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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

> A campaign that calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18.

So, we're, like gunna ban fruits?

Seriously, it's kind of crazy to have the immediate response to "the mainstream consensus was totally wrong" to be "let's use the force of the law to enforce the new consensus!" A little bit of humility is called for, I think. By all means improve the official recommendations, but let people make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies.

Tangentially, I've become convinced that the actual #1 worst ingredient we're eating is too much vegetable oil:

https://www.breaknutrition.com/omega-6-fatty-acids-alternati...

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To be fair, we were the ones that selectively bred fruits (and vegetables!) to be so sugar-rich that zoos can't even feed them to some of their animals that traditionally only eat fruit.

If this guy is correct, this would be no different than if we found some other toxic substance in our fruit. The point is that it's toxic and it's bad for us, and decisions would need to be made to account for that.

>but let people make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies.

Again, if this guy is correct, how would this be any different than tobacco? We don't let young people decide to put tobacco or booze in their bodies because science has shown they're not old enough to make that decision well.

* To be fair, we were the ones that selectively bred fruits (and vegetables!) to be so sugar-rich that zoos can't even feed them to some of their animals that traditionally only eat fruit.*

I've never heard of this. Got a source?

https://qz.com/1408469/humans-have-bred-fruits-to-be-so-high...

Much appreciated.

Yeah, the selectively-bred fruit is a very interesting point.

>Seriously, it's kind of crazy to have the immediate response to "the mainstream consensus was totally wrong" to be "let's use the force of the law to enforce the new consensus!" A little bit of humility is called for, I think. By all means improve the official recommendations, but let people make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies.

Well said. There is a much bigger lesson than "it turns out sugar is bad." It's: "we don't know as much as we think we know so we should stop being so overconfident."

> let people make their own decisions about what they put in their bodies

why not let people make their decisions about what they put in other people's bodies then? if they do damage - they suffer consequences, so it all should be fine right?

There's not very many things that people put in other people's bodies, but I'm all for most of those things. ;-)

i mostly meant bullets, knives and baseball bats.

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