Hacker News Reader

462436347on Weight-loss drug found to shrink muscle in mice, human cells

Consumption of HFCS and added sugar are both down significantly since 2000, with the decline in the former driving the overall decline in the latter.

462436347on Weight-loss drug found to shrink muscle in mice, human cells

> addicted to HFCS

HFCS consumption (along with added sugar consumption in general) peaked in 2000 and declined steadily until 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

> The fact you even have to ask this question is telling. Specifically you're talking about Hadza tribe that spends pretty much all of their waking hours outdoors hunting and tracking pray, day in and day out.

Look up Pontzer's Constrained Total Energy Expenditure Model. His doubly-labeled water experiments show that Hadza and other hunter-gathers have--contrary to his (and your) initial expectations--roughly comparable TDEEs to sedentary western counterparts (controlling for lean body mass) due to metabolic compensation (i.e., the more they exercise, the more their bodies compensate by expending less energy elsewhere, on things like inflammation and thyroid/sex hormones): : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4803033/

Regardless, they're in energy balance, meaning they aren't gaining or losing weight, and despite their high-sugar diets, they aren't presenting any of the metabolic maladies that Lustig ascribes to sugar specifically, and not to weight gain--maladies that saturated fat seems to cause with no weight gain.

> This is akin to asking why do long-distance cyclists who spend 10-16hrs a day on bike on long cross country rides can drink liters of cola every day and be skinny like a fig.

Sugar has 4 calories per gram. Fat has 9. Are you arguing that sugar calories are more fattening than fat calories?

> I'm getting second hand embarrassment from just reading the question.

It's remarkable that I've had less derogatory and flippant comments than yours downvoted and even flagged in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=462436347

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

Good thing the beef and diary industries aren't spending any money to convince you that saturated fat is harmless.

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

Fizzino's HPF study, while not an RCT, is the most comprehensive study to date done on HPFs. She's also identified links between HPF proliferation and tobacco companies: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332

I cited RCTs in other comments pertaining to macronutrient intake and metabolic health. Lustig instead relies on mouse models and mechanistic speculation to make his case, because the RCTs in humans haven't shown sugar to cause all the ills he claims, without associated weight gain. Meanwhile saturated fat (given the available literature) ironically seems to be able to do much of what Lustig claims (impair insulin sensitivity, increase visceral fat), even without weight gain.

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

> Seems like you are cherry picking data and ignoring other data from the chart - sure the total sugars from 2000-2020 are down slightly while what’s being labeled as “corn sweeteners” or HFCS is up 3x

HFCS consumption is still higher than it was in 1970, but it has declined since 2000, and its decline has driven the overall decline in sugar consumption, yet obesity and diabetes incidence have only increased.

> some cases T2D can be reversed by minimizing sugars/carbs and increasing fats so your mitochondria is primarily using ketones rather than glucose.

"Reversed" means you can eat carbohydrates normally again. If anything, high-fat, low-carb diets seem to worsen actual insulin sensitivity, which carbohydrate restriction just masks (even then, not always, as many on keto find when they check their BG): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5291812/

Severely restricting carbohydrate enough to get an artificially low HbA1c or fasting BG and claiming you "reversed" diabetes is like claiming you "reversed" your lactose intolerance by never drinking milk. But actual weight-loss (however you achieve it) does improve real insulin sensitivity, but low-carb isn't magic when it comes to that either.

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

What's your point? The article implied that sugar magically causes obesity and diabetes, all calories being equal, when the weight of the evidence supports neither assertion, and ironically implicates saturated fat as being worse, showing an ability to cause an increase in visceral fat and worsened insulin sensitivity (measured with oral glucose tolerance tests), even in weight-stable subjects.

> different approach to nutrition

The "different approach" HNers gravitate towards is eating bacon and butter (i.e., keto/low-carb) and denying all of the evidence linking these foods to CVD, probably because fat and sodium are so addictive, much more so than sugar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42028432

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

> The problem in US is the variety of food and how engineered they are to be hyper palatable

The best study done to date on hyperpalatable foods found that fat and sodium were the most common drivers of hyperpalatability:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.22639

> The HPF criteria identified 62% (4,795/7,757) of foods in the FNDDS that met criteria for at least one cluster. Most HPF items (70%; 3,351/4,795) met criteria for the FSOD cluster. Twenty-five percent of items (1,176/4,795) met criteria for the FS cluster, and 16% (747/4,795) met criteria for the CSOD cluster. The clusters were largely distinct from each other, and < 10% of all HPF items met criteria for more than one cluster.

(CSOD, carbohydrates and sodium; FS, fat and simple sugars; FSOD, fat and sodium; HPF, hyper-palatable foods.)

> Check out books by Robert Lustig on the subject

Lustig is a crackpot who relies on animal studies and mechanistic speculation, because the highest-quality RCTs (like the ones I cited) don't support his theory.

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

Exercise temporarily raises your heart rate and systolic blood pressure, yet avid exercisers have lower RHRs and SBPs; how do you know it isn't the same with carbohydrates, provided fat (especially saturated) is restricted?

462436347on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life

US sugar consumption declined from 2000-2020 to 1970s levels, while its T2D prevalence only increased: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

And if sugar is so metabolically harmful, where are the RCTs showing this? All I've seen is that outside of a caloric surplus, it isn't especially metabolically harmful, and ironically, even outside of a surplus, saturated fat is much worse:

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/41/8/1732/36380/Sa...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-015-1108-6

Meanwhile tribes of hunter-gatherers in Africa get 15-80% of their daily calories from honey during certain seasons; why aren't they obese and diabetic? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

462436347on Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990

Because adding fat (usually in the form of vegetable oil) and sodium is the cheapest, easiest way to make food hyperpalatable, and the share of the grocery store shelf space occupied by these products has exploded in the last 40 years, greatly contributing to the obesity epidemic. Ominously, this a trend that the researcher behind that paper I linked to attributes in large measure to the tobacco companies entering the packaged food business: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332

462436347on Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990

Sugar consumption peaked in 2000 and has been in steady decline since, and not only that, but the decline has been led by a decline in HFCS consumption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

30% of the US was obese in 2000, now it's over 40%, despite per capita sugar consumption reverting to what it was pre-1975.

> The US needs, and has needed, to offset the corn subsidies that get turned into HFCS by adding a "sugar tax" at the consumer side.

If anything, we need a tax on added fat and sodium, the two biggest drivers of food hyperpalatability, when added in excess of the thresholds identified in this paper (> 25% kcal from fat and ≥ 0.30% sodium by weight):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.22639

(CSOD, carbohydrates and sodium; FS, fat and simple sugars; FSOD, fat and sodium; HPF, hyper-palatable foods.)

462436347on Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds

How much longer are you people going to keep beating this dead horse? Sugar consumption has been in secular decline since 2000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

People are eating about as much sugar per capita now as they were in the early 70s, yet they're fatter and more diabetic than ever, even than when they were consuming significantly more sugar 24 years ago. A tax on added fats (oils, butter, lard) and excessive sodium makes much more sense, but good luck getting such a measure enacted given how effective the propaganda from Big Fat (the dairy and beef industries and people promoting high-fat diets like keto and Atkins) has been.

462436347on Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

> Stuff like this tells me the privacy fight is just completely unwinnable

Mozilla has done so many things to weaken users' trust in it (like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166801) that at this point many regard them as the least worst (rather than best) alternative to the competition when it comes to privacy and the open web.

I'd like to hope that Ladybird will give us a genuine alternative, but Google has ensured that current web standards are so complex that even MSFT (another megacap tech company) threw in the towel on maintaining their own browser engine.

462436347on Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

I don't agree. This is something so basic that there isn't, from a Q&A standpoint, a justification for it ending up broken for 2/3rds of a year, and where the kind of hard-line stance Linus takes against certain kinds of regressions is warranted. Also consider that a lot of users have been unhappy for years with how the foundation is running and spending money (e.g., more and more on things unrelated to FF, like this: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...).

462436347on Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

> The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click.

No, this is a new thing that happens on sites that weren't and aren't doing that. Also tab-switching fixes it.

462436347on Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

I use Linux, so initially I assumed it was some weird Linux thing. Until it happened on my father's brand-new Win-11 notebook. This is embarrassing and disappointing. I'm old enough to have used the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) betas in 2001 and had no reservations recommending early stable versions to friends and family members over IE. Same with Firefox ten years ago. Now? If asked what I'd recommend, I'd honestly tell them idk.

462436347on Copy and Paste context menu entries sometimes disabled when they should not be

Specifically the right-click menu option, which is often greyed out for no apparent reason. This happens on both Windows and Linux. Ctrl+C still works, but how does Firefox break something as basic as the right-click menu and copy in 2024?

462436347on Thoughts on Seed Oil

> I may have read theories that it contributes more to visceral fat, which is really bad for your health? But that won’t be the majority of weight gained I think.

Yeah, about that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7171936/

462436347on Thoughts on Seed Oil

> Many vegetable oils (and particularly seed oils) are high in linoleic acid. And guess what’s making up a rapidly increasing fraction of body fat? (figure from Stephan Guyunet):

No, this can't be true, since HN has repeatedly told me that the body preferentially stores sugar as fat (presumably via de novo lipogenesis, which studies like [1] show to be only a minor contributor to fat balance, but that's probably just more Big Sugar propaganda, right?), that dietary fat doesn't become body fat, and even that you can eat all the fat you want without getting fat because ketones are magic.

1) https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)06404-3/ful...

462436347on Thoughts on Seed Oil

Sugar consumption has been declining since 2000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

462436347on Ice to treat soft-tissue injuries contraindicated by creator of protocol

The obesity rate was 30% in 2000, when sugar consumption peaked and the low-carb movement became mainstream. Now the obesity rate is over 40%:

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11497.jpeg

> Many Americans subscribed to the ideology of low fat

The "low-fat guidelines made people fat" nonsense would carry more weight if people actually followed the guidelines, but they didn't.

462436347on 2600.network Dialup Service

> A phreaker going by Joybubbles was the first to exploit the tone by whistling.

Joybubbles (formerly Joe Engressia) specifically denied being the first. In this interview (no timestamp), he mentions having heard of others phreaking as far back as the 50s: https://www.2600.com/offthehook/mp3files/1991/off_the_hook__...

He also demonstrates whistling 2600hz during that interview, including doing so on one of the only US trunks in service at the time still using it for supervision.

> Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.

Not true, even he admitted, belatedly, that Denny Teresi introduced him to it:

> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/john-draper-beyond-the-little...

> Denny called me and told me about this whistle that blew the magic tone that disconnects long distance phone calls, and that he had a spare. He asked me if I could drive him to San Francisco so he could show me how it worked.

462436347on 2600.network Dialup Service

> FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco.

Was a common supervision tone used by the NA toll network prior to the introduction of SS7. Also practically everyone here knows (or ought to) that already, given that Jobs and Woz dabbled in making Blue Boxes for profit, and Blue Boxes produced 2600hz (along with the set of MF tones used to encode numbers). The fact you posted your redundant FYI with a mobile wikipedia link (phoneposting) is even more egregious.

462436347on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

Wrong:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

462436347on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

> Elevated glucose is exactly what causes type 2 diabetes. Take away the glucose supply, and you don't have elevated insulin. Fear of glucose that is too high too often is entirely justified and is not something that should be going on if people can avoid it. Sugar molecules are damaging to cells and are related to other things like cardiovascular calcification.

No, it doesn't: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6602127/

462436347on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

> If we look at the Blue Zone, many people eat mostly carb. So carb/high GI food definitely doesn't cause diabetes.

While obesity is known to be the greatest risk factor for T2DM, you can induce insulin resistance in weight-stable individuals just by shifting the macro composition of their diet towards saturated fat:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291812/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7171936/

Sugar, amusingly, doesn't seem to have the same effect.

Given that the typical recreational CGM wearer (in my experience) is a low-carb/keto type (who ruined their insulin sensitivity), you should probably take the comments in this thread touting CGM use with a grain of salt.

462436347on I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)

> ancient Greece, is completely alien to the modern US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(disambiguation)#United_S...

462436347on Chinese migrants are fastest growing group crossing into U.S. from Mexico [video]

> Interestingly you've left it somewhat ambiguous as to whether you view these immigrants as morally upright while being somewhat naughty.

I thought my post was unambiguous. Powerful, successful people (like pg and sama) clearly don't believe the rules apply to them.

462436347on Chinese migrants are fastest growing group crossing into U.S. from Mexico [video]

https://paulgraham.com/founders.html

> 4. Naughtiness

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.