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Comment by reedf1 | Hacker News Reader

And consumption of erythritol, xylitol, and other sugar alcohols (maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol...) goes completely unmonitored. It's important to note that in most products sugar was simply replaced by sweetener - not reduced. Are we okay with this large scale natural experiment on children's health? There is building evidence of glucose tolerance, prothrombosis, and cardiovascular risk.

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Let's not pretend sweeteners are anywhere near as damaging as sugar.

Humans eat sugars for thousands of years now (and honey since millions of years), but random sweeteners are new.

I'd say let's not pretend that any map made by splashing paint on a paper is the terrain, and go full retard based on that.

Humans have not eaten this much sugar for thousands of years.

They have not eaten any artificial sweeteners for more than a few tens of years.

I'm contradicting the point that people have been eating this much sugar for thousands of years. I'm not claiming the reverse for sweeteners. No population's eaten this much sugar for more than tens of years either.

All the living humans, in average? No.

But otherwise, individually, why wouldn't they? A lot of people had the sweet tooth, and the money, and they ate this much sugar, or even more.

Because until recently it was very expensive to get sugar. Only the richest people could even afford any at all.

There were lots of things with small amounts of natural sugars, but nothing like the processed foods we have now.

The Hadza get 15 to 20% of their calories from honey: https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/what-can-hunter-gatherers...

First, honey is not the same as refined sugar.

Secondly the article itself states that it’s the intense exercise that keeps them healthy, not their diet.

In response to the first point, honey is predominantly fructose, glucose, and water. If you think sugar hydrolysed by bees is better for you than HFCS hydrolysed by humans, why? Is it the glucose?

In response to the second, do you agree with the original statement that implied sugar was damaging, or do you think it has no ill effects on someone who exercises enough? If walking 8 to 12km a day can completely counteract such large quantities of sugar in the diet, does that not make sugar harmless in many cases?

Non-pasteurized honey (almost guaranteed to be what the Hadza consume) also has antioxidants and prebiotic properties that normal sugars don't.

Right, so if I drink straight-up HFCS it'll be fine provided I also stick trace quantities of antioxidants and pollen fibre into it? But if I don't do that, it'll be terrible for me?

What's HFCS got to do with honey?

Honey is formed by the hydrolysis of the complex sugars in nectar into fructose and glucose. HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is formed by the hydrolysis of cornstarch into fructose and glucose. They're chemically extremely similar, except for differences in the ratio of fructose to glucose, and for small traces of other stuff (pollen etc.).

The statements I was responding to claimed that "until recently it was very expensive to get sugar" and then "honey is not the same as refined sugar". Honey is refined sugar formed by the same process as HFCS[0], and some hunter-gatherers get a surprisingly high amount of daily calories from it with seemingly little impact on their health.

[0] From a different precursor, but the general process of breaking down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars is the same, and so is the output

I fail to see how this is relevant, if anything it's evidence of harm. Those people notoriously had rotting teeth [1] and probably a myriad of other health issues (many unrelated to sugar)

[1] https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/18/tudor-england-the-...

> Humans eat sugars for thousands of years now

Indeed, and that has been plenty of time to discover that, in excess, it kills us. Despite intense scrutiny, there is no reason to think that the same goes for aspartame, which is the only sweetener used in significant amounts in soft drinks in the UK, and thus the only one promoted by this levy.

I don't have an opinion on the health effects of sweeteners, but as I noted in a longer comment on this page, multiple sweeteners are commonly used together and aspartame is far from universal in the mix.

Research suggests that aspartame increases the risk of:

    -certain types of cancer, including lymphoma, leukemia, urinary tract tumors, and neurological tumors

    -type 2 diabetes

    -preterm delivery

    -toxicity in the kidneys

    -toxic liver disease

    -harmful changes to the salivary glands

Your "completely safe without question" additive, sir

Is there any food that doesn’t cause cancer according to some study?

Can you cite the paper, I'm very intrigued.

a rare smart take on HN, hats off

If you know one road is dangerous and the other may or may not, which one do you choose?

This conversation always goes like this:

----

Person: Diet soda is bad for you

Me: It's better than sugar and especially high fructose corn syrup

Person: Just drink water

----

Ok... Such a helpful suggestion. We should all just drink water, just exercise, just save money, just work harder, just put down our phone.

I wonder why we don't all just do all the right things all of the time.

Depending on the person they can be worse since sugar alcohols tend to cause digestive issues whereas sugar doesn’t.

I know lots of people, loved ones included who are utterly addicted to sugar-free soft drinks they will not even touch the "full fat" versions.

There are no nutrients there and they appear more addictive, which is why I suspect the industry was so accommodating in moving away from sugar

fat??

Fat as in fat models, thin controllers ;-)

We’re adding fat to soft drinks now?

Full fat is a Britishism for whole milk and it's used to refer to non-diet drinks too as a way of saying full sugar. Original coke is often called 'full fat coke'.

> and they appear more addictive

_Massive_ citation needed, tbh. Sugar is highly addictive.

(Also, I mean, even if aspartame _was_ very addictive, to some extent, well, so what? To be clear, soft drinks ~never contain the sugar alcohols that people are talking about above; the sheer volumes would have, well, undesirable digestive impact. They use aspartame, which is pretty well-understood at this point.)

Real sugar soda tastes like shit by comparison. It's less sweet, and it's got a sour aftertaste as the flora in your mouth begin fermenting the sugar to acid. And you get cavities and weight gain as bonuses.

Diet Coke is notorious for having higher caffeine content than its brethren. Edit: I mean, that's why I love it

Citation needed.

They will have an outsized effect on children (everything does due to their rapid growth, and longer time to bioaccumulate). There is not currently pressing evidence of harm, but little study has been done in children, and some signs suggest there may be issues (see other posts upthread).

This is a good write-up on the emerging issues around some sweeteners: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/and-now-xylitol

Sabine Hossenfelder has a good video on sugar alcohols like erythritol and xylitol as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4

Isn't aspartame used 99% of the time in sodas? Despite decade-long doubts, afaik studies have always failed to find convincing evidence of it being problematic.

"First erythritol, now xylitol. This research group followed the same flawed design and ended up with the same flawed conclusions." https://peterattiamd.com/xylitol-and-cvd/

Sugar alcohols will never be as popular as more obvious choices like aspartame and sucralose. Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols. Personally, all of them, used in any meaningful quantity, turn me into a bloated farty mess that ends with diarrhoea. Absolutely terrible stuff.

> Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols.

Citation? I have a decent number of friends who are sugar-free soda enjoyers. They don't seem to have any adverse effects from these sugar substitutes.

Can you link any papers about these adverse reactions?

I have yet to encounter a soda that uses sugar alcohols, most use aspartame, ace-K, sucralose, or stevia. Those don't bother me at all.

But the side-effects of sugar alcohols are pretty well known (especially to anyone who has had the pleasure of eating beyond their threshold). I haven't searched for any papers but I'm sure you'll find plenty that conclude that many people have adverse reactions to sugar alcohols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_alcohol#Side_effects

It's in sugar free red bull unfortunately.

Not where I live (ace-K and sucralose). Maybe it differs per region.

Mannitol is literally a laxative if you're looking for an adverse reaction... Just eat a few too many haribo sugar-free gummies.

This is very easily searchable. Here's the first result:

Gastrointestinal Disturbances Associated with the Consumption of Sugar Alcohols with Special Consideration of Xylitol: Scientific Review and Instructions for Dentists and Other Health-Care Professionals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5093271/

Virtually all artificially sweetened soft drinks in the Uk (that’s what the levy applies to) are sweetened with aspartame, which is fairly well-understood.

> Virtually all artificially sweetened soft drinks in the Uk are sweetened with aspartame

A quick look at a few soft drinks I could think of, and their UK sweeteners:

  Fanta: Aspartame, Acesulfame 
  Coke Zero: Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Enzymatically Produced Steviol Glycosides
  Pepsi: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Irn Bru: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
  Tizer: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Old Jamaica Ginger Beer: Sucralose
  Lipton Iced Tea: Steviol Glycosides from Stevia
  Ribena: acesulfame K, Sucralose

There seem to be no clear winners, with the most noticeable finding that multiple ones are usually used.

Acesulfame-K and friends is normally used in small amounts with aspartame; individually they both taste bloody awful, particularly Acesulfame K, but together they taste borderline acceptable.

Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.

A personal guilty pleasure is sugar-free red bull. Sorbitol, Sucralose, Ace-k unfortunately.

Huh, how much sorbitol do they put in it?! I thought that one was mostly only used in low-volume applications, because in large volumes, it's a laxative (AIUI this is why you rarely see sugar alcohols used as sweeteners in drinks.)

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