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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

My personal, unsubstantiated opinion is that the food most people eat is now full of substances and chemicals that weren't there 50 years ago. A huge example is high fructose corn syrup. Almost everything is sweetened with that instead of cane sugar.

Food manufacturers IMO only care about making food cheap, making us crave it, and making it last a long time on the shelf. They aren't concerned about making sure it is healthy, as long as it doesn't immediately kill us.

Another example is artificial sweeteners. Studies have shown that sucralose (Splenda) reduces insulin resistance something like 17%. Is anyone making sure that everyone knows that? Hell no.

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Not to blindly defend excessive food additives or anything, but putting questionable additives into food has been a thing for at least three times as long as you say; look up Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley[1] and swill milk[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley?useski... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal?useskin=vec...

America is not the world.

High fructose corn syrup is a very American thing. Over 90% of the nutritive sweetener used worldwide is sucrose.

Sure, but HFCS is also a bit of a red herring. Sucrose is half fructose, the difference from HFCS is minor - they're both problematic for humans to consume in excess.

There's a very big difference between HFCS and sucrose. HFCS is soluble monosaccarides. Sucrose is a disaccaride which requires enzymatic cleaving to produce free fructose and glucose. The kinetics of the fructose processing are very different as a result--with sucrose the release is much slower because it's rate-limited by the quantity and kinetics of the sucrase enzyme. It's not going to hit your liver with a high concentration of fructose instantaneously, it's going to be a slower release over an extended period.

That's not what the endocrinologist behind Sugar The Bitter Truth video tells us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM&t=18m46s

Well, given that he references papers from the "corn refiner's association" immediately afterwards, I'll note that this may not be entirely unbiased. This entire industry in the US has immense political clout, and that may well extend to publishing questionable research that comes out in their favour to confuse wider debate and regulatory change.

There's plenty of evidence from the other point of view demonstrating that HFCS has rather different behaviour than sucrose. Quickly-found example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22152650/

> Well, given that he references papers from the "corn refiner's association" immediately afterwards, I'll note that this may not be entirely unbiased.

That's a fun conspiracy theory and all, but he's clearly not advocating for HFCS consumption. Watch the entire talk, he's obviously not pro-corn industry. Infact he does attack HFCS specifically but not for metabolically different reasons.

He's clearly concerned about people mistaking HFCS as the problem when fructose is the problem, and sugar is half fructose, so you're not avoiding it by replacing your HFCS with sucrose. Metabolically they're basically the same.

It's almost entirely caused by the conflux of sugar tariffs and immense overproduction of corn in the USA.

More specifically, sugar tariffs and corn subsidies.

I run a health food company[1] and when going to trade shows to interact with reps from the big ingredient supplier companies it's all about touting that everything is 'Legally GRAS' or Generally Recognized as Safe and 'Clean Labeling' meaning that experimental ingredients can be put on the label under a more innocuous sounding name. Inquiring as to actual safety is met with blank stares.

1. Mealsquares.com

High fructose corn syrup is a very poor example. It is composed of fructose and glucose, both very familiar molecules to our bodies.

However, glucose can be stored and metabolised throughout the body whilst fructose requires processing in the liver. Our bodies are not designed to have a large instantaneous "hit" of fructose. They can cope with slow release of natural fructose in fruits, but in processed food it's soluble and released very quickly. The kinetics of how it's processed are very different.

Apples are also much sweeter today than they were decades ago because of careful breeding. But this is perceived differently.

I tried removing sugar from my diet at one point. My sense of taste changed, some varieties of apples became too overpoweringly sweet to enjoy.

Sugar is 50% glucose / 50% fructose. GFCS is 40%/60% at worst, not a huge difference.

Humans didn't eat a lot of sugar until fairly recently, too. And even if you did, you'd have to be very, very rich to be eating it 3 meals a day.

Now you can get sugary cereal for breakfast, sandwich bread with HFCS for your lunchtime sammo, and a curry jam packed with palm oil and sugar for dinner. And that doesn't count the cookies or Pepsi you slam in between.

Raw sugar of HFCS -- don't matter none, it's that you're slamming em at each meal, all the time.

All I am saying is HFCS and sugar are pretty much the same thing and it makes no sense to vilify one and not the other.

They’re familiar, but not in the acute and frequent doses we receive it in these days.

Fructose is an appetite stimulant, so eating a lot of it will change your eating habits. And we definitely eat more fructose than a few generations ago.

In the same way that we have cannabinoid and opioid receptors, and the molecules that activate them are very familiar to our bodies, yeah.

As if people 50 years ago had a life expectancy of 120. While healthcare is primary reason for its increase it is not scientifically rational to pray what was there 50 years ago. HFCS contributed to diseases so far less than cane sugar, with a lower volume dose as it is sweeter by far. As with making food cheap, I doubt what diet will be if local farming is the only choice. Suddenly no oranges from Cali, beef from Chicago, nor fishes from sea. How is it possible to have seafood diet if someone lives in Utah then? Fish out of the dead salty swamp? The single catch-all phrase of "that was not a thing 50 years ago, and there are bad things happening last 50 years, gonna blame them all" I'd rather unhelpful.

this makes me so sad. I can't eat anything sweet and the one thing I found that I seem to tolerate well to a degree is sweetened with sucralose, sweet is addictive... I just ate 8 apples today when I lost control and I'm going to pay the price the next few days (food intolerance)

Are you intolerant to apples? If not, I think you’re in good shape as far as binging goes.

I eat two or three apples just about every day. As far as food habits go I think it’s one of the best I’ve had.

Seemingly intolerant to starches and sugar in general, leads to depression. Weirdly enough green stuff seems to give me panic attacks and suicidal ideation. Takes about 4 days to get into effect. Probably something to do with fermentation. Next one will be the 3rd Therapist, this time she's also a general practicioner. There are all kinds of doctors on youtube talking about this, but haven't found one in Germany who could give me a diagnosis... I'm so frustrated

Not a doctor, but it could be auto-brewery syndrome [1]. In effect, your gut biome contains fermenting bacteria that ferment sugars and starches into alcohol. The alcohol might be causing depression, and switching to a diet that avoids fermentable stuff might cause anxiety due to alcohol withdrawal.

Again, not a doctor, not a diagnosis, but it might help give you a name that your doctor could look into.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513346/

looking into enzymes for the next 2 weeks. Haven't gotten a SIBO test yet, but SIBO makes sense when undigested carbs sit around.

Oh wow, that sounds incredibly frustrating. It seems wise to consider that it might be a fermentation problem, perhaps a serious imbalance of microbes or something.

Good luck. I dealt with GI issues that lead to both physical and psychological misery once (after repeated courses of antibiotics), and my advice is to hang in there — you could find something that works for you, even it takes a while.

yes, fermentation was my thought as well. Carnivore diet helps, but I am unable to stick to it some days and when stressed out I'll eat anything carb, even cookies that bugs won't touch. Probably toxic in other ways I don't know.

8 apples is nothing, they contain very few sugar, the question is more what else do you eat? isn't it the combination that's causing intolerance?

edit: I saw your other reply, there must be other problems, like constipation (fruits should be digested quite quickly and not too quickly too - diarrhea, it takes time to build the right microbiome), not enough mastication maybe too, and not enough fasting

Fermentation is actually something great (before eating), like naturally fermented onions or peppers (they get soft), or almost all non sugary vegetables, allows to skip cooking which destroys most valuable things in vegetable

If binging on apples is the worst of your concerns you're doing just fine.

I have oral allergy syndrome and get a reaction when I eat a bunch of different fruits raw. I'm allergic to fucking apples. LOL

this is really sad :(

checked out this, out of curiosity https://www.thermofisher.com/diagnostic-education/hcp/de/de/...

Birch also shares an allergen with cashew nuts and tomatoes, afaik

Not chemicals. It’s the processed foods and food science.

And by processed foods, I mean foods that are designed to: - Minimize required mastication and digestion time. - Designed to subvert the satiation and cloying defense mechanisms, that tell our body to stop.

Sucralose (Splenda) increases insulin resistance.

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