Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and executive function in children
mdpi.com
mdpi.com
Furthermore, while they account for diet in their covariate analysis, it's not very detailed or granuar so it doesn't account for other sources of sugar that these kids might be having (the authors acknowledge this). Based on this study it's hard to conclusively say whether it's the sugar that negatively impacts cognition or other ingredients, or vice versa whether kids with poor executive function prefer sweet drinks. Probably still a good idea to limit refined sugar intake for your own kids though.
The counterargument was that sugar intake often accompanies life events that are themselves overstimulating to kids, so it's more of a correlation than causal link. I was expecting this study proved the original assumption but your read suggests that it's more of the same.
That said, I have discovered that there's a particular food coloring that does tend to make me irritable, and children's candy is usually loaded with it. Whenever I can find the 'naturally colored M&Ms' in the bulk foods aisle I usually grab a little of it.
Yep. I stopped reading as soon as it was clear the data would be biased.
Teasing out all the causal chains will be hard work, though. Metabolism is really complicated. Sugar increases levels of insulin; fructose kicks liver into overdrive; how does that excessive metabolic activity work out in remote parts of the body such as the brain?
More important than what we eat, we didn’t evolve in an environment where we had infinite easily available calories.
That boiling process and amount of sap required is partly why it's so expensive. It's like aged whisky: you lose so much of what you started with.
CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID PRESERVATIVES , SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE
Some of our primate relatives live off fruit, but a) wild fruit is generally way less sugary than whatever we produce now, b) they are fairly far from us in many other regards (lifespan, anatomy, the ability to swing in the trees), so we cannot really derive relevant lessons on human metabolism from them.
Our closest living relatives are chimps, who can eat tree bark and some leaves that we are unable to digest (they do not prefer them, but can eat them without ill consequences). Even at this relatively short evolutionary distance, our food requirements diverged.
At least, that’s currently the prevailing theory among scientists.
That's a poor argument. We're also not "designed" to consume cooked foods, drink filtered tap water, and have access to modern medicine (eg. prescription/OTC drugs).
Filtered tap water isn't that different from natural water in streams, but I do not know nearly enough about water to dispute this.
Prescription / OTC drugs can mess with us fairly seriously if not used carefully and in recommended quantities, so this is actually a good analogy.
It is the dose that makes the poison. One Tylenol and/or 10 g of sugar per day won't probably harm you, but 20 Tylenols and half a pound of sugar per day, consumed every day for years and years, is another story.
complete with chlorine and flouride added? also, from a microbial activity and/or organic contaminants point of view, tap water probably has orders of magnitude less than most streams.
>Prescription / OTC drugs can mess with us fairly seriously if not used carefully and in recommended quantities, so this is actually a good analogy.
What's the equivalent statement for "the quantities of sugar that we on average do consume", but for drugs? I'd say that a big chunk of the population consumes infinitely more antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering drugs than we were "designed to consume".
> I'd say that a big chunk of the population consumes infinitely more antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering drugs than we were "designed to consume".
Connecting these two topics together, there are localities that have naturally occurring lithium in their water supply. Depression and suicide rates in these areas are lower than average.
See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
Fluoride could be pretty high naturally: https://nccd.cdc.gov/DOH_MWF/Reports/Default.aspx
> also, from a microbial activity and/or organic contaminants point of view, tap water probably has orders of magnitude less than most streams.
So a whole less cases of diarrhea with a chance of lead poisoning (Flint, MI)
> Human beings evolved to eat cooked food. It is literally possible to starve to death even while filling one’s stomach with raw food. In the wild, people typically survive only a few months without cooking, even if they can obtain meat. Wrangham cites evidence that urban raw-foodists, despite year-round access to bananas, nuts and other high-quality agricultural products, as well as juicers, blenders and dehydrators, are often underweight.
> Cooked food, by contrast, is mostly digested by the time it enters the colon; for the same amount of calories ingested, the body gets roughly 30 percent more energy from cooked oat, wheat or potato starch as compared to raw, and as much as 78 percent from the protein in an egg.
> In essence, cooking—including not only heat but also mechanical processes such as chopping and grinding—outsources some of the body’s work of digestion so that more energy is extracted from food and less expended in processing it. Cooking breaks down collagen, the connective tissue in meat, and softens the cell walls of plants to release their stores of starch and fat. The calories to fuel the bigger brains of successive species of hominids came at the expense of the energy-intensive tissue in the gut, which was shrinking at the same time—you can actually see how the barrel-shaped trunk of the apes morphed into the comparatively narrow-waisted Homo sapiens. Cooking freed up time, as well; the great apes spend four to seven hours a day just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the intellect.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes...
Same thing here with yogurt and granola. People want to believe these things are good for them. But instead of adapting their taste to healthy food, they adapt the food to their unhealthy taste, turning anything into a vehicle for sugar.
Also this sounds like changing the goal posts a bit too much after the study protocol was already set:
The distribution of SSB consumption status was highly skewed, and transformation of data was not feasible owing to the large number of people who reported never drinking SSB. Therefore, the frequency of SSB consumption was aggregated and then a new intake category was categorized in order to ensure an adequate number of participants in each group.
And a lot of people who don't care about parenting norms at all are probably dubious parents in other ways...
There's no attempt here to case control for other factors.
Worse, the parents' own reported measures of children's executive function were used.
20 years ago juice was good. In the US (linked study was done in China), I saw older friends having kids bringing home pamphlets from the doctor's office extolling the virtues of 100% fruit juice. Juice being bad is a very recent thing, and it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that some parents didn't Get The Memo, but they are otherwise still "good parents".
Or they may just have given up the fight over juice. Pick your battles and all that, and without any research showing juice was really "that" bad, parents may have figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting over.
I haven't really seen that, or at least not a clear cut "it's bad". (I'm sure there's someWhen updated school food guidelines from the Feds came down, traditional SSB's were cut out but juice w/o any additives were still included as acceptable healthy drinks. I have seen information that it shouldn't be the only thing you drink, but also that the natural sugars in them are much better than, say HFCS. Most of what I can find on the topic simply advocates moderation, though there are some exceptions.
Most sources will advocate "moderation" because you can't tell Americans not to eat trash without Americans getting upset.
"OK in moderation" means "it is unhealthy but if we tell you to stop you won't so...."
Same as alcohol being OK in moderation. It isn't. It is 100% bad for you. (Those studies in wine are all statistically trickery).
Ditto for cookies. There is no healthy amount of cookies to eat. Do oatmeal cookies technically have some nutritional value? Sure. But that is like dropping a multi-vitamin into a shot of jack daniels. Good for you only in the sense that of hitting yourself on the head and then going for a massage.
Or to put it yet another way, there is exactly 0 instances where fruit juice is superior to eating a piece of fruit. Is orange juice better than something getting scurvy? Sure. That's about the limit of its health benefit though.
It wasn't psyops, it was just marketing.
The problem is, without evidence to the contrary, doctors are as want to go along with "common sense" as everyone else.
Thus, when "common knowledge" because "fruit juice is good for you" doctors just nodded their head and agreed with the advice, until evidence to the contrary come out.
What do you think marketing is?
Of course they have significant overlap in techniques & tactics, and all come in the same flavors: White/Grey/Black, categorizations that pertain mainly to whether or not the source is known, though also the types of tactics that might be used.
--White have a fairly clear attributable source & intent.
--Grey are more ambiguous. Usually you get someone else to say what you want them to say. Maybe they don't even know you're doing it, maybe they're a paid shill.
--Black are completely secretive
As a kid, I did have the choice but I didn't have the knowledge. Had I been informed about how harmful sugar is, I would have just chosen to drink water, at least after I turned 5 years old and had a concept of long-term health consequences being linked to some behaviors.
In the US, schools tend to be pretty good at this these days. Possibly in part because in 2010 there was the "Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act". Part of this outlined acceptable beverages, and the guidelines exclude anything with added sugar. But if parents aren't reinforcing that, or in fact go against it in what is allowed at home, that won't help too much.
Although somewhat to my frustration, schools (at least in my district) have taken what I consider unreasonable initiative in further limitations of food that parents can send to school. My daughter came home upset one day, thinking she had done something bad, when I packed a piece of chocolate in her lunch for a special occasion. It was seen by staff and she was scolded for it. Apart from what I view an overreach, if there was a problem then the school should have taken it up with me, the parent, and not done anything in a way that made my daughter feel the she was to blame.
Edit: I love twin studies for exploring this sort of nature/nurture issue. Here's one for executive function that looks at both identical & fraternal twins, and their conclusion is a heavy genetic influence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/
Futurama quotes aside, I don't know what to make of adults doing this to themselves and their children. Water is fantastic.
If taste is what one is after, one can easily drop a couple bags of chai/tea in a liquid vessel of choice. Don't even need to brew it. And if one really "needs" their instant sugar kick - use some actual honey.
Cheaper, healthier, better. In every way.
Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty much the same thing? Cause I just did some searching and literally all results (ddg, if that matters) are obviously politically motivated. To me, that means that no, they're not the same thing and there's been a lot of money spent on pushing that "agenda", if you will.
Edit: Thanks for your input, guys. It would seem the problem with sugars is quantity, not quality. I am agreeing to that not so shocking fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Sugar_profile
"'HFCS 42' and 'HFCS 55' refer to dry weight fructose compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being glucose"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
So they're broadly similar.
"The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey
>"HFCS 42" and "HFCS 55" refer to dry weight fructose compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being glucose.[5] HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.[5]
If you can find anything that shows an important difference from sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, report that.
Both honey and HCFS usually contain a bulk composition of a 40:60 to 60:40 ratio of fructose to glucose. There are variations in honey and different grades of HCFS. Honey contains a few other sugars in considerably smaller amounts, and a few percent of "other" stuff, HCFS likewise contains a bit of other material.
So either you believe that the minor components of one or the other is what is "good" or "bad" for you or you're the victim of magical thinking that something "natural" is better than something "synthetic" despite being substantially identical.
In my 20s, I was downing just over a Cube (36 cans) every couple days and that was very difficult. I didn't keep it up for more than a couple weeks.
Are you guys fit/healthy today?
^Fountain soda has a different chemical composition than bottled or canned sodas. Notably less acid, which has left my teeth intact after 25 years. Also, you don't have the aluminum (which is what makes Pepsi taste better from a can) as a neurotoxin. Bottled soda is particularly vulnerable to chemical changes from light and degredation of the bottle's inner coating. I am a coke connoisseur, with a very sensitive palette and would never touch 2 liter soda again (glass bottles are ok, but again, the sugar and acid content is higher).
genuinely curious how this logic works? Liquid sugar is liquid sugar isn't it?
I'm 6'2 and 89kg (196lbs). I stopped drinking any soda, I dont add sugar to any drink anymore (I drink flavoured black tea like vanilla, or ginger/lemon etc but only 1-3 cups a day). No coffee.
I control my GERD issues by diet and exercise instead of medication and it seems to be working. I appear to have FODMAP related issues so I'm very careful about the sort of sugars i consume. Artificial sweeteners are right off the list of options as well.
Edit: ha you answered it ta. I don't know if I believe what you believe. I'll look into it .
How does insulin work for them? Do they get intense blood sugar spikes whenever they eat?
is caffeine controlled for?