Hacker News Reader

Comment by eldaisfish | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com