U.S. Sugar consumption trend from 1970-2021
ers.usda.gov
ers.usda.gov
Sugar is much less of a problem if you are also being very active on a daily basis. For example, your work contains physical component or maybe you are walking a lot.
So while the graph is showing dropping amount of sugar consumption, it is not taking account for also falling healthy limit of sugar consumption, ie. the fact that we should be eating even less overall given falling activity levels.
And this is especially true for kids whose activity levels fallen dramatically since smartphones.
I can tell that the same amount of sugar has much less effect on me since I lost weight and started running a lot every day. And I know this because I put on a continuous glucose monitor from time to time and can observe sugar spikes from foods to debug my diet.
You can learn a lot wearing CGM like the fact that my local Starbucks was serving me lactose-free milk regardless of what I ordered. You can tell lactose-free milk on a CGM because of a huge glucose spike. The reason? "Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose which can be easily absorbed by the body and cause blood glucose spikes.
...how?
Like, seriously how? The graph is about sugar. It doesn't have obese or similar words in it.
If there is a graph of "U.S. citizen's smartphone usage trend from 2010-2021", are you going to say it's misleading a bit because it doesn't take sugar into account...?
The truth is that obesity is more complex problem but sugar definitely one of the important drivers.
One way obesity is a complex problem is that in most people it is delayed by decades. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment for a long time before they become disregulated enough to start gaining weight.
If you want to add that to an article about how "100 pounds of sugar a year with half the activity because people people are playing xbox too much" that's fine - this could be a part of that conversation.
Nothing wrong with the bigger conversations... but also nothing wrong with data points like this for the sake of data points.
Are you diabetic?
Most people will never have CGM on and hence no way to really understand how different food they eat influences their blood glucose.
Not my intention at all. Quite the opposite. I only mean to point out that some valuable (hard-fought) tools are there, literally at our fingertips, to take greater control over our diets and lifestyles, and I wish more were aware of them! The information is not hiding.
If you drink something like "lactose-free milk" or feed your kids "50% reduced-sugar juice" I encourage the intellectual curiosity to understand what it is that makes it different from the regular kind - be it lactase or stevia or whatever else. And more often than not the answer is found in the ingredients label
Thereby leaving the milk lactose free... Lactase, the enzyme in question, is produced by those who are not lactose intolerant and results in the same quantity of sugar though perhaps without so much "spike".
PS. A graph showing the total amount of daily calories from carbs, not just sugar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-caloric-supply-deri...
The data in the chart is sweetener "availability" and not really consumption, though it can be assumed that if less is available per capita, then less is consumed as well (per capita). But, this data doesn't explains the increase in obesity since 1970. this might be because of data being an average. Stats like p90 sugar consumption might show a better correlation with obesity rates and hence may be more meaningful than per capita sweetener availability.
There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive" -- it's good for you! It's an obscenely easily digestible source of energy, whose products are used very easily by the cells. In the case of fructose, its consumption is relatively more insulin-friendly than the glucose-heavy starches. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.
Seriously "addictive" sugary foods are psychologically problematic usually for other reasons. Pure cane sugar is not very addictive when consumed alone. Try it.
Sugar on its own isn't addictive and isn't a necessary nor sufficient ingredient for hyperpalatability. Foods can be hyperpalatable without sugar, and in fact most (~70%) hyperpalatable foods have their hyperpalatability driven by fat and sodium:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672140/
> The availability of HPF in the US food sysltem has expanded substantially over the past 30 years. The current US food supply is highly saturated with HPF, which our findings indicate comprised almost 70 % of available foods as of 2018. The growing availability of HPF over time, particularly HPF high in fat and Na, may have resulted from the reformulation of existing food products in the food system to be hyper-palatable. Thus, expanding HPF availability may be one key contributor to the obesogenic food environment in the US. Given potential consequences for population health, policy-level action is needed to address the presence of HPF in the food system. Policy may focus on limiting the nutrient thresholds allowed in foods to be below HPF thresholds (e.g. foods should contain <25 % kcal from fat and <0·30 % g from Na).
In reality, sugar is just straight-up bad in anything resembling the quantities we eat it, and we should not. It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density. Therefore it makes sense to seek out. In our synthetic world, we can make as much as we want and eat it whenever we want.
The reward system exhibits unconstrained positive feedback.
As a counter-example there are tons of things that 'feel good' but are destructive, like opioids and cigarettes. Things that are addictive aren't de facto good for you. In fact they're usually very bad for you because they overload your reward feedback network.
Fat has 2.25x times the energy per gram that sugar does.
Not to mention cane sugar is just sucrose, also called table sugar, and it's the same as beet sugar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose
It is not much different than high fructose corn syrup.
"Sucrose is composed of 50% glucose and 50% fructose, whereas the forms of HFCS used in most foods and beverages are typically composed of 55% fructose and 45% glucose "
Fructose just the principal sugar in fruit, and is used by diabetics as a sweetener. It has to be enzymatically decomposed in the liver, and doesn't yield a large insulin spike. The only particular risk is of non-alocoholic fatty liver disease if you consume way too much of it.
The point I was making in my reply was exactly what you said - there's no real difference between sucrose and HFCS, while the parent was implying there was. So at least on that we agree.
"Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin."
https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/
That's definitely not mentioned in your supporting link
My link was showing that table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are not very different from each other.
The only particular risk is of non-alocoholic fatty liver disease if you consume way too much of it.
Everyone is consuming way too much of it, that's the point.
That's what I was saying too! Violent agreement :)
> Everyone is consuming way too much of it, that's the point.
Agreed!
looks like a decade+ long decline trend abruptly stopped there and miraculously stayed flat for 20+ years
Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.
But two decades of "fat doesn't make you fat" probably didn't help, and neither did the continued trend of increasing empty calories from cheap vegetable oils, especially soybean oil: https://thedietwars.com/why-are-americans-getting-fatter-a-f...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/59529/indicators_goa...
>Added fats and oils provide more calories per day for the average American than any other food group
EDIT: I think most Americans would be shocked to discover that their "favorite" food group is added fat/oil.
"The scientists theorize relationships among the global increase of plastics production, human exposure to microplastics, and the global increase of overweight and obesity in populations." https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newslett...
"In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011). In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011). In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972). In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011)."
[Source](http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...)
1. As another commenter posted, total calories consumed per capita has gone up considerably since 1970.
2. As you posted, we move a lot less than we used to. There are tons of studies that confirm this across a number of different metrics (e.g. average grip strength has gone down considerably since the 80s, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/13/4815909... ).
We eat a lot more, of more foods that have higher calorie-to-nutrient ratios than we used to, and we move a heck of a lot less.
Exercise does have many positive metabolic and other benefits, but not anywhere enough to be a causal explanation on its own. If people started walking 5 miles a day, every day, not only would there still almost certainly be a widespread and growing obesity epidemic, but there's even an argument that it could be worse. Increases in activity tend to drive increases in hunger which will typically surpass caloric deficits if somebody is not actively controlling their diet, in which case they would not be fat in the first place.
This is made even worse by misleading advertising which will do things like showing fit athletes drinking Gatorade, Coke, etc during their training or competition. And somebody goes and does a couple of miles on a training bike and does the same thing - which is going to send their net caloric input skyrocketing.
> Increases in activity tend to drive increases in hunger As far as I know, certain types of high intensity exercise do so but not necessarily all exercise.
If we take your numbers at face value, that'd be a delta of 684 pounds per 20 years. Again kind of an obvious indicator why these long term calorie/pound measurements are pretty dubious, but at the same time also an indicator of why diet is just so much more important than exercise for weight management.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
People who stop doing sports suddenly gain weight. People who get into sports habit like running or swimming slowly loose weight.
So, imo, this uber simplified model of just don't work like that.
You can note that average male height in the US continued increasing up until the late 1980s.
That points to a general caloric deficit up until roughly 1990--which is roughly where we claim the "obesity epidemic" kicks off.
Also, a graph of sugar doesn't include caloric fillers like "soy protein" which now seems to be in everything.
Fat is estrogenic, and estrogen accelerates growth plate fusion.
I meant bodyfat specifically
So we should expect people to continue to get fatter as we get better at engineering food.
Note that I don't think that engineered food is inherently bad, just that today most food are engineered to be unhealthy because that is better for sales.
As I said, engineering food isn't bad in itself, it depends on what goals you have when you engineer it. Just because Japanese people eat a lot of engineered food doesn't mean it is bad for them if that food wasn't engineered to make them fat.
Many say they slim down as they visit Japan, so I wouldn't rule it out.
What I'd want to see is if two countries that has the same snacks available had vastly different outcomes. But as far as I know most countries has domestic snacks so it varies wildly around the world. For example, why is Czechia much fatter than Slovakia? They were the same country 30 years ago.
I'm sure Japan has a variety of unhealthy foods, I don't see how that matters. That unhealthy food exists in Japan doesn't tell us anything about how much of it people actually eat.
That's why I linked the video, its author talks about the experience of the average person, here's an exact link: https://youtu.be/lr4MmmWQtZM?t=176.
I cannot stress this enough, the only thing that matters is what is readily available to the average person. That's the determining factor of most people's diets, not what's theoretically possible to purchase.
Protein is a major appetite suppressant. I'd read this but never really realized how true it is until starting on a protein heavy diet. I now eat near 500g of chicken breast a day, and by the end of the day I'm basically having to force feed myself. Yet 500g of chicken breast is less than 800 calories! And the other stuff is just to balance out my diet.
And I love eating as much as anybody else. But you simply cannot eat that much when you're on a protein heavy diet. Finding data on protein consumption rates over time is difficult, but I'd hypothesize we were probably much higher on effective protein consumption in the past. I know absolutely nobody that regularly had something like 'steak and eggs' for breakfast, yet it seems that was indeed a thing at some point.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...
Meat consumption is associated with higher BMI: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32443920/ (summarized in: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200615/Vegetarians-have-...)
Something you have to keep in mind in modern times is also food processing. A 10 piece set of McDonalds chicken nuggets weighs around 163 grams, but contains only 23g of protein. By contrast 163 grams of chicken breast contains just about exactly 50 grams of protein. The more processed something is, the more it tends to drift from its nominal nutritional value, and it's safe to say that a much larger chunk of people's "meat" is also coming from these sort of heavily processed meat-like foods.
As for the studies, you have a common bias they suffer from. You're comparing some group of people opting into some diet or another, versus the population at large. An apples to apples comparison would be something closer like comparing those on a long-term vegetarian diet to those on a long-term carnivore or keto diet. The idea is to just make sure you control for the "I care about my diet and have sustained dietary self control" variable. Unfortunately actually controlling studies means you'd get far fewer exciting headlines and bullet points for our CVs.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
The obvious answer for why portion sizes are increasing is that food keeps getting cheaper, in particular relative to other costs in the food service industry. The traditional formula for restaurant pricing is 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 labour and 1/3 overheads; if your food costs have decreased over time but your rent and labour costs continue to increase, it's natural to increase portion sizes to maintain the appearance of value-for-money. The same would apply (to a moderately lesser extent) to convenience foods sold at retail. This has a quite drastic anchoring effect - when you normalise excessively large portions, reasonable portions seem meagre.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328241/americans-average-weight...
Yes, it's nice that we're getting sugar consumption back down to 1970 levels so we don't keep adding more obese people to the cohort, but that doesn't help everybody who gained weight prior to 2020.
From 1995 to 2005, people ate roughly an extra 10 pounds relative to 1970 of bodyweight in sugar every single year. That's an extra 100 pounds in bodyweight over 10 years if you don't adjust something else. That's huge. Literally.
Fact.
> Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
Speculation.
This isn't completely hopeless, though. Fat cells "remember" the weight you are when they are created and fat cells turn over roughly 25% per year. However, it does mean that you need to hold your weight down for 3+ years for new fat cells to forget about the "fatter" you.
Random web hit claims 89% of American women are unhappy with their weight[0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/89-percent-of-amer...
Compare advertisement vs the Japanese "fat ban".
The fat acceptance movement in the 2000s changed how we advertise.
The amazing part is that it works: humans are capable to believe two contradicting things at the same time.
Or look at MLB players. They're all Chubby Mc Chubster!
In Japan - we wouldn't dream of putting fat people in ads!
Couldn't possibly have anything to do with its aging population (median age closing in on age 50). Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37878558
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
2. Pretty sure calorie intake is not uniformly distributed so if avg dropped bc some folks went from 5000kcal to 4000kcal a day it’s not going to reduce overall obesity rate
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
The goal is changing weight. The immediate means is to change calorie intake. The hard problem is that doing so requires changing hunger, and we don't have a good (safe, cheap, widely available) way to do so.
CICO is necessary to understanding, but is not sufficient. Any proposed solution that doesn't address hunger is bound to fail.
Of course meal plans are more complicated than just counting calories.
It is scientism and not a science.
I do think there’s a difference, though, between processed and unprocessed foods. My guess is that your body can extract more of the calories from highly processed foods than it can from unprocessed foods, or that extracting the calories from unprocessed foods takes more work, burning calories in itself.
But regardless of the efficiency, if you overfill the tank and the fuel starts to spill on the pavement, that is not going into the milage but straight into the pollution bracket.
The idea that intake is irrelevant is just as ridiculous as the idea that everyone's metabolism is an exact clone.
Regardless of how many calories I burn with exercise, I am also training my metabolism.
My metabolism includes feelings of hunger and satiation, as well as cravings for particular foods. It is plenty capable of going out of whack for all kinds of reasons, but my best tool for bringing my metabolism back to a healthy place is a spate of vigorous exercise, and I've relied on that.
If my metabolism were conditioned to be in an unhealthy place over a long period of time then I would have an uphill battle ahead of me to correct it, and I believe many people are stuck in such a situation.
One observation is a growing class divide between the fat and the fit that saw a sharp uptick over the pandemic. Our culture unfortunately is very poor at accommodating healthy activity and getting poorer. Conversely, the national parks the last 2 years summers were mobbed with people who found healthier lifestyle practices during their downtime and were out to challenge themselves.
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-total-daily-smo...
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Dietary fat is even more easily stored as fat, since it doesn't require the added step of de novo lipogenesis (DNL) like carbohydrate does, or the added steps of gluconeogenesis + DNL as protein does. And go look up recent photos of Lustig: he's fat (bordering on obese) himself.
This is not relevant to arguments (with sources and statistics) about systemic obesity he presents.
If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat, why do keto diets work?
Also do you have sources or data that says what you are saying here?
Yes it absolutely is, since he claims he doesn't eat sugar for all the reasons he cites, yet he's fat and looks metabolically unhealthy:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/heresthething/episodes/...
>Robert Lustig: I carry a few extra pounds and I’m not happy about it. I don’t eat sugar.
>Alec Baldwin: You don’t.
>Robert Lustig: No. I have dessert twice a year. When I’m in New York I have a piece of Junior’s cheesecake and when I’m in New Orleans I have bread pudding -
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
> If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat,
You seriously believe your body preferentially uses de novo lipogenesis to convert carbohydrate to fat (which entails some energy loss) rather than just storing fat as fat? DNL on a typical mixed macro diet is rare, to the point that something like 90% of your bodyfat came from fat you ate, and the fatty acid profile of your body mirrors that of your diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12324287/
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
I'm not saying overeating carbs won't make you fat, but arguing that it somehow makes you fatter, calorie-for-calorie, than fat is ridiculous considering that eventually your body runs out of fat and has to use DNL (which is inefficient), and that fats require the least energy for your body to digest of any macro.
> why do keto diets work?
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets. They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass, i.e., water, glycogen, and probably at least some lean body mass (muscle and bone density). See the graph on p. 4 of Kevin Hall's NIH study comparing the diets:
If it was only twice a year why would it matter at all? He also might drink alchohol, but the point he was making was not that you can't get fat unless you eat sugar, it was to explain the systemic rise of obesity.
These two things are completely different.
You seriously believe
I don't 'seriously believe' anything, I was just asking for evidence, which seems to make you upset. Your link also doesn't back up what you are saying, it is only says "Adipose tissue is a suitable biomarker of dietary fatty acid intake"
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
Says who? This is another claim you aren't backing up.
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets.
You should tell that to thousands of people that post non stop about their 50-150 pound weight losses while exclusively doing keto diets.
Also you seem to be saying a high fat diet and low fat diet work the same, but then you're also trying to say that fat is treated differently by your body.
* They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass,*
Anyone who looks at a keto forum like /r/keto can see that that isn't true. People slim down to half their weight, that isn't 'water and glycogen'.
It breaks my brain, but on the "Holy hell, that's a TON of extra calories for the entire population to be consuming."
That graph shows almost 30 pounds of sugar consumption differential between 1970 and 2000. That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year every year in calories. That's a HUGE amount of body fat packed on that has to be explicitly removed.
In addition, even in 2020, there's a difference of somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of sugar consumption relative to 1970 which is roughly 2.5-5 lbs of extra body fat every year. That's 4-8% more calories consumed by the population every year. That's a LOT.
If there is no corresponding decrease in caloric consumption in some other category (remember: there was a big anti-fat push which switched everything to turbo amounts of sugar) then it's no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US.
Side note: my favorite anecdata on this is iced tea in Austin, TX. In the early 1990s, the default iced tea serving was a 32oz glass of unsweetend iced tea. When I came back in the late 2010s, the default is now a 16oz glass of sweet tea which is actually a hyper dose of sugar. Think of the gigantic amount of extra calories that people eating out are now consuming.
It's an extra 4,300 calories per month. Or 145 calories per day. Or about 35 minutes worth of light walking.
Also, I wonder about fiber and other carbohydrates. Fiber moderates carbohydrates of all types and prevents glucose spikes (and crashes). and other processed carbs/starches can be very similar to simple sugars - breads, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, etc.
But yes[0], while metabolic pathways have been identified where artificial sweeteners certainly could cause insulin issues, RCT's have failed to find this effect expressed in vivo.
Artificial sweeteners do cause notable changes in gut biomes, and the effects of that are unknown.
0: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2020.59834...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8880058/
lots to sort through though:
But people don't become obese overnight. People ate much more sugar in 2000-2010, and those people, if not dead now, are still contributing to the obese rate today.
Also this graph shows people are still eating more sugar in 2021 than in 1970. Just not as much as in 2000.
No one says sugar is the only reason causing obesity. But this graph doesn't debunk the correlation between sugar and obsesity either.
Now it is entirely possible to spend the entire workday having barely taken any steps or physical exertion.
I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
>I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.