Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions | Hacker News Reader

Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

eurekalert.org

236 pointsstarkd170 comments

The nice thing about reducing sugar is that after a while your taste buds realize how insanely over-sweetened many products are in the US.

My current favorite example is bottled teas. When I was a kid I remember drinking Snapple, now I can't understand how I ever downed that stuff, it's like drinking syrup. If I'm lazy I'll get a bottle of unsweetened tea and mix it about 4-1 with sweetened tea. I get something that has a pleasant, natural, gently sweet taste, and even if I drink 3 of these a day I'm still getting a lot less sugar than a single glass of fully sweetened tea.

This. I abstain from all sugar a few times a year for at least a week. I can't drink soda in any form anymore, it all tastes like syrup at this point. I have no cravings for it at all. But continually breaking the sugar cycle helps me realize how off things taste being overloaded with sugar. There's plenty of research showcasing how addictive sugar can be and since there's no health value to consuming it there's no downside to minimizing it.

Sugar is a dangerous drug masquerading as a macronutrient. It is probably as dangerous as cigarettes and alcohol, and more deleterious to you health (although not as acutely dangerous) than hard drugs like opiates and amphetamines.

Yep. Cereals, fruit juices, mainstream coffee (Starbucks, Dunkin, etc.), yogurt, baked goods...

It's insane to me that society in the US has been conditioned to consume literally hundreds of grams of sugar for breakfast. If you need caffeine (which is a separate discussion), you don't need to consume what's essentially a frozen milkshake as the delivery vehicle.

> yogurt

I don’t think unflavored yogurt has much sugar, does it?

No, but most yoghurt I see people buy are the sweetened kinds.

Buy unsweetened! If you can’t stand it, mix some pre-puréed fruit from baby jars intended for infants ($1 or less each).

Unflavored yoghurt has 5g of sugar (size of a sugar cube), and I’ve often seen up to 12g… (2 cubes and a half!) still branded as unflavored. It’s a crime we’re doing here, there is no place where we can get unsweetened matter.

The 5g per serving example is probably actually unsweetened, i.e. it's just the naturally present lactose. No sucrose.

We have "natural" joghurt in all stores (Germany) without any sugar. A breakfast with <1g of sugar is possible but requires some searching

I quit coffee New Years and the reason was I was drinking it with a teaspoon of sugar and throughout the day would have about 5 cups like this. Being 240 days into the year I have cut out 1200 teaspoons of sugar from my diet by cutting coffee. I would like to cut out other sugars as well but find it extremely difficult to get ride of things like chocolate.

I can’t drink coffee with sugar for the same reason, just some 2% milk and I’m happy.

I tried to cut out processed/added sugar in April. It's worked great mostly, even when eating out if I'm careful. Tea was the big thing for me though. I'm from the South and was literally drinking sweet tea from the time I was a few months old. It was difficult, especially as my grandmother made the best tea. But she eventually started making unsweet for me and it's really hard to go back to sweet tea. It's just so overpowering. Even eating too much sugar makes me sick now.

I'm super glad I'm in Ireland now though, as I hope to keep up with the no added sugar trend once I start cooking for myself more. It'll be really interesting to see how much more weight I can lose (down ~20lbs since summer started simply by IF, walking and cutting out sugar more rigorously)

I witnessed a lot of Japanese exchange students happily purchasing a bottle of "green tea" in the states only to see a look of pure shock on their face as they tried it.

It only takes a few weeks to get used to unsweetened tea but it's so much better for you, and honestly really refreshing. Oi Ocha and Ayataka green tea are my personal favorites. If the states had more of a vending machine culture (like Japan) with these healthier drinks in them, maybe it would catch on more. That's probably too optimistic of me though...

You can also add a little bit of honey to tea to taste. Lovely to sip on, especially if you get some quality honey.

When I first visited Japan, the wide variety of conveniently available unsweetened tea in vending machines was one of the things I really wished I could take back home with me.

I think Japanese generally don't put sugar in tea as a cultural thing. Same way most of the world wouldn't even think of putting milk in tea like Brits do.

I read some story about "customer is always right" in US vs. "customer must be saved from his ignorance" in Japan.

Author ordered green tea with sugar in Japan. She got no sugar when she requested it she was told that sugar ran out. But she could order black tea with sugar right after.

> I read some story about "customer is always right" in US vs. "customer must be saved from his ignorance" in Japan.

I think the typical phrasing is "The customer is god" in Japan, though thankfully this mindset is changing somewhat. It leads to great customer service, but also some super entitled customers who treat servers like crap.

I would guess the tea and sugar story is more about the rigidity of Japanese menus. If the green tea doesn't have a sugar option, it won't ever come with it even if the black tea version does. Though I'm fairly sure I could order a green tea with sugar if I really wanted it.

My favorite example is spaghetti sauce. I don't like sweet sauces, and looking through the ingredients of the major brands, I could only find one without added sugar.

> When I was a kid I remember drinking Snapple, now I can't understand how I ever downed that stuff

This is because as we grow older, our sweet taste receptors become more sensitive [0]. This is a finding from research last year by UIUC. This finding also makes evolutionary sense, as children have higher energy needs due to their growth.

A quote from the research post link: “Compared with adults, children and adolescents are less sensitive to the sweet taste and need 40% more sucrose in a solution for them to detect the taste of sugar, a new study found.”

[0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-sweet-taste-perceptio...

But is this confounded due to the phenomenon mentioned above? i.e. it's due to children consuming more daily sugar vs adults that's causing the difference.

Might an obese soda chugging adult have the same sensitivity as a child? Or would a child living in a remote village (i.e. no processed sugar in their diet ever) have the same sensitivity as the children mentioned in this study?

It does feel like a large part of the sensitivity is related to how much one normally consumes sugar. I know that since quitting processed sugar even some fruits taste too sweet to eat.

That is assuming that all children (in the study) consume higher amounts of sugar than the adults. This may not necessarily be the case, at least for more conscious parents of children today. There is also an example case of the US federal government having mandated that school lunches be of high nutritional quality [0].

On a side note: Even as I quit processed sugar, I noticed that fruits taste slightly sweeter than normal. However, the bigger personal observation I've had is that my cravings for sweets has reduced. IMO this likely has to do with less drastic blood sugar swings during the day.

[0] https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/obama-era-school...

As a person whose lived mostly in the UK and Australia, and now the US for six years, I still can’t eat many American versions of things I know. Ordinary things like Kit Kat’s or any chocolate, supermarket cakes and so on. They’re almost unpalatable to me. Cadbury’s chocolate, made under license here, is another example. In a shop the other day and the lady at the checkout was discussing with the lady she was serving how some salt she had in store had sugar in its ingredients list. We were all bemused.

>some salt she had in store had sugar in its ingredients list. We were all bemused.

That's common in iodized salt. It's not nearly enough to taste or make a difference in your diet.

Thanks I didn't know that. Potassium iodate mostly elsewhere and iodide in the US, stipulated by the FDA, which seems the right conservative decision. Now I’m amused by our bemusement.

As a Canadian, may I offer you a double double?

I love coffee. Not Timmie's -- good proper coffee. And I only ever add a dash of milk and about 1/4 tsp of sugar.

The rationale behind making a weak cup of coffee sweeter than the accompanying donut has never made sense to me. It's so hard to drink like that. I'm clearly outnumbered by people who are used to taking in that much sugar with every syrupy mouthful.

I think part of the issue with coffee, at least in the US, is that most mainstream coffee is ghastly over-roasted (hence the nickname Charbucks), so you need to add sugar to make it palatable.

I'm big into home espresso, and my morning breakfast drink is a 5-6 oz cappuccino. With a delicious, medium roast coffee and properly steamed milk the drink is more than sweet enough (heating milk to the right temp makes it taste sweeter) with no additional sugar. I contrast that when the rare occasions I get something from Starbucks and I always need to add sugar to mask the burnt taste of the coffee.

Starbucks did introduce one non-burnt base for drinks, the "blonde espresso"

But burnt Starbucks also sets the standard that a lot of people now expect, and then smaller places try to follow that so...

I only once got a good cup of coffee in Vancouver when I visited for two weeks about seven years ago.

I expected to get good coffee, it was insipid shit.

I drink it black unsweetened.... So my fault...?

People typically mask the sour/bitter taste of not well prepared coffee with milk and sugar to make it more palatable.

Good coffee you can drink black.

>As a Canadian, may I offer you a double double?

Ordering coffee black up there used to be hard, now it's not seen as too unusual.

Related, but I spent half my time in the Toronto area in the early 2010's and being from NYC-area I would get a craving for unsweetened iced tea. I remember I spent a week or so asking every restaurant I went to if I could order it unsweetened and this was not possible. I think Timmy's was finally able to do it in the last few years I was up there, but not without a lot of looks of confusion 'please, no base... just plain tea and ice'.

I once fasted for a week and when I started eating again I remember being amazed at how flavorful plain oatmeal was, without any additives. Never before had I been able to eat oatmeal without fruit or sweetener but after resetting my taste buds it was enough by itself.

Oh yeah. Try an elimination diet that zeroes out sugar and you’ll see how hard it is to find anything on grocery stores that doesn’t have an added sweetener.

Yogurt, bacon, sauces are all sweetened (outside of high end speciality brands). Eggs, raw meat, and raw vegetables are basically the only way to avoid sugar.

It is sometimes hard (or impossible) to completely remove sugar, as some items contain natural sugars e.g. even natural yogurt without added sugar contains sugar from sucrose. There was a diet that gained popularity in my country that was the "5% sugar" diet. Here on the labels of items there is always the per 100g reference, so if the sugar is <=5 on that column, you're good to go. So it's easy to stick to and it's interesting what gets filtered from eating in this way.

Same with salt [0].

After 6 weeks of abstinence, your salt sensation is recalibrated downwards.

[0]. https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129...

> The nice thing about reducing sugar is ...

... that your endless cycles of great hunger, binging, then hunger again an hour later end. Instead, when you eat fresh food, you have constant energy and a feeling of satiety that lasts. It frees your mind to concentrate on work or pleasure without distraction.

> The nice thing about reducing sugar is...

... that you soon start dropping lots of weight. If you keep off the sugar, the pounds stay off.

The sugar aisle smells like a gas station to me now.

Same applies to the most common drink out there, Coca-Cola. Used to be a heavy consumer, now it feels my jaw gets stuck from all that sugar stickiness.

Boy is this the truth. I grew up on a very sugar heavy diet. My whole family would sip on quart tumblers of soda more or less continuously throughout the day. I took that into adult hood with a habit to constantly drink cans of coke.

In my early 20s, my then boss one afternoon suggested I just try cutting nearly all sugary stuff out of my diet, as I was having issues with low energy during the day. It took a couple weeks for my metabolism to adjust, but holy cow what a difference. I've stuck with a diet low on simple sugars ever since.

While I'm sure what some posters are saying about age related sweetness sensitivity is true, what the above poster is talking about is very real, very acute, and very obvious. Likewise, the taste of less sweet things changes dramatically as well. I drank a lot of diet coke for a while during the transition. I remember what it tasted like back when I drank sugared stuff all the time, and I found it disgusting. Now it tastes very sweet. It's also a texture thing: sugared soda feels like syrup in my mouth now.

Overall this is probably the most positive health related decision I've made in life. I still have the occasional bowl of ice cream or such as a treat, but it's like a once a month thing now, if that. Beer is really the last sugar laden thing I have with some regularity. I'd never go back to where I was.

My colleagues (UK) when I worked in a small grocery shop thought I was crazy for drinking water instead of coke or something. And for lunch breaks everyone would buy at least one chocolate bar. And then of course everyone would complain about energy and feeling lousy and everything. I do wonder what the health outcomes would be to drastic sugar regulation.

American here. I generally stick to a vegan/vegetarian diet to try and work on my "numbers" from our company healthcare bio-screening. My woke moment was when I was told exactly how much sugar is in a teaspoon. 4 grams.

After that day I started seeing just how criminally insane some food products were and just how far most companies go to make sure you dont accidentally find out how much refined sugar you eat. tricks like changing portion sizes displayed to per-serving instead of per-package, or hiding behind vegetables and smoothie jargon for drinks to pass off a third cup of sugar as somehow healthy.

4 grams is a teaspoon. 3 teaspoons is a tablespoon. 4 tablespoons is a quarter cup.

EDIT: 3 teaspoons, is a tablespoon apparently.

3 teaspoons is a tablespoon.

It would be interesting to plot the amount of sugar added to various food staples over the years.

At my dentist growing up, they used to have little plastic bags stapled to the wall labelled with the product that that amount of sugar came from. A can of Coke has a pretty big bag of sugar in it, as does a glass of orange juice. It's amazing seeing it visualised like that.

these are US measures. Metric 5ml is a teaspoon, 20ml a tablespoon. In case anyone else was confused like me.

I'm assuming you're Australian. In the rest of the world, a tablespoon is 15ml.

Really? Well TIL, wonder why australia is different, always assumed that was a metric standard.

Edit: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/15002/why-is-a-t... for more than you ever wanted to know about tablespoons.

a standard 12 oz can of soda is literally a shot glass of sugar.

Looking at the sugar content of things and then measuring it out that mass of sugar is shocking.

So many thing are like that. Normal hard cider like angry orchard is like syrup. How do people drink it?

This is why the EU mandates all products to have their nutrients listed the same way, it's always amount/100g of product.

They can add the per-portion or per-whatever, but the per/100g MUST be there.

Airheads are vegan, in fact I would say you're likely to eat more sugar on a vegan diet.

Michael Moss conducted a remarkable research effort into the food industry during which he gained access to food scientists and executives from the largest food corporations.

He presents what he learned in his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat.

Sugar is not just in candy, cake, and soda. It's in virtually all processed food. Anything sold in a supermarket in a box, bottle, can, jar, or packet, is likely to have sugar added up the the "bliss point". That's an empirically derived level at which the cravability and addictability of the product is maximised.

SuperSummary

https://www.supersummary.com/salt-sugar-fat/summary/

Navigating the Supermarket Aisles With Michael Pollan and Michael Moss | The New York Times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATAZrRfebiw

I usually keep to a low carb diet. Recently I had a burger from a local burger joint bun included. The entire time I’m eating this burger I keep thinking this is the best damn burger I’ve had in forever. I chalk it up to being hungry. At the end of the burger I had bite of bun left that was bare of toppings. I ate it and realized this white bread bun is so sweet it tastes more like cake than bread… no wonder I thought the burger tasted so good.

There was a story here about the Irish tax authority classifying Subway bread as a sweet, not as bread, due to the high sugar content. I think that's an accurate description of a lot of american breads.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919189045/for-subway-a-ruling...

Usually when I buy bread in the bread isle i discard all that have added sugars. But it's been getting hard recently.

"Irish tax authority"..."bread isle".

> Usually when I buy bread in the bread isle i discard all that have added sugars. But it's been getting hard recently.

Even companies that try to market their bread as healthy still add sugar but then try to imply that it is a "healthier" kind of sugar. I wrote to one about it and got this reply:

Thank you for checking in with Dave's Killer Bread about the sweetness of our bread. We use sweeteners because we find that our DKB consumers prefer a bread that is sweetened. All of our varieties are sweetened with organic dried cane syrup

So now I mostly make my own.

That’s at least a pretty honest response.

See about Nature's Own 100% Whole Wheat. I get it from Kroger. Total sugars are <1g, all of which seems to be added. The only sweetener I see on the ingredients list is brown sugar, but the FDA defines that as an added sugar so it's taken into account.

interesting. I have a massive sweet tooth but I absolutely hate sweet tastes in my savory food/dinner

I'd add salt to that. Americans consume way too much of these two ingredients. I cook some good stuff but I take it easy on the salt, it tastes better that way, and almost everyone that tries it says it needs more.

I like sugar, I use a little bit in my coffee, tea, I like fruits and stuff. But I don't drink soda or eat pastries or candy (except in November). Knowing how much sugar I used to consume really baffles me, and when I see how much other people eat I am dumbfounded that I ever considered such a thing normal. It's like watching little kids smoke cigarettes for breakfast.

Hold on a second, the linked research is about sugar. I've seen a lot of similar studies suggesting sugar consumption is a problem. Is salt consumption also unhealthy? I was under the impression that it's not.

From what I understand excess consumption causes increase in blood pressure and subsequent cardiovascular problems. Definitely nowhere near as dangerous as sugar, and you die without salt, not so with sugar, but Americans do consume too much of it.

Very much so. I just saw this article the other day:

Super Simple: Drinking Enough Water Could Prevent Heart Failure

https://scitechdaily.com/super-simple-drinking-enough-water-...

It has this effect only on roughly a quarter of the population though.

i used to use this as en excuse to not worry about it. turns out I'm in that 1/4th haha

Salt leads to high blood pressure:

https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

When there’s extra sodium in your bloodstream, it pulls water into your blood vessels, increasing the total amount (volume) of blood inside them. With more blood flowing through your blood vessels, blood pressure increases. It’s like turning up the water supply to a garden hose — the pressure in the hose increases as more water is blasted through it.

Over time, high blood pressure may overstretch or injure the blood vessel walls and speed the build-up of gunky plaque that can block blood flow. The added pressure tires out the heart by forcing it to work harder to pump blood through the body. And the extra water in your body can lead to bloating and weight gain.

High blood pressure is known as the “silent killer” because its symptoms are not always obvious. It’s one of the major risk factors for heart disease, the No. 1 killer worldwide. Almost no one gets a free pass. Ninety percent of American adults are expected to develop high blood pressure over their lifetimes.

Did you know that sodium can affect your blood pressure even more dramatically if you’re sensitive to salt? Recent science explains that certain factors may influence how your blood pressure changes when you eat salt, such as:

Age Weight Race/ethnicity Gender Some medical conditions (like diabetes or chronic kidney disease) Even if you don’t already have high blood pressure, eating less sodium can help blunt the rise in blood pressure that occurs with age. It can also reduce your risk of heart attack, heart failure, stroke, kidney disease, osteoporosis, stomach cancer and even headaches.

https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

For most healthy people, salt is not problematic, your kidneys do a great job of maintaining your blood salinity.

However, if you have kidney disease, or if you have genetic mutations that cause you to retain salt (as is, apparently, common in certain subpopulations), then too much salt really messes you up.

In population studies, this averages out to "excess salt is moderately bad for you", but the distribution of "how bad" is really shockingly bimodal.

Unlike sugar¹, salt is also necessary in small quantities. It is also quite useful/needed even in moderate quantities (say 1/10 - 1/2 teaspoon) in cases where it got flushed out.

For example, you eat too much sugar/saccharides/food for body to process, blood sugar rises and salt is flushed to keep osmotic pressure. After a couple of hours, sugar is spent, you get cravings from falling (normalizing) blood sugar, but you're also hypotonic so you get headaches as your brain is swelling against your skull.

Eating/drinking some salt (say 1g), some time after eating, when sugar levels fall (~1-3h) can do wonders. Eating more sugar also relieves the pain, but only by delaying the issue. Of course, not overeating sugar in the first place is even better.

¹ sugar in the sense of mono and disaccharides. Not sure if any saccharides are required in diet.

I want to start a Truth in Packaging campaign.

Mint Sauce? Nah. That mint flavoured sugar water.

Cheese is a Good Source of Protein? Nah. Bollocks, it's clearly a better source of fat.

I could go on for ages.

I'm truly glad I don't live in America... The amount of sugar in NZ food is frightening and I have to spend ages label reading to avoid the worst of it....

....but the amount of HFCS in American food is just plain stark crazy.

Nothing annoys me more than ‘protein balls’ that have more fat and carbs than protein.

>Cheese is a Good Source of Protein? Nah. Bollocks, it's clearly a better source of fat.

The former can be true despite the latter.

"Carrots a good source of vitamin A? Nah, clearly a better source of sugar."

If you have as a Biggest Label about the nutrition on Carrots is "Carrots a good source of vitamin A" then it's misleading. It's "spin".

(Speculation ahead!)

Interesting point in video posted recently by Veritasium: Basically, they are doing experiments to track evolution in "realtime" of some organisms. During the conversation the guy mentions that the population growth of their organisms are controlled by adding or removing glucose for them to consume - basically as long as glucose is available, there will be growth. (First 5 minutes of video)

This is really not my field at all, but I found it interesting that sugar has that great an effect on growth. Considering how much sugar most humans eat, considering the gross amount of other organisms in our bodies.. there must be some kind of measurable effect on our microbiome by eating more sugars (or things that use glucose). What if sugar is ~the~ culprit for many diseases (cancer anyone?)?

I'm not anti-sugar, just speculating. Criticism welcome, am I on the right path to think this way?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M

And then also, when people fast for whatever reason, how much does it disturb the microbiome and is primarily disturbed by the lack of glucose (causing tons of trimming/organisms dying and/or fighting for food)?

Maybe there is a synergy with meat that is pumped with anti biotics.

You eat sugar which feeds microbes so its not perfectly absorbed into your body. Then you eat meat with anti-biotics which kills the microbes and lets your body absorb the sugar directly.

Random HN comment alert by the way.

Are claims that sugar consumption has been declining in the US for decades true? https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/heatlhyfoodamerica/pag...

In theory.

But sugar is a pain killer. Makes me wonder why it's so popular and what would really need to happen to effectively make such changes.

Are you implying the food industry is abusing depression to sell its products?

Nope.

> Product reformulation efforts have been shown to be successful in reducing other harmful nutrients, such as trans fats and sodium.

Trans fats are harmful (well except some natural ones), but how can sodium be a harmful nutrient unless you have existing cardiovascular or renal issues? Seems like a strange statement.

When I read things like this, I feel that a nutrition class should be required in US high school. Not a unit about nutrition during health class, but a full semester on nutrition.

Salt (sodium) is terrible for blood pressure. Just search keywords “salt blood pressure”. And if you don’t know why high blood pressure is bad for you, that’s ok. Spend 2 minutes reading about it, that’s all you need.

Sure but you have to already have high blood pressure for that to be an issue. It would take time and a diet very high in salt to cause high blood pressure alone.

Given the qualifier "unless you have existing cardiovascular or renal issues" they probably understand the relation between sodium and blood pressure. (Dare I say understand it better than you?)

Trans fats (more specifically partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) are understood to be harmful in any amount. Sodium is essential in some quantity and only harmful in excess. It really doesn't make sense to group them together as "harmful nutrients."

> only harmful in excess.

Tell that to the American Heart Association:

https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

That's not about sodium - its about high blood pressure, which is not in dispute.

Your body is exquisitely designed to balance sodium. Sweat, tears, urine remove excess very quickly. Blood pressure is affected by sodium, sure. A point or two for an hour or two.

Unless you have a health issue related to sodium, lets quit demonizing it. The worst thing about salt is, folks use it to distract from real improvements they could make in their health.

Literally the third word in your excerpt is "extra".

That’s right. I never said sodium is bad for you. Excess sodium is.

Sodium is considered to more problem than trans fats for Japanese people because average Japanese takes more sodium than recommended and takes less trans fats than it meaningfully harm.

I’ve been LCHF-ing for last two months. My weight steadily goes down half a kilo a week. Except for that one week during which i consumed half a kilo of Philadelphia cheese

Fat and sugar are different, does cheese are always with added sugar ?

There’s no sugar in that cheese, at least in Australia. Fat maintains weight on that diet as it replaces carbs as the source of energy (simplified statement, there’s a bit more to it but the end result is fat == maintain weight)

Except in the United States that will never be done voluntarily by the manufacturers or most consumers, we just had two years now proving "freedumbs".

The only "solution" is the cigarette model, all food now has an "added sugar" nutrition label, add a dollar to price for every added gram.

Those dollars go towards health care fund for sugar based diseases.

If you don't eat sugar-added foods, great for you and you don't pay for it. Just like the cigarette model (except goverments siphon cigarette taxes for everything except cancer/copd treatments).

Manufacturers will then also make low or no sugar foods that cost way less because they don't have any taxes.

IMO this is attacking it from the wrong angle.

What I want is a change to insurance industry regulations to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way and not be subsidized by those of us who maintain their health.

Could be done a number of ways. Life insurance already sometimes requires a physical at signup. Why not for health insurance too? Could also just be a discount. Could even, e.g., partner with Peloton--you work out 5 days a week? Actuarial table shows you're XX% cheaper to insure.

If it's opt-in like that, all the healthy people will opt-in, and all the unhealthy people (NOT pre-existing conditions, just things within people's own power to control that some do well and others ignore--exercise and diet, primarily) will pay more.

No need to tax the sugar, tax the actual impact, healthcare.

"to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way" You can make people pay for added sugar in the food but not for them being fat. That is discriminating. BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape.

> BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape

If you are obese or overweight you are, by definition, not healthy.

No, only "morbid obesity" includes a morbidity in the definition.

Other than that, body fat is an indicator not of personal health, but of personal risk.

You're pulling a sleight of hand here with your definitions.

To rephrase the sibling: if you are obese or overweight, you have, by definition, a certain BMI. (According to the WHO and many national entities, anyway.) The intended common-sense definition of obesity is "accumulation of fat to an unhealthy level", but the diagnosis of obesity is usually based on a statistic which merely correlates with that.

Similarly, to declare that someone is in bad or good health based on their overall shape is to do the same thing: to diagnose someone as having medical problems by observing that they demonstrate a property which often correlates with medical problems.

The sleight of hand is that you're defending a position based on a "diagnosis by correlating statistic" definition of obesity, but you're using the intended definition of obesity ("enough fat that you're unhealthy") to do the actual argument, and relying on the fact that both are referred to by the same name ("obesity") to hide the gap.

Harvard Medical School:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-you-be-ov...

UCSF:

https://generalsurgery.ucsf.edu/conditions--procedures/healt...

Naturally, this is all phrased in general terms, and all hedged with e.g. the direct quote "While there is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to a person's ideal weight, men should not ignore significant weight gain and the implications it has for their future health." Again, of course, you're pulling exactly the same sleight of hand: confusing a risk factor with an actual health problem. It's certainly not "true by definition" that being overweight means you are unhealthy, as you claimed.

Why would you tax the symptoms? It's like taxing oil companies for melting glaciers.

I like the corporate responsibility aspect here. However, this always gets labeled as a sugar tax and the food industry lobbies to stop any bill like this from passing.

I would offer a cap n trade alternative. Each business gets a fixed amount of sugar they can put in their food based products. They can buy credits from businesses who are sugar free. This shifts the messaging that this isn’t a sugar tax. Businesses can sell sugar. Just dial it down, buy credits, or find a way to spread the sugar across all your products.

Would it work? I honestly have no clue since I don’t know if that incentivizes the right behavior.

Should reduce sugars and oils. It seems that refined oils are just as damaging if not more than refined sugars.

Any alternatives? I’m guessing olive oil is a good substitute?

Beef fat. Truly delicious and very cheap.

Ahhh... But not in USA. It will be full of "get fatter" hormones(?)

I am not sure organically grown beef fat is available, or as cheep.

Where I live, where it is illegal to feed grow drugs to cattle, I do a lot of cooking with beef fat.

You could try bison fat, although I believe bison are, on average, less fatty than other cattle. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) forbids the use of hormones and antibiotics in farm-raised bison:

Q: Can hormones and antibiotics be used in bison raising?

A: Antibiotics and growth hormones are not given to bison.

Source: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

Olive oil is considered a better oil, but it doesn't mean you can have as much as you want.

It's surprising what you can cook and still get good results without oil. Not that I don't ever use oil, but a lot of times it doesn't actually add much to the dish.

Edit: You can for example saute veggies in water, maybe relying more on spices for flavor. And if you're really looking for some browning/charring, use dry heat from an oven or air fryer.

For cooking, try avocado oil (available in any grocery market these days), not olive oil.

The parent comment "should reduce oils" is silly. Oils as a category are hugely important to good health. Presumably, eliminating the bad oils is the way to go.

The way I do it is to have a palette of base ingredients for each of fat, acid, and heat. You can create a lot of beautiful, artful meals with a very limited palette. My fat palette, for instance, is primarily rendered animal fats (pork lard, then beef tallow, then chicken fat, in order of frequency of use--we sautee and sear in, and even eat on toast, almost exclusively rendered animal fat). Then olive oil for finishing and occasionally cooking (e.g. some kinds of fish poached in olive oil is heavenly).

Acid palette is limes/citrus and rice vinegar.

Heat palette is certain peppers and some hot sauces.

All healthful ingredients that can be applied to endless proteins and veggie combos.

The standard American pantry of like a billion different spices and sauces and the United Nations of possible ethnic food types means invariably lots of preservatives and in general mediocre (at best) meals. No non-pro cook can crank out high-quality carne asada one day, then a penne vodka, then an injera platter.

But the answer is: Rendered animal fats are the best substitute, and the real answer is, don't eat processed bullshit food. (Aside: "Lab grown" branding is doing a great job tricking smart people into believing "highly-processed factory-made" is somehow healthy).

What do you think oil is? It's processed food. And I never said you have to get rid of it entirely. But there's no doubt we use too much of it. Why is that controversial?

And there is too much consensus around saturated fat being involved in both cardiovascular disease and diabetes for me to say animal fats are a good substitute. It's a step in the wrong direction, even. The only thing worse might be palm oil.

I found both your and GP's comment very interesting. The one thing that drives me crazy about nutrition is that everyone is literally saying exact opposite things. It makes it impossible to know what is actually right. It's crazy to me how little we actually seem to know about nutrition.

I don't get the same feeling from other areas of study. Most physicists seem to agree on pretty much everything besides the super new, cutting edge discoveries. Same with engineers, chemists, etc.. But in nutrition it's the exact opposite. Google "is milk good for you" and you'll get equally convincing arguments for "yes" and "no". And that's the story for almost any nutrition based question.

It seems like the only option for a non-expert like myself is to just kind of wing it and try to eat vegetables and whole grain, and avoid things like sugar. But if there is one area in life that would be worth hyper-optimizing, I'd have to think it would be eating insanely healthy. It just doesn't seem feasible because I'll spend 10 years eating "healthy" only to discover that what I was eating is insanely bad for you.

Why is it so hard to figure out exactly what I should be eating? Especially since billions of us are doing it, and have been doing it for thousands of years.

Yeah, it is frustrating. I'm no expert, either.

Part of the problem with nutrition is it's hard to get quality data, like how do you get long-term studies where you can control every aspect of each participant's diet and lifestyle? The best data we have is all over relatively short periods.

Saturated fat is one thing there is strong consensus on.

https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/41/8/1732

I'll point out that regarding "healthy" fats, what you see in most recommendations is that replacing unhealthy fats with healthy fats improves heart health, not that adding healthy fats improves heart health.

Eating less meat helps, too.

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/110/1/24/5494812

(surprisingly, in this particular study, white meat was about as bad as red meat)

I've made similar comments before, but this is a neutered attitude. Needing some studies before you agree or disagree with something as fundamental as healthful eating. You can do your own scientific studies by changing your diet and feeling the results.

Nutrition "science" is, like all science these days, inherently untrustworthy.

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

Richard Horton, current editor of The Lancet.

When it comes to nutritional studies, which are basically impossibly to ethically control, and are most often funded by large agribusiness concerns, and with a huge problem of only publishing studies that agree with a certain incentive set, you not only CAN but SHOULD ignore it all.

And finally, anything that winds up saying meat is bad for you should raise huge amounts of skepticism. Our entire history as a species indicates that we were built for healthy meat. (Obviously notwithstanding garbage, factory-farmed tortured flesh.)

If you're of the mind that you can't make decisions about your health without a bunch of highly-motivated sophists telling you what's right, you should probably take a step back and rethink.

I'm not being absolutist. Eat your meat now and then. But if you're interested in longevity, cardiovascular disease is the #1 cause of death. So, I personally make diet decisions with that in mind.

There are a lot of bunk studies, but that doesn't mean you should ignore all scientific studies altogether. If you have multiple randomized controlled trials with good sample sizes saying certain things, and funded by public health institutions, I want to pay attention to those.

You're right about the agricultural industry and its influence. The beef, chicken, and dairy industries are chief among them.

True, oil is processed food. By that same argument, all cooked food is processed.

The animal fats I eat are from my own farm, processed by me, lard rendered by me. I realize not everyone can do this, but quality control (and lack of preservatives and other bullshit) is much easier to do when you're the one doing the cooking.

Just like roasting a chicken yourself is making "processed food", there's a big difference between that and, say, getting some chicken from Chili's, or some canned whole chicken.

When I speak of "processed foods" I guess what I mean is highly processed foods, usually processed in factories, surrounded by incentive structures directly opposed to healthful food production (because it's invariably more expensive).

I guess I'm specifically referring more to refined foods, where you often strip away other healthy components of the food. Oil falls under that category, and is always an important component to the highly processed foods you're talking about.

But if sugar is addictive, as it seems it is, this would cost a significant fraction of annual revenue to food producers, so there's no way they'd do it. Even if it's not literally addictive, it's clearly attractive and they'd take a big hit.

What baffles me is that artificial sweeteners exist and yet there is enough (imo) unfounded FUD about them that leads people to instead choose Sugar or Nothing (which inevitably translates to Sugar because of the pseudo-addictiveness you mention.)

Is wireheading bad? Maybe, but if I'm going to be doing it either way I'd rather reduce the harm.

Well, they also taste pretty bad to some people.

I am one of those people. If even sip something with stevia in it I am going to be trying to get the taste out of mouth for hours. It makes me want to scrap my tongue off. It was truly the worst thing I have ever consumed. It has only happened a couple of times, now I am literally traumatized and check the ingredients on anything that is likely to have it. For context, I am not a picky eater, there are things I don't like, but this is on a whole other level.

There are many others on the market now besides stevia. If added sugar is important to you, try the others because they all taste a little different. There’s also just plain maple syrup which is better than using pure sugar.

>There’s also just plain maple syrup which is better than using pure sugar.

How do you figure? It's practically pure sucrose, just like table sugar.

Table sugar has a glycemic index of 65. Maple sugar's is 54. Not a huge difference but if sweeteners are important to you, maybe every bit counts.

The same reasoning would imply pure fructose is a better option. Or that eating a potato is worse.

Depending on quantities, you are correct. Glycemic index and quantity tell you how the food affects your blood sugar levels. Whether or not you’re diabetic, keeping blood sugar levels low is important to health.

It's pretty gross IMO too. Especially in carbonated waters or seltzers.

Do you avoid eating any sugar?

I'm not super strict about it but when given the choice yeah I go for the substitutes.

The switch to sugar alternatives is already happening.

https://www.marketingweek.com/diet-coke-sales-overtake- classic-coca-cola/

"Compare this to the week before, when Diet Coke sales were at £10.4m and classic Coca-Cola £10.65m. The data shows Coca-Cola value sales were higher than Diet Coke every week for the past year until the brand overhaul and subsequent introduction of the sugar tax. Since then they have diverged with Diet Coke sales increasing at a faster rate than classic Coke." [2018]

Beverages are interesting because there are now financial incentives to switch off of sweetened beverages: sweetened beverages are taxed higher in some municipalities (e.g. SF) and even banned in some school districts (e.g. PepsiCo has been selling Dasani and Bubly in some in-school vending machines instead).

Those penalties must be really harsh if Pepsi is electing to sell Dasani, a Coca-Cola product.

I don't know how true it is, but one thing I've heard about artificial sweeteners is that your body thinks it's sugar, and will make your body feel hungrier because it expects it to have the same calories as regular sugar. I still prefer them because I hate the sticky feeling sugary products leave on my teeth, but I've talked to people who think artificial sweeteners are pointless from a calories-in/calories-out POV due to how your body reacts to them. For all I know that's completely made up though, they might have learned that from Dr. Oz or other daytime TV shows.

I'm pretty sure most of the "artificial sweeteners are evil" stuff is just moral panic to how they seem like cheating. It seems so unbelievable that any of them are especially bad for you or your habits, especially when compared to sugar.

So you're saying that all the papers on this made up their data?

No, if there was a preponderance of scientific evidence, I'd accept it of course, but the alternative sweetener story isn't like that. There are papers out there on almost any topic with all sorts of results, many of which don't generalize, don't transfer, don't reproduce, or otherwise don't have the meaning they might point to if you guessed the implications.

It's bigger than that.

So first off, just about all of these artificial sweeteners are like 200x sweeter than sugar or higher. This kind of means that you have high amplification which comes with distortion—artificial sweeteners do not taste like the real thing. So those chemical aftertastes are probably the biggest contributors to skepticism.

Second, the most common artificial sweetener right now is aspartame, and it is kinda nasty stuff. Don't take my word for it, drink a Diet Coke that's about 1 week before expiration and see if you can stomach it—it's foul. That foulness is the metabolites of aspartame, I want to say one of them is formaldehyde? They are pretty nasty and you do produce them after drinking a Diet Coke, they appear in urine afterwards. The aspartame also bears a cryptic warning for people with phenylketonuria, and it might legit make consumers feel worse, as in reduce their serotonin and dopamine and make them more irritable.

The only silver lining on this cloud is that because this stuff is 200 times sweeter than sugar, you actually only get a very low dosage per each individual beverage. Because of that very low dosage, we are thankfully not seeing huge epidemiological problems from it yet. But yeah, a combination of nothing tasting right and the poster-child being awful is a decent recipe for conspiracy theories.

'Formaldehyde' fearmongering addressed at (sorry) https://youtu.be/92r1oOul0kM?t=69

No that's fine, unlike one commenter replied, I am really not fear mongering here but just trying to answer the question—are people just upset that they're getting something for free? It's just that the most common sweetener legit starts to taste awful after just a little while in the can.

This is the exact kind of FuD that I'm talking about. There is a whole world of low-calorie sweeteners, Aspartame isn't the only one by a long shot. As you pointed out It's uncanny potency means that the amount of metabolites you end up with is vanishingly small. For most people it does not cause any problems. Certainly fewer than the 100% of people who art consuming calories when they consume sugar.

My suggestion is that for any food, read the ingredients! If you don't like Aspartame and won't trust anything made in a lab go with Stevia.

Both aspartame and stevia have definite tastes. I don't mind either and I actually like aspartame in a lot of places.

Sucralose and allulose have virtually no taste other than sweet.

If you see me as FuD you might consider re-examining yourself?

Aspartame may not be the only one but it's absolutely the most common. And it really isn't very shelf stable and it really does taste nasty when it decays. If that's “FuD” then you're at war with taste buds?

Diet Pepsi switched to sucralose and had to switch back. Diet Coke sells a sucralose version but it's not at all popular. There are a couple smaller markets for offbeat sodas sweetened with stevia, but like someone else mentioned, stevia is a hella acquired taste, very soapy.

What about xylitol? I use it all the time putting it into morning coffee. I'm avoiding table sugar as much as i can, and generally prefer stuff that is not sweet, but coffee is the only thing that needs to be sweetened a bit to kill bitterness.

There tends to be more fearmongering about non-nutritive sweeteners (like sucralose and aspartame) than sugar alcohols, for whatever reason.

FWIW, in the last few years two new low-concentration sweeteners have grown a lot: erythritol and allulose. These tend to be tolerated gastrointestinally by more folks than traditional sugar alcohols. Erythritol is in some popular mass-produced food products like Vitamin Water Zero and Halo Top--it has a bit of a cooling sensation. Allulose tends to really just read 'sweet'. It's a little behind erythritol adoption, but I've started to see it in stores (Trader Joe's now carries it) and in random drinks (I've seen a couple smaller canned coldbrew coffees with it).

> your body thinks it's sugar

Look for an artificial sweetener with a glycemic index of 0. For example, stevia (made from plants), erythritol, or mannitol. Xylitol has an index of 7, others even higher.

> glycemic index of 0

That doesn't necessarily help. Saccharin, aspartame and acesulfame-K have all glycemic index of 0, but have been found to alter food preferences in humans.

cf. Roberts et al., Uncoupling sweet taste and calories: Comparison of the effects of glucose and three intense sweeteners on hunger and food intake, Physiology & Behavior 1988 https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9384(88)90207-7

I used to be a regular Diet Coke consumer. I used to get frequent migraines. A doctor suggested that might be related. I quit drinking them and sure enough, the migraines became way less frequent. Seems like only 2% of people have this problem with aspartame [1], but some of the fear is definitely justified. Maybe that's the only neurological effect it has, but I can see why some people pick sugar or nothing.

[1] https://www.uchealth.com/articles/sweeteners-headaches-and-t...

There are many alternative sweeteners to aspartame fortunately. Sucralose is my go-to personally.

Artificial sweeteners are not getting to the root of the problem. What people expect their food to taste like.

Why not dial back on the sweetness? Is it really that addictive? Why not drink water rather than cans of genuine or artificial sugar water.

FUD, sure. Personally I am uneasy about tricking my body that it is getting sugar when it is not. I am not waiting for scientific evidence.

The hippies were right. Eat food. Mostly plants. As close to raw as practical and tasty. If your great grand mother would not recognise it, it is not food.

I personally do drink water instead of soda usually and definitely endorse that idea.

After college, I started gaining weight (like many Americans), so I switched to using Splenda (sucralose/E955) in my coffee. Taste was fine, “after effects” were not. Pity, because I liked the taste a lot better than other artificial sweeteners.

Artificial sweeteners in soda (Aspartame and Asesulfame K) make me fart out stuff that smells so bad that it should be banned by the Geneva convention.

But weirdly it somehow depends on the ratio of the ingredients. Some brands I can handle, others I can never partake in (Pepsi MAX being the worst offender).

> I'd rather reduce the harm

The fact that artificial sweeteners are used as animal feed additive in order to increase body mass should give you enough to think what happens if we add it randomly to human food.

Yes, artifical sweeteners can be a good replacement for sugar, but things that shouldn't contain sugar in the first place should probably not contain artificial sweeteners either.

I had many unpleasant experiences with zero calorie sodas, especially if I started to consume them regularly. Belching, farting, reflux etc. Those always went away when I stopped. (I do not drink sugary sodas at all.)

So it wasn't as surprising for me to learn that there are suspicions that artificial sweeteners may alter gut biome.

There isn't any consensus yet, but my N==1 seems to agree with the suspicion. I am generally fairly sensitive to gut biome changes, even a few weeks on a different probiotics might change e.g. my sensitivity to milk.

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/10/5228

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8156656/

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13793

Government can pass laws

Probably not so easily against a set of lobbies that includes some of the most powerful there are: agriculture, food and health insurance.

You don't need lobbyists to explain this. Even in super-progressive SF and Seattle, there's immense popular resistance to a sugar tax on bottled drinks. The people like sugar, and the people are democracy.

> Even if it's not literally addictive

Except that some research suggests that it is:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

Yes, but we are effectively subsidizing them with increased health care costs due to type 2 diabetes and other illnesses.

That's absolutely the problem. The current equilibrium is the results of an arms race. If any one manufacturer just cut sweetening by 50%, they'd be be screwed. We'd have to do it all together to reset everybody's tastes, and that's unlikely to happen.

It's a similar dynamic to advertising. In theory, advertisements give us new information about products. In practice, the biggest spenders are companies you've heard of pushing products you're familiar with. Approximately everybody on the planet knows what a Coke takes like but they spend $4 billion per year, or about 10% of annual revenue. Would consumers like it to be 10% cheaper? sure. Would Coca Cola Inc like $4 billion extra in profits? Most definitely. But they have to advertise because their competitors advertise, so we're all stuck in a wasteful equilibrium.

It's like the loudness wars[0] for your tastebuds!

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Ooh, great example!

Sounds like a sugar epidemic. Why are these ingredients not banned?

These suggestions are very extreme: ban ingredients, use artificial sweeteners.

What about America means that you can’t just use less sugar and eat less sugar? Plenty of other countries don’t have this problem.

Sugar companies paying for studies on the dangers of fat were a great distraction. Nowadays high sugar content is ingrained in the culture. Some other countries are also increasing their sugar intake. Soda companies in particular drive this phenomenon.

If you're willing and able to make everything from scratch, nothing.

But if you're not, or can't... well. Simple lack of availability will be a major hurdle.

Plenty of countries have this problem. WHO recommends a "sugar tax", to decrease market viability of products that are high in added sugar.

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/260253

Whether artificial sweeteners are the answer is less clear, given lack of evidence that increased use of artificial sweeteners leads to reduced sugar consumption.

If refined sugar were invented recently, it would be another illegal white powder.

Because the US produces WAY too much corn. Like insane amounts of corn.

And to make use of all that production, they make sugar out of it. High-fructose corn syrup to be exact. And then they put it EVERYWHERE because it's so cheap - because of the overproduction.

We should all be reducing our sugar intake and the intake of any food that is quickly/easily metabolised into glucose. It’s one of if not the main fuel source of cancer cells.

Sugar Mandate next?

Eh. Sure, maybe you'd see these results if people actually reduced their total consumption. Would just cutting it in packaged foods and beverages actually accomplish that though?

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