Replace sweetened drinks with unsweetened tea (there are hundreds of varieties, you will find something that you like).
Replace desserts with your favorite fruit or berries.
Your body, mind, and teeth will thank you.
Eg strawberries - 100 g is 7.7g of carbohydrates (4.9g sugar), 0.7g protein, 0.3g fat. 56% sugar.
Or oranges - 165 g without membrane or peel is 20.7g carbs (14g sugar), 1.5g protein, 0.2g fat. 63% sugar.
As opposed to, say, a snickers bar. 9.1g carbohydrates (7.6g sugar), 1.1g protein, 3.6g fat. 55% sugar.
Or a kitkat. 27.1g carbs (20.4g sugar), 2.7g protein, 10.4g fat. 50% sugar.
Granted, the fruits have way way more water content so by mass are substantially lower fractions of sugar. It can be (but is not necessarily) more satisifying to eat the increased mass and volume of fruit, or to eat the same total mass/volume but ingest substantially fewer calories (about tenfold, by mass).
But really this advice is just 'swap sweets for smaller quantities of sweets'.
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices...
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices...
The nutrient density of fruits is magnitudes higher than sweets.
And water mass matters as it contributes to satiety vs grams of food consumed.
The nutrient density of desserts is magnitudes higher. Carbohydrates, protein, and fat are the primary nutrients. You must mean micronutrients, i.e. individual amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Of these, the snickers bar does quite well with amino acids thanks to the peanuts, but yes, a serving of strawberries will give you vitamin c which the snickers won't.
However, that single vitamin is the only real difference in micronutrient quality!
The fruit and candy are both negligible 2-10% amounts for the remainder. They're also very similar on mineral content, with the candy providing 8-10% dv on 5 minerals, while the fruit provides 7% and 29% of two minerals, the rest negligible in both, averaging 5.6% dv for the fruit or 7.6% dv for the candy across the ten minerals.
I already addressed water mass and caloric density, but for completeness I will say again that you're getting these very comparable amounts of micronutrients for a tenfold caloric difference.
I think one thing that is usually overlooked in these discussions is the "feeling" part of it, for lack of a better term. Some things make you want to keep on eating, while others are satiating. Of course, if you're able to only eat one Snickers bar a day while the cupboard is full of them, then that's great! I know I can't, so I avoid them altogether.
Carb content (calories, actually) isn't important per se, what matters is the total consumed quantity, and usually calorie-dense foods have a tendency to incite overconsumption.
Junk food recipes are a/b tested and statistically evaluated just like in ad tech.
One example I have in mind about products being made like this is Nestlé's Extreme ice cream cones. They're fairly sugary throughout, but right at the end there's a small "chocolate bomb", super sweet, that just gives you that "I have to have another one" craving.
I’ve often wondered how many secondary impulse buys are made because someone makes an extra trip to the store to satisfy their primary craving for tobacco, coffee, energy drinks or just sugar.
Strawberries, as we know them, only came into being in the 18th century.
Also, fruit is being actively manipulated to fit consumer's tastes and producer's profitability. The Honeycrisp apple is one of the biggest recent success stories.
Key quote that refutes GP's perspective.
Confectionery is sucrose + other carbs + filler + appetite enhancers.
While you can over eat fruit, the water and fibre make it very difficult.
With confectionery, it's literally designed to be easy.
Volume and digestability is key to eating less.
Come on, this is just incomparable. Protein is satiating.
A protein bar is a very different experience from a Snickers
http://www.wholefoodsplantbasedhealth.com.au/wp-content/uplo...
100g is half a cup. It's about 5 large strawberries. See https://findanyanswer.com/how-many-grams-are-3-strawberries for more numbers.
I buy strawberries in 500g boxes, and let me tell 1/5 isn't all that filling (definitely less than a Snickers bar).
Maintaining the complex structure of the unprocessed ingredients isn’t even on the radar.
There are very serious reasons to treat the fiber as deeply precious, and removing it as deeply harmful.
Ultimately, all the evidence I see points to the fact that most people can’t eat large amounts of fruit. I can, though. I’m like 170 lbs (77 kg) and I can easily devour pounds of apples or strawberries or mangoes in a sitting and eat more tomorrow. So the pro fruit argument usually ends up on CICO which I am willing to accept.
So I stay away from fruit when I know I need to control weight.
We've arguably evolved to do exactly that, since fruits are seasonal crops with brief periods of availability before rotting and vanishing until next season. We binge when they're available (and love sweets accordingly), storing some energy for the coming period of scarcity.
But it's true that intact fruits include soluble dietary fiber. The soluble fiber interferes somewhat with the small intestine's access to the sugars locked up in the goop as it passes through, to become flatulence via your guests living in the colon.
Just look at an insulin index including fruits to see how they compare, there's a small example on wikipedia @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index#Explanation_of_I...
I like the Insulin Index page. That seems like reasonable evidence.
My understanding of the role soluble fiber plays in fruit digestion comes entirely from talks by ucsf professor of pediatrics Robert Lustig. There's a bunch of his stuff on youtube, you may have heard of the famous one Sugar: The Bitter Truth. In some talks he goes more into the role of soluble fiber, but I don't recall which, and it's a bit of a rabbithole to go digging through again. Plus it's been years since I spelunked this particular hole, it's presumably even deeper now.
I'm sure if you do some digging you could find reliable info on the subject. It's not my impression that we're breaking new ground here, pretty sure dietary fiber's effects on digestion are at least partially understood scientifically at this point.
Unfortunately you'll still encounter a lot of folks fixating on "the physics" and calories in vs. calories out, which ignores the fact that your body is full of living organisms. The composition of your food largely determines how much of its calories get taken up by your body vs. your guests vs. simply pass through.
I have recently started appreciating the gut flora stuff after discovering that there’s a whole class of artificial sweeteners that not only gives me the runs (easy to handle) but also wrecks my mood (harder to detect since it borks my detection mechanism).
On the bright side, if I’m willing to accept the pain, weight loss is trivial. Smash the Nick’s and Halo Top for a week, compensate for mood with a Barry’s Bootcamp every day, come out the other side stronger and lighter.
The real problem—don't do that. Eat a salad beforehand and then keep the fruit to a serving or two. Zero doesn't work in the long term, there is no need for deprivation that squeezes out the fun in life.
You'll die of malnutrition on a fruit-only diet. It lacks fat, for example, which is essential.
People seem to think fruit == candy since both contain lots of sugar. It's a lot more complicated than that.
P.S. I'm not talking about juicing fruit, I mean chewing and eating fruit in its natural state.
If you regularly experience a 'sugar-high', I wonder if it might be indicative of problems with your body's blood sugar regulation.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324896#Acute-sugar...
Ever heard of Avocado?
https://www.byrdie.com/fruitarian-diet
You can get fats from nuts.
"Anyone following a fruit diet may be missing out on vital nutrients, including: iron calcium vitamin D zinc omega-3 fatty acids B vitamins, including B-12"
Without, it all goes straight into the bloodstream, and has to be processed immediately. If there is too much, the fructose gets processed to fat in the liver. Fructose has to be processed by the same pathway as alcohol, because the rest of the body doesn't know what it is. American children are getting cirrhosis like alcoholics now. The appetite system doesn't know about fructose: eating any amount fails to make you less hungry.
With, much of it gets to the lower intestine, where it feeds gut bacteria, instead. They need it. We need them. What gets absorbed takes longer, resulting in much smaller swings of concentration of various blood chemicals.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221226721...
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6181280/
3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11906-011-0197-8
4: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200005113421903
5: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/899/4649308?login...
6: https://www.jrheum.org/content/35/9/1853.short
7: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
Can't say that about candy bars.
They taste better than any candy bar I’ve ever had, and come without the guilt.
What constitutes the rest of the non-water mass matters quite a bit (especially if l, as much of it is with many whole fruits, it is fiber, which is demonstrated to mitigate Type 2 diabetes risk and severity.) Sugar + fiber is much less bad for you than sugar alone.
If you meant some smaller bar, then you are comparing a very small candy bar against 100g or 165g or fruit; not very fair.
Fruits contain micronutrients in addition to the regular nutrients they have. There's no comparison that just about any fruit would be a healthier choice than a candy bar. I thought it would also go without saying that it is essential to have a diverse diet because a person needs a lot of different nutrients, not just one.
Many diets forbid fruits on account of the simple carbs.
I never understand these claims of fruits being unhealthy — or an unhealthy substitute for processed/refined sugars — yet there are many sources stating that fruits are fine/healthy [1].
There’s more to the story than just comparing the amount of “sugar” from nutritional facts between fruits and candy.
Yes, juices aren’t great. But be clear that whole fruits and fruit juices are vastly different, and shouldn’t be thought of as equally unhealthy.
[1] https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2016/08/natural-...
Fruits are healthy in the same sense that dihydrogen monoxide is. Infinitesimal amounts have no health consequence, moderate amounts are healthy, amounts that exclude other foods will cause nutritional deficiencies, and excessive enough amounts will result in suffocation.
Basically, I think you're losing something when you compare the macros of a pear to a snickers bar.
But other than that it's a very good analysis.
Is it because fruit sugar is fructose and not saccharose?
The important difference is that they all (except grapes!) have enough fiber to modulate absorption. Juice, any juice, is as bad as candy. Amount matters. Rate matters.
Regular corn syrup and corn sugar are just glucose, so relatively harmless. You can't find corn sugar at a supermarket, but can online: "Homebrew" sells it for $2/lb, nominally for home beer brewers to boost carbonation, but it is good for anywhere you would use cane sugar. (Sometimes a pinch of the latter may still be needed, e.g. in hot cocoa.)
Fruit juices or any sort of fruit product where the fiber is removed, however, is just as bad as sugar.
Second, the presence of fibers is the differentiator here, meaning that the same amount of sugar in fruits will bring a lot more satiety.
Wean off sweets with less sweet things, which do have other nutritionally redemptive qualities.
According to Google, Snickers has 189 mg of salt per 100 grams. Strawberries have 0.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/25/sa...
Anecdotally, I have noticed I can basically eat an entire large pizza and still want more. Once we switched to making our own pizza from dough at trader Joe's, I'm stuffed after about 2 slices. I think the difference is that we don't add a ton of salt and cheese like a pizza place does.
How do you know that this is true?
This is the simplest sort of biochemistry.
It's obvious by a simple experiment: cut out everything sweet (at the very least candy, sweets and desserts) for a couple of weeks, then try eating a candy bar or a thickly-frosted cupcake. It will taste almost unbearably sweet.
Make sweets something you only enjoy as a rare treat, and you'll find that you'll eat much less of them, because the sweetness will simply be too much.
Is there any peer reviewed literature that supports this?
I'm gonna bet it does. Even our autonomic systems are pavlovian in conjunction, for good reason evolutionarily (hyper efficiency somewhere in the past).
Good luck with whatever.
Since you're stating this definitively in a response to Someone posting evidence debunking your previous claim, can you link a study backing it up?
This insulin lowers your blood sugar. Because artificial sweeteners provide only the sensation of sweetness and not the energy content of an actual sugar, your blood sugar falls low enough that your unconscious brain is compelled to eat.
People who drink diet soda consistently eat more calories than they would have eaten if they had drunk a regular soda--even if you include the calories from the soda.
Studies haven't found a causal relationship between diet soda and weight gain.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...
https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-sodas-and-weight-ga...
I’ve straight told people it’s just gonna have to be my vice. I can eat salads and peanut butter sandwiches all day and night. But i haven’t found a way to wean myself from caffeine.
I definitely don’t like when I drink too much (see coffee comment). But I can’t just cold turkey it either.
That's not my experience at all. My sweet cravings after having actual sugar are much more intense, and they remind me of what a real craving feels like. My daily consumption of sweeteners doesn't make me crave any sweets, and I normally don't.