Being Happy With Sugar | Hacker News Reader

Being Happy With Sugar

theatlantic.com

31 pointssizzle26 comments

What I personally found out was that if you stay away from sugar and sweeteners completely, eventually you get used to the new taste and no longer suffer from lack of sweetness. I didn't think I'll ever be able to drink unsweetened coffee, but now I'm doing exactly that. More than that, things that had "normal" taste before (such as soft drinks) will now seem overly sweet, to the point of not being able to drink them at all.

So maybe instead of asking "what is the best sugar replacement" one should ask "how do I best get used to not sweetening everything I eat".

(I understand that the article casts doubts on sugar being evil. I still think that reducing sugar and / or sweeteners as much as possible at the very least will not hurt you, and most likely will be a bit of a benefit).

> More than that, things that had "normal" taste before (such as soft drinks) will now seem overly sweet, to the point of not being able to drink them at all.

This I can confirm. Apples for example taste as sweet as candybars taste to "normal" people. And candybars are un-eatable. They are so sweet that the sweetness starts to turn into bitterness. (I'm from Europe though so we don't have much high fructose sirup in our food - so I can't imagine how sweet US food is).

It's really interesting how much sugar and sweeteners our foods contain nowadays. And because people get used to sweetness the manufacturers have to add even more sugar to make things taste sweet again.

> I understand that the article casts doubts on sugar being evil. I still think that reducing sugar and / or sweeteners as much as possible at the very least will not hurt you, and most likely will be a bit of a benefit

Yeah, I don't really know how 'evil' sugar is - but I know that I feel much better when I eat less of it (less bloated, not so sleepy after eating). And that's enough for me. I think interested people should try a sugar-less diet for some weeks and then decide if it's for them. If not for health reasons it could make you just feel better.

I eat a lot of sweeteners, but no sugar (sucrose, I still enjoy fructose). The great thing about artificial sweeteners is that they are mostly not as sweet as real sugar and what's most important to me, don't leave the horrible sour after taste that simple carbs do.

These days most things people consider normal are too sweet for me.

As for sugar being evil. It is, for varying definitions of evil. Its biggest problem is that it's just a lot of calories packed into a small volume, so you don't realise how much you've eaten. Surprisingly, once you abolish sugar, it becomes difficult to fulfill your daily calorie needs. When strenuous exercise is involved it becomes downright impossible.

If you don't care about calories, then surely you care about energy fluctuations. Foods high in sugar will give you an instant rush of energy that abates quickly. This leaves you hungry and sleepy, leading to a cycle of being hungry all the time even though you've eaten enough calories.

For instance, I read a study (that I can't find a link to right now) showing that eating oatmeal for breakfast leaves you feeling full hours longer than eating regular cereal even when controlled for calorie intake.

PS: especially for the reasons of those energy spikes, I aim for a low glycemic index diet rather than just a no sugar diet. It tends to describe the desired result better.

I was on no-carb/keto for 6 months. For a while I almost couldn't walk past the sweets section in the supermarket, but after a couple of weeks, I completely lost interest in it. I still had a piece of chocolate here and there, but I could just stop when I wanted to!

I'm still a little sensitive to sweet things. As a child I liked it but after keto it's not as appealing anymore.

Also, eating sugar makes my teeth feel really nasty.

When I started to fix my diet I had to purge myself of Caffeinated sodas first. I found the combination of HFCS and caffeine would make me crave junk food like an addict. I purged myself of the caffeine and ate junk food then after a few weeks purged the junk food and now I can turn away from the bag of potato chips without too much willpower.

Having gotten off of physically addictive drugs before I recognized the feelings and realized how much I had to slowly ween myself off of that stuff.

> What I personally found out was that if you stay away from sugar and sweeteners completely, eventually you get used to the new taste and no longer suffer from lack of sweetness.

I tried this a few years ago. It took about a month to acclimate.

Sadly, the adjustment goes more quickly in the other direction; eat the usual sweetened stuff every day for a week, and it's all over.

"Eliminating sugars from a diet can’t constitute playing it safe"

That's ridiculous! There is no nutritional necessity to ingesting sugar. Not eating sugar IS playing it safe!

My god are people so ignorant as to think eating sugar is somehow part of an essential diet!?!? We're doomed.

... and by "sugar" we are clearly not talking about eating an apple.

Cutting fruit (fructose) from your diet doesn't seem like a wise choice. I agree that highly processed foods and sugared snacks/drinks are unhealthy.

You can eat a little fruit once in a while, but it actually isn't important for your health. Think of it as natural candy. Now, vegetables/greens are important.

Looking through history, humans only had fruit available a few months/weeks of the year. Nowadays we can get all the fruit we want.

How are vegetables important? They provide little to no energy.

That's why they are important. :) On a serious note, there is nutrient density.

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

Most commonly, nutrient density is defined as a ratio of nutrient content to the total energy content. Nutrient-dense food is opposite to energy-dense food (also called "empty calorie" food). [...] Fruits and vegetables are the nutrient-dense foods, while products containing added sugars, processed cereals, and alcohol are not.

This is why replacing added sugar with anything that contains at least some vitamins and/or minerals is beneficial.

Fruit is actually a poor source of fructose. There's too much fiber, it can't be absorbed quickly.

Compare that to cola, which adds salt and bubbles so your mouth can't even taste how much sugar/HCFS it's swallowing.

Everything in moderation == 75 grams a day

I'm fine with not getting my nutrition info from Oz, Gupta and Oprah if that's ok. I think they forgot to ask Dr. Phil what he thought.

I mean it's more than halfway through the article comparing pop garbage simplified nutrition before we start looking at any clinical studies.

I thought the article was trying to discredit the pop-nutritionists. To me, the point of all those quotes and anecdotes in the beginning of the article was to show the shallowness of their recommendations.

I agree with a lot of the comments here. Just cut way down on sugars of any kind in general. I cut out about 90% of them about a year ago as part of a weight loss plan, and I'm sure I feel much better for it (Well, and losing weight too so no real evidence). I no longer have much craving for sugar and when I do have some it really tastes sweet now!

Sounds like your body is trying to get you back on the good stuff.

Your brain likes sugar. Get over it.

These so called experts seem to constantly go back and forth between which processed foods are good and which are bad for you. The obvious answer is probably to just avoid processed food all together.

The skeptic in me thinks that these experts are just pawns of the food industry which needs to push processed food as the potential for commercialization is much much higher than with natural food. Don't listen to any of them. Just eat something straight off a tree instead.

The very beginning of the article explicitly describes where one of these pop doctors recommended something just because it was natural (agave nectar) and ended up taking it back when it turned out just as bad as the artificial stuff (HFCS).

Thinking that good and bad is as easy as natural and artificial is exactly the type of bad simplification that end up teaching people that GMOs are unhealthy and meat is bad for you. Nutrition is complicated, and if you want to understand it there's no substitute for the research.

Let's also be clear - no one in this article is a nutrition expert.

They may call it natural. From Wikipedia[1]

"To produce agave syrup from the Agave americana and A. tequilana plants, the leaves are cut off the plant after it has aged seven to fourteen years. The juice is then extracted from the core of the agave, called the piña.[2] The juice is filtered, then heated to break the complex components (the polysaccharides) into simple sugars.[Need to cite reference for production process] The main polysaccharide is called inulin or fructosan and is mostly fructose. This filtered juice is then concentrated to a syrupy liquid, slightly thinner than honey. Its color varies from light- to dark-amber, depending on the degree of processing."

So we have juice extraction, heating to break up the components, filtering and concentrating. It just shows how far the industry has gone to consider that as natural.

Or alternatively :

"An alternative method used to process the agave juice without heat is described in a United States patent for a process that uses enzymes derived from the mold Aspergillus niger to convert the inulin-rich extract into fructose.[6] Aspergillus niger, a fungus commonly used in industrial fermentations,[7] is "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.[8]"

We have a process to alter its chemical structure, luckily it is "generally recognized as safe".

Just because someone says it is natural doesn't mean that it is. Natural to me is picking an apple off a tree and eating it. Some food does need processing. Meat and some veg needs cooking, but anything beyond that is processed in my book.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agave_nectar

When I read about the "natural" status of Agave nectar, I was immediately interested in the process of obtaining it. Thanks for placing this info right here!

I always think its a moderation and output issue rather than input.

In anyways, sugar fuels the brain!

Glucose fuels the brain. Fructose doesn't. And while more research needs to be done there's a lot of evidence that some people respond poorly to fructose.

Correct. Furthermore, if the subject is in ketosis, there is an adaptation which your brain becomes 'glucose free'. That's the whole point of keto diets.

a) Fructose is only metabolized by Liver, and not brain nor muscle. The liver converts it to energy form like bad cholesterol. In small quantities that exist in fruits with the fiber limits the speed of absorption so it doesn't overwhelm the livers primary mechanism for dealing with it. But moderation of sugar is impossible without actually spending time to find how much sugar there is in different products, and cutting those that come with mercilessly until you consume 15 grams of it a day. Its about 1/3rd of smallest coca cola bottle here or single serving of yogurt. I remember some study that majority of food items in market have added sugar in USA so moderating it is extremely hard without spending time to think about it.

Also sugar messes up the system that tells the brain that you are no longer hungry, which means if you eat stuff that has sugar in it, it takes longer for you to feel full.

Also while there is health reason to exercise burning more calories isn't it. Single snack is often more than hour of exercise.

You should watch "sugar bitter truth" lecture by dr. Lustig on Youtube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

sitting in front of the computer and reading this article makes you obese, better do some stretches. i canceled reading it at the half, because i already felt gaining some pounds:)

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