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Comment by vallassy | Hacker News Reader

Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup).

Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn't want to talk about.

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> even bog standard bread

Yes, we definitely have too much sugar in everything, but as an amateur baker I will defend sugar in bread. Sure, you don't need it in a baguette or a rustic boule, but it is indispensable for a nice, soft sandwich loaf. It's not there to make the bread sweeter. It makes the bread softer, it boosts the yeast for a nicer rise, and it keeps it from going stale as quickly.

Granted, I don't use a ton of it. My favorite sandwich bread recipe[0] is 8g of sugar to 500g flour, and with my long loaf pan I typically get 20-25 slices, so maximum 400mg a slice. Quite good compared to my favorite supermarket bread at 2g a slice.

Sure, "bog standard" bread could have less sugar, but some sugar is essential for this style of bread.

[0] https://www.nigella.com/recipes/old-fashioned-sandwich-loaf, omitting the butter and oil and using cultured buttermilk instead of spoiled milk or sour cream. I say "omitting the butter", but I do still butter the loaf pan. I just don't include any in the dough itself.

> Sure, "bog standard" bread could have less sugar, but some sugar is essential for this style of bread.

I fully agree. As a German I do want to point out that American style sandwich bread is a very specific style. Sugar goes into it much as it does into challah dough or brioche - but all these stradle the cake-bread boundary for me.

If you want sugar in your bread, you gotta suffer through the process of making pumpernickel like everyone else, gosh darn it! /j

what does pumpernickel have to do with sugar?

Its very high acidity dough combined with its long, low bake makes the starches break down into sugars more compared to other breads.

Thanks

I'll add to this: A lot of home cooks were taught to add a bit of sugar to the bread to help the yeast. I used to mix yeast, water, and a bit of sugar together to get the yeast started. I mostly did this because I learned to make bread before the internet, and this was common in instructions that I could access.

https://youtu.be/AqFeXxa_NTk

This guy experiments with sugar levels and how it affects yeast.

Turns out the water absorbing properties of sugar also has a large effect in the other direction, so maybe it doesn't really help the yeast

Sugar can inhibit yeast development: This is generally only an issue with sweet doughs, though. A teaspoon of yeast won't have that effect, especially if it is in a half cup of water.

But more importantly, in the times before the internet, you just couldn't reason like that. If your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother all start bread by dissolving yeast and a small amount of sugar in some water... well, you do it too. The cookbooks sometimes told you this if it wasn't too terribly old (old cookbooks expect you to know a lot, and directions get sparse).

> but it is indispensable for a nice, soft sandwich loaf

There's a difference between the kind of bread you're making, and Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is just an oversized marshmallow.

The difference between a nice brioche - made with plenty of sugar, with a soft, fluffy character - and a standard loaf of french bread is quite large. I spring for the french bread only because it's cheaper. Bread with sugar is superior.

I consume nothing but sourdough, because of the simplicity of ingredients and no sugar is necessary in its recipe. Lately I've found that "take-and-bake" loaves can be purchased, frozen, and freshly baked on demand. It works out great, and I love the simple, honest flavor of San Francisco style sourdough for sandwiches or just a buttered slice to go with my supper.

That’s pretty much the point though isn’t it? Everything is a bit (or a lot) better to the human brain when you add sugar

> Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky

But that's packed with fat calories as well and fat has a much higher energy density as carbohydrates. As an European I'm very very astonished over the size of the food portions in fast food restaurants in the US. If this portion size is the same on the diner table than it's not only sugar but a lot of non necessary calories. I don't think it's entirely caused by sugar but by a big surplus of calories in day to day food (combined with too little physical activity)

But fat increases satiety much more quickly than sugar. 500 cals of fats will make you feel "fuller" than 750 or even 1k cals of sugar. That's what makes sugar so much worse. Is may not be as colorically dense, but we can comfortably guzzle down far more empty calories from sugar than from fat.

I think separating the two is not a good idea.

Very few people will just eat a spoon of white sugar. Very few people will eat a stick of butter.

But almost everyone can binge on a box of cookies, where the main ingredients are butter and sugar (and flour I suppose.)

Drink a soda. There's a couple of spoons of white sugar.

US restaurant portions are huge. If you eat like that every day, it will kill you. I think one reason is that the ingredients are cheap relative to other costs including labor. It used to be rationalized by saying that a restaurant meal was supposed to be a rare indulgence, but I don't think that's true any more for a large swath of the population.

Anecdote: I had two long meetings at work last week, that crossed over the lunch hour, so they brought in lunch. Each was from a "fast casual" or "fast food" sandwich shop. There was like 1/2 inch slab of processed meat on each sandwich. I would typically put one thin slice of the same meat on a sandwich that I make for the lunch that I bring to work. I discreetly removed most of the meat and threw it away. I know some people who will take a delivered meal like that, cut it in half, and save the second half for the next day.

Another anecdote: There was an article about a town in Texas that was losing its last restaurant, and the author wondered how people would eat.

Of course to maintain a higher body weight, you need to eat more.

I'm American living in Europe. There is sugar in every packaged food here too just FYI.

And not just in the country I live in, it's basically everywhere in grocery stores.

So sugar is not the only culprit.

I'm an American in Europe, and really, what I've noticed here is it's natural sugar in stuff, whereas in America it's HFCS. I can't help but wonder if that's part of the difference. I list 5-10kg easily without watching what I ate (and drank much more cause there's nothing else to do of an evening in Ireland), while keeping the same activity level or slightly less. There's something different in the food, and I can't help but think real sugar and lower levels of it is a key thing.

It IS _natural_ sugar in stuff, not HFCS. You are right about that.

So that is one difference.

But let's look at the other differences between W. Europe (this is the Europe I am thinking of at least).

1.There are ZERO local national restaurant chains in this country. Zero Chipotles, zero In-n-outs. The only national food chains are McDonald's and Burger King.

2. There are zero drive-thru restaurants. Not even starbucks. So food is not as easy to get.

3. There are fewer restaurants in general.

4. When you do go out to a restaurant the portions are smaller. I haven't weighed two things, but my best estimate is about 1/3 less. For instance, where I live, the local burrito "chain" of two locations, the burritos are about one-third smaller while the portion of chips that come with it is 60-70% smaller.

5. The food here costs more when going to a restaurant. There is no way to get a full meal for less than $10. A Mcdonald's combo meal is $15-$19. So food costs twice as much. Mcdonald's portions are not way smaller than the US, but every other restaurant's are. Because a meal is 50-100% more expensive and you get smaller portions, food is actually 3x the cost. This, obviously, has the effect of people eating less.

6. A greater percentage of people live and work in cities in Europe than the States [citation needed; would love to know the actual number]. So they probably burning 100-200 more calories a day because of this.

7. There are also zero billboards for any industry. So way less food advertising to go along with that.

These are the differences I think that make the biggest difference. There is simply less of an emphasis on food too.

But portion size, which is culture, and amount of physical activity are what I personally believe make the biggest difference.

This is going to be an extremely challenging thesis to explain the phenomena, as HFCS and sucrose are effectively chemically identical once they hit the stomach.

Yes, but HFCS is cheaper. Cheaper means it ends up in more products. Cheaper means more gets consumed.

I mentioned in another comment above that circa 2003-ish the NYT Sunday mag ran an opinion piece that proposed that gov subsidies of corn were contributing to the obesity crisis. Lower corn prices === lower price for HFCS === more HFCS in more products === more products at lower prices === more sweetener calories being consumed.

Our gut microbes aren't evolved for this type of diet.

Sugar is negligibly expensive. It's just so cheap. In a wealthy region such as W. Europe, I can't even see the price differential mattering.

When you're manufacturing at scale pennies add up. If not, then how else do we explain the rise in the use of HFCS?

"Lower" is far more important than "real".

> Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar?

The two are not mutually exclusive.

We know fructose is a problem. We know bisphenols and phthalates (endocrine disruptors found in plastics) are problems as well.

It's both.

I've tracked my diet pretty regularly over the last several years. The one constant in every weight-gain cycle for me is a sugary treat after a meal. This is true even when I've otherwise kept my caloric intake constant.

Blood sugar spikes do strange things to our hunger response.

If your blood sugar is too high the body may produce an emergency response to keep blood sugar down and it may overshoot which makes you hungry much sooner.

Sugar and seed oils (vegetable oils). Practically impossible to avoid especially in "food deserts".

I've seen a lot of broscience that says "seed oils and PUFAs are bad". Is there actual evidence for this?

Yes, broscience exaggerated the point, but they are not far from correct.

It depends on genetics and the amount and type of PUFA consumed. The Fatty Acid Destaurase genes will dictate how bad short chain PUFA's (Seed oil's) are for a person. These people should stick to fatty fish.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00260...

Omega 6 PUFAs are more inflammatory than long chain PUFA's.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7990530/

It just so happens that most seed oils contain tremendous amounts of Short Chain Omega 6 fatty acids.

Whether or not peer-reviewed studies show an impact on health, seed oils are just kind of gross:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI

Compare this to making butter - shake up some cream for a little bit to separate out the buttermilk.

For balance, here’s a rebuttal to the fad that seed oils are our nemesis: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...

There is a great book that goes into this whole topic called Deep Nutrition. Also, anecdotally, I see a lot of correlation between PUFAs and FUPAs.

I consume multiple times more sugar than the average person, and I'm thin as a rail with a healthy metabolism. Sugar in itself isn't likely to be bad. Sugar in addition to a deranged metabolism is probably bad. Fixing the deranged metabolism, (which is likely to be caused by various environmental factors) will probably be the best solution.

> I consume multiple times more sugar than the average person, and I'm thin as a rail with a healthy metabolism.

The average American consumes around 125g of sugar per day [1, 2]. This is about 500 kcals. Multiple times that would mean most of your daily calories are coming from sugar, unless you are very physically active.

[1] https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/

[2] https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/45-alarming-statistics-on...

Yesterday, I had 3 bottles of coke at 40g of sugar each, 4 cups of OJ at 25g of sugar each, and 1/3 a pound of fudge, which I think is about 50g. That's around 270g of simple sugars. If you care about carb intake, I also had 7 idlis, which is an indian rice cake, and a dosa, which is a rice crepe, which probably adds a significant amount of starch.

I probably reliably have 2x the average for simple sugars

May I ask if you're under 45?

Yes haha. I'm sure my habits will change as I age

What's your daily caloric intake, though? It's not just sugar that's negative. Traditional diets which are high in either carbohydrates or fats are broadly ok, it's the combination which is problematic, because it's all the caloric consumption of fats at 9kcal/g along with ghrelin/insulin spiking/dropping with carbohydrates (at 4kcal/g) which is an issue, because all of a sudden daily caloric intake is much higher.

The OP’s point was that sugar is a problem in itself, so I was addressing that. You’re saying it’s total caloric intake which is a different claim. I do eat a good amount of fat, from the fudge and the dosa for example. Idk what my total caloric intake is like, but it’s probably around 2k

> Fixing the deranged metabolism

> with a healthy metabolism.

how are you measuring that you have 'healthy metabolism'.

Standard measures like blood pressure, avg body temp, thyroid levels

those don't measure 'healthy metabolism', what does that even mean.

I've found myself looking at 8 different kinds of mayonnaise now, and still can't find one that has added sugar (apart from the ingredients listed under 'contains less than 2% of...").

There is Miracle Whip but that is a bit of a reach to call mayonnaise.

Look for real sourdough bread. ("San Francisco style") The loaf is round, and the bread has to rise more slowly.

Years ago I dug through every bread in the aisle to find the one with the least amount of sugar. I went home with a weird-looking sourdough loaf, and I've been hooked ever since.

In CA, most grocery stores carry it, because it's a local style. In MA, I have to go to Trader Joes to get it at a good price.

Timeline doesn't work out, really. People ate a lot of sugar before the 80s and 90s where the obesity epidemic took off. Timeline points more to plastic and/or lithium, as suggested by Slime Mold Time Mold.

Sugar is pretty bad for you, though.

It could be both, and might even include other factors as well.

Here's the answer. It's a factor. As is sugar. No one thing is going to solve the problem, but everything helps.

I’ve seen it discussed here in the past that when controlling for sugar consumption there isn’t any correlation with obesity and that the causes of the obesity epidemic are more enigmatic than blaming it on sugar.

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