Children under eight should avoid slushies as glycerol leads to hospitalisations | Hacker News Reader

Children under eight should avoid slushies as glycerol leads to hospitalisations

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80 pointsaustinallegro87 comments

I looked around a bit wondering why they’d even contain glycerol. Apparently, it’s a sugar substitute that has similar antifreeze properties as real sugar:

https://foodcomplianceinternational.com/industry-insight/new...

I checked ICEE ingredients here in the US, and they don’t seem to contain it.

https://www.icee.com/flavors/

Their FAQ says no such sugar substitute exists:

https://www.icee.com/faqs/

(Though it also fails to mention that their products are loaded with HFCS).

My guess is that looking for brands that are sugar based or at least advertise they’re free of artificial sweeteners is probably the right move.

I looked for Slurpee (#2 brand in US) ingredients, but could only find them for Canada, with a note saying they vary by country. Canada doesn’t have any sugar free offerings, and none contain glycerol.

The US has a sugar free oreo slurpee that sounds terrible. I’d like to see the ingredient list for it!

I've always wondered what makes high-fructose corn syrup so uniquely bad among sugars. AFAIK, 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless of if it's fructose, glucose, sucrose or lactose.

Of course Americans love their products stuffed with sugar.. your ordinary bread is almost like a really fluffy cake. But in that case there's just more sugar, so the culprit is easily identified :)

Fructose is metabolized through the liver where it gets converted to glucose and other molecules. I assume it would put more stress in the body to metabolize a large amount of fructose, compared to glucose.

Yes, fructose is uniquely bad, as it must be metabolized in the liver, where it can contribute to fatty liver disease.

But regular sugar contains fructose in almost the same proportion as high-fructose corn syrup, so it's not a much better or worse alternative.

Edited to add: Fructose also has ten times higher glycation activity than glucose, which is the process by which sugar binds to (and destroys) proteins and lipids in the body.

So, same issue as ethanol?

Same in the sense that their liver metabolism ends up depositing fat in the liver, leading to the same fatty liver disease. The actual metabolic pathways are different though.

I see no reason to think either the manufacturing process or the glucose-fructose balance is a problem.

It is just a cheap way to make a lot of sugar. That makes sugary foods cheap. Which helps make people diabetic and fat due to overconsumption.

When they have separate names and are separate chemicals, why would 10g of sugar where the proportions could be any of those four be considered equivalent?

My personal lived experience is that HFCS is easier to consume more of. A 12-ounce can of HFCS sweetened soda is easier to drink than the same size, same brand, sugar sweetened beverage. The sugar sweetened version gives me feelings of done / too much that the HFCS version doesn't.

But yeah, we like to put sugar in everything, because we learned fat was the devil in the 70s? and when you remove all the fat, adding in sugar makes things palletable again. :p

>> A 12-ounce can of HFCS sweetened soda is easier to drink than the same size, same brand, sugar sweetened beverage. The sugar sweetened version gives me feelings of done / too much that the HFCS version doesn't.

Allow me to be the counterpoint here: I can finish an equivalent amount of NFCS or Cane Sugar (pretty much the only common alternative) soda with the same ease.

My thoughts on the issue with HFCS: it's cheap as fuck, the human body loooooooooooves sweet, so lazy food developers throw that shit in everything. Yea yea yea, "the live metabolization" and all that shit, but honestly it's the prevalence not the molecule itself. Is the issue that we put HFCS in Ketchup over regular sugar...or that we put so much extra sugar into the blend at all?

Don't forget the salt!

My family recently realized that corn tortilla chips actually have less salt than the brand of flour tortillas we were using. I assumed incorrectly that deep fried, salted chips would have more sodium.

Different brands of chips have very different amounts of salt as well. A brand that I like, El Milagro, doesn't actually tout low sodium, yet their chips have less than half the salt (49 mg per 28 g serving) than regular Tostitos (115 mg per 28 g serving).

Tostitos are covered in a fine dust of salt. It allows for good coverage, every bit is perfectly salted but you end up consuming more salt. I prefer tortilla chips that use course salt sprinkled on top. Not every chip will be perfectly salted and some are over salted (which are more of like process issues) but you do use less salt overall. Chipotle does this. Their chips have about 2.78mg of sodium per gram of chip. Tostitos has 4.1mg of sodium per gram of chip. Using coarse salt in cooking (when not simply dissolved into the food) does lead to being able to taste the salt better as the large salt crystal takes longer to dissolve on your tongue and also lasting longer on top the food without dissolving into it.

Although I will say that sometimes some food manufacturers use sea salt that has a higher potassium chloride content in an effort to reduce the sodium. I was buying canned corn the other day, both from the same company but one listed as lower sodium. They both used "sea salt" but the original sodium version used "natural" sea salt whereas the lower sodium one made no such claim. Likely they were using modified sea salt that had higher potassium content while still keeping the overall salinity the same. They didn't say "less salt", which is what many product do say, they said "less sodium" which is technically true.

> AFAIK, 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless of if it's fructose, glucose, sucrose or lactose.

Remember that we rely on very noisy abstractions in many sciences, and especially in biology, nutrition, and public health. In terms of the (abstract) model of calories-as-fuel, different sugars mostly all have the same effect of providing about 4 calories per gram. And in terms of the (abstract) model of glucose-as-blood sugar, they all get more or less converted to glucose eventually.

But behind those useful high level abstractions, these are all different molecules and bodies have different ways of processing them: different gut absorption and biome effects, different organs, different catalysts, different pathways, different rates of processing, etc.

So from certain views, yes, "sugar is sugar" but from other views each compound that we call sugar is a different molecule and this implies critical and sometimes quite impactful differences in how any body may respond to it at any given time.

This is all true, but HFCS-55 is only a little higher in fructose than other sugars considered more healthy like cane sugar[1] and honey[2].

[1] https://kansasfarmfoodconnection.org/spotlights/which-is-bet...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Carbohydrate_content_...

Lots of words to say absolutely nothing about why HFCS has a meaningfully worse impact on you than other sugars.

I took the GP for asking why there might even be differences in the first place, and answered that question directly.

The question as to whom it might impact differently and in what way takes a critical survey of research, of which much has been done. With the output of that research being contentious and hotly debated, I have no interest in trying to summarize that here even if it was what I read the GP to have asked.

Those words also clearly didn't mean to, so unless you have reading comprehension issues, I'm not sure why you're taking an issue with that.

The body processes sugar compounds differently. Fructose is typically not preferred amongst athletes (bodybuilders, runners, etc). Reasons being Fructose's low absorption and requirement that it be processed by the liver - it needs to be converted to Glucose before the body can even use it. Fructose also lowers physical activity and increases body fat compared to glucose in the same dose and calorie intake.

So no.. all sugars are not equal.

Table sugar is half fructose.

From a metabolism standpoint hfcs and table sugar are basically the same thing, except the former has water in it.

Sucrose is broken into fructose and glucose by an enzyme in the small intestine.

Honey and agave are also fructose and glucose, making the whole hfcs is worse than table sugar, honey, or agave thing even sillier.

Bur honey contains some very useful ingredients also, so it's good to have some honey so now and then.

And agave does have a lower glymetic index than table sugar. So that certainly makes a difference.

Also I think that more naturally grown food is in general better and healthier for us compared to artificially / synthatically make food. Because natural processes add a lot more nutritional value to the food than we realize. We keep discovering new things that are in there which we didn't know about before.

Isnt that just because agave is 80% fructose to 20% glucose, instead of the 55/45 split of hfcs.

Yeah but agave is also a natural product from the agave plant, not artificially made, so it probably contains more useful nutrition, although I guess less than honey. But better than synthetically made anyway.

> AFAIK, 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless of if it's fructose, glucose, sucrose or lactose

Sucrose is just fructose + glucose.

There is actually evidence that the sugar makeup (fructose vs glucose) makes a differences in how it is metabolized, but the bigger impact seems to be coingestion of fiber.[0] Added sugars don't usually come alongside "added fibers". (this is also partially why glycemic index is strongly correlated with added sugar content but much less with naturally present sugar content)

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-bitter-tr...

You're not going to get evidence where foods with sugar swapped with HFCS have different hard health outcomes. You're just going to get HNer storytelling about why HFCS is magically bad and blog posts.

there is not much evidence that fructose is worse than glucose, but in principle part of it is because fructose permeates cells via diffusion while glucose must be pumped into the cell; so it consumes more energy to produce energy from it. There's also differential ability of different cells in the body to process glucose vs fructose

> Of course Americans love their products stuffed with sugar

When these are the only products available to buy, “love” is a bit strong of a word choice I think. Certainly we consume shitloads of sugars— but for a great many of us its all that is available.

I sure do “love” my poor health, enforced by poverty and shit products available to me.

Surely it's cheaper to make a product without sugar than with; saves you the cost of an ingredient.

I think it really is Americans like the taste of sugar. Would be interesting to know if other countries are just behind us in ramping up sugar in food or if some sort of legislation is the difference. Really don't see much reason that some descendants of Europeans would have such a taste difference than other descendants.

No. Sugar is cheap, addictive, and a preservative. other countries heavily regulate it is the only reason its more an America problem

Your inability to imagine my situation doesn’t change my situation one fucking bit. Your comment is both dismissive and infuriating. I hope poverty visits you and forces you to a new perspective.

If adding sugar to your product causes it to sell more then a company is going to do so. If every option for food include sugar then at every price point (including below poverty) then you're going to buy sugared food; but it's not because sugar is negatively priced, it's because it sold better.

>Certainly we consume shitloads of sugars— but for a great many of us its all that is available.

The proportion of people who don't have access to a kitchen and a grocery store is far less than the proportion of people consuming too much sugar.

The widespread popularity products with added sugar, such as soda, coffee flavored drinks, sweetened breads (donuts, etc), is by far the bigger factor in overconsumption of sugar.

Spoken like someone with access to a kitchen.

Anyone with a sink, a flat surface and an open window has access to a kitchen. You can buy a 2-plate induction or propane/butane burner for relatively little money.

> fructose, glucose

In the end calories are calories, but what I learned from endurance sports is that these two surgars have different transport pathways. You can absorb a certain amount of each one individually up to your individual chemistry's max.

From what I learned 15 years ago, but am too lazy to fact check now...

Fructose is metabolized in the liver, i.e. similar to alcohol. Glucose can be used directly by cells. The biggest issue is that fructose doesn't tell the brain that you've had enough, while glucose does (I'm guessing it's because of the delay the liver adds.) So you can eat more fructose than glucose without starting to feel weird. At the same time, you're straining the liver.

If you're eating equal parts glucose and fructose (like sucrose), it's not a problem, as your body is used to it and can adjust its glucose sensitivity. But if you completely remove that signal substance, it doesn't stand a chance.

> The biggest issue is that fructose doesn't tell the brain that you've had enough, while glucose does (I'm guessing it's because of the delay the liver adds.) So you can eat more fructose than glucose without starting to feel weird. At the same time, you're straining the liver.

This might be the money shot. Basically, HFCS isn't much worse in of itself, but humans are much more prone to overconsume products with high amount of sucrose.

Thanks for making the point!

Same problem as LED lighting: fine in concept but so cheap that it's suddenly easy to have way too much of it.

Fast food places often have non-branded ones.

McDonald's doesn't appear to have it:

> Ingredients: Carbonated Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Caramel Color, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine, Quillaia Extract, Yucca Extract.

https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/frozen-coke-small...

Neither does Taco Bell:

> Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, natural and artificial flavor, sodium citrate, yucca Mohave extract, sodium benzoate (P), potassium sorbate (P), calcium sodium EDTA (PF), blue 1 (C), red 40 (C).

https://www.tacobell.com/ingredients

It's in McD's UK strawberry version; https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/frozen-strawberry...

I'd guess this is one of the side effects of the 'sugar tax'. A few years ago the UK introduced a tax on sugary drinks, but there is no tax on sugary free drinks.

> looking for brands that ... advertise they’re free of artificial sweeteners is probably the right move

Glycerol is not considered an artificial sweetener, or labeled as such.

"It is a colorless, odorless, sweet-tasting, viscous liquid." ... "It is also widely used as a sweetener in the food industry and as a humectant in pharmaceutical formulations."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol

It's not considered an "artificial sweetener" as it's usually extracted from natural sources.

It also has the same calories (or more) than sugar. It’s not used to make low calorie food.

Yeah but it's orders of magnitude more sweet then regular sugar, so you use way less of it

As I understand it, they aren't saying "it isn't sweet".

They are saying "it isn't labelled as an artificial sweetener"

The key part being "labelled as".

It’s getting lumped in the wrong category here.

SimplyProtein Crispy Bars have it (Costco) if anyone wants to look in their cupboard at a nutrition label. It falls into total carbohydrates but not Total sugar, despite being a sugar alcohol. It has the same calories as sugar; but a different metabolic pathway.

Glycerine / Glycerol is NOT a calorie free sweetener. It also tastes less sweet than other sugars.

The point is: On the ingredients label, it is called a "Humectant", not a sweetener, so a drink sweetened with only glycerol will be advertised as sugarfree, and "artificial sweetener free"

It looks like US (edit: sugar-free) Slurpees contain 968 (Erythritol) and 955 (Sucralose) but it seems like the UK and Ireland mostly use glycerol in slushies so far.

(second edit: this was mistakenly from the .au 7-11 page, I couldn't find reliable US ingredients either.)

> Apparently, it’s a sugar substitute that has similar antifreeze properties as real sugar

Does sugar have any "antifreeze properties"? The ways I know to make a sugar drink into a slushie are alcohol or salt (like ice cream.) Sugar and water just makes sweet ice.

> I checked ICEE ingredients here in the US, and they don’t seem to contain it.

I don't think ICEEs ever did, but I think 7-11-style "Slurpies" always have. It's why Slurpies are creamy and ICEEs are not.

> advertise they’re free of artificial sweeteners is probably the right move.

I don't think that the glycerol is used for its sweetness at all, but for its lack of saltiness and because it's not alcohol. They're trying to keep the drink from freezing for the sake of the creamy texture, which I have to say is objectively better than without glycerol.

It seems that glycerol is having an alcohol-like effect on tiny-livered people. I had most of my best slurpees before I was 8, though. If they got me a little drunk, all the better.

I have protein bars with it in it. It’s used for sweetness, stickiness, and also because it doesn’t cause a cooling sensation in the mouth.

In the UK (the study was covered the UK and Ireland) using glycerol rather than sugar avoids the "sugar tax" on sugar in drinks (I assume slushies as taxed at drinks).

The tax was imposed mostly to encourage people to consume healthier sweeteners instead of sugar.

> It also recommends children between five and 10 are limited to no more than one slushie a day.

I would really hope most people would have imposed such a limit on their kids already.

Imagine you spend a family day at the fair, a full 10-12 hours. Allowing your 8yo to get two slushies throughout the day doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

The correct number of slushies per day is zero.

And an hour of exercise, no sweets, a healthy diet, 10+ hours of sleep, etc. However the real world works differently.

The nice thing about having kids is you get to dictate what they consume, how they spend their time and when they go to bed.

I've never met a parent in my life who has been able to dictate every meal, every moment of the childs day and their bedtime to the minute. I've met many who have tried, but reality doesn't work like that.

It's really not that hard, just start the way you mean to continue. My children went to McDonalds twice in their youth, once for a party and once on a road trip with no other options. We would take them to the cinema and walk right past the food and drinks. Whilst other parents took their kids to the sweet shop after school we went right to the park.

There were no complaints because they didn't know any different.

Clearly a lot of parents don't do this sort of thing but that doesn't make it impossible. We were far from alone.

After reading this and realizing that glycerol is processed in the liver like ethanol, I can't help but wonder if slushies will also cause adverse effects with medicines that interact poorly with alcohol.

... or just damage the liver itself.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that everyone should avoid “slushies” as they’re nothing but frozen sugar.

The ones containing glycerol are sugar-free.

But anyway, the scientists agree:

“From a public health perspective, there are no nutritional or health benefits from these drinks and they are not recommended as part of a balanced diet. Recommendations on their safe consumption therefore need to be weighted towards safety.”

>The ones containing glycerol are sugar-free.

Well glycerol is not sucrose but it has more calories per gram than sucrose and the FDA requires the glycerin content per serving to be declared as sugar alcohol.

>Glycerin (sometimes spelled glycerine), or glycerol, is a sweet, syrupy liquid that is about 75% as sweet as sucrose. It is chemically categorized as a polyol with 4.32 kcal/g. ... If the label has a statement regarding sugars, the FDA requires the glycerin content per serving to be declared as sugar alcohol.

https://diabetesjournals.org/spectrum/article/17/3/137/2007/...

I would perhaps amend that statement for adults to: consume it on very rare occasions as an enjoyable treat, but certainly not frequently.

These packaged slushies have glycerine in them. Glycerol is also known as glycerin.

https://www.amazon.com/Icee-Slush-Frozen-Fruit-Pouches/dp/B0...

Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/713aJ4YGS7L.jpg

Maybe we shouldn't be drinking sugary antifreeze.

why not?

>The study looked at the medical notes of 21 children aged between two and seven in the UK and Ireland who fell ill after consuming the drinks between 2009 and 2024.

Is this just a sample of 21 among a larger set of children, or is that all the children that could be found that had this reaction?

I wonder how much glycerol they use, the article is scant on data.

You'll often see somewhere around 10g of glycerol in a protein bar, bodybuilders take quite a bit too in order to increase water in muscles and it's safe [0].

Glycerin is also used for baking, used for stuff like fondant.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3590833/

The original paper: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2025/02/10/archdischild-20...

I have used Glycerol in a low sugar/low fat icecream I made in a home ice cream maker; it works pretty well at stopping it freezing solid, so I can see why it's there.

Be aware that glycerol has as many calories as regular sugar. It does have a lower glycemic index, though.

So does a small quantity of Arrowroot, I used to add that when making my own ice cream.

Or, you know, one should not be permitted to sell slushies to children.

Who would have thought that anti-freeze is not healthy to ingest?

That's glycol, not glycerol. Ethylene glycol is especially toxic, while propylene glycol may be used as a food additive (E1520, or E490 for pharmaceuticals).

Note that the two are chemically related: glycerol is propylene glycol with its end-chain carbon atom and bonded hydrogen atoms yeeted off and replaced with an oxygen + hydrogen pair.

(The process of actually manufacturing glycerol is more complicated than that, of course.)

Wrong. Glycerol was used as antifreeze historically.

the way this is worded, is that responibility is bieng downloaded onto "Children under 8", whereas I am absolutely shure that there is no toxin that effects only children remarkable how this appears right out in the open like it's a technical discussion involving the placement of a regulatory warning sticker.

From the paper, they are going by body weight, and then a conservative age as a proxy:

“To ensure safe population-level recommendations can be easily interpreted at the individual parental level, and given the variability across an age cohort of weight, we suggest that recommendations should be based on weight rather than age.

“Alternatively, the recommended age threshold may need to be higher (eight years), to ensure the dose per weight would not be exceeded given normal population variation in weight.”

This is quoted at the end of the Guardian article, which is better than the Sky one: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/12/under-eights...

Sorbets, ice's, sherberts, etc, have been in use for centuries, its absurd that there would be a "food" presented, and designed to attract youth, where something akin to a LD50 is bieng floated as "goooood times for the whole family"*

*Some fatal conditions and limitations apply

Glycerol has no function as food, it's a "cheapener"

We are at a point were we are being feeded acfual poison directly..

These have been on sale for at least 50 years.

Which coincides with the period of increasing obesity.

Poison doesn’t age well

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