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Comment by cheekibreeki2 | Hacker News Reader

Just returned from Ireland and every 'regular' soda was full of disgusting artificial sweeteners. In the usa these would be labeled diet. And of course sucralose was pretty common and we're now finding scary things about its harm to the human body. Sugar really isn't that bad..

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Sugar in the amount put in soda absolutely is terrible for you. The problem definitely is with people drinking too much soda, period, but replacing your average Americans's diet soda consumption with sugar soda consumption works out to an average increase of ~73 calories/person/day. Of course, most of that consumption is being done by the subset of the population currently primarily drinking diet soda, which multiples that number by 2-5 depending on what study you refer to. Which would definitely be an alarming increase in caloric consumption in a significant block of the population.

It's really weird that we've normalized consuming huge amounts of what's effectively an exceptionally-sweet dessert drink with most non-fancy restaurant or fast-food meals. Shit made a lot more sense when standard serving size was like 7oz and free soda refills weren't a common thing (so: the 1950s or whenever, for the former, and before some time in the '90s, for the latter). 20+oz glasses (and 32oz "medium-size" to-go cups—JFC) and free refills pushed by servers are just nuts. That's so very much sugar.

Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.

Gotta do something with all that corn.

The cups are usually 3/4 full of ice to start with, heh

73 calories actually sounds misleadingly low? How is that calculated?

I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.

The average American consumes 38.87 gallons of soda year. 43% of Coke sales are Diet, I extrapolated that across the market, since Coke has a pretty dominant market share anyway. That's 16.7 gallons of diet soda per American, or 178 cans of soda. Multiply that by 150 calories/can, divide by 365, you get the 73 calories.

As I mentioned before, that's a side effect of averaging across all Americans, a fraction of who don't drink soda, and a (much larger, in both senses of the word) who drink sugared soda. The population that those calories would realistically be distributed over, the diet soda drinkers, is somewhere between 20% and 40% of the population, hence the "multiply by 2-5".

Makes sense; but I think it is odd to include folks that aren't relevant in the increase, though. Really, it is just weird to see a number that the only way to see an increase of 78 calories is to swap over into a half of a drink.

Granted, you work with what you have. :D

Yeah, I suspect it works out closer to the "350 more calories per day in 20% of the population" number, but again, sources were rough.

As a biologist, I can tell you that sugar really is bad. All sorts of nasty effects (e.g., look at the RAGE gene and pathway). Of course, that doesn't mean artificial sweeteners are a good alternative. Limiting added sweeteners of any kind is a good idea, just hard to follow.

You are making it sound like alcohol - where the warning is no amount of alcohol is safe.

Sugar is a naturally occurring substance and is totally safe for consumption. However, purified added sugar is bad for you because in nature you cannot find a fruit that contains that many sugars per gram.

Just because we're finding out many sugar replacements are bad doesn't mean that sugar isn't bad in high doses as with sugary drinks.

Don't consume high doses of anything. Sugar is fantastic.

Sugar is pretty bad. Glucose spikes cause a huge amount of stress in the body.

But yeah, Ireland's drinks are like that because of a 'sugar tax', and now it's quite hard to find fizzy drinks without gross sweeteners. Even brands that were quite high quality before are kinda rancid now.

Nah, sugar is way worse.

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