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Comment by snitch182 | Hacker News Reader

You shure as hell have a lot trouble shopping food.

There's a world of difference between eating food that's had some sugar added to it and consuming explicitly sugary things in large quantities. Really if you just do three things there's an enormous health benefit:

1. Replace all sugary drinks (soda, starbucks drinks, etc.) with non-sugar alternative (water, plain coffee, etc.)

2. Make whole fruit your dessert and/or snacks, replacing ice cream and candy and stuff

3. Cook several times per week with recipes that don't call for adding sugar

> 3. Cook several times per week with recipes that don't call for adding sugar

Which savory recipes call for sugar? The only time I can remember using sugar is for speeding up onion caramelization and bbq sauce.

We had an.. incident.. in my house where a teaspoon was misread as a table spoon of sugar for a noodle stir fry recipe.

> ice cream

There's a rather surprising result in nutrition science that ice cream consumption seems to be associated with better cardiovascular health. No other dessert has the same pattern and it's unclear why this is seen.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

What you can do is "shop the perimeter" at the store. Supermarkets in the US are usually laid out where the meat, dairy, and produce sections are along the edges of the store, and the middle aisles have the prepared foods (comes in boxes, cans, etc.) The prepared foods are the ones typically loaded down with sugar and are highly processed, so only go down an aisle when there's something you really need there, like maybe a spice.

Yeah, learn some recipes before trying this experiment. Quality is almost always far superior but the time investment can hurt.

Focus on recipes that reheat in a microwave without destroying the texture so you can meal prep a week in advance.

Soups and braises are the most optimal in that regard.

I recommend short ribs braised in red wine (I like Barollo but you can just as easily use a three buck chuck). Works great on mashed potatoes and by changing up the wine you can change up the flavors. Thai curries are also great and easy to make.

Eating well is really, really simple - Only buy and eat things with one ingredient. Cook your own meals, then you know what is in there.

Hint: stay away from the interior of the grocery store where all the shiny bags are. You want the stuff around the edges - fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, rice, beans

Do you make your own bread and stock and pasta?

I do. Bread is easy and not lot of active work: make the dough the night before, bake in the morning. About 15 minutes labor. Stock: make a batch once a month and if necessary supplement with store bought (you can find stock with almost no salt and no sugar). Pasta I make only for special occasions due to the labor involved and it's trivial to find pasta that has 2 ingredients.

Do you mind posting some recipes or ideas for types of bread that do not need sugar? Most of the simple recipes I have found that are not sourdough or flatbread require a bit of sugar for the yeast, though not sure how much sugar the yeast consumes.

No need for sugar, just let it rest more; it will still rise, only more slowly.

Combine 400g flour (bread flour is better but AP works) with 300g of tap water, 4g of salt, a 2g of yeast (I use instant but I don't think it matters). Mix until a shaggy mass forms. Cover and let it rest overnight (no more than 12 hours). The next morning, preheat a Dutch oven at 450F for 60 minutes. While the oven heats up, stretch and fold the dough a few times, let it rest 15 minutes, shape into a boule, let it rest (I use a banaton) for 45 minutes. Score, bake in the Dutch over with the lid on for 30 min. Remove the lid and bake another 20 min until the color of your choice. Careful the Dutch over is rip-roaring hot.

What I like about this is it takes 5 minutes to make the dough the night before and then 2 hours after I wake up I can have fresh hot bread with just about 10 minutes of active time (fold dough, rest, make boule, rest, put in oven, wait, remove lid, wait, done).

Thanks, this worked well for me, too at about sea level and about 60 degrees in my home. I was wary because of the cook time - I usually only need 18 minutes for a French loaf at that temperature. I did get more rise than expected during baking so my shallow Dutch oven cover smooshed it a bit but I have a deeper Dutch oven I can try next time.

I use a pretty deep dutch over, and it's really the key to getting a nice crumb. Since home ovens aren't steam ovens, it helps to use a small (but big enough) chamber to let the loaf steam for the first half of the bake. I've also seen people use an "inverted" dutch oven or buy a bespoke cloche for the purpose.

Better than Bouillon seems fine health-wise to me (box stock is a rip-off - you're just paying for the water).

Boxed dried pasta also isn't inherently unhealthy.

Clearly GP's rule is a little extreme :)

Holy crap no. Take a look at the amount of sodium in Better than Bouillon. Way more than any other type of stock like product. You can get the rip-off box stock with no sodium added in all three flavors.

I think you misunderstand how I use stock. I use a teaspoon or two of BtB for an entire dish to help build a sauce or otherwise season. So I am using it for its salt content entirely - as in, I salt the dish less because I account for that.

It's 30% the recommended salt in a single teaspoon. That's like a big pinch of kosher salt. So really, it's like 3-5% per serving because I get 6-8 servings out of my dishes. right.

I do make my own bread. Sourdough, it's excellent.

Pasta is an exception I allow to my rule, though I eat it probably only once a month now.

In general, it's a very good rule to stick to. This way you are in control and what you're eating at all times.

I suspect this depends somewhat on where you live. Eg in parts of the United States it may be harder to get bread without added sugar. Bread is an example of something lots of people want but which they probably won’t be willing to make themselves in sufficient quantities. For other foods one can often switch to more basic ingredients but this could be a lot of work or a bit annoying (eg making a ketchup alternative, pasta sauces, muesli, bread rolls/buns, pre-made soup). This can be easier if you live somewhere more rich/urban where you’ll be better able to find eg a bakery or store selling non-sugary foods.

Some things are easy, eg you can not buy soda if you live in New York or if you only have a dollar general to shop for food.

Just cook from scratch. I almost never buy premade foods, because I like to cook and it ends up tasting better anyway.

I gave up on added sugar and started reading the label for everything I bought. I was surprised to find out my Costco milk has 11grams of sugar(non added).

Lactose is a sugar

I didn't think it was that much in a glass of the stuff and explained why I loved it.

Congratulations! You have just discovered - Milk!

In Sweden we drink it all the time especially kids.

(11g means 11g/cup, right? That sounds like normal milk...)

It's not unique to the Swedes. My mother threatened to get me my own cow as a child because I drank so much of it. I just didn't realise how much sugar it had. I swear the non refrigerated box milk I drank as a kid didn't taste as sweet.

It is actually possible that the more pasteurized it is the sweeter the taste?

A very unsweet sugar at that. It's all the downsides of sugar and almost non of the upside (taste).

We started our teenage son on Fairlife 2% milk. Half the sugar, lots more protein than regular milk. So far so good, tastes the same and he’s getting the protein he needs (along with other sources) to build muscle for football.

You have a lot of trouble shopping for prepared food.

You only have a lot of trouble if you're adamant about looking for all the same kinds of food you did before.

It's actually pretty easy if you accept that the total number of items at the grocery store / restaurants has dramatically shrunk, and you stick to mostly whole foods (food category, not the corporation). Your staples start to become less processed crap and more animal products, vegetables, dairy, nuts/legumes, and more cooking at home.

It's a big transition that most people are unprepared for, but not actually terribly difficult as a single person with no SO/kids.

So you agree that it’s hard to find prepared food without sugar…

Sugar alone? No, not really. A lot of stuff that doesn't need any added sugar has it (tomato sauce, baby formula, jams/jellies, gravy, salad dressing, etc), but overall, a plurality of the items for sale in my local grocery store don't have sugar. I can buy prepared pizzas, burgers, frozen dinners (just don't eat the dessert, be careful of gravies), lunch meats/cold cuts (almost all animal products really), many types of wheat-derived products like bread, pasta, cereal. Lots of veggies are super easy too.

Sugar is pretty easy to avoid. Stop doing your shopping in the twinky aisle.

Simple carbohydrates in general? That's more difficult.

For reference, I say this as someome who's cooking skills consist of knowing how to use a microwave, knowing how to boil water, and knowing how to cook a frozen pizza, I'm not some kind of culinary wizard.

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