> The biggest one humanity has ever seen.
Sugar, anyone?
Sugar, anyone?
Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.
They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.
> Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.
I disagree, sugar is bigger than screens.
And instead of complaining about my answering another comment, you can write an article about complaining.
But the copious amounts we're ingesting these days? It's actually terrible. A major contributor to the coronary disease epidemic.
Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.
Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.
Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)
No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"
I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.
Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...
(plus some other quick search results)
https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...
https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...
> I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.
I don't think this really captures the concept of "sugar". Here's ordinary sourdough bread: https://beckmannsbakery.com/collections/sourdough-breads/pro...
Serving size 38g, 22g carbohydrate, 0g fiber.
By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.
(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)
Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.
The difficulty I have with this idea is that they would have to also not count as "carbohydrate".
> Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.
Sodium is reported to the microgram, so we know that salt is 0.5g of it.
For one third of the bread to be "minerals", I'd start to worry that it'd be more like eating a rock than eating bread.
EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that the missing weight is water.
https://www.nerdscandy.com/nerds
(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)
A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.
Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.
Some other chewy candies:
Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).
Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.
Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.
> especially since the rest is corn syrup.
Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".
So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...
@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?
BTW, the current product website says Jolly Ranchers are 72% sugar: https://www.hersheyland.com/products/jolly-rancher-original-...
I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
sure sounds like someone needs a 10kg bag of sugar to be emptied down the back of his shirt on instagram live
glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) + oxygen (6O₂) → carbon dioxide (6CO₂) + water (6H₂O) + energy (ATP).
Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.
This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.
Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.
My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:
"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"
Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.
Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
* The worst addictions, i.e. all the ones really worthy of the name, punish you (or kill you) if you stop.