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Comment by abellerose | Hacker News Reader

I've never known that people add sugar to their apples. I have lived in US & Canada and I find that odd people need to add sugar to enjoy an apple.

Croissants or baguettes are not a daily thing if my assumption is correct. My experience is buying them when walking home from work and if I'm in the mood because bread isn't generally healthy for people compared to something else that happens to be better.

edit: okay, I now understand the comment is about apples having natural sugar.

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Yeah, I think you misread the original comment. The "average" apple contains nearly 10g of sugar[0].

[0]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/171688/n...

Somehow I've received multiple downvotes on the original comment. I can no longer edit the comment but I think it's funny that people expected me to know he didn't just mean the natural sugars in apples. I mean apples are healthy in general compared to what the original discussion was about.

I think he means that apples have a lot of sugar in them, which is why they taste so good.

I think the OP meant natural sugar, not added! And sadly, many jams and pies have extra sugar added, I much prefer the no/low sugar versions.

Yes natural sugar is just barely better than added sugar (due to the fiber it's typically mixed in with). The apples we eat today are candy bars, they just happen to grow on trees. Trees shaped extensively via artificial selection for thousands of years to pack in more glucose, trees that are nowhere near to what our ancestors have encountered for millions of years.

A Snickers bar has 27g of sugar in it[1], almost 3 times the 10g in the 'average apple' (without the fiber or water to slow down metabolizing it). I haven't encountered anyone claiming that obesity and diabetes are rampant in the US due to over-consumption of fruit (though fruit juice is not doing us any favors).

1: https://www.myfooddiary.com/foods/22930/snickers-regular-siz...

Fortunately, apples are not candy bar. The metabolic effects of eating 1kg of apples is completely different from eating glucose and fructose extracted from those 1kg of apples.

Natural sugar is magnitudes times better than processed/added sugar.

Fructose consumed through fruits has never had a similar metabolic effect as high-fructose corn syrup.

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