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Comment by gregcrv | Hacker News Reader

There was no fat to remove from pasta sauce. Maybe they also figured out that sugar was addictive and added it everywhere to sell even more food with sugar?

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> There was no fat to remove from pasta sauce.

Olive oil is one of the four basic ingredients. (In addition to tomatoes, garlic, and salt.)

It doesn't matter, I add sugar even after adding oil. And usually there are onions instead of garlic and you need to add less salt when using onions because they are already sweet.

That's good fat though..

You need to add sugar to contrast tomato acidity, it has nothing to do with sugar addiction. And it has been like this since forever, not only from the '70s. Source: even my grandmother added a pinch of sugar when cooking pasta sauce.

A very little bit of sugar that's in a pinch isn't any kind of a problem. Even a tbsp isn't that much. The problem is the massive amount they put in drinks of all types...and foods of all types. They even put it in bread for heck's sakes.

In terms of taking the edge off of tomato sauce, shredded carrots works pretty well. I don't use sugar in any of my cooking, and no one has noticed.

Sugar in bread is so nasty to me. I can't stand to eat it, yet it's in almost every loaf on the shelf at a supermarket with 50 types.

Even without sugar, bread contains a lot of carbohydrates that break down right into sugar just by coming into contact with the spit in your mouth.

If you think that's not true, simply take a sugar-low bread (check the food label, don't just go for organic/whole-grain, those usually have more sugar) and taste it for a while in your mouth. You'll notice it starts to become sweeter in your mouth.

And that's actually not an issue. As you probably know, glucose is the fuel our bodies and brains run on, and while your body can break down proteins to glucose in a pinch, it's not actually healthy (despite what proponents of ketosis diets will tell you). It's especially hard on the kidneys.

As long as you stick to proper bread without the crazy added sugar, and preferably whole grain (actual whole grain, not just marketing "whole grain"), it's not an issue. Unless you try to subsist on literally only bread, of course.

I'm not talking about various proteins and rather about starch, which is a natural part of a good bread. The enzymes in your mouth and digestive system will break down starch to normal Glucose without a problem.

My point is that we need carbs, it is unhealthy to subsist on protein alone.

Obviously, yes. A balanced diet is always a better choice than any extreme diet. Like basically anything else too.

This is one of the best reasons to make your own at home. Thankfully, bread machines aren't expensive.

No knead bread is great. You don't even need bread machines.

Rye bread even has sugar in it.

Yes, a pinch, not enough sugar to turn the sauce into "kids ketchup"

That's actually a good guideline. Treat sugar as seasoning, to be used sparingly.

My grandma used grated carrots to offset bitter/sour flavors in tomato sauce. There was a time before industrial white sucrose was as cheap as flour.

If everything you are eating has sugar added, the item you eat without it will taste bitter and/or bland. Or the sugar made the bland (picked early etc) tomatoes used in the sauce more palateable.

Sodium gets paired with sugar to manipulate the tastebuds. Taste has become a hyper-surreal experience.

Most chicken sold is pumped up with water (because water is cheaper than chicken). To bind the water, they add a ton of salt. To counteract the salty taste, they add sugar. As a side effect, it makes skinless boneless chicken breasts less likely to dry out if you overcook them slightly.

The end result is that most people find the taste of non-pumped chicken unappealing, because they're simply used to the faked-up salt/sugar chicken.

Yup. Bought a precooked whole chicken at Wegmans a couple weeks ago. The small printed said up to 12% was water and other ingredients (e.g., salt). All we wanted was chicken.

You're basically paying chicken prices for salted sugar water, it's crazy.

I think this is generally true, but I'm not sure how to explain pasta sauces since I've been paying more attention.

Sugar content in pasta sauces is almost random. Varies from 3 to 10 grams per serving at least. It seems to vary more than almost any other premade item I buy.

And yet, even though I still eat junk too often, and like some treacle, I would not sort sauces based on sugar content.

I can't tell if there's no correlation or if it is literally reversed for my taste buds, but often the high sugar ones are the worst to me.

Just a theory, but maybe the sugar enhances some flavors, like garlic, but masks others, like basil, rather than drawing them all out equally?

I'm not sure how well sugar's complex affect on taste is understood by food scientists, let alone smaller or newer food brands. (What do the generic brands have, a couple chefs and a couple rounds of taste tests? No idea.)

Maybe there are too many possible combinations of ingredients and market segments for producers to all agree on the proper role of sugar, and maybe they're mostly guessing.

If that's true, then we could all probably stand much less added sugar than we/they realize.

You add sugar especially when using fresh tomatoes for the sauce. The tomato passata already has a bit of sugar. Ever tried an homemade tomato passata made with fresh tomatoes before adding sugar? I remember that the home made one sometimes was so acidic that it literally tingled my mouth.

There's a term in the industry that's used for the amount of sugar that makes a food tastier/more addictive while not making it too sweet, don't remember what it is though. But yeah, it's like you said, they add it to everything to make it better tasting and more addictive.

There was some lab-rat study super long ago where they got mice/rats addicted to sugar and cocaine, then let them pick between the two - and they chose the sugar every single time.

The term is 'Bliss Point' in case anyone was wondering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

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