Sugar Rationing Lowered Diabetes and Hypertension in British Children | Hacker News Reader

Sugar Rationing Lowered Diabetes and Hypertension in British Children

nytimes.com

31 pointslxm13 comments

Makes sense. But in my experience, both parents and physicians seem unable to update their "fat is the root nutritional evil" faith.

In which country? I was a kid in the 1980s and I remember the low fat craze, but I was under the impression it was always targeted at (from my perspective) "old people". Meanwhile avoiding sugary treats is the number one piece of nutritional advice I remember being drilled into me from birth just about. Of course as kids we still ate them, but everybody knew it was bad for our health.

I remember being told to avoid sugary treats for the sake of my tooth health, but with respect to weight loss, the message in the 70s and 80s was all about "fat makes you fat" and "the only good thing to do with avocado is put it in your hair" etc.

Source: My mum worked for Weight Watchers in 80s :-)

In the US. 2024 AD.

E.g. at Trader Joe's, look at the huge quantity of fruit juices, sugary snacks, and low-fat dairy products they sell. "Low-fat" should not even exist as a category!

Trader Joe's customer base is much more educated than average, and it's not all "old people." If they are buying (in to) this crap, the rest of America is doing even worse.

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "old people": anyone older than a kid. People who do their own grocery shopping are almost certainly adults, and not what this story is about. Thinking back to my own childhood, when the low fat diet trend was still a thing, I do not recall it being something that was targeted at us or that we were interested in, while I do very much remember being told not to eat too much sugar - by parents, school teachers, healthcare providers and so on.

You are being deliberately obtuse. I don't understand why you do this.

Reread my comment: the "low fat diet trend" is very much a thing today - at Trader Joe's, at the doctor's office, and almost everywhere else - except a few corners of the internet.

The reason I asked what country you are from is because this does not match my experience growing up and living in various countries around the world, including briefly in the US in the early 2000s. From my perspective the low fat diet trend peaked in the 1980s. It is possible that in the US today there has been some kind of resurgence, but doing a quick web search does not suggest that to be the case.

Just a small selection of the top hits...

NPR in 2014 had a piece suggesting that the fad peaked in the early 90s and was long over by the mid-2000s: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/28/295332576/wh...

PBS in 2004, saying this was a 1990s trend: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/themes/l...

The Mayo Clinic mentioning in passing that "the fat-free and low-fat diet trend is a thing of the past - 80s and 90s to be exact": https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...

Meanwhile the Wikipedia page on fad diets also specifically mentions the primary diet trends of the mid 90s through early 2000s being low-carb, not low-fat (Atkins, Zone, South Beach, Paleo etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet

It is for these reasons that I am surprised to hear there are still places in the world where low fat diets are advocated, and specifically (in the context of this article) pushed on children.

The thing about the "avoid sweets" advice for kids is that it is a lot like the "avoid alcohol" advice that students get coming into alcohol soaked campuses of mid-western colleges. Parent's advice is really nothing compared to TV (and I'd assume now IPad) ads and peer consumption and candy being really good.

I'm not convinced that either sugar or fatty cuts of meat are great for you. Why would we have to pick one or the other?

The main thing is that when manufacturers make "low fat" variations of their food or just in general try to have less fat in the food they produce, they tend to do this by adding sugar.

Part of the problem is the nuance. There's only a few forms of sugar - sucrose, fructose, lactose. There's a lot of forms of fat - different combos of length of the chain (omega #), amount of saturation, hydrogenation, triglycerides.

I could eat a diet with no sugar and be healthy. I don't think that's true for fat.

What a story for Halloween night

https://archive.is/CJfyO

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