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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

> About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight[...]

Same thing happened to me at probably around the same time. I realized I could just have a lollypop, and it would be a tenth of the sugar. Most of the sweetness in soda doesn't even get a chance to touch your tongue before it's going down your throat. If I want candy, I should just have a piece of candy. If I'm thirsty, I should have a glass of water.

Also, the carbonation in soda enables them to get twice the sugar into it. Drinking a flat soda is like drinking maple syrup.

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It's probably a risky line of thinking, if you're addicted to sugar, to substitute in some other source of sugar. Best to avoid pastries, lollipops and sugary sodas.

It's a risky way of thinking to reduce every act to a moral choice. ie I could have used the energy that I burned making this post, to hand out a dollar to a homeless person.

Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.

I agree with almost everything you say. However:

> Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.

No. People live on no-carb diets just fine and enter ketosis. (And in any case, the comment you replied to only talked about sugar, not carbs in general.)

Not just any no/low carb diet:

'A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.'

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2989112/

It is of course rather difficult if not impossible, to have a vegetable diet completely devoid of carbohydrates.

The number of people in this study is surprisingly large!

Alas, it doesn't have much bearing on the part of the comment I wanted to focus on 'You have to have carbs for your brain to run.' Because the diets in question here still have some carbs. (And the changes in mortality rates are fairly modest, too.)

What I wanted to say is that even if you eat no carbs at all, you brain will still get its energy. You won't just keel over after a while, like if you didn't eat anything at all henceforth.

Of course, there might be second order health effects, like the study you linked suggest.

no you don't. You have to have glucose for your brain to run. Understand the difference.

u dont have to input it as body makes enough

I agree with peers. Doesn’t Keto (for part of the year) worked for millennia for our ancestors?

Most of our ancestors lived a fraction of the lifespans we do.

So any argument based on “it worked for our ancestors” is flawed.

“It worked for our ancestors” could be the beginning of an idea for research, but certainly does not take you much further than that.

I agree with all you said but I also guess our ancestors mostly die from infection, hypothermia, viruses… certainly not from brain stop working because carbs deficiency.

"You have to have carbs for your brain to run" doesn’t make sense. You have to have sugar in your brain to run, but that sugar surely can comes from fat as well.

Some of our ancestors might have done keto some times, but I'm not sure most of them did most of the time? Humans are decidedly omnivorous, and most of them would eat whatever they could get their hands on, including plants and mushrooms (and sometimes honey!) etc.

iirc the inuit had a diet mostly consisting of meat and fish, but - according to wikipedia - not even they were usually in ketosis.

They also had carbohydrates in their diet. Meat naturally contains carbs. Pretending that the human body is misunderstood and that it worked very differently is a common pitfall of these discussions. Largely it was the same, with the amounts differing.

Meat contains only insignificant amounts of carbs. The human body can convert protein to carbs (glucose specifically) but the rate at which it can do it is limited, and my guess is that if it can't burn glucose, a metabolically-healthy body will burn fat (rather than glucose made from protein) until the diet has been quite deficient in calories for at least 3 days.

No. You dont.

There are other metabolic pathways to produce glucose (or produce ketones). The other pathways ‘push’ the body more since they have to do some conversion. This ‘extra effort’ is considered to be more healthy.

Yes there are. You still need carbs and you get them (ie celery has carbs), regardless. Repetition wont convince someone arguing in bad faith, so I will bow to your religious beliefs.

Yes you need to have carbs, however the quality of the carbohydrate is the most important factor.

If you have any sense for your health you will not have regular intake of sugar, white bread, potatoes crisps, rice cakes, any thing with a high GI.

Some carbohydrates reduce your risk of diabetes, and if you're smart you follow the evidence and you eat these-

https://youtu.be/DNQrNWsoPEE?si=GORRP5IblhNkKCdF

>You have to have carbs for your brain to run.

The brain can run well on ketone bodies (which the liver makes from fatty acids). In fact, causing the brain to run on ketone bodies is used by doctors to treat illness (and not just epilepsy).

The human brain can run on up to 70% ketones overall (this is not only safe, but it appears to have additional therapeutic benefits) and your body can synthesize glucose in your liver and kidneys from fats and proteins though gluconeogenesis to supply the remaining parts of your brain that can't metabolize betahydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate and acetone.

Why are people downvoting this?

Because they strongly disagree.

If I have soda cravings, I can take a single Tic Tac. It doesn't satisfy my soda cravings, but crucially, it prevents the soda itself from satisfying those same cravings if I do subsequently drink it.

Usually I crave soda after a high salt/fried food. Giving myself a tiny amount of sugar (Tic Tac has 0.5g) removes the salt/fried taste, and I just can't get the good soda effect I know I would have gotten without the Tic Tac. There just isn't a point for me to take soda after a Tic Tac.

So yes, substituting a small amount of sugar for a large one can be very effective.

If I go to a restaurant with fill your own drinks (rare in the UK), I generally get soda water with about 10% coke. It's remarkable how much it tastes (to me) just like coke, albeit palatably sweet. I always thought the sugar tax should be a sweetness tax to change people's perceptions.

I also do this, usually with sprite or fanta and I think its more refreshing this way

I drink 250 ml soda cans/bottles. 25-28g of sugar.

Be aware that a lot of candy has similar amounts of sugar. M&M packets have even more.

The typical soda in the US is either 12oz (can) or 20oz (bottle).

A 12oz coke has 39g of sugar. A 20oz bottle of coke is 65g.

Coke isn't close to the worst offender and this ignores soda at restaurants when 28oz is often the smallest you can buy

> The typical soda in the US is either 12oz (can) or 20oz (bottle).

True but you can get 250ml cans in most grocery stores.

Also, there are plenty of places I shop at where the smallest Hershey's bar or M&M packet is the King/share size one. The M&M one has 57g of sugar.

Difficulty in buying smaller portions is not unique to soda.

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