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Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> Disciplined appetites sharpen the mind

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

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