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Comment by dialamac | Hacker News Reader

> We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment

The flour you make French bread with is not found any more or less naturally in the environment than the sugar you get from cane or beet.

This whole thing about evolution and nutrition is entirely pseudoscientific woo.

If humans had to eat the same way as our ancestors (ie actual paleo, not some hipster fad diet) humanity would have died out long time ago.

The French thing makes this all the more ironic... I can’t imagine much more triumph in modern processing than the five mother sauces.

Clearly the American diet has a crazy oversupply of sugar... fructose, glucose, sucrose... at the amounts we’re talking about in the average American diet it doesn’t fucking matter (making the whole HFCS controversy always a joke).

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I respectfully disagree. Flour is basically crushed wheat. Refined sugar is not crushed beet, and you would have to eat a lot of beet to eat the same amount of sugar that you eat in a typical "industrial food" diet.

I would not take paleo food as a reference, but rather look toward what our grandparents had for lunch when they were kids. I don't think they were doing so badly.

And I don't cook like Bocuse everyday, the five mother sauces are not intended to be eaten on a daily basis :-)

Well sugar beets excluding water content are about 85% sucrose. Sugar production and consumption dates to antiquity, long before mass western obesity epidemics, a luxury item. It essentially became a staple food in the North American diet in the 20th century.

Anyway, honey has a higher concentration of fructose so it has a lower GI than table sugar, but this difference is quite moderate (a few percent) - it seems to get overstated a lot on the web. Honey is basically refined/processed fuel produced by bees - and on evolutionary time scales it has been in use by humans about the same as sugar. Don’t get me wrong, it has chemical and physical properties that make it a beneficial sugar alternative - probably most of which is earlier satiety and therefore less consumption. If consumed in similar quantities it’s still going to make you fat. TANSTAAFL.

My grandparents are probably older than average... but the life expectancy was a fair bit shorter just 100 years ago. Most didn’t even get the opportunity to live long enough to have gastric cancer (smoked meats) or a second MI.

My grandparents ate Oscar Meyer hot dogs on bleached buns for lunch so not sure it's the best choice

> rather look toward what our grandparents had for lunch when they were kids. I don't think they were doing so badly.

This is baseless nostalgia, not something to base health advice on.

The modern wheat is a product of a lot of breeding, just like we do with dogs. Because of it it's pretty different from anything you can find in nature.

Wild varieties of wheat doesn't have nearly as much gluten, and the higher concentration results in a lot more children (myself being one of them) reacting to the protein with an immune disorder(celiac disease).

So you can't just say "sugar bad, flour good" as if it was a binary decision. Everything has consequences on different levels.

Exactly. It took me a long time to piece together that modern wheat was making me sick. I don't think I ever would have if I hadn't been so intrigued by the gluten free diet trend and started researching it. I am able to eat whole grain spelt without problems.

I was curious about your comment on sugar vs flour. I think it's much easier to make wheat compared to sugar at home. https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=5WbYu9XHQPw.

In the end, I think it's good to know how much raw stuff go into making any ingredients. It takes a lot of sugarcane to get a soda's worth of sugar.

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