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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine the Amish buy or make sugar-enriched foods, so a diet without those would also contribute to their health

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The Amish love sugar as much as the next group along. Jams, jellies, preserves; pies, cakes, and cookies are all part of their diet.

They are probably less likely to consume large amounts of prepackaged desserts, sodas and snack foods than their "English" neighbors, but that varies from community to community.

I've never seen Amish consuming pre-packaged anything. They have an abundance of home-grown food.

Cigarettes though.. the youth still love them.

the culture you live in has enormous impact on how much you will attach to the sensory pleasure of sugar bloated products. With time I started to develop new taste, and I can recognize when something has too much sugar in it. Before that I would be blind. If you live in a place with more subtle food, you probably get years of advance at that game and you can find pleasure in other nutrients. Also lifestyle change your diet, amish are said to be often working outside in groups, that makes you hungry and not seeking for greedy/gourmet.

I agree with your first point -- when I drastically reduced my sugar consumption, it was only a few months before I felt that everything I had liked before was horrendously over-sweetened.

However, your second point is not applicable. The Amish have a culinary tradition of their own that stems from 18th C German cooking adapted to American ingredients. Because they strictly limit their exposure to technology changes, they do more manual labor than is common for their neighbors, but this isn't correlated with a lack of desire for good (tasty, appetizing, visually appealing) food. If you tour Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, you'll discover Amish foods and handmade goods being sold everywhere.

I don't know what amish eat, but I'd bet a dollar or two that it's not crude industrial premade recipes, nor hamburger or pizzas and soda. If it is.. then I am wrong, but I'd be surprised considering the conservatism mentioned in articles about them; they seem to only accept things that have clear benefits and not cheap ideas that look shiny (like any new technology).

They also get lots of sunlight, exercise, and have a tight knit community (one of the largest predictors of longevity).

But they do! I have a sweet tooth and some of their stuff is just too sweet for me. It really depends on what part of the country they are in, but Pennsylvania Amish are known for their pies. One of the most famous types, Shoofly Pie, is basically sugar flavored sugar.

>>sugar flavored sugar

How does that work?

It's not literal, but it is basically a molasses cake baked into a pie topped with sugar, so yeah. Sweet.

God that sounds delicious.

That sounds like the cure for anti-diabeetus.

50 states of sugar:

caramel

cream

dough

powder

crystal grain

icing

...

From what little research I did, Shoofly Pie is basically Streuselkuchen but with brown sugar/molasses? As somebody who loves regular Streuselkuchen I can't really imagine having molasses in it, that sounds just too sweet.

When I was about 6 I thought very highly of it. Now that I'm 30, even thinking about it makes me feel a little ill.

AFAICT shoofly pie is basically just layers of streusel (made with butter or shortening) and molasses with leavening, so…Streuselkuchen minus the Kuchen (egg/yeast).

Addressed in the article - with the same diet, 7% T2D incidence rate in non-affected population, 0% rate for those with the mutation.

"similar diet" .. All of the Amish communities I know produce all of their own food. I never see them as customers in restaurants or buying anything other than basic ingredients in stores.

I'm sure it happens, but it would be extremely difficult to find people who have similar diets as the Amish, as you'd have to grow your own food and butcher your own animals to achieve a similar level of diet.

I think this is comparing Amish people with the mutation vs. Amish people without the mutation. Both groups are Amish eating Amish food in Amish communities with other Amish.

I'm pretty sure you could have fit just one more "Amish" in that sentence.

It's not similar diet to the outside world. But the two Amish groups with and without the mutation have similar diets so the Amish without the mutation act as the control group and have 7% incidence of T2D while the Amish group with the mutation have 0%.

Presumable the p-value for normal Amish 7% vs. rest-of-US 8% is not significant in the numbers they studied, but the 7% vs. 0% was.

The amount of manual labor involved in Amish life, I suspect, deters type-2 diabetes a fair amount, as well as many chronic diseases.

You’d be wrong to assume it. Amish make some of the best candies around, made the old way but full of sugar. I doubt they are growing their own sugar cane so it’s likely it comes from sugar beets or corn.

My fried growing up was from Pennsylvania and would bring back massive amounts of candy from Amish country. Whenever I drive to Florida I see many road side stores touting “Amish made candy”.

The answer is yes they eat the candy they make as well.

You've also got maple syrup (and maple sugar) and honey, which produce sugar with very little processing. Honey you just need to extract from the comb, maybe filter out the bug parts if you're picky, syrup you just literally boil the sap (and filter out the bug parts).

They might eat the candy, but what about soda, fruit juice, processsed foods in general, etc.

Yeah, sugar is the work of the devil. But it's the amount Americans ingest in many other forms that create obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc.

Not sure if there is a precise definition of sugar enriched foods, but the Amish do make pies, cakes, cookies, and so forth.

>I can't imagine the Amish buy or make sugar-enriched foods

My dad used to buy chocolate chip cookies and gobs[1] from the Amish at the farmer's market. They were huge, and good but definitely not healthy :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoopie_pie

The average incidence of diabetes in the US is about 8.3 %, not very different from the Amish. See https://www.everydayhealth.com/hs/type-2-diabetes/diabetes-a...

The 7% was the Amish without the mutation. 0% was the Amish with the mutation. That's why they want to study the mutation.

Given the rate of overweight + obesity in the general pop 8.3% sounds too low.

Pennsylvania Dutch not liking sugar? Have you seen their recipes?

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