Comment by llm_nerd
2 days ago
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has.
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
Sure, that’s a reasonable take, but satiety research was also far less developed.
The general understanding at the time was basically a full stomach tells people they have eaten enough. We didn’t understand the multiple systems the body uses to adjust the hunger drive and how much a high carb low fat diet messes with them.
> I'm sorry, but this is simply nonsensical. Calories were EVERYTHING among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
Less vilified is on a relative scale, I was alive back then and there was plenty of nonsensical low calorie diets being promoted. However you also saw crap like the Fruitarian Diet where unlimited fruit meant people could actually gain weight on a diet that also gave them multiple nutritional deficiencies.
Low fat dieting is in part from that same mindset as fruitarian diet where it’s not the calories that are the issue but the types of food you were eating. Digging just a little deeper these ideas made more sense before global supply chains and highly processed foods showed up. Culture can be a lot slower to adapt than technology or economics, diet advice from your grandparents could be wildly out of date. Cutting X means something very different when you have 20 available foods vs 20,000.
> Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar.
That has been kind of a consequence of that though. Low-fat foods tend to taste pretty bland, so sugar is added instead to improve flavor.
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
Skim/lowfat milk just... takes the cream out.
The same rule changes tightened the rules on added sugar.
Taking the cream out is (by some diet theories) bad. The fat in whole milk slows down the absorption of lactose, leading to a slower rise in blood glucose compared to skim milk. Whole milk is more satiating as well, because of the fat.
If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.
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In my country the lowest fat milk has added lactose.
It did twenty years ago, when I noticed, I have not bought it since
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For the milk you don't add sugar directly, but you end up adding more carbs to the rest of the meal when you take out nothing but fat from the milk.
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>which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
This is not accurate.
No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.
Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.
They will however recommend sugar, just by calling it something else.
See "carbohydrates", "complex carbohydrates", "integral grain" and so on.
Quite frankly, plain sugar from fruit is less dangerous than the complex carbs from grains. But fructose is still dangerous, just less so.
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
While what you say is true, starch is still nutritionally unnecessary. And wheat in particular has a lot of unhealthy or even outright toxic substances in it, especially if you are talking about the whole wheat.
>High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.