Its the Sugar, Folks (2013)
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Once again, there are powerful commercial interests that fight tooth and nail against any step in the right direction and try to hijack any institutions that should keep them in check. Once again, there are important people who protect their ego by denial of the problem. Once again, pathological behavior has become the societal norm and it will take generations to return back to health.
Our descendants will pity us for our folly, while engaging in something comparably stupid.
They might not know that saturated fat isn't as bad as they claim but sugar has definitely risen in the public consciousness.
The thing that bothers me is the substances people don't even have a clue about. Vegetarians, carnivores, keto types, all of them really downplay or ignore the role omega6s from seed oils that we shove into literally everything. The oxidation and inflammatory effects of which contribute to both obesity, cancer and heart disease
We can't eat enough omega3s to offset it either. We should be at a 1:1 ratio but are rather at a 50:1 ratio.
Industrialized food and the powers behind it have perverted our relationship with fat, jacked up our sugar and increased our omega6s by 50x what it should be.
And cutting seed oils, imho, is way harder than cutting carbs. Most people would just give up if made aware
I looked at a few, all were soaked in corn syrup. Finally, I asked the proprietor for beef jerky that didn't have added sugar. She was taken aback, apparently nobody had ever asked her that before. She thought for a minute, and said sorry, not a single variety of beef jerky was unsweetened.
I sadly left without buying any. I remember eating beef jerky in the 1960s and it didn't taste like candy.
P.S. I looked and looked on Amazon for protein powder that was not sweetened. Couldn't find any. If I wanted sugar in it, I'm perfectly capable of adding some myself. I wound up going to a supplement specialty shop, which did have what I wanted.
P.P.S. I was curious what unsweetened chocolate tasted like. I finally found some on Amazon, it's called cacao nibs. It's now my preferred chocolate!
When buying protein powder you want to make sure it's not "isolate". This has one ingredient: whey protein concentrate.
I'm surprised to hear that. Unsweetened, unflavoured, pure whey protein is a standard product for most supplement sellers. A search for "unflavored protein powder" on Amazon finds all sorts of things (many out of stock, some actually flavoured, but some suitable):
https://www.amazon.com/Unflavored-protein-powder/s?k=Unflavo...
I doubt you'll find flavoured but unsweetened protein powder, though. For some reason, savoury flavours of protein powder is not a thing.
Good point, never thought of that. Makes sense, though.
Yo HN entrepreneurial types, get on it!
I would have the same reaction to chugging pork :P
I would not recommend the later for flavour though unless you really like peas.
I too find all sweeteners absolutely disgusting and will avoid them everywhere.
bars in the $8+ range often use higher quality beans, allowing for lighter roasts which give a fruity and acidic flavor akin to lightly roasted coffee. my personal recommendation is Fresco's 'Polochic Valley' bar (no affiliation).
But especially as Americans we demand sugar in everything. When I started removing sugar from my diet I couldn't believe all the places it hid.
- Ketchup - Yogurt - Salad dressing - Coleslaw - Spaghetti sauce - Soups
Etc etc etc. After years of avoiding too much added sugar, if I accidentally eat any of these my mouth almost feels sick with the sweetness.
I grew up listening to the marketing and science that said FAT = BAD and so stuffed myself with raisins, low fat cookies, and baked chips. Took decades for me to recover from learning to eat that way.
I ran into this same problem, but found a slightly different product without sugar:
South African-style beef jerky, known as "biltong" - it is also a spiced dried meat, but is more meatier and almost always unsweetened.
Biltong can be found at specialty/ethnic food stores, my local grocery shops carry it but display it separately from the American jerky, you have to know where to look (or order online), but it is worth it.
Or, it is easy enough to make jerky at home if you have a dehydrator - slice strips of lean beef (I've used top round, bottom round, eye of round, and tenderloin), cover with salt/pepper and/or spices to taste, then dehydrate overnight for a tasty sugar-free treat.
50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
It’s the Sugar, Folks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300255 - Feb 2013 (219 comments)
b) Funnily enough when looking at the old thread, I happened upon a comment of mine "The title is pure linkbait. What they are trying to hide behind their typical populist wording[…]" which made me feel ashamed (not only because it seems to make little sense, but also because of the hostility displayed).
But in general, roughly 1 year later I started with a ketogenic diet, so sugar really hasn’t much to do with me anymore ;)
The bots haven't shown up. The workday is just starting on the US east coast; the marketing teams don't know what's being said yet. Give it time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you have any evidence about it, even an iota, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you don't have evidence, then this is just fertile internet imagination of the sort which overwhelmingly dominates the topic and is why we have that rule in the first place.
Edit: we've had to ask you about just this sort of thing before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237584). Please don't do it again.
The idea that sugar is bad in great amount seems to have gone mainstream, but many people I know who seem to be aware that sugar is bad and have lowered their intake are still just fine with pasta, rice, flour etc. This is the message we need to get out now. Not saying you need to completely drop your favorite refined carbs (pasta etc) but at least try to lower your intake like you do with sugar and prioritize unrefined carbs and green veggies instead.
Personally, I find it hard to cut down on carbs because it's expensive to do so. Refined carbs are the cheapest source of energy.
Have you tried fresh food eg salads? They are delicious and filling in a way that keeps you sated longer than carbs without the highs and lows of energy and mood.
It takes a bit of organisation to make a big salad every day, but once you get the hang of it, you feel better, big time.
I love fresh veggies. I just can't afford to replace carbs with them. Veggies are expensive.
I would suggest a link between abundance of food and obesity. Also sedentary lifestyle
You can see this in action with this procedure (or thought experiment):
1. Lose most of your belly fat so that you look thin.
2. Eat a tub of ice cream. Do this for two nights. You’ll see a lump on your belly. It is 4 pounds of new fat. That won’t happen if you replace ice cream with the same weight of fruit.
You can eat a lot of carbs over time when being physically active. But once you stop being as physically active, you have to adjust your carbs accordingly. So what OP says is correct for how most people live nowadays.
Removing the husk of wheat and rice removes the source of fiber which then speeds up the metabolic process of your body turning the carbs into sugar.
It overwhelms the glucose regulator in your body similar to eating raw sugar.
This is why consuming whole fruit instead of juice is so much healthier. It's about speed of glucose delivery.
Sure, it is bread, but it might as well be called bread substitute.
It is not easy to find bread that isn't made up of primarily cheap ingredients. Even so-called supermarket "artisanal" barely resembles actual quality bread.
We've been eating bread for millenia but we also moved a lot more until recently. Also, lifespans and health were worse than they are now. Also, how much does the bread we get at a supermarket today resemble the bread people ate 500 years ago?
Its easy to explain ANY side you like because there are millions of factors. That's exactly why diet research is conducted by doing statistics to isolate the impact of particular variables even as 100s of things vary across any group of people.
I think people like to argue against dietary research because it tells them things they don't want to hear. Admittedly, i didn't believe in any of this or like hearing it until recently because its made to sound so difficult - cut out sugar/refined carbs/carbs completely!
Personally i was able to move to a healthier diet after just going through a simple book on sports nutrition. It drills in a few key points that tend to get lost in clickbait. For example, what you eat over a period of time (i.e a DIET) can be unhealthy or healthy, but pointing to any ONE meal/food as healthy/unheathy doesn't make a lot of sense
That is, pardon the pun, huge. It would be nice to get some more recent data and to adjust for height.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
I grind my own grain at home and make my own bread. 100% difference from what's available in stores vs. at home.
You'll never find any of the artisan-style almost-burn loaves that you see on pinterst using 100% whole grain. Will never poof up like that, you'll get something closer to German-style brown breads.
They pull the wheat germ -- essentially the plant embryo, but also a source of nutrients that can go bad -- out of the flour to extend shelf life. Ditto for taking out all of the bran -- fiber! -- though "whole wheat" flours will add some of that back in later. But for the most part modern breads are nothing but refined carbs with a touch of fiber.
The germ is sold separately, as a health food or feedstock for animals.
The difference in taste and shape is noticeable. It's also much, much more filling and satisfying. Not as great for avocado toast, but does pretty well with a little cream cheese and tomato (plus a pinch of salt).
According to wikipedia [0]: approximately from 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Let's take an average reproduction age of 25y and you've got roughly 1000 human generations eating bread.
But, also according to wikipedia [1], the oldest Homo Sapiens that we can date range from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. That's 70-90% of our direct ancestors' natural selection process not having been exposed to bread (widespread grains, in fact).
And, if we dare to argue that human metabolism have mainly not changed since Homo Erectus, then we are in another world in terms of comparison, because Wikipedia trace the oldest signs of Erectus as far as 2,000,000 years ago [2], which represent 80,000 generations, and that's ~1% of our ancestors having evolved exposed to grains.
So, all in all, "we've been eating bread for millenia" is clearly not all that there is to say on that matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
Now I would be surprised if the average person burns more than 2k calories/day. Moreover, once you get to high fat levels your body produces more estrogen like hormones. These indirectly lower your metabolism even further. This is because those hormones impede the synthesis of testosterone, which is highly correlated with muscle-synthesis and muscle fibers are much more metabolic active tissues than fat. A feedback loop that is really hard to escape from.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1271/bbb.90231
Maybe Japanese cuisine compensates some of the negative effects by using vinegar more often than we do. My wife used to make sushi according to Japanese recipes; the rice was soaked in vinegar. But Westerners do not soak their bread or rice in vinegar.
We generally think about an element of nutrition being a cause of some disease (cholesterol, fat, sugar etc.). We spend less time thinking about the question whether an element of nutrition may have protective effect against deleterious effects of another element.
12.1% of Japanese have diabetes (https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00249/)
For comparison, about 13% of people in the US have diabetes (https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...)
In practical terms, anybody who eats 100g of sugar, and 100g of pasta, will notice a huge difference.
Paleo is very fashionable, but I wonder how many people will actually follow through in the long term (years), since eating very large amounts of meat is not realistically sustainable, in different ways (I have firsthand experience on this).
I agree with you, but pasta is only 37% carbs. So 270g pasta (that's enough for 2 people!) and 100g sugar would need to be compared.
However I still think this will be unfavorable to the sugar, since you won't be satiated for long, and the insulin crash will make you eat again soon.
We can't ignore psychology on this, too. In the long run your hormones will beat your rational thinking, so you can of course theoretically lose weight on a high sugar diet, but you won't.
Curiously, we're mixing cooked vs. uncooked. I've always been using dry pasta weight as reference (as the pasta is weighted before), but in context, your observations are more precise :)
That said, the average American diet is imbalanced in favor of carbs, with pretty much everything sweetened. My European diet is a lot more balanced out, we eat brown bread, regular pasta and rice, etc, all part of a balanced diet (can't beat a brown bread, ham and cheese sandwich. Real butter, because margarine is shit)
The other problem the US diet has is portion sizes. American portions are big. As an occasional tourist I can appreciate it, but at the same time it's one reason behind the obesity crisis.
The UK has a similar problem. Compared to where I'm from (NL), eating 'out' is affordable, and you can load up on a full English or a carvery for around 6 pounds. Drinking a ton of beer also seems to be normalized with a big percentage of the population.
I agree with your post, I just want to add something to this.
Aside from just choosing between butter and margarine, there are also "spreadable butter" products, which mix butter with vegetable fats, for a spreadable consistency and a better saturated:unsaturated fats ratio. The one I have in my fridge right now tastes exactly like butter, but has ~500kcal per 100g instead of the ~700kcal in pure butter. The only downside is that it melts faster on warm toast.
The ingredients are butter, rapeseed oil, water and salt, so it's not some weird industrial concoction. Do avoid the types with palm oil and such, though. They're less sustainable and I find them to have a slightly garlicky off taste.
What worked wonders for me is buying a steamer. Now I add to every meal some steamed broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, ... . The fibers in them keep me satiated for longer and I stopped snacking thanks to that.
Additionally, those veggies help counter the estrogen-like hormones and after 2y of doing this my physique improved considerably without any major change in my exercise schedule / routine.
As a layman, what he says sounds reasonable to me, but it's also difficult to know what context we're missing. If anyone has seen it and has some authoritative/professional opinions on it, it'd be really helpful. I've heard complaints that he's just trying to sell his book, and I don't know what how much weight to give everything.
That Sugar Film
1. Doctors aren’t taught nutrition in medical school! Their business model is to treat diseases.
2. Nutritionists have been targeted by food companies to dispense misnomers and complexity so that you can’t get a straight understanding.
3. Supermarkets use the terms “healthy” and “low fat” to sell you foods that have amazing amounts of added sugar that makes you hungry 25 minutes after eating it.
To understand where nutrition advice is coming from, follow the money.
To get healthy, eat fresh food.
Try eating a totally 100% unprocessed diet (except you cooking or combining unprocessed ingredients into a meal) and see what happens. We would have maybe 2% obviously overweight people.
Combine that with a minimal physical exercise, compared to sitting all day, driving to work, even driving in stores, and you would put that percentage at <1%.
It's not very helpful in finding out why people are actually unhealthy
Which one of these is unhealthy? Eh, doesn't matter, it's processed therefore it's bad.
I don't think we do. What criteria exactly determine if a food is "processed"? It's a vague word that leaves a lot open to interpretation
Other additives make the food last longer, which might be OK, so long as they don't have other harmful side effects.
The main negative about processed food is added sugar.
The reason food manufacturers add sugar to products is that it makes them addictive, so people finish the box, can or bottle and buy another one. Manufacturers test products to get the level of sugar just below the maximum before it makes products taste sickly sweet. At this threshold, the sugar makes the product addictive.
The main reasons sugar is a negative for consumers is that when metabolised, sugar goes straight to body fat. Wham. Pow. Fat. Just like that. Sugar is like nothing else for body fat.
Another reason sugar is a negative is that it makes you feel unbalanced. At first it gives you a rush of energy. When your body detects the excess sugar in your bloodstream, your pancreas secretes insulin to absorb the glucose. Your glucose levels spike up then down, and with it, your mood and energy level.
By definition:
A processed food is any food that has been altered in some way during preparation.
Food processing can be as basic as: freezing. canning.
In fact, I think we shouldn't even distinguish between processed/non-processed, but instead judge foods on their relevant aspects. An example of this is battery-farmed vs free-range cornfed chicken are both non-processed.
If it has more than 2g of sugar per 100g serving, it’ll make you fatter.
Again, it's more on the actual details of the food (e.g sugar density) rather than labels like "fresh".
> Meat is ok but not processed like sausages
Why, what's wrong with sausages? Does mincing a steak and putting it in a case make a difference?
Is there anything I can look for on the label that will lead me to a healthy sausage?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curing_(food_preservation)#Nit...
Still, the added risk is not massive and unless you eat bacon and sausage every day, there are probably other and more important carcinogenic factors in your life that you need to care more about. The calories and saturated fats in most cured red meats are more likely to adversely affect your health.
And people pretend like they don't know what we mean by "processed food". You need like one hour of education about food, or really common sense to distinguish which kind of processing is bad in almost all cases.
We eat processed sugar more than ever before. We eat processed fat more than ever before. We eat processed protein more than ever before. Hell, we eat anything more than ever before. And we move less. And then we nitpick on what "processed" actually means?
Is it that hard to figure out that packaged broccoli is better than breakfast cherios? Or that farmed chicken cooked in your house is better than deep fryed minced with who knows what fast food one? That raw cacao bean is better than sweets in the store? That raw nuts are better than hydrogenated palm oil? That strawbery is better than strawberry icecream?
Most of us know even only by intuition what type of processing is bad, but we overeat almost everything and then blame particular food group or item or macronutrient.
It sounds like a fairly poor, even progress adverse, distinction. You may as well judge foods by the character count of their ingredients & additives.
> people pretend like they don't know what we mean by "processed food"
Does it differ from the dictionary definition I just quoted?
> We eat processed sugar more ... And then we nitpick on what "processed" actually means?
Maybe if we where clearer on terminology, we'd eat less of these things?
like distinguish between medium, high and very-high sugar density foods to avoid binary thinking (healthy vs unhealthy).
> Is it that hard to figure out that packaged broccoli is better than breakfast cherios?
No, but you're cherry picking a low-sugar vegetable and a high sugar cereal. Grey areas still exist; I don't know who this rant is directed at.
> Most of us know even only by intuition what type of processing is bad
Nonsense, there are lots of unhealthy foods that mislead in packaging.
* Drive short distances rather than walk
* Home deliveries rather than getting things ourselves
* Escalators and elevators everywhere
* Drive-thrus to avoid short walk across a parking lot
* Childrens' play restricted to indoors or small yards
Sidewalks used to be part of a normal subdivision, but I haven't seen a new subdivision here that has a single foot of a sidewalk.
And I live in Copenhagen, so it's not like I don't see tons of people walking and riding bicycles, but a significant number of people seem to really want to avoid any sort of physical activity.
Making a promise to yourself to take the stairs, walk/cycle to the shops, park at the far end of the parking lot, walk up the escalators rather than just standing still, do all of those small things that add up and don't even feel like exercise, could be the best decision you make.
Just the fact that some stores and restaurants are basically impossible to walk to, because of missing sidewalks, makes me furious. So do "beg buttons" at pedestrian crossing.
But in the end, there also needs to be a personal choice to prioritize one's own health.
About the same, both are high on fructose (orange's being nature made, whereas coke's is added from corn syrup), and fructose is the #1 culprit in fatty liver.
Both are piking your insulin big time, which is the main vector of 'sugar' consumption leading to a wide variety of health concerns (numerous insulin pikes leads to insulin resistance which leads to type 2 diabete which leads to virtually any non-infectious disease).
How about glycemic index?
All carbs transform to glucose, that sugar too. Is it bad?
For me seems like not sugar itself is bad - a lot of sugar is bad which equal to modern diet.
Our body is wierd thing :) Sugars taste sweet but it hurts you.
All my fat friends avoid sugar. And drink coffee...because they're tired.
It's not the sugar, it's the not using it, that is a problem. Especially when discussing an article that was published in (2013).
Nope! For the general populace the linked article and research clearly points out that this is just not true.
Now, of course there are cases when excessive consumption of sugar is beneficial - for example, where someone is malnourished it might be good for one's health. Just like some people need specific medicine to get better, the same medicine being poisonous to others or poisonous in higher concentrations.
As for the article being from 2013... the medicine (and science in general) does not get outdated the way some other fields do. Did we get over obesity problems since 2013? Nah, not even close: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/01/06/obesity-c... . Exact opposite is true.
> All my fat friends avoid sugar.
As they should - yet this is super vague. People "avoid" getting killed in road accidents yet are guilty of speeding in numerous cases. Without proper data on their sugar consumption (which you don't have, and they likely don't have either) you are in no position to say whether the amount they consume is anywhere near "safe".
If you lost that much so fast it's because before being sick you were very high in glycogen muscular reserves, which binds on water big time. Surely you didn't eat during your sickness, leading to glycogen depletion, leading to shredding all that water and weight.
You surely were then very miserable, because losing so much water during 5 days means having virtually no more minerals, magnesium and potassium being key components for cellular activity.
And then you binged on carbs, building your glycogen reserves back to normal, bringing minerals back in your system, and assuredly you felt better.
But you also piked your insulin level by eating a lot of carbs, and you are now a step closer to insulin resistance.
> Sugar is good for you
If you eat sugar often enough to induce insulin resistance, then, no, it's not. Otherwise, yes, go enjoy your annual 100gr of candies, it won't hurt, it may even go one rep further on that squat max.