Hacker News Reader

Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Fruits and vegetables are full of sucrose, it is the most commonly occurring sugar in plants. If splitting more sucrose (or is fructose really the problem?) increases your chance of cancer, it means very little on its own. Would you get the same results if they matched the starches to the glucose equivalent, rather than the same mass?

Which is why I don't see why they would bother to suppress a result like this, but I guess the public interpretation would likely be the outrageous "specifically refined table sugar gives you cancer", so I can't exactly blame 'em for wanting to.

View on HN

A 12 oz can of Coca Cola has twice the sugar content of an apple, without the beneficial fiber or vitamins.

How many Americans are obese because they eat too many fruits and vegetables? An overwhelming majority are obese due to fast foods, soda, snacks, and sweets... costing taxpayers millions of dollars while companies profit from the negative externality.

I absolutely share your viewpoint.

As a consumer, I try to think about the ingredients of a product: if it is mostly chemicals (in contrast do agricultural products), then the product probably isn't healthy.

well, consider that basically everything is constituted by chemical compounds (an apple contains stuff like epicatechin, phloridzin, quercetin, etc.)

https://cdn.paperpile.com/blog/files/Goldberg-2014.pdf

The "chemicals are bad!" scare has gotten completely out of hand.

I'm not at all against chemical additives.

I'm just saying if you're eating something which barely contains any agricultural product, you should ask yourself whether this is really healthy.

> costing taxpayers millions of dollars

How do you mean? My understanding is that it would affect insurance rates for the overweight, unless of course insurers are not allowed to set rates based on bodyfat guidelines? I'd accept that it's costly here in Canada though, definitely an increase in emergency medical service load.

About one third of Americans receive government-funded health care, mostly through Medicare and Medicaid.

Additionally, when uninsured people visit the emergency room and can't pay for the service, the ER is not allowed to turn them away, and the rest of us end up paying for it.

regardless of rates, it puts a strain on the healthcare system

While I don't necessarily agree with GP, and don't disagree with you, I feel compelled to point out that your comment is almost orthogonal to his. Your points have little to do with what the GP wrote about.

How is the food industry supposed to grow if we stop becoming more and more obese?

If we eat better food that is more sustainable the food industry will do well. You replace the giant producers with lots of small farms. People pay more for food per calorie, but balanced out by fewer calories.

The food mafia won't like this though so they'll lobby for laws to avoid it.

I'm actually in the process of founding a small farm :-)

I tend to conflate the food industry with the food mafia though, and I'm highly skeptical of the long term prospects of civilization if we pursue our growth-based economy.

Resources on earth are finite, efficiency can't rise past (or approach) 100%, and the amount of entropy we generate today is already too high for the rest of the biosphere, leading to its collapse.

By focusing on healthy food with higher margin. That could cause people to eat less and be thinner and food companies would keep their revenues because margin would be higher (think free range eggs, chicken that lived outside in good conditions instead of horrible food factories where they are treated horribly).

I actually hope we get there :-) but it would mean that people would have to spend a higher share of their income on food.

When it comes to stripping people of their cash, the competition is fierce, and we humans are usually not very good at long term thinking.

Guilt- and shame-based marketing is not very effective (boasting health/societal benefits is indirectly guilt tripping people), less than hey look at this shiny $product that would make you sooo cool among your peers. Shiny! Buy now! And don't get me started on addiction-based products, like junk food (or screen-based products, be them games or serial TV shows).

I mean government would need to subsidize food for poor people. Large parts of population today rely on cheap food (prepackaged meals or fast food) because they can't really afford higher quality more expensive food.

So government would need to subsidize healthy food similar to the way it is subsidizing green energy (electric cars for example). And probably tax fast food so that kind of business becomes unprofitable.

Where I come from, if a person buys and eats junk and gets obese, that's their own fault, not the fault of the person who sells junk, and certainly not the fault of taxpayers. Their additional costs should come out of their own pockets.

What about the gov subsidies of corn that got us to the current situation?

That's an extremely short sighted way to look at things, which gives a complete pass to a bunch of bad actors in the system.

Why is it always "personal responsibility", but never "corporate responsibility"?

We should tax the companies that profit to fund public education on these issues... If the public is not aware of the risks, they cannot be at fault because they never made a decision.

The fiber is really important because it slows the rate of blood sugar change, and makes you feel full.

I could easily drink 2 cans of pop, but could not eat 4 apples.

Fruit & vegetables full of sucrose? That seems a little exaggerated. An onion, for instance, is 90% water, 4% sugars, 3% other carbs and 2% fibre. A coke, on the other hand, is 90% water, 10% sugar (either HFCS or sucrose, depending on your locale) and not an iota of fibre.

Would a coke onion (84% water, 10% sugar, 5% fibre, [1% other stuff {caramel colouring, deactivated coca leaf extract, etc.}]) be a bad source of sucrose?

Pineapple is about 6% sucrose, red delicious Apples are about 2% sucrose (the rest being mostly fructose, and some glucose), bananas have more than 5% sucrose (As do mangoes, nectarines, and varieties of apple like pink lady).

Current thinking is that the binding of the sugar to fibre in fruit and veg makes it better than raw sugar.

no that's not true. current thinking is just that if you eat fruites and vegs that you probably don't eat so much that you can get sick.

however when it comes to drinks (i.e. smoothies, apple juice, orange juice) we already know that they could be as worse as cola. (from a sugar perspective). fructose is as worse as sacarose for a human beign if you eat/drink too much of it. it is just worse in another way i.e. it can give you different diseases. Well the problem is just that people consume way more sucrose than fructose. That's why there is probably never a bad word about it.

Basically everything should be consumed with care and moderation, but with the current generation it gets harder and harder (less time -> less time to cook -> excessive use of fast food, etc..)

no, really, current thinking is that whole fruit is better than juice or smoothies because blending releases the sugar, which is otherwise somewhat bound to the fibre.

Of course, it's far easier to overconsume blended fruit, but there are studies showing an increased risk of t2 diabetes from drinking limited amounts of fruit juice, and over consumption isn't the whole story.

https://www.nhs.uk/news/diabetes/fruit-may-lower-diabetes-ri...

https://www.nhs.uk/news/diabetes/fruit-juice-and-type-2-diab...

Right, fruit juice is definitely problematic since it completely removes the fibre. I only skimmed those articles but it seemed to be talking about juice, not e.g. smoothies where the fibre from the fruit is still present. If I make a smoothie from a packet of blueberries, I assume that gives more or less the same benefits as eating them.

I guess an important point to make is how easy it is to consume a sugary drink. I can very easily sit down and drink a tall glass of orange juice but not so easily could I sit down and eat the six oranges that would be used to make that oj.

I just ate 3 carrots and I definitely don't feel for a 4th.

Meanwhile, I'd have to eat 3 pounds to equal a bottle of coke: http://www.sugarstacks.com/carrots.htm

Pretty crazy. And eye-roll inducing when people bring up sugar in vegetables/fruits. As if it's your apple habit keeping you wide.

A peeled apple is about as bad - little fiber, and 10% sugar.

> Fruits and vegetables are full of sucrose, it is the most commonly occurring sugar in plants.

Modern strains of fruits and vegetables. They are all artificial breeds.

There is a difference in the way the body processes sucrose and fructose from plants and that from refined sugar. Plants have all kinds of other nutrients that necessarily go into the stomach at the same time as the fructose and sucrose.

Yeah, and given that the study was specifically about the metabolic output of the gut bacteria of mice, I am very suspicious of anyone jumping to the conclusion that this has even a decent chance of having any relevance to humans. Overall, of course sugar increases likelihood of cancer. Everything which provides energy to the body is because it might provide that energy to dividing cancerous cells. Anything which increases cellular activity increases the risk of cancer, whether it be heat, friction, calories, whatever. Reducing caloric intake is the only proven reliable means of life extension for a reason. But beyond that basic contribution it would be very hard to see how such basic molecules could contribute significantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com