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Comment by dota_fanatic | Hacker News Reader

It's being "unfairly" singled out because it's being "unfairly" added to most processed foods. Why is it added? Because it's addicting, people will always want more, and are therefore willing to pay for it. Want your food product to sell more? Add sugar. It's nice that you think people should "just eat normal levels", but it's extremely hard in practice when the food landscape is heavily saturated in the stuff, especially the cheaper products. Healthy food, or "moderate" behavior, exists alongside a mountain of more appealing options in the moment, especially considering cost.

Go to the grocery (in the US), and look at many products attractive to children. Notice the heavy prevalence of added sugar. Unfairly singled out? lmfao

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> Why is it added?

Because it's delicious.

Why do people eat too much sugar? Because they like delicious things and eating delicious things makes them happy. Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.

> Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.

That's not really fair. I agree with your general skepticism in this thread (there's a reason that most of these studies show small effects due to dietary modifications but most anecdotes of the same are "and now everything is amazing!"), but the human body is designed to crave things like fat and sugar and to feel good when they're acquired.

Some kind of ascetic lifestyle -- where we can remove the desire for the pleasure of eating -- may be possible, but the physical design of the body and our reward system indicates that enjoyment from eating food is built right in.

It would be like ignoring people perpetuating fraud and instead only trying to solve all the ways that the human brain is susceptible to it.

You responded to a rhetorical question and completely ignored my response to your ridiculous claim that sugar is being unfairly singled out. Why is that?

Because it's delicious

It's not though. It's only delicious for people who have high sugar intake. And besides, deliciousness is subjective and orthogonal to nutrition, while nutritional value is largely objective (we hope).

Smoking is bad for you, so it's illegal for minors to buy and it's illegal to even smoke with a minor in the car. High sugar intake is bad for you, so it's illegal to advertise sweets to children /s.

Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.

You really think for us to have any hope of changing the prevalence of obesity is to get people to change their behavior, instead of minimizing the accessibility and prevalence of the environment which reinforces said behavior? It'd be great to do both, but realistically...? Get millions of people to change their behavior and opt for the more expensive / less flavorful foods? (And I mean less flavorful in a subjective sense, since they're used to very sweet, very salty things.)

You guys just love arguing about semantics.

We can't convince others with an aggressive tone. Like I'm doing. But we can definitely win over an audience.

> > Why is it added? > Because it's delicious.

You can't possibly be this ignorant of nutrition. Do you really think sugar is somehow objectively and universally delicious (excluding the trivial definition in which almost every taste is "delicious" in that it contributes to the overall palette of flavor)?

I didn't quite cut sugar out of my diet but around college I stopped eating as much, and I now found most of the desserts or candy one would find in the supermarket to be too sweet for my tastes, as well as most "normal" sweetened drinks (by contrast to e.g. many fruits). How does that mesh with your claim that sugar is added because it's simply "delicious", as opposed to other's model of a feedback loop between amt of sugar consumed and amt of sugar desired?

Sugar is addictive. It is therefore a drug. Like it or not.

Stop eating it for a few weeks and you will find food with a lot of added sugar disgusting (eg: coke).

> Sugar is addictive. It is therefore a drug. Like it or not.

Addictiveness has nothing to do with whether or not something is a drug. Like it or not.

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