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Comment by tomhschmidt | Hacker News Reader

>Thiel said he also follows a Paleo diet, doesn’t eat sugar, drinks red wine and runs regularly.

But red wine has sugar in it...

Not all sugars are created equal. In a dry red wine, most of the fructose is gone, replaced with alcohol. Fructose is what causes most of the problems.

Moreover, people who say they don't eat sugar don't mean they'll never ever eat sugar in any amount. I don't eat sugar - but I'm okay with a desert once per month or something. I'm also willing to eat things which have minute amount of sugar on a regular basis.

Moreover, you have to eat some kind of sugar, or you'll die.

That's pretty much broscience unless substantial redefinition is made of "you" "have to" "sugar" and "die".

There's plenty of broscience to go around, I only eat roughly 1800s era quantities of sugar per year, compared to the American average being about 150 pounds/yr, so along with a bunch of people I say "zero" in general conversation but in reality its about 5-10 pounds/yr. Well under 10% the sugar consumption of "average american" so close enough to zero. But yeah I'll probably eat some kind of sugar until I die, just practically none. Last week I had a piece of family members birthday cake, how you folks eat that kind of stuff mystifies me, I practically puked it was so sickly sweet and the frosting was like a scoop of Crisco.

That's false, there are no essential sugars. You can live a completely normal life even if you manage to remove every single molecule of sugars from your diet.

Sure, wine will get some sugar inside. Basically if you let the wine ferments without any intervention you will get less than 1g/l in it. Some winemakers will intervene the process end will ends up with about some amount in region of 5g per litre of sugar for red wine. This sugar content is then split to few groups of sugar, notably fructose and glucose. I am not knowledgable of Paleo diet, but I guess these non processed sugars will be ok for them.

Which is why it said doesn't "eat" sugar and not doesn't "drink" sugar.

No need to reach for red wine, paleo diets include nuts (fair amount of sugars) and fruits (full of sugar).

You can point the contradiction that a "paleo diet" doesn't allow red wine (or any kind of alcohol)

Artificial sugar. Even some natural fruits are bad due to the high levels of natural sugar (e.g. kiwis)

I hear artificial sugar is made from chemicals

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