Fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health | Hacker News Reader

Fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health

washingtonpost.com

193 pointspseudolus173 comments

I think we'll soon discover that the sugar industry is paying a lot of money for all this 'research' and 'news coverage' on sugar alternatives.

The phrase 'non-nutritive sweeteners' is just too loaded a term for me to accept.

Any article that doesn't heavily emphasise that excess sugar is right now killing people is suspect.

> Studies show that when other countries, including Chile and Australia, instituted policies to reduce sugar consumption, the result was an increase in artificially sweetened foods and beverages.

Oh no, artificial sweeteners replacing the "natural" corn syrup in my caffeinated beverage. How frightening, I want good old fashioned corn syrup killing me while providing empty calories.

I'm the opposite - I want my food to match my biological expectations, one of the largest being sweet = I just took in quick calories. Not for any grand reason other than I let my hunger and energy levels guide my food choices. I find that the best way long term.

I don't have a strong biological instinct of discerning corn syrup from "natural sugar". That is something reading labels helps me with. But I can't fight the biological urges the same way.

Empty calories are still somewhat beneficial. I eat a lot of fruit for energy, but sometimes I just want something even quicker and easier to digest and process for my calories, like jelly beans or something. And fruit is more expensive.

The important piece here is context, as it always it. One example - i grew up eating bread that used no sugar or very little sugar. North American bread tastes too close to cake. Many North Americans don’t share my opinion because their baseline is different.

Almost all food is a combination of flavours and it is not easy to spot added sugar. The idea of « sweet » is a lot more difficult to use in the real world.

Go carnivore for a week, and you'd be surprised how overly sweet everything tastes after... until you get used to it again that is.

You don't need a "carnivore" diet for that, you just need to avoid sugar and adjust to it.

Avoiding sugar may still include very sweet fruit varieties, or juice that can still prevent such adaptation... otherwise, sure, you can do similar without full on carnivore. All said, it was an example.

A lot of the problem I have with fruit now is that it's picked so early that it's virtually flavorless. Fuji apples for instance have this beautiful floral/tangy/fruity flavor when they're allowed to ripen on the tree. But go into a supermarket anywhere in my neck of the woods and they're these green things that are just beginning to turn red, and they just taste like fresh leaves with sugar in them. And the supermarket is charging like 4 dollars a pound for the lowest quality crap fruit they can get.

The trick for me is to get them from a grocery store with a huge selection. Among a hundred or so apples, there's usually 2 or 3 red ones. The flavor is amazing.

In my early 20's I made it a point to stop drinking and eating garbage like Starbucks frappucinos. After a period of 3 years I found myself in a place that only sold the pre-made frappuchinos and some other drinks, but no water or water-like drinks. So I bought one. And in the intervening years it had become disgustingly sweet. Like so sweet that I almost threw up and had to throw away half the bottle. So yes, avoiding sugar will change your tastebuds.

I used to have a can of coke for breakfast every day. I improved my diet a few years ago. I still enjoy the first few sips, bit I can't drink a whole can anymore.

A 12oz bottle for my rare (these days) soda indulgence is usually about four ounces too many. Dunno how a 20-ouncer ever seemed like a single serving to me, but it did.

I think free soda refills in restaurants becoming normal in the 90s is an under-appreciated contributor to American health & diet problems. There were Big Gulps and such before that but giant 32+oz soda servings weren't as common as now (have you seen how huge the medium cup is at some fast food joints now?), and most folks had maybe two glasses of soda when eating at a restaurant, if they really liked soda. Suddenly, with free refills and a server constantly topping you off, it's almost natural to become accustomed to downing huge amounts of the stuff.

We have these little 250ml cans in Australia now, I think that's ~ 8oz.

I have one once in a blue moon at the beach or on some outing when I feel like something more that water.

I really like/appreciate the little 6-8oz cans here myself. Juice, as an example, when I was little was a serving of 4oz, and one wasn't meant to have it more than a few (3-4) times a week, as explained by my grandmother (when I was little) and definitely not meant to have a giant fruit juice smoothie every day.

One 12oz can of soda is the recommended daily sugar limit for an adult male. How many people consume way more than that every single day. And it's been hidden in so many products over the years. Now it's almost worse using artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols that have varying affects person to person.

Like gluten intolerance (celiac at ~1% and intolerance at 3-4%), may foods and combinations only affect a small piece of the population, but with processed franken-foods it's possible to affect much larger portions in varying ways. And it can be temporary or cumulative, such as with histamine intolerance, which is probably the issue most people who think they may have gluten problems lay.

Seconded - I stopped drinking anything sweeter than kombucha about 10 years ago, and now soda is utterly disgusting. My coffee and tea are unsweetened, and if I drink orange juice, I water it down to 1 part juice, 3 or 4 parts water. Sugar no longer tastes like a pleasurable treat, it's cloying and unpalatable. Even sweet food is gross - especially candy. Chocolate has to be 65% or darker.

The intersting part is, since we rarely have candy or sweetened foods in the house, my 5 year old child actually prefers popcorn to ice cream, and likes plain cereals like Smart Bran and Ezekiel. He has a bucket of candy from Halloween this past October and he hasn't eaten more than 2 pieces of it. He like his chocolate at least 72% dark.

You can get used to not consuming sugar, it just takes effort to find products without it.

The biggest change for me, is actually liking Walnuts now... where I really never liked them before going low carb (mostly carnivore).

What is "North American" bread exactly? I bake my own bread and use a tablespoon of sugar; the bread does not taste sweet. But if you buy like Wonder bread in the stores, that's intentionally sweetened to taste like cake. I have never seen anyone buy that stuff, though.

You've never seen anyone purchase the best selling brand of white bread in the US?

Surely we're not surprised how detached, on this site, we mostly are from common consumption behaviors?

Stroll through the prepackaged bread aisle of any U.S. grocery store and look at the sugar content on the nutrition labels.

At my local Safeway, the generic brand 100% whole wheat bread contains 4g of sugar per slice. With 16 slices in a pack, that’s a third cup of sugar per loaf.

The ingredients? Whole wheat flour, water, sugar, wheat gluten, honey, brown sugar, yeast, oil, salt, …

I enjoy converting g to number of sugar packets which is about 3g. So that's 1 packet per slice (which the yeast might eat). When you say that a coke has 10 packets of sugar it makes you gag a little.

When I bake bread I use a pinch of sugar for an entire loaf. The yeast are just fine eating the flour. Thinking of a packet of sugar PER SLICE is insane to me. Especially for whole grain

> I have never seen anyone buy that stuff, though.

Must be why there's a whole aisle dedicated to that kind of bread, in most stores. Nobody buys it.

> American bread tastes too close to cake.

I've heard multiple people from other countries say the same thing. It seems crazy to think about people using cake for bread in sandwiches, but I can see why they'd think that. Even the packaged lunch meats sold in stores have sugar added to them for some reason, I wouldn't be surprised if the deli meat did too. The only thing without added sugar in a sandwich might be the lettuce!

I'm mostly inclined to agree... I try to keep my total carbs below 50g/day and net carbs under 20g/day, I'm diabetic and prefer to minimize my use of exogenous insulin. The cap on the total, is because there are definitely affects from fiber, sugar alcohols, etc that aren't accounted for otherwise.

Too many people will turn to the alternatives as an all you can consume buffet and not realize that what is being consumed still has 40-60% of the effects that sugar does on glucose control alone. And that doesn't cover the effects on gut flora.

I'm not fond of the vegetarian push in TFA though. I think animal products are perfectly natural and generally good nutrition sources and that the refined fats and sugars are far more dangerous generally speaking. Fruit juice in quantity being as or more dangerous as soda.

Fructose does everything bad to the liver that alcohol does without the negative reinforcement of a headache after.

> Fructose does everything bad to the liver that alcohol does

Does the alcohol itself not add to the damage?

Sure... but you don't need alcohol... just fructose will do it. The point is that most people don't know that fructose alone will cause liver damage in anything resembling significant quantities... eg: more than 100g HFCS or table sugar a day, which many western people regularly consume... especially if they think that fruit juice smoothies are healthy.

Yeah, as a Boring Technology Club [1] sort of developer, I've grown steadily more suspicious of engineered foods, which includes both highly processed foods and artificial sweetners. We just don't have a very good understanding of the bodily mechanisms, especially once we start looking at things like the gut ecosystem. I'm definitely not telling anybody what to eat, but the more attention I pay to this, the more careful I get. The food industry has many competing motivations, but my long term health is pretty far down the list.

[1] https://boringtechnology.club/

Less of a worry than artificial sweeteners and the like, but I think still a concern is that almost all the fruits and vegetables we eat today are "engineered". When I buy a box of blackberries, they are perfectly black, sweet, juicy and delicious. Modern breeds of apples like Cosmic Crisp are juicy orbs of sugar. Neither of these are natural. They have been selectively cultivated for generations and I wonder how the nutritional value compares to their natural, wild counterparts. Even today's brussel sprout has been cultivated to remove much of the sulfur that made it bitter in the past. Heck, pretty much all the vegetables in the grocery store today are completely engineered by humans. Broccoli and Brussel sprouts are human "engineered" from the same ancestor. Not even considering the pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs, I worry that we are going to have no options except for these delicious flavor and sugar bombs that may not contain enough nutrients to keep us healthy.

I hope I am wrong and we have actually managed to out maneuver mother nature by creating more delicious versions of cultivar that are still healthy. I just have this nagging feeling when eating a delicious, juicy fist sized strawberry out of season that it's a bit too good to be true.

A totally valid question. It seems like a race between our evolutionary adaptation to our changing diet and our ability to change our diet to be a hyperstimulus to our tastes.

Based on no evidence at all, I figure simple plant breeding was much more limited in rate of change so it's reasonable to suspect that our bodies kept up, or at least weren't very far behind. But with modern tech, who knows!

Something insightful I got from a Netflix food show was the quote: “Eat whatever you want, but cook it yourself.”

When you go shopping, do you pick up a bunch of chemical flavour enhancers known only by their E numbers? No, you buy raw vegetables, fruits, and meats and dump combinations into a pan or pot.

That’s my “trick” to eating healthy. Don’t eat anything that comes in an cardboard box and was manufactured in a factory.

Sound advice. Furthermore, the effort of obtaining and preparing food could dampen any mindless, gluttonous impulses. The threshold to satisfying the promptings of the appetite is higher, and over time, will cause such promptings to atrophy as a result of repeated denial.

As the saying goes, appetite comes with eating.

My SO can't seem to make a meal for less than 6, when it's usually the two of us, and may only have leftovers once, leading to a lot of waste, which irks me. Sometimes I'll eat more or less, depending on how I feel. It's also hard in that I'm a social eater, and although some foods are more problematic than others for me, she doesn't have issue with them.

Example, legumes... I don't feel well, general muscle aches the next day, when I have them. I grew up with PB almost every day of my life until isolating the problem about 8 years or so ago. I still like the stuff, living in the southwest, beans are a typical side. I also still have it, it's just I live with the effect, or after a few days am more inclined to stop having it. Self control isn't always the easiest thing living and being around others.

> I let my hunger and energy levels guide my food choices.

Perhaps "inform" (as in a signal that does not determine decision) might be a better approach. Hunger is not strictly correlated with need. That is, hunger and appetite are also subject to habituation. If someone is accustomed to eating three large meals a day with snacks in between, they will likely feel hungry when one of those meals is eliminated, or even when snacks are reduced. We hardly need as much as we generally consume, and the last thing we need is to be led around by our appetites. Like children, they can tell us what they want, but it is we who must assess what is actually needed or within healthy limits. Lack of hunger should also not form the basis for not eating. I suspect that's why you included "energy levels" as another signal. If you're not merely hungry, but feeling weak, and you know you haven't eaten in a while, then you could probably use some food.

I would argue that adopting a schedule and using fasting to reduce intake and "noshing" and conform hunger reoccurrence to this schedule are a good approach. Fasting also has the benefit of helping us discipline our appetites, something people are generally miserable at unless they practice self-denial or have them disciplined by outside causes. Disciplined appetites sharpen the mind and strengthen the will and contribute to virtue and therefore true freedom (in the classical sense, not the liberal sense which is a recipe for enslavement). This latter benefit is more important than the first. Furthermore, human beings are animals, but we are not beasts. We do not merely guzzle slop from a trough. We eat meals. Meals are not merely about obtaining nutrition.

> Disciplined appetites sharpen the mind

Do you have a source for that? To what extent is the mind "sharpened" by putting off snacks?

You’re right on many points. And yes I did say energy levels to account for not relying solely on hunger.

You’re using the “through disciple -> freedom” idea from Aristotle I think.

And you’re using what is needed.

I agree for your conception of humans we need the regimen you lay out.

I don’t argue with that.

But how do you fill your plates? With discipline you count each asparagus frond, weigh each food group, count every calorie?

No, at some point we are listening to ourselves. Since we are already doing that, why not skip many of these middle-practices?

I am very present taking in food and assembling my meal. Why do I need Greek philosophers to tell me what I already know?

Eating is for ourselves. Not everything is so selfish and personal, but it is one case where listening inward is the primary focus. Contrast to listening to the needs of others in order to be happy.

Maybe that’s another discipline, to be present and listen inward. And not appeal to principles of others.

I also arrived at this stage by failing with other diets over 7 years or so. It’s not like I had some grand principle at the beginning. I could not do certain things I like to do with fasting. I hike and stretch every single day as physical therapy for an injury. Fasting would wreck me.

> I want my food to match my biological expectations, one of the largest being sweet = I just took in quick calories

Except for that your biological expectations should be that sweet foods are relatively slow calories. We've co-evolved over millions of years to get sugar from fruit and other complex carbs. Refined sugar has only existed for a couple thousand years, and has only been ubiquitous for a few hundred years.

To the extent that your body is expecting a quick rush of calories after eating something sweet, that's only because your body is very reactive based on your prior eating habits, not because that makes any sense from an evolutionary perspective.

I’m talking in terms of carbs as fast vs fat and protein as slow. Not the different type of carbs. I should have been more precise.

It's best to just read what actual researchers/doctors think rather than rely on bullshit corporate media like WaPo/CNN/etc.

You can read

- Peter Attia (Stanford MD) -> https://peterattiamd.com/more-hype-than-substance-erythritol...

- Layne Norton (Nutritional Sciences PhD) -> https://youtu.be/Ad8_scQtHFM

They both think the study is being sensationalized by the media for clicks (as usual)

> the sugar industry is paying a lot of money for all this 'research' and 'news coverage' on sugar alternatives

This has happened before. In the 1960's, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

Sugar isn't the only industry either, Dairy operated the same ways. Funding nonsensical research about how healthy and great it is, meanwhile the study is just on added vitamin D, something milk doesn't have naturally. It's how they get away with it, and all you would see in news and ads is "drink milk it's healthy!"

Dairy even worse in many ways, because there was no requirement in the food pyramid (and it's related forms) to have a bunch of sugar. However, it's been standard for decades to push multiple full cups of milk per day.

Don't also forget when margarine was considered healthier than butter. Or that activists were pushing McDonalds for switch from tallow to vegetable oils. Now we consider trans fats and many vegetable oils bad. Or that one time eggs were considered to raise your cholesterol.

that one time?

I feel like you could set your watch to how often eggs being bad flip flops

Tallow is absolutely not better for you than frying in oils. Tallow also has trans fats. Margarine is lower in saturated fats than butter with none of the cholesterol. None are good for you versus a liquid oil like canola.

Eating more fruits and vegetables is always going to be better for you all other things being equal. I still eat fried foods as a vegetarian but my cholesterol is way down. When I donate plasma there isn't gunk in the filter like everyone else.

Dunno why people think eating meat and butter every day is possibly sustainable at a health or ecological level. Our ancestors were lucky to get bone marrow. That's the baseline. We still have those same bodies and brains. We've just changed the environment completely and are seeing the consequence (less acute mortality, higher chronic mortality)

It's perfectly fine when our understanding of something evolves and we discover that what seemed like a good idea with the information we had before looks like a bad idea with the more complete information we have now. There's nothing better than using the best evidence available at the time to draw conclusions.

Where there's a problem it's when corporations and industries manipulate research until they get favorable results, and bury any evidence unfavorable to their products or when even well-intentioned research is distorted by the media just for clicks.

We should expect science to change in the face of new information, that's a feature not a bug. We should be doing a lot more to hold people accountable for lying and misleading us though, including researchers and the media.

Saturated fat and added sugar are both bad. I think the issue with "added" sugar is that basically all everyone eats all the time contains "added" sugar. It's a tough pill to swallow to be told that your entire diet is shit. Now you aren't just up against the sugar lobby but all processed foods.

Deal with a bout of fake-sugar-induced gut fauna chaos and you'll be singing a different tune. It sure woke me up on the subject.

I really doubt that sugar is more profitable than fake sugar for industry.

Regardless, I do wish products containing them were labeled better. My dad is allergic to most of them. We nearly had to make an ER visit after he ate some pickles because Kosher decided that they suddenly needed to put artificial sweetener in their pickles.

Agree. Sugar also blasts your immune system:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32395846/

Better to reduce sugar and artificial sweeteners, but sugar alone, especially in a concentrated food/drink additive form is far worst for you than artificial sweeteners.

International Life Sciences Institute

From what I can tell, sugar is much better than corn syrup, and corn syrup is much better than 100% of well-studied non-nutritive sweeteners.

Most of the issues with all those things boil down to “they blow up your metabolism and gut microbes”.

The whole organic artificial sweetener thing is clearly just cynical labeling. Worse, the soda industry found that young people almost unanimously avoid diet soda, so they renamed it “light” and added some sugar back in (to screw over the diabetics and cement their status as products that should not exist.)

No. Absolutely not. These are drugs that we do not see in high quantities in nature, JUST LIKE SUCROSE.

This is a whole 'nother industry with the same bad interest; their profit. They aim to serve people pleasures over their health.

Just eat natural foods, it's not hard.

its not hard if you can afford it

I am homeless and live in a minivan on disability and I can afford it.

If you've got a healthy diet plan that homeless people can follow I'd like to know.

What is your typical diet in a day? How much are you spending on food? How are you cooking it and how much of your time is spent preparing for/cooking/cleaning up after meals?

Canned seafood in olive oil, rice rice pasta, gluten free bread, potatoes, some veggies but not much, and I do not eat a lot, maybe 1800 calories a day.

This is healthy for me though, genetics....

That's just the appeal to nature fallacy. When people talk about natural food the main benefit is the lack of processing for palatability and heterogeneity (varied eating). There's no reason why molecules occurring in nature would automatically be healthier.

these articles are useful because the change that has to occur is that people's dietary habits simply have to change. trying to "substitute" sugar in an attempt to keep someone's experience of food exactly unchanged is futile.

the answer is not that people should go back to using sugar, it's that food should be *much less sweet*. Sweetness itself is an addictive thing that one can and should lose their dependence on.

"Any article that doesn't heavily emphasise that excess sugar is right now killing people is suspect."

It is emphasized multiple times in the article.

Instead of using artificial sweeteners, another option is to just make things less sweet. In most cases I feel like I would prefer that.

To dampen the media and consequent HN frenzy, here's [0] a substantive analysis on the recent Erythritol paper and why people should be cautious of some of the headlines run by the media.

[0] https://kcklatt.substack.com/p/the-alchemy-of-metabolomics-e...

Guy needs an editor.

Ah yes, those pesky fake sugars sneak into foods all on their own! Title should be: "Food producers seek new addictive adulterants as an alternative to sugar"

It's the standard language of victim-blaming and deflection by moneyed interests, like single-use plastic recycling and household carbon footprint.

Yes, to some extent, individual choices matter, but there are people will strong financial investment in making those individual choices harder and skewing them towards certain outcomes.

Exactly, systemic problems require systemic solutions.

The title made me cringe.

I would wager that most people are consuming way more sugar and artificial sweeteners in the form of beverages than food. Once you get used to drinking water as your primary beverage (unsweetened tea or coffee in the morning and beer in moderation on the weekend is fine) you will soon find yourself repulsed by soda, sports drinks, sweet tea, juice, etc. The amount of sugar (and/or artificial sweeteners) in this stuff is astounding.

I think people are pretty aware that something like soda is just sugar water, but sugar added to just sort of generally improve flavor in food items isn't as obvious, yet it adds up. Sugarier "low fat" options would be one of those areas where it's easy not to notice.

When I'm packing my kids school lunches I try to avoid "sweet" food and prefer "savory" snacks. I play a game with myself where I try and guess the amount sugar in something. Some savory crackers are good at only 10% sugar. Some have as much as 40% sugar.

This is one thing I've never been able to relate to.

I'm thin - at the bottom of my weight range for my height. I eat healthy. I have very little tea & coffee (maybe once a week, tops) and zero alcohol.

But I've always liked sweet things. "Does a cake taste good to you?" Yes, as good as it ever has. It tastes as good as it did when my diet was unhealthy trash.

I was able to change my eating habits, and have stuck to the change for well over a year, but my "taste buds" haven't changed at all.

No, beer on the weekends is not fine, at least if you are somehow rating it as worse than soft drinks. There is no "moderate" amount of alcohol that you can drink that does not have negative health outcomes.

Fructose and ethanol follow the same biochemical metabolic pathways and are equally harmful. You just don't get buzzed from fructose. https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?t=3424

> But studies suggest that fake sugars can also have unexpected effects on your gut and metabolic health and even promote food cravings and insulin resistance, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

I can’t help but think (other than being annoyed the studies aren’t linked right there) that it’s more of a correlation than causation that the artificial sweeteners are changing gut bacteria . Presumably you gut is adapt to high sugar intake, then all the sudden you’re not getting high sugar intake? Wouldn’t you expect these changes regardless of the artificial sweetener and wouldn’t the short term changes be basically a withdrawal from high amounts of table sugar which would be hard on the body in the short term but better off in the long term?

You're making some pretty big assumptions about the design of these unnamed studies. I don't think it's safe to assume the test population started with high sugar intakes, that the studies only tracked short-term effects, nor that they didn't use a control group.

this is wrong; the experiments in question did hold sugar intake constant

In rats and mice.

some of the experiments were in humans

Do u have a link to the experiments? I couldn’t find them in the article

unfortunately not; it's been quite a while since i read them

the reporter has no such excuse

As far as I can recall, the last time I read a study on the subject the conclusion was that artificial sweeteners do have an affect on gut bacteria, but the study purposely did not state whether the change is of any actual harm/benefit.

The discussion on the study was here on HackerNews and as I recall most people agreed with the methodology and outcomes. What is problematic is people reading conclusions into the study that were never there: that the change was harmful.

I've been hearing about sweeteners and gut flora for years and it still seems inconclusive. If there's a smoking gun it seems like it's hard to find and we've been eating artificial sweeteners for decades. What's creepy is that it's no longer a "diet" food but showing up unannounced.

I don't know if this is true of all types of fake sugar, but I've found that I can easily taste the difference in many cases, even when I'm not expecting it or looking for it.

Like the article says, it's often with food where I wouldn't expect to find artificial sweeteners, but there's a very distinctly odd, kind of sickly sweet taste that I'll notice sometimes; whenever I do, I check the ingredients label and always find fake sugar on the list.

Not only can I taste it, but I dislike the taste strongly, and my stomach definitely does not appreciate it. I actively look for and avoid fake sugars of all kinds, both traditionally artificial (aspartame, sucralose) and "natural" (stevia, monkfruit).

Real sugar makes me feel worse, but differently worse, if I consume more than a small amount at a time. However, small amounts of real sugar seem subjectively less poisonous than small amounts of fake sugar, especially if the real sugar is buffered by other non-sugary food (e.g. a drop of maple syrup in oatmeal vs. a gummy bear on an empty stomach).

The only exception to my fake sugar rule is that every once in a while I go for a pack of Orbit/Trident/Extra chewing gum, or a Diet Coke / Dr Pepper / Red Bull (yes I like the taste) when I'm on a long car ride and I want a little caffeine and something that tastes entertaining to fight the boredom. My stomach always hates me for it, but it's a once in a while thing, and I appreciate my body's reminders that I shouldn't consume that stuff on a regular basis.

I prefer the taste of low calorie sweeteners to HCFS and regular table sugar from corn or sugarcane or beets.

How about palm sugar? Or dates?

I hear you that artificial sweeteners taste surprisingly good but I love natural sweetners and if I want to taste sweetness I love whole dates.

Natural sweeteners? Stevia is a plant. Erithrytol is produced by your body. How exactly would you classify something as natural if not that?

I thought the person I replied to was talking about aspartame or sucrose.

I've never tasted HFCS on its own. Does it actually taste different from table sugar?

I meant foods with HFCS in it. I have never had it in its own, although I imagine it tasted disgustingly sweet. But I do like aspartame soft drinks more than HFCS/cane sugar soft drinks, and other “sugar free” options compared to the added sugar options (like popsicles).

All of this is anecdotal, so discard if you wish. I've never tasted it on its own, but you can get sodas sweetened with sugar or HFCS or many fake sugars. For me, the fake sugars have distinct aftertastes that I find unpleasant; sugar vs HFCS is more subtle, but I get more satiation from sugar sweetened than HFCS sweetened so I'm less likely to drink large quantities of sugar sweetened beverages vs HFCS sweetened. I don't know if any are still sold, but beverages sweetened with a mix of sugar/HFCS and sucralose were harder for me to detect the sucralose aftertaste. I also find sucralose to have a less offensive aftertaste than aspartame.

Coke is sweetened with cane sugar instead of HFCS during Passover for reasons I'm not the slightest bit qualified to explain. Pick up a bottle with a yellow cap come Passover and do a triangle test with a bottle sweetened with HFCS.

You might also find that Mexican Coke in your grocery stores, which I believe is more likely to be sweetened with cane sugar.

I'll usually notice a flavor change when they make the switch (like, oh, must be Passover), but I couldn't tell you which is which by blind taste test. I don't drink a ton of Coke either.

I hate sweeteners too. They all seem to have an almost but not quite menthol aftertaste, and some also have an unpleasant slimy or oily mouthfeel.

I have been accused of being anti-science when refusing fake sugars because people assume it's based on safety. They don't want to believe someone can have a different experience of taste. "No, I don't care about the studies, it just tastes horrible." It's taken as an excuse.

Agreed, artifical sweetners, particularly stevia, are the most horrible things I have ever tasted. The first experience I have consuming stevia now makes me refuse any kind of product that is likely to have it without checking the ingredient list first. Side note, I cannot find a protein shake, except for plain protein powder, that does not have artificial sweetners. Please, someone start producing a savoury shake :(

I gave up and just use plain protein isolate powder. It doesn’t taste great, but at same time it doesn’t have this horrible chemical taste flavored versions do.

I sometimes add unsweetened cocoa powder or vanilla to spice it up, but more often than not just drink it straight up.

I can definitely taste a difference between stevia-sweetened tea vs sugar-sweetened tea. "Sickly sweet" is a good description of stevia. Xylitol on the other hand feels quite similar to the regular sugar.

I find a mix of sweeteners is usually less offensive, part of why erythritol is usually combined with monk fruit sweetener. Of course the effects of each will vary from person to person... including glucose response.

What happens with your liver and pancreas in response to something sweet crossing the tongue can work against you... it's amazing how sweet everything tastes, too much so, when you don't eat refined foods (including sweet fruits) for a while.

> ...allulose, stevia and monk fruit extract, are referred to as “natural” because they’re derived from plants.

You are unlikely to find plant-derived allulose in many products[0]:

"Because it occurs naturally in very small amounts, the allulose you find packaged for sale isn’t its natural form. It has been created artificially by food scientists from fructose (fruit sugar)."

Physician and nutrition expert Michael Greger recently did a survey of the medical literature around allulose, which appears to be cautiously optimistic.[1]

[0] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-allulose/

[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/does-the-sweetener-allulose...

On my second round of children, and I track these things.

The article is distracting if you are used to reading well-written text. You need to watch a bunch of one-liners with swiping graphics to get to the 'meat' of the argument.

Too much sugar in the presentation of the material ;)

> Too much sugar in the presentation of the material ;)

Yes exactly, even if it isn't propaganda it's too sweet for any purpose. Someone should study this.

The solution to this entire class of problems is not a question of which type of sugar or sugar substitute should be in your processed foodstuffs, it's whether you should be consuming any processed food items whatsoever.

Even if you still want some prepared foods, be sure to read the ingredients label, and stick to the more traditional processed foods (bread, soy sauce, etc.) as long as they're free of the dough conditioners, high-fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate and similar preservatives, etc.

Far and away the best dietary option is to go back to basics and learn to cook at least a little using only fresh ingredients, it's one of the simplest ways to improve nutrition and general health.

Love how this article has diagrams of how insulin resistance works to scare people against using artificial sweeteners that might, "according to some studies", cause insulin resistance.

SUGAR causes insulin resistance.

My takeaway was that you should try your best to consume neither of the two products, and that you shouldn't assume that a non-nutritive sweetener was perfectly healthy and that you can consume it in unlimited quantities.

And it took many paragraphs to reach this conclusion:

“The most rigorous clinical trials show that when people replace sugary drinks with artificially sweetened beverages like Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi it helps them avoid gaining excess weight.”

There's misguided government policies leading to weird consequences where I am. Other than Coca Cola original, it's impossible to find any carbonated drink that doesn't have artificial sweeteners mixed in. Apparently sugar above some threshold triggers tax but there are no restrictions on artificial sweeteners. This is probably not going to end well.

In the area I am in (Philadelphia), drinks with artificial/zero-calorie sweeteners are actually taxed the same way as sugar/corn syrup.

Will vary from region to region... I think GB and EU are stronger on this than in the US as an example.

Most of them have diet or zero in the name which makes it pretty easy to tell. The tricky ones contain some sugar (likely from fruit) and some artificial sweeteners,the only one I know of being the v8 sparkling energy drinks. I don't know of any soda that has partial HFCS and artificial sweetener.

Not where I live (some EU member), not so obvious. For example all Fanta has some artificial sweetener. Diet fanta has no sugar at all.

  Another study published in Nature Medicine linked the sugar substitute erythritol to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes

This study was discussed here last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34965453

  Two sweeteners in particular, saccharin and stevia, worsened the participants’ blood sugar control

These are commonly-used; I wonder if my PCP will ever discuss / contact me in regards to this.

Most doctors know and follow the "standard of care" which is excellent for treating acute symptoms and diseases. Doctors are generally terrible about dietary recommendations and knowing how to treat diseases of civilization.

I was having constant stroke symptoms. dozens of doctors in all specialities. One mentioned that I shouldn’t take triptans for migraines as it could trigger a stroke. Not a one mentioned anything else. Including 4 neurologists.

Symptoms stopped the moment I went on blood thinners.

What symptoms? I didn’t think they were quickly reversible.

Think 10% of usual functional to 50% in a few days of blood thinners. 4 years on and I’m probably at 80% now.

Right side body weakness, numbness Severe Brain fog, visual issues, inability to write, etc. basically TIA symptoms, was having several a week. Damage was building up. Had a huge clot show up in lungs. A few days after starting blood thinners the worst of my symptoms stopped. Going off of them and they come back quickly.

I have 2 known risk factors. So anything extra that contributes is a big issue.

IC thanks.

The Washington Post article say: "Two sweeteners in particular, saccharin and stevia, worsened the participants’ blood sugar control"

But the research paper from Cell says "Sucralose and saccharin supplementation impairs glycemic response in healthy adults." Stevia in the research paper is not stated as "impairs glycemic response". [1]

Is the Washington Post article correct about the research paper findings?

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00919-9

It isn't clear to me if that study makes any attempt to control for confounding variables. Like, maybe people that are already obese or suffering from heart disease are more likely to consume sugar substitutes? I haven't had time to read the original study and ctrl+F did not locate the phrase "3rd variable" or "confound[ing|er]:" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9.epdf

Wet streets cause rain.

Am I the only one who likes sugar? You know that is substracted from fruits and vegetables. The one that all my 2^n ancestors consumed for billions of years. It gives me calories, so I can do stuff. (So do carbs, fats and protein.)

I don't like artificial sweeteners ( I don't really like sweet stuff ), as they are not proven to be safe. (Even when natural, they are substracted from weird stuff, not from carrots or grapes or whatever.)

Everybody likes sugar the way our ancestors consumed it, in naturally occurring fruits and veggies.

We object to it being added to every single food you can buy in the supermarket.

Fake sugar is not the solution to that.

Increasing my sugar intake helps me exercise more and be healthier overall. Fake sugars are worse than sugar being added to food. They are not the solution to that. Anyone bringing that up is strawmanning. (I bring it up only because many posters are seemingly saying, hey at least fake sugar combats extra added sugar in bread and stuff).

Food with added sugar - at least it will give you energy to go do something with. Whether or not you do is up to you. Fake sugars mislead your body into thinking it just acquired energy to go do things. It has no good longterm purpose. Being low energy and hungry and ingesting fake sugar to stave off that feeling is misunderstanding the problem.

That's my experience over 7 years of trying to lose weight and be healthy long term. I had a diet soda/fake sugar phase in there and it worked for a few years maybe, but I am better off overall abandoning that whole idea.

> The one that all my 2^n ancestors consumed for billions of years.

Your ancestors don't increase exponentially as you go back in time. Consider that the number of humans in existence gets smaller, not larger, as you move into the past.

Studies also reveals that companies has been sneaking Dihydrogen oxide even in store salads!!! the same substance that's been shown to cause hyponatremia. This world is becoming unlivable!

Not just companies add this. Farmers spread it on their crops.

Hard to imagine that the negative effects of sugar alcohols could be anywhere near as bad as added refined added sugar.

I finally gave up on protein powder. It's impossible to buy just protein powder. They always sneak in one sweetener or another. The latest is erythritol, another one suspected of causing metabolic problems.

If I wanted sugar in it, I'd add it.

I switched to eating a hard boiled egg instead.

I'm glad I can still buy coffee that is just coffee.

Naked Nutrition sells 5lbs containers of just whey, no other ingredients.

Naked Nutrition Naked Whey is Whey Protein Concentrate, which has no added sugar but does have some sugars. (Of course, so do hardboiled eggs.)

There are manufacturers that sell Whey Protein Isolate without any sugars (added or otherwise).

> I finally gave up on protein powder. It's impossible to buy just protein powder. They always sneak in one sweetener or another.

There are, in fact, protein powders with no added sweeteners, though most of them still have some sugars (and usually also fat and/or nonsugar carbs) from whatever the source of the protein is (but these can be very low; e.g., Naked Nutrition Naked Pea protein powder has 27g of protein, 2g sugars (0 added sugar), and 0.5g fat per 30g serving.)

But, if you really want protein powder without sugar, you can, in fact, find protein powders without it (e.g., Whey Protein Isolate.)

> I switched to eating a hard boiled egg instead.

At 0.5g sugars for 5.7g protein? Why, exactly, are you avoiding protein powders, again?

Sugar in its natural state (not refined, not artificial) is fine.

What these articles never seem to discuss is whether artificial sweeteners are anywhere as bad for you as HFCS.

... or whether HFCS is really that much worse than sugar water.

I don't really hold that HFCS is really much worse than regular table sugar... the ratios are similar. Not to mention your pancreas and liver don't really care about the source and it's broken down almost exactly the same. Fruit juice (much higher fructose) content is imo much worse than HFCS even, in that only the liver can metabolize it and the negative effects are roughly the same as consuming alcohol in similar quantities.

“Sneak into foods” like the culprit is the fake sugar itself and not companies making decisions.

I really want augmented reality in a google glasses like format for in-person shopping. Lookup the nutrition facts and put X's over the items my configuration says I don't want.

OMG Yes, please.

Stevia is not a quoted "natural" thing, stevia is a plant. And a medicinal one by the way. Been drinking stevia infusions for a long time and tastes great. Nice try sugar lobby.

"When given a choice between cocaine or water sweetened with saccharin, rats will almost always choose the artificially sweetened beverage."

This is how I know I am not a rat. Not that I am in the habit of drinking cocaine water but I am absolutely one of the people who are revolted by the taste of artificial sweeteners.

Black coffee all day long for me, though usually decaf nowadays.

I mean, I'd definitely pick the water sweetened with saccharin given those options; maybe these rats grew up in arcades and know that Winners Don't Use Drugs[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Don%27t_Use_Drugs

Diet Coke vs really really OG classic Coke.

i was astounded a few weeks ago to discover that sprite and 7up now have acesulfame k in them, at least here in argentina

not the diet versions, to be clear, the sugary versions

I've noticed this too in the USA: artificial sweeteners being added to "non-low-sugar" junk foods. Dietary labeling laws and greater public awareness of the dangers of sugar have led people to start checking the sugar content. So they add artificial sweeteners to bring down the labeled sugar content without reducing perceived sweetness.

We just need artificial sweeteners added to the labels right under added sugars. Giving consumers more information and letting them make choices for themselves is something everyone should be able to get behind.

Same with tonic water in the UK. You have to buy the much more expensive premium products if you don't want artificial sweeteners.

Generally, it's to better comply with limits on HFCS/Sugar. Not sure it's better or not... I generally consume zero calorie drinks, and try to limit them to with meals (caloric intake).

For me it is a labeling issue. I really don't like the fake sweet flavor. It used to be you could look at the ingredients for a small set of known fake sweeteners, but they seem to invent a new kind every month so I can't keep track.

Whole foods and foods you cook yourself don't have any added fake sugar.

I noticed a commercial last week, "65 percent of all soft drinks sold last year had little to zero sugar."

Then the next morning "artificial sweeteners cause heart attacks."

>Sucralose and acesulfame-k, are regularly used in Greek yogurts,

"Greek-style" yogurt? Yes. The original Greek strained yogurt has no sugar. It is inedible. Choke-hazard.

Reminder to read the ingredient list on everything. Something I do anyway but I realize I'm a nerd and many consumers don't want to do this.

There are ways to get around the ingredient list requirements. Tic tacs famously don't list any sugar because the quantity in a single tic tac is below the threshold for reporting. I've seen "dehydrated cane juice" listed as an ingredient...that's just another name for sugar.

Some others to look out for: agave nectar, Cane juice crystals, Diastatic malt, Barley malt, Brown rice syrup.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/popular-artificial-sweeten...

They also found that some fake sugars increases clotting. Particular interest in that I used to clot like crazy when having drinks that contained that same sugar.

I propose that in discussions like this we don't group all alternate sweeteners together as if they're one thing.

For example, saying "some fake sugars increase blood clotting" subliminally throws shade on all alternative sweeteners even if only one has been studied in a study.

Also, the term "fake sugars" implies that somehow sugar is real while all other sweeteners are "fake", which is again just a way to throw shade. (For example, erythritol and stevia are natural.)

Aside: I am not a fan of scroll-interactive stories with rare exceptions. Even though it is "just" an intro for this article, it sets up a very childish (?) framing for the article, which makes the rest of the content suspicious. If the data were good and the reasoning sound, would they still need a scroll-by cartoon of ingredients sneaking into a grocery?

I've seen an influx of articles providing "look over here" reasons for potential cause of metabolic issues. A quick search shows, in the last week: Fake sugar, marijuana, the flu, keto diet, and lack of sleep. Maybe it's just the media returning to its usual hysterics ... or maybe they're trying to distract from something else.

> Maybe it's just the media returning to its usual hysterics ... or maybe they're trying to distract from something else.

Two things can be true! Maybe there is evidence suggesting problems with all of those things and maybe it's just being heavily pushed in media to distract from something else. Personally, I think most of the food we eat and the environments we live in are poisoned and that's how companies like it because it means you can't blame any one of them for health problems they know they are causing since it's impossible for anyone to say which of the countless poisoned things we're regularly exposed to was the cause of those issues.

Sucralose gives me hives within about 30 mins of ingestion that lasts for days and diarrhea that lasts for at least a week.

Excessive maltitol (easy if you eat a ton of sugar-free gummy bears) gives most people the latter.

I still wonder why Athletic Greens uses stevia. It just tastes terrible. Even if it's natural.

Fake sugar? Is that like "fake leaded petrol"?

processed foods ⇒ cancer

Artificial sweeteners are not processed foods, so what's your point?

Ah yes, everything good in life is bad and cause cancer and diabetes and heart attacks....the blaming game has come for artificial sweeteners that were created because we were blaming sugar of everything wrong with the world. Who's next?

If I were a regulator, I would try to directly link foods to health outcomes.

Ie. If someone eats lots of bigmacs and then dies young, mcdonalds should have to pay a 'killer food' penalty.

If someone eats lots of apples and lives to 100, then the apple farmer should receive some kind of reward.

I would implement this by having some subset of the population volunteer their purchase data and health data, and have the regulator issue rewards and fines each year based on which food producers managed to make/keep their customers healthiest.

The end result should be that healthy foods are both profitable and cheap, and there is an incentive to reformulate foods to keep the eaters healthier.

That entirely bypasses the current problem of having food manufacturers trying to make their food look healthy while it actually isn't.

It's completely impossible to prove that eating some food X caused someone's death. Also, anything can kill you if you have otherwise poor health and eat enough of it, including apples.

No, but you can take data on 1 million customers of food X, and see how many died, vs the non-customers.

Sure, there will be ways to game the system, like "Buy 6 of this soda and get free gym membership!". But is that a bad thing?

I disagree, because... correlation does not imply causation.

Does ice cream cause skin cancer?

The great thing about this is it doesn't matter if the cause is correlation or causation. Either way, companies will be incentivized to make their food and customer base healthier.

> No, but you can take data on 1 million customers of food X, and see how many died, vs the non-customers.

This is actually extremely difficult to isolate that the food X has a causal link to lifespan. Consider the amount of research and scale of research needed to evaluate the safety of cigarettes, which I can guarantee you has a significantly greater effect on lifespan than any possible food eaten.

Your first job as a regulator, should be to realize that McDonald's is the government.

Your second job is to not piss off "the government".

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