Hacker News Reader

Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

True enough, but people should know how much bleach and water is needed to hurt themselves; death and/or pain provides immediate feedback. The problem with sugar is that the benefits are so immediate and the drawbacks so distant that it requires a strong will to avoid.

View on HN

The problem is that the question "Is sugar toxic?" is inherently meaningless. Bandying the word around like this in a publication like the NYT dilutes public understanding of the issue.

Scientifically responsible journalists would have chosen an accurate term to discuss the issue rather than shooting for maximum emotional impact.

The thesis of the article is pretty obvious: Sugar is toxic in the amounts found in a typical western diet.

Hmmmm. You're right. That is pretty obvious. I feel kinda silly now.

I tend to be on a bit of a hair trigger over the use of words like toxic by nutritionists, because so often they turn out to be graduates of degree mills, pedalling patent medicines via press release reprinting churnalists.

This guy seems to check out however, even if he is a bit absolutist.

Technically, you don't even need a degree in anything relevant to nutrition to call yourself a nutritionist. Dietitian on the other hand comes with more accreditation. For that reason, dietitians often refer to themselves as dietitians rather than nutritionists because it's more distinguished. I err towards suspicion when someone refers to himself/herself as simply a "nutritionist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist

That's cool; I actually appreciated your insight in the top comment. It is meaningless to say sugar is toxic or not toxic. The important question is at what level does it become toxic, which is almost certainly less than what we consume now but surely greater than zero (I hope so anyway -- zero strikes me as both impractical and not very tasty).

The thesis being true or not is beside the point - yes, America eats too much sugar. Probably. But the problem about articles like this, and other campaigns to curb "bad eating habits" (like New York City's vendetta against salt and soda) is that it promotes a negative attitude towards food and eating, which feeds the cycle of abuse towards food and towards self esteem, instead of going deeper into the root of the problem itself. Any recovering food addict will tell you that the first thing you learn in rehab is to relearn your attitude towards food. What if, on the subway, people read signs that said "Eat well! Eat what you want! Thumbs Up!" instead of "You're going to die of diabetes if you don't stop eating sugar in toxic amounts"? Of course, that's an over reductive analogy - but my point is that it's not the American Diet that needs change, it is the American Attitude Towards Food that is desperately dysfunctional.

Humans have a problem with those sort of issues. Furthermore when surrounded by pretty much everything sugar, its kind of hard to avoid. Imagine if we were to find out tomorrow that people who use facebook are 60% likely to die of a seizure caused directly by facebook within the next 50 years. And we find out by a vague hard to prove no direct correlation study. Would be pretty hard to convince everyone you know to stop using facebook. What if it's too late? Etc.

Definitely. Imagine if sugar was the opposite: You gain weight immediately (* poomp *!), and a year later you get a pleasant sensation on your tongue.

You actually gain weight immediately, due to the conservation of mass. Eat an ounce of sugar (or anything else) and you gain an ounce, until you poop it out. You just don't feel it because the amounts involved at any given meal is small. But if you ate 10 lb of sugar at one meal... you'd definitely feel the consequences.

It's "until you breathe it out" actually, isn't it?

The term we're looking for here is "excrete"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com