50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
npr.org
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Fat was bad. We got reduced fat milk, everything was fat removed stuff. We at margarine.
But the breakfast cereals were laden with sugar.
To this day this trend continues. I saw a box of cookies at Fry's the other day. Reduced fat! But same calories as the non-reduced fat box, just less fat and more sugar.
Which other industries have distorted reality, and which future ones will be revealed in the coming decades?
In addition, transporting glass is inefficient, and it is much more prone to breakages.
The real issue is the fact that every company gets to have their own plastic bottle design, with 3-4 different plastic types that have to be triaged. They typically also want way thicker bottles than required because they feel more premium.
A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.
I don’t know if metal cans or tetrapack are better.
Given the thread we're in that bottle will some type of unimaginable cancer after 30 years and in 2070 people will be talking about how big plastic captured government.
Glass on the other hand is the definition of inert, who cares if it's more expensive if it keeps us alive longer?
Also, it doesn't further enrich/entrench the oil industry to the same degree as most plastics based manufacturing does.
Those are not environmentalist, but people who are trying to find any excuses to oppose renewable energy. Environmentalists know that wind turbines kill a fraction of the numbers of birds killed by things like house cats or power lines.
I've got an old 7up bottle that was about 20 years old when I bought it in a 6-pack.
It definitely is great to be recycled but hauling around cullet in diesel trucks that is further away than your raw materials might not be the best decision.
Eg:
> Fiber cannot, however, be recycled endlessly. It is generally accepted that a fiber can be used five to seven times before it becomes too short (as a result of repulping and other handling) to be useable in new paper products.
- https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/paper/web/...
I thought the same about glass but that turns out to be genuinely endlessly recyclable. Good to know!
Most industries employ honest people, don’t have to cover up anything major.
There’s a big difference between slightly misleading marketing (say, calling your 10% hand stitched clothes “hand stitched”) and outright paying scientists to cover up genuine harms to health and the environment.
Think of the places where corruption is endemic. Having an outlook of "well, everybody is corrupt" normalizes the behavior and makes it easier to justify sliding into corruption oneself.
If the outlook were useful, it would help to fix the problem instead of doing the opposite.
The disillusionment doesn't offer any benefit that can't also be gained with a touch of common sense alone. But going from "some people are terrible, sometimes" to "everybody is terrible" forecloses any possibility of improvement.
To ignore gradations of disappointment is to excuse everything via apathy.
One thing can be bad, while another is worse.
tell me about how netflix dumped millions upon millions of gallons of oil in the ocean and wiped out entire ecologies.
There are definitely egregiously-bad actors compared to those that aren't.
Someone has a vested interest in the side of the story you’re getting, and they may have even paid for it.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” -Dwight Eisenhower farewell address 1961
Did we listen? Nope.
Great book about it The Fish that Ate the Whale.
https://www.amazon.com/Fish-That-Ate-Whale-Americas/dp/12500...
imagine if they were as rare as dragonfruit or durian
Only because sugar is bad for you does not mean fat is good for you. Evidence is rather on the side of complex carbs, high fiber, moderate protein, moderate unsaturated fat and low saturated fat intake.
But I would say that in general, 'x is good/bad for you' is a harmful oversimplification. Sugar is also not 'bad for you'. It's not that simple. Glucose is important and sometimes extremely beneficial to consume (in any form).
As for saturated fat: it's complicated. Correlation != causation. For transfats we have a pretty good idea via which causal mechanism problems arise. For saturated fat we only have correlations. Given how hard nutritional research is and especially how hard it is to draw conclusions from it, I would say it's better to refrain from feigning confidence on substances where the jury really is still out.
Right, in small amounts though. You don't need that much. Eat a handful of nuts and you're good.
It's like a teaspoon of sugar in your tea won't cause huge issues. Cold drinks with 10 teaspoons in a bottle however are a problem.
Frankly, the number of carbs and fiber you need throughout your life is 0.
Sincerely, what are you talking about? It's been well-known a diet high in fiber lowers your risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
Also, no carb diets are largely bullshit. There's plenty of complex carbs with many nutrients. The problem is while "no carb" might be somewhat effective, it's not sustainable for the vast majority of people. That, to me, makes it very close to worthless.
For most of humanity, humans ate 100+ grams of fiber a day and had a diet almost entirely composed of carbohydrates. Access to farmed meats is a very new phenomenon. I think this is the part people are missing - they believe paleolithic humans ate mostly meat. They didn't. They ate mostly carbs. Also, the meats they did have had very little saturated fats because they were game meat, not farm meat.
A burger isn't really the same thing as a wild antelope.
https://marginalrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Su...
I think it has more to do with 'too many calories' than blaming sugar.
Because a lot of US sweetener consumption has moved away from sugar to corn, because subsidies.
For added fun, you can try to eat “too many calories” as well.
After, you can report to me how successful you were in gaining weight.
If you eat a load of sugar in one sitting you will feel sick, lethargic, have a sugar high or some combination. It also literally _feels_ bad for your teeth. Having a coke or a cookie every now and then is fine but constantly eating it just feels off.
Eating lean chicken with a small amount of butter or oil feels obviously healthy.
Most of the other gaps are just things like OK, you're working 50 hours a week to optimise your bank account, just wind that back a tiny bit and spend 5 hours on your personal health, stop being a mug and take it seriously.
It's like when people ask "how do you have time to...". You turn off the TV and Instagram for a bit (no problem with using them, just maybe not for 2-3 hours a day) and pick up that book you wanted to read or whatever. Job done. It's both trivially easy and very hard if you make it a core aspect of your personality that you are some sort of helpless plebian.
So TLDR the sugar industry paid for (1?) literature review paper that said that existing papers reporting risks of sugar were flawed.
But what I hear is that _until recently_ sugar research has been put on the backburner, and only recently are people starting to re-examine the links between sugar and heart health.
How are these two related? Did the one paper really put people off researching it for 50 years?
Yeah, sugar isn’t good for you. It’s a lot of concentrated calories. And possibly has some other issues as well. Probably stay well below the guidelines. An occasional sweet treat isn’t gonna kill you but don’t go guzzling down coke instead of water.
Lots of fats aren’t good for you either. Especially the saturated kind.
PS: Is there a concerted pro fat effort going on HN right now? We’ve had 1 opinion piece by a non scientist journalist paid by industry to pretend saturated fat is good for you against all evidence so far, and now we have a 2016 article being pushed up to the top defending fats without being marked as such, within hours.
If someone finds high fats good for themselves, then they might feel lied to and want to shout it.
That may be reason for what youre observing.
So many cases in human history are where one thing is believed, people and studies come and show that it's false, and then it takes a really long time for culture to come around to it. Earth being round, tobacco, climate change among others.
Based on what the non-industry funded science shows, saturated fat being considered any bit healthy is in the long stage of culture taking a long time to accept what the science is saying. And it's not helped by studies with industry funding that know how to skirt the edges. Many places to choose from, but here's one from Dr. Barnard talking about sugar vs saturated fats [2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957637 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkqWdY5_2-8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xeHDqBB6X0
It's not that dense though. Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense as sugar. Many are surprised to learn that peanuts, fatty meats, oils, butters, and granolas have more calories per gram compared to Skittles. The only way to avoid overeating fat is to make the portions sizes absurdly small. There is often a shock at learning that only a tablespoon of peanut butter, which is a miniscule amount of food, is 100 calories. It's trivially easy to adds hundreds of calories with butters and other fats.
It's common for posts here to lack date markings that they should have. It doesn't change the conclusion of the research, except that "60 years ago" would be more accurate now.
It also seems to be common (enough that I've noticed the pattern within a couple of months) that there are suddenly two articles on related topics out of nowhere. A lot of the time, this seems to happen because someone reads the first link, browses around and find something else interesting.
3500 calories of lean meat won't.
I compared Oreos to red meat because two medical students argued with me that Oreos, which are vegan, were equivalent or even better than red meat.
They believed this because the medical establishment had gone full tilt against red meat for the past 50 years.
And of course they used their authority on the subject as an excuse for believing something insane.
Even different sugars (glucose/fructose/sucrose) affect the satiety response differently.
I eat lots of healthy fats and no sugar or wheat. I'm borderline underweight. When you eat such a diet, your insulin levels stay low. High insulin is what causes your body to convert sugar to fat and store it. Low insulin causes your body to burn your fat reserves. I just got back from a 5 day, 50 mile backpacking trip where I averaged about 1000 calories a day. Not once was I hungry.
The arctic explorers weren't gaining body fat from the fats they ate, they were burning them almost immediately.
You may want to do some reading on the satiety response. You could also imagine whether you think you would gain or lose weight over the next month on a tallow-only diet.
I think the desire to simplify the model down to calorie in and calorie out is a way of putting all responsibility onto the unhealthy individual as an aversion to empathy. Our population has been intentionally misinformed and our food has been poisoned in a way that personal responsibility cannot always overcome, so while people may still deserve the brunt of the blame we must also understand that the food industry/medical/politics played a substantial part in creating the situation and as hard as it is to fight back against these profitable industries it is even more difficult to remodel people to have more willpower.
Similarly, if you find a zero added sugar low saturated fats treat and eat too much of that, then you can still run into problems.
It seems more productive to me to not classify food as “bad” but to focus on balanced diets, including sugars and fats, in healthier proportions.
There has been much laudable and scientific progress in the past 50 years. Higgs Boston discovery and mRNA vaccines being two that come to mind.
And examples of progress that science helped start and then international and national institutions brought to the masses: Smallpox eradication, HIV treatment, lower childhood mortality, etc.
The problem with capitalism is that it destroys democracy. Money distributes to a small group of people who then have overwhelming influence over the government, available information, and so on.
We also see that as money flows away from the poor, and the affordability of essential goods like housing, food, and healthcare worsen, those who should gain from democracy rightfully grow to hate it, and vote to destroy it (e.g voting for Trump).
We need a new economics.
Many European countries are also capitalist, but don’t seem (at least from the outside) to have the same rampant corporate influence on government as the US.
Granted they are more open to socialist policy, most of which seem like good ideas.
We have some companies in the US that have been around for nearly as long as the country itself. These companies pre-dated regulation and had a hand in building it. As a legislator, you’d want input from experts before writing laws. IMO that’s why corporate involvement in politics is so normal in the US.
I’m not sure if that the case for many European countries.
It’d be great to find a new economic axis that can break us out of the planned economy/radical free market axis.
Here's one start:
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
Did I miss something?
That's too broad of a term to carry universal meaning without the context provided by the article.
The piece is more of a modern translation based on present conditions, and it isn't to be confused with "the Nordic model" or any other instance or attempt that readers might instinctively cling to when hearing the word.
We’ve known about this problem for a while and communism was the solution to it. But there’s an even bigger problem with communism is the lack of correct incentives.
Turns out capitalism is better than communism purely because it has the right incentives.
In most countries we have hybrid models.
> We need a new economics
Right now many parts of the US are dangerously close to extremist liberalist agendas. It’s as big of an issue (if not bigger) as the neoconservative issue back when bush jr was president.
Wouldn’t be surprised if liberalism took over and communism became the overarching thought process. We already redefined pronouns.
It's pretty wild to put the "extremist agendas" of what pronouns people use anywhere near the significance of our economic and governmental systems.
Democracy does not conflict with capitalism. It's capitalism vs. communism. For democracy it's democracy vs. autocracy. Communism can still be a democracy.
Also I never said anything about neopronouns. What is even a neopronoun?
>It's pretty wild to put the "extremist agendas" of what pronouns people use anywhere near the significance of our economic and governmental systems.
It's associated. I use to be a liberal, but the definition changed and now I'm more moderate. I agree with distribution of wealth but I don't agree with pronouns which are also a liberal thing. These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
Communism (per Marx) describes a stateless society. A society without a state cannot be a democracy. Communism is antidemocratic per definition.
The reason why communism describes both the economic and the political system of a society is because the two are intertwined.
> Democracy does not conflict with capitalism.
Capitalism offers various means to private entities to steer democratic vote. The two are intertwined just like all other political and economic systems.
> These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
Perhaps. I don't know what your bubble currently considers to be liberal politics. I still don't see why you consider pronoun usage to be such a significant issue.
e.g. Why can’t someone hang up portraits of both John D. Rockefeller and Mao Zedong in their room, admire them both, and still get along fine in life, maybe even achieve great successes? Regardless of any specific set of words, definitions, arguments, etc…?
False, democracy does not require a state.
>Capitalism offers various means to private entities to steer democratic vote. The two are intertwined just like all other political and economic systems.
No capitalism only means this: an economic system where private individuals or corporations own and control the production and distribution of goods and services.
You can have a capitalism under a dictatorship OR a democracy.
>Perhaps. I don't know what your bubble currently considers to be liberal politics. I still don't see why you consider pronoun usage to be such a significant issue.
Bro. Liberalism nowdays means politically correct pronoun usage. If you don't know this, you're living in a bubble. Just google liberal and pronoun and you get articles like this:
https://amac.us/newsline/society/pronouns-gender-and-the-lef...
I think this caught the old liberals of the 2000-2010s off guard. In that time liberalism meant something else. Nowadays those people are moderate. But there's a good number of people on HN who are still in that bubble.
(Also, "liberalist" is a terrible term for the "extremist agendas" you appear to have in mind. I refuse to let them coopt the label.)
What he doesn't see is that the "fix" is liberal politics and communism. That's the most extreme end of the fix.
Also as much as you hate it, identity politics is not part of being liberal. I was a liberal back in the early 2000s. Things have changed, a liberal in the early 2000s is now a moderate and the moderates are the majority. But they are also the least active.
That was my point. These identity politicians are pretenders to the label. It is a difference in kind, not in degree.
It could be argued that capitalism has played a significant part in the improvement in our living conditions and the technogical development of our species. Then again, it could also rather easily be argued that capitalism is a plague on society that will inevitably result in total domination by a handful of billionaires.
But what realistic alternatives are there? And even if such an alternative exists, why would those in control - who benefit the most from capitalism - relinquish their power?
The challenges you point out are massive, but if it’s true that a change is necessary, then the challenges must be overcome.
Do you view it as a failed promise that they would represent you and that that was something that should be expected given history?
Is it a moral failing of the government person?
I suppose the confusing thing to me is that people who rail about the government, are simply complaining about the power of companies to control it.
If those sugar companies now _are_ the government (after they've taken it over, as you say), the question becomes: do you like those sugar companies? Do you trust them?
There are some elites that are self sacrificial and view other Americans as countrymen and not units to extract from but they are very few. As somebody who rails about the government, it's fundamentally an elite problem. You can propose any system you want, but if those running it are rotten it's not going to work.
This is a baseless assertion with no evidence, written in an emotionally manipulative manner ("the confusing thing", "I'm curious", etc).
The government is responsible for drafting laws and regulations, and for setting nutritional standards. Not companies. This is a fact.
If a government official decides to claim that sugar is ok and fat is bad, that's something they have to take responsibility for given that they are literally doing so as a representative of the government.
The sugar industry is not mind-controlling these government employees. They are being corrupted, yes, but ultimately they are making the decisions. The primary moral failing is with the individuals making the decisions. This is factual. If you make a decision, you are more responsible for that decision than someone else who did not make it, by definition.
None of this is to say that this bribery and corruption on the part of the companies is somehow excusable or doesn't make the problem worse, just that the primary responsibility lies with our elected officials and those they then nominate and hire in turn.
This is almost never actually stated in comments on HN. This is statement is just projection and/or inventing hypothetical strawman positions.
These days I consider our governance to be oligopolistic corporatism where the government is a corrupted tool of the corporations that mainly exists to keep the peace between the corporations so they can more effectively extract monopolistic rents. I do like the idea of a hypothetical ideal of an uncorrupted government but I have no idea how such a government could be achieved and worry that attempts to achieve this could easily backfire and make things worse.
Edit: I consider the attempts to pin all ills on government to be the result of yet another successful public relations campaign by large corporations. Unfortunately society has been polarized to the point that I don’t have a political home with either the left or the right - and again I think this is an intentional conspiracy to undermine effective opposition.
If a medical professional tells you that you shouldn't smoke and that it's bad for you, but are smokers themselves, are they wrong? Should you not follow them?
Calling someone a hypocrite (which is essentially what you are doing) is a specious reasoning:
In the case of a doctor that tells me smoking is bad even though they smoke, I’m more likely to believe them because they have first hand experience even if they don’t follow their own advice. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to not follow your own advice especially from the point of view that they would follow their own advice if they could and are open about that. In fact there have been numerous smokers in my life who have told me they’re addicted and recommended to me to never start and I did heed their advice.
But that’s not what happened in grade school so I’m not exactly sure what point you are making.