Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

What about consumption of processed sugar? (e.g. ice cream, candy, cookies, brownies, and all the foods from the grocery stores in the United States with sugar discreetly sprinkled in).

Personally, I know if I consume too much of the above for several days, weeks, or months prior to a blood test, my A1C will be fucked up and bad. I am quite athletic, trim, and thin.

View on HN

Discreetly? It’s on the nutrition label. I don’t think candies and ice cream today are particularly less healthy than they were 50 years ago - and there are clearly more options today. It’s easier to eat healthy today than it ever was - this is not why people are getting fat.

This is an unwinnable conflict between population medicine and policy and individual choice.

Candy has probably gotten larger and easier to eat. Like compare a peppermint to stuff like peppermint M&Ms.

No - in general shrinkflation is a thing - and it tends that things peaked 20 to 30 years ago. Many junk food items are larger than when they hit the shelves but substantially smaller than their peak sizes.

An example since the pandemic, a "pint" of Hagen Dazs ice cream is no longer a pint (16oz). They are now 14oz. Same with most other brands that come in that size container. Halloween candy also got pretty microscopic. The "bite size" snickers, etc, are like 1/4 the size they used to be.

Haagen Dazs has been 14 oz for several years now, possibly even more than a decade.

>Beginning in late January 2009, 16-ounce cartons shrunk to 14 ounces, and two months later the larger 32-ounce pots lost 4 ounces. The price for either carton, however, stayed the same.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/shrinkflation-the-consumer-g...

Impressive memory!

I don’t think candies and ice cream today are particularly less healthy than they were 50 years ago

Compared to 50 years ago, portions are larger and, based on little more than my personal impression, stuff has gotten softer and easier to eat.

Larger packages tend to be have shrunk some, but like there's "shareable" M&Ms or whatever by the register, in a much bigger package than decades ago.

> Compared to 50 years ago, portions are larger and, based on little more than my personal impression, stuff has gotten softer and easier to eat.

The person I was replying to was talking about supermarket sold mass produced confections, and my response was valid, not based on personal experience and can be easily verified. For most of those things shrinkflation is the predominant force. Ice cream packaging sizes and prepackaged cookies haven’t gotten larger. And if anybody is surprised that these products are loaded with refined sugar (then as now) that’s on the public education system. The fats used have may have changed.

Restaurant portion sizes and content have increased but that’s a different problem. Same as dispensed soft drinks.

> gotten softer and easier to eat.

What does this even mean?

Hostess foods famously went out of business a few years ago. When I think “soft” and calorie dense I can’t imagine any time more representative than the 50s and 60s.

>> gotten softer and easier to eat.

>What does this even mean?

I believe the implication is that packaged food is even more processed than before (less fibre, more multi-syllabic ingredients). The benefit is that our bodies can extract more calories from food (ground beef provides more calories than similar amount of steak). But the increase in type-2 diabetes suggests lack of calories is not a problem for these people.

The problem is the same as with cars; it's true that the "standard size" M&M packet may be smaller now (I've not checked, but let's grant it), but most checkouts are lined with KING SIZE or SHARE SIZE which are way bigger.

"Of the 11 dietary factors considered, three had an outsized contribution to the rising global incidence of type 2 diabetes: Insufficient intake of whole grains, excesses of refined rice and wheat, and the overconsumption of processed meat. Factors such as drinking too much fruit juice and not eating enough non-starchy vegetables, nuts, or seeds, had less of an impact on new cases of the disease.

“Our study suggests poor carbohydrate quality is a leading driver of diet-attributable type 2 diabetes globally, and with important variation by nation and over time,” says senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and dean for policy at the Friedman School. “These new findings reveal critical areas for national and global focus to improve nutrition and reduce devastating burdens of diabetes.”

Type 2 diabetes is characterized by the resistance of the body’s cells to insulin. Of the 184 countries included in the Nature Medicine study, all saw an increase in type 2 diabetes cases between 1990 and 2018, representing a growing burden on individuals, families, and healthcare systems.

The research team based their model on information from the Global Dietary Database, along with population demographics from multiple sources, global type 2 diabetes incidence estimates, and data on how food choices impact people living with obesity and type 2 diabetes from multiple published papers.

The analysis revealed that poor diet is causing a larger proportion of total type 2 diabetes incidence in men versus women, in younger versus older adults, and in urban versus rural residents at the global level.

Regionally, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia —particularly in Poland and Russia, where diets tend to be rich in red meat, processed meat, and potatoes —had the greatest number of type 2 diabetes cases linked to diet. Incidence was also high in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially in Colombia and Mexico, which was credited to high consumption of sugary drinks, processed meat, and low intake of whole grains."

Correlation does not equal causation. Diets high in red meat and fat have been the norm for most of human history, yet diabetes has only become an epidemic in recent decades. The real culprits are the processed foods and sedentary lifestyles of modern life, not traditional diets.

But they specifically called out processed meats, not just red meat.

Red meat consumption in the US may be down compared to the 70s, but I'm pretty sure it's up compared to the human average 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000 and 50000 years ago.

Overall meat consumption (per capita per year) in the US has increased continuously and quite significantly from around 90kg in 1960 to around 120kg in 2000 and stable since then.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...

I would guess that processed grains and starches (i.e., stuff made of flour - even flour made from "whole grains", Veggie Straws, stuff like that) is still a bigger problem for most people. My understanding is that they get digested so quickly and efficiently that, from a nutritional perspective, they're equivalent to sugar.

imo, the biggest contributor is soda. soda is roughly half as many grams of sugar as ice cream, but eating half a soda bottle of ice cream would make most people puke

A can of coke has 39g of sugar. A 14oz Haagen Dazs vanilla bean ice cream contains 32g per serving and 84g in the entire 14oz container.

A 2L bottle of Coke contains 220g of sugar. So half a bottle is less than 1.5 ice creams.

39g/355ml[1] is almost exactly half (54%) of 84g/414ml.

So Coke is indeed half the volumetric sugar content of ice cream. However, I think I probably could fairly handily eat half a Coke-can's worth of ice cream! Half a 2L-bottle's worth of ice cream (1L) would not end well, whereas 2L of Coke is a lot but definitely possible.

[1] Had never realised US cans were slightly larger than what we have (330ml).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com