Comment by ablyveiled
1 year ago
Added sugar is not necessarily problematic, but consumption of anti-thyroid substances like high amounts of PUFA (especially seed oils), chlorine, bromine, fluoride (in absence of iodine) can make it so, by way of increasing energy supply which is not properly consumed. Industrial pollutants like PFAS and hexane byproducts also play a role.
There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive" -- it's good for you! It's an obscenely easily digestible source of energy, whose products are used very easily by the cells. In the case of fructose, its consumption is relatively more insulin-friendly than the glucose-heavy starches. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.
Seriously "addictive" sugary foods are psychologically problematic usually for other reasons. Pure cane sugar is not very addictive when consumed alone. Try it.
I think this is an example of proportionality bias. There's a cognitive bias that big effects (obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc) must have big and complex causes.
In reality, sugar is just straight-up bad in anything resembling the quantities we eat it, and we should not. It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density. Therefore it makes sense to seek out. In our synthetic world, we can make as much as we want and eat it whenever we want.
The reward system exhibits unconstrained positive feedback.
As a counter-example there are tons of things that 'feel good' but are destructive, like opioids and cigarettes. Things that are addictive aren't de facto good for you. In fact they're usually very bad for you because they overload your reward feedback network.
> It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density
Fat has 2.25x times the energy per gram that sugar does.
It's very weird to quote someone's sentence while deliberately ignoring half of it.
Counterpoint: Try munching on some pure cane sugar. Observe that it is not very addictive at all.
Yeah, I don't agree with that. Plenty of people all over the world drink literal cane juice. [1]
Not to mention cane sugar is just sucrose, also called table sugar, and it's the same as beet sugar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane_juice
4 replies →
> There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive"
Sugar on its own isn't addictive and isn't a necessary nor sufficient ingredient for hyperpalatability. Foods can be hyperpalatable without sugar, and in fact most (~70%) hyperpalatable foods have their hyperpalatability driven by fat and sodium:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672140/
> The availability of HPF in the US food sysltem has expanded substantially over the past 30 years. The current US food supply is highly saturated with HPF, which our findings indicate comprised almost 70 % of available foods as of 2018. The growing availability of HPF over time, particularly HPF high in fat and Na, may have resulted from the reformulation of existing food products in the food system to be hyper-palatable. Thus, expanding HPF availability may be one key contributor to the obesogenic food environment in the US. Given potential consequences for population health, policy-level action is needed to address the presence of HPF in the food system. Policy may focus on limiting the nutrient thresholds allowed in foods to be below HPF thresholds (e.g. foods should contain <25 % kcal from fat and <0·30 % g from Na).
Yes, this is what I put forward at the end.
Agreed entirely. Even more glycemic foods than sugar (which is only half glucose), are not a metabolic problem. I started eating pasta, white bread, and white rice and have been able to lose weight. People on this very forum will tell me that what I do is impossible, but I'm done taking the advice of bots and people who aren't fit. I am downright skinny now. Go ahead and downvote my post, after all HN is an echo chamber full of IYIs and shills, is it not?