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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

It's also so very difficult to avoid. I opened yesterday a can of tuna and beans salad - it tasted almost like dessert. Are the producers really crazy? Or are they onto something? Sweet bread for sandwiches, sweet bbq on grilled meat, jam with cheese, so much of the (modern?) cuisine is just disgusting to me. Note, desserts are fine and good, I'd love a tiramisu right now. But sweet corn soup??? Ew.

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This was an interesting film that talked about how fat was demonised in the 1960s(?) so food companies started taking it out as much as possible but replacing it with sugar to retain taste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sugar_Film It certainly matches your experience.

> fat was demonised in the 1960s(?)

Still nowadays. Docs still learn about LDL and HDL like it says something about your future cardiovascular risks and tell you to control your diet to avoid fat. The original study on this is full of flaws.

Yes and no, docs are taught that LDL and HDL are not the targets themselves, it's possible to move those numbers without actually improving outcomes at all (especially improving HDL doesn't seem to really do anything).

Docs are _basically_ taught to just put everyone on Statins. On as high a dose as people will tolerate. There's fairly good evidence that statins work, the problem is more than people don't like taking them.

Retain taste? Fat doesn't taste sweet, at least not to me... the only reason I can imagine is they do it to mask a bad taste, or just to hide that the ingredients are bland (and/or low quality). That, I can understand - although still not approve as it's even worse, lying under the guise of sweetness.

Yeah, "retain" was the wrong word - what I meant was that it replaced one thing that tastes nice with something else that tastes nice. But like GP I find almost every processed food too sweet these days.

True! As a real addicted to sugar (but under control), I prefer to eat a lot of sugar intentionally, a proper dessert. Nothing is more waste of biological clocks than added sugar.

> but under control

I could quit at any time, I just don't want to.

I mean, RIGHT NOW, I'm not eating every candy or chocolate I see in front of me (last time I ate a chocolate was one month ago).

One of my least favorite games to play these days is trying to find ham that doesn't have glucose or its relatives added to it. My understanding is that it's added simply because it makes the product more addictive, gives bigger spikes of energy which many people enjoy, but it's the polar opposite of what I'm trying to find.

Speaking of that energy spike, is it something you would get from sweetened ham? Does it have that much sugar oh my... Isn't the spike rather coming from a piece of cake, which happens also to be the proper way to consume sugars? That or fruit, also good.

Sugar is a popular (because it’s inexpensive) preservative.

They add a lot more than sugar as preservative nowadays. Good luck finding something without preservatives sold in stores.

They even put acids in your food! ACID! The stuff that melts steel beams and makes IE6 crash. Think about that.

The point of preservatives is to prevent biotic life from consuming it. If the food is actively preserved--sugared or salted or what have you--it will be just as cytotoxic if not prepared in a way to dilute or remove the preservative.

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