American toddlers are eating more sugar than the amount recommended for adults
qz.com
qz.com
Health benefits aside (I was also exercising a lot more and drinking less, so I can't comment on specific benefits), it was incredibly hard.
It wasn't the sugar cravings that were hard. I didn't get them at all, I didn't miss sweet food or sugar one bit. The hard part was actually finding food that didn't contain added sugar.
I was basically relegated to preparing all my food from scratch. Practically anything in a packet contained sugar. Even the most innocuous things would contain it. Obviously some things only contain low amounts and that's normal (e.g. cured meats), but I couldn't eat most bread, any sauces, the vast majority of pre-prepared meals (except for "paleo" meals), or any spice mixes. Even bottled mayonnaise contains sugar!
It made trying to find a snack incredibly difficult, I basically had to eat carrots and hummus.
At least whisky contains no added sugar (caramel colouring wasn't counted as sugar, in this case).
I don't really use mayo, I prefer vinaigrette dressings. I was just using mayo as an example though, if you make mayonnaise yourself, it's just oil, egg yolk, and vinegar. There shouldn't be sugar in mayo.
On the second count, you're right that you don't need to be extremely strict. I went sugar-free for a month because I made a bet with a friend, rather than for any actual health reason. A small amount of sugar is fine for you.
The problem is that practically every shelf stable packaged food contains added sugar. If you have a diet that consists of a lot of packaged food, the sugar starts to add up quickly, especially if you're in a habit of using ketchup, which is astoundingly high in sugar. Granola bars (and granola in general) are also a food that people seem to forget contain a boatload of sugar too.
By all means, steer clear of HFCS (operative word: fructose, not sucrose). It's probably less bad than it's reputation suggests, but its also probably worse than sucrose. More pertinently, it's indicative of cheap, low-quality food that has way too much sweetener because it otherwise has no flavour.
But more on point for this thread: Don't replace a food that shouldn't have sugar in it at all (mayonnaise) with a variant that just has a different kind of sugar. Find a variant that is better quality and doesn't have sugar at all. Good mayonnaise requires really good eggs and those are expensive.
I didn't say it was.
>...organic sucrose is absolutely chemically identical to non-organic.
Have any evidence to support this? Also, many things are "chemically" similar but affect the body in very different ways.
Whether organic or not, the process to make it yields the same molecule.
I was arguing there is a difference between raw unprocessed extract from the sugar cane plant vs processed white sugar.
Pasta sauce for instance IMHO should not have any sugar at all (tomatoes, spices, and a little bit of olive oil). If sugar is added, it should be very modest. But try finding a typical pasta sauce in the store with no sugar or even only a modest amount of sugar. This is more difficult than it sounds.
Options definitely exist and Googling, it seems with keto being more of a thing, there are a few more options compared to when I searched a few years ago -- haven't honestly made pasta in a while. But it's still relatively few, your typical Ragu type bottles will have sugar or HFCS as one of the top 3 ingredients. The options that do exist tend to cluster around more expensive "organic" offerings. And you have to keep checking ingredients lists continuously for changes. One report for instance said Aldi's used to have a pasta sauce without sugar. This is not the case now... http://ggfgourmet.com/en/index.php/aldipastasauce/
Pasta sauce is one of those things that takes time to make. If you don't have the time to make it, and can't find a quality variety without the unnecessary sugar... you're out of luck.
I'd like to be able to buy ground sausage, but a lot of packaged ground sausage has added sugar, as do a lot of packaged broths and bouillon cubes. Broth and sausage are great ways to add some flavor to staples like beans and lentils and it's really unfortunate that it's so hard to find packaged versions without sugar.
The issue with sugar is how the body processes fructose and glucose. Unless there is indication that substances present in non-organic vs organic sugar modify digestion of sucrose and fructose there isn't much to the theory organic makes sugar less harmful.
Processed white sugar has a detrimental effect on the body, and unprocessed sugar does not. Or if it does, it's so minimal as to be unnoticeable in my own tests.
This includes ability to concentrate, lethargy, dental health, sleep, hyperactivity and general health like colds and the flu.
This is from my own experimentation with multiple people, first hand, not just reading what others have said.
And I will use that as my reason for picking up my next bottle of Single Malt.
It also had a positive effect on my mental health, which was an unintended but nice side effect.
Do you think this could be a result of improved sleep? It's one of the benefits I've heard reported by people following a similar diet.
One friend's severe eczema completely cleared up, others pretty much universally reported sleeping better and feeling more alert. Some just lost a lot of weight (as was their intention, although as with most diets probably mainly retained water weight).
We live in a rural area of the UK where farm shops are common so it's relatively easy around here, but I could see it being much more difficult for city dwellers.
I personally wouldn't do it myself and am not a fan of short term "fad" diets but the results are hard to deny.
I do eat organic sugar and honey though, but because I don't eat any white/processed sugar (nor corn syrup) this automatically cuts out 95% (guess) of the bad food I would normally have been eating.
There's no one solution for "wellbeing" of course, but this sure is a big thing to change.
That is not my argument. I never said "brown sugar", I said "organic sugar", which includes the growing and any processing of the sugar. True brown sugar is something like succanat [0], and it doesn't look anything like what we normally consider "brown sugar".
[0] https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Foods-Sucanat-Organic-Sugar/dp/B0...
> find a snack incredibly difficult [..] I basically had to eat carrots and hummus
You make it sound as if it was not normal to cook your own food from basic ingredients and not regularly eat processed snacks.
When I was growing up, practically everything I ate came out of a packet, and was usually cooked in a microwave.
My parents never made sauce from scratch or used their own herbs and spices. Any sauce came in a jar or a packet. Gravy was that disgusting mix of maltodextrin, MSG, and colouring that you simply add to hot water. Pasta sauce always came in a bottle, with the inevitable hit of sugar. If we had tacos, the seasoning came in a packet, which is mostly sugar with a little bit of cumin and chilli.
The meat would inevitably be cooked in a microwave so as to not require using oil to cook it. My mother practically had a phobia of fat and salt. The only meats I ate were chicken breast and ultra lean mince with the grease drained off.
It wasn't that my parents were unhealthy, I ate a lot of vegetables, and as I mentioned, I had a very low fat diet. I guess it was a lack of time and creativity that drove them to using packages for everything.
And Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" is the most read book in my house. My wife and I have taken to calling it The Bible.
Both books have a good number of quick recipies (Bittman tends to write his more like guides), with general cooking tips and history mixed in.
This is easier with meat based meals (better calorie density), but works fine with vegetable based meals too. Just get bigger pots. :)
All those people cooking for 30 mins per day are hardcore.
After I hit my lowest weight I decided to ease up on the extreme calorie counting and shift my efforts towards eating simple home cooked meals since they'd be less expensive and, if you believe the common wisdom, healthier. Consequently, I put on about 30 pounds. This was mostly eating tofu, eggs, potatoes, fruit, mushrooms, various vegetables, cheese, and homemade bread (usually whole grain).
So I went back to what worked. One other thing eating packaged foods did was give me a bunch of time back. I'm still about 10 pounds up from that experiment.
Another useful tool is a food scale. Everyone has measuring cups and stuff, but having a food scale can make stuff like measuring a serving of mixed nuts for my breakfast way easier.
However, packaged foods vs. from scratch is an element of time and convenience as well. I just make food when I have the time/feel like it (I enjoy cooking as a hobby, but am not always up for it) and use 'easy' meals when I need to: throwing together some pasta and a pre-made sauce jar I keep in the pantry, plus some frozen TJ's meatballs or something.
Knowing how much of what to eat isn't the problem. It has never been the problem. The problem is actually sticking to that diet when your body is screaming at you to eat more, when the part of your mind that evolved to keep you from starving --which is what losing weight is, since your body literally has to eat itself-- starts playing tricks on you and conveniently forgetting that you ate earlier, and when your metabolism, which has been unavoidably and permanently damaged by the mere act of losing weight at all, requires that you eat substantially less than the daily average.
I'm really sick of people assuming I'm a moron because losing weight is difficult. Do you know what it is like to only eat one meal a day? To have to avoid all social functions at which free food might be present? To ensure that there is only ever enough food in your house for exactly one week of your caloric allotment of 1600/day?
Trust me, whatever parroted advice you're thinking of offering next, I've heard about it and tried it.
Food is absolutely addictive and we have so much available. Combine that with a car based and sedentary lifestyle and it's a huge problem. The only thing that has worked for me is being a lifelong runner and cyclist. Burn an extra 500 to 800 calories a day and most weight loss goals are much more attainable. I am trying to help my mom lose weight and when you are very overweight adding huge amounts of activity is very hard.
She seemingly also has a 'slow' metabolism but in reality she moves as little as possible. Whereas I am always wandering around doing things at top speed. Activity begets activity because it begins to hurt less to move.
Anyways, best of luck in your efforts.
Main take away for me was to eat fibre rich foods - so instead of potatoes eat squash and celariac, instead of rice eat bulgar wheat, and so on.
[0] The Truth About Carbs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b5y6c0
These things are not simple, are they?
One strategy is to focus on the healthy veggies that your genetic ancestors likely ate; your body is more likely to be adapted to those foods.
This is the shit I'm talking about. If you have difficult losing and maintaining weight people crawl out of the woodwork to parrot bullshit advice they got from some clickbait article as though knowledge isn't the easiest part of the process. People don't have difficulty with their weight because they lack knowledge, people have difficulty with their weight because suffering sucks and the human body doesn't like having to eat itself.
I lost about 70 pounds and now am easily maintaining a normal BMI.
Kitchen scale and MyFitnessPal.
Also don't have food around that doesn't require prep! It is super easy to snack on fruit and bread. If everything in your fridge is raw meat or veggies that require cooking, there is no way to over eat.
Also I try to avoid prepping too much food in advance, since if the food is good I am tempted to eat it all without waiting! So I cook each meal individually, which takes a lot more time, but it works for weight loss.
Either that or I do a weeks meal prep and commit to not buying any more food, that way if I am stupid and eat more food per meal than I should, one of my future meals is going to come up short. It is amazing how quickly self control develops under those situations. :)
In comparison, packaged food requires at least a bit of conscious prep work, so people are aware of the time they spent and of the calorie consumption, thus I can see why that route can be easier.
Yes, somehow I managed to lose half my body weight and keep it off despite a setback from a failed experiment without every knowing how to count calories or properly measure things in a kitchen.
What is it with talking about health and nutrition on the internet that makes everyone come out and offer their unsolicited advice that assumes the person they're speaking with is an idiot?
You mentioned that you had problems with home cooking, and found portion control easier with pre-packaged food. I proposed that measuring out home cooked food gives the same effect as prepackaged food.
I fail to see how that is accusing anyone of being an idiot.
One of these things don't seem to be like the others. Is there typically added sugar in canned fish? My go to is canned tuna, but the nutritional label checks out to me.
From my experience, I would say you find more and better vegetables in Southern Europe. And Eastern Europe is quite similar to Northern Europe in terms of accessibility and choice (probably still better in quality though).
And South America in my opinion is rather poor in vegetables (but fantastic in fruits!). They can grow perfectly there but people just don't seem to eat them much, apart from a few specific ones. But they do cook at least.
One final factor is also the price of restaurants. In South America and Asia many people just eat at restaurants/cafeteria/whatever local street food you find all the time because it is not expensive at all. And not super healthy. Doing that in Sweden or Norway would lead you to ruin very very fast (and also street food is obviously less popular when it's freezing outside so it doesn't help developing a street food culture).
I assumed because it's suprising how much worse the American diet is, even compared to countries with similar Western diets, incomes and lifestyles (UK, IE, DE, NL etc).
Especially in Northern England and Scotland, its not difficult to see things that are culturally closer to Scandinavia.
Food: roast meats with gravy and (if pork) crackling, pickled herring and other preserved fish, cranachan / rød grød med fløde or rice pudding / risalamande. The strong flavours of whisky are closer to aquavit than a cognac or brandy. Beer, especially in excess.
Traditions: maypole dancing, woollen clothes. Guising is similar to some fastelavn activities.
Poor weather including long nights for many months; leads to a more indoor, cosy culture and excitement at summer.
More feeling of equality between people, not being better than other people.
Long history of trade and cultural links across the North Sea, from the Viking age to the present.
Not to say there aren't links, there certainly are, but I wouldn't say they are strongly culturally bound compared to our relationship with Western Europe.
In Brazil at least, the variety of vegetables, and especially fruit, is surprisingly limited for a place so sunny and rich in nature; but you do get a lot of stuff you won't find anywhere else, and it's very easy, and relatively cheap to have a healthy meal if you know where to look. The most common type of street restaurant is an all-you-can-eat buffet, which offer a ton of fresh food of all kinds. I miss this a lot, the rest of the world seems content with pre-assembled dishes everywhere.
It's not as bad as the USA in terms of being a food desert, but it's not amazing either. Fresh meat and vegetables aren't cheap. Being an isolated, mostly self-sufficient country means that vegetable prices are at the whim of the season and the harvest. If there's a bad growing season, vegetables can be up to twice the normal price.
You are correct. It's amazing.
Some folks view this as some kind of evil corporate overlord thing, but I think the answer is much closer to home: we like stuff with sugar in it. So other people are going to put sugar in stuff so that we'll like it more. Sadly it looks as simple as that.
I had tried low-carb before and couldn't stay on it. What I didn't know back then was that you can fall off your low carb diet without even realizing it. There are so many items with hidden sugars that it's impossible not to -- unless, as you say, you prepare all of your stuff. (My strategy is to curate items that are safe.)
Carbs past a certain point are addictive, although probably at the low end of the addiction scale. I believe this is because if you live in an environment where fruit only ripens one month a year, it's important to have a biological drive to fatten up on those easy sugars in preparation for the winter months. Of course we don't live in that environment any more.
And you will lie to yourself, making it even worse. I imagine what happens to most folks is that they accidentally eat enough carbs to start triggering perverse insulin responses, then "decide" to go ahead and eat one or two things that they've always loved. After all, those one or two things by themselves are fine, right? And then we've flipped over the tipping point.
I am amazed at the obesity crisis in the West, although it seems like a natural outcome to so many plentiful foods. The part that amazes me is how nutrition experts consistently blew it, over and over again recommending public health policies that only worsen the problem.
I recommend the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It is widely thought by people who have only heard about the book third-hand (criticizing the people who wrote their second-hand assessments of it) that it's a diet book, but the bulk of it is actually a well-researched history book on how the modern conception of "correct diet" came about, you know, the bad one that we're still oh-so-slowly extricating ourselves from. Basically it answers the question "If the late 20th-century diet consensus was so bad, how did it become the consensus?"
Since I read it, my assessment of the late 20th-century diet consensus has only gone down, and the history itself doesn't change, since, you know, "not changing" is pretty much what history does. You can blip over the bits where it does try to discuss the science of proper diet; even if you're interested in this branch of scientific thought, there's more up-to-date resources now. But the history is good.
And fruits, I hope? :-)
Also, you mention carrots, but there's lots of other vegetables that taste nicely when eaten raw that require little to no preparation time. I recognize that this is not mainstream at all but lately I've begun eating all kinds of vegetables as a snack. Eg iceberg salad: if you take the outer 5 or so leaves off, then the rest has not usually been touched by pesticides, so you can just eat that without all the washing cutting prep etc. I've found that just putting an iceberg salad next to my keyboard works exactly the same as just putting a bag of crisps there: when i look up an hour later, it's all gone.
Similar tricks: pointed red peppers only need washing, and then you can eat them as if they're a mars bar. The seeds are only at the very end. bags of pre-cut lettuce. Also, way too few people are aware that cauliflower tastes great raw. It's a bit of work to clean (but not too bad) but cauliflowers tend to be huge so you can cut one into pieces, put the pieces into four bags and bring a bag every next day or so. It also stays good super long.
I also like cabbage (you can also remove the outer leaves and eat the rest without washing), but it has a pretty strong taste and I recognize that this might not be for everyone :-)
Vegetable contain a lot of sugar too, like the mention he ate a lot of carrots, he ate a lot of sugar, but that's naturally occurring sugar human body can process well, unlike tablespoon of sugar in a sausage made of processed meat.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/09/26/140753048/ki...
Why? Fruits are just sweets with fibre and nutrients. Vegetables have everything you need.
Also,your mileage may vary but I'm not sure that fruits should be very high on the list of food to avoid when you're trying to eat healthier. Ketogenic diet, sure, but that's not what this subthread is about. Fruits are good for you. Skip the hotdog instead.
(Not all fruits are sweet either -- like avocados, tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers.)
I also think there is too much exposure to sweet foods in the US. You are offered sweets things so often. It is just part of the culture it seems.
It is 15 years now since I lived in the US and I steel struggle with a sugar addiction from just living one year in the US. I never had any particular desire to eat sweet things before I moved to the US.
It is a lot better now. In just the last 2 years the low carb movement has really kicked off, it is super easy to get no sugar or low sugar options. Restaurants now swap out buns (which have added sugar in them of course) without question, no sugar BBQ sauce is finally a thing, no sugar ketchup is a thing now, and there are even a lot of sugar free snack food options.
As someone who has been doing Keto for ~5 years, this last year has been the easiest yet.
But ethanol probably isn't a whole lot better as excess calories than sugars are.
Carrots are mostly carbs (sugar) [1]. The problem isn't sugar; its an abundance of calories in the form of sugar.
[1] https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetabl...
As someone with sugar problems who loves mayo, I hate this.
It should be noted that The Longevity Diet, promoted by Valter Longo, recommends nuts as the "go-to" snack. Super easy, and healthy too.
I don't see a problem with this. It's not hard and doesn't have to be too time consuming if you prepare things in bulk. You can listen to music or the radio while doing it. I find it quite relaxing.
> It made trying to find a snack incredibly difficult
Don't snack. That would solve so many problems that people have with diets. I eat two meals every day. Between meals I do not eat. By eating I mean opening my mouth and inserting things into it. I honestly think some people just don't realise how much they eat by snacking. I get hungry every day but that's fine. I look forward to my next meal. Don't snack when you're hungry. Just look foward to your next meal.
What's not hard is being able to see a problem with preparing all your meals from scratch. I don't know a kinder way to say that you're just wrong.
My partner gets impossible really quickly if she doesn't eat about four times daily, and I've met enough hangry-type people to believe that some people really do have to snack. Although I guess I'd encourage everyone to try not-snacking given how much more convenient and healthy it is if your metabolism can manage it.
Bread may benefit from added sugar if your primary goal is trying to increase your yield from an industrial process. Sucrose is also really easily digestible for yeast, so I wouldn't be surprised if a dough with added sugar rises faster than a bread that's made with regular ingredients.
I think that this sort of thing is part of the general problem with added sugar: There are all sorts of practical reasons why you might want to add a little bit of sugar to products. (As another example, a lot of commercial hummus contains it as a preservative.) But a bunch of individual products using a little bit of it for their own individual purposes adds up to a whole lot of excess sugar consumption for the people who are eating all that food.
But even if you include sugar-for-flavor on top of any practical uses, my point still stands: Spread across all the different kinds of foods you can get at the grocery store, a little sugar here and a little sugar there adds up to a whole lot of sugar overall. Maybe it's worth accepting a somewhat less carmelized crust on your paninis in the interest of having a healthier diet.
How does this work? I thought sugar works as a preservative by reducing the water activity, and for it to be effective requires a high concentration (like jam or honey) that would be inappropriately sweet in hummus.
- if you need bread, there are some pitas that are low on sugar. You can also find tortillas with minimal sugar and make wraps instead of sandwiches.
- if you need a prepared meal, some canned soups are very low on sugar.
- a homemade salad dressing made of lemon juice, olive oil, and pressed garlic is delicious, and takes only as long to make as it does to press the garlic - a week's worth takes about 5 min
- no-sugar-added peanut butter can be delicious, especially if it's made with salt, and is easy to find at the grocery store these days. It goes well with carrots, celery, pretty much everything
- cheese generally does not contain sugar. Other dairy, such as milk and plain yogurt has sugar but its natural rather than added sugar.
- eggs are great for quick prep, and you can scramble them up with vegetables and cheese in minutes. Or hard boil a week's worth at a time
- nuts are spectacular for snacking
Onion, mushrooms, garlic, spinach, with baked chicken or a steak for dinner.
Protein shake with a banana and almond/coconut milk (with no sugar added) for breakfast.
I don't think it's that hard to avoid added sugar you just have to keep things a little more basic.
https://smile.amazon.com/Benefiber-Prebiotic-Supplement-Dige...
The sugar in bread is rarely there for flavor. It’s a way to cut corners by feeding the yeast and causing the dough to rise faster. Leave it out and you just have to wait a bit longer, but you get a better developed flavor as a result.
Also, many sports nutrition bars will rely on sugar alcohol, which has its own problems but isn’t (probably) as bad as sugar.
I can't imagine most packaged food companies are using amazing produce. I would bet that most packaged meals would taste terrible without some added sugar.
Drinks were maybe the most difficult for me; I drink coffee with Nutpods[2] and Coffee Booster[3], unsweetened tea, and water now.
For snacking, I like salted cashews, although again, strict Whole30 doesn't really want you to snack.
It does involve a lot of cooking, and (especially when you're following it strictly) makes restaurants difficult. But I think it's worthwhile. I could talk more about it if people wanted but I don't want to divert the conversation.
I love having random fruit and veggies in my kitchen and just being able to grab one and cut it up in 1 minute or so. Call me weird, but it's fun.
sharp knives are safer than dull knives
"The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.
Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.
By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jun/11/why-our-foo...
The kids get involved early in learning about healthy food making and we get a cook book about what sort of food one should make for children when they start school.
This is something so serious for people's future and life that I don't think one can focus enough on it.
The description is in Norwegian but I can give a quick summary: It gives recipes for breakfast, lunch boxes, food for hiking trips (hiking is very common in Norway), dinner, supper and snacks. The recipes are simple and tasty. There are discussion of what is healthy and what one should eat.
It has different authors. One of the co-authors is Rune Blomhoff who is nutritional science professor at university of Oslo and one of the leading researchers in the world on anti-oxydants.
In our book there are discussion for each dish what part of the food making the kids can participate in. It is to encourage children to learn about food themselves and get used to making healthy food themselves.
This seems reasonable.
I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?
EDIT: Okay, since I'm not on mobile now, relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Counter-claims
I personally have lost 55 lbs since January 25th of this year and McDonalds hamburgers and fudge sundaes have been a meal frequently.
To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.
What point did this prove? Weight is hardly the sole determinant of health.
It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.
Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.
(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)
Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.
Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.
I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.
In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.
Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.
After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.
If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.
One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.
http://www.thetraveltester.com/wp-content/uploads/mos-burger...
When you meet foreign travelers, ask them what they think about US serving sizes. Many of them find it shocking.
1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.
2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.
If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because 1) Almost all food contains some sugar 2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.
This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.
Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.
But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.
Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.
I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.
I think they maybe had deserts like pudding sometimes. There were no sodas or junk food available at all. The drink choices were 2% milk, chocolate milk, or water.
What I do remember is the food seemed fairly low quality. Canned and frozen packaged stuff, never anything resembling fresh. Every kid got the exact same meal unless you had some medical exemption.
In high school there were some bad choices available in the menu. There were soda and junk food vending machines, but they weren't part of the normal cafeteria and I never had money for them. While there were unhealthy options, there were also many healthy options and you simply bought what you wanted. The freshness was maybe a step up from elementary school.
I think there may have been efforts to remove the vending machines since my time there.
I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.
It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.
I think at my school it was because staff wanted them, so why not have them available for the kids too? I don't think much thought was given to it, and even if there were it would have been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Adults there would have not thought of their responsibility to teach children good eating habits -- that was for the parents.
I think the corporate sponsorship you talk about here also means that the pressure to fund schools properly through taxes are taken away. It gets too easy to avoid taxes by getting others to pay.
I had a great High School class in genetics that would not have been possible without large donations of money and equipment from a local biotech company.
I have fewer problems with companies donating science equipment, computers, and the like. There have been occasional issues with corporate donated history books though...
School lunches have certainly declined over the years. Continued relaxation of nutrition standards[1] doesn't help.
[0]https://www.usd497.org/cms/lib/KS01906981/Centricity/Domain/...
[1]https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/secretary...
Pizza has a normal lunch. But chocolate bars, no.
Also the school breakfast programs were catastrophic, in my opinion. Again, no real food, just packaged donuts and danishes and sugar-laden cereals. It was arguably better when we had snack time instead, with milk and a bag of pretzels or Goldfish and a piece of fruit.
None of these are healthy staples!
Healthy staples are beans and whole grains.
Compared to sugar-laced and processed frozen foods that replaced them, anything home-cooked would be wildly more healthy.
I did forget to mention the mountains of C-ration style canned vegetables and fruits that were also present.
In the US, we don't like to fully fund education with tax money, which means our public schools need other sources of revenue to fill the gap. Junk food vending is a large and crucial funding source.
Pizza wasn't uncommon but it wasn't like take-out pizza, it was a real cheap basic version that had much less grease and fat. They would on rare occasions make 'real' pizza or have some kind of 'real' food that people would devour, but in general the lunch food was a grade or two lower in quality than the cheapest shit you can buy at walmart. In many schools it is literally the same food/supplier as our prison food so all of it was somewhat questionable in nutrient content.
Both school and pre-school make it sound like they don't allow sweets, so it's very disingenuous. At least they're not served lemonade daily for lunch, and the afternoon snack is fruit.
All the adults who were deprived in childhood.
Most candy is cheap to buy in volume and you just discard it rather than handing it to customers. Everything looks fine in the books. You just don't have as many customers in the shop as the accounting books says you have. You will have to pay tax on the laundered money but that can be a small price for making the money fully legal and usable for e.g. house loans.
Norwegians driving across the border to avoid the sugar tax?
Norwegians
How frequently is this curriculum revised and how are updates communicated to children after they graduate from that course/class/curriculum?
I'm mostly curiously because of how dietary research has changed and because there is little consensus on what a "bad" diet is. Almost everyone will agree to avoid sugar and processed food, but that's about where it ends. You also have to factor in individual genetics and lifestyle, although perhaps less so in countries like Norway where there would be a common genetic ancestry.
As far as I know the debate about health eating has centered around how much carbo hydrates we should eat and the role of fat. But I think eating less processed food, more whole grain and less sugar has always been accepted wisdom about healthy eating.
We Norwegians probably eat a bit much bread and potatoes and should probably eat more vegtables and alternatives such as beans, lentils etc. However I think we've been fairly good at avoiding too much sweets in the diet.
Do kids bring carrots?
Ha! I suppose fruit roll ups[1] are also "fruit" then right?
No wonder so many Americans eat iceberg lettuce, and put added sugar in bread.
And for all the flaws of the food pyramid, I can remember a time before that when it was even worse. We had the "Basic Four" food groups: meat, dairy, fruit+vegetables, and grains.
You aren't hurting yourself by eating lettuce, but it's a missed opportunity to do so much more for your diet. See the difference for yourself.
https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Lettuce%2C_raw%2C_iceberg_%28...
https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Spinach%2C_raw_nutritional_va...
Our milkshakes will have other additives such as malt, vanilla extract, and some sweetener.
But I'm sure the reason kids threw away fruits and vegetables because they were terrible; not necessarily because they were healthy. I don't know if it's a low value put on food or cost-cutting...I'm sure both are related. You can see this in places other than schools, outside of every corporate meeting is a tray of terrible honeydew and cantaloupe. Most lettuce and tomato don't really have flavor but seem to leach off-flavors. In my personal experience, when I find out someone says they don't like a certain food about half the time it's because they've never had a good example of it.
It's difficult because fresh food spoils so much more quickly than other, cheaper, and less healthy foods. But what's crazy is that today we have way better technology than most of human history to make even the foods most prone to spoilage cheaper an accessible...it's just relative to frozen pizza and ketchup it's more expensive.
One thing I've noticed is that a huge percentage of the American population had been tricked into thinking that fruit juice is healthy.
It isn't healthy. It is soda with some vitamins tossed in as far as the body is concerned.
I fully blame the US government for this. Even liberal cities that pass soda tax laws ignore fruit juice, because hippies with a naturalistic fallacy are a powerful voting bloc on the Democratic party.
I would say that MOST toddlers I see drink several juices a day.
For my kids, it was always a treat, and served incredibly watered down, as in 1 part juice to 6 parts water. So sweet that they don't even know that.
Insanity.
I also see lots of parents offering "fruit snack" candies to their kids as if that's a legitimate substitute for actual fruit.
Don't even get me started on breakfast cereal.
Knowing what we know about the long term impact of high-sugar diets, is it really that much of a stretch to limit intake?
I wonder when the state will ban sugar from the homes too. These people don't understand what they're asking for - like the frog in boiling water.
Should 5 year-olds have voting rights, access to jobs or the ability to buy alcohol and tobacco?
It is just about people agreeing to common sensible rules for the benefit of everybody. It is about showing consideration for other people.
If you dump chocolate in your kids food box every day then the employees will simply talk to you about why it is a bad idea. They are not going to stop you or take away the chocolate.
This is also about consideration towards other parents and children. If one child has lots of candy in their food box you make the other kids envious and they start complaining to their parents about why they don't get candy. That is why it is good to have common guidelines on what kind of food parents should put in the lunch box of their kids.
There would be a very small amount of praise from the right, a very small amount of jokes about her being a phone-it-in first lady from the left, and both would be overshadowed by an overwhelming amount of indifference by everyone.
It's just an assumption to say that both sides are the same. Barbara and Laura Bush, for example, were not demonized like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.
Moreover, generally democrats don’t stoop as low as republicans. Republicans attacked Chelsea Clinton when she was like 11—Rush Limbaugh was calling her ugly. Can you imagine any democrats calling Barron ugly or something as vicious? How about how Fox News harassed Obama’s kids? You’d never see that on CNN. Republicanism is a morally bankrupt ideology.
In Norway none of this is very controversial, and fast food companies have little political influence. Money in Norwegian politics is quite restricted. Not sure how it is now, but usually you could not pay for political TV ads.
If you wanted to get on TV you would have to join a political TV debate of which there are usually a lot of.
The issue is harming children's nutrition to score political points.
In 2011, USDA tried to improve the school lunch requirements involving pizza sauce being a vegetable, but Congress blocked it all in an appropriations bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/2112...
The USDA is now prohibited from not treating pizza sauce as a vegetable, at the behest of corporate food companies like ConAgra.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/15/142360146/pi...
Not only do we get the cookbook for parents, but we are also offered free lectures about nutrition and healthy eating for children. That is an offer all first time parents get. So you can go in the evening and listen to a nutritional expert talk about what sort of food is good for children.
I remember the nutritional expert that held a lecture for me was really cool. She said, that to her, there was no bad food. Instead it was about how much you ate of different kinds of foods. She wanted to emphasize the the problem for most people is that they eat the wrong quantities of different types of foods.
E.g. she mentioned how we eat too much red meat, but that we should not cut it out entirely because it contains many useful things such as iron. Eat red meat once or twice a week I think she said.
And this is the real kicker. Norway is a relatively affluent country with a comprehensive social safety net and a relatively homogenous culture.
Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.
Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.
It wasn't until grade 11-12 or something that we sometimes started going out and getting burgers for lunch....
Norwegian food culture is in fact rather primitive. The only reason we are somewhat healthy is because we don't eat that much sweets and fried stuff, and we tend to eat primarily whole grain.
> Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.
I get that, but they might already struggle given what I've seen American school lunches look like. Also one need to teach parents how to cook healthy food. It doesn't help that they get something healthy in school if they just eat junk at home.
> Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.
Hahaha, then you don't know Norwegian politics ;-P We have a whole political party just for farmers. Farmers get more subsidies than anywhere else in the world I think here. They got very strong influence. This is tied to our history and identity. Farmers manage to project this idea they they are the sole of the nation and that food from any other country is scary and dangerous.
I would claim the issue in the US isn't your agricultural sector but the political clout of the food processors. Fast food chains, grocery store chains and makers of food products don't have that much influence in Norwegian politics. But they seem to have a lot of influence in American politics. Anyone with money seems to have.
Farmers in Norway don't have influence due to money but more from an emotional stand point. They appeal to basic emotions. We are a country which has historically suffered a lot of food shortages and so there is an ingrained belief that we need to be self sufficient. There is also an element of xenophobia. That foreign food is full of anti-biotics, hormons, e-coli, salmonella etc. Which is partially true but not as dangerous as people make it.
Does Norway also ban fruit juice?
I see what you're saying, but considering the exploding rates of obesity for children in the U.S., maybe dialling down some of that "fun" is necessary. There is overwhelming evidence that overconsumption of sugar is very unhealthy and fits the profile for addiction. I started looking at sugar the way I look at alcohol: to be consumed in minimal amounts, if at all. If one takes that view, measures such as those in Norway don't seem that extreme anymore.
Yes.
> and fits the profile for addiction
Sugar doesn't really fit the profile for addiction, which requires tolerance, preoccupation, seeking, and not stopping even though you know it's harmful.
Sugar hits maybe one or two of those, but rarely all four.
It sure does. Tolerance manifests itself as insulin resistance. Preoccupation starts as soon as the blood glucose level drops, which happens at regular intervals on carbohydrate-rich diets, manifesting itself as cravings. Seeking is just a trip to the vending machine, and choosing the crepes and the donuts over the eggs and salads. Not stopping even though you know it's harmful? The struggle to fix one's diet is one of the hardest and most likely to fail as far as addictions go, as can be seen in the ever-increasing diabetes and obesity rates in the general population. It's certainly not because of a lack of awareness, even though a lot of people (and doctors) still think low-fat diets are the key to success.
Sugar doesn't come close.
While I will defer to your experience with working with addicts, with respect I would suggest that the nature of your work may lead you to underestimate the addictive properties of sugar.
I am not claiming it compares with alcohol, meth, or crack cocaine addiction, but I think it is not unreasonable to compare its intensity to, say, coffee addiction. Except that in the case of sugar, the consequences can be chronic disease and premature death.
Research shows that sugar affects the brain reward pathways in a way similar to other drugs [1]. This contributes to its addictive properties in addition to those caused by the metabolic disruptions brought about by insulin resistance.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23719144
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/
[3] https://addictionresource.com/addiction/sugar-addiction/
Its pretty easy to give up sugar for many people, for months at a time. Going back is probably laziness (easy availability, nostalgia) and not a physical compulsion.
Its common to throw words around like addiction when better words exist. Like habitual, or accustomed, or conditioned.
It's also common for attitudes to change very slowly with respect to something that has been around forever, that is available everywhere, and that can be safely used in moderation. It may be hard to accept that 'sugar addiction' is not an exaggeration; sugar brings to mind Valentine's Day, Halloween, and mom's apple pie, while addiction is associated with laying in the street, fatal overdoses, and ruined lives.
I certainly don't mean to say that everyone who likes sweets is automatically addicted to sugar. I use the term 'addiction' not to throw it around lightly, but because it is being used with its literal meaning by the medical professionals conducting said research, and because the usage is supported by the evidence (as can be seen in the links provided). That sugar addiction is being felt much less intensely than addictions to hard drugs, or that it can be overcome more easily, doesn't mean it doesn't fit the definition. Moreover, at a societal level, its consequences are just as dire (arguably, more so).
The idea that "sugar" === "fun" is exactly the misconception they are trying to fix.
So I think you are overreacting a tad here ;-) Also keep in mind this isn't exclusively a government thing. We have meeting were parents were the pre-school comes with suggestions and parents come with suggestions as well and people agree together on common rules.
"And talk about taking the fun out of any celebrations."
You can't have fun if there aren't sweets? That is sad? In a school there are lots of kids. If you celebrate with sweets for every single birthday through the year, and then in addition have your celebrations at home with sweets that ends up being a LOT of sugar.
I think you are trivializing the problem with sugar. Kids don't NEED processed sugar. There are lots of other things they can enjoy such as fruits, smoothies, yogurts and other good food.
They successfully shifted blame from sugar to fat as cause of modern lifestyle diseases for last two decades. Would highly recommend the book "Case against Sugar" by Gary Taubes discussed amply here[0] and here[1].
Also recommend the documentary "Super Size Me"[2] a revealing take on workings of fast food industry.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733
Fat (not necessarily the stuff you consume but the build up in your body) has regulatory properties for your insulin uptake and thus levels which generally result in more fat == more production needed which will give a more quick rise to diabetes type 2 due to a runaway competition.
In my experience, totally anecdotal, (I have type 1 diabetes since I was about 5): If I gain weight the amount of insulin required by injection is significantly more than what is to be expected by the simple weight gain (e.g. more stuff == more required to control it, you'd expect some linear correlation).
While true; until I see studies showing otherwise, I'll assume that becoming overweight is overwhelmingly caused by sugar though, with few exceptions. And if that assumption holds, the cause is sugar regardless.
Someone with insufficiently treated type 1 diabetes can have very low insulin levels, sky-high blood sugar levels, and be losing weight (and seriously unwell).
Sure, but that's like saying that it's not the size of the hole in the boat that is sinking the ship, but the capacity of the guy with a bucket shoving water out of the boat.
If you can't produce enough insulin to lower your blood sugar to avoid glucose toxicity, you're already sick. So while the insulin is technically storing the fat, the sugar is directly/short term controlling the insulin response, and indirectly/long term your insulin resistance.
There's plenty of studies that talk about how bad are added sugars. Governments don't do enough to contain this drug.
WHO recommends free sugars to be less than 10% of daily calorie intake. And suggests going down to 5%. Source: http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/guidelines/sugar_i... An adult that takes 2000 calories, should not take more than 25g of free sugars. Now tell me if it's easy for you to not go over the limit.
Kids and todlers food has more sugar than adult processed food, maybe so they create a dependency on sugary products since they are babies? And so they buy these products when they are older.
We've all seen kids asking cookies and shitty food instead of vegetables (or unprocessed food), they get angry and parents have to say 'no, you've to have lunch now'. Isn't that strange? We are so used to this.
Food is not only calories. Quality of ingredients matter. Plenty of studies relate refined oils, flours, sugars to cancer, diabetes, heart problems. Cheap, easy to get != healthy. It's cheap and unhealthy because ingredients are low quality.
Was processed food in supermarkets a hundred years ago? Humans don't need it. Of course food is safer than 100 years ago, but also processed food has pulled apart healthy and unprocessed food from our diets.
Nestle, Coca-Cola, Unilever, they are in universities, associations, etc... we see plenty of cases here in Spain. They do courses for professionals... and they are the brands with the best public perception. And we say advertising doesn't work?
So many inputs when you go to a supermarket and so easy to fall for a chocolate bar, for some cereals, sweetened yogurts, refined flours white breads... Then, they try to sell you some (supposedly healthy) food because it has some part of bio unrefined flours, but it's the same disguised as healthy.
To avoid all these games they play you just have to look for vegetables, fish, (some) meat, dairy products, eggs, fruits, dried fruits... just unprocessed food or foods like canned peas and other minimal treated foods were a physical process like boiling has been applied.
I've only been "health conscious" for half a decade or so, and went sugarless for at least a year of that, but got off that mainly for social reasons and difficulties finding food when not at home.
But to the point: We have thus far made all her food from scratch, and would never in a million years entertain the idea of feeding her soda, cookies, or ice cream, when she's already super happy with cinnamon oatmeal with mashed apple or brown rice carrot chicken with cumin and black pepper. Because why not? That stuff is super tasty.
What's weird and really scary is realizing the effect sugar has on your own psyche. I know sugar only do bad things to my body in the long term, and yet I stuff my face with a chocolate bar for the immediate euphoria.
Stepping back and reviewing the ingrained cultural tradition of sugar becomes fascinating when we consider it only does harm, and it's extremely addictive.
If we (hyperbole, I know, or is it?) substitute heroin for it, and then discuss it like we do sugar?
"It's his/her birthday, we should celebrate it with a cake (heroin). Just this once"
"Heroin is fine in moderation, if you otherwise live healthy and eat well".
"I only use heroin sometimes, and I'm in control of it."
I mean, I guess all of those can be true, but it's keeping something really bad in your life that probably takes a heavy mental toll, rather than just avoiding it.
And I'm as guilty as anyone. And I'm sure my daughter will be exposed in time regardless of what we as parents do.
Maybe it's not as dire as I portray it, but does it have any redeeming qualities, at all?
If we were discussing something not yet introduced into our lives, would your conclusions be the same? Like starting now celebrating a birthday with... huffing paint? Smoking a cigarette as a non-smoker?
Sugar, like some drugs, isn't particularly appealing the first time you try it, depending on the delivery method. Or more statistically probable, the first time after a period of absence. We get used to it, and then we "crave" it.
I don't think our current societies' rush to outlaw everything that's unhealthy if used immoderately is a particular high ideal. If weed was introduced into our lives today, it would be made illegal, and it was, and nothing good came out of that. The fact that we'd probably outlaw sugar tells us more about the quality of our political systems than it does about sugar, in my opinion.
Sugar and sweets has been a fixture of life for hundreds of years, but two major things have happened: cheap, processed food, which of course is a boon especially to poorer families, but which has way too much sugar to make it taste of anything, and a radical transition in modern lives away from hard, physical work. As long as you burn it off again through physical work, sugar isn't terribly bad for you. It's when you consume hundreds of calories more than you burn every day sustained that the wheels come off.
No one suggested outlawing anything.
> As long as you burn it off again through physical work, sugar isn't terribly bad for you. It's when you consume hundreds of calories more than you burn every day sustained that the wheels come off.
There are (at least) some adverse effects:
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)31606-4/ful...
That is an opinion based on 0 studies and ignoring WHO and many other studies that show free sugars are bad for health.
Then eat free sugar and call me when you get diabetes. Instead of eating healthy, whole fruits or vegetables you are accustoming your palate to sweet taste, generating rejection for healthy foods. To be honest, I don't see anything good about (high/ultra) processed foods.
The only truth here is that yes, ADDED/FREE sugars are something new, which only shows how unnecessary have been for the human race to live.
Anyways, there's nothing wrong with celebrating a birthday with sugar and it has nothing to do with it being a widespread tradition that's already in our lives. It's because sugar has basically no adverse effects in small doses and it isn't as addictive as heroin or nicotine.
And here, we are only talking about added/free sugars and not palm oil, refined flours, in general, bad quality ingredients (but cheap for the food industry).
Eat whole fruits, vegetables, dried fruits, some meat, fish, etc... that's the easiest rule, go back to what we ate just a hundred years ago.
Yes, you can take a cigarette, a beer, wine, but just be conscious that you are not making yourself a favor. And.. just one question, what if you find pleasure in good things instead of bad things that you crave for on friday night, etc...? We use drugs, alcohol, sugar, cigarettes to avoid stress, thinking/pain... what if we face the issues instead of avoiding confronting them with plenty of addictions? We also have sport to generate endorphins, the natural way of lowering stress levels...
Free sugars are not needed. The body already takes sugars from vegetables and fruits. That is the problem, 'moderation' is what the industry sells and that's what we keep repeating every day. Free sugars found in processed foods are NOT NEEDED to live at all.
Moderation in this context means taking something certainly bad for you occasionally like heroin or alcohol. Do what you want, but don't lie yourself.
- Carlos Ríos started the 'Realfooding' movement in Spain and this is kind of a manifest. https://realfooding.com/queescomidareal/ In 'blog' you can find more posts. He always provides studies for all his statements. He also uses his Instagram account so it's easier to reach more people: https://www.instagram.com/carlosriosq/ https://www.instagram.com/academia.realfooding/
- Aitor Sanchez (Mi dieta Cojea) has 2 books, unfortunately also in Spanish... He has a youtube channel and also provides scientific base to all his statements. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqcClZ5Rshy94OnnJ-ixEgw https://www.instagram.com/midietacojea/
They are both dietist-nutritionist, Aitor is also 'food technologist'.
Other interesting (but also Spanish) twitter accounts: https://twitter.com/pzjarana (love him, highlights interesting studies) https://twitter.com/fitrebelde (food and sport/fitness)
I read a lot of stuff in English but not about food right now ^^'.
The first link is great and as a tip to get started I would say: go for whole foods, the raw foods, kind of avoid food with 'stickers'. In your fridge there should be veggies, fruits, dairy products (yogurts <without added sugars>, cheese..), some meat (like twice a week), fish, dried fruits, legumes... In the instagram links you'll find plenty of daily examples of great foods/meals.
With that being said, I've found that cutting out sugar and fast digesting carbs isn't hard due to not knowing what foods to eat, but it is hard because you have to plan meals and it can be psychologically difficult, especially at first. You have to plan meals and cook since it is near impossible to find food that aren't packed with sugar or fast digesting carbohydrates. This requires a time investment and potentially clearing up some time in your schedule. If you are someone who rarely cooks, this is a huge change. Some psychological barriers that I have personally experienced:
- Dispelling beliefs like "Life is not worth living without beer".
- Finding healthier ways of managing stress than eating sugary food, fast digesting carbs or drinking.
- Not just eating or drinking something because you're out with friends/family and they are doing it.
- Turning down offers from coworkers for unhealthy snacks at work.
- Having a reason to continue on the diet such that you won't just quit when things get tough.
- Getting through the initial stress of taking sugar and fast digesting carbs out of your diet since your body and brain will be used to using that as fuel and you have to initially feel worse before you feel better.
If only we lived in a world where most of our food wasn't garbage and most people didn't eat garbage, then all of this would be so much easier.
Ref what I wrote on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17017920 :
"As a Norwegian, when I visited Boston in 1999 for an Allaire dev conference I saw more grossly fat / obese people in the _hour_ spent switching flights at Newark airport than I had in my (then) home country in the preceding year. I was really taken aback."
I never got my now 7y son into juices etc and Coke products are generally banned in our home. He has a very healthy body weight, so that's one fewer thing he has to worry about whilst growing up.
I suspect that outrage is partly manufactured by the sugar and junk food industry though.
Copenhagen is also very active in getting people to bike in town instead of driving.
https://www.elitedaily.com/p/netflixs-wild-wild-country-docu...
You'd be working hard to find a cross-section of non-athletes/models in the US these days that didn't include a reasonable number of larger people.
Sugar lobbyists have a lot to answer for IMO.
And then there was something that infuriated me. I eat a lot but I am pretty skinny (I do a lot of sport and keep a healthy diet), and the usual commentary during meals was how lucky I am for being able to eat anything I want without getting fat. I was always polite but damn... for a culture so focused on the self made man they sure believe in predestination.
I hope cereal sounds as blasphemous in the future as the old 50's soda commercials do now. "It's never too early to start your child on a soda regimen. Soda is proven to help your teen fit in". [ EDIT: Apparently this soda commercial was fake ]
And are then shown displayed on a table adjacent to that healthy balanced breakfast.
FYI, that ad was fake: http://rjwhite.tumblr.com/post/472668874/fact-checking
If your food is being advertised it isnt cheap. You can find lower cost alternatives that are almost always healthier. Fruit and veggies come to mind. 200-300 calories per dollar is cheaper than most snacks, fruits and veggies take moments to be washed and consumed.
The way I consider cereal and other carb loaded snacks as: "Empty carbs". And those 700 calories/dollar boxes is nothing like getting 3,000 calories per dollar on rice, oats, breads, or noodles.
But I guess this would just roll up into "food industry regulation" anyways
When you refine the addictive, pleasure-causing white powder out of a plant and make cocaine or heroine we call it a drug. For historical reasons when we do it to make sugar we call it food, but it seems more of a drug.
Maybe drug regulations should apply.
Since most plant foods we eat, hell, even breast milk contains the exact same sugars that are refined into table sugar, syrups, etc. and the chemicals themselves are required by the body for things like brain function, it's probably fair enough to call it a food...
Seems more likely that it's because people eat sugar, and they don't eat heroin or cocaine.
>"There are records of knowledge of sugar among the ancient Greeks and Romans, but only as an imported medicine, and not as a food. For example, the Greek physician Dioscorides in the 1st century (AD) wrote: "There is a kind of coalesced honey called sakcharon [i.e. sugar] found in reeds in India and Eudaimon Arabia [i.e. Yemen[17]] similar in consistency to salt and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt. It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and [can be] taken as a drink to help [relieve] a painful bladder and kidneys."[18] Pliny the Elder, a 1st-century (AD) Roman, also described sugar as medicinal: "Sugar is made in Arabia as well, but Indian sugar is better. It is a kind of honey found in cane, white as gum, and it crunches between the teeth. It comes in lumps the size of a hazelnut. Sugar is used only for medical purposes."[19]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
And one of the mechanisms proposed for smoking addiction/withdrawal is that smoking spikes your blood sugar, while abstaining crashes it. Ie, a smoking habit may actually be an indirect sugar habit, although somewhat more addictive since you don't have the delayed reward due to digestion/absorption. Eg:
http://whyquit.com/joel/Joel_03_21_blood_sugar.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7455580
EDIT:
I guess I should add I'm not in favor of any regulatory approach beyond the FDA's original purpose of making sure the label is complete and accurate.
Toddlers consumed? More like parents fed them. Toddlers eat what's put in front of them.
> parents might want to consider cutting soft drinks, fruit drinks, . . .
"might want to consider*?!?!
Might they want to consider not giving the kids cocaine too?
People think that if you don't stuff your kid 3 times a day with massive quantities of food, they will fade away over night. It's very easy to refuse food and be picky when you are not truly hungry.
My personal rule of thumb is if my least favorite food doesn't sound edible, I don't actually need to eat.
But, like, the kid is demonstrably underweight for his age, shorter than all his classmates, etc. So I don't know if just starving him is the right call either. Some people (you) get lucky and don't have to make the decision, but sometimes it actually is hard to get kids to eat.
I went to the hospital later that year with a kidney stone, and was told: Stop eating the spinach and cut back on nuts, these foods are way too high in oxalates! Other than that I was healthy as a horse, with a resting pulse of 40 bpm and having lost 100 lbs.
I'm an anecdote, but many people look and feel OK and eat tons of refined sugar. That's part of the reason it's still around. We like it and show no ill effects.
Was processed food in supermarkets a hundred years ago? Humans don't need it. Of course food is safer than 100 years ago, but also processed food has pulled apart healthy and unprocessed food from our diets.
Nestle, Coca-Cola, Unilever, they are in universities, associations, etc... we see plenty of cases here in Spain. They do courses for professionals... and they are the brands with the best public perception. And we say advertising doesn't work?
I generally agree with your point above, but you could have said it much clearer.
Avoid the slang like 'dunno' + 'coz', commas have a space after them and split your posts into paragraphs for readability. Also work on properly capitalising, it's a mistake you're constantly making in your previous posts.
And this was SF. I can’t even imagine how it’s like in the average US city.
This is really exaggerated. I lived in SF, and would easily prepare healthy meals for ~$6-8 per meal ($2-3 for some proteins, $1 or less for some portion of rice or some bread, and the rest for vegetables). Maybe $10 max if I felt like eating avocado :)
For one thing, healthy != organic. As much as pesticides are harmful on the long run, the biggest health hazard is the type of food you consume, not its provenance. Eating bananas or some oatmeal instead of pop tarts and Oreos saves you money.
I went to new york a long time ago, but i believe you’re right in that it’s probably one of the few places where you can eat correctly for a normal price in the US.
I’ve dropped 20kg in that time and just last week ran a marathon carrying a 25kg pack in 5 hours 48 minutes with just an 11 week train up.
Zero sugar diet has been a massive positive game changer for me.
You can still have desserts that don’t require sugar!
The only difficulty with it has been the struggle of what/where to eat when traveling.
It now really clicks for me after several years of putting the pieces of the puzzle together.
3 years ago I met a cohort of middle aged male vets from a specific military unit with a work culture where sugar was viewed as poison for the 40 years since this community’s inception.
They all seemed noticeably younger than their actual years.
I’d like to learn if telomere length is shortened by sugar consumption and conversely lengthened by the absence of sugar in your diet.
I don't get why America is so against regulation like this to promote the welfare of the most previous thing in people's lives. Do corporate interests really have that much power?
In short, yes.
If kids, and people in general, are suffering from too much sugar the blame falls squarely on their own shoulders. If you are so lazy that the only food bought is heavily processed, then yes, your daily intake of sugar, fats and calories will be quite high. Not giving your kids juice boxes thrice times daily will go a long way too, but you may need to listen to them whine about having to drink.. water.
But yes, I concur.
http://www.enzafoods.co.nz/the-company/technology/fruit-suga...
What do you give kids other than water?!?
I think concentrate can have vitamins added to bring the result back to fresh juice's levels, but that's it.
Also, (cow's) milk is popular and IMO much better than juice.
The main loophole is White Grape Juice, which is very high in sugar and has very little taste. Its pretty common to include it in juices here in the US to bring the sugar content up.
> Milk and dairy are good sources of calcium and protein which are needed as part of a healthy, balanced diet. Calcium is important for teeth and bone health.
> Studies looking into the link between cancer and dairy products have not given clear results. There is evidence that dairy products could reduce the risk of bowel cancer, but we cannot say for sure that this is the case. There is no strong evidence linking dairy products to any other types of cancer. We need further research to find out more about the links between dairy products and cancer risk.
> Hormones in milk
> In some countries, a hormone called bovine somatotrophin (BST) is used to speed up or increase the production of milk or meat. In the UK and the rest of Europe, farmers are banned from using this hormone, and the import of meat from countries, including the US, where this hormone is used is also banned. This ban is on animal welfare grounds and not because there is any proven effect on human health. Independent health bodies including the European Union Scientific Committee have reviewed the evidence on BST and found it does not pose any harm to human health.
Don't you see the possibility here that this organisation receives money from pro-diary individuals?
Also, I wasn't alluding to BST. Milk contains growth hormones naturally, because calves half to gain an absurdly amount of weight in a short time. We don't need to grow so fast as humans.
Especially since the NHS has nothing to say on the matter either, other than the reduction in bowel cancer from drinking milk is unproven.
Lots of kids in England drink squash (maybe called cordial elsewhere?). It's sometimes referred to as juice, but it's much less sugary than actual fruit juice. Is that not a thing elsewhere?
There used to be half a shelf of "no added sugar" squash, and half a shelf of "no artificial sweeteners".
It seems there's now much less choice of sugar-only drinks, although they still exist. Several have redesigned bottles that look more appealing to adults.
http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/shelves/Squash_And_Cordials_i...
Well, for my toddler:
Milk [0]. Cold herbal tea (generally, diluted chamomile tea.) The occasional yogurt + whole fruit smoothie. (The latter as a treat—either that or a cookie but not both—on grocery shopping trips.)
[0] which includes “chocolate milk”, which is approximately a 7:1 ratio of whole milk to ultrafiltered chocolate milk.
Why put sugar in water? Water is great.
Yes, coke has more sugar, but it's the same order of magnitude, fruit juice, even freshly squeezed from pure organic oranges is very much comparable to soda.
A "safe value" for an adult would probably be up to 40g. A can of soda has exactly that amount.
Now imagine a kid eating cereal, snacks, then soda... can probably end up having 160g of sugar in a day, or about 38 teaspoons.
Fructose has been increasing as a percent of daily calories since the 70s as a consequence of attempts to reduce fat, and this is the likely cause behind the massive increase in diabetes.
Getting in the habit of checking utrition labels also reveals some surprises and frustrations. In the average American grocery store, try to find a single cold breakfast cereal with less than 5g of sugar per serving.
They are still pure processed carbs, not really the best regular breakfast.
Of the ones you listed, only Shredded Wheat has less than 5g sugar per serving.
You were probably looking at one of the sugar-added variants like Honey Nut Cheerios, Very Berry Cheerios, Chocolate Cheerios, Frosted Cheerios, ...
There are several other similar commonly available breakfast cereals which also have <5g of sugar per serving.
I can believe that your particular market didn’t stock any of the 50-year-old classic cereal brands and only stocked sugar-added cereals (frosted this, honey that, marshmallow everything), but among American markets I have seen it is typical to have at least 4 or 5 choices of low-sugar cold breakfast cereals on the shelf, as well as several choices of low-sugar hot cereals. [Of course, as I said before, they are all still pure processed carbs, and not the best regular breakfast.]
Fortunately those were the only occasions when we'd have it, and as kids we were far more active back then - roaming the streets and forests, so we had more than enough activity to offset.
My son's grown up on water after the breast and has very little interest in soft drinks now, not that we encourage him to try them out.
The only thing that prevents us from throwing it up immediately is the ascorbic acid.
This is an epidemic that needs strong legislation. The use of sugar, salt, and fat in food needs to be regulated otherwise it's an arms race for brands that just keep adding all 3 to their products.
Lobbying from the food industry is extremely powerful and pervasive. They're using the same playbook as the tobacco industry a few decades ago. For instance the traffic light nutrition labels (that I believe originated from the UK) were shot down at the EU level, under the pretense of not stigmatizing the important gastronomic heritage in several European countries.
The study found that toddlers 12 to 18 months consumed 5.5 teaspoons per day, and that toddlers 19 to 23 months consumed 7.1 teaspoons. This is close to, or more than, the amount of sugar recommended by AHA for adult women (six teaspoons) and men (nine teaspoons).