It’s the Sugar, Folks | Hacker News Reader

It’s the Sugar, Folks

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

175 pointsjoecurry219 comments

Two comments from the article that I liked:

As the principal author of this study, I wanted to clarify some of its details for scientifically-minded readers, in order to avoid misinterpretations: http://epianalysis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/sugardiabetes/

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The opening line ("Sugar is indeed toxic.") is distorted and inane. Sugars are not toxic, as evidenced by our evolution of taste buds that respond so positively to them. Sugars are a dense source of energy, which is why our metabolic systems cherish them. Let's leave such excessive, unsubstantiated commentary to The Onion or Mad Magazine, and just apply common sense to our diets.

Dr. Lustig does indeed claim sugar is toxic in the same since that alcohol is toxic. He goes through the complete cycle of metabolizing 1 molecule of sucrose (1 half glucose linked to 1 half fructose). The fructose metabolism is the problematic part, which was hard to follow for me, and I have an undergrad degree in Biochemistry and graduated with a 4.0. Here is the original talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

JPKab below has a good high level overview.

Toxicologists are far more likely to emphasize dosage, eschewing the categorisation of chemicals as toxic or non-toxic . Non-toxicologists “tend to view chemicals as either safe or dangerous and they appear to equate even small exposures to toxic or carcinogenic chemicals with almost certain harm" [1].

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1992.... Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks (2006)

It's a problem of translation between the chemistry definition of toxic (it will kill you in short order) and the common definition (poisonous, noxious). Bittman was using the latter, with an understanding that the dose makes the poison.

I don't think either of those definitions are well served by evidence.

And which sugars too? Most of us would assume this means glucose, but what if fructose is also a factor? Could fruit cause diabetes? Or perhaps the galactose in milk? Sugar alcohols?

It doesn't even mean glucose. Glucose is, as best we can tell, just fine. Which is almost a given, considering "blood sugar"- a key way your body distributes energy to your cells- is glucose.

Most studies that conclude "sugar" is "toxic" are talking about fructose, which is metabolized differently than glucose. This means fructose (e.g. HFCS) and sucrose (table sugar, e.g. cane sugar)

Glucose is, as best we can tell, just fine.

Obviously glucose is fine at some level -- as you say, the body uses it internally.

But that doesn't mean that there wouldn't still be a problem if we only got rid of the fructose we're eating and replaced it with glucose. The quantity of glucose we would then be ingesting with each meal would be quite large, and that might have other negative consequences -- mediated, perhaps, by the even larger insulin release that would be triggered.

But I'm only speculating. I haven't come across any research that bears on this question. If you have, I'd like to see it.

Does it also include fructose, the main sugar in apples, oranges, bananas, berries, tomatoes, and corn?

If I remember the oChem correctly, HFCS is just glucose and fructose mixed.

Yes, that fructose.

You are correct. HFCS is unassociated glucose and fructose, and to my understanding is pretty much interchangeable with sucrose, as sucrose is enzymatically cloven almost immediately.

I will throw in that firstly, it is theorized that the fiber in apples etc provides some regulation to the absorption of the fructose and that somehow changes matters. Secondly, and in my mind more importantly, it is much easier to gorge on pure sugar than it is to eat an equivalent amount of sugar in the form of apples.

I'd also point out that there's no way in hell we evolved a metabolism that expected ready access to as much fruit as we could eat for 12 months of the year.

Why is that? In nature, different fruits ripen at different times. Even if you were restricted to nature's cycle, there could potentially be fruit available for most of the year.

http://www.cuesa.org/page/seasonality-chart-fruit-and-nuts

I mean, sure, you wouldn't have access to all of these fruits in one location, but point being fruit wasn't something you got for a week in June, then never again until next June.

Important to note that this is the opinion section, not news. I wonder how many people are going to miss that detail?

As with sugar, most toxins are only toxic at a certain level of intake.

If you are talking about toxicity, this is a useless observation. Everything is toxic at certain levels. Did you know that there is an LD50 for water?

A NYT Editor's Pick Comment:

""" I'm glad the smoking gun has been found.

High fructose corn syrup is in virtually everything people buy to eat. It needs to go. Enough people's lives have been ruined. The design and engineering of prepared foods people commonly buy is toxic and addictive.

Now we need to re-educate people and make sure long-held views are erased. People have long blamed gluttony for obesity and obesity for diabetes. We now know it isn't true and that the super-sugars we are being force-fed are the culprit. We must all, together, demand that processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup be banned or, at the very least, severely restricted. I don't use the words force-fed lightly. Those among us who are on food stamps or a limited income have no choice but to buy the cheapest foods. Those are the ones that most commonly have the highest amount of sugars added. Anyone with a busy lifestyle eats out a lot. Fast foods, including the ones that claim to be "better," are laced with sugars, sodium, and fat.

We must demand policies that protect us from harm and the greed-driven irresponsible practices of Big Food.

Thank you, Mr. Bittman, for keeping us informed. """

So is "Big Food" the new scapegoat? I guess the next article we'll see a comment proclaiming how "Big Grocery" prices unhealthy foods too low, so now it's their fault.

This is a great study, and it's results are extremely interesting, but this article, and the inferences people are getting from it border on witch trials. The article does a great job of doing everything but coming out and saying what the commenter does "They're force feeding us toxins!". There is such a clear departure from responsibility in today's culture it's almost astonishing. The blame lies 100% with nobody, but the individual has just as much a part to play as those producing the food.

Edit: Does anyone notice the language used in the comment? "Force-fed", "re-educate", "We must all, together", "Enough people's lives have been ruined". It sounds almost like something from 1984.

Also, look how easily the commenter provides inclusion to victimhood... anyone "with a busy lifestyle", or those who "are on food stamps or a limited income". Limited income is pretty broad. It's interesting also, how they "have no choice but to buy the cheapest foods".

One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal individualist world-view. The best of us make terrible decisions in almost everything we don't consciously analyse, i.e. almost everything. The rest busy ourselves with illustrating Murphy's Law in strings of bad decisions. When a system provides individuals with easy bad decisions it should not be surprising when people behave per expectation, and thus, not sufficient to blame them.

The hard part isn't condemning the decisions of busy people operating in an environment of limited information, it's determining a system that works better and isn't vulnerable to bad actors, which is AFAIK an unsolved problem.

When you put out an ad for someone to decide what everyone in a country will spend billions of dollars on, you don't get fair-minded public servants, you get the most compelling villain moneyed interests can afford.

> One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal individualist world-view. The best of us make terrible decisions in almost everything we don't consciously analyse, i.e. almost everything. The rest busy ourselves with illustrating Murphy's Law in strings of bad decisions.

That's also a pretty trivial truth in psychology.

Those who claim that people are rational agents probably spend too much time interacting with computers, and then make unwarranted (and, I should say, spectacularly naive) generalizations.

It's extremely dangerous to excuse someone of not wishing to make conscious, good decisions.

Despite studies showing that people have a limited amount of willpower, after which they revert to habit?

I would think HNers of all people would understand the idea of abstraction and information hiding. We have so many parts of our lives that to try to get a complete understanding of even one of them is pretty complicated.

What's the best toothpaste to buy if I want white teeth? Will it hurt my enamel? What about gingivitis? What about tooth brush hardness? What about flossing? What's the proper technique? Should I do it before or after I brush?

And that's just dental hygiene.

So yes, while this libertarian ideal of "the free market solves everything" and "fuck the consumer if they won't educate themselves" is nice in theory, in practice it's not effective public policy. It simply isn't possible to be completely informed on everything that goes into every part of our lives -- if you actually want to live, that is.

that doesnt mean there's a better option though. what else are we gonna do, have some committee tell us which toothpaste to use?

Basic regulations about what makes a toothpaste fit to sell is a good start.

It's extremely unwise to assume that someone has the ability to research every topic in front of them in enough detail to make an informed decision, though.

The rational economic agent is fictional, of course.

The problem with leaping to grand conclusions on that basis is that you must first establish that whatever putative replacement you want to propose is actually better than what people are already doing in the aggregate, and not merely theoretically better. Given that you have the same raw material to work with as the economy as a whole (irrational agents), this is a great deal harder than people are willing to admit. For instance, the very popular "regulate it" answer generally completely ignores the high likelihood that the irrational regulators will simply rigidly lock in some irrational answer; "regulators" or "government" are simply assumed or asserted to be somehow rational, even though it consists of the same irrational agents as anything else. (Bearing in mind that we are generally talking about sorts of irrationality that are difficult or impossible to eliminate with "education", education itself coming from other irrational agents, and with incentive structures in place to embrace irrationality if it suits an agenda.)

I'm a libertarian primarily because I believe letting people choose, then experience the consequences, then communicate with each other in a free society about those consequences, is the fastest way for both the individual and the society to learn about what works and does not. Anything else extends the feedback loop, impeding its functionality, and in many cases, such as the regulated irrationality, actively destroys it entirely.

I'm not a libertarian "despite" the irrationality of the public, I'm a libertarian because of it. If people could be counted on to be perfectly rational and logical, that's when the whole "regulate everything" would be logical and correct; we could assume the regulators were cold and rational in their choices and therefore it's rational to offload judgment to them, because we'd come to the same decisions they would anyhow. But that's not the world we live in.

Getting back to the original topic, I currently consider it highly likely that nutrition is precisely one of those cases, and if it does turn out that nutrition has been grossly wrong, the damage done by it is literally one of the top five crimes against humanity in the 20th century in terms of death and destruction. And to emphasize, yes, I mean fully literally; millions upon millions upon millions of cases of preventable "metabolic syndrome", a passionless name for a horrific, life-altering and life-destroying disease, even before it kills you decades before your time. I'm still waiting to see how it all plays out but someday this is likely to be considered one of the greatest failings of irrational agents being allowed to regulate individuals in the history of mankind. In the meantime, I strongly commend to everyone to read up on all sides of these issues and come to their own conclusions; your life depends on it.

You have a point here, the 1984-ish attitude is unpleasant. However, a broken clock is right twice a day.

From earlier in the week, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307

Junk food is designed to be addictive. Furthermore, there's no truth in advertising, the fact is that people are being manipulated en messe. In the article they full admit to it.

Finally, it is marketed at kids. (Besides, I've been to the US - I know what passes for cheese over there! Heh)

Personal responsibility is all well and good but surely you can't expect the general population to watch the lectures of Dr. Lustig or even know what HFCS is to begin with, never mind that it is bad for you and why.

Once upon a time doctors recommended smoking. What's obvious to you in the present is not necessarily 'common' sense.

Have big warning labels, skull and bones, the works, just like cigarette packs. And ban them from marketing it at kids at least. "If you eat more than one pack of these a week, you will gain weight and increase your risk of diabetes" - I bet you MOST Americans have yet to connect those dots.

> next article we'll see a comment proclaiming how "Big Grocery" prices unhealthy foods too low, so now it's their fault.

And here it comes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01...

This is a backhanded attack on "Big Grocery." Wal-Mart is being "responsible" with an initiative "to offer more healthful foods and push its suppliers to do the same."

Of course, Wal-Mart's competitors can't afford to manhandle their suppliers at the same scale.

People buy crap. They buy on taste, they buy on price, they buy on marketing. The problem, in fact, is the consumer. Demand will always be filled, and demand is not subject to law.

Here in China, I witnessed a commercial, western-style, pre-packaged apple juice drink yesterday that was sold for 6元 (just under 1USD) for 500mL. On further inspection, it contained 10% 'real' apple juice (which could mean anything...), some artificial flavoring and colouring, glucose syrup, aspartame, and preservatives. They must be making a killing: it was 90% water. Health impact? People used to drink tea - you be the judge.

It's not exactly the worst thing Wal-Mart does. Maybe now their employees will be able to afford the mental and physical strength to change or displace Wal-Mart.

I have an infographic for that:

http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/why-does-a-...

Yes, the wording is sketchy, but are you aware…

* one of the reasons HFCS is so prevalent in the US is because it's effectively government subsidized? * which is also why the worst foods are often the cheapest? * that HFCS is in all kinds of food you'd never expect, like "grilled" chicken in the salads at mid-level (or worse yet, fast food) restaurants?

If you're a label reader, you will find HFCS in a million places it oughtn't be. Since nobody expects their grilled chicken strips to stuffed with sugar, they are being tricked -- an angry person might say "force-fed."

"Big Food" may be inflammatory but it's also true, in this case. Agribusiness is an enormous industry and in the top 10 lobbyist groups in the US.

Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

Evidence does not suggest that high-fructose corn syrup is any unhealthier than other sugars. The problem isn't so much HFCS as the consumption of refined sugars without the fibrous padding that accompanies them in nature. Note that sucrose is almost immediately broken down into glucose and fructose in your gut.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991323/ Health implications of fructose consumption: A review of recent data (2010)

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup_and_he...

It's not an issue of HFCS, it's an issue of HFCS (or any sugar) being put into all sorts of food where it shouldn't be. Like bread and grilled chicken.

"The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas."

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/inde...

Not saying one two-part study alone is everything, but it's also not nothing.

That study doesn't say anything as to whether high-fructose corn syrup is unhealthier than regular syrup. That study's only claim is that mice gain more weight if they eat high-fructose corn syrup compared to normal syrup. I think they could have probably counted the calories within each sample and saved everyone a lot of time.

And who's to say additional weight gain is bad for those mice? Mammals in a cold climate might appreciate the additional weight gain.

From the article: "[The study] demonstrated that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup ... gain significantly more weight than those with access to water sweetened with table sugar, even when they consume the same number of calories."

So, they did indeed count the calories and the result seems to indicate something about HFCS encourages rats to gain weight in a way that standard table sugar does not.

Your quote is from the caption, the actual article gives no indication of caloric intake.

More importantly, you are just repeating the line that high fructose corn syrup causes more weight gain. So what? There is no indication that this is a bad thing.

The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fresh, unprocessed foods. A whole chicken, rice, and fresh broccoli can feed a family of up to 8-9 for under $20. There are very easy ways to eat healthy for cheap without ever having to resort to sketchy Tyson pre-packaged chicken, or suspicious Wonder Bread.

There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.

The problem is, people do know [...]

No they don't. You know that and I know that, but we're reasonably well-educated, with a general grasp of economics nutrition and so forth. There are a lot of people - I'd guess up to half the country - that don't understand that stuff and have difficulty understanding the 'nutrition facts' labels on food. I do think people ought to be more responsible for their own diets, but consider the impact of poor diet upon brain development. If you grew up being fed low quality food, you're less likely to appreciate how bad for you it actually is.

> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it.

For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.

It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda...

People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.

It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time.

Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it?

The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.

Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements.

Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do.

And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either.

I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.

So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.

I think you are really overstating this. We're meant to believe that going shopping, bringing the food home, preparing it (just rice alone takes a good half an hour, and chicken takes twice as long) and serving it takes less time than going to the McDonald's drive-thru?

That is very much not my experience.

I actually like to cook. It's fun and the food is perfectly suited to my tastes. But when I'm pressed for time, I'll still just stop by a fast-food restaurant because it's faster. And I have better access to fresh food and good cooking implements than many poor people, so cooking is even more of a decision for them.

You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels.

A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know.

There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue.

And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".

You've never spent time with people who were really poor

I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions.

Many of these kids do not watch TV

No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.

No offense, but I have friends who teach in inner city schools and who mentor teens in places as diverse as Washington DC and Portland, OR. We talk about the plight of these kids all the time, and all the "obvious" stuff they don't know, and what's worse, how they don't realize their existences are abnormal because they have little exposure to what normal is. (Not: "Normal" is not a judgment. But if you don't know what options are, you can never be said to be able to choose.)

One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked.

I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare.

(How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)

"And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves"."

Or salmonella, e coli, lysteria, botulinus, cholera, etc, etc...

Buying a large bag of rice and large bag of beans once every two weeks isn't a big problem. Those dry foods have a huge shelf life and are cheap. I didn't say they need to eat fresh baby spinach and kale every day.

First of all, even those articles are untrue unless your time is valued at zero.

Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by:

"Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…"

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

Yeh, meat and vegetables can be expensive. But, for example, a bag of lentils, a bag of brown rice, some tinned tomatoes and spices. That stuff is so cheap, none of it requires refrigeration and it's easy to cook large amounts using a single pot on a plug-in stovetop. Sure, there's a process around it, but almost by definition, if you're poor, then you've got a low hourly rate. Even these days, as a "proper grown up", if someone suggests getting food out, my instinctive reaction is "No, I can't afford that". I think the problem more lies with the sort of idea that was in a front page article a couple of days back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307) the bad stuff is just so tasty - what can make different kinds of people choose to eat super boring lentils and rice over super stimulating delicious fat/salt/sugar?

That still doesn't address the issue that none of those ingredients look like "food" to someone who doesn't already know you can put them all together with some heat, water, and time. Part of what keeps those foods cheap, as well, is that they aren't marketed, they have dull packaging, and they're on the lowest-value shelves in the supermarket where they're practically invisible.

Yeh, so true. It's a good hint you're shopping right if you have to bend down a lot and, hey, free workout. Also I know a huge number of people who well know how to cook, but just don't get round to it. Something, something delayed gratification, future time orientation, blah. Also, why am I reading hacker news and looking at knowyourmeme when I could be cooking dahl and rice?

Note that the article is considering fruits and vegetables, while I would argue that they should be considering staples such as potatoes, beans, and rice. Staples which are cheap, feed a significant portion of the world, and are easy to prepare by cooking in water.

Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.

I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim.

A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else.

Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.

I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.

There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close.

You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.

I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.

But you NO how to comparison shop. And you have access to a supermarket that has what you want. And you have the time to cook. And you have the time to save. And you have pots and pans. And you have adequate food storage containers. And you have...the list goes on.

It's incredible how easily we overlook everything it takes to do what you said.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who recently had a baby. He's an educated, employed, white, probably wealthy, smart, guy who loves good food and knows how to cook and lives in wealthy suburbs. What he said yesterday was along the lines of "I totally understand why people eat fast food so much. I drive by Jack in the box on the way home and, while I haven't done it yet, the idea is compelling."

So here's a guy who "knows" that it's bad to eat fast food. and doesn't want too. But he's tired from his 9-5 desk job, doesn't sleep as well as he wants to do to the newborn), and doesn't want to cook at the end of the day.

What if he was a high school graduate with a physical job making $35k a year with 2 kids who doesn't live near a grocery store and never had any exposure to cooking, food saving, and all the other things you have? What is the chance that person, on their own, is going to discover their horrible diet, learn how to prepare and save their food, break the habit of sugary foods, etc.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's easy, or common sense, or even possible for a huge swath of the population.

Empathy. That's all it takes to understand how easily people get stuck, because they're not superhuman. Yes, yes, personal responsibility etc. etc. but there's no point in denying that environment (and ecosystem -- viz a viz propping up incredibly unhealthy foods) plays a huge role.

Thanks for having empathy. Hopefully comments like yours will help other people see what they're lacking.

You're not quoting realistic prices for my part of the country, because $1/pound is about half what I pay for a whole bird, on average. Even at Safeway, I would pay around $1.80/pound for a factory farmed chicken.

So basically, the numbers only work out if you're living somewhere cheap (i.e. not urban). Where I live, a chicken that feeds four costs $8-$15 (roughly $2 a pound). Eight meals means two birds, plus the cost of everything else.

Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods.

There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.

In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical.

Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most.

That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

I do what exactly what you're talking about, and there's still no way I can match the prices of a canned stew with stuff I buy in a grocery store. It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

And this isn't surprising: $5 is remarkably cheap for a beef-based product. They do it by using remnant beef, which you can't really get in stores. Grocery store stew meat is probably 2-3x more expensive than the stuff they're using. Mine will taste better and be higher quality, but it won't be cheaper.

It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

I can't understand how you come to this conclusion. I definitely save money by buying larger cuts or bulk packs. Maybe you should come over for dinner :-)

I'm not saying that you can't save at all -- you can save 10% or so if you buy certain kinds of meat, in bulk. But it still doesn't make you cost-competitive with Hormel.

it surprised me when I realized most people don't do this.that's what my parents to growing up in that's what my wife and I do now. I only recently realized that most people don't put so much planning into their menus.

You can have a McDouble burger for $1 on the Dollar Menu. It contains 390 kcal and you need ~2300 kcal/day or about 6 burgers or $6. Can you go below that by cooking yourself? Unless you buy food in huge quantities, only eat pasta, or reduce your intake of meat, I think it's pretty hard.

Why not Google for research instead of speculating? It took me 5 seconds to find this:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

"Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups."

Comparing calorie to calorie almost seems silly. The definition of a junk food is something that has a high concentration of calories, particularly relative to its overall nutritional content.

How else will you compare a 2300 calorie diet of healthy foods with a 2300 calorie diet of unhealthy foods?

McDonalds chicken strips and nuggets have 0 grams of Sugar. There's sugar in the buns, but it's not in the chicken.

http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...

Looks like it contains vast amounts (~30% of the calories in an alleged meat product) of potato starch. How does that work metabolically? If it turns into fructose in the body, we're right back where we started with the sugars...

Starch is a whole bunch of glucose molecules chained together. No fructose.

I wasn't talking about their nuggets — although, there are a few facts you ought to know: One, the FDA allows you to report nutritional categories at 0g if there is .9g or less per serving. A lot of "low carb" foods push this ruling to its limits.

Second, I wasn't able to find the page for nuggets specifically, but I doubt their preparation of the chicken meat in nuggets is better than their non-breaded, grilled breast filets:

Grilled Chicken Fillet Allergens: SOY LECITHIN Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning (rice starch, salt, sugar, yeast extract, canola oil, onion powder, maltodextrin, chicken skin, paprika, flavor, sunflower oil, chicken, garlic powder, chicken fat, spices), sodium phosphates.

Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

CONTAINS: SOY LECITHIN.

SOURCE: http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item...

Maltodextrin isn't HFCS but it is a (no doubt corn-)derived sugar. And I highly doubt even most reasonable people would look at a plain grilled chicken patty and assume it has 18 ingredients, including TWO types of sugar (and possibly three — "flavor" is enigmatically opaque).

If you believe that McDonalds is the only one stuffing natural-looking food with HFCS, you are mistaken. And while educated people expect fast food burgers to be bad for you, the salads look like a smarter, reasonable choice (even though they often have more calories than the burger, even though the chicken is injected… not all places require calorie counts on the menu.) You will also find that many sit-down restaurants give the same preparation to their meat.

Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work.

The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies.

Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16.

Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5]

Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation.

[1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies

[5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p...

EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either.

[6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...

It should be mentioned that the govt. subsidies are present to protect US corn farmers rather than prop up food corporations.

Perhaps, but the intention doesn't change the result. Who is left unprotected? The taxpayer, who's funding all this.

You make a very good point: between tariffs, subsidies, FDA and UDSA regulations, etc., the government has effectively shaped the US food industry into what it is today. However, that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to ban HFCS. But I agree we should stop subsidizing it.

> Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

Nothing in your post appears to justify a ban on HFCS. Are "it gets used in foods you wouldn't expect" and "other countries ban it" justification enough? I'm not trying to defend HFCS, but if you're going to call for something to be banned, you need to provide better reasoning.

There are heavy subsidies on corn and not enough on fresh vegetables and fruits.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fresh-fruit...

So yes, lopsided subsidies indeed shape what some people eat.

If subsidies were put in place for fresh fruit, agribusiness would switch from corn sugar to sugar extracted and refined from, say, grapes. The end result is that the market finds a cheap way to put large quantities of sugar in foods. These are the unintended consequences of subsidies.

That is true, but they're going to drop the sugar from some of the products as well, since it's not as cheap as HFCS right now.

It's better to remove all subsidies though, or subsidize things like spinach and broccoli. If they want to extract something from those and add it, I guess I am fine.

If the govt were concerned with the health of its populace, it could enact a law to limit what govt-subsidized fruit and vegetables could be used for. Imagine it: only whole corn, kernel corn, and popcorn from subsidized corn. Doritos would suddenly be too expensive to manufacture.

This will be great once we can all agree on what is healthy!

CSPI (mentioned in the article) campaigned hard in the 80s for fast food restaurants to switch from lard to cholesterol-free 100% vegetable oil. After all, back then, cholesterol and saturated fat were considered evil. They complied and switched to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was laden with trans fat... which is now widely thought to be worse than saturated fat and is itself being phased out (again at CSPI's urging).

That's a good reason to ignore CSPI as a parasite on the American public, not to throw out the baby of public health with the bathwater of bullshit rent-seeking pseudoscience.

This is ridiculous. Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

Yes, we know that over-eating causes diabetes and obesity. And this study says that foods high in sugar pose the greatest threat. But seriously, are we going to start to say that sugar is toxic in the same way that cigarettes are toxic? We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising. The damage done by smoking... not so much.

This reminds me of a pet peeve that my grad advisor had. In our area it was common to see signs that said something to the effect of "No dumping of chemicals". He loved to point out that water was a chemical.

I think the point that is left out by the article, but emphasized by Robert Lustig (Dr. mentioned in the article) is that sugar, in nature, is almost always accompanied by large quantities of fiber, which prevent it from being absorbed too quickly.

Sugar isn't toxic, but refined sugar, or sugar that has been separated from the fiber it sits with (fruit juice) is indirectly toxic. Dr. Lustig's research has demonstrated this, and he has some very detailed lectures on the subject. He isn't some quack: he is a leading researcher in both understanding AND TREATING pediatric Type II Diabetes, which is a newly occurring disease.

When I drink a beer, I understand that the alcohol I love so much in it is essentially a toxin, that in low enough quantities won't hurt me. I also know that regualr, periodic consumption of it will negatively effect my health. Oddly enough, Lustig's research has shown that fructose, in quantities which are completely normal for someone who has just consumed a moderate amount of refined sugar or fruit juice, has a very similar effect on the liver to alcohol. Not completely identical, but similar. I suggest you watch the video.

I have a 6 year old son and a second child on the way. The only fruit juice he gets to have is extremely diluted with water. This isn't me overreacting as an ignoramus. I've looked at the data, evaluated the research, and found it extremely compelling. Ever use a juicer? Think about how many oranges it takes to make an 8 oz. glass. (It takes several, and if you tried to eat that many, you would be full halfway through due to the fiber.) Refined sugar is just juiced sugar cane with extra chemical preparation.

Oranges are good for you. Orange juice is bad for you. I know it screams out BS, but I assure you, look at the science. You will, as I was, be shocked. How the hell can this stuff I've been eating all my life be THIS bad for me, without me knowing it.

I'd like to thank you for bringing some sanity into this thread, and (hopefully) provoking some of the commenters here into doing some further reading.

The kind of thought process that causes someone to go "Fructose is a sugar, fructose is in fruit, article says sugar is bad, therefore article says fruit is bad!!11one" is quite frustrating to watch. The levels of uninformed snark in this thread is quite depressing, and is one of the main reasons I usually prefer not to see non-technical discussions on HN.

(Not that I know any better, but I recognise my lack of knowledge and attempt to address it before spouting forth opinions.)

Moderate alcohol consumption actually increases longevity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_alcohol. So regular periodic consumption of a reasonable amount of alcohol is actually helping you.

I read an article just recently that argues that the reasonable amount may be much lower than many people think.

http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/how-much-alc...

But there is little variation in one respect. The optimal amount of alcohol is somewhere around 5 and 7 g/d, which translates into about the following every day: half a can of beer, half a glass of wine, or half a “shot” of spirit.

The juice thing is a bit more complex, because it depends on the type and form of the juice and what you do or eat along with it. I find that clear apple, grape and pineapple juice is not ideal, but very pulpy orange juice or very cloudy apple juice is fine, especially combined with exercise or the right meal as long as it's in proportions of how much of said fruit you would normally consume.

No matter how pulpy the orange juice is, if you are drinking it in any kind of remotely large quantity (> 4 oz) you are taking in a ton of fructose that is not bound to fiber. Bound to fiber != mixed in a solution with fiber. The juicing is nothing more than breaking down the fibrous tissue of the fruit to release the bound up liquids. Its not about the amount of fructose, it's about the amount of fructose absorbed per unit of time. Juicing makes the fructose able to be rapidly absorbed.

Orange juice has an advantage of its flavonoids. I didn't really think it made much difference until another health nut pointed me to the studies. It does behave differently than other juices.

I was a low-carb zealot until I started learning about endotoxin (I also had some random health issues on low carb like severely low blood pressure) and I started drinking orange juice again.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20067961 is just one study, there are others. I try to accompany my meals with some flavonoid-rich food or beverage. My biomarkers have not shown any indication that I am heading towards diabetes and are identical to those I had on a low-carb diet.

> I find that ...

I'd love know more, where did you find this out?

Personal anecdotal experience. I've been having sugar metabolism issues which was diagnosed when I was quite young, basically reactive hypoglycemia after ingesting refined sugar. I was put on a controlled sugar free diet for a couple of years, then ignored it for much of my teens, and then sortof veered back onto it over the years. I was allowed fruit juices as a kid but was warned against consuming too many grapes. The main thing it seems to affect with me is an increased inattentiveness, and my ability to fall asleep at night. So I cut out sugar during my working day, and since I work on the computer I can determine how much I switch away from tasks (without realising I have drifted off, until later). I also cut it out in the evenings, since most days it makes it hard for me to fall asleep, similar to other forms of stimulation (e.g. suspenseful movies etc.) that keeps my mind racing. I also have a slightly increased heart rate. I have found what fruits and combinations work, or rather which ones doesn't work for me (e.g. if it's after 2am and I'm still awake after having a very relaxed evening). This is kind of in line with the findings from Langseth and Dowd and also Girardi on attention and sugar.

I have generally had no problem with orange juice (regardless of how clear it is), but clear pineapple and grape not.

My issues with it is not directly related to the toxicity theory, but I do think what throws my insulin response out of whack is probably the types of sugar that can be considered more on the toxic side.

I'm also pretty fond of aspartame and saccarin. There's the very vague and rather unproven risk of cancer on the one hand (which also doesn't run in my family), or the clear risk of diabetes (runs in my family) on the other hand.

I made juice this morning: 2 oranges, 2 kiwi, and 1 grapefruit. Made two cups of juice for my wife and me. I don't know about the science of sugar, but eating 1 orange, 1 kiwi, and half a grapefruit doesn't seem excessive to me.

If you ate the fruit it would be much better for you. Instead you are basically taking something healthy overall, extracting the candy part out, and throwing away the parts that are best for you.

We started drinking juice to replace cereal in the morning and to increase our vegetable intake. This morning, I just happened to only use fruit.

I'd bet that eating the fruit & vegetables would be better. But at this point, neither my wife or I will be eating kale or celery for breakfast. Juicing helps us at least some vegetables in our diet. Baby steps.

Well, atleast he's getting some vitamins and minerals.

Eating fruit is better than drinking fresh fruit juice, which is better than drinking Mountain Dew.

If hewere drinking the fruit juice in place of Mountain Dew it might be better, but I doubt he was chugging Mountain Dew for breakfast before he started drinking fruit juice.

The problem is that people think fruit juice is healthy and nutritious, and they aren't aware they should limit consumption.

But if you ate that fruit you'd be full, and thus less likely to eat other stuff.

And that one cup of juice could be swigged down easily. You can see how some people would just pour another glass? (Especially if they think undiluted juice is healthy?)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+oranges%2C+2+kiwis%2C...

56 grams of sugar total

Total sugar/serving:

28 grams

Total sugar/serving of a 12 oz. Coca Cola:

36 grams

Would you think that drinking more than 2/3's of a can of Coca Cola every morning would be healthy, if you were to add a bunch of vitamin C and whatever nutrients are present in Kiwi/Grapefruit to go along with it?

>> Ever use a juicer? Think about how many oranges it takes to make an 8 oz. glass. (It takes several, and if you tried to eat that many, you would be full halfway through due to the fiber.)

I was replying to that quote of yours, meaning that it doesn't take an excessive amount of fruit to make 8 oz. of juice.

I admitted that I don't know about the science of sugar, but I have a hard time believing that fresh fruit juice is equivalent to Coca Cola with some vitamins added in.

I agree with your general sentiment, but one thing you said bears correction:

>We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

No, not really. Our bodies run on glucose yet our diets are rife with fructose which must be converted by our livers into a usable form. The metabolic pathway responsible for this conversion is a bottleneck and has nothing to do with how much exercise we get.

Thank you. It's frustrating how much ignorance there is related to the blind "a calorie is a calorie" and "calories in = calories out = health" lunacy.

It's not very logical until you learn the science behind it:

If I want less of something (fat) on my body, I eat less of it, right? But I actually have to keep my fat consumption the same and eat less carbs.

You can probably increase your fat consumption, eat less carb, and still lose weight. Shoot for less than 50 grams or carbs a day.

I was thinking more in terms of glycogen and lipid getting burned up during exercise. Whatever glucose you can't use gets converted in one way or another. I'm sure there are nuances, and it's been a while since I had to be able to recite the TCA pathway, but isn't fructose converted to glycogen? So, can't it be burned for energy like anything else? It's one of the metabolites for the TCA cycle, right?

Not to mention, this article (and this thread) are all playing fast and loose with all sorts of scientific terminology... :)

> We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

The assertion being made is that that's not true:

"The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity"

(emphasis added)

>Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

That's not necessarily true. Humans do not need sugars from external sources to survive.

>“The amount of sugar needed by the body is zero as the body can produce and absorb sugar from consumption of other daily food supplements.

http://www.theborneopost.com/2010/01/10/human-body-can-survi...

Also see:

http://www.theiflife.com/the-inuit-paradox-high-fat-lower-he...

The no-sugar diets are unsurprisingly popular these days in one of their many forms: Atkins diet, paleo, keto, primal, etc: I personally tried Keto for 6 months and lost 30 kilos and plateaued at a normal weight. I felt great and had lots of energy.

I would actually opine that consuming more sugars than, say, a couple pieces of fruit or a loaf of bread every day, is quite toxic.

It's only relatively late in human evolution we obtained access to lots of sugar.

Again, this is not just some blind data cherry-pick, "zucchini-eaters live longer". Robert Lustig has written and spoked extensively about his hypothesis for why fructose is toxic for the human liver and metabolism[1]. It's a controversial idea, but IMO he has made a compelling argument and is now gathering data which supports the hypothesis.

If you want to argue against the hypothesis, please do.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...

You fail reading forever.

It's not sugarS. He didn't talk about sugar>S<. Nobody is claiming that the entire family of sugar>>>>>>>S<<<<<< is toxic. The title is "SUGAR is toxic" (see, no sugar>>S<<. It's not sugarS. He isn't talking about a class of molecules.)

SUGAR - a.k.a. sucrose, saccharose, one part glucose and one part fructose, either bound in a single molecule or alone in what's called HFCS. Extracted. Alone by itself or mixed in a liquid. IS TOXIC.

THAT sugar.

NOT sugarS.

In science, "sugar" is a class of molecules, of which sucrose is one. One thing I'm trying to point out the difference between common language uses of scientific terms.

The other is the sheer ludicrous nature of the statement "sugar is toxic" (meaning sucrose). No, it isn't. Too much sugar in your diet can lead to health problems, but you will not die from eating sugar.

In sufficient quantities, even water is toxic to some degree (and I'm not even talking about drowning).

So, why don't you tone it down a little.

If sugar causes diabetes and people die of diabetes, doesn't that mean that the amount of sugar that is commonly consumed is toxic?

By the logic you've laid out, cigarettes aren't toxic. Smoking them can cause a variety of diseases that kill you.

Water isn't toxic, yet drinking too much water can cause your blood to become so diluted that you can die (water intoxication/hyponatremia). And yet water is essential for life.

Consuming sugar (in some form, not necessarily sucrose) is also essential for life. It's what your brain runs on. So to call it toxic is quite a stretch.

I'm not criticizing the research. I haven't read the paper and I probably won't - it's not my field. But I am criticizing the overly broad generalities in the NYT article.

Commonly consumed amounts of water don't make you ill. Commonly consumed amounts of sugar do make you ill.

Is it an exaggeration to call trans fats toxic? Your body can use them to run, but if you eat them, you'll get sick.

Consuming any amount of any form of pure sugar will spike your blood glucose. If it's a small enough amount, the spike will be small enough that it won't do you harm, but the human body evolved to handle gradual rises in blood glucose, like complex carbohydrates cause, not spikes. Comparing that to water is a stretch.

No, if you read the article, the Methods section says "sugars". They don't have data for just sucrose.

The article unhelpfully uses the term "sugar" broadly when a more specific term would be clearer, using a few specific terms only in passing. Then mentions the causality problem by claiming it's also impossible to "prove" climate change or that smoking causes cancer (???). It says in one place that fructose is the problem, but concludes that "sugar" is toxic.

I feel bad for the authors of this study.

Actually yeah, just like a cigarette here and there is not the same in effect as smoking a pack a day, some fructose and other sugars here and there are probably not going to hurt you, but there are noticeable long term effects of constantly having too much sugar.

Further comparison: sugars and nicotine both trigger dopamine cycles that can turn into mental dependence on higher doses, feeding the negative affects even more.

Finally, I can't wait to see all the backpedalling from food companies about how the healthy staple foods they load up with sugar (e.g. whole wheat bread) are actually and 'obviously' just meant to be treats. 'the added sugar should be a give away, its right there in the small print on the back of the label, under the "this is super healthy" label'.

The backpedalling needs to come from the federal government. After all, they have been promoting the idea of the food pyramid and "a calorie is a calorie" for decades. The food companies are definitely influenced by what the federal government says is healthy and what they convince people is healthy.

Sugars may not be "toxic" per se but dietary intake of sugar or carbohydrate is certainly not essential for human life. Your liver will create glucose when needed and your brain will happily burn ketone bodies when it isn't available. You can easily survive on a diet of mostly animal fat.

I'm seeing this as yet another attempt by people to justify their own poor health. Clearly it cannot possibly be their portions that are to blame, but rather society, big bones, genetics, and now the food itself being "toxic". Anything to avoid reality.

Fructose is not the problem. Too much fructose is the problem. I think it is no coincidence that the sensational spin the news has put on this story also happens to be a spin that makes their readers feel better about themselves.

I'm seeing this as yet another attempt by people to justify their own poor health. Clearly it cannot possibly be their portions that are to blame, but rather society, big bones, genetics, and now the food itself being "toxic". Anything to avoid reality.

This paragraph demonstrates a widely held, thinly veiled contempt for those with a less fortunate metabolism. This contempt is disgusting, because it is willfully ignorant of all the scientific research that indicates there is a lot more than mere willpower that determines a person's behavior, including eating habits.

As with any religiously held position of superiority, people will continue to justify this contempt with all manner of carefully worded excuses for their desire to feel better than those fat people over there. When does it end?

I think it is no coincidence that the sensational spin the news has put on this story also happens to be a spin that makes their readers feel better about themselves.

What point are you trying to make? That the news should be trying to make people hate themselves more than they already do? Good grief! This research isn't about justifying behavior, it's about identifying the chemical processes driving various metabolic phenomena so they can be controlled and corrected!

You know what about this reseasrch would make an obese reader feel better about himself or herself? It's the fact that, finally, someone has identified a specific mechanism that is causing their problems! It's the hope that comes from having a direction of attack that's more effective than self deprivation.

I never said that eating less was easy. I am not sure how you read that from what I wrote.

> What point are you trying to make? That the news should be trying to make people hate themselves more than they already do?

No, my point is that the news should not be trying to make people hate themselves less. Editorializing with peoples feelings in mind may be good business sense, but nevertheless I find it contemptible.

> This research isn't about justifying behavior

I like the research. The research is great. My issue is with the editorializing.

> those fat people over there

It sounds like you are making an assumption about me that is rather false.

I never said that eating less was easy. I am not sure how you read that from what I wrote.

That's just it. It is easy. It's absolutely, effortlessly, ridiculously freaking easy. If you're lucky enough to have my metabolism. I can buy basic, average quality food, eat to satiety, binge during the holidays, occasionally eat an entire bag of candy, and barely move the needle on the scale. It's not fair! But it's reality, and my luck with regard to metabolism is compensated for by other things about myself that are less fortunate.

While the arguments from conservation of matter and energy are obviously true, they are not the best guide to find actual success in eating. Human bodies are fantastically complex systems of systems. Human metabolism is a chemical system with an insane number of components. Conscious decision is only a very small part of that system, with the vast majority being controlled by autonomous chemical and neurological processes.

Attacking obesity by focusing on portion control and willpower seems rather like trying to control a PC by carefully fluctuating the voltage coming into its power supply.

So when news outlets start reporting on some part of the problem other than portion control, don't take it personally; take it as looking at the big picture.

> > those fat people over there

> It sounds like you are making an assumption about me that is rather false.

Given your original post about "people trying to justify their poor health" and "big bones", I'd say that assumption is pretty accurate.

Fat people are not "those people over there" to me. I am in that group. Actually no, I am not "fat". I am 15 pounds over the line between overweight and obese; I am a "fucking lardass".

The fact is that many fat people come up with all sorts of justifications and excuses to try to make themselves feel better. If you honestly have not noticed this tendency, take a look at the "fat/body acceptance" social movement. It is a real phenomenon, not imagined.

Right, so all of the conventional wisdom that you're putting out (portion control, willpower, "fucking lardass", etc.) has essentially been shown to be wrong. Homeostasis is a bitch.

Weight control is far more about maintaining healthy insulin and hormone levels - more sleep, less sugar, alcohol and carbs, some moderate exercise but not full-on jogging - than denying yourself food.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading "Good Calories, Bad Calories" - it goes into a lot of the scientific background, weight loss and overfeeding studies, etc.

Your body doesn't have permission to violate conservation of mass and energy. If you put yourself in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight, as I have been doing.

Is it easy? Fuck no. Do different bodies react in different ways? Of course. Is there nuance involved in making sure your body reacts optimally for weight loss? Of course Are most overweight people consuming gargantuan proportions of shit? You better fucking believe it.

If you live a sedentary lifestyle and consume many thousands of calories a day, fixing the problem isn't rocket science. Pretty fucking simple, and pretty fucking hard.

The fact that I am a fucking lardass is not conventional wisdom, nor has it essentially shown to be wrong. It is a simple fact. No idea what you were trying to get at there.

"If you put yourself in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight, as I have been doing."

It sounds like you think establishing a caloric deficit is as simple as forcing yourself to eat less and exercise more. Research says it isn't. Some diets result in a lowered desire to eat. Some diets result in an increased metabolism.

What you are saying is that some diets are better than others. I would never dream of disputing that, and I don't think I have been disputing that.

That's not precisely conservation of mass and energy. At least not in the conventional E=mc^2 sense.

> Too much fructose is the problem.

Or maybe the problem is that your portions could be small and still contain too much fructose. I remember watching a talk where speaker claimed it's not easy to find just some bread without added fructose at a grocery store nowadays (I think it was Dr. Lustig's presentation, actually).

I remember watching a talk where speaker claimed it's not easy to find just some bread without added fructose at a grocery store nowadays.

Solution: don't eat any bread.

I've been on the Paleo diet for a couple weeks and am loving it. I cook my own meals now, and whenever I get a sweet tooth I just pop open a can of pineapple chunks.

Bread was invented when agriculture was invented. But our body wasn't designed (by evolution) to process a diet of agriculture. It can process it, just like a car can run on corn starch, but it's probably not very good for the system.

I don't necessarily buy the evolution argument, the extent to which some human adults are lactose tolerant is a very recent evolutionary development which coincides approximately with the development or agriculture, but the conclusion is nevertheless sound. Stop eating bread, or at least so much of it.

People binge on bread these days, it is insane. It is no wonder that any amount of fructose in bread can be alarming when you look at how much is consumed.

I'm interested in counterpoints to the evolution argument. Not to prove myself right; just the opposite. I enjoy proving myself wrong, since it means I've probably learned something.

The logic is this: evolution is supreme. It's why our eyes see brightness logarithmically rather than linearly. In fact, every sensory input (sound, etc) except pain is logarithmic. Pain is linear. We see green more intensely than other colors because we've spent a long time hunting for prey that hides in green grass and green tree leaves. Evolution determines the very nature of our thinking patterns. It's why some people count "out loud" to themselves in their heads, whereas others count by "seeing" the numbers in their heads. Etc. There are at least thousands of examples of how evolution has forged our state of being.

Evolution determines so much of our nature that in comparison we have very little control over aspects of ourselves. One thing we do control is input to our bodies. We can control whether we watch TV, and we can control which foods we eat. The question here is, which foods should we eat?

One view is that if we eat foods we've been eating for the past million years, then we probably don't have to worry about which foods we eat. The answer is simply, "Eat any which haven't been designed by humans in the past 10,000 years."

In the USA, foods are required by law to list every ingredient. This is a huge advantage if one were to read them. If I see corn starch, soy, sugar (if it's added as an ingredient, then that means the food is artificial), etc, then I don't buy it.

It's incredible how many foods are excluded by this method. You almost can't find ham that hasn't had sugar added. I pretty much have to buy summer sausage, pork steaks, and chicken. No more bologna.

I'm afraid I don't have very much insight into the matter. All I know is that it seems apparent that evolution can change human dietary constraints in surprisingly short periods of time, particularly over the short course of 10,000 years.

Paleo diets still seem like a good idea to me, I just remain unconvinced that this is clearly due to evolution. Other types of restricted diets seem to stack up well; the diet seems sound but the justifications seem a bit pseudo-sciency.

Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

So is carbon dioxide, but in the political vernacular it's now a "pollutant".

Obviously there is a sense in which it's true that sugar can be toxic and carbon dioxide can pollute, but these kinds of word games aren't meant to convey that sense, they're designed to confuse people. I think less of the writers and politicians who use them.

The title is pure linkbait. What they are trying to hide behind their typical populist wording is that the confidence levels linking increased sugar intake to an increase in diabetes are just as high as those linking cigarettes to lung cancer.

>In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.

Sigh. No, according to this study, there is a stronger correlation between sugar and diabetes than between obesity and diabetes.

>Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence.

Much better! Lead with that next time, medical research reporter.

All in all, this seems like a pretty good study that controls for a lot of confounding variables that a lot of diet related studies completely neglect. I just wish the reporting here, and in general in all medical research reporting, wasn't so sloppy. The goal should be to spread awareness of new findings, not to spread misconceptions.

"The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics)."

As far as observational studies, (of which I am a huge skeptic), this one is pretty well controlled for. It's not like they studied 7 nations, or 11 nations. They studied 175 nations. That allows for a whole lot of controllability for various factors.

Not on that list: family history/genetics. I believe that has already been identified as a significant risk factor for diabetes. So it's not just the sugar.

It controls for etnic variables, by using trends instead of comparing raw numbers and some more advanced techniques.

It can not control for family because it was population-wide, not person-wide (and yes, that is a flaw that the authors acknoledge).

This study doesn't do the impossible and prove causation, but it goes beyond mere correlation in several key ways; follow Uhhrrr's link to http://epianalysis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/sugardiabetes/ . It's not something you can casually dismiss with a wave of the "correlation is not causation" mantra.

This is commentary, not reporting: "Opnionator - Exclusive online commentary from The Times". It's little more than a guy on a soap box or one of the talking heads on TV. Unlike the article, the study itself does appear to be legitimate however.

I would be interested to see if the arguments about sugar we're having now are similar to the arguments about cigarettes in the 60's.

Wouldn't it be better for us to link directly to the study, rather than to Bittman's editorial about it? I find the study harmonizes nicely with my view of the world, and I'm even ok with Bittman, but he's not a subject matter expert at all. He's the NYT's former food writer who recently decided to write more about food policy.

They had better change the messaging. I'm in favor of common-sense regulation of mass-production food ingredients, and "sugar is toxic" even rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, its an indiscriminate expression. Sort of like saying metal can kill you when its actually bullets.

Its isolating fructose from its natural packaging that is the problem. Metabolizing large amounts of it must be done by the liver and it has side effects.

The other half of table sugar is glucose and it is handled by releasing insulin. Insulin releases leptin as a side effect, which makes you feel satisfied.

Starches break down into glucose. And glucose can be used by every cell in the body.

Lustig's video on this goes through all the biochemistry.

We need to tax sugar like we tax tobacco for the same reasons. It will decrease consumption. Those taxes will pay for the medical expenses of people with diabetes.

When is this going to stop? Endless government regulation is not the solution to everything. Look, there's a huge health movement going on in the country right now. Just like there was an anti-smoking movement starting up before the government ever got involved with that. The people who fund this crap aren't looking to do good, they just want more tax revenue (or more grant dollars from those who want more tax revenue). That's what they've always wanted.

Don't believe me? Restaurants are now voluntarily adding calorie numbers to menus, because the lower calorie stuff is higher margin and people buy it. Vitamin water, coke zero, pepsi one/0, izze, baked chips, etc... etc... etc.. take up much more room in the grocery stores than they used to. Trader joes and whole foods are massive businesses now and threatening the big boys like kroger. I'm not saying obesity isn't a problem, but I do think we'll see the trend start changing for the better soon.

There's no need for regulation. The public will shift on it's own. All we need is better education. Almost everyone I know(in my age group and younger) eat much more healthily than their parents do/did simply because they are better informed. Contrary to popular belief, people do make rational decisions when it comes to eating (excluding socioeconomic factors).

> Don't believe me? Restaurants are now voluntarily adding calorie numbers to menus, because the lower calorie stuff is higher margin and people buy it.

Actually, if you are in California then it's more likely because of a 2009 law[1]:

"Putting our heads in the gastronomic sand became a bit harder starting July 1, 2009, when a new law went into effect making California the first state to mandate that chain restaurants--those with 20 or more locations--provide a calorie count for everything on the menu."

[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/calorie-count-california-res...

I moved from Texas to California and I can confirm that, while there does seem to be a trend toward more and more restaurants voluntarily including this information, you don't really SEE it until you cross the border into California.

This is an example of a business regulation that has had a directly positive impact on my daily food choices... I find that I automatically choose lower calorie foods just because the calorie numbers guilt me into doing so. In fact, this one thing led to a general softening of my hard-core libertarian "no regulations ever let the market decide" stance of the past.

Yeah, I have to say I really appreciate this as well. It's especially eye opening to go into a movie theater and see the large popcorn labelled as 1500 calories (!!!).

Almost everyone I know(in my age group and younger) eat much more healthily than their parents do/did simply because they are better informed.

So basically, everyone you know is rich and either white or first-generation indian/chinese?

The government subsidizes the production of corn syrup, to a huge extent, and that's why it's used in damn near everything, with serious costs to public health (reflected in your insurance premiums and tax bills).

> Almost everyone I know

I'm sure you know a representative random sample of people your age, of course.

So we should be taxing fruits then, right?

No, it would be worth your time to read/listen to Robert Lustig. He explains how and why consuming natural sources like fruit where fructose is encased in digestion-slowing cellulose is normally fine, while extracting the fructose and adding it to other products like soda (and huge amounts of American processed foods) leads to toxicity and liver and metabolic damage.

You can make jokes, but cutting excess fructose from American diets would probably be the #1 easiest thing to do for millions of people to live longer, healthier lives. And Bittman is correct that the FDA should get involved.

It's actually difficult to buy "Healthy, Good for You™!" yogurt in an American supermarket that doesn't contain toxic amounts of added fructose - that is just crazy.

Educate then, don't attempt to socially engineer. Smoking was reduced through education, not taxation. The more people understood the long term consequences of smoking the less people smoked.

I share the views of those who are not fans of processed sugars or fructose, but I am entirely opposed to social engineering.

> Educate then, don't attempt to socially engineer.

Education is social engineering.

Nonsense. Social engineering is using the force of the state to modify behaviors. You can say forced education is social engineering, but the act of educating or learning is not social engineering.

> Social engineering is using the force of the state to modify behaviors.

You may think that, but that isn't what it means. Look it up

Wikipedia: Social engineering is a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups.

Google: The application of sociological principles to specific social problems.

Dictionary.com: the application of the findings of social science to the solution of actual social problems.

So whatever you're talking about, social engineering isn't the phrase you're looking for.

In the political sense I am using the term appropriately. You want to get into semantic debate and I am not really interested.

Words have meaning, I'm not "wanting" a semantic debate, I'm simply telling you that the way you're using the term is bound to be misunderstood because it doesn't mean that. Take it how you will, but no you didn't use the term correctly even in the political sense as I gave you the political science definition from Wikipedia, that is the political sense.

Wikipedia is not the beginning and the end. The English has a profound ability to change. And yes, I used the term in an appropriate manner that many who debate politics understand it.

Also, go argue that decimate means to destroy 10% versus what it is perceived as to mean today (more than 10%.)

Words change.

Words do change, you still used it wrong. Good day.

Smoking was reduced through education, not taxation.

Do you have any references to back this up? I'd be genuinely very curious to see them!

Not on hand, but you are right to ask for them. I'll further articulate the argument that I should have made above. The demographics of smokers skew towards higher consumption in poorer & less educated brackets while less consumption among wealthier & more educated.

My argument is simple. Taxation has a minimal effect on our behaviors, but our level of education & level of wealth has a much larger effect. Those who are more impacted by a tax on tobacco make up a larger percentage of those who are less impacted by the higher cost.

Source: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult...

*Edited for clarity & for a less glib response.

Really? Because I always thought the ever increasing cost of cigarettes had some small role in it as well. http://www.treatobacco.net/en/page_120.php

Is there a societal problem of people having massive fruit intake?

It seems both logical and effective to just worry about the 'added' sugars in processed foods.

An apple a day is the doctor's pay?

No, we need to stop subsidizing sugar and flour production. I'm visiting the US after living elsewhere, and the #1 thing I notice about the meals is how carbo-loaded and sugar-loaded they are -- including most people's home cooking!

Not to say I don't enjoy some of the sugar-loading, but the carbo-loading is just annoying. When I help friends make a vegetable stir-fry with noodles, I don't want a bowl that's 75% rice noodles. I don't want to feel hungry again 3 hours later despite eating a large meal, because the large meal had little in it other than kilocalories from simple carbohydrates.

I want the kind of veg-and-protein filled meals I've gotten more used to, in which I can measure sugar levels by whether something tastes sweet and I feel full all day/evening because most of the meal's content was "thick" stuff like vegetables, legumes, eggs, meat, cheese, olive oil and/or fish rather than "thin" foods like milk or sauce, or "very thin" foods like bread, pasta, or rice.

Would taxes on sugary things actually decrease consumption? I doubt you would actually be able to tax a 50 cent drink enough to make anyone reconsider purchasing it, particularly considering people will pay up to several dollars for that same beverage in other contexts. Nobody is going to be doing the "can I afford this, with the tax price included" calculus with things that cheap. (The fact that we seem to always display prices pre-tax only aggravates this)

(The fact that we seem to always display prices pre-tax only aggravates this)

I find this practice of American retailers incredibly pernicious. I really think displayed prices should be out-the-door on everything - you can still put the tax data on the receipt. When I moved to the US from Europe, I found it very difficult to manage my grocery bill for the first year or so until I got used to adding 8% to everything.

Agreed. Using the same logic, they could wage the same campaign against water.

Because your chance of diabetes goes up 1.1% for every glass of water you drink?

No, because it's flat out fatal if you inhale too much of it.

Or for that matter, drink to much of it.

Water intoxication is real and potentially life threatening, not just in theory but practice as well.

The key difference between water and sugar here is that most people stop drinking water when they've had to much.

Consumption of dihydrogen monoxide correlates perfectly with onset of diabetes. In fact there is not one single person who has developed diabetes who hasn't ingested DHMO at some point in their life.

Nope, its actually a correlation of 0. All the people who didn't get diabetes had the same DHMO consumption. If you want to be snarky, do try to at least make sense.

No, the R^2 is 1.0 between (dhmo-exposure,got-diabetes). You're talking about (dhmo-exposure,!got-diabetes) which turns out to also have a 1.0 correlation, which was kind of the point of my snark in the first place.

Those who don't understand even the basics of correlation are doomed to be led astray by statistics. The authors of the paper in question seem to understand it just fine, it would be nice if we could expect even minimal statistic comprehension from those making follow-on claims using the paper as supporting evidence.

No, your snark fails because you picked the wrong variables. Got Diabetes necessarily implies a population of Did Not Get Diabetes, so the r^2 would not be 1.0.

On the other hand, the r^2 between Have Diabetes and Water Exposure would be 1.0.

Correlation is not causation.

There is no mention of it in this thread so far, so here: http://reddit.com/r/keto Check the sidebar out.

See the transformations which happen to people when they (mostly) give up consuming sugars: http://www.reddit.com/r/keto/search?q=progress&sort=top&...

Keto cuts out carbs including those that are converted to just glucose, not just sugar (which is 50% fructose). It's not the same thing at all.

Uh, sorry, what exactly did I say? I said mostly giving up sugars, which is why I mentioned keto.

A very related, and VERY WELL PRESENTED and scientific video explanation of why sugar is poison, presented to residents at the University of California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

If you like TED talks, this will just blow your mind. It gets highly medical at one point of the talk, but HN should be able to follow along. I recommend watching this when you have an hour of absolute free time and want to learn.

I'm sitting here, dumbfounded, in a mix of response between "no shit" and "this isn't something that needs to be regulated".

Is there something special about sugar compared to other carbs? If I had to choose between eating bread or cake for the same calories will cake hurt me more?

The difference is that table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are about 50% fructose (the rest glucose).

While glucose (which is what bread is mostly metabolized into) can be used by every cell in the body, fructose must be broken down by the liver using a metabolic pathway similar to that used by alcohol.

There is a hypothesis that once a person's metabolism has been damaged by enough fructose, that any carbohydrate is likely to cause obesity. Basically, that insulin resistance seems to affect fat cell last and once it sets it glucose will be preferentially absorbed by fat cells.

So people with a well-functioning insulin response should be able to eat relatively large amounts of (non-fructose-containing) carbohydrates without issue, but those in whom the insulin response is damaged (probably a majority of Americans over age 25) might need to cut back on all carbohydrates to stay lean.

But again, this is very much an untested hypothesis.

If the bread is a typical "pedestrian" loaf, there's probably little difference. There is a bigger difference if it's something like Ezekial sprouted grain bread.

What do they mean by sugar "availability" in the study? How is that measured, by the price in a given country, imports?

I was going to publish a comment on the study about that- my background is in agricultural economics so I'm very familiar with the database they used. I am curious to know which FAOstat data they used. Was it Sugar, Raw Equivalent or Sugar, Refined Equivalent? Either way, the FAO data is calculated based on production + imports - exports. They admit in the paper itself that this is not a perfect proxy ("It is thought that much of the FAO data on foods and nutrients in the food supply have limits to their reliability") for consumption so it is alarming, but predictable to see this being termed as such by the media.

I don't know if it's the best series of data to use for this. I would have used a much longer series if possible because to be honest the past ten years have not seen a dramatic change in sugar consumption, but I guess their diabetes prevalence dataset only spanned that long. But that brings up the question of the lag for developing diabetes itself, it's not like 50 extra calories. I also couldn't find if they threw out countries with weird or obviously low quality data. Israel's data, for example, is a bit strange. It goes from around 500 kcal/capita/day sugar to 230. I find it hard to believe that consumption habits changed so drastically there.

They also do not discuss much about why they, as non-economists, chose to use econometric rather than epidemiology or biostat methods. I also hate that their final graph is totally unlabeled and there is no option to download a format that would allow one to see which dots correspond to which country.

It would be wise for some of the alarmists on this thread to read the paper and this sentence in particular " Hence, any of the findings we observe here are meant to be exploratory in nature, helping us to detect broad population patterns that deserve further testing through prospective longitudinal cohort studies in international settings, which are only now coming underway."

I wondered the same thing. For the most important variable in their study they sure don't explain it very well.

I looked all over FAOSTAT but couldn't find an explanation. http://faostat3.fao.org/home/index.html#METADATA

There's an interesting idea in this article:

  ... and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar 
  that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” 
  list, because that’s what gives the industry license to 
  contaminate our food supply.

Ignoring the loaded language, does anyone know what the consequences of removing fructose from the GRAS list would be?

Industry would find the next cheapest alternative to making the food sweet.

If fructose is removed from the GRAS list, that would imply fruits are no longer considered safe to eat.

Does not being GRAS imply a duty to test edible plants for containing something? That seems difficult. Of course, it wouldn't be the first crazy regulation...

>>> The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list, because that’s what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply."

Oh fer cryin out loud, just try to educate people a little better on how to MODERATE intake of everything, don't go overboard here and try to get a ban on sugar.... What is this world coming to when everybody expects some bigger force to make all the decisions for them and keep them safe. Learn how to think for yourselves and take some vested interest in you actions and decisions. Gotta strike a balance between natural selection and idiotracy I suppose...

I don't want a bigger force to make the decisions for me, but I am quite happy to delegate some of my authority to the government and have it act on my behalf by requiring more accurate labeling and so forth. I eat a very healthy diet, but I don't have the time or inclination to keep up with every last additive and food manufacturing process out there. In fact, I'm happy to pay some of my taxes so other people can study that as their full-time job.

There's a huge difference between banning sugar and regulating labeling. Even Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson supports food labeling (though purists might be opposed to that).

Nobody's proposing a ban on sugar.

Every time I see an article related to Medicine on HN it seems a high amount of people comment without reading or at least comprehending the article. It's pretty and remind me of the negative parts of Reddit.

I'm uncomfortable with how this article keeps repeating that because it's "not possible" to do a better study, that the result must be conclusive. That simply does not follow. The fact that you can't do a better study doesn't mean we should believe the result of the best study we have uncritically - and it certainly doesn't mean by itself that the "smoking gun" has been found. So many health myths have been conclusively believed in the past that we should know better than this by now.

I think many people know by know sugar is "toxic" and is responsible for pandemic obesity, type 2 diabetes and 99% of the dental mafia, erm... industry; at least I for one preach against sugar every time there's a discussion on diets and food.

This might have just reached a level where authorities need to get their shit together and do something about it... And this is the sad and hard part as many of our politicians may be "subsidised" by the food industry.

With luck, this will encourage people to cook their own food. It isn't that hard to do, doesn't really take that much time, and the benefit of knowing what you are eating really helps inform your diet choices.

Is aspartame a good alternative?

No it isn't. If you're going to use it or products containing it, I strongly suggest you research this subject for yourself since this is not the place to argue the toss. When you do so, as ever, look to the money.

look to the money

What is that supposed to mean? Coke (et al) probably make more money per volume on the diet drinks. So now that we've looked at the money, so what? As for health, you've got conspiracy nuts on one side, and a clear link with obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay on the other.

> What is that supposed to mean?

It means that, when you read a study, also read the name of the entity financing it.

What study are you referring to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

Aspartame has been deemed safe for human consumption by over 100 regulatory agencies in their respective countries

...are they all financed (corrupted) by your unidentified bogeyman?

Big Sweetener.

Yes, it is.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070102024642/http://www.fda.gov...

> FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.

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