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Comment by redwards510 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

> 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.

Even in the UK, when I stopped eating candy for a while, it turned out that I found a lot of "ready-to-eat" food overly sugary.

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.

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.

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.

The only thing scientists widely agree upon about Suger is that it's unnecessary - very unusual for foodstuff. An RDA for sugar therefore doesn't make that much sense. The optimal sugar intake seems to be zero.

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