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Comment by UIUC_06 | Hacker News Reader

I'm being a killjoy here, sorry:

Just drink water. Much healthier. Carbonated, if you like. With some lemon or lime juice, maybe.

Who said anything about soft drinks? They're putting artificial sweeteners in "unsweetened" sauces and condiments these days. They're getting about as hard to escape as sugar was in the "fats bad" era.

Good point. I say, have the regular stuff (w/sugar) but just go easy with it.

The thing that's crazy is that even the "regular" items sometimes have artificial sweeteners now. You basically cannot assume any product category, with any labeling, with not have it. You have to check the ingredient list yourself (and make sure you're familiar with all the names these things go under).

At this point my main strategy is to minimize number of ingredients (e.g., two ingredient peanut butter) because otherwise it's just too easy to miss something getting slipped in there. It's insane.

>You basically cannot assume any product category

Picked up a loaf of bread on sale the other day and, because it wasn't the brand I normally get, I scanned the ingredients. Surprised to find that it contained sucralose.

It wasn't listed as "lite" or similar. Just "regular" bread. With sucralose.

Does the place you shop not sell fresh bread? In European supermarkets that’s the norm. Anything branded (i.e. shelf stable and sold in a plastic bag) is to be treated with suspicion.

Supermarkets in the U.S. will frequently have a bakery, but they tend to sell other baked goods, such as cakes, pastries, etc. Whatever bread they do sell is generally more "specialty", like baguettes or sourdough. If you're looking for "standard" loaved bread, that's generally relegated to the shelf stable type, of which there is a substantial selection.

Some of the shelf stable stuff is better than others WRT ingredients, and it's possible to make relatively decent selections. The cheaper stuff tends to be more awash in garbage ingredients.

OTOH, it's also not necessarily the case that the in-store bakery stuff is free of garbage ingredients, to include artificial flavors, etc.

I hope one of the ingredients in your pb is salt

Maybe 10:1 ratio of water:isotonic drink is an acceptable idea.

> unsweetened

Unsweetened generally still means it. The weasel words I usually see are "no added sugar". The ingredients will then list juice concentrates, stevia, or monkfruit.

This to me seems less of a problem where I come from, Italy. It's true that most Italians indulge in sugar when drinking coffee (which it's a terrible practice, we should instead push for better specialty-grade coffee that doesn't need sugar). At the same time what Americans call "condiments" it's basically just olive oil, some salt and pepper for 95% of our dishes. A traditional mediterranean diet, made primarily of grains, legumes and vegetables with some occasional meat and fish is what me and most of my friends' families would have for dinner. Of course, there's the ice cream, the cakes, the BBQ with friends, etc. But I'm just thinking about the normal daily diet here. And the standard seems pretty healthy, with most sugars coming from seasonal fruit.

Everything in moderation.

If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun.

It's OK to pick a point somewhere in the middle.

I have fun drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol. I have no desire to drink sweet liquids. But point well taken, moderation is key to a happy life.

Sweetened beverages, including no calorie, fall on the extreme end of the sweetness spectrum. If you consume such sweet things even in moderation, you are recalibrating your sense of sweetness.

Personally, I’ve avoided all added sugars and sweeteners for a few years now. I used to find apples bland and boring, but now they taste like indulgent candy. The same goes for pretty much all fruit. I can taste sweetness in vegetables that I used to find bitter. Lightly cooked carrots, beets, squash are all deliciously sweet treats. The bottom line is that I get a lot more enjoyment out of “healthy” foods now.

When I’ve recently tried “normal” sweets like cake or soda, they taste sickeningly sweet. However, I imagine that if I drank even a no calorie sweetened drink like Coke Zero “in moderation”, my sweetness scale would recalibrate and I would start gravitating more towards sweeter things, and be less able to sense the sweetness of mildly sweet things.

The same concept applies to other flavor profiles. Salty, umami, starchy, fatty. Eating processed foods even in moderation reduces your enjoyment of whole foods and consequently makes you less likely to eat them.

How does watermelon taste for you?

This is something that a lot of people claim with a universally authoritative tone, but it's counter to my own experience. I don't consume regularly candy, sweets, etc., but I do drink diet soda and zero-sugar energy drinks and when I (rarely) have fruits or make mixed drinks with fruit components they are really sweet to my palate. When I've cut diet soda out for long periods, fruits taste no sweeter. Cooked starches and tubers are already sweet-tasting and always have been for me; diet soda doesn't affect those, either.

Moderation might not be fine for you. It seems to work for me.

Not to contradict you at all, but worth noting that those fruits probably are extremely sweet, having been selectively bred precisely to compete with the sweetness of other foods people regularly consume. Something of a sugar arms race.

This is a good point, yeah--of course they're bred for it. That they taste similarly relatively-sweet irrespective of artificial sugar consumption is orthogonal to how much sugar is actually in them.

Honestly, I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, and I did the same "recalibration" on myself years ago. But a while back I started allowing myself to eat junk food again and it has not at all diminished my taste for "bland," natural foods.

ymmv, but some (many? most?) people are able to drink a can of diet soda a day and not totally abandon eating vegetables as a result.

> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun.

I have plenty of fun only drinking water thanks.

Drinking soda is no fun

> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun.

That's a very strange thing to say...

It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing.

When I first switched to water only 7 years ago, it was actually hard because I'd had a lifetime of flavor overload, and it takes awhile for your sense of taste to adjust to normality. American food in general is over-salted, and over-flavored. Eating most things there is like a punch in the face after eating normal food again (England has the opposite problem).

Drinking carbonated water with a twist of lime helped a lot, and then after awhile I came to appreciate the subtle nuances between different water types. Tap water in San Francisco has a harsh overtone to it. Tap water in Western Oakland tastes a little muddy. Tap water in Vancouver and Leipzig is actually quite tasty. The best water I've ever had is hands down in the tiny town of Nagasasa in Japan. We actually dumped out all of our water bottles and brought 20 litres of the stuff back with us to Nagoya (where the tap water tastes terrible).

> It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing.

It's only in the last six generations that water has supplanted beer (typically "small beer") as a beverage. Prior to that it was a dangerous thing to drink water unless you lived far out in the countryside.

I doubt this very much. Beer costs money to make, and very few people would have been able to afford it.

We also see much more recently that 3rd world countries didn't do this, either. People drank water.

Why doubt it? People made beer at home from barley and water and mugworth, it was decidedly not expensive.

Today the Czech Republic is the country with the highest beer consumption per capita, at 140 liters per person per year. Germany clocks in at 99, and the US is at 72. In the late middle ages, the average in Britain was 300 liters per person per year.

In 1830, Americans over the age of 15 consumed more than 31 liters of pure alcohol per year. If that was all in 7% beer, it corresponds to 1.2 liters of strong beer every day. Probably quite a bit was also in whiskey, which was cheaper than milk back then.

Very true. People did drink a lot more back then (even John Adams had some hard cider with breakfast), but also, the alcohol content of their wine or beer was probably pretty low.

I haven't been to Japan, so I'm not arguing. Just curious: have you been to Mt. Shasta in northern CA? Their water is awesome.

How much cocaine a day would still be "in moderation" ? I mean, we are talking everything, and everything includes cocaine too.

A fascinating question. Are you worried?

I tried that, but my cakes just don't come out the same.

Water doesn't mix well with rum.

Sure, you can do it, the British Navy did it for centuries, but "can" isn't "should".

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