to eat healthy is to only buy things in the supermarket that have one ingredient.
Pretty soon you'll notice you're only buying fruit, vegetables, pasta, rice, beans & non-processed meat.
Disclaimer: of course you could buy pure sugar or pure lard - so don't do that :)
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I agree, especially industrial sugar is bad food, and artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes are even worse. Sugar and its derivatives are massively overused in todays cheaply processed food chains.
Do you drink beer at all? I'd be open to trying to a low sugar diet, but I homebrew and don't want to give that up right now.
> I rarely say anything is black and white in this world but sugar is in my opinion. Without any doubt in my mind.
I think you're missing the word "bad" between "is in".
It can be written either way. The "bad" is implied as written. Your suggestion would be clearer.
and this folks is why I have trust issues...
Scientists paid off by industry to make people look the other way, who then become head of some Governmental departments and agencies advising the world on whatever it was they were paid off for or have a conflict of interest in and the door keeps revolving...
It's a wonder we believe anything at all after the amount of lies and propaganda we're fed only to find out it's false... or are they lying now? Now we're being fed information that it's the sugar industry at fault and not the fat industry, while we have fad diets that are high fat, low carb, low sugar, because carbs and sugar are bad and fat isn't bad at all allegedly. Who is making the money from the increased fat sales and decreased sugar sales? Is it because sugar is cutting into their bottom line too much and fat is in cheap supply?
Why do we continue to believe the shit that pours out of the mouths of big agriculture and the nutrition agencies as if they haven't been feeding us bullshit for the past 50 years in aid of increasing profit. They don't give a shit about the consumer, they give a shit about whatever fuels the greatest growth in profits.
So this is why I have issue believing anything that any of them have to say about anything because it's all underhanded subterfuge and manipulation, with no end in sight.
As far as the actual food sales, most of the money winds up in the same small set of hands regardless of which fad is currently popular. They'll resist trends that switch from high-margin to low-margin foods, but only until they've figured out how to alter the low-margin food to make it high-margin.
The secondary money-grab is from the food-fad industry. All of the books, all of the websites, all of the memberships, all churning out recipes and advice and misinformation, depends on constant change in what's considered "good". Without constant change, their markets would dry up to a trickle. It's just like the fashion industry; if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed. So instead we have a constant rotation of the fashion trends. (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)
The longer I live, the more I value the lessons I learned from my Grandparents:
- Don't listen to the shit you hear in the media, it's all self serving. Do your own research, that way it serves your need, not anyone elses.
- Stay out of the centre aisles at the grocery store. Buy simple ingredients. Make it yourself. If you can't grow it yourself or kill it, you probably shouldn't be eating it.
- Do the research, buy it once, buy it right. Quality will always beat quantity in the long run. Buy something you can repair yourself over something replaceable.
> if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed
A few of us got stuck at a moment in time and never really updated... a decent pair of hard wearing jeans and an endless supply of decent t-shirts that last more than a few months of continuous wear and a decent pair of solid, dependable boots. You may be able to tell that the fashion industry doesn't make a whole ton of money out of me. Don't care, lol.
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> (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)
The Bangladeshi children working 16 hours a day sewing dresses for H&M might have a thing or two to say about that.
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It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.
Sometime I wonder if chemicals from bottled water, radiation from Cellular/Wifi/Bluetooth pose health risks and we will find it out decades later.
There are a lot of unknowns. Chances are it's not going to be Bluetooth, but some toothpaste additive, cellphone case sealant, or something else nobody really thought about that we are going to look back and cringe.
but some toothpaste additive
About 9 months ago I stopped using toothpaste (my Dentist said it was fine) because I read the canker sores I had been getting for years and years were caused by an additive in tooth paste: Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). Sure enough, I have not had a single canker sore since I stopped using tooth paste!
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For instance, For a long time diesel has promoted in Europe as greener than petrol. This is soon to change, because: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum...
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I always assumed it would be the opposite: something that a lot of people already recognize as being dangerous, but which lacked concrete evidence demonstrating how dangerous it is. So my candidates for a future "omg we have to stop this" are:
- bad posture at office jobs (probably mandated adjustable standing desks in the future)
- stress from a long, high-traffic commute
- insufficient sleep
- per the article, high-sugar foods. EDIT: technically, a high-sugar diet. Part of the problem is that no one unit of sugar by itself is the problem, so you can't point to any one food as the culprit.
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Agreed! But we cannot ignore potential visible risks while worrying about unknown risks.
I use organic/natural exclusively. Try to model my life closed to simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back. I also diversify things I consume. Someone once posted on HN: His grandpa told him everything is poison, so use everything in moderation. I really liked this recommendation.
However it is very difficult to prevent all the radio waves in today's world as much as you try. Maybe it's not harmful but we won't find out for decades.
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Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk. You can stand inside the path of a microwave communication dish and receive many orders of magnitude more radiation, and what it'll do is make you warm. That's it. Soviet soldiers used to do that in Siberia to keep themselves warm, and the only risk is the dish outputting too much power and cooking you instead.
The first day in radar class the instructor put a piece of steel wool in front of a small dish and it instantly melted white and dropped molten metal onto the floor.
It always made me nervous when the class goofballs turned the horns on other people so you could feel the microwaves.
Goofball 1: 'accidentally' radiates goofball 2 Goofball 2: What? What are you doing? Oh, I'll show you - just watch me increase the power on this baby...
It turns out your testicles and eyes are a bad place to receive microwaves.
I submit to anyone thinking of attempting this: you are probably going to get the power calculations wrong and cooking human cells is not fun at all.
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I mostly agree with you. There are edge cases with microwave towers that can lead to vision loss as your eyes heat up, but don't dump heat very well. Further, modern cellphones don't operate in the same bands as old radio-waves.
However, this stuff is very likely to be safe at cellphone usage levels.
>Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk
Your confidence and shortsightedness are astounding.
Do you not see that ~40 years ago scientists were saying exactly the same thing, with exactly the same conviction about Asbestos, Lead, DDT, etc.
We don't know what we don't know, but at least we should admit it.
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Didn't those Soviet soldiers have a greater incidence of cancer later in life?
Some people wonder if one of our cells have a process to check the DNA runs an electric current through the molecule. There is a possibility that electromagnetic fields could distrupt this. This might obviously be bollocks but to say it's only heat output is also wrong...
True. And until then if you resist such things you're labelled as a crank, luddite, anti-science, etc. etc.
Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.
I have friends who would chide me for that. And now FDA bans sale of many anti-bacterial soaps: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/fda-bans-sale-of-m...
I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.
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If the past is any indiction, we probably interact with several things on a daily basis that people 100 years from now wouldn't go near for anything short of crazy amounts of money, or with protective gear.
I think it's more likely that the behavioral patterns created by our constant engagement to mobile devices will carry more adverse effects to our mental and physical health than any mobile device radiation.
Fortunately we completely understand light; if you actually wonder about radio and want to bring it out of the realm of mystery potentially hiding dark magic, learn some basic quantum mechanics. As to what you ingest, learn how its made and understand the basic chemistry of the end product. No label gives insight into that, its just alot of research.
Sure, systematic disinformation campaigns are real, but in 2016 those don't eliminate the also very real and verifiable scientific knowledge.
I am sorry to inform you that we don't completely understand anything at all. We barely understand the world and universe around us. To say that we completely understand anything is a fallacy. Also with the scientific method, nothing is set in stone as fact. Anything can change our understand at anytime.
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The most believable claim I've seen so far is that DNA might be very slightly conductive. Just barely enough to slightly increase replication errors.
I discount it without further evidence, but sounds plausible.
> Fortunately we completely understand light
So is it a wave, or a particle?
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It's going to be smartphone usage itself, especially among children. We are going to look back and cringe at kids screen-holing (this is the term me and my girlfriend use to describe it, similar to k-holing, and in social settings, assholing) at will. A whole generation's minds unprotected from the screen! It's gross.
You can count flurochemicals as one. Ubiquitous in the water supply. No good way for water treatment nor the human body to remove them. Proven harm. Not much discussion today.
Also re toothpaste additive: Colgate Total still uses triclosan, which has been removed from pretty much every other product already and declared harmful by the FDA.
Your comment sounds like the FDA declared triclosan in Colgate Total to be harmful. That is not true: http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm205999.ht...
"For some consumer products, there is evidence that triclosan provides a benefit. In 1997, FDA reviewed extensive effectiveness data on triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste. The evidence showed that triclosan in that product was effective in preventing gingivitis."
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There are so many things that we already have fairly strong evidence to worry about in our foods alone: Trans fats in all of our food (finally will be banned in a couple years), BPA all over our food containers, BPA-like mystery substances in all the BPA-free food containers, BPA gets absorbed in our skin when we touch receipts, constant listeria outbreaks, constant e coli found in factory farmed beef, homogenized milk damages the fat molecules, fracking chemicals in our drinking water, artificial sweeteners and their effects on our gut bacteria, preservatives and their effect on our gut bacteria, dyes like caramel coloring, glyphosate all over our fruits and vegetables.
That's just off the top of my head.
Radar in the near future from every self driving car on the road concerns me more than the wifi.
Not to mention the health issues caused by meat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ
The documentary "Fed Up" is about sugar and was the first time I was made aware there is no daily RDA % for sugar on nutrition labels. They just have the grams. They lobbied very hard to make it that way, because having "4700%" for a daily RDA wouldn't look very good!
The WHO recommends a 50g daily limit of sugar (the FDA's RDA for total carbs is 300g). A single 16oz Coke will put you over the limit. Even as someone who eats relatively clean, it's hard for me to stay under 50g over the course of an entire day.
Step 1 - Don't drink regular Coke.
True, but there is carb count and percentages on labels and it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.
The point isn't that it's hard to figure out. It's that it's harder than everything else that might cause health issues. They deliberately hid things that might look bad to line their own pockets.
How many people know how many carbs are recommended daily? How many know how much sodium is recommended daily? Which of those 2 can you look at a package and be reasonably informed about with no other information?
It's apparently a trick question, as the new labeling is at least partially addressing this.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-s-new-food-lab...
Sugar still remains with no % DV listed, but at least the 'added sugars' has something now.
> it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.
You are probably getting more sugar from things you don't think should be full of sugar than you think. US tastes have skewed to sweet so far that sugar is stuffed in everything.
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There is an RDA for carbohydrates, but:
1) It's way too high
2) It doesn't have a sublimit for sugar, so you can get 99% RDA of carbohydrates from sugar and the guidelines will tell you that's fine.
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I imagine people also get insensitivized to such labels. It can be quite hard to comprehend that a big soda can contain more than a meals worth of energy, especially given how you can drink one with lunch and still be hungry at dinner.
My wife and I rewatch the obligatory Lustig lecture about once a month to re-anger ourselves at sugar. Nothing motivates like a bit of biochemistry mixed in with political intrigue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
My wife is having kidney issues which she believes is associated with her nearly daily intake of Advil, but I had no idea that fructose was also a major potential factor in kidney disease. She consumes about 24 oz of soda per day, which is about 60% fructose. So it looks like it was a double-whammy, Advil + fructose has destroyed her kidney function.
Your wife drinks 2 cans of soda and takes Advil every single day? And you let her do this?
Can I ask why you don't care about the well-being of your spouse?
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This lecture is amazing. I sort of put some of it in the background the first time I watched it, but now I want to delve deeper into it, so thanks for bringing this up. For people who haven't seen it, IMO, it's a real eye opener. I intend to verify a lot more of the science he explains myself as the industry--and let's face it, it's certainly not alone in this--is hardly trustworthy. Interesting how most--if not all--issues of science and technology boil down to trust.
The problem is Lustig is on the far end of the spectrum on anti-sugar. No added sugars? Sure, I buy that. Labelling fructose as a poison simply because it is directly metabolized in the liver is stretch. I'm not going to worry that my kids are eating berries because of their fructose content.
In nature, fructose is almost always found in conjuction with fiber. For example, fruits and vegetables. This combination of sugar and fiber tempers the impact on the body. In contrast, many processed foods have added sugar and reduced fiber content.
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Clearly you didn't fully understand what lustig is saying. Its not the fact that fructose is metabolized in the liver that is problematic - its the effects of the process that are horrible and poisonouos.
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Fructose and sucrose are chemically identical (as in, the same) except that sucrose has an extra glucose attached, which breaks off in the stomach. Fructose tends to come in fruit, surrounded by fibre, which arguably reduces its cost to our bodies. Arguably, I say, because modern fruit is so extremely high in fructose, and because the sugar then hits the lower intestine where it messes up your bioflora, which affects your immune system and so on.
Would you be that sanguine about your kids tossing back a shot of vodka every day? If you take Lustig's analysis of fructose's effect on the liver at face value, you should treat them the same.
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I think after the last few years of these kinds of things coming out, the takeaway is pretty simple: be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
Don't eat too much food. Limit processed foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Eat a large variety of foods. Be active.
These rudimentary guidelines are clearly difficult for a lot of people to follow, but I think it's pretty easy to avoid negative diet effects by just doing what most people intuitively know as the right thing, even if we consume some of all types of food. It seems to me this is more about self-control and effort level than any scientific knowledge, at this point.
Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently. Similarly, there was never a wide range of foods available. I'm not sure we've got enough evidence to say that changing our diet to include lots of fruit and a wide variety of foods is safe. The encouragement to do this is coming from large governing bodies.
I'm off to eat nothing but turnips for a year and get scurvy :-)
> But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently.
Certain groups like Europeans haven't, but humans have lived in lots of places that have year-round fresh fruit for quite a long time.
not to mention most fruits have been selectively bred/genetically engineered to have much higher sugar content than they did when we evolved to eat them seasonally
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>Yeah. But humans haven't had fresh fruit available all year round until recently.
Which humans? There are many tropical regions where fruit is available year round.
Good point. Does anyone know if there have been any studies on only eating in-season fruits and vegetables and how the body reacts?
The original solution was simply preservation. Drying, canning, pickling, etc.
> be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.
I agree with the latter part, but what's wrong with health institutions recommendations? they look pretty sensible to me. I'm much more skeptical of advice from 'health gurus' that seem to have increasing influence.
The massive gulf in healthiness between fruit and fruit juice is not intuitive at all.
The most important question by far is how to eat less, and the answer is very complex.
“be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible”
That's terrible advice. "Common sense" is what happens when popularly accepted ideas escape proper scientific scrutiny, and that's exactly how we wound up here.
The problem with "just being sensible" is the terrible common sense my family has.
And MOST IMPORTANT: Don't be obese! That's the #1 risk factor. If you can control your weight, I wouldn't worry about sucrose vs glucose.
We need to start holding overweight and obese Americans accountable.
As someone who has a fairly limited and simple diet, what are some of the effects of not eating a large variety of foods?
I wonder if this has anything to do with my observation that it's ridiculously hard to find whole fat yogurt, especially whole fat Greek yogurt (!), in most grocery stores in the Boston area. Only specialist and high-end stores such as Whole Foods keep them in stock, whereas the proles get stuck with the sweetened, low-fat versions that contain up to 30 grams of sugar per serving.
Boston area? Oh, I may be about to make you very happy then, especially if you like real Greek yogurt. Sophia's Greek Pantry in Belmont makes the best yogurt I've had outside of Greece. You have to enjoy a good, tangy yogurt, and it will ruin you for all other yogurts. It's best (IMO) with a little bit of good honey drizzled on top.
I mean, this stuff is so thick that you can hardly shake it off the spoon, no sugar, and not too much fat; just a nice protein gel as the yogurt gods intended.
Other than the suggestions offered below: Talk to the store manager and request that they carry the foods you cannot find.
Depending on the grocery, some will hear you, some won't. But many (not all) stores are responsive.
Write (handwritten, postal mail) the CEO as well.
If they won't, at least you tried.
Counter-anecdata: I am able to find plain, whole milk yogurt pretty much at any grocery store I visit out in the Natick area (Natick + adjacent towns). Occasionally they are sold out but it's rare. I certainly don't think it is ridiculously hard.
Maybe my observation has another plausible explanation: everyone is buying the whole fat yogurt, so they're constantly sold out! If true, brings up another question though...why do Shaw's and Stop & Shop keep stocking items that don't sell?
Try making it yourself. I use a variety that ferments at room temperature (Caspian Sea): just add some left-over yogurt from the last batch to a fresh carton of milk, stir, and wait 12 hours.
Greek yogurt, make it 10% or more or get out! Really the low fat stuff is disgusting.
Trader Joe's has it.
wal-mart has it..
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive.
Good thing there is no collusion between big industry and paid off scientists like Willie Soon to direct the narrative around things these days.</sarcasm>
So much wealth lost so 3 people can get $50k...
You forgot your sarcasm tag, most people will miss it ;)
Done, thanks.
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This quote from the article is a great one:
"It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion"
Has the acceptance policy for prominent journals improved that we're sure this is not happening now? I have suspicions that this is likely still happening more frequently then we might expect (i.e. pharmaceutical trials, etc.).
The basic issue is that reviews are just looking for glaring problems in the presentation. To really test an article one has to replicate the experiment from the ground up. And these days thats damn hard and expensive to do.
For the typical reviewer, replication is probably downright impossible.
http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
The real issue is the reliance on authority rather than actual evaluation of the merits of the papers by everyone.
As indicated in the article, journals at the time often didn't require scientists to disclose their sources of funding, whereas they're now extremely strict about full financial disclosure. You can still get published in a prominent journal with a tricky source of funding, but it will be a matter of public record, and your results will (in theory) be more heavily scrutinized.
What if this backlash against Sugar is as extreme as the initial marketing? What if 50 years on, people come back to say, "the generation that endlessly promoted tasteless food and took away the sweetness". Is there a proper study on the effect of eating a sweet chocolate everytime you feel like it, to some kind of happiness? Everyone just sees to be treating this as a magical wand... while still irrationally giving in to a lot of other hyped up food.
Possible but unlikely. For one, you can get lots of tasty food by reintroducing more dietary fat. One of the main culprits for the over reliance on sugar for tastiness in the first place was the focus on reducing fat intake.
Aye, exactly my thinking. The French woman who lived the longest (122) has reportedly eaten a kilogram of chocolate every week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
Personally, I don't subscribe to any of these dietary fads (including 'cutting sugar'). Just eat less, and you'll do fine.
In my experience, tasteless food and sweet food are positively, not negatively correlated. The blandest food (lowfat yogurt) is often the sweetest while the tastiest food (ribeye steak) has no sweetness at all.=.
Follow the money and you will find the motive for what you're being told. There is a reason you're being told what you are and don't believe that it's for your own good. These industries and agencies don't care about what's good for you, they are self serving and only care about what's good for them. You're just the vessel supplying the cash they're after.
I wonder that sometimes about seat belt laws and stop smoking campaigns. Is it the insurance companies that lobbied for and promote these ideas, or is it some altruistic group that actually cares about my well being instead of profits?
There have been studies showing that one, roads that "Look hard" instead of the wide & straight & obstacle-free variety make drivers slow down and pay more attention. I forgot what the influence on accident rate is. Two, same without seat belts, people drive more slowly.
That said, I think overall seat belts are better to have, and we can't redo our highways in a manner that makes people drive more carefully. Instead we need to and do turn the wheel of progress faster and head towards AI drivers on even "cleaner" roads. The planet is way too crowded for idyllic driving pleasure, especially since humans gravitate towards population centers. We can't have the "free driving" of former days back in most places.
Seat belts and many other automotive safety improvements were driven by insurance companies. That's a fortunate case of incentives being aligned.
It's surprising that health insurers aren't more vocal about sugar. Diabetes and obesity are expensive for them.
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Seat belt laws are largely thanks to Ralph Nader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Unsafe_at_Any_Spee...
Follow the money and you will find the motive for what you're being told.
That is definitely true, but way beyond the scope of almost everyone that is targeted by the things that should be questioned.
> way beyond the scope of almost everyone that is targeted by the things that should be questioned
and this is both why the lobbyists are successful and shouldn't be trusted
From the article I can't tell if the sugar industry hid or falsified data.
There are at least two ways you can look at this. Imagine if the sugar industry thinks they are getting a bad rap about heart disease, and want to get researchers to study the link and show that they aren't to blame. Conversely, maybe they knew there was a link and were paying researchers to downplay it (or worse).
I feel like this article just points out that the sugar industry funded research, but it never points to actual misinformation that resulted from it -- or did I miss it?
Of course this happened. Duh. It's still happening today. I'm not saying where because I don't know where. But if you do the simple math about how many people are working as scientists, it's not hard to figure out that there are companies who could benefit from positive scientific findings--no matter how wrong--and realize that some of what we're reading in original research was paid for and not really true.
I wish people would keep that in mind when they get all worshippy about science being self-correcting and a great system.
It's not a particularly great system if you are looking, for example, for certainty. If you want absolute certainty, a good dose of syllogist reasoning will serve you better than any inductive method.
The problem is that syllogistic methods break down very quickly in real world applications because you have to find ways of classifying all the objects that may or may not fall into your category of "all", "some", or "none".
The scientific method is not a bad method, but it's not great. And it's weak in ways like this. It is not even close to the best method. But it's the only one we've found that's generally applicable to the human endeavor.
That's all it is. Better at being more general. I wish we'd get over ourselves and be honest about that.
It doesn't help when most of the information you hear regarding nutrition has been to underwrite the profits of multi-billion dollar corporations that are only out for one thing: Your money... and they don't care what means they have to use to get it. For instance buying exclusive access to resources that you had free access to for pennies on the dollar so that you don't have access to it any more and then selling it to you for gross profits... and I don't mean that in a taxation sense of the word gross. I mean that it's quite literally disgusting.
I'm looking at you Nestle, but realistically, you're just one example of the systemic corruption and propaganda that is pervasive across the entire nutrition market.
The less political the subject, the better the science about it. That's why I love maths. Nobody bribes a set of mathematicians to incorrectly claim the Collatz Conjecture has been proven.
This is the definition of chutzpah: "The [sugar] association also questioned the motives behind the new paper.
“Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research,” the organization said. “We’re disappointed to see a journal of JAMA’s stature being drawn into this trend.”
Yes, the dubious ethics and research quality at issue here are clearly JAMA's, and not the lobbyists' who, by their own admission, paid scientists to publish a journal article to exonerate their own industry.
I thought the book "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes was a pretty interesting read in the sugar vs fat debate.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259
The bitter truth about sugar: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
CTRL+F to see if anyone posted it, and sad to see it so far down. This is the #1 video to show anyone that thinks sugar is fine. It's literally, at a biological level in high doses, poison to our bodies. Watch the vid. It will open your eyes. Too bad the food industry fabricated their lies decades before we had the internet to share information like this. The damage is done and will take decades to undo.
The biggest problem with our health, however, is still Obesity. Just as the fat were mislead by being made to believe that "low fat == healthy" these people will be similarly think "low carb == healthy" and proceed to get obese on low-carb foods.
Face it, if you're a healthy weight, by body-fat percentage, you don't have to worry about fructose vs glucose or fat vs carbs.
Americans need to put their forks down. We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.
> We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.
Ha, that's a good one. The answer you'll get is that nobody is responsible for their expensive lifestyle choices, and everyone is a victim of the system. People are fat? Not their fault; they live in food and exercise deserts and/or are trapped in the poverty cycle where they can only afford garbage calories. What, they are middle class? Genetic, then. Their parents are fat and it takes an overwhelming amount of effort to break the cycle.
The only solution is to change the system, not people. Which, unfortunately, can have adverse effects on healthy weighted people that like the current system.
Weight should probably be taken into account for insurance premiums. But you shouldn't single them out as the only unhealthy people in the world.
Drinkers, drug users, smokers have huge impacts. People who engage in anal sex transmit a hugely disproportionate amount of STDs.
Non-obese people who eat unhealthy are also a problem.
"They cost us money" is often just an excuse to discriminate or control other people's lives.
It's cheaper to eat unhealthy than healthy foods in America. Only the rich or upper middle class can afford healthy food.
> We need to start holding the overweight and the fat accountable for their expensive lifestyle choices.
Accountable to whom?
Here's a suggestion: Mind your own business. Don't concern yourself with things that don't concern you.
I recently am finding it really hard to find non low-fat yogurt. Not fun.
On the other hand, I think the low carb/keto people have taken the pendulum too far in the other direction. A lot of research seems to suggest that a plant based diet heavy on whole fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts is healthier than one consisting of animal fats and protein. It makes sense when you look at the diets of the healthiest people on Earth. Just because excess processed sugar is bad for you doe not mean all carbs are unhealthy.
Low carb and keto is consistent with a vergatable, plant and especially nut diet.
> Whole fruits
What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural - neither oranges nor apples have historically been as sweet as they are now.
There's a world of difference between something fresh off a plant and something ... not fresh out of a (chemical processing) plant, as most processed foods are.
Yes, ag breeding has created foods which are far removed from their ancestors. But get this: effectively none of the foods eaten by humans today existed in anything resembling their current form as little as 10,000 years ago.
Wheat ... was a wild grass occurring in the Mesopotamian valley. Corn was ... teosinte, a small, hard-kerneled Central American plant. Rice was a wild marsh grass found in the Yangtse river valley. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, horses (probably initially hunted for meat, only later exploited for draught), were bred from ancestors only distantly similar to today's major breeds. Apples were wild fruit tree from Turkey which didn't breed true. Etc., etc.
There's an online "tree of life" showing the evolutionary history of plants and animals, and what was shocking to me was the recency of most of humans' major ag and animal foods -- they're literally younger than our species, by far.
That's not to take away entirely from your point. But humans have been relying for much the past few thousand years, and certainly centuries, on foods far removed from their origins.
Well I don't agree that modern fruit is "unnaturally" sweet. If anything, the fruits you get in supermarkets today are watery and bland compared to locally grown stuff. Compare a strawberry bought at a farmer's market to one you buy at a grocery store, for instance.
Obviously it's possible to overdo anything, but fruit gives you a whole assortment of fiber and nutrients that you don't get from processed sugar. In moderation it's extremely healthy.
>What are whole fruits and why do you feel fruits of any kind are healthy? The levels of sugars in them are unnatural.
I am slightly skeptical. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% on the no added sugar train. But I regularly go and pick wild blackberries from a thicket that has been there for about 100 years and they are like pure sugar. Easily sweeter than any storebought berry.
Whole fruits are pieces of fruit from a tree, that you bit into, as opposed to fruits that have been chemically mechanically/processed to extract some molecules (sugar) and discard others (especially the pulp/fiber)
Modern meat is also unnnatural, engineered by the agriculture industry.
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A diet of animal parts (i.e. ALL of the animal, not just muscle) and leafy, non-starchy plants, is perfectly keto-compliant. Who says that a low-carb diet excludes plants?
I'm pretty sure that's why low carb/keto diets work: they force you to avoid most processed junk food. However I don't think it has to do with carbs. I'm pretty sure you could get the same results eating potatoes, corn, beans, rice, etc.
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This makes me remember the late Dr. Atkins of the "Atkins Diet" who was pretty much the laughing stock of dietitians then and now.
Yet people that tried the diet have found life-long positive health impacts. I'm one of these people.
I would also like to put some blame on so-called dietitians, who up until very, very recently would have warned you against a low carb diet.
Every dietician I talk to is so absolutely sure about what they recommend and believe.
False dichotomy. Both sugar and saturated fats are bad. Processed foods in particular.
Atkins died fat and with a heart problem. An extremist but not a scientist.
There seems to be increasing evidence that high blood sugar over a long period of time is very bad for you. That insulin response keeps this under control mostly... but that it was probably never meant to be active all day, every day. So eating lots of sugar (and carbs in general) at every meal is probably long term, not the best thing you can do.
The sugar industry was also the main driver of the African slave trade. When you have strong selection bias against morally principled people joining an industry (as there must have been in, say, 1850) it's hard for an industry to ever recover a moral compass.
Maybe you have a lot of information that I don't (I'm hardly an expert here), but describing it as the main driver seems like a stretch. In the Caribbean, I can see your statement being true. But in the US, as I understand it, it was more general agriculture / cotton. And so far as I know, a huge proportion of slaves were sold into the Middle East, and I assume they didn't have a huge sugar trade there.
This teaches among many lessons, one in particular: We can't take anything for granted. A lot of people use research studies in arguments as it was the absolute truth. The papers can be wrong, or even true but for a narrower sample, or even worst, faked.
The lecture "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" by Robert H. Lustig explains some details about the harmful effects of sugar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
I am honestly mostly scared by how cheaply those scientists were brought. I mean 50 grand?
Not even, the number is ~7,000, but the article is using inflation adjusted dollars to make the number sound bigger.
It is also unclear whether they got that amount each, or in total.
You realize the absolute number is virtually meaningless? Inflation adjusted is the best number, with the caveat that your inflation index needs to be good.
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This is the kind of thing I think of when people here on HN try to convince me that glyphosate is safe. When so much money is at stake, corporations naturally try to influence the science, and unfortunately, there are plenty of poorly-paid and/or dubiously-ethical scientists in the world who will take their money.
Under such circumstances I think we have to be massively skeptical of any result that aligns with the business interests in question. When public health is at stake, the burden of proof should fall very heavily on those claiming their product is safe.
Honey is a strange alternative to sugar. For the past 2 decades, I have used honey as the sole sweetener, though the rest of the family continues to patronize sugar :( The trouble with honey is that it's seriously pricey, and the community is a something of a cult - you have to know a lot of the terminology, otherwise you'll walk out with sugar-water. I take an empty 1 gallon jar to the honey store in Sac, and pay $100 to fill her up. I have experimented a lot with the cocktail over the years. Generally, avoid anything"American" ie. sweet light colored honey. Go for the raw unfiltered darkest thickest broth you can find. They have gigantic jars of various colors, so I sample from the darkest ones. Then add a few grams of propolis and a few scoops of nectar and a few combs. Top it off with manuka and part with $100. Lasts 3 months. It tastes weird and too thick and gooey, but it's an amazing product. All the debris floating around on it is supposedly packed with enzymes etc.
There isn't a significant health benefit to using honey over refined sugars. Sugar is sugar.
Sugar is sugar, but honey is interesting in the flavors and aromas it can provide outside of your standard white sugar.
Just to add if anyone is interested in honey as a sweetener - What dxbydt was saying with honey being ~$8/lb is a good price for identifiable flower honey. Wholesale is roughly $4-5/lb, depending on varietal.
There's a significant range in flavors and aromas depending on what type of flower produced the bulk of the honey. Don't need to avoid anything on colors, it's primarily based on what type of flower is used to produce the honey. Try a sampler, most apiaries/honey specialty shops will sell you a small container of each varietal they have. Avoid heat treated honeys, heating the honey to have it pass through a filter will get rid of a lot of the aroma. You'll see a lot of "raw, unfiltered" at specialty shops.
If you're interested, you can ferment meads with a minimum of ~1.5 pounds per gallon, depending on how strong you want the resulting beverage.
1 gallon of honey lasts you three months? I have a 12 oz jar that has lasted me almost a year, and I use honey closely to exclusively.
1 gallon honey over 3 months is about 11 teaspoons of sugar equivalent.
It's about 184 calories of honey/day.
Let's not forget how WW2 propaganda shifted blame to sugar. Where the fictional notion of a "sugar high" was invented to connote an illicit character that will get your children that much closer to the reefer madness. All to manipulate the public into conserving sugar needed for the war effort.
A sugar high is not fictional. I do in fact get a sugar high. Just ask my co-workers. I sometimes use a threat of eating a candy bar, which will make me hyper before I crash.
This was a great documentary on the subject, I saw it on Netflix I don't know if it's there anymore though:
https://vimeo.com/122387548
http://sugarcoateddoc.com/
What about the fat industry? Didn't they have enough money to pay for scientists to shift the blame to sugar?
Is there a "fat industry"? Sugar production is very industrialized, just a few companies with a strong lobby.
Fat is much more diverse. Sure, there are a few giant soybean oil producers, but it's not their only product, and individual companies don't dominate their market.
The pork industry for one.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon_mania and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-...
There are definitely meat and dairy industries.
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Fat based foods are pricier vs sugar based. Given limited household budget for food, margins tend to be lower on Fat based products.
And you can eat a lot more sugar based food vs fat based food on per food weight basis.
I believe there isn't a fat industry, can you imagine manufacturing fat? Paid for by the Fat for America Industry.
What? Where do you think soybean, corn, Canola/rapeseed, peanut, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, olive, coconut, and palm oils come from?
Animal fats are rather expensive in comparison, but I can also buy pork lard, beef suet, and butter rather easily.
The problem there might just be fragmentation. Growers of cane and beets (and sorghum, too, I guess) have basically just one major homogenized end product: refined sucrose. There are a few related products, like molasses, brown sugar, and confectioners' sugar, and the stuff like bagasse, that tends not to be seen by consumers, but refined sucrose is the moneymaker. Corn growers can also side with the sugar lobby thanks to corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.
There's definitely an industry ($800M/year?), but it isn't one that has a great common marketing association around, to collect dues and pitch catchy slogans that play well on television and radio.
The soy and Canola/rapeseed growers might come together to promote B20 biodiesel, though, while simultaneously bashing palm oil plantations. I can't currently imagine anyone trying to convince me to eat more fats and oils in my diet, at the expense of sugars. Low-carb is still largely seen as an irresponsible, unhealthy, fad diet in the mainstream.
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I guess the closest is the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers (http://www.iheartbutterytaste.com/).
There actually are fat factories I know of one in New Jersie, whether it's an industry I don't know.
The dairy industry is backing all these sugar bad, and implicit or explicit fat good. In particular discrediting valid research warning on saturated fats. Against the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and even NHS.
Guess they were busy destroying the reputation of lard.
Probably not without the corn subsidies that make sugar so cheap.
I watched this documentary titled "That sugar film" [1] a year or so ago. It was quite an eye opener. Although I knew processed foods had a lot of sugar (like we expect sodas and colas to have), what was shocking was the amount of sugar added even in foods where you would never think of sugar as an ingredient. Of course, this varies across different geographies and cultures, but if people consuming processed foods spend some time reading the ingredients in whatever they buy and learn more about them and the proportions, it could help in bringing some changes (I realize this is a rather simplified view). We also need more education and awareness to be spread around to effect a change in people's habits.
[1]: http://thatsugarfilm.com/
see also the really well done movie "That Sugar Film" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/) where exactly this connection is laid out in the first part.
It is available on Amazon Prime last I checked. I've recommended it many times over to friends.
First of all, there is no daily recommended value on sugar because that value is 0.
Then, a can of regular Coca-Cola (and most sodas) has about 38g of sugar. 38g doesn't sound like a lot, but would you take a cup of coffee with 8 teaspoons of sugar? That's what 38g is, 8 teaspoons, for a single can. Many kids drink multiple cans a day, with sugary cereals, pancakes with syrup, snacks, and adding all that up they end up consuming over 100g and end up severe obesity and diabetes.
So food with sugar but also a decent amount of fiber is fine? Like vegetables, certain fruit and whole grain bread?
What should the fiber:sugar ratio be? Broccoli has 1.7g sugar and 2.6 fiber per 100g. Bananas have 12g sugar and 2.6g of fiber. I guess you should avoid food that goes below 1:1?
Glycemic index/load help a lot to answer these questions.
We're going to need another Surgeon General's warning, it seems.
pure gold comment by Eduard Fischer (in Reader's pick section):
"Last week while traveling in the US, I witnessed a mother place a cola soft drink in front of a young child. The girl began to sip on the drink, the volume of which I estimated to be about twice the size of the girl’s head. I was tempted to make a remark, but remembered that I was in a foreign country where the citizens are famously well armed and roughly half the folks eligible to vote have lost their minds..."
Sugar industry is guilty in that case, but let's not put all blame on them. It is the whole society that wanted to believe that mass consumption of sugar is OK.
I'm American and sugar doesn't taste good; I must be very lucky.
how to fat industry shifted blame to sugar in return
> One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.
This is why I'm cynical.
Obesity as the end all be all measure of health is flawed and out-dated.
The real damage is being done silently, ie. cell damage, DNA damage, telomere shortening, endocrine disruption.
Visual cues may or may not be there.
The corruption of science is much more subtle these days. This is an enlightening read:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/16/hal-lewis-my-resignat...
The corruption of science is much more subtle these days. This is an enlightening read:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/16/hal-lewis-my-resignat...
Can anyone recommend a 'healthy' alternative to sugar? Primarily for sweetening Coffee.
Nope :D
But truth be told, I only drink black coffee. Now. I used to put lots of sugar and cream in coffee. I simply started cutting back slowly. I got rid of the cream first, and when it got to the point I was wanting less than 1 package of sugar in a McDonald's large coffee, I just stopped using it, though I could have cut down a little more.
For the first week or two, the coffee seemed a bit bitter, but in the years following, it has been just fine. And much easier to order.
Agave or Honey although they do impart some taste to the coffee
I wouldn't recommend any of these either. They are rich in fructose.
This bad advice may have directly contributed to the deaths of millions of people.
Oh wow this is a real shock. Who could have ever imagined this was actually what was going on the whole time. They totally got me here.
Well that escalated quickly
Only saw the documentaries a few months ago. I'm glad this awareness has pushed for deeper more reputable investigation.
There is almost everyday a topic about sugar/carbs/fat on the frontpage.
you sir are my hero.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481745 and marked it off-topic.
please avoid making comments like this. you do not contribute to the discussion and you embarrass yourself.
please avoid making comments like this. you do not contribute to the discussion and you embarrass yourself
The scientific consensus is that weight gain is caused by saturated fat. Anybody who disagrees with the consensus is anti-science and a fat-denier. Any scientists who disagree with the consensus must have being paid off by Big Fat.
Even Crisco agrees that their products are the cause of Global Fattening and is working on alternatives to oil. Companies that produce saturated fat products should have to buy Fat Credits and fat skeptics should be thrown in prison!
But what about all the actual scientific evidence that a low-carbohydrate high-saturated fat diet results in weight loss? Well, I never said that weight gain causes weight gain or a Global Fattening. What I said was it causes "Body Change".
Body Change means eating saturated fat will make you become deathly skinny or morbidly obese or grow a tail or get cancer or contract herpes or go blind or a million other medical problems.
Basically, if something is wrong with your body, it's because of Body Change. Child falls off jungle gym and breaks its leg: Body Change. Man dies of heart attack in China: Body Change. Conjoined twins: Body Change. Down's Syndrome: Body Change. Hot flashes: Body Change. Wet dream: Body Change. Body change hides under your bed at night waiting to murder you with saturated fats.
Some people say that Body Change is idiotic and unscientific! I guess they believe bodies never change. What morons!
/s
When in fact nothing can be blamed but our overconsumption of almost everything but vegetables and fruits.
I eat about 70% from my calories in carbs (some are refined), but it's just 2500kcal calories per day. I'm pretty sure the fact that average US citizen eats 3500kcal daily has more to do with anything than what particular ingredient one eats.
edit: some irrational unscientific and anegdotal statements require me to remove myself from discussion. thanks.. for the downvotes, I'm outta here boys! :wink:
Then the question is why do they eat 3500kcal? The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more. A calorie is not a calorie.
It would seem that calories don't provide any metric with respect to psychological effect, whether caused by the food or otherwise.
If only people had tried to point this out for many years...
I didn't check the science, but I'm pretty confident that "feeling full" is a matter of volume and not of calories. At least in my personal experience a really dumb and easy way to lose fat without feeling hungry was to eat food with a low calorie density.
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> The hypothesis is that sugar does not make people feel full whereas fat does, so they eat more.
They still eat about 1500kcal of fat and protein - of which I eat about half the amount.
If you were really talking about feeling full, nothing makes you feel more full than a belly and guts filled with lovely starch/fiber from fruits and vegetables, which an average US eats little if not any.
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I think that fruits have an issue too. The fruit we get today has been bred to contain a lot more sugar than they did originally. I'm not convinced that lots of fruit all the time is as good for you as it ought to be.
There hasn't been a study showing that calorie controlled fruit diet will cause you any harm (except potential malnutrition if fruit selection is not as varied).
Just like excessive consumption of protein (but with a calorie cap) in healthy people shows no harm, or similar studies on healthy, physically active people.
Diet is just a part of a healthy lifestyle and a huge variety of diets can be healthy. This blaming of particular ingredient or macronutrients is unscientific, I as a skeptic dislike it very much.
Fruits are rich in fiber which slows down the absorption of their more "potent" sugars, not to mention that digestion of that fiber is far more taxing than digestion of something else.
Of course, if I were to eat excessive amount of calories it's quite probable I'd get the same symptoms as those people consuming the equivalent in refined sugars.
I agree. People always spam the "eat fruits and veggies" meme but come on, what is in fruit? Sugar and some fiber, maybe some vitamins. You are still just eating useless sugar. Let's not delude ourselves that fruits somehow contribute to fulfilling daily macros in a significant way. I consider them a treat, not a staple.
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and don't forget about vegetables, I swear every year carrots get sweeter and sweeter, it feels with some carrot cultivars they are nearly as sweet as corn used to be (now corn often just tastes like candy basically to me, some varieties I can't stomach due to them tasting way too sweet)
note I do not eat any sugar or sweeteners and haven't for years, so maybe that's why I am more sensitive to this
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This is one aspect of sugar and fat that I find confusing. Is sugar in and of itself bad? If I like to eat sugar but am otherwise healthy (healthy weight, plenty of fruits and vegetables, plenty of exercise, etc.), am I still damaging my cardiovascular system?
Of course not.
Is sunlight bad because it can give you cancer?
Are apples bad because they contain cyanide in seeds you can accidentally consume?
Is red meat bad because it causes cancer?
Is alcohol bad because it causes cancer?
If you feel you're living a healthy lifestyle, you can easily check that by doing some medical tests. No diet related disease is going to invisibly attack you at a random moment in life.
Atherosclerosis is fairly visible. Diabetes too. With regular checks you can be sure you're fine.
Sugar in itself is not necessarily bad in moderation. But the "normal" diet contains way too much and this makes it bad.
No - see studies mentioned in https://rawfoodsos.com/2015/10/06/in-defense-of-low-fat-a-ca...
Those shows that sugar on it its own is OK, what is problematic is mixing it with fat. I.e. as long as fat is less that 10%-15% of calories, sugar and carbohydrates are fine.
Sugar is poison. Search YouTube for Lustig lecture video.
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Individual food components can always be "blamed" relatively to their impact.
You may be accidentaly shifting blame to overconsumption. Something the sugar industry would do :-)
For the record I up-voted you for sensibly pointing out that the amount of food one eats matters (in regards to health) more than the particular ingredients. I guess it will take another 50 years before people begin to realize this.
this is almost certainly wrong. (That nothing can be blamed.) I can't eat much sugar for medical reasons, so that means that entire aisles are basically unavailable to me. things like cereals, cookies, cakes, lots of delicious stuff. But there is something or someone (or some process or some state of affairs) to blame here.
Because check it out: stevia is delicious, and with splenda and all sorts of other zero-calorie artificial sweetener choices (going back to saccharine) it would be trivial to make almost all of those food choices in varieties that are artificially sweetened. what do you want to bet that the high fructose corn syrup or sugar industry has a say in directing the conversation that leads to these foods simply not existing? They literally don't exist in supermarkets: you make them at home.
why the fuck would an expensive premium food like this - https://www.specialk.com/en_US/products/protein-cereal.html have 20% by weight in sugar! Generally speaking what I've just linked is a great food, and it's premium and expensive and for those who are very health-conscious. It hardly has any calories, converting by multiplying the suggested serving by 3, it has only 360 calories in 100 grams, which contains 30g of protein (so that if you further multiply by three to get to your daily intake, you get to 90g of protein, enough for just about anyone, reaching only 1080 calories - so it seems great to me. you could literally consider this diet food.)
But it has 21 grams of sugar in those 100 grams. (I happened to find someone weighing 100 grams of cereal, though a denser one - here is what that looks like: http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/cerealpannacotta1.jp... -- * EDIT: also found someone who happened to weigh 20 grams of sugar, this is what that looks like: http://alcademics.typepad.com/.a/6a00e553b3da20883401a3fb659... (that's about 5 cubes of sugar.)).
Why does it have 21% by weight sugar! Why not use an artificial sweetener? Like, it's not even an option.
You can't really find stevia alternatives. The third ingredient in what I just linked was Sugar. Here is someone asking them to include stevia: https://community.kelloggs.com/kelloggs/topics/special-k-pro...
Like, what gives?
I realize that stevia might be expensive compared with sugar, but some people would likely pay for that. You can't get foods made that way though, unless you make it yourself.
why is that? There is someone to blame here. It's a dichotomy: you eat the 21 grams of sugar, or you don't eat the 100 grams of Special K Protein. It's not about overconsumption: it's about a lack of choice. Why doesn't the artificial-sweetener version exist, at all? There is something, or someone (or an abstract economic process, or something) to blame here. While "blaming" an economic process (or a lack of FDA mandate, or ... whatever) might sound bitter due to the phrasing, we can still ask what leads to this state of affairs. I don't usually like to play the "blame game" or put things in those terms, but in this case, I'm missing out on a lot of foods, so yes, I'll do it. If Coca Cola can do it, and get it everywhere, why can't dessert "foods" like oreos or breakfast cereal, do it? They simply don't exist in artificially sweetened versions. Why not?
I also get headaches, fever and joint pain from taking in any sugar. It would be so nice to find cereals where I can add sweetener as needed. In theory they should be cheaper since they don't have to add sugar but in reality they don't even exist.
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When cooking, sometimes the taste of the ingredients isn't everything. Have you ever forgotten to put salt to something you were cooking, and then tried to add salt after cooking to correct it? It doesn't taste the same because in addition to just tasting salty, the salt was supposed to participate in some chemical reaction while it was being cooked.
Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.
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As an experiment, I would try saturating the cereal with water and fermenting with Saccharomyces and Acetobacter to get the sugars out.
I have a hunch that it would taste absolutely horrible, though. I'm not sure there would be enough stevia in the world to bring it back to palatable.
Personally, I would probably prefer to just eat some chicken eggs if I wanted protein for breakfast. That's 160 kcal/100g, with 1g sugar and 13g of protein--as 100% complete protein. And eggs are about $5/kg or less in the US.
I'm not even certain why anybody health-conscious would ever bother with boxed cereals at all, for exactly the reason parent points out--sugar. If I wanted complex carbs in my breakfast, I'd boil a potato, cool it overnight, and heat it back up with the eggs in the morning. No flakes or nuggets are necessary. No sweeteners are necessary. If desired, ketchup is plenty sweet enough for that potato.
But crap.... why can't they make ketchup with stevia, or just unsweetened ketchup? It's back to the same problem. If you can't eat sugar, the American grocery store is mostly a colorful wasteland of foods you just can't touch.
Munchies, munchies, everywhere, and all the cupboards creak; Munchies, munchies, everywhere, nor any speck to eat.
To be honest, I don't like the taste of stevia. It tastes a lot like other sugar substitutes (like aspartame) to me. That being said, I've had it used in cooking (without knowing it) and thought it tasted OK. Maybe in commercial foods they make it taste more like existing sugar substitutes because thats what is expected by people who already seek out sugar free foods?
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I'm a diabetic and I eat 70% of calories in carbs. I make sure they are all low GI.
My statement was mostly about average people, not sick people. I'm fairly sure diseased individuals are an exception and have to make sure to put their disease in remission (or to meet their genetic predispositions) with proper diet plans.
Coca Cola has a stevia version that seems to be very niche. I rarely see it, nor have I tried it. But I wonder why it hasn't been pushed more, especially in a market where your product is increasingly demonized because of the 30 - 40g of sugar each serving contains.
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