Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
bbc.com
bbc.com
One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).
Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.
It amazes me how many people make this mistake.
Generally speaking, people are pretty good at rationally analyzing advertisements. The ads may still be effective, but almost nobody believes them at face value. Except for diet/low-fat/natural products. It's like people turn off their bullshit detectors for them. I just don't understand why.
In Western diets, it is all too easy to binge on processed carbs. For people struggling to manage weight, that is usually the main issue. Diets such as Keto or Paleo tend to restrict processed foods which make it hard or nearly impossible to consume processed carbs.
Restrictions from these diets naturally lead to CICO. The body only cares to consume so much whole foods -- you can eat a very large quantity of vegetables before hitting an equivalent amount of calories from processed foods (like potato chips, etc). These diets are essentially an "easy" framework (easy conceptually, challenging in practice for some due to cravings) for following CICO and reducing calories.
But I also found that I was not making progress in my athletic hobbies until I stopped eating keto. My progress visibly accelerated after I stopped. So I hesitate to recommend it as anything other than a short term body recomposition tool. Fat may not be evil, but carbs aren't either.
But I think the specific diet isn't that important. Cutting out the processed foods and high glycemic index sugars is the most important part.
I don't mind much. I feel healthy, I'm losing weight and my mind feels focused the entire day.
For protein which in proper Keto should be kept at very moderate levels you can use any source of vegetarian protein you like, if you are willing to eat eggs it’s even better since you have a carb free source of protein.
It's an incredibly effective tool to help you re-imagine the composition of your diet. For example, after my first time doing Keto, I seriously considered which carb sources I wanted to re-introduce to my diet.
On one end, you have short-chained carbs (sugars), and on the other end, complex carbs. You also have processed foods (which have fortified micronutrients), and whole foods (naturally occurring micronutrients). I now stick to whole foods with complex carbs. You'll get more fiber this way, and complex carbs are a slower-burning food source that keep you feeling fuller, longer. I've re-introduced carbohydrates from things like beans, quinoa, and the occasional potato.
Like anything, Keto is a tool. It should not be considered a silver bullet since we don't know the long-term health consequences of long periods of Ketogenesis.
The eight teaspoons of sugar in a can of coke can reduce the hormone Testosterone in young teenage males by 25% within 2hours. The study only concentrated on Testosterone, but it would be interesting to find any studies, if they exist in the public domain, that shows what other effects sugar has on hormone levels, besides insulin and its increased risk of diabetes.
I take it you don't enjoy snowshoeing or XC skiing? I really enjoy aerobic activities in the cold. In the heat? Not so much...
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.
For me the biggest surprise was how little food we actually need. I remember myself few years ago eating a breakfast in the morning, then coffee with a muffin or donut first thing at work, then huge lunch, then another snack, then huge dinner at home (of course! just came from work - need to treat myself) and then maybe another snack before going to bed. Can't even imagine how many calories and sugars we were consuming each day. We were literally overeating every single day.
Now we eat only once a day, avoid junk food and sugars, feel awesome, look and feel much better. And it works for us even with quite intensive hiking trips and with gym/exercises.
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
I think you really do gotta pick one there, because each implies the other's opposite.
You don't really even need two different studies to demonstrate "demand is higher in the presence of advertising" and "demand is lower in the absence of advertising". It's mathematically impossible to experimentally demonstrate one without also demonstrating the other.
Not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I would say that failure to prove that a group of people responds to advertising is not the same thing as proving that a group of people does not respond to advertising. So, if we really have demonstrated that banning advertising didn't have an effect on demand for alcohol in Russia, we'd expect to also see that alcohol companies don't even want to advertise their products in Russia, because they know it would just be wasting money. Do we see that?
If you advertise a craft beer to take share from budwiser, its possible that no additional beer was drank, but the ads were still effective
In other words, the reason a 40 year old coal miner with black lung drinks every day might be different from the reason a 19 year old frat bro drinks on friday and saturday evenings.
Is it reasonable to say that people wash their clothes more often because there's ads for laundry detergent on tv? I think these ads were designed to make you grab their product when you're in the super market because you've seen their brand before. I remember I recently bought a bottle of shampoo and realized the only reason i grabbed this particular one was that i immediately recognized it because i saw their ads on TV over a decade ago.
If we assume that most people drink socially, then I think it's not unreasonable to think that consumption doesn't really increase with advertising. You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
>You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
That's an unjustified assumption. It may very well be the case that "go out with friends for a beer" is such a popular default because it's depicted in advertising and media so often. If your only choice was to drink, then it's easy to see that advertising for alcohol is solely about influencing which alcohol you pick. But that's not the real world, where drinking does compete for attention with other activities.
Alcohol consumption is primarily a cultural phenomena (consumption rates vary GREATLY from country to country. In France people drink 12.2 liters of pure alcohol a year, while in Turkey they drink 2 per year. Neither of these countries are even on either extreme...) Cultures can be changed; history has shown that there is no such thing as an immutable culture. Advertising impacts culture, that is well documented. All of these things we should know. So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I suggested this. I'm also not interested in an emotional discussion on alcohol advertisement bans, because I frankly don't care.
Please don't put words in my mouth though.
I'm for ban, but I can't even find any sources saying it had no effect (or the opposite). Anyone can help?
German constitutional principles only permit restricting basic rights (this seems to affect free speech, at least in its US definition) if it is "proportional" (verhältnismäßig) - restricting only what is absolutely necessary to reach a legitimate goal.
More specifically, it has to be suitable, necessary, and appropriate/non-excessive ("geeignet, erforderlich und angemessen").
A law that doesn't achieve the stated goal would fail the "suitable" test.
I think even the larger cohort studies failed to connect joint smoking with ear/nose/throat/lung cancer, much to the consternation of people who like to throw down the "combusting and inhaling anything has to be bad for you" statement.
Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
I don't think it's clear what is an "addiction", as addiction is part of how humans (and all brains) work. reinforcement of reward is necessary for normal function. The most discrete sign of addiction would be the molecular switch DeltaFosB which is manifest in behavioral and drug addictions. However, for things like sugar things are more nuanced.
The two are also hard to compare side-to-side because alcohol addiction is like 50-70% genetic, and the effects tend affect other people more severely while sugar basically harms the person who eats it.
That's the genetic fallacy. They link to a number of other sources from that article with supporting information such as a Connecticut College study and a Princeton University study. I would deem university sources "good" (although you're still subject to cherry-picking and the like)
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
See my comment re: health care costs (which everyone pays for).
We should change the law to make sure that every job pays a living wage, so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc. just to survive. We should increase social support for families and children. We should strive to reduce the cost of housing, transportation, healthcare, and education.
Our society is rich enough to dramatically increase public funding for primary and secondary education and adequately train and support career teachers, dramatically increase funding for social workers, mental health professionals, etc.
I always love the 'teachers' pay discussions and argument. While there are many teachers that are dedicated and do a great job there are also many who go into it for the (at one point not sure if it's true everywhere still) guaranteed retirement money and summers off. Also if a career doesn't pay enough for whatever lifestyle you want or place you want to live perhaps you can give thought to either relocating somewhere else or before you pick that career (for whatever reason) what the pay and benefits are for your choice. For sure not everyone is in a position to do this but my guess is most don't even give that thought. Meaning for example they decide to become a teacher in a very expensive place (NYC let's say) and then even at $90k per year can't afford to lead a decent life style. They could probably move 60 miles west from NYC (to say rural Pennsylvania) and earn less and have a better life. But then they wouldn't be in NYC, right? And they've decided they have to be there. As any immigrant who has left their family and the familiarity of a foreign country would tell you sometimes you have to relocate somewhere else if it's not good where you are.
> so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc
You'd have to look at the total picture of how they are spending their money though.
Well not that it would ever happen but why should I pay for someone's dangerous and/or foolish risky activity? (Rescue, health care and so on). People often act as if there is a large pot of money sitting around to cover any and all mistakes and life choices someone makes.
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
Obesity has a variety of contributing factors, (lack of) access to actual healthy food, lack of physical exercise, high calorie intake (certainly aided by sugar), ...
Here's some pictures of guys with that build: https://www.height-weight-chart.com/600-230.html
They're not very fit, but they look "a bit fat/chubby" to my eyes - not dangerously unhealthy like your comment seems to imply.
I still have 26.8 BMI and i'm aiming 23-24 as i'm not a very muscular guy.
I'll have to agree though, alcoolism is worst than low obesity. Etanol is as bad as fructose for the liver, and worst for everything else too.
Also let's not overlook how alcohol could contribute to obesity either.
Not to mention sugar is not the only cause of obesity anyway. Sedentary lifestyle, hormones, gut bacteria, and the portion sizes in the US are all likely causes.
If you could wave a magic wand, wouldn't most obese people prefer a healthy weight? In aggregate, we can add up individual decisions and call the average "human nature." The actions of society have forced individuals to live with bodies that don't function as well as they could, so it makes sense for us to do something about the problem.
How well do we understand the causes of the obesity epidemic? Is sugar responsible for, say, 10% or 90% of the total? If we wish to progress toward a low-sugar future, then it would be good to have an estimate of how much good it would do.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
NIDA puts the overall US national cost of tobacco use at $300 billion and of alcohol use at $249 billion.
It's impossible to become physically dependent on sugar, whereas an alcoholic can die if they quit cold turkey.
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
Do you eat yoghourt?
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
One in eight American adults.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
While there are so many fun activities not involving alcohol. Seems like most of team building events nowadays boils down to pretentious dinner plus drinking to celebrate?
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/alco...
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
> ...suggested sweets, snacks and sugary drinks should be wrapped in plain packaging to make them less appealing, given the excess consumption of the sweet stuff
(I think some of the responses here are assuming the question is about treating sugar like smoking in other respects.)
You can do whatever you want with sugar, but it's not going to solve the obesity problem. Not only are carbs one of the few macro nutrients we can digest, they're also in pretty much everything.
Snacks are mostly carbohydrates: bagels, donuts, chips, chocolate, granolas. It's hard to eat healthy, you have to make it yourself, but that costs time and effort, which you don't have much of because we work a lot.
It takes a conscious effort to say no to all of these delicious things, and that's hard to sustain.
I think the environment we've created is setting us up for failure in the sense that the easiest and most available options for us in food and jobs, are not good for us in the long run.
I'm gonna go take a walk.
I think what will solve the obesity problem is education. The basic ideas of nutrition (in terms of physics and biology) should be taught to everyone. It should not be possible for someone to graduate high school and find the basics of a nutritional label difficult to understand.
This should also be coupled with a better cultural attitude. People should feel encouraged to try to lose weight when they're obese, rather than told some form of "healthy at every size" nonsense or be made fun of when they are at the gym. It should be seen as an ailment that can be improved rather than something shameful. If you have a broken arm, then you're not told that it's fine to have a broken arm, nor are you made fun of for trying to get your broken arm fixed.
I used to be overweight and I understood that it was bad, but it was difficult to try to improve it. The people around you notice that you're doing things differently and you'll hear snide remarks or encouragement, but this leads to expectations, so you try to hide it instead. That way nobody expects anything.
To get very meta, the argument that regulation is a slippery slope, is itself a slippery slope. As in, I think the fear that government is going to continually encroach upon our freedoms until we live in a police state is misguided. This is the argument that big industry uses to exploit workers, cheat on taxes, spew their externalities over the environment, etc etc.
What we should really aim for is a democracy in which well-minded and level headed politicians work to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Perverse incentives aside, I think if that were really the goal, you'd get some level of regulatory balance that was neither too loose nor too restrictive.
I forget what exactly caused me to switch, but I realized in college that buying soda with a meal made it significantly more expensive (e.g., $7.50 meal was now $9.50). Tight on money, it's a quick way to squeeze an extra meal or two. Still wanted something more than water, so I tried the soda machine's carbonated soda water tab. Now, it's my go-to! (Sidenote: a good number of restaurants do not have soda water tabs on their machines. I find it to be a slight annoyance).
Folks that only enjoy sweetened carbonated beverages, I think, can't even imagine enjoyed unsweetened carbonated. But it is totally possible to eventually reach that state.
I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a way to define it, but it'll be hard.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
> If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
Extremely disagree.
“I didn’t add sugar, i just put this highly sweet blended fruit in the dish!”
[1] https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2018/05/nutr...
My biggest complaint about learning about nutrition is that everyone says opposing things, and it is really difficult for me to know what is right and what is snake oil.
Any tips on learning the “right” way to be healthy?
That and also cooking more at home, be in contact with your food is a way to eat simpler and for me that is key.
Look at those numbers and keep in mind that a daily recommended caloric intake is at 2000 kcal. Now look at caloric values of food - carbs and protein are at around 4 kcal per gram and fat is 9 kcal per gram. Take pineapple juice for instance - it has around 60 kcal per 100 ml. If you drink 2 glasses of that (400ml) then that's already more than 10% of your daily calories. People often drink an entire liter per day though.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories...
Sugar is bad in large quantities, but there's no such thing as second hand sugar consumption, which is the main reason why anybody wanted to regulate smoking, since nobody wants to get lung cancer from working in a place where everyone else is doing something harmful.
What we need to do with regard to sugar is get people to have some got dang self control, which starts with proper education K-12 and decent menus for school lunches.
I think you'll find a bowl of oatmeal hard to beat for satiety, and that's super high in carbohydrates (~70% carbs). Compare that to a glazed donut, which has fewer carbs and more fat, and I think you'll find that the oatmeal is more satisfying.
I think most diets ignore perhaps the most important part of successfully losing weight: feeling reasonably full. IMO, the macros don't matter nearly as much as the satiety of the food you eat, since feeling full is a huge help when trying to avoid excess calories.
Not all white bread is identical either. Sugar content may vary a lot from brand to brand. Glycemic index too.
Fructose gets processed in the liver whereas glucose goes into the blood stream triggering insulin response.
Other very fine points are glycemic index, for example a low glycemic index food breakdown to glucose, bypassing the liver, but is absorbed into the bloodstream relatively slowly for glucose and minimizes the insulin spike/response promoting more stable blood sugar levels.
I think people are talking about adding sugar for taste, beyond what the yeast can metabolise, which is common in US food culture but not generally elsewhere.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4224
This is important because eating when you're not hungry is a huge risk factor for obesity. It's not rewarding or fun to eat bland foods when you're not hungry, but it is still fun to eat candy when you're not hungry. This can be particularly problematic when sugary foods become a form of hedonic substitution or a coping strategy in bored or depressed individuals. Additionally, there are some studies which suggest that the tongue may become desensitized to sweetness when habitually eating sugary foods, potentially motivating individuals to choose sweeter foods at meal times:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.13149
White bread isn't good for you, but it lacks these effects.
What’s more, what’s healthy depends on who you are. People with eating disorders, for example, need easy access to caloric foods, including sugary foods, to weight restore and eat healthily.
Instead of focusing on trying to figure out what is and isn’t good for you, we should focus on making sure people have access to foods we already know are healthy by eliminating urban food deserts.
What is refeeding syndrome?
As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addicted to it, eating sweets with every meal or as a snack. Earlier this week I heard someone at work talking about how their child has never eaten any kind of sweets before and personally this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
The market and social forces, left unchecked, have resulted in a bleak situation: for instance, I've noticed that the frozen goods aisle in most urban supermarkets has slowly become dominated by ice creams and other deserts, pizzas and french fries, together frequently making up > 3/4 of the area, the rest being frozen vegetables, fish and meat.
I think this trend needs to be countered because I don't believe most people made the conscious choice "I'm mostly eating crap now".
Would the conversation be different if this were about ads for opioids targeted at children?
Public policy has real, measurable implications. We don't need to treat sugar like smoking or alcohol, but when you find a way to move people away from it as their "default" setting, you will find, in aggregate huge savings in health care expenses and better outcomes (a sizable amount of health care spending is due to preventable conditions, like Type II diabetes).
I agree, in principle, people can still consume sugar, if they want. The occasional slice of birthday cake is not the problem with sugar. It's the consumption of a 2-liter of soda, multiple times per week, that's the problem (regular consumption). But we need to make it easier for people to avoid processed, simple carbohydrates.
One possible solution is increasing the ubiquity and ease-of-access to whole foods. Eating healthy needs to have the convenience of going to a fast food restaurant -- they're everywhere, they're cheap, and it's fast. We desperately need this as a society. Consider it more as a preventative, or we can pay for it on the other end (higher health care costs).
Healthcare costs are a communal burden. With that shared responsibility to pay comes a shared responsibility to supervise.
Children, moreover, have always been seen as at least partly communally parented. Their sugar consumption is thus of public concern.
I remember telling my anti-smoking, chocolate-eating friends “you know one day they will come for you too, right?”
That sure didn’t take long. Let’s see how they feel about it this time around.
Smoking is banned for under 18 already, and affects others around you, while chocolate does not (an I really saying this?). As seen in the article, sugar is a bigger issue for the 4-18 age range. I’m sure your friends feel absolutely fine.
No. I don’t eat chocolate, don’t drink soda and don’t have sugar in my coffee.
You may find that crazy, but what’s really crazy is having no vices at all.
Trying to ban them all is sure to make us all unhappy.
Some people being addicted to sugar makes food makers add sugar where it's not needed or increase it's quantity a lot. So you have harder time limiting your sugar input.
What? How? They can as much sugar as they like, none of it is getting into me. No airline has ever force-fed me sugar.
The incidences of both fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes in children is pretty alarming, and just saying that and focusing on the number of incidents is alarming rather than the fact a single child has either of those diseases, whereas the first medical cases of either only occurred in the 80’s. I don’t think the first case of childhood type 2 was even diagnosed in the UK until the 90’s. Now we have 1.25 million kids in the US with the disease whereas 100% of all cases could have been prevented through diet.
What we should have is health insurance premiums based on risk factors such as obesity, even in public systems.
Alternatively, we could work to help everyone become healthier, and then use as large a risk pool as possible to leverage the benefits of insurance.
I have a problem with the presumption of unrelenting competence, good faith, and humaneness in a bureaucratic organization despite the inevitable pressure from various political factions and lobbying groups.
Since I'm healthy, I got a fantastic rate.
However, nothing like that happened for my health insurance. The closest I have is a program that helps pay for my gym membership if I go regularly. The really silly thing is that I'm not able to go regularly because I ride my bike a lot, yet I am likely more healthy because of that than many of the people who go to the gym regularly.
Honestly, I would totally be down with a voluntary system like that for things like obesity, smoking, etc. If I present a lower risk to the insurance company, shouldn't I be rewarded with lower rates? If that were the case, I think more people would make real changes to their lives instead of fiddling with fad diets, pedometers, and gym memberships. Saving $20/month on a gym membership or getting a free Fitbit is less motivating than saving $100/month for being healthy.
Next thing we know we're all constantly monitored for every single health metrics and pay more for every one that is slightly off.
"Bacon every morning ? Well sorry sir but that'll be $30 more per year. Oh and you drive to work instead of cycling, that's another $60. Our tracking system tells us that you were sitting more than 7 hours per day on average for the last month so we'll have to charge you $0.55 per seated hours for the next 6 months. You should also think about your monthly running goal, you only have 3 days left and 36km to go."
We could also stop insuring people when they start getting unhealthy. Imagine the profit !! /s
What we should do is better educate people about health and stop trying to get them addicted as much and as early as we can.
Of course, that apply very well for one-time items like life insurance.
Higher end restaurants that cook their own food won't be restricted this way either and that's a good thing because one goes to such places for food you don't normally get at home but fast food restaurants get most of their food from factory stores where sugar content can and should be restricted for the same reason grocery store food should--sweetening foods makes you want them more.
But, obviously, like 99% of people, the parent poster lacks the willpower to do that. wink wink
All of this is further hampered by other factors as well such as the disappearing HomeEc curriculum, the general faddness of dieting in the press (this article being a good example) and a misconception on the behalf of the public on matters related to food consumption. There is almost a mysticism/dogma about how food works that seems to prevail over discourse related to nutrition these days. Furthermore, there is a return to quackery lately with things such as alkaline diets and such despite the fact that most of the foods that they suggest to eat, such as fruit, are often more acidic rather than basic. I blame this on MLMs trying to sell water to middle class retards too stupid to understand that they are being swindled. Sugar is not the Great Satan of food. It's simply people that are too ignorant to understand what they are eating will continue to make poor choices.