Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

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While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.

Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.

That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.

> That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic

there is no way to separate the discussion, doing so it’s just to avoid solving the issue that is to regulate refined sugar

Refined sugar is extremely concentrated compared to the natural sources. You need like 50 kilos of sugar cane to produce one kilo of refined sugar, and through multiple steps of heavy industrial processes.

You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

Sugar is literally evaporated sugar cane juice. You need a lot of cane to make a little sugar because water is heavy. "refinining" is just separating out the molasses to make it white and so the molasses can be sold separately. You only need "heavy industrial processes" to make it profitably at scale.

The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.

> You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

In the natural environment, said other ingredients would be the angry swarm of bees?

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