The average American eats 17 teaspoons of added sugar daily
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Can somebody help me understand how sugar in orange juice is somehow magically healthier than sugar in soda? As far as I know, it's all just glucose and fructose.
What journalists often seem to confuse is that fruit sugars eaten as whole fruit tend to be fine because the amount of sugar you can reasonably eat is quite limited (you're not going to eat 10 apples or oranges), and the sugars are bound up with fiber so are slower to digest, so "fruit sugars" are generically considered to be "fine".
Unfortunately that falls on its face when you're talking about juice. Almost nobody is going to eat 8 medium oranges in one sitting, but you might easily drink the resulting 16 oz of juice they produce. In that case it's little different from a Snickers candy bar.
There's more to it than that. I was lucky enough in China to encounter a vending machine for fresh orange juice. The machine included a press; you could watch whole oranges roll into the press and juice flow into the cup which was ultimately dispensed.
This is great as a novelty, but the juice you got was only very slightly more flavorful than water. No one is going to drink the juice of 8 oranges. What we drink is heavily concentrated, with vastly less water than would have been present in the fruit.
Non-fresh-squeezed orange juice is, universally, artificially flavored: https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...
I don't agree with your assessment that fresh squeezed orange juice is watery though - its usually not. The china vending machine must not have had good oranges.
That machine has some dud oranges. But I encourage you to test your theory yourself with some store-bought oranges.
China's about the same size as the US.. and a bit further south. So their climate is as varied as the US.
It's decidedly not slightly more flavorful than water (not to mention the pulp that comes out with it). A cynical man might say the machine must have watered it down for you surreptitiously :p
That being said, it is decidedly far from "pulp-free orange-flavored fruit-drinks" or whatever marketing term is used to sell things like sunnyd or other orange coloured drinks having almost no relation to fruit juice.
(Fruit juice is itself still generally unhealthy because of the sheer amount of sugar you can consume in any one go and the acidity wrt dental health, but those fruit juice imitators are in another category again)
The machine you describe is fairly common. I bought a quart of fresh squeezed organic Valencia orange juice from such a machine in a Idyllwild, CA grocer and it was unbelievably good.
My guess is the machine was adding water.
Plus your body treats fructose like alcohol and most of it gets processed out by the liver in much the same way. Over too long, the liver will look like that of a heavy drinker.
High-fructose corn syrup has also been shown to be far worse for you than simple fructose and glucose.
HFCS contains slightly more fructose than glucose. It doesn’t follow that this would be any worse or better for you than if you were to ingest pure dextrose, fructose, or glucose. If you are ingesting these in high quantities you are damaging your liver and pancreas way worse than even drinking alcohol.
I have no idea if there’s any validity to this, but it sounded plausible. [edit: it would make some sense, since we evolved alongside fruit.] Would love to hear if anyone else knows more about it.
Reductionist reasoning in a complex system is extremely dangerous. Eg: fruits have sugar mixed in with a lot of fiber. Therefore, the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream (and the resulting insulin profile) is very different compared to a orange juice or a soda.
Taking a step back, the simplest forms of cooking / food processing that humans have done throughout history is by applying physical transformation on food while leaving underlying chemicals mostly invariant. If that did not affect the biochemistry, then food processing would be basically pointless. That wasn’t all done for taste!
It is hopelessly naive to believe that biochemistry of a complex organism could be reduced to chemistry of simple constituents like glucose without any regard to context (conditions and other constituents).
This is why intermittent fasting or extended fasting (water + salt) is so helpful in resetting the hormones and getting it back to normal.
The second best way is using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), if only for a few weeks. Most people are shocked by the height and length of glucose excursions. And dismayed by the total area under the curve. These can be purchased yourself or by insurance. Your doctor can advise. Use Dexcom G6 if you have a choice, for accuracy.
Finally, you can do spot checks at 1- and 2-hours post-prandial, with test strips, a finger prick, and a glucose meter you can purchase at your drug store, Amazon, etc.
Your body is awesome at surviving on whatever you give it. You can eat like crap, and you'll feel totally normal once you get used to it. That's why sugar is everywhere and yet people don't notice it. They consume it regularly and their body adjusts so they feel normal, even healthy. Yet, increase the sugar (or decrease the sugar, and then resume normal consumption) and you'll feel nauseous and sick.. for me personally, it feels like I'm getting the flu. (But if I do this several times, it'll go away and I'll feel the same as before but with a higher sugar intake.)
You're probably consuming a lot of sugar. I try to avoid it, and I can tell you soda tastes like a disgusting syrup. If you're able to drink that, you've adjusted to a high sugar diet. It's unbearably sweet.
But just because you've adjusted to it, doesn't mean it's not having an effect on your body. You might feel healthy right up until you get diagnosed with diabetes.
In this case, what I'm getting at is that we can't win by just declaring sugar the new bad thing. That would probably just lead to us finding a way to kill ourselves with fat and protein instead. I feel like we desperately need to, as a culture, develop an understanding of and appreciation for balance and synergy.
This doesn't make sense as fat is typically low in carbs. I think they mean the war for carbs had been won.
TFA is rife with errors, it's annoying because excess sugar consumption is a real issue but poorly researched and written articles like these are not helping.
I've been actively cutting carbs/sugars from my diet since July, and along with exercise, I've dropped 20 kg. This was after a 8 month plateau where no matter what I did in the gym I couldn't drop those two stones. Oh, I also feel better, don't get hungry as often, can easily pull off 18/6 or 24 hr fasts, and maintaining a calorie deficit has actually been easy.
There is a really simple way to deal with this, and always eat well. In the supermarket, try as hard as you can to only buy things that have one ingredient.
Fruits, vegetables, meat, beans, rice, etc.
If it has more than one ingredient, be skeptical, and try to consume as little of it as possible. That goes for liquid too. Water is the only liquid you should drink.
(Yes, yes, for all the snarky comments coming - obviously you could buy "raw sugar" or "lard" and defeat my idea. Please - use your brain, it's not a big ask)
Run into a grocery store or farm stand to grab fresh fruits and vegetables whenever you see one and eat the stuff raw.
You don't need to cook to eat healthily. Even when I'm not traveling most of my diet doesn't involve cooking at all. Just rinsing off dirty vegetables and slicing/peeling is the majority of preparation performed.
Lettuce, Tomato, bell peppers, cucumber and some hummus make a pretty good lunch (obviously the hummus has more than one ingredient).
...maybe we should just tax sugar. It's been our general response to any "vice" whose costs outweigh the benefits.
And everyone gets a $20 grant per day.
It's the subsidies on high fructose corn syrup that's the problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-america...
Which states:
> Added sugars — defined as sweeteners added to foods or beverages when they are being produced or when being prepped to be eaten or drunk at home — include white or brown sugar, honey, molasses, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, lactose, sucrose and more.
So this includes lactose from mother's milk and honey.
I'd personally rather see a breakdown by type. Are lactose, molasses and honey major contributors here that are a big problem and demonstrated to lead to obesity and diabetes? Should infants be removed from both breast milk and lactose intense formula since they are bad?
Perhaps there's a silver lining in that? US regulatory, trade, and industrial policy, has as an objective, spreading this diet around the world. And yes, it's a major public health issue in many countries. And yet, even here on HN, people have for example, praised TPP, with its ISDS provisions permitting companies to recover from governments, profits lost to health regulation. So as a silver lining, surely it would be even more unethical to inflict all this harm on others, if we were not subjecting ourselves to it as well? Eating our own sugary dog food.
[1] https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overcon...
That's from American heart foundation so take it with a grain of salt.
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...
> “Free sugars include monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods and beverages by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, and sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates"
In other words, the natural sugar in apples technically wouldn't be applicable.
[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/149782/1/9789241549...
Many bottled fruit juices have their bulk made of juice from a cheaper fruit that doesn't match the label...but it's not sugar cane, beets, or corn. Does this make them ok?
Isn't that bad for your blood pressure :)