Interesting. I think folks in the comments here maybe missed this paper is way more about the beverages part making it important. The research is around sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs). If I'm reading it right, the SSBs have a differentmetabolic effect.
"Due to their liquid form, SSBs are rapidly consumed and digested, resulting in lower satiety, higher caloric intake and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways, which can result in visceral fat production, hepatic and skeletal muscle insulin resistance and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested fructose directly activate hepatic fat synthesis, leading to ectopic fat deposition and metabolic dysfunction in liver and muscle"
Unfortunately I can't find where they define high dose, but if you look at what they say is high elsewhere, it seems to be around 9 servings a week of "any beverage with added sugars and >50 kcal per 8 oz serving, including commercial or homemade beverages, soft drinks, energy drinks, fruit drinks, punch, lemonade and aguas frescas." - A can of coke is 12oz I believe?
About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight but simply because it dawned on me that for the same amount of sugar in one soft drink that I drink without any afterthought, I could enjoy a really good pastry that I can slowly savor.
I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
More recently, I'm starting to apply this to meat as well. I really enjoy meat, but I'm not one for quantity since I'm on the skinnier side. So I'm trying to enjoy meat more, and in doing so, get better quality, prepare it better, etc. while at the same time eating less of it. This is still a work in progress, and eating in restaurants can be challenging as they usually favor quantity over quality—except for the very high-end & costly places.
>I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
We are increasingly moving away from looking at fat as an indulgence, towards understanding it as an essential nutrient, with a large variance in fat types and their benefits. E.g. some people would avoid eating nuts, because they are high in fat, and not as tasty as something similarly fatty, like a pastry. This seems wrong both intuitively, but also from empirical findings about the impact of certain omega-3 fatty acids (such as in nuts) versus that of, say, omega-6 fats, which are way overrepresented in our diets due to being so cheap.
This. People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads. It's sad, because as you mentioned some days are indeed essential nutrients. Especially for kids and pregnant women.
"People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads."
If this is true then what the hell is going on? We knew this about sugar with certainly at absolute minimum a half century ago when I was a kid (I know as I remember the message).
The message—even as told at school—was that 'excessive and repeated amounts of sugar (especially the refined type as in drinks and sweets) causes diabetes'. QED!
So what the fuck has happened, how was this once well-established message erased from the collective consciousness of more recent generations?
The message back then was so all pervasive that everybody knew it.
So many important facts have been lost to recent generations that I'm beginning to think education is going backwards fast. What happened to health lectures in primary school where we were told these facts?
We only really recently have evidence for sugar, on its own, causing diabetes.
We had a lot of evidence for sugar causing weight gain. And higher weight is strongly correlated with type II diabetes. But from a public health standpoint, we were worried about fats. We realized that many fats caused health problems even without weight gain and also viewed fats as having a more primary role in weight gain.
It's only recently (in the last couple of decades) that we've gotten evidence that sugar on its own can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes--even if you are of normal weight.
I mean, the "fat is bad" thing isn't completely wrong: it is definitely possible to overdo it. It's extremely calorically dense, and most fats are bad for us in other ways.
But society didn't replace some of the fat with increased intake of vegetables and lean meats.
Food manufacturers compensated for less fat with more sugars and salt, which we've been finding are even worse.
>In most cases you could eat multiple pastries and still have significantly less sugar than a soda.
yep. The can of soda has something like 10 spoons of sugar. In that volume i stop feeling the difference after 2nd-3rd spoon of sugar. I do drink soda - by diluting it about 1:5. For the pastries and other bakery products - it does depends where it comes from. The standard American bakery sill puts a lot of sugar into pastries, cakes, bread (especially the fast-rise), etc. while some of the ones trying to do European style do use sugar more moderately (they also usually use more fat like butter thus making the taste better, more balanced, and probably also thus more healthy - my personal impression/opinion - as the more balanced content (fat/carbs vs. low-fat-high-sugar approach somehow more popular in the American bakery) seems to me to be better).
> About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight[...]
Same thing happened to me at probably around the same time. I realized I could just have a lollypop, and it would be a tenth of the sugar. Most of the sweetness in soda doesn't even get a chance to touch your tongue before it's going down your throat. If I want candy, I should just have a piece of candy. If I'm thirsty, I should have a glass of water.
Also, the carbonation in soda enables them to get twice the sugar into it. Drinking a flat soda is like drinking maple syrup.
If I go to a restaurant with fill your own drinks (rare in the UK), I generally get soda water with about 10% coke. It's remarkable how much it tastes (to me) just like coke, albeit palatably sweet. I always thought the sugar tax should be a sweetness tax to change people's perceptions.
It's probably a risky line of thinking, if you're addicted to sugar, to substitute in some other source of sugar. Best to avoid pastries, lollipops and sugary sodas.
It's a risky way of thinking to reduce every act to a moral choice. ie I could have used the energy that I burned making this post, to hand out a dollar to a homeless person.
Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
The brain can run well on ketone bodies (which the liver makes from fatty acids). In fact, causing the brain to run on ketone bodies is used by doctors to treat illness (and not just epilepsy).
Some of our ancestors might have done keto some times, but I'm not sure most of them did most of the time? Humans are decidedly omnivorous, and most of them would eat whatever they could get their hands on, including plants and mushrooms (and sometimes honey!) etc.
They also had carbohydrates in their diet. Meat naturally contains carbs. Pretending that the human body is misunderstood and that it worked very differently is a common pitfall of these discussions. Largely it was the same, with the amounts differing.
Meat contains only insignificant amounts of carbs. The human body can convert protein to carbs (glucose specifically) but the rate at which it can do it is limited, and my guess is that if it can't burn glucose, a metabolically-healthy body will burn fat (rather than glucose made from protein) until the diet has been quite deficient in calories for at least 3 days.
I agree with all you said but I also guess our ancestors mostly die from infection, hypothermia, viruses… certainly not from brain stop working because carbs deficiency.
"You have to have carbs for your brain to run" doesn’t make sense. You have to have sugar in your brain to run, but that sugar surely can comes from fat as well.
> Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
No. People live on no-carb diets just fine and enter ketosis. (And in any case, the comment you replied to only talked about sugar, not carbs in general.)
'A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.'
The number of people in this study is surprisingly large!
Alas, it doesn't have much bearing on the part of the comment I wanted to focus on 'You have to have carbs for your brain to run.' Because the diets in question here still have some carbs. (And the changes in mortality rates are fairly modest, too.)
What I wanted to say is that even if you eat no carbs at all, you brain will still get its energy. You won't just keel over after a while, like if you didn't eat anything at all henceforth.
Of course, there might be second order health effects, like the study you linked suggest.
There are other metabolic pathways to produce glucose (or produce ketones). The other pathways ‘push’ the body more since they have to do some conversion. This ‘extra effort’ is considered to be more healthy.
Yes there are. You still need carbs and you get them (ie celery has carbs), regardless. Repetition wont convince someone arguing in bad faith, so I will bow to your religious beliefs.
If I have soda cravings, I can take a single Tic Tac. It doesn't satisfy my soda cravings, but crucially, it prevents the soda itself from satisfying those same cravings if I do subsequently drink it.
Usually I crave soda after a high salt/fried food. Giving myself a tiny amount of sugar (Tic Tac has 0.5g) removes the salt/fried taste, and I just can't get the good soda effect I know I would have gotten without the Tic Tac. There just isn't a point for me to take soda after a Tic Tac.
So yes, substituting a small amount of sugar for a large one can be very effective.
Not that no sugar variants of soda are exactly a shining health food staple or better than going to healthy drinks lik water but...
For me I was absolutely shocked at how a soda being sugar free didn't have to imply it was like drinking horse piss. I had tried Diet Coke a few times and assumed that was what you had to deal with if you went sugar free. One day someone gave me a Coke Zero and it was actually not bad, even if not quite being as good as Coke. This led me to try some others like Dr Pepper Zero Sugar for which I thought "what the hell, this tastes better than Dr Pepper???".
Obviously which are better will vary by person and most people will, overall, like sodas with actual sugar more often but if everyone tried a few different options they might be surprised how little they'd have to trade down on the soda for, if anything, to drastically drop their sugar intake.
> We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage
I note that "normal" here should be read as "common during the last 50years (or less)", where the last 50ears is quite reductive in human dietary habits.
This paper you linked does not even involve aspartame. The only sweetener they experimented with is saccharin. You can check out the main figures from the link below:
I would be very reluctant to read too deep into this given saccharin is known to behave very differently in animal models - for a long time it was thought to cause bladder cancer, but follow up studies proved that it’s an idiosyncratic reaction only found in female lab rats and no other gender/species combination. Not to mention the dose used was unrealistic to begin with.
It’s entirely plausible that sugar analogs like sucralose and non-calorific sugar alcohols such as erythritol and maltitol can cause long term changes in the gut biome but high quality evidence is still lacking.
I think for meat especially, there's a difference between the stuff people talk about (like premium steaks they almost never eat) and the reality of what ends up on their plates which is a lot less glamorous.
A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one. For me the cheap and nasty stuff is easy to skip on a daily basis and it's not like I eat the expensive premium stuff that often anyway. I love a good steak, but I don't splurge on paying 3x the other items on the menu when I'm at a restaurant typically. Which is what it takes typically to get a nice premium cut of meat.
I do enjoy cooking with meat but I'll make an effort to make the most of it. E.g. I made a nice beef stew over the weekend. That's a bit of of work and a humble/affordable cut of meat. And very tasty.
If you like Indian food, try having or making a dal. As it turns out, Indians know a thing or two about making very tasty vegan food from cheap/simple ingredients. And this can as nice as some chicken curry with a few chunks of cheap chicken that is maybe a bit overcooked and dry (I've been served that in many Indian restaurants). Those curries actually still taste fine if you don't eat those chunks of meat. And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India. Fridges are a fairly recent novelty too.
And the meat doesn't even add a lot of flavor; they just add it last minute typically. Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat. The only difference between eating meat or vegan in such places is literally what protein is added to the dish at the last minute. The rest is basically vegan or vegetarian by default.
Anyway, I skip sugary drinks mostly. And I've cut down on my alcohol intake as well. Most of what I drink has basically very little or no calories.
Most of my remaining food challenges are unhealthy snacks, unnecessary carbs and the temptations of unhealthy restaurant food, or late night shopping in super markets and the associated bad decision making.
Restaurants bulk out their dishes with carbs and they make things taste good by adding salt and fats. It's hard to eat healthy in restaurants. So, I try to limit my restaurant food intake. And like with meat, most of the restaurants people visit aren't actually that great anyway. At least where I work, Michelin stars are not a thing for the typical lunch options. Quite the opposite actually. I'm only an OK cook but I can cook tastier/better versions of a lot of the shit I get served in places like that. It's not that hard.
I recently actually started just skipping lunch entirely at work mainly for this reason and I'm training myself out of having a Pavlovian craving for food just because the clock says so. I don't actually need the calories. Or the post lunch dip in productivity. I especially don't need the lousy food choices imposed by that one person that wants to go to the burger place. There's a lot of group thinking inspiring unhealthy choices around lunch time. I took part in that for years. It's stupid when you think about it and I've suffered the health consequences as well. There's a cumulative effect if you do that for a few decades.
My brother worked for multiple (very) good restaurants here in France. I’m always super chocked when I see him throwing a good portion of the butter brick in almost any meal. His dishes are super delicious. His current restaurant is a a very good vegan one and he does the same with plant butter.
Man, as an Indian, this is hard to read. You're spreading a lot of misinformation about Indian food.
> Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
First, while there are a lot of tasty Indian vegetarian dishes, vegan food is decidedly not a cultural thing. We use butter and ghee pretty commonly in food: definitely not vegan. India is the world's largest milk producer; also not vegan. That dal you refer to will often have a "tadka" of ghee and spices on top. The "dal makhani" - another popular restaurant dish - literally means "buttered dal".
And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
> Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat.
If it's India, you're talking about, you're unlikely to find tofu being used in a restaurant. Paneer is made from milk, so...not vegan. Maybe restaurants abroad do it differently.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
OK, this annoying canard is the worst. [1] Spices and meat used to be both historically expensive. A bit of research will tell you that. You know, that whole "spice trade" thing. Malaysian, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, food also use spices and they're not vegetarian cultures at all. (For that matter, only some 30% of Indians are vegetarians, despite the stereotype, but that's a discussion for another day.)
TL;DR India has lots of good vegetarian food, but hardly any of us are vegans.
Hi, thanks for this cultural sharing. I don't understand something about Indian culture -probably because of prejudices- and would be glad to know more. Hindus in India venerate (or respect?) cows such a way they let them live in free roaming. Also they eat a lot of ghee and milk derivatives. Where does those milk comes from ?
A. Is it ok to eat a cow if someone else raise the cow?
B. Is it ok to eat milk raised by someone else
C. Is it ok to 'milk' a stray cows while they looks skinny?
D. How do they regards the calves needed once in a while for milk production?
E. Does Hindus only eat chicken (and so) but no milk while muslims eat everything?
F. Where goes the dead free roaming cows cadavers? Is there enough vultures?
Note I'm not trying to find logical incoherencies or logical fallacies, I'm very aware there's many think that can been seen as inconsistant or very consistent depending on your knowledge on a subject - which is never 100% reachable.
> And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
Some years ago I fell into a Youtube rabbit hole of British Indian Restaurants. (Actually most seemed Bangladeshi) In Britian Indian cuisine has a far more "takeout" status. Hence BI restaurants started to deconstruct popular dishes into components which can be prepared in advance and combined into different dishes. It may not be original but I found the process of adaptation rather fascinating.
(Here in Germany it seems rather worse. Also takeout status, but I suspect a lot of takeout orders are simply microwaved stuff.)
I'm actually well aware of this and didn't mean to offend people. And 30% is actually quite a large percentage.
I actually make ghee myself sometimes from butter (easy and a lot cheaper than buying it from the super market).
A lot of (british) indian restaurants use cooking oil instead and I'm well aware that that's not the same as what people in India would consider Indian food and that something like a Tikka Massala is not actually a thing you'd find in a proper restaurant in India; which is a country I've never been to and would love to go to to experience the food.
But anyway, a lot of these restaurants use cooking oil because it's cheaper and because it makes everything they cook with that vegan by default. Which at least in places with a lot of vegans is a nice feature.
Here in Berlin, finding decent Indian food is a bit of a challenge in any case. Germans are hopeless with spicy food. And I know only a few Indian places that add more than homeopathic amounts of chili. Most of the Indian restaurants in the more touristy spots are owned by one family and those aren't great. I've gotten some tips from Indian colleagues over the years for better options.
Anyway a lot of dals indeed don't use a lot of spices or flavoring. And that's just sidestepping all the different regions and food styles. Which are a thing as well of course.
As for Malaysian/Indonesian style cuisine; I'm Dutch and got exposed to a lot of the Dutch Indonesian food which, similar to British Indian food is not really that authentic. Lots of meat in there indeed. And quite spicy.
> A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one.
The "Big Mac Attack" is real. I used to get one about every six months or so. Then I would eat a Big Mac, and the attack would be sated, but the GI discomfort reminded me of why I don't get Big Mac Attacks more often.
These days I just avoid fast food. I live in a part of the country that's actually rather persnickety about good food, and there are much fresher options available nearby that are rather cheap. Plus I'm stocked up on low-carb soups, lunch meats, and other yummies most of the time now.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime.
My dad used to tell me stories about roadside chili houses in Texas. They kept a big pot of chili constantly going, and added whatever meat they could find, together with beans, spices, etc. to keep the pot full as the chili was served to customers. Roadkill was, supposedly, one of the most convenient sources of meat for the pot.
The weirdest thing for me is that when I was young I used to live off fast food. A few Jack in the Box burgers and I was good to go (my girlfriend at the time looked at me somewhat strange the first time I asked her how many burgers she wanted). But now when I eat a fast food burger I just don't feel very good afterwards. Curious how many others also seem to get the same thing. I always thought I was just being a bit more snobby than when I was younger and it was some sort of psychosomatic thing.
Part of it is age. Part of it is, I think, the fast food companies are lowballing what they can get away with serving in order to keep costs down. It's said that some Diné (Navajo) refer to Burger King with a word that means "just enough food to get strength from". I think that's the fast food joints' specialty: compromise the food till it's barely enough to tolerate and derive nourishment (calories) from to sell the stuff cheap and quick to a ravenous but indiscriminate clientele. With the passage of time comes more efficient ways to produce less delicious or satisfying food, so BK today is not as good as BK 30-40 years ago (which in turn is less good than BK shortly after its founding). Some burger joints e.g. Whataburger can differentiate themselves with higher quality, but they don't achieve the volume of McD's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc.
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/) is a pretty long watch, but it's incredibly eye-opening in terms of explaining in detail exactly why our current dietary sugar intake is so damaging to our bodies.
Note: Robert Lustig is a professor of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF, I promise I wouldn't ask you (the reader) to watch a long-ass youtube video unless it contained extremely relevant science about how you (the biological machine) work.
This isn't true. He has books and lectures explaining the metabolic processes when eating refined sugar, and why it's bad for you. Nowadays it's pretty mainstream stuff. Nevertheless, can you give an example of one of his opinions which is "well outside scientific consensus".
> Nevertheless, can you give an example of one of his opinions which is "well outside scientific consensus".
Lustig specifically claims that sugar is addictive; that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose; that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss; that in fact, weight loss is somehow a function of insulin, not calories; that fructose is uniquely bad relative to other sugars; that fructose causes inflammation; that recent decades' increase in obesity is caused by increased sugar consumption; that statins are essentially useless; that some kinds of LDL cholesterol are good for longevity; that non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar; etc, etc, etc, etc.
A few of these claims are wholly unsubstantiated by research; the rest have some research and the research does not support Lustig's claims.
>>The evidence supports the hypothesis that under certain circumstances rats can become sugar dependent. This may translate to some human conditions as suggested by the literature on eating disorders and obesity.
>that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose
>>Dietary fiber (DF), especially viscous DF, can contribute to a reduction in the glycemic response resulting from the consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods.
>that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss
>>Mechanisms smooth out the large day-to-day differences in energy consumption, decreasing the importance of the size of a meal. In the short term a reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that reduce metabolic rate and increase calorie intake, ensuring the regaining of lost weight.
I'm not going to go on and on... UCSF, which is one of the most respected teaching hospitals in the country, isn't hiring cranks. He specialize in exactly this stuff. Yea, he's a bit more strident than would would expect from a scientist, yes, he deals with the extremes of childhood obesity, which isn't really relevant to most people's bodies, but christ, he's not a crank.
> In the short term a reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that reduce metabolic rate and increase calorie intake, ensuring the regaining of lost weight.
If calorie intake increases, then it's no longer "calorie restriction".
If his actual claim was that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss, then that's wild despite your quote.
> I'm not going to go on and on...
Well you didn't address the other really egregious supposed claim, that "non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar". If that's an accurate description of his stance, that's really bad.
When you make accusations like this why not offer a specific illustrative example to avoid suggestions of mere name calling. Scientific consensus?. Actually nutrition & medical science is replete with the abandonment of 'received opinion'. How about applauding researchers who have novel ideas outside the consensus while at the same time insisting they demonstrate their evidence or in problematic areas, convincing reasons for pursuing their path?
This is one of those areas where scientific consensus needs to catch up with the alarming facts that have been discovered. Scientific consensus was against handwashing for doctors and plate tectonics, and it still is in favor of "clearing amyloid plaques will totally fix Alzheimer's", but the facts just keep on being what they be.
Orange juice is high in sugars. Drinking any alternative beverage with a lot of sugar is bad for your health. I believe a 12 ounce glass of orange juice is 100% of maximum sugar intake for one day. If you drank orange juice the same way you drank soda with added sugar, the health effect would be equally detrimental.
> High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways...
Orange Soda (i.e. Fanta), an SSB, and Orange Juice have glycemic indexes of about 68 and 48 respectively. I assume that's a material difference in that OJ doesn't spike your insulin as abruptly and therefore is not as harmful. Thre's more to it than simply grams of sugar.
Maybe because they can drink it faster. Glycmic index's and the equivalent index's around insulin response are literally the gold standard for deciding what's okay to eat. "Vibes" or "My opinions" do not matter. OJ is marginally "healthier", significantly because the fiber in the drink (more pulp the better) slows down (slightly) the insulin and glycemic responses.
Source: Family of diabetics who have actually lost limb to the poison that is refined sugar.
Citric acid and phosphoric acid likely have the same impact on your teeth and no impact on your bones and kidneys.
Acids and bases on your diet have very little to do with what pH is exposed to the rest of your body. Your stomach is probably more acid than anything you eat or drink, and your lungs and kidneys tightly regulate the pH of the blood. If your diet is effecting your blood pH, your probably already on death's door
Intuitively, I suspect any acid is bad for your teeth. But I see that statement primarily from Dentists, and their track record in a number of areas is less than stellar. Prime example: Flossing and 6 month checkups. Neither of which have good scientific evidence, despite their widespread promotion.
I go every three months, and they have a good amount of tartar to clean off my teeth then. Also before I did that I was having pretty significant pockets for gum disease for all my teeth (it was close to the point where it's irreversible).
It's mostly under control now, except for problem areas in two specific spots, but even those are still better than they were.
I haven't really changed my dental hygeine habits other than going in for routine cleanings twice as often, so it's definitely helping.
I believe sucrose and fructose are processed differently — specifically fructose is processed by the liver so can have the same issues as alcohol there.
So taking myself as an example: I drink 12 oz of coffee daily (7 days per week), and I add exactly 12 grams of table sugar to my coffee each day (equivalent to 3 sugar packets), which is 45 calories. Seems like I don't have much wiggle room and should continue avoiding soda and juice.
I'll be the guy that I assume most people are sick of by this point, and recommend experimenting with dropping the additives in exchange for higher quality coffee if you can afford it (it's usually not much more per cup). At effectively zero calories, after some period of time you'll get used to it and recalibrate your sense of sweetness to the point where sugary drinks and coffee are much less palatable
You can either get better coffee or you can also just get used to the flavor. I didn't like it and after about a year it became fine, now I have a lifetime of no sugar coffee unlocked.
I think this is something that people don't appreciate about being acclimated to sugar coffee. It takes a while to adapt, you can't just try it periodically and try to convince yourself it's better than the milky alternative, contrast is too significant, like comparing a pear and a slice of dry whole grain bread, or walking vs driving, or going to the gym vs not. A couple of months though and you'll probably be well on the way. In a pinch I'll grab a black coffee from McDonalds, since it's more on the medium side anyway, and it's perfectly serviceable.
I was able to switch to coffee and a little half and half with nothing else. That seems to be good enough for me and pretty low calorie and sugar content.
Drinking black coffee only has been difficult though, even with more expensive coffee (I'm not sure what's considered higher quality necessarily, but I have an espresso machine and I'm grinding whole beans for brands of coffee that websites claim are good)
From my cursory sense of espresso, it's a bit of a finicky, expensive, and niche thing to enjoy in the raw. It's my impression that the overwhelming majority of people in Canada and the U.S for example enjoy their espresso in an espresso-based drink, like a latte or cortado, because the intensity and texture of it mixes quite well with the fats and sugars in cream or milk, and is often made from darker roasts which balance out well. It would be very hard to transition from that to just raw espresso made from any bean.
I personally do not enjoy espresso on its own enough to invest in that sort of equipment, and am fine just getting that periodically at a cafe.
Anyone recommending any particular coffee on the internet should qualify it with their brewing method and personal preferences, because some people like a french press, some people like espresso, or aeropress, or pourover, for various reasons, and none are better than any other, but some people like the intensity of straight espresso, and some people like what you'd call drip/filter coffee, which would be a classic cone that you drip water through.
Likewise, among "high quality" coffee, there's a world of variety. Many great South American beans lean into chocolatey, but some end up quite sweet and fruity, while east african or indonesian beans can pretty much taste like candy. Quality usually refers to "grade", which is more technical and I'm not too well versed on, but to me it means how well the roasted product reveals the potential of a well-selected batch. Sounds a bit pretentious, but basically if you like bitters or cocoa or milk or dark chocolate, high quality beans will make that very enjoyable, both because it was a good crop from the right region, and because the roaster did their job by leaving enough of the sugars and moisture in the bean throughout the roasting process. It's worth experimenting with all of this.
If it doesn't taste that good, it can be because any of those other variables are off, or the blend that the roaster chose to make wasn't a good selection; they might have chosen to mix a brazillian with an east african and got the balance wrong for your taste, or it's too bitter because they roasted it too long, or it might just be stale, or you just don't like it because it's not your vibe.
Right now, I'm doing pour overs with a Hario Switch or V60 dripper and use a modest grinder. It's a pretty standard and inexpensive setup, the dripper usually comes in plastic or glass, and I get beans that are roasted in the neighbourhood within the month for about ~$10USD or sometimes more, and often they'll be an african or columbian blend. It costs me very little and is a simple pleasure. This is probably what I'd recommend if you were looking to play around, it's cheap and would require only the most marginal of equipment changes. It admittedly did take me a long time to taper off the cream and milk, I'd get it from McDonalds or whatever, but now I can even drink that stuff black pretty easily, but it's nearly impossible to tolerate if you're just side-by-side comparing with a coffee+milk mix, the contrast is too harsh.
I do still drink an occasional soda fwiw, and enjoy a latte, but now that I've figured out how to find and make good black coffee, there's no turning back. I'd rather the sugar come from a dessert.
I honestly can't tell much difference between expensive coffee and Maxwell House. But in general I've never nerded out over coffee, wine, bread, cheese, whiskey, or any other food or beverage.
I can easily tell the difference between the two, but I really don't care so long as the coffee is brewed well. I still like Maxwell House Black Silk, but at home I grind my own beans and brew in a French Press.
What I don't like is "Church Coffee", where it has brewed within an inch of its life and is the darkest, most bitter/burned flavor that ever existed.
I’ve tried lots of different coffee’s and I keep going back to (don’t laugh) Folgers Instant. Maybe it’s because it’s what my parents had when I was a kid. Nothing else is quite like it.
Unfortunately, I add 100 calories of crap to it. But I drink it slower than Coke and it’s at least half the calories of a 32oz (my other vise). I use it as a way to lower my calorie count, just a little.
Surprisingly less calories in 32oz of Coke than I was expecting, less than a standard Starbucks sugary drink probably. Regarding coffee, people like what they like, and there's a lot of memories I also have associated with it, as well as drinking copious amounts of Coke for that matter.
If you ever want to try and ease off both those vices, I'd simply recommend buying a McDonalds coffee, buying a Starbucks Blonde Americano, and then taking them home and brewing a cup of the folgers instant with no additions. Get someone to pour them into identical cups, and have them play a shell game (move the cups around to hide which ones they are), then try them back and forth. Try to avoid anything with sugar in it for a few hours before. I bet you'll pick out some differences and maybe even like them, then if you want to try and delete the sugar from your coffee, avoid it in exchange for black coffee for at least a few months. It's not as hard as it seems, but it does take some time.
Then if you like, play around with easy home brewing methods like french press or pour over, grinding beans etc.. those were probably the most impactful things I tried when I went on the same journey. Grinding recently roasted beans before brewing was eye opening. I honestly didn't believe black coffee could be palatable, and was drinking Folgers with half and half from the big red can for ages.
Cheese is worth it, a bit. First because it’s way leas of a bullshit industry when compared to wine for example, and also because (particularly if you’re in europe) there is so much variety of cheese at overall an affordable price. And you largely don’t need tools or fancy accessories. If anything, you could get something nice to paid it with :)
Here in Singapore cheese is a lot more expensive than in Europe, alas.
I can definitely tell the differences between different coffees or teas or bread etc. The range for wine isn't that large. And that's not just in 'quality', but also just in less variety than eg (craft) beers or breads.
Just to add a bit, we bought a Breville espresso and grinder. I only use some whole milk to make my coffee and no sugar. My wife uses a little agave syrup and skips most of the milk.
Have you tried playing around with using the same grinder, but switching up the beans and brewing method?
I think a lot of people go espresso at home, but I do think that's an extremely difficult thing to transition to consuming black unless you're really into the hobby of it all and have adjusted. It's just really intense, which naturally blends well with the fats and sugars in dairy, especially with most espresso roasts being darker. If I personally go espresso, it's either a latte or black Americano.
Agave syrup is virtually pure fructose. As a sugar alternative it's ... not that great. The insulin response is fairly low, true, but the high fructose content carries its own risks.
Stevia would be a non-sugar-based sweetener, though it does have a distinctly different taste.
I'd learned to drink coffee with milk/cream, no sugar. With decent beans (Trader Joe's Bay Blend, e.g., nothing fancy) and a Moka pot that's more than sufficient.
I just add a few drops of Stevia (have a liquid bottle that ends up being incredibly cheap on the whole)... personally, I can't really tell the difference.
I sweeten my coffee now with pure monkfruit. It's great in coffee, and chocolate too. It's really sweet, which is how I like my coffee, only a little is needed. And there's zero sugar or anything even close to a sugar.
The best time to stop eating sugar is yesterday. I wish I hadn't fucked up my body so much with sugar.
Learn to drink it black, it’s good. But I do get beans and grind them so the brew is much higher quality. I’m assuming you drink that can of grinds for 3 bucks or instant. Those suck
I learned to drink it black, but not for health reasons. I did it to avoid having to depend on sugar a/o milk in order to have a coffee. Plus, nothing says "No nonsense" like "Coffee? Yes, black please."
It"s funny but also true? I have taken my coffee black for years now, having started because I wanted to just simplify my experience with it (among other things in my life). Not that my old coffee order was complex, but being lactose intolerant meant I needed to choose which milk substitute I was going to get, since not all coffee shops carried the same ones back in the day (less of a problem now, from what I understand). I grew to enjoy it black and still drink it that way to this day.
Going back to it, I think the need to simplify things was key for me. We are bombarded with so many choices, especially in our food products which I've described as the Breakfast Cereal Problem in the past. There are simply too many to consider them all with each shopping trip, so you are almost forced to just make one arbitrary choice and live with it unless you want to be paralyzed in the grocer aisle. None of the choices really offer a significant value or weight over the others, each cereal promising the same thing; to be part of a balanced breakfast, that Gestalt puzzle created by marketers to kick off our day.
Once you step back from that world, it does seem miserably pointless and the same can be said for the SSB's in the article. But on a deeper level, it says something about the stresses we introduce into our lives by chasing too many choices. I can't remember which of his books he mentions this in, but Richard Feynman seemed to have the same realization when struggling to decide what to get for dessert in restaurants. Eventually, be just settled on chocolate cake so he didn't have to make that decision anymore. That stuck with me for some reason, more than any concerns about how soda or whatever might be affecting my blood sugar, pushing me in the direction of just going with the more ubiquitous alternative; water.
Plus with soda at $4USD a pop in most restaurants these days, it's just cheaper to go with water. So we have health, simplicity and financial reasons to not go for the SSBs. Seems enough for me.
I'm always glad for more hard evidence, but this exact reasoning has been "common sense", or something to that tune, my entire life. Maybe not every individual resulting issue, but that liquid sugar absorbs more rapidly and as such is worse that an equivalent amount of sugar in a more solid meal.
I'm curious what is the number of added sugars and above 50kcal peer 8 oz serving. You can get away with saying fruit drinks have no added sugar and still be insanely sugary.
Fruit drinks have a neat trick to increase sugar content. Take apple juice for example: you can evaporate water out of it till it's a sugary syrup, then add it to regular apple juice, and it's still called "100% pure apple juice no sugar added".
(This is also done with various flavor essences from the juice, so they can recombine them in such a way as to produce a uniform flavor all throughout the year regardless of where the fruits are coming from.)
Are you saying that they couldn't say "100% fruit juice and no sugar added" on the label when the drink is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate? What part of the regulation would prohibit this?
They could not. That would not pass the 'clearly indicated' in the quoted rule. There is also another more general rule which enforces a label of 'sweetened' or 'with added sugars' for any kind of sweetening agent including fruit concentrate:
> 4. For fruit juices which have been sweetened by the addition of sugars, the sales name shall include the word "sweetened" or "with added sugar", followed by an indication of the maximum quantity of sugar added, calculated as dry matter and expressed in grams per litre. [1]
> A claim stating that sugars have not been added to a food, and any claim likely to have the same meaning for the consumer, may only be made where the product does not contain any added mono- or disaccharides or any other food used for its sweetening properties. [2]
Coming from a country of impenetrable legalese everywhere, I find these regulations very refreshing, they are incredibly easy to read and always straight to the point.
All carbohydrates eventually break down into sugars. Some quite a bit faster than others.
What people and scientists haven't been saying in any meaningful way is the truth that carbohydrate poisoning is a real thing. If you eat too much, its harmful.
Its common knowledge that medicines may become poisons when taken in too high amounts. This applies to most things in this area.
Protein poisoning is fairly easily discovered in the scientific literature, why isn't carbohydrate poisoning? Its a conundrum.
You don't think the scientific literature has anything to say about sugar surplus or junk food surplus?
Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though. Too many potatoes and whole grains, for example, aren't poisoning you. More people should be replacing junk food with those things.
It's just a fad to use "carbs" as a euphemism for "junk food" and it only further confuses the discourse about nutrition.
I've noticed that people who want to deny that the extremely high carbohydrate content of the typical western diet is the major factor for runaway rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease like to label the "bad" food as "junk food" or "ultra-processed food." But we never get an explanation from them as to what exactly is IN the junk food or ultra-processed food that causes the disease.
It's not always about a certain boogeyman inside it, but whether it makes it easy to overeat and whether it pays its rent in nutritional content.
Consider potato chips. Even if they have zero saturated fat, the issue most people have with them is that they are hyperpalatable and low nutritional value compared to their calorie density. Combine fat and salt and certain textures, and we can't stop ourselves. Trying to blame a macronutrient like carbs doesn't make much sense to me.
Add in bad ingredients like saturated fat and the problem becomes multifaceted, but it's not necessary for individual ingredients to be bad for us for a food to have its downsides.
Your comment kind of illustrates his point though, there's a complete lack of mechanistic empiricism[0] in the discussion of nutrition. What is the metric for 'eas[iness] to overeat and whether it pays its rent in nutritional content.'? I agree with the premise, but it is ill-defined.
e.g. consider: A baked potato, with salt and butter vs. an equivalent weight of potato chips. They are essentially identical post-mastication, except one is 'junk food' and 'ultra-processed' and the other is quintessential home cooking. What system do I use to rank them if they are in fact not identical?
[0] What (or combination of whats) at a structural/chemical level in a food causes the harm, and by what biochemical/psychological/psychosomatic pathway(s) does said harm occur?
Re: mechanistic empiricism, I don't know if you're doing this, but it seems that some people have this mindset that if you can't tell me specifically how X is bad for you, then I have to assume it is not harmful by default, even if it's a thing that is relatively novel.
I find myself leaning heavily in the other direction these days. If it's not something that has a long history and (I'm not already dying anyway), I'll pass. If I lose out on some benefits because of that, so be it.
As far as diet is concerned, I'm very much in the camp of you do what works best for you. However, if you choose to give advice to a wide audience (rather than saying what works for you), I think one should have some idea of why their advice is good.
>if you can't tell me specifically how X is bad for youthen I have to assume it is not harmful by default
Speaking for myself, its a matter of how my brain works. Setting aside rational considerations like cost-benefit analysis or Bayesian likelihoods: if there isn't a generalizable logic to 'what (is harmful)' and 'how (it is)' I just get a 404.
It's not that I don't (or do) believe potatoes chips are harmful it's that the e.g. statement 'ultra-processed foods are bad for you' is literally devoid of meaning. Might as well be baby-speak.
As such, any attempt to incorporate that information[0] into my decision making process goes nowhere: I can't categorize a food as to it's degree of ultra processed-ness nor can I assess whether another foods/foods/etc might cause harm like UPF's are purported to do. Ergo: no basis for a behavioral modification, no new pros or cons to weigh.
[0]not even getting into the reliability of e.g. a paper's conclusions
> As such, any attempt to incorporate that information[0] into my decision making process goes nowhere: I can't categorize a food as to it's degree of ultra processed-ness nor can I assess whether another foods/foods/etc might cause harm like UPF's are purported to do. Ergo: no basis for a behavioral modification, no new pros or cons to weigh.
So I guess my question is what are your defaults? What is your unmodified behavior?
There is a package on the shelf, you only know what it says on the box, what you've seen on commercials, and maybe you've seen/heard of other people eating its contents. What's the decision tree for this scenario?
Anecdotally I think there's something to this, when all I have to eat is lacking in micro nutrients I tend to be hungrier. When I'm eating lots of very nutrient dense things, even when less calories, I feel satisfied.
It isn't extremely high. I have no idea what you imagine that people used to eat. The typical pre 20th century diet was near 100% carbohydrate based, most people ate meat once a weak, if at all, and fat was scarce. The now typical meat-with-every-dish diet is a post WW2 development.
But we never get an explanation from them as to what exactly is IN the junk food or ultra-processed food that causes the disease.
You don't get it, because 1. there is something VERY CLEARLY wrong with it, and 2. what is wrong with it is at odds with what is hammered into them over and over.
> You don't think the scientific literature has anything to say about sugar surplus or junk food surplus?
No, I know it does, but it doesn't properly communicate the relationship with correct words, where other related subjects do. Instead it dances about with a disconnection, I would guess because of the sugar and health industry lobby.
The medical definition of poisoning is generally defined as injury or death due to swallowing, inhaling, touching or injecting of various substances.
Disease can be considered as an injury when it refers to a condition that develops gradually over time due to repeated exposure or stressors.
> Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though
Carbohydrates are in the potatoes, but are not the potatoes.
There are contextual limits when you associate specific things into a unique word definition, potatoes (unless green, or unsafely handled), would not be poisonous because they have a finite amount of components that our bodies can handle, and it would be quite hard if not impossible to eat sufficient amounts given biological limits and rates inherent in structure.
A concentrated chemical solution of simple carbohydrates in reduced liquid form that absorbs more quickly than your pancreas can handle on the other hand would be different.
When you exceed safe operating limits, this can cause injury, and that may show up, or present as symptoms of disease.
I would have responded sooner but apparently when posts get downvoted, it automatically applies a strict QoS filter that won't let the poster respond at all.
Not a very reasonable thing to do for a rational-minded community, for something as tame as what I said.
That system structure almost always trends eventually towards collectivist sock-puppetry opinion with the mob silencing others based solely on individual mass hallucination. Not very scientific, and at the same time eliminates requirements needed for intelligent thoughts.
In order to learn you must be able to risk being offended.
In order to think, you must be able to risk being offensive.
In order to share the benefits of either broadly, you must be able to communicate.
Without these inherent strengths skewing towards survival, its just a matter of time and circumstance before losing the fight against extinction.
I'm very much in the "reduce carbs" camp. Long-term high carb intake leads to many health issues, and reductions lead to improvements. I'm not sure that science is behind on this (there's plenty of literature on the topic) but man-in-the-street understanding seems to be behind.
The concept that sugar leads to diabetes is not exactly news at 11. But articles like this are helpful in moving the popular mindset.
Personally though I'd avoid the term "poison". Mostly because it's a very long-term effect, whereas people use "poison" in general usage more as a short term thing (rat poison versus feeding rats carbs till they get diabetes).
Secondly calling it "poison" is far outside normal understanding and so you become the "nutter" in the conversation. Which then devalues the valid points you have to make.
I say this as someone in your camp. While your body certainly needs some carbohydrates its safe to assume everyone is getting enough. Nobody needs sugar though, and removing as much of that as possible from daily diet will have big impacts in the long term.
For me that doesn't mean 'never sugar'. It means cake at celebrations, ice-cream once a month, eating "normally" when at restaurants (which is probably less than once a month) and so on.
The goal is not to be "perfect" the goal is to improve one step at a time. Coffee without sugar? Check. No daily, or weekly, sugar sodas or fruit juice? Check. And so on.
Small changes introduced slowly over time become the new normal, and that leads to sustained improvements.
Protein poisoning happens because your body has a limited capacity to process protein. It's very high and you're unlikely to hit it, but it's happened to people living off the land and eating nothing but lean meat. Carbohydate processing is not inherently rate-limited like that. How much you need is dictated by how much you use. Even the stated numbers here about 9 weekly 8 oz drinks with 50 kcals or more per serving is comically miniscule compared to what is ingested with no ill effects by any serious endurance athlete who actually needs and uses that much energy. Carbohydrate only has a deleterious effect when you ingest more than you use, which is not characteristic of a poison.
My father was Type 2 and for decades drank sweet tea; sweet tea that progressively became sweeter and sweeter. If you were to let it settle, you would see a thick layer of sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass. Eventually, he lost both of his legs beneath the knee due to infections that festered. He spent his last few years in a wheelchair and then eventually died of a heart attack.
Bad habits, bit by bit, over the course of years.
As a photojournalist, he won a Pulitzer for earthquake footage in 1989, saw the shuttle take off and land countless times, and took an incredible photo at a NASCAR event of a car, engulfed in flames, flying directly at his lens. (He got the shot and then dove out of the way.)
Which I guess is to say... life is ups and downs. Be wary of sugary stuff.
Your father sounds similar to mine: high-achiever, running every which way. Question: how was his sleep? My father's career was in a field that required annual physical fitness certification; his diet probably could have stood to include less salt and sugar when I was very young, but he cleaned it up, especially by the time he was diagnosed with T2. Something his job also required, however: early mornings. Late nights. And, evidently, not enough time to stop for a moment and determine if he might have sleep apnea (he did).
So, I think it's a three-part issue. Diet (sugar), obviously. Exercise, too, and whether or not you're getting it regularly throughout the day, every day. But I think it all goes to shit if you're getting bad sleep, especially if that "bad sleep" is "miniature bouts of asphyxiation." It completely screws with your body's ability to regulate itself, hormonally, and to recover from the day's damage.
Agree about sleep. He managed a newsroom and “put the paper to bed” so he worked from 7pm to 4am. I’m sure it didn’t help. For myself, I’m physically built very differently (leaner) and I don’t care much for sweet tea, so I’m lucky I guess. But as an achiever, sleep is always my battle. Comes and goes!
The data and the code used for the analysis appears to be available.
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One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold. Afterall, it would benefit not only the receivers of care but also the people funding the healthcare system. The sellers of those things will fight (to their death) to prevent that environment from existing.
Not allowing something to be mass produced, marketed and sold is different than banning it outright.
I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
For the most unhealthy class of people that are most affected by things like T2 diabetes, we have universal healthcare. At 65 you get Medicare which covers diabetes treatment.
We have yet to ban sodas despite the added cost to the taxpayers.
> I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
For tobacco, the age restriction has been the thing that has limited use more than anything. People don't tend to pick up smoking once they hit 21. Millennials by and large do not smoke and the anti-tobacco legislation in the 90s is a large part of that.
Unfortunately, because the legislation didn't target all nicotine products that left the door open for vape companies to come in and get Gen Z and Alpha addicted to nicotine all over again.
A broad ban on the sale of nicotine products to minors should be in place. It certainly shouldn't be sold over the internet.
Soda is trickier. I don't think an outright ban would be right (though it would have a fair number of positive health benefits). A sin tax would likely be ineffective and age checks seems like it would be somewhat burdensome.
> Unfortunately, because the legislation didn't target all nicotine products that left the door open for vape companies to come in and get Gen Z and Alpha addicted to nicotine all over again.
Gen Z and Alpha nicotine use rates are still lower than Millennials in absolute terms; it's happily not a huge problem (nevermind that stuff like Zyn is unambiguously much healthier than smoking cigs).
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold. Afterall, it would benefit not only the receivers of care but also the people funding the healthcare system. The sellers of those things will fight (to their death) to prevent that environment from existing.
Perhaps you’re implying something unique about the US, but those products are still sold in other countries that have state-funded universal health care.
This argument by massive processed food industries, that if we get Universal Healthcare, that their products and practices will be curtailed because it will be for the actual monetary public good says nothing about what is sold in countries with public healthcare.
Are you saying that corporate processed food manufacturers are not making that statement?
Clearly there is a problem with soda consumption leading to obesity in countries with Universal Healthcare, but that isn't the argument I am making.
> Are you saying that corporate processed food manufacturers are not making that statement?
No. I have no knowledge of what statements such manufacturers are or are not making.
However, your original post said “One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.” This phrasing implies that the statement is true, or at least you believe it to be true. So it seemed relevant to offer a counter-example.
Even if you had originally said “corporate processed food manufacturers claim their products will be curtailed and lobby heavily on this point,” I think it would still be useful to point out that such claims are highly likely to be false given past experience in other countries.
Those other countries already have Universal Healthcare, so no lobbying against UH will be effective or successful. The fact that other countries have a supply of unhealthy processed food doesn't have any bearing about how much effort US food companies will put in preventing UH.
You can see their concerted response when sugar taxes are instituted.
I don't think people realize the scale of soda consumption that needs to happen to have health issues. By and large the people in these affected studies are not drinking water at all. They are getting all their thirst needs met by a sugary drink. That is so overboard. You can have a can of coke every now and then and not have your enamel slough off.
Mostly from own experience I know poor people drink sodas and as you get used to the taste you don’t like taste of plain water - even when you have decent tap water.
As an adult I started drinking tap water and now I don’t like taste of sodas anymore. I am happy that I got over with it but still have some people I know stuck on sodas and disliking plain water taste.
I think "don't like the taste of water" accurately describes me. That being said I do have a rule of "never drink anything with calories" specifically to avoid the sugar. But I don't know what you plain water drinkers are on about, the added flavor tricks me into drinking way more than I would naturally.
Humans have been constantly flavoring our water for thousands of years, I think the verdict is in that water tastes kinda meh. I would take tea or flavor extracts every time.
We had a family friend who is in her late 50s stay for a couple of days over Christmas, all she drunk was Diet Coke. Even going to bed at night she took a bottle of Diet Coke with her. The thought of waking up through the night for a swig of Coke grosses me out a bit. And yes, she is the absolute picture of health...
eh, Diet Coke is primarily water, aspartame, phosphoric acid and caffeine. I drink 5/6 of them a day (don't like water much). The paper linked actually says short term effects of diet soda are less problematic, but recent evidence suggests that aspartame may have harms on the microbiome and glucose tolerance generally.
That said, the idea of drinking anything either sweet or carbonated before bed, during the night, or in the morning, mind boggling to me, that does sound really gross.
Have you ever tried plain carbonated water? It's more interesting than still water, and for me more thirst quenching. Easy to make at home with a Soda Stream or similar, just don't add any of their syrup.
That isn't the argument I made. Processed food industries actively block healthcare reforms because they fear being regulated for the now obvious public good.
Perhaps. But I don't think that's the public consensus. So it's hard to accept such arguments without any evidence.
AFAIK in Europe most food safety regulation is coming from the EU directly and not the national governments. Also it's not like all countries in Europe have public tax funded healthcare systems.
Fundamentally some are inherently not that different from the one in the US (i.e. semi-private or even entirely privatized) it's just that they much better regulated and much more efficient.
Even if we exclude private spending the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than most other countries so why would anything change if e.g. Medicare was extended to a higher proportion of the population?
> > smoking rate is considerably higher in France or even in Spain
But they somehow compensate with other good habits considering that lifespan and healthspan is greater than the US.
Then we can get into a whole different conversation about the intensity of one's life in the US v. Europe not just the lenght, but that is a whole different conversation.
America's poor use EBT/food stamps to buy massive amounts of junk food, including billions on soda. Those same people are almost 100% on ACA or state health insurance plans and milking the tax payer on treatment for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. There is no way, in my mind, it is feasible to fund these lifestyles and provide the treatment for it. Its absolutely insane.
Do they? Food stamps in most states have restrictions on what you can buy with them. My impression is soda is not on the list. Of course this is (mostly?) the states and every state has different rules so you probably need to cite 50 different state rules to verify this and thus an exception state is likely.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
Counter argument: Pretty much every other nation has socialized healthcare and still allows sugary beverages and tobacco products.
>I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
I'd be fine with that to be honest. I'd drink soda water going forward just to not have to smell cigarettes, but be fine with people backyarding some tobacco to make their own cigars.
It would probably even be healthier to force people to make their own syrup for soda at home vs the ease of obtaining it now.
Before we go here, what is the alternative. If restrict soda and people switch to beer even if they will be driving that could be much worse. (I don't otherwise know how the effects of alcohol vs soda come up but that too is a question worth asking)
I don't think that's a relevant comparison. They're both beverages, sure, but that's about where the similarities end. As drugs they're entirely different. May as well add Ayahuasca to consideration as well.
I could see tea or coffee (particularly the sweetened varieties) and sparkling water, but honestly I think the most likely alternative will just be plain ol' water.
I wasn't intending to imply that is what would happen. That is the worst substitute I can think of. If high sugar coffee would also be counted as soda for the laws - something that isn't a given - this seems even more likely.
If I recall correctly part of the origin of soda was doing the reverse, from efforts to actively substitute for alcohol. Hence why they emphasized as "soft drinks" as a marketing category.
As for other substitutes, we've seen highly sweetened coffee drinks as the common one, to the point where soda taxes started to face accusations that they are actually thinly veiled classism due to exclusion of more white collar "Starbucks" type drinks. Rightfully or wrongly they have a point about it at least looking bad.
I think you strike a good balance between personal freedoms and health of the population.
You’re right in that availability is the problem.
If I go across the road to the store, there’s a whole WALL covered in hundreds, maybe thousands, of sugar drinks, all very very cheap.
You know what there isn’t any of in the whole store? Something healthy and low sugar / high protein.
I have the luxury of time and a little bit of money so I can choose, but what about the busy parent who just needs energy? The busy office worker with a bunch of projects due, or just the poor individual with not much money, I don’t think it’s fair to setup these kind of situations and then blame the individuals for their choices, we have to step in at a governmental level
I went little further. I could not find low or no sugar Nestle cereals at the local supermarket, then I asked their support if they have something with low sugar. Their rep wrote that they have lowered the sugar amount by 34% from 2000 to 2010, but it is still not clear if those amount are OK, when I taste the sugar amount is definitely high. I do think the government should step in and promote healthy food and habits
So many of these "we lowered X" things are simply "We cut the portion size down by 34% to hit calorie/sugar goals".
That's where you get dumb things like "Here's a candy bar with 3.5 servings" to try and trick a consumer into thinking it's not as calorie dense as it is.
It's really tragic that lots of Americans think this kind of garbage is a healthier alternative to other kinds of breakfast. It may actually have less sugar than pancakes drenched in some disgusting syrup, but it's still garbage. There's a real problem with nutritional literacy in this country. The manufacturers of these products really aren't helping here either. Cheerios have a big 'CAN LOWER CHOLERSTEROL' plastered on the front of the pack, but the contents are still literally 24% added sugar.
That is still a good amount of sugar given it’s every day and setting your morning baseline. If taken with e.g. a refined juice or sweetened coffee, that’s probably setting one up for sugar cravings in a few hours.
A slice of bread (in the U.S.) has more than 1g of added sugar (and less than 140 calories). (If you know of any besides Ezekiel that have less sugar, I would like to hear about it.) I don't think it is fair to villainize Cheerios when it is one of the least offensive options among ultraprocessed breakfast cereals. Especially based on... other things that aren't Cheerios? Juice (20+ g sugar) and coffee sweetener (4+ g sugar) would be the villains in this scenario.
There's nothing wrong with the "can lower cholesterol" banner on it because it's a source of whole grains and it has no saturated fat. That combo generally does lower cholesterol when put to the test, and it probably is one of the best cereals in the aisle.
Directing people towards better alternatives is a good thing.
The Honey Nut Cheerios are glazed in sugar, but the plain Cheerios (to my taste) don't have much if any. Don't have any here to check the ingredients though. If I want cereal for breakfast I generally make plain oatmeal.
FWIW - the convenient stores near me sell the Core Power Elite Protein drinks. I have picked them up and it helps make my protein goals on days where I come up short. They do taste pretty good but more expensive than a soda.
It's possible people are depressed and looking for the most tasty option.
One thing 7-11s have started stocking in recent years is packaged hard boiled eggs. The price is insane if you compare it to boiling your own, and they are a bit tasteless, but you don't have to peel them and the price is reasonable compared to other stuff there if you're stuck eating lunch from 7-11.
You're paying for footprint. There's 320 Walmarts in California and almost 2000 7-Elevens. There's zero Walmarts in SF and San Mateo county, and at least 50-Elevens. Those 7-Elevens are often in premium locations downtown.
I don't know that that's true. Most healthcare is subsidized. And so is the sugar. There's very little movement to restrict the sugar. There are profits to be made on both ends (selling the sugar and the insulin for example) by those who have captured the relevant parts of the government.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
Yeah that not it boss. Never did I come across something getting banned in France because of healthcare costs.
It's good to see more studies come on this but it's not exactly news. Researchers have known for quite some time now that there's an entire constellation of diseases (diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, fatty liver disease, heart disease, etc, etc) known as metabolic syndrome that are all caused by diet and lifestyle.
Also good that GLP-1s have been found to help people patch the reward center around unhealthy diet demand signals. We know these things are bad, we know will power isn't a solution, and we have a fix we can deploy at scale relatively inexpensively.
Saying will power isn’t a solution is insulting to everyone that successfully made lifestyle and diet changes to become healthier without pharmaceutical intervention.
It may not work for everyone all the time, but I know a lot of people that have made these changes.
This is just an uncharitable / strawman interpretation of what they said. They are concerned with all the people left over once you remove the people that just had to muster up "willpower". And they are concerned for the people who weren't dealt the same hand of traits that us fit people have.
If one is insulted, they should revisit their mental model and emotional state. There is no gold star for will power because someone lucked out with genetics and brain chemistry/structure. “Be more lucky” is not actionable for the body you are issued.
We can patch bugs in the human, and we should whenever possible and desired by the person. This helps them make their own luck.
You are transferring the problem from the foods industry to the pharmaceutical industry. I hope "one" knows that.
The "bugs" are not in "the human," they're in the food industry. Fixing our food supply would be far better for individuals and society than fighting fire with fire by leaving our food broken and using drugs to work around it.
In the meantime, doing what you can to unbreak your diet without using drugs is still far smarter than relying on an artificial "fix" for the "machine" that is literally you (and can't be tossed and replaced when you find out your "fix" caused other issues, which happens almost every time the pharma industry provides shortcuts for people). Doing it this way also moves your demand as a consumer to the unbroken parts of the food supply, which will help everyone else as food companies are incentivized to cater to that instead of continuing on with what they're doing.
If this is your belief, then you do not understand the mechanisms by which GLP-1 agonists work. They silence the signals in the brain craving the unhealthy foods in question. You will never win against your brain chemistry.
Pharmaceutical companies would love for you to believe that. They salivate over the idea that they can convince you that you need their products for the rest of your life. They aren't any different from the common street dealer in many ways. They don't really care about your health, only that you keep coming back.
"You will never win against your brain chemistry" is a defeatist way to dismiss taking basically any action, ever. People selling you artificial solutions will, of course, be incentivized to convince you that it's true.
Humans lived for thousands of years (without the widespread diet-related ailments we're seeing epidemics of today) without artificially "fixing" their own brain chemistry. This is not an internal medicine problem, it's an external food supply and societal lifestyle problem.
If you want to say it's too hard for you (you, only) to do what's required to not get sick and you'd rather rely on medicine, fine. But it is actually insulting to pretend like everyone needs a crutch just because you do. The main thing is that the crutch should be a last resort, and "willpower isn't a solution" should not be a common mantra to push the crutch as the first option.
Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale and your theory is not? We tried the silly will power way, that did not work. We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it. If you want to ignore data out of a belief system, that’s a choice. You believe the intervention is inferior to will. But the evidence clearly shows the vast majority of humans are assisted by an intervention versus “will power” which does not work (gold stars to those who need to feel better about themselves they don’t need an intervention).
I don’t take GLP-1s, but I support getting them to everyone who wants them and ignoring anyone who tries to stop that, or says that is a lesser path for lesser people. I hope you learn to give grace, because lucky people are just lucky, not special.
> We tried the silly will power way, that did not work.
They still work for plenty of people, just not you. They can work for more if we enable healthy diets and lifestyles as a society.
And no, that's not a "gold star" to the people who were able to literally have their "machine" work as designed. It's rather a gold star for you to not acknowledge if you needed artificial assistance to exist.
> Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale... We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it.
None of the articles you cited in your earlier comment address "scale" at all, nor provide evidence of "shifting industries." Two of them address changes in the spending patterns of high-income consumers who are already using the drug (unrelated to the proportion of the total population using the drug), and the third is a blog post by a doctor literally selling GLP-1s as a miracle drug ("It's getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren't good for"-- yikes).
Your most recent KFF link (which it looks like you removed) claims 12% of adults have taken GLP-1 drugs (going off of a single poll taken by a health-tracking organization-- probably biased towards people actively working on their health). If that number was true, it would be alarming that over 10% of humans needed an artificial fix for a problem created by the food industry and socially sanctioned sedentary lifestyles, not something to parade around like you've actually fixed the underlying problem.
By this logic I, a person who has never been at risk of financial insolvency partially due to my lack of consumer addiction/upbringing with financial literacy, should be insulted by someone who says that budgeting isn't a solution to systemic poverty.
No, by this logic, you should be insulted by someone saying paid professional accountants managing all of your money is the only way for society to avoid widespread debt because "most people" haven't managed to bring themselves to do the basic at-home budgeting that you're used to.
> by this logic, you should be insulted by someone saying paid professional accountants managing all of your money is the only way for society
But toomuchtodo didn't write that GLP-1s were the only way to address the issue. So maybe there's no reason to be insulted. Perhaps you could exercise your willpower and not feel insulted by things that didn't happen.
That is true but I think emphasizing liquid sugar is particularly important. When I was young I tried to bulk (for sports) several times and ate an obscene amount of carbohydrates and protein, think like 8 hot dogs and half a gallon of milk for lunch... roughly 4k calories a day of carbs/protein/fat.
I never got past 220. I would get terrible heartburn and bloating and be too full to eat enough, 220 seemed to be about the max my body could obtain without severe discomfort. It always made me wonder how people get up into the 300+ range. Liquified sugar seems like the only food that your body can process efficiently enough to get you into those massive weight categories.
The study quantifies the effect. The paper doesn't just say "Drinking too much sugar is bad for you."
Say one group drinks six cans of coke a day per person vs another group drink only water. Overall they have similar caloric intake and expenditures. What is the increase in type 2 diabetes for the first group vs the second? Yes, it is not surprising it would be higher, but is it 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%? more?
It's not propaganda. Saturated fat is bad. That's a common internet belief that runs rampant because saturated fat tastes good and it sounds awesome to believe some conspiracy against it.
I know it's hotly debated and I don't imagine I could convince you :). This is my opinion.
If I read right, you're saying that an entire food group that people have been eating for eons is simply "bad", specifically, meat, dairy, and eggs, in their unprocessed form. The argument I've seen is that it's better to eat a new kind of food that people have only begun eating in quantity within the last hundred ish years requiring industrial technology. (Specifically, oils extracted from plant material using solvents like hexane.)
I'm open minded but this is a really serious claim and I'd need really solid evidence which I haven't seen, and I've looked. There are a lot of studies; those that I've looked into have too many confounding variables for me to take their conclusions at face value.
I could also see the possibility that saturated fat in someone who already has metabolic syndrome might increase their risk of heart disease, and maybe be considered the proximate cause, in cases where the root cause is the metabolic syndrome caused by sugar in the first place.
There's also the question of there being different kinds of LDL cholesterol and it perhaps actually serving a function in the body that isn't categorically bad, even if in some circumstances the metric correlates with atherosclerosis.
I'm from latam. I never saw anyone drink water growing up. Anytime you try to drink water, people label you as boring, even your parents. Whenever we go to a restaurant, the first thing you ask the waiter is "what sodas do you have?". If you're not feeling like drinking soda and want something "healthier", you ask what kinds of fruit juices they have. If you don't like the options, you settle on a hyper-sweetened tea.
I frequently ask my parents to drink more water, and they get defensive saying they drink a lot of water but I just don't see it. The truth is they only drink half a small cup in the middle of the night...
I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
Prior to early 2000s when sugar consumption started going down, it was probably a reasonble guess as one of the drivers of increasing disease. But since then sugar consumption has tailed off while disease rates have continued to rise, so I don't think it's plausible anymore.
My bet to flatten the chronic disease curve would be reducing n6 fat consumption, especially from foods fried in vegetable oil.
Provactively, the steep upturn in diabetes rates around 1990 conincides with a broad movement in the fast-food industry to replace animal fats like tallow with vegetable oils.
While I don't disagree that omega-6 oils are suspect - especially when heated/reheated - the evidence for sugar being bad for you is still far greater than the evidence that seed oils are bad for you.
The US State system lends itself to natural experiments so I'm all for iterating on what taxes incentives actually lead to the desired outcomes (higher healthspan and lower healthcare costs).
There very well could be multiple contributing factors to the epidemic- generically if the behavior increases chronic disease burden on the population it needs to be disincentivized via taxes so that you can incentivize moving to alternatives without the negative externalities.
Are there any chains that still use tallow to fry food?
I love fried food and would pay a premium for high quality oil options. Most of the time you don't know what it is, at best it's peanut (five guys). I'd much prefer avocado oil or tallow.
The only one I know of is Popeyes -- they famously never stoped frying their chicken in beef tallow. Probably unhealthy for about a million other reasons, but hey, at least it's not fried in vegetable oil!
Not what has happened in the UK, where sugar tax has been a thing since 2018. It's now actually quite hard to find a sweetened drink - almost all soda-style beverages now are "zero sugar", sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Nobody is buying sugar and pouring it in. Nobody.
It's a little too early to determine if this has slowed the prevalence of diabetes in the population. One problem is that other studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages with foods means many people end up eating more calories of food - the brain is looking for calories indicated by the sweet taste its not getting from the beverage, so compensates.
It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
Last time I was in the UK, nearly everywhere that sold soda offered the full calorie, full sugar version of Coke. Pepsi and other drinks were often only available in lower or zero sugar, but Coke was almost always available in the full sugar version, for some reason.
Pepsi and Dr. Pepper decided to go lower sugar with supplemental artificial sweeteners to keep their price down, whereas Coca-Cola kept the original formula, but it costs more.
To put figures to this:
- Pepsi (11g sugar per 250 ml): 8.8p/100ml
- Dr. Pepper (11g sugar per 250 ml): 10.0p/100ml
- Coca-Cola (27g sugar per 250 ml): 14.2p/100ml
"full sugar" Dr. Pepper also contains: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
"full sugar" Pepsi contains: Sucralose, Acesulfame K
So after the sugar tax some people moved to these hybrid drinks whereas others just moved whole-hog to Pepsi Max and Diet Dr. Pepper which are commonly cheaper and have the same aftertaste as their "full sugar" variants.
It would be interesting to see the effect of a sweetness tax. See if the manufacturers can make desirable beverages that don’t taste so sweet (and don’t have whatever effect triggering sweetness receptors so intensely has).
> It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why?
When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff.
Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well!
Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.
> When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary
Are you aware that you're supposed to dilute squash to taste? It's just concentrated juice. If it's too sweet, you haven't added enough water.
Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.
Unfortunately Internet people like to point out the hypothetical 99th percentile person who would evade/be immune to such incentives and suggest that therefore, it would not be worth doing.
When I read those, I don't actually think those people believe their own arguments. They started with a conclusion, like "sugar taxes are bad," and then worked backwards to find an argument to fit it. That's why when you challenge them they just shift the goalposts.
they'll optimize the packaging to help you out. My mom tells me about how margarine used to come with a yellow color packet to mix into your white spread. The dairy board lobbied to make it illegal to sell yellow margarine because "it looks like butter". Didn't seem to hurt Oleo much...
Both would reduce demand so a sharp drop off would still be fairly realistic. Of course, getting anything done at the federal would be impossible in the US today.
about 40% of adults in the US are obese. Doesn’t seem that crazy to me (as an experiment one could run for a couple years, to see if it has a positive impact on society)
Yeah but then again, selling addictive sugar shit is lucrative AND treating diabetes is lucrative. Very few people in charge care about your health, the world would be a very different place if it was the case.
The solutions are extremely simple, and it's the same for many of our modern issues, the will simply isn't there.
> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas).
It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place.
It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively.
The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now.
I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore.
Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price.
I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax).
In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.
I would expect it to work badly whenever a person could easily cross a boundary. In larger cities -- say, New York -- it would suffer similar, but fewer, problems simply because the average effort of getting outside the city would be higher.
You see this between states when tax regimes differ. Sure, those who live near the border "cheat". But most people live far enough away that they are affected by the tax.
There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
I'm curious if you have data showing this? Last I heard, which a quick google seems to back up, is that Seattle's similar tax had modest benefits. (https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/sph-blog/sugar-sweete...) Took a brief look to see if there were strong challenges to this, but I didn't find anything.
Regarding the sugar tax? Only empirical/anecdotal, I'm afraid: the fact is, as mentioned in my statement and in a response below, is that it's a geographical based tax, which while annoying can be trivially circumvented. (And even then black-markets emerge to meet that demand, or better known as System-D.)
A better analysis would be the effects of better health and the decrease in tobacco smokers in younger generations over the last decades, which is mainly a product of discretion. I can assure you having lived with a pack a day people no amount of advertising, gross tumor pictures on the side of the box, high costs/taxes came close to people just realizing it's a horrible thing to do to your health.
Arguably this led to the mass vaping trend, and a myriad of other ailments associated to that, but still what remains is that tax while a deterrent is no match for proper market-product-fit--how ever dangerous, or stupid one may think said behavour is.
> There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
Here is the thing, I spent a lot of time in Europe where smoking is still incredibly prevalent and culturally relevant and the taxes are still incredibly high, the result: people just buy loose tobacco and roll it themselves to bypass the higher tax on pre-roll stuff offered every where.
The ancillary products sold in 'head-shops' become a niche market unto themselves for these people and divert that tax money into another sector, proving that while markets have many flaws they tend to be effective at navigating any and all legislative hurdles even in an incredibly highly regulated market-place.
I think this specific matter seems to be a bigger issue with people who feel the need to judge or deem people's actions 'right or wrong' based on their own subjective values when it comes to personal body autonomy, and think they know better and want to deter them in any way possible which I think this is ultimately what this is about: not Society's health.
If that were the case, I think resources are better utilized in helping people address the MASSIVE mental health crisis in the US.
I'm confused on where the quote on cigarettes comes from? Isn't in my post, is it?
And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study. I fully agree that, on the merits, this is easy to circumvent. I further agree that this sort of tax is almost certainly regressive. Largely for the reason you give of how easy it can be to get around. The study shows that, despite that, it still saw gains to the goals.
My gut would be some of the gains will have come from advertising around the ideas. Having a tax is one thing. But prices typically go up with people being none the wiser. So, the messaging that went with the taxes could have also given a pause.
That is beside the point, though, being that I don't know why it could have had modest results. Study shows that it did.
> And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study.
I don't have much to say, other than personally I feel it's a tacit nod to the fact they found the results they wanted from this study, because it resoundingly relies on justifying a higher sales tax and this further encourages other parts of WA to adopt it and further establish it as a form of tax revenue while trying to provide a 'social good' which can be monetized.
Again, it's not entirely hard to bypass and because it 'may' show some minor benefit to justify itself seems like how most poorly formed versions of bureaucratic gate-keeping works.
But, to take the contrarian position [0] to even my own argument it seems that in the 5 states they launched this with income taxes have also 'benefited' from these taxes. But its hard/impossible to properly measure that these consumers didn't just purchase things in a nearby city with no additional tax or just online so I think it's parameters can derive the favourable results it claims. And the following claim regarding 'significant evidence' doesn't really compel me to say it was vastly evaluated:
> But the study also looked at adjacent zip codes to the SSB-taxed cities: finding no statistically significant evidence that purchases had increased in these neighboring areas.
Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
PS: That 2nd quote was not yours, but the other users who wanted to address tobacco use: I keep doing this having grown up on IRC/forums but since HN doesn't do attribution. I should find a solution to this, but making 2 posts seems tedious, I guess I can pre-fix with @ or something.
Ah, 2nd quote being a sibling post makes sense. I typically look at things in threads after I post, so didn't see it.
I want to stress that logically, I fully agree with your position. I am always hesitant to go with logical arguments that aren't supported empirically, though. Would love to see some critical studies that go into why this stuff isn't the case.
I can say that, at a personal level, we thought we would shift buying of juices and sodas to outside of Seattle when the law passed. We largely didn't, though. Just started getting smaller servings from places in the city. I hesitate to say we are representative, though; as we don't do that much on the sweetened side, all told. Were buying small juices for the kids, but not many of that, even.
> Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy ? As far as I can see, you are free to continue putting sugary water into your body. Is the argument that even a small increase in tax is an encroach upon bodily autonomy ? Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production) as a bodily autonomy issue then, since it lowers the cost of corn / fructose and making them available in more food ?
> Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy?
Simply put, you are arbitrarily punishing those who consume these products (which I will repeat I do not purchase myself) in often high cost areas (eg Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder) to align with a specific ideology that these areas ascribe to, at least on the surface.
I feel like a boomer saying this and it seems like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because it's something that on the surface makes sense to a degree--relying on the old adage of tax it and you get less of it--and even appears to be well intentioned way to make people make 'healthier' choices, but from what I've seen in practice is a bureaucratic way to modify behaviour in people's everyday lives that ultimately only causes a minor inconvenience/friction for those resolved to circumvent and the initiative's results seem dubious at best and over-reaching at worst.
I genuinely don't think in practice it's about health either as you can easily go around the other aisle and buy all the high sodium, poly-saturated chips with as much or more HFCS and MSG and countless amounts of dyes and food preservatives to your hearts content with no tax implication and are often encouraged to be purchased in bulk, so it seems perplexing that this is really the success they make it out to be.
It seems to me like a bike-shedding initiative if I have ever seen one as it avoids the much bigger issue of how un-healthy the American diet really is.
> Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production)...
Because as you have mentioned, the obscenely lucrative farm subsides of corn for mega farms is the crux of the issue here and by extension all of the lobbying by big business that takes place for these chemicals that are actually shaping what the American diet itself is; I believe we would be better served addressing that obvious and glaring problem, and forcing producers of these products to have to do without these highly subsidized and addictive chemicals in their products and letting consumers decide whether to consume them of their own volition at actual market rates rather than this window dressing approach.
No, that is an incorrect reading of the result. San Francisco is not a neighbor of Berkeley, and nobody started traveling 15 miles to SF to save a dime on Coke. The 4% increase in the comparison cities was exogenous.
I don't think we can attribute causality to the decline in Berkeley any more or less than we can attribute causality to the increase in comparison cities. If it was causal in Berkeley, it was causal in SF and Oakland. (Whose rates actually went up by like 20%? But at some point that gets cut down to 4%, I'm not sure why.)
And still: Among low income households only. We don't know what the effect was on the whole population.
Anyway, I'm sympathetic to the idea that sugar taxes work, just being critical of this particular study and your claim which is stronger than the actual study outcome.
Fruit smoothies are an interesting case of a "sugar beverage" which doesn't quite act how you'd think. Intuitively, you'd think that speedy ingestion of that much fructose with all its fiber obliterated in a blender could potentially cause spikes in blood glucose. However this study showed that when the fruits had seeds, like blackberries and raspberries, the glucose peak was lower with blended fruit than whole.
fiber isn’t ’obliterated’ in a blender, it’s only removed with juices. in juice you strain all the pulp and seeds out, smoothies retain the seeds and fiber.
I used to drink a lot of soda but stopped 15 years ago and have had a total of three or four cans since. I switched to unsweetened green tea instead of a zero-calorie soda because I don't like the taste of artificial sweeteners, and I am somewhat suspicious of the unknown long-term consequences of their use.
The older diet sodas definitely didn't taste like sugar but the new ones (Coke Zero) are pretty great? Idk, I almost never drink full sugar soda but I'm a fan of Coke Zero.
Coke Zero still has aspartame and so still has a bit of that "aspar-tang" to its taste. But there's something in its formulation that masks that somewhat and makes it tastier than Diet Coke. The advertisements used to say "Diet Dr. Pepper DOES taste more like regular Dr. Pepper!" and it's true: something about the spices? they add to Dr. Pepper causes the aspartame flavor to blend right in and be less noticeable.
I drink sugar-free (or occasionally, low-sugar variants like Olipop) soda from time to time but I find I'm drinking way less soda -- and everything else except maybe water and coffee -- these days. Being on a dietary protocol for early T2D has brought my liquid cravings way, way down.
They are in some countries. The sugar tax in the UK quickly led to many places only selling non sugar variants or charging a premium for the sugared versions.
Based on the abstract it's not a study showing that "Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease [are] attributable to sugar beverages", it's a paper quantifying the "[Amount of] Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease [that are] attributable to sugar beverages [in various countries]". The link and causation is already well established. This is trying to determine how much harm it's doing in different parts of the world.
It's "good" that this is in Nature, but does any health-aware person not already know this?
Our real problem is that most people aren't health-aware, and advertising (including the pharma-funded healthcare system) absolutely overwhelms common-sense truths about health.
Over the past few years I have improved my own health by greatly limiting my intake of sugars, including by cutting out "healthy" smoothies, but I learned all this from Dr Internet, and NOT from any physician who was being paid to treat me. US physicians' knowledge of nutrition is stuck at whatever they were taught in med school, which was probably 20+ years behind the research at that time.
There is almost nothing* like sugar drinks in the natural world our bodies evolved in. Sugar drinks are about as different as tea leaves and pure cocaine. It's is no coincidence that both are refined white powders.
I take it you haven’t tried a nice ripe mango from subtropical regions, or a pineapple, white grapes (or grape juice), watermelon, navel oranges? They can be sweeter than Dr. Pepper.
Sugarcane also exists and you can chew it.
They just tended to 1) come with fiber, 2) not be as easy to acquire or eat in large quantities 3) not available all year, or all at once
The fiber is afaik a big factor for slowing rate and amount of sugar absorbed (amount because apparently some of it makes it far enough to feed gut bacteria in the large intestine).
As mentioned in the sibling comment, your numbers are not comparable, and anything >10% is already an absolutely unhealthy amount of sugar.
Point being that sugary drinks/foods didn’t suddenly come to existence.
There are sugary products everywhere because we want them - or you might say we were made to want them. We made it central to our culture in many ways, and accepted terrible dietary habits as the norm. The wide availability of something like Dr Pepper is as much a cause as a reflection of that.
Well still different, as I could never possibly drink 300ml of honey, without choking or something worse.
On the other hand, grape juice, while not 100% natural, I’m not sure how it fares against cola (just considering sugar, not the rest of the junk)
Once I drunk some not-still-done wine, basically grape juice where the fermentation started, and so some bubbles were present. That was the most natural and delicious soda I’ve ever tasted… I do bot even hope it can be healthy to the body… but my soul ;)
Good point. Natural fruit is different from sugar drinks in a few ways: takes effort to collect and consume, contains fiber that increases satiety, and is much less sweet (even when compared to the extra sweet varieties humans have bred).
Well this article scared me. Guess I will have to quit Mountain Dew. But what if I switched to the sugar free one? (Am I swapping diabetes and heart disease for cancer?)
Weird software X diabetes story. CFO at my small startup had type 2. We only had sugar free sodas and water bottles and, oddly, Capri Suns at my 15 person startup. I distinctly remember wracking my brain working on some code for long day and my brain was like "give me sugar!". I didn't realize that attempting to feed it many (sugar-free) sodas, it wasn't getting what it wanted. It needed the glucose. I began surreptitiously drinking Capri Suns. My CFO sees me chugging aforementioned childrens' drink and informs me those are his emergency sugar drinks and please don't accidentally kill him if he ODs on insulin. Never learned so much biology while writing software in my life.
The human experience is all about controlling your urges. I also like to eat until I feel stuffed and sleep 12 hours a day, but I don't because I value my long term health above short term pleasures. Sadly for us modern life is all about short term pleasures and convenience, if you're not careful you can lose yourself real quick
Try sparkling water, home made water kefir, herbal teas, &c.
why are you lecturing somebody on the internet about personal lifestyle choices? as if the whole world doesn't know what they consume can negatively affect their health...
There is a classic book about the effects of sugar named "Sugar Blues" for the interested. I have a bad reaction to sugar so have to avoid certain foods -- e.g. bananas are a no-no for me.
Tangentially related: a while ago i used to drink aspartame-sweetened drinks (sugarfree coke) but I did quit that as well after reading thst the sweet taste is still going go stimulate insulin production.
Speaking with a relative eho is a medical doctor they told me that yes, that’s a thing.
I’m not sure to what degree this might fit into the discussion, but just wanted to write this down.
Nowadays i just drink water.
I still have the occasional beer or the occasional glass of proper wine if i’m out with friends.
When I researched it in the past I thought that multiple studies corroborated that while blood sugar doesn't increase from drinking artificially sweetened drinks that people who drink them still tend to gain weight. I'm not sure how those studies adjusted for things like people that already have metabolic syndrome who simply choose artificial sweetener for health reasons though?
It seems the most I would be comfortable concluding from recent reviews of studies is that there are some worrying findings, enough to warrant caution. If you can simply reduce your consumption of sugary foods and beverages I suspect it will reduce your craving better than a replacement stimuli. You can review some studies here:
It's a fallacy to draw conclusions from the number of studies/reviews supporting a given hypothesis, but the majority conclude that artificial sweeteners are associated with negative health effects and not a helpful tool for adiposity-related diseases.
I've known multiple with glucose monitors and all of them told me they saw no increase after drink a diet soda. I think the "aspartame causes sugar spikes" is an urban legend. I never get the sugar rush from them like I do if I drink a sugary soda.
>> I've known multiple with glucose monitors and all of them told me they saw no increase after drink a diet soda. I think the "aspartame causes sugar spikes" is an urban legend. I never get the sugar rush from them like I do if I drink a sugary soda.
IANAD, but my reading of Dr. Jason Fung's book "The Obesity Code" suggests that while artificial sweeteners do not spike glucose immediately, they elicit an insulin response, which over time causes insulin resistance, which over time increases glucose.
Yeah absolutely taking artificial sweetener can't cause a glucose spike itself (no glucose or minimal amount to be derived), but maybe it could contribute to spikier glucose in general (due to sweetness contributing to hormonal dis-regulation/lack of satiety and overeating)
I drink coke in very small dose, mixed with Fernet branca. And I know positively, that if somebody upvotes this, is coming from a very specific country, where I’ve been, where it is very popular :)
I do not think is so bad, as I drink it a couple of times a month (tops).
People who have serious health issues from drinking soda are usually drinking 1+ liters per day. A liter of whiskey per day would be extremely bad for you.
Yet another article implying causation from association. The theory that sugar CAUSES diabetes type 2 fails when you look at people that eat a ton of carbs but keep the fats low: low fat vegans, fruitarians. Find one that's diabetic. They should be dropping like flies. But look at people that eat high fat >40% of calories, and the rest in carbs, and there you'll find the population of the metabolically compromised.
I’m not an expert but pretty sure fibers helps a lot regarding diabetes 2, microbiote and many other thing related. Vegans and fruitarians usually gets a lot more fibers than others regimes. But a diverse omnivorous diet including many vegetable is better than tofu+potatoes only. I recommend tempeh (0) instead tofu.
I agree with you sugars can’t be seen as the only one cause.
Interesting. I think folks in the comments here maybe missed this paper is way more about the beverages part making it important. The research is around sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs). If I'm reading it right, the SSBs have a differentmetabolic effect.
"Due to their liquid form, SSBs are rapidly consumed and digested, resulting in lower satiety, higher caloric intake and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways, which can result in visceral fat production, hepatic and skeletal muscle insulin resistance and weight gain. High doses of rapidly digested fructose directly activate hepatic fat synthesis, leading to ectopic fat deposition and metabolic dysfunction in liver and muscle"
Unfortunately I can't find where they define high dose, but if you look at what they say is high elsewhere, it seems to be around 9 servings a week of "any beverage with added sugars and >50 kcal per 8 oz serving, including commercial or homemade beverages, soft drinks, energy drinks, fruit drinks, punch, lemonade and aguas frescas." - A can of coke is 12oz I believe?
About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight but simply because it dawned on me that for the same amount of sugar in one soft drink that I drink without any afterthought, I could enjoy a really good pastry that I can slowly savor.
I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
More recently, I'm starting to apply this to meat as well. I really enjoy meat, but I'm not one for quantity since I'm on the skinnier side. So I'm trying to enjoy meat more, and in doing so, get better quality, prepare it better, etc. while at the same time eating less of it. This is still a work in progress, and eating in restaurants can be challenging as they usually favor quantity over quality—except for the very high-end & costly places.
>I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
We are increasingly moving away from looking at fat as an indulgence, towards understanding it as an essential nutrient, with a large variance in fat types and their benefits. E.g. some people would avoid eating nuts, because they are high in fat, and not as tasty as something similarly fatty, like a pastry. This seems wrong both intuitively, but also from empirical findings about the impact of certain omega-3 fatty acids (such as in nuts) versus that of, say, omega-6 fats, which are way overrepresented in our diets due to being so cheap.
This. People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads. It's sad, because as you mentioned some days are indeed essential nutrients. Especially for kids and pregnant women.
"People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads."
If this is true then what the hell is going on? We knew this about sugar with certainly at absolute minimum a half century ago when I was a kid (I know as I remember the message).
The message—even as told at school—was that 'excessive and repeated amounts of sugar (especially the refined type as in drinks and sweets) causes diabetes'. QED!
So what the fuck has happened, how was this once well-established message erased from the collective consciousness of more recent generations?
The message back then was so all pervasive that everybody knew it.
So many important facts have been lost to recent generations that I'm beginning to think education is going backwards fast. What happened to health lectures in primary school where we were told these facts?
We only really recently have evidence for sugar, on its own, causing diabetes.
We had a lot of evidence for sugar causing weight gain. And higher weight is strongly correlated with type II diabetes. But from a public health standpoint, we were worried about fats. We realized that many fats caused health problems even without weight gain and also viewed fats as having a more primary role in weight gain.
It's only recently (in the last couple of decades) that we've gotten evidence that sugar on its own can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes--even if you are of normal weight.
I mean, the "fat is bad" thing isn't completely wrong: it is definitely possible to overdo it. It's extremely calorically dense, and most fats are bad for us in other ways.
But society didn't replace some of the fat with increased intake of vegetables and lean meats.
Food manufacturers compensated for less fat with more sugars and salt, which we've been finding are even worse.
In most cases you could eat multiple pastries and still have significantly less sugar than a soda.
This depends if you consider all carbohydrates to be sugar or not. At the end of the day, the refined flours in the pastry are also sugar-equivalent.
>In most cases you could eat multiple pastries and still have significantly less sugar than a soda.
yep. The can of soda has something like 10 spoons of sugar. In that volume i stop feeling the difference after 2nd-3rd spoon of sugar. I do drink soda - by diluting it about 1:5. For the pastries and other bakery products - it does depends where it comes from. The standard American bakery sill puts a lot of sugar into pastries, cakes, bread (especially the fast-rise), etc. while some of the ones trying to do European style do use sugar more moderately (they also usually use more fat like butter thus making the taste better, more balanced, and probably also thus more healthy - my personal impression/opinion - as the more balanced content (fat/carbs vs. low-fat-high-sugar approach somehow more popular in the American bakery) seems to me to be better).
pastries also have fat though and parent was talking about enjoyment per kcal.
Fat is good for you, as long as it isn’t trans-fat. The common wisdom around cholesterol is false (the ”lipid hypothesis” is just that, a hypothesis).
Excess calories are bad for you, no matter what form they come in.
When I stopped drinking soda (about ten years ago), my stomach immediately started feeling better.
I will sometimes have a ginger ale, from time to time, when I'm eating out, and usually won't finish it, but I otherwise, don't drink soda, anymore.
> About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight[...]
Same thing happened to me at probably around the same time. I realized I could just have a lollypop, and it would be a tenth of the sugar. Most of the sweetness in soda doesn't even get a chance to touch your tongue before it's going down your throat. If I want candy, I should just have a piece of candy. If I'm thirsty, I should have a glass of water.
Also, the carbonation in soda enables them to get twice the sugar into it. Drinking a flat soda is like drinking maple syrup.
If I go to a restaurant with fill your own drinks (rare in the UK), I generally get soda water with about 10% coke. It's remarkable how much it tastes (to me) just like coke, albeit palatably sweet. I always thought the sugar tax should be a sweetness tax to change people's perceptions.
I also do this, usually with sprite or fanta and I think its more refreshing this way
It's probably a risky line of thinking, if you're addicted to sugar, to substitute in some other source of sugar. Best to avoid pastries, lollipops and sugary sodas.
It's a risky way of thinking to reduce every act to a moral choice. ie I could have used the energy that I burned making this post, to hand out a dollar to a homeless person.
Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
Yes you need to have carbs, however the quality of the carbohydrate is the most important factor.
If you have any sense for your health you will not have regular intake of sugar, white bread, potatoes crisps, rice cakes, any thing with a high GI.
Some carbohydrates reduce your risk of diabetes, and if you're smart you follow the evidence and you eat these-
https://youtu.be/DNQrNWsoPEE?si=GORRP5IblhNkKCdF
>You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
The brain can run well on ketone bodies (which the liver makes from fatty acids). In fact, causing the brain to run on ketone bodies is used by doctors to treat illness (and not just epilepsy).
I agree with peers. Doesn’t Keto (for part of the year) worked for millennia for our ancestors?
Some of our ancestors might have done keto some times, but I'm not sure most of them did most of the time? Humans are decidedly omnivorous, and most of them would eat whatever they could get their hands on, including plants and mushrooms (and sometimes honey!) etc.
iirc the inuit had a diet mostly consisting of meat and fish, but - according to wikipedia - not even they were usually in ketosis.
They also had carbohydrates in their diet. Meat naturally contains carbs. Pretending that the human body is misunderstood and that it worked very differently is a common pitfall of these discussions. Largely it was the same, with the amounts differing.
Meat contains only insignificant amounts of carbs. The human body can convert protein to carbs (glucose specifically) but the rate at which it can do it is limited, and my guess is that if it can't burn glucose, a metabolically-healthy body will burn fat (rather than glucose made from protein) until the diet has been quite deficient in calories for at least 3 days.
Most of our ancestors lived a fraction of the lifespans we do.
So any argument based on “it worked for our ancestors” is flawed.
“It worked for our ancestors” could be the beginning of an idea for research, but certainly does not take you much further than that.
I agree with all you said but I also guess our ancestors mostly die from infection, hypothermia, viruses… certainly not from brain stop working because carbs deficiency.
"You have to have carbs for your brain to run" doesn’t make sense. You have to have sugar in your brain to run, but that sugar surely can comes from fat as well.
I agree with almost everything you say. However:
> Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
No. People live on no-carb diets just fine and enter ketosis. (And in any case, the comment you replied to only talked about sugar, not carbs in general.)
Not just any no/low carb diet:
'A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.'
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2989112/
It is of course rather difficult if not impossible, to have a vegetable diet completely devoid of carbohydrates.
The number of people in this study is surprisingly large!
Alas, it doesn't have much bearing on the part of the comment I wanted to focus on 'You have to have carbs for your brain to run.' Because the diets in question here still have some carbs. (And the changes in mortality rates are fairly modest, too.)
What I wanted to say is that even if you eat no carbs at all, you brain will still get its energy. You won't just keel over after a while, like if you didn't eat anything at all henceforth.
Of course, there might be second order health effects, like the study you linked suggest.
No. You dont.
There are other metabolic pathways to produce glucose (or produce ketones). The other pathways ‘push’ the body more since they have to do some conversion. This ‘extra effort’ is considered to be more healthy.
Yes there are. You still need carbs and you get them (ie celery has carbs), regardless. Repetition wont convince someone arguing in bad faith, so I will bow to your religious beliefs.
no you don't. You have to have glucose for your brain to run. Understand the difference.
u dont have to input it as body makes enough
Why are people downvoting this?
Because they strongly disagree.
If I have soda cravings, I can take a single Tic Tac. It doesn't satisfy my soda cravings, but crucially, it prevents the soda itself from satisfying those same cravings if I do subsequently drink it.
Usually I crave soda after a high salt/fried food. Giving myself a tiny amount of sugar (Tic Tac has 0.5g) removes the salt/fried taste, and I just can't get the good soda effect I know I would have gotten without the Tic Tac. There just isn't a point for me to take soda after a Tic Tac.
So yes, substituting a small amount of sugar for a large one can be very effective.
I drink 250 ml soda cans/bottles. 25-28g of sugar.
Be aware that a lot of candy has similar amounts of sugar. M&M packets have even more.
The typical soda in the US is either 12oz (can) or 20oz (bottle).
A 12oz coke has 39g of sugar. A 20oz bottle of coke is 65g.
Coke isn't close to the worst offender and this ignores soda at restaurants when 28oz is often the smallest you can buy
> The typical soda in the US is either 12oz (can) or 20oz (bottle).
True but you can get 250ml cans in most grocery stores.
Also, there are plenty of places I shop at where the smallest Hershey's bar or M&M packet is the King/share size one. The M&M one has 57g of sugar.
Difficulty in buying smaller portions is not unique to soda.
Not that no sugar variants of soda are exactly a shining health food staple or better than going to healthy drinks lik water but...
For me I was absolutely shocked at how a soda being sugar free didn't have to imply it was like drinking horse piss. I had tried Diet Coke a few times and assumed that was what you had to deal with if you went sugar free. One day someone gave me a Coke Zero and it was actually not bad, even if not quite being as good as Coke. This led me to try some others like Dr Pepper Zero Sugar for which I thought "what the hell, this tastes better than Dr Pepper???".
Obviously which are better will vary by person and most people will, overall, like sodas with actual sugar more often but if everyone tried a few different options they might be surprised how little they'd have to trade down on the soda for, if anything, to drastically drop their sugar intake.
Aspartame is bad for your gut microbiome
Citation?
Is this a normal soda consumption levels in humans or when feeding it to rats at some obscene rate?
I'm not saying it is good for you, but we need facts not blind statements with no context.
I’m not an expert but a quick search leads me to:
> We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage
I’d be glad to see the full paper
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25231862/
> normal soda consumption levels in humans
I note that "normal" here should be read as "common during the last 50years (or less)", where the last 50ears is quite reductive in human dietary habits.
This paper you linked does not even involve aspartame. The only sweetener they experimented with is saccharin. You can check out the main figures from the link below:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265791239_Artificia...
I would be very reluctant to read too deep into this given saccharin is known to behave very differently in animal models - for a long time it was thought to cause bladder cancer, but follow up studies proved that it’s an idiosyncratic reaction only found in female lab rats and no other gender/species combination. Not to mention the dose used was unrealistic to begin with.
It’s entirely plausible that sugar analogs like sucralose and non-calorific sugar alcohols such as erythritol and maltitol can cause long term changes in the gut biome but high quality evidence is still lacking.
Christ I'm not your mother. Search pubmed.
Research suggests a link to cancer. It'd be bad for your microbiome if you die.
Source
Good for you.
I think for meat especially, there's a difference between the stuff people talk about (like premium steaks they almost never eat) and the reality of what ends up on their plates which is a lot less glamorous.
A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one. For me the cheap and nasty stuff is easy to skip on a daily basis and it's not like I eat the expensive premium stuff that often anyway. I love a good steak, but I don't splurge on paying 3x the other items on the menu when I'm at a restaurant typically. Which is what it takes typically to get a nice premium cut of meat.
I do enjoy cooking with meat but I'll make an effort to make the most of it. E.g. I made a nice beef stew over the weekend. That's a bit of of work and a humble/affordable cut of meat. And very tasty.
If you like Indian food, try having or making a dal. As it turns out, Indians know a thing or two about making very tasty vegan food from cheap/simple ingredients. And this can as nice as some chicken curry with a few chunks of cheap chicken that is maybe a bit overcooked and dry (I've been served that in many Indian restaurants). Those curries actually still taste fine if you don't eat those chunks of meat. And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India. Fridges are a fairly recent novelty too.
And the meat doesn't even add a lot of flavor; they just add it last minute typically. Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat. The only difference between eating meat or vegan in such places is literally what protein is added to the dish at the last minute. The rest is basically vegan or vegetarian by default.
Anyway, I skip sugary drinks mostly. And I've cut down on my alcohol intake as well. Most of what I drink has basically very little or no calories.
Most of my remaining food challenges are unhealthy snacks, unnecessary carbs and the temptations of unhealthy restaurant food, or late night shopping in super markets and the associated bad decision making.
Restaurants bulk out their dishes with carbs and they make things taste good by adding salt and fats. It's hard to eat healthy in restaurants. So, I try to limit my restaurant food intake. And like with meat, most of the restaurants people visit aren't actually that great anyway. At least where I work, Michelin stars are not a thing for the typical lunch options. Quite the opposite actually. I'm only an OK cook but I can cook tastier/better versions of a lot of the shit I get served in places like that. It's not that hard.
I recently actually started just skipping lunch entirely at work mainly for this reason and I'm training myself out of having a Pavlovian craving for food just because the clock says so. I don't actually need the calories. Or the post lunch dip in productivity. I especially don't need the lousy food choices imposed by that one person that wants to go to the burger place. There's a lot of group thinking inspiring unhealthy choices around lunch time. I took part in that for years. It's stupid when you think about it and I've suffered the health consequences as well. There's a cumulative effect if you do that for a few decades.
> Restaurants bulk out their dishes with carbs and they make things taste good by adding salt and fats.
Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “If you eat at any good restaurant, assume you've eaten a stick of butter.”
My brother worked for multiple (very) good restaurants here in France. I’m always super chocked when I see him throwing a good portion of the butter brick in almost any meal. His dishes are super delicious. His current restaurant is a a very good vegan one and he does the same with plant butter.
Man, as an Indian, this is hard to read. You're spreading a lot of misinformation about Indian food.
> Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
First, while there are a lot of tasty Indian vegetarian dishes, vegan food is decidedly not a cultural thing. We use butter and ghee pretty commonly in food: definitely not vegan. India is the world's largest milk producer; also not vegan. That dal you refer to will often have a "tadka" of ghee and spices on top. The "dal makhani" - another popular restaurant dish - literally means "buttered dal".
And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
> Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat.
If it's India, you're talking about, you're unlikely to find tofu being used in a restaurant. Paneer is made from milk, so...not vegan. Maybe restaurants abroad do it differently.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
OK, this annoying canard is the worst. [1] Spices and meat used to be both historically expensive. A bit of research will tell you that. You know, that whole "spice trade" thing. Malaysian, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, food also use spices and they're not vegetarian cultures at all. (For that matter, only some 30% of Indians are vegetarians, despite the stereotype, but that's a discussion for another day.)
TL;DR India has lots of good vegetarian food, but hardly any of us are vegans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice#Preservative_claim
Hi, thanks for this cultural sharing. I don't understand something about Indian culture -probably because of prejudices- and would be glad to know more. Hindus in India venerate (or respect?) cows such a way they let them live in free roaming. Also they eat a lot of ghee and milk derivatives. Where does those milk comes from ?
A. Is it ok to eat a cow if someone else raise the cow?
B. Is it ok to eat milk raised by someone else
C. Is it ok to 'milk' a stray cows while they looks skinny?
D. How do they regards the calves needed once in a while for milk production?
E. Does Hindus only eat chicken (and so) but no milk while muslims eat everything?
F. Where goes the dead free roaming cows cadavers? Is there enough vultures?
Note I'm not trying to find logical incoherencies or logical fallacies, I'm very aware there's many think that can been seen as inconsistant or very consistent depending on your knowledge on a subject - which is never 100% reachable.
> And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
Some years ago I fell into a Youtube rabbit hole of British Indian Restaurants. (Actually most seemed Bangladeshi) In Britian Indian cuisine has a far more "takeout" status. Hence BI restaurants started to deconstruct popular dishes into components which can be prepared in advance and combined into different dishes. It may not be original but I found the process of adaptation rather fascinating.
(Here in Germany it seems rather worse. Also takeout status, but I suspect a lot of takeout orders are simply microwaved stuff.)
I'm actually well aware of this and didn't mean to offend people. And 30% is actually quite a large percentage.
I actually make ghee myself sometimes from butter (easy and a lot cheaper than buying it from the super market).
A lot of (british) indian restaurants use cooking oil instead and I'm well aware that that's not the same as what people in India would consider Indian food and that something like a Tikka Massala is not actually a thing you'd find in a proper restaurant in India; which is a country I've never been to and would love to go to to experience the food.
But anyway, a lot of these restaurants use cooking oil because it's cheaper and because it makes everything they cook with that vegan by default. Which at least in places with a lot of vegans is a nice feature.
Here in Berlin, finding decent Indian food is a bit of a challenge in any case. Germans are hopeless with spicy food. And I know only a few Indian places that add more than homeopathic amounts of chili. Most of the Indian restaurants in the more touristy spots are owned by one family and those aren't great. I've gotten some tips from Indian colleagues over the years for better options.
Anyway a lot of dals indeed don't use a lot of spices or flavoring. And that's just sidestepping all the different regions and food styles. Which are a thing as well of course.
As for Malaysian/Indonesian style cuisine; I'm Dutch and got exposed to a lot of the Dutch Indonesian food which, similar to British Indian food is not really that authentic. Lots of meat in there indeed. And quite spicy.
> A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one.
The "Big Mac Attack" is real. I used to get one about every six months or so. Then I would eat a Big Mac, and the attack would be sated, but the GI discomfort reminded me of why I don't get Big Mac Attacks more often.
These days I just avoid fast food. I live in a part of the country that's actually rather persnickety about good food, and there are much fresher options available nearby that are rather cheap. Plus I'm stocked up on low-carb soups, lunch meats, and other yummies most of the time now.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime.
My dad used to tell me stories about roadside chili houses in Texas. They kept a big pot of chili constantly going, and added whatever meat they could find, together with beans, spices, etc. to keep the pot full as the chili was served to customers. Roadkill was, supposedly, one of the most convenient sources of meat for the pot.
The weirdest thing for me is that when I was young I used to live off fast food. A few Jack in the Box burgers and I was good to go (my girlfriend at the time looked at me somewhat strange the first time I asked her how many burgers she wanted). But now when I eat a fast food burger I just don't feel very good afterwards. Curious how many others also seem to get the same thing. I always thought I was just being a bit more snobby than when I was younger and it was some sort of psychosomatic thing.
Part of it is age. Part of it is, I think, the fast food companies are lowballing what they can get away with serving in order to keep costs down. It's said that some Diné (Navajo) refer to Burger King with a word that means "just enough food to get strength from". I think that's the fast food joints' specialty: compromise the food till it's barely enough to tolerate and derive nourishment (calories) from to sell the stuff cheap and quick to a ravenous but indiscriminate clientele. With the passage of time comes more efficient ways to produce less delicious or satisfying food, so BK today is not as good as BK 30-40 years ago (which in turn is less good than BK shortly after its founding). Some burger joints e.g. Whataburger can differentiate themselves with higher quality, but they don't achieve the volume of McD's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc.
Back then, fast food compete with home made food, now it competes with another fast food.
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/) is a pretty long watch, but it's incredibly eye-opening in terms of explaining in detail exactly why our current dietary sugar intake is so damaging to our bodies.
Note: Robert Lustig is a professor of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF, I promise I wouldn't ask you (the reader) to watch a long-ass youtube video unless it contained extremely relevant science about how you (the biological machine) work.
Lustig is a crank with opinions well outside scientific consensus.
This isn't true. He has books and lectures explaining the metabolic processes when eating refined sugar, and why it's bad for you. Nowadays it's pretty mainstream stuff. Nevertheless, can you give an example of one of his opinions which is "well outside scientific consensus".
> Nevertheless, can you give an example of one of his opinions which is "well outside scientific consensus".
Lustig specifically claims that sugar is addictive; that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose; that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss; that in fact, weight loss is somehow a function of insulin, not calories; that fructose is uniquely bad relative to other sugars; that fructose causes inflammation; that recent decades' increase in obesity is caused by increased sugar consumption; that statins are essentially useless; that some kinds of LDL cholesterol are good for longevity; that non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar; etc, etc, etc, etc.
A few of these claims are wholly unsubstantiated by research; the rest have some research and the research does not support Lustig's claims.
What are you talking about?!? He's not some random dude, he's a specialist and professor, at UCSF: https://pediatrics.ucsf.edu/people/robert-lustig
>sugar is addictive
>>The evidence supports the hypothesis that under certain circumstances rats can become sugar dependent. This may translate to some human conditions as suggested by the literature on eating disorders and obesity.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2235907/
>that fiber somehow mitigates the absorption of fructose
>>Dietary fiber (DF), especially viscous DF, can contribute to a reduction in the glycemic response resulting from the consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9736284/
>that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss
>>Mechanisms smooth out the large day-to-day differences in energy consumption, decreasing the importance of the size of a meal. In the short term a reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that reduce metabolic rate and increase calorie intake, ensuring the regaining of lost weight.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5639963/
I'm not going to go on and on... UCSF, which is one of the most respected teaching hospitals in the country, isn't hiring cranks. He specialize in exactly this stuff. Yea, he's a bit more strident than would would expect from a scientist, yes, he deals with the extremes of childhood obesity, which isn't really relevant to most people's bodies, but christ, he's not a crank.
> In the short term a reduction in energy intake is counteracted by mechanisms that reduce metabolic rate and increase calorie intake, ensuring the regaining of lost weight.
If calorie intake increases, then it's no longer "calorie restriction".
If his actual claim was that calorie restriction does not cause weight loss, then that's wild despite your quote.
> I'm not going to go on and on...
Well you didn't address the other really egregious supposed claim, that "non-nutritive sweeteners have the same impact on fat/weight gain as sugar". If that's an accurate description of his stance, that's really bad.
When you make accusations like this why not offer a specific illustrative example to avoid suggestions of mere name calling. Scientific consensus?. Actually nutrition & medical science is replete with the abandonment of 'received opinion'. How about applauding researchers who have novel ideas outside the consensus while at the same time insisting they demonstrate their evidence or in problematic areas, convincing reasons for pursuing their path?
This is one of those areas where scientific consensus needs to catch up with the alarming facts that have been discovered. Scientific consensus was against handwashing for doctors and plate tectonics, and it still is in favor of "clearing amyloid plaques will totally fix Alzheimer's", but the facts just keep on being what they be.
No, this is an area where Lustig is probably wrong, and definitely making unsubstantiated statements.
As in? No examples so that we can look at the facts ourselves?
Can you elaborate a bit?
You can use that exact post to reply to anything. It's devoid of information relevant to this topic.
Seconded. Lustig's talks are extremely good and highly recommended for anyone who eats.
Orange juice is high in sugars. Drinking any alternative beverage with a lot of sugar is bad for your health. I believe a 12 ounce glass of orange juice is 100% of maximum sugar intake for one day. If you drank orange juice the same way you drank soda with added sugar, the health effect would be equally detrimental.
> the health effect would be equally detrimental.
From the article:
> High doses of rapidly digested glucose also activate insulin and other regulatory pathways...
Orange Soda (i.e. Fanta), an SSB, and Orange Juice have glycemic indexes of about 68 and 48 respectively. I assume that's a material difference in that OJ doesn't spike your insulin as abruptly and therefore is not as harmful. Thre's more to it than simply grams of sugar.
The diabetics I know say OJ is worse than (sugared) sodas.
Maybe because they can drink it faster. Glycmic index's and the equivalent index's around insulin response are literally the gold standard for deciding what's okay to eat. "Vibes" or "My opinions" do not matter. OJ is marginally "healthier", significantly because the fiber in the drink (more pulp the better) slows down (slightly) the insulin and glycemic responses.
Source: Family of diabetics who have actually lost limb to the poison that is refined sugar.
I think citric acid is better than phosphoric acid (e.g. for your bones and kidneys), though both can dissolve tooth enamel.
OJ also has more vitamin C than typical sodas.
Milk has more calories/ounce than soda, but it also has protein, fat, and calcium.
Anecdotally, I find juice more filling than soda, milk even more so.
Citric acid and phosphoric acid likely have the same impact on your teeth and no impact on your bones and kidneys.
Acids and bases on your diet have very little to do with what pH is exposed to the rest of your body. Your stomach is probably more acid than anything you eat or drink, and your lungs and kidneys tightly regulate the pH of the blood. If your diet is effecting your blood pH, your probably already on death's door
Intuitively, I suspect any acid is bad for your teeth. But I see that statement primarily from Dentists, and their track record in a number of areas is less than stellar. Prime example: Flossing and 6 month checkups. Neither of which have good scientific evidence, despite their widespread promotion.
I go every three months, and they have a good amount of tartar to clean off my teeth then. Also before I did that I was having pretty significant pockets for gum disease for all my teeth (it was close to the point where it's irreversible).
It's mostly under control now, except for problem areas in two specific spots, but even those are still better than they were.
I haven't really changed my dental hygeine habits other than going in for routine cleanings twice as often, so it's definitely helping.
From anecdotal evidence: when I stop flossing for a few days, my gums start bleeding.
Not sure what suspicious extra super powers your dentist suggests flossing has?
Milk actually has a ridiculous amount of sugar. 11g per cup! That makes it hard to drink if you're trying to cut back on sugar.
Lactose is poorly digestible though
also a lot of people won't acknowledge that as far as damage that sugar is likely just as bad as HFCS. both should be heavily reduced
I believe sucrose and fructose are processed differently — specifically fructose is processed by the liver so can have the same issues as alcohol there.
Sucrose is 50% fructose. HFCS is typically 42-55% fructose. They are essentially indistinguishable to your liver.
There is also a chemical bond that needs to be broken in sucrose
Of course, and the human body is full of enzymes that exist to cleave saccharides into their constituent sugars.
> Sucrose is 50% fructose
What? They're different molecules
Sucrose is a disaccharide made up of 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
So taking myself as an example: I drink 12 oz of coffee daily (7 days per week), and I add exactly 12 grams of table sugar to my coffee each day (equivalent to 3 sugar packets), which is 45 calories. Seems like I don't have much wiggle room and should continue avoiding soda and juice.
I'll be the guy that I assume most people are sick of by this point, and recommend experimenting with dropping the additives in exchange for higher quality coffee if you can afford it (it's usually not much more per cup). At effectively zero calories, after some period of time you'll get used to it and recalibrate your sense of sweetness to the point where sugary drinks and coffee are much less palatable
You can either get better coffee or you can also just get used to the flavor. I didn't like it and after about a year it became fine, now I have a lifetime of no sugar coffee unlocked.
I think this is something that people don't appreciate about being acclimated to sugar coffee. It takes a while to adapt, you can't just try it periodically and try to convince yourself it's better than the milky alternative, contrast is too significant, like comparing a pear and a slice of dry whole grain bread, or walking vs driving, or going to the gym vs not. A couple of months though and you'll probably be well on the way. In a pinch I'll grab a black coffee from McDonalds, since it's more on the medium side anyway, and it's perfectly serviceable.
I was able to switch to coffee and a little half and half with nothing else. That seems to be good enough for me and pretty low calorie and sugar content.
Drinking black coffee only has been difficult though, even with more expensive coffee (I'm not sure what's considered higher quality necessarily, but I have an espresso machine and I'm grinding whole beans for brands of coffee that websites claim are good)
From my cursory sense of espresso, it's a bit of a finicky, expensive, and niche thing to enjoy in the raw. It's my impression that the overwhelming majority of people in Canada and the U.S for example enjoy their espresso in an espresso-based drink, like a latte or cortado, because the intensity and texture of it mixes quite well with the fats and sugars in cream or milk, and is often made from darker roasts which balance out well. It would be very hard to transition from that to just raw espresso made from any bean.
I personally do not enjoy espresso on its own enough to invest in that sort of equipment, and am fine just getting that periodically at a cafe.
Anyone recommending any particular coffee on the internet should qualify it with their brewing method and personal preferences, because some people like a french press, some people like espresso, or aeropress, or pourover, for various reasons, and none are better than any other, but some people like the intensity of straight espresso, and some people like what you'd call drip/filter coffee, which would be a classic cone that you drip water through.
Likewise, among "high quality" coffee, there's a world of variety. Many great South American beans lean into chocolatey, but some end up quite sweet and fruity, while east african or indonesian beans can pretty much taste like candy. Quality usually refers to "grade", which is more technical and I'm not too well versed on, but to me it means how well the roasted product reveals the potential of a well-selected batch. Sounds a bit pretentious, but basically if you like bitters or cocoa or milk or dark chocolate, high quality beans will make that very enjoyable, both because it was a good crop from the right region, and because the roaster did their job by leaving enough of the sugars and moisture in the bean throughout the roasting process. It's worth experimenting with all of this.
If it doesn't taste that good, it can be because any of those other variables are off, or the blend that the roaster chose to make wasn't a good selection; they might have chosen to mix a brazillian with an east african and got the balance wrong for your taste, or it's too bitter because they roasted it too long, or it might just be stale, or you just don't like it because it's not your vibe.
Right now, I'm doing pour overs with a Hario Switch or V60 dripper and use a modest grinder. It's a pretty standard and inexpensive setup, the dripper usually comes in plastic or glass, and I get beans that are roasted in the neighbourhood within the month for about ~$10USD or sometimes more, and often they'll be an african or columbian blend. It costs me very little and is a simple pleasure. This is probably what I'd recommend if you were looking to play around, it's cheap and would require only the most marginal of equipment changes. It admittedly did take me a long time to taper off the cream and milk, I'd get it from McDonalds or whatever, but now I can even drink that stuff black pretty easily, but it's nearly impossible to tolerate if you're just side-by-side comparing with a coffee+milk mix, the contrast is too harsh.
I do still drink an occasional soda fwiw, and enjoy a latte, but now that I've figured out how to find and make good black coffee, there's no turning back. I'd rather the sugar come from a dessert.
I honestly can't tell much difference between expensive coffee and Maxwell House. But in general I've never nerded out over coffee, wine, bread, cheese, whiskey, or any other food or beverage.
I don't add sugar to my coffee either.
I can easily tell the difference between the two, but I really don't care so long as the coffee is brewed well. I still like Maxwell House Black Silk, but at home I grind my own beans and brew in a French Press.
What I don't like is "Church Coffee", where it has brewed within an inch of its life and is the darkest, most bitter/burned flavor that ever existed.
The best coffee I have ever had was from a coworker's French press. (:
The best coffee you'll ever have is one that was made for you with care :) Pay it forward if ya can.
I’ve tried lots of different coffee’s and I keep going back to (don’t laugh) Folgers Instant. Maybe it’s because it’s what my parents had when I was a kid. Nothing else is quite like it.
Unfortunately, I add 100 calories of crap to it. But I drink it slower than Coke and it’s at least half the calories of a 32oz (my other vise). I use it as a way to lower my calorie count, just a little.
Surprisingly less calories in 32oz of Coke than I was expecting, less than a standard Starbucks sugary drink probably. Regarding coffee, people like what they like, and there's a lot of memories I also have associated with it, as well as drinking copious amounts of Coke for that matter.
If you ever want to try and ease off both those vices, I'd simply recommend buying a McDonalds coffee, buying a Starbucks Blonde Americano, and then taking them home and brewing a cup of the folgers instant with no additions. Get someone to pour them into identical cups, and have them play a shell game (move the cups around to hide which ones they are), then try them back and forth. Try to avoid anything with sugar in it for a few hours before. I bet you'll pick out some differences and maybe even like them, then if you want to try and delete the sugar from your coffee, avoid it in exchange for black coffee for at least a few months. It's not as hard as it seems, but it does take some time.
Then if you like, play around with easy home brewing methods like french press or pour over, grinding beans etc.. those were probably the most impactful things I tried when I went on the same journey. Grinding recently roasted beans before brewing was eye opening. I honestly didn't believe black coffee could be palatable, and was drinking Folgers with half and half from the big red can for ages.
Do you add cream or milk?
Cheese is worth it, a bit. First because it’s way leas of a bullshit industry when compared to wine for example, and also because (particularly if you’re in europe) there is so much variety of cheese at overall an affordable price. And you largely don’t need tools or fancy accessories. If anything, you could get something nice to paid it with :)
Here in Singapore cheese is a lot more expensive than in Europe, alas.
I can definitely tell the differences between different coffees or teas or bread etc. The range for wine isn't that large. And that's not just in 'quality', but also just in less variety than eg (craft) beers or breads.
I'll chime in to agree that it does take some time to get used to it, but after the transition period you don't miss it.
Giving up sweetened drinks and learning to cook healthy foods from scratch have been my most effective lifestyle changes.
Just to add a bit, we bought a Breville espresso and grinder. I only use some whole milk to make my coffee and no sugar. My wife uses a little agave syrup and skips most of the milk.
Have you tried playing around with using the same grinder, but switching up the beans and brewing method?
I think a lot of people go espresso at home, but I do think that's an extremely difficult thing to transition to consuming black unless you're really into the hobby of it all and have adjusted. It's just really intense, which naturally blends well with the fats and sugars in dairy, especially with most espresso roasts being darker. If I personally go espresso, it's either a latte or black Americano.
Agave syrup is virtually pure fructose. As a sugar alternative it's ... not that great. The insulin response is fairly low, true, but the high fructose content carries its own risks.
<https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/agave-nectar-is-even-wo...>
Stevia would be a non-sugar-based sweetener, though it does have a distinctly different taste.
I'd learned to drink coffee with milk/cream, no sugar. With decent beans (Trader Joe's Bay Blend, e.g., nothing fancy) and a Moka pot that's more than sufficient.
Milk has a bit of milk sugar in it. So you get some sweetness that way.
I just add a few drops of Stevia (have a liquid bottle that ends up being incredibly cheap on the whole)... personally, I can't really tell the difference.
Monkfruit sweetener tastes better and more like sugar to me.
I've used and liked that as well, but honestly I'm not too discerning. Where I am in Mexico atm it's hard to find in a similar liquid form.
that's what I do, just a few drops is more than enough with a splash of whole milk or cream
I recommend replacing the sugar for a little bit of milk.
I sweeten my coffee now with pure monkfruit. It's great in coffee, and chocolate too. It's really sweet, which is how I like my coffee, only a little is needed. And there's zero sugar or anything even close to a sugar.
The best time to stop eating sugar is yesterday. I wish I hadn't fucked up my body so much with sugar.
Learn to drink it black, it’s good. But I do get beans and grind them so the brew is much higher quality. I’m assuming you drink that can of grinds for 3 bucks or instant. Those suck
I learned to drink it black, but not for health reasons. I did it to avoid having to depend on sugar a/o milk in order to have a coffee. Plus, nothing says "No nonsense" like "Coffee? Yes, black please."
It"s funny but also true? I have taken my coffee black for years now, having started because I wanted to just simplify my experience with it (among other things in my life). Not that my old coffee order was complex, but being lactose intolerant meant I needed to choose which milk substitute I was going to get, since not all coffee shops carried the same ones back in the day (less of a problem now, from what I understand). I grew to enjoy it black and still drink it that way to this day.
Going back to it, I think the need to simplify things was key for me. We are bombarded with so many choices, especially in our food products which I've described as the Breakfast Cereal Problem in the past. There are simply too many to consider them all with each shopping trip, so you are almost forced to just make one arbitrary choice and live with it unless you want to be paralyzed in the grocer aisle. None of the choices really offer a significant value or weight over the others, each cereal promising the same thing; to be part of a balanced breakfast, that Gestalt puzzle created by marketers to kick off our day.
Once you step back from that world, it does seem miserably pointless and the same can be said for the SSB's in the article. But on a deeper level, it says something about the stresses we introduce into our lives by chasing too many choices. I can't remember which of his books he mentions this in, but Richard Feynman seemed to have the same realization when struggling to decide what to get for dessert in restaurants. Eventually, be just settled on chocolate cake so he didn't have to make that decision anymore. That stuck with me for some reason, more than any concerns about how soda or whatever might be affecting my blood sugar, pushing me in the direction of just going with the more ubiquitous alternative; water.
Plus with soda at $4USD a pop in most restaurants these days, it's just cheaper to go with water. So we have health, simplicity and financial reasons to not go for the SSBs. Seems enough for me.
/ramble
“Please hold on, white”
I'm always glad for more hard evidence, but this exact reasoning has been "common sense", or something to that tune, my entire life. Maybe not every individual resulting issue, but that liquid sugar absorbs more rapidly and as such is worse that an equivalent amount of sugar in a more solid meal.
It's also a lot easier and quicker to drink the juice from, say, 6 oranges than to eat 6 oranges.
Soft drinks tend to be much higher in sugar per ounce, roughly double. A 12 ounce can of coke has 39 grams, so you blow past that at around 4 ounces.
I'm curious what is the number of added sugars and above 50kcal peer 8 oz serving. You can get away with saying fruit drinks have no added sugar and still be insanely sugary.
Fruit drinks have a neat trick to increase sugar content. Take apple juice for example: you can evaporate water out of it till it's a sugary syrup, then add it to regular apple juice, and it's still called "100% pure apple juice no sugar added".
(This is also done with various flavor essences from the juice, so they can recombine them in such a way as to produce a uniform flavor all throughout the year regardless of where the fruits are coming from.)
Not in the EU:
> It should be clearly indicated when a product is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
Are you saying that they couldn't say "100% fruit juice and no sugar added" on the label when the drink is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate? What part of the regulation would prohibit this?
They could not. That would not pass the 'clearly indicated' in the quoted rule. There is also another more general rule which enforces a label of 'sweetened' or 'with added sugars' for any kind of sweetening agent including fruit concentrate:
> 4. For fruit juices which have been sweetened by the addition of sugars, the sales name shall include the word "sweetened" or "with added sugar", followed by an indication of the maximum quantity of sugar added, calculated as dry matter and expressed in grams per litre. [1]
> A claim stating that sugars have not been added to a food, and any claim likely to have the same meaning for the consumer, may only be made where the product does not contain any added mono- or disaccharides or any other food used for its sweetening properties. [2]
Coming from a country of impenetrable legalese everywhere, I find these regulations very refreshing, they are incredibly easy to read and always straight to the point.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_0...
You can say "no added sugar" but you are forced to write it’s from a concentrate and it must be in the front of the product, not hidden somewhere.
Not perfect but at least you can’t just say it’s fruit juice.
All carbohydrates eventually break down into sugars. Some quite a bit faster than others.
What people and scientists haven't been saying in any meaningful way is the truth that carbohydrate poisoning is a real thing. If you eat too much, its harmful.
Its common knowledge that medicines may become poisons when taken in too high amounts. This applies to most things in this area.
Protein poisoning is fairly easily discovered in the scientific literature, why isn't carbohydrate poisoning? Its a conundrum.
You don't think the scientific literature has anything to say about sugar surplus or junk food surplus?
Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though. Too many potatoes and whole grains, for example, aren't poisoning you. More people should be replacing junk food with those things.
It's just a fad to use "carbs" as a euphemism for "junk food" and it only further confuses the discourse about nutrition.
I've noticed that people who want to deny that the extremely high carbohydrate content of the typical western diet is the major factor for runaway rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease like to label the "bad" food as "junk food" or "ultra-processed food." But we never get an explanation from them as to what exactly is IN the junk food or ultra-processed food that causes the disease.
Well, I can answer that.
It's not always about a certain boogeyman inside it, but whether it makes it easy to overeat and whether it pays its rent in nutritional content.
Consider potato chips. Even if they have zero saturated fat, the issue most people have with them is that they are hyperpalatable and low nutritional value compared to their calorie density. Combine fat and salt and certain textures, and we can't stop ourselves. Trying to blame a macronutrient like carbs doesn't make much sense to me.
Add in bad ingredients like saturated fat and the problem becomes multifaceted, but it's not necessary for individual ingredients to be bad for us for a food to have its downsides.
The total lack of fiber isn't helping us either. Fiber fills you up and takes much longer to digest sating a person for longer.
Your comment kind of illustrates his point though, there's a complete lack of mechanistic empiricism[0] in the discussion of nutrition. What is the metric for 'eas[iness] to overeat and whether it pays its rent in nutritional content.'? I agree with the premise, but it is ill-defined.
e.g. consider: A baked potato, with salt and butter vs. an equivalent weight of potato chips. They are essentially identical post-mastication, except one is 'junk food' and 'ultra-processed' and the other is quintessential home cooking. What system do I use to rank them if they are in fact not identical?
[0] What (or combination of whats) at a structural/chemical level in a food causes the harm, and by what biochemical/psychological/psychosomatic pathway(s) does said harm occur?
Re: mechanistic empiricism, I don't know if you're doing this, but it seems that some people have this mindset that if you can't tell me specifically how X is bad for you, then I have to assume it is not harmful by default, even if it's a thing that is relatively novel.
I find myself leaning heavily in the other direction these days. If it's not something that has a long history and (I'm not already dying anyway), I'll pass. If I lose out on some benefits because of that, so be it.
As far as diet is concerned, I'm very much in the camp of you do what works best for you. However, if you choose to give advice to a wide audience (rather than saying what works for you), I think one should have some idea of why their advice is good.
>if you can't tell me specifically how X is bad for youthen I have to assume it is not harmful by default
Speaking for myself, its a matter of how my brain works. Setting aside rational considerations like cost-benefit analysis or Bayesian likelihoods: if there isn't a generalizable logic to 'what (is harmful)' and 'how (it is)' I just get a 404.
It's not that I don't (or do) believe potatoes chips are harmful it's that the e.g. statement 'ultra-processed foods are bad for you' is literally devoid of meaning. Might as well be baby-speak.
As such, any attempt to incorporate that information[0] into my decision making process goes nowhere: I can't categorize a food as to it's degree of ultra processed-ness nor can I assess whether another foods/foods/etc might cause harm like UPF's are purported to do. Ergo: no basis for a behavioral modification, no new pros or cons to weigh.
[0]not even getting into the reliability of e.g. a paper's conclusions
> As such, any attempt to incorporate that information[0] into my decision making process goes nowhere: I can't categorize a food as to it's degree of ultra processed-ness nor can I assess whether another foods/foods/etc might cause harm like UPF's are purported to do. Ergo: no basis for a behavioral modification, no new pros or cons to weigh.
So I guess my question is what are your defaults? What is your unmodified behavior?
There is a package on the shelf, you only know what it says on the box, what you've seen on commercials, and maybe you've seen/heard of other people eating its contents. What's the decision tree for this scenario?
> low nutritional value compared to their calorie density. Combine fat and salt and certain textures, and we can't stop ourselves.
In the end the body realizes it didn't get the nutrition it needed so I sends out a notice "eat more".
Anecdotally I think there's something to this, when all I have to eat is lacking in micro nutrients I tend to be hungrier. When I'm eating lots of very nutrient dense things, even when less calories, I feel satisfied.
It isn't extremely high. I have no idea what you imagine that people used to eat. The typical pre 20th century diet was near 100% carbohydrate based, most people ate meat once a weak, if at all, and fat was scarce. The now typical meat-with-every-dish diet is a post WW2 development.
But we never get an explanation from them as to what exactly is IN the junk food or ultra-processed food that causes the disease.
You don't get it, because 1. there is something VERY CLEARLY wrong with it, and 2. what is wrong with it is at odds with what is hammered into them over and over.
> You don't think the scientific literature has anything to say about sugar surplus or junk food surplus?
No, I know it does, but it doesn't properly communicate the relationship with correct words, where other related subjects do. Instead it dances about with a disconnection, I would guess because of the sugar and health industry lobby.
The medical definition of poisoning is generally defined as injury or death due to swallowing, inhaling, touching or injecting of various substances.
Disease can be considered as an injury when it refers to a condition that develops gradually over time due to repeated exposure or stressors.
> Carbohydrate poisoning sounds nonsensical though
Carbohydrates are in the potatoes, but are not the potatoes.
There are contextual limits when you associate specific things into a unique word definition, potatoes (unless green, or unsafely handled), would not be poisonous because they have a finite amount of components that our bodies can handle, and it would be quite hard if not impossible to eat sufficient amounts given biological limits and rates inherent in structure.
A concentrated chemical solution of simple carbohydrates in reduced liquid form that absorbs more quickly than your pancreas can handle on the other hand would be different.
When you exceed safe operating limits, this can cause injury, and that may show up, or present as symptoms of disease.
I would have responded sooner but apparently when posts get downvoted, it automatically applies a strict QoS filter that won't let the poster respond at all.
Not a very reasonable thing to do for a rational-minded community, for something as tame as what I said.
That system structure almost always trends eventually towards collectivist sock-puppetry opinion with the mob silencing others based solely on individual mass hallucination. Not very scientific, and at the same time eliminates requirements needed for intelligent thoughts.
In order to learn you must be able to risk being offended. In order to think, you must be able to risk being offensive. In order to share the benefits of either broadly, you must be able to communicate.
Without these inherent strengths skewing towards survival, its just a matter of time and circumstance before losing the fight against extinction.
I'm very much in the "reduce carbs" camp. Long-term high carb intake leads to many health issues, and reductions lead to improvements. I'm not sure that science is behind on this (there's plenty of literature on the topic) but man-in-the-street understanding seems to be behind.
The concept that sugar leads to diabetes is not exactly news at 11. But articles like this are helpful in moving the popular mindset.
Personally though I'd avoid the term "poison". Mostly because it's a very long-term effect, whereas people use "poison" in general usage more as a short term thing (rat poison versus feeding rats carbs till they get diabetes).
Secondly calling it "poison" is far outside normal understanding and so you become the "nutter" in the conversation. Which then devalues the valid points you have to make.
I say this as someone in your camp. While your body certainly needs some carbohydrates its safe to assume everyone is getting enough. Nobody needs sugar though, and removing as much of that as possible from daily diet will have big impacts in the long term.
For me that doesn't mean 'never sugar'. It means cake at celebrations, ice-cream once a month, eating "normally" when at restaurants (which is probably less than once a month) and so on.
The goal is not to be "perfect" the goal is to improve one step at a time. Coffee without sugar? Check. No daily, or weekly, sugar sodas or fruit juice? Check. And so on.
Small changes introduced slowly over time become the new normal, and that leads to sustained improvements.
Protein poisoning happens because your body has a limited capacity to process protein. It's very high and you're unlikely to hit it, but it's happened to people living off the land and eating nothing but lean meat. Carbohydate processing is not inherently rate-limited like that. How much you need is dictated by how much you use. Even the stated numbers here about 9 weekly 8 oz drinks with 50 kcals or more per serving is comically miniscule compared to what is ingested with no ill effects by any serious endurance athlete who actually needs and uses that much energy. Carbohydrate only has a deleterious effect when you ingest more than you use, which is not characteristic of a poison.
Scientists aren't saying it because it's not true.
My father was Type 2 and for decades drank sweet tea; sweet tea that progressively became sweeter and sweeter. If you were to let it settle, you would see a thick layer of sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass. Eventually, he lost both of his legs beneath the knee due to infections that festered. He spent his last few years in a wheelchair and then eventually died of a heart attack.
Bad habits, bit by bit, over the course of years.
As a photojournalist, he won a Pulitzer for earthquake footage in 1989, saw the shuttle take off and land countless times, and took an incredible photo at a NASCAR event of a car, engulfed in flames, flying directly at his lens. (He got the shot and then dove out of the way.)
Which I guess is to say... life is ups and downs. Be wary of sugary stuff.
Your father sounds similar to mine: high-achiever, running every which way. Question: how was his sleep? My father's career was in a field that required annual physical fitness certification; his diet probably could have stood to include less salt and sugar when I was very young, but he cleaned it up, especially by the time he was diagnosed with T2. Something his job also required, however: early mornings. Late nights. And, evidently, not enough time to stop for a moment and determine if he might have sleep apnea (he did).
So, I think it's a three-part issue. Diet (sugar), obviously. Exercise, too, and whether or not you're getting it regularly throughout the day, every day. But I think it all goes to shit if you're getting bad sleep, especially if that "bad sleep" is "miniature bouts of asphyxiation." It completely screws with your body's ability to regulate itself, hormonally, and to recover from the day's damage.
Agree about sleep. He managed a newsroom and “put the paper to bed” so he worked from 7pm to 4am. I’m sure it didn’t help. For myself, I’m physically built very differently (leaner) and I don’t care much for sweet tea, so I’m lucky I guess. But as an achiever, sleep is always my battle. Comes and goes!
That sounds like an epic photo, indeed.
> Burdens of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages in 184 countries
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4.pdf
The data and the code used for the analysis appears to be available.
----
One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold. Afterall, it would benefit not only the receivers of care but also the people funding the healthcare system. The sellers of those things will fight (to their death) to prevent that environment from existing.
Not allowing something to be mass produced, marketed and sold is different than banning it outright.
I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
For the most unhealthy class of people that are most affected by things like T2 diabetes, we have universal healthcare. At 65 you get Medicare which covers diabetes treatment.
We have yet to ban sodas despite the added cost to the taxpayers.
> I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
For tobacco, the age restriction has been the thing that has limited use more than anything. People don't tend to pick up smoking once they hit 21. Millennials by and large do not smoke and the anti-tobacco legislation in the 90s is a large part of that.
Unfortunately, because the legislation didn't target all nicotine products that left the door open for vape companies to come in and get Gen Z and Alpha addicted to nicotine all over again.
A broad ban on the sale of nicotine products to minors should be in place. It certainly shouldn't be sold over the internet.
Soda is trickier. I don't think an outright ban would be right (though it would have a fair number of positive health benefits). A sin tax would likely be ineffective and age checks seems like it would be somewhat burdensome.
> Unfortunately, because the legislation didn't target all nicotine products that left the door open for vape companies to come in and get Gen Z and Alpha addicted to nicotine all over again.
Gen Z and Alpha nicotine use rates are still lower than Millennials in absolute terms; it's happily not a huge problem (nevermind that stuff like Zyn is unambiguously much healthier than smoking cigs).
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold. Afterall, it would benefit not only the receivers of care but also the people funding the healthcare system. The sellers of those things will fight (to their death) to prevent that environment from existing.
Perhaps you’re implying something unique about the US, but those products are still sold in other countries that have state-funded universal health care.
It's just your normal run-of-the-mill HN posting that makes no sense and doesn't match reality.
This argument by massive processed food industries, that if we get Universal Healthcare, that their products and practices will be curtailed because it will be for the actual monetary public good says nothing about what is sold in countries with public healthcare.
Are you saying that corporate processed food manufacturers are not making that statement?
Clearly there is a problem with soda consumption leading to obesity in countries with Universal Healthcare, but that isn't the argument I am making.
> Are you saying that corporate processed food manufacturers are not making that statement?
No. I have no knowledge of what statements such manufacturers are or are not making.
However, your original post said “One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.” This phrasing implies that the statement is true, or at least you believe it to be true. So it seemed relevant to offer a counter-example.
Even if you had originally said “corporate processed food manufacturers claim their products will be curtailed and lobby heavily on this point,” I think it would still be useful to point out that such claims are highly likely to be false given past experience in other countries.
Those other countries already have Universal Healthcare, so no lobbying against UH will be effective or successful. The fact that other countries have a supply of unhealthy processed food doesn't have any bearing about how much effort US food companies will put in preventing UH.
You can see their concerted response when sugar taxes are instituted.
I don't think people realize the scale of soda consumption that needs to happen to have health issues. By and large the people in these affected studies are not drinking water at all. They are getting all their thirst needs met by a sugary drink. That is so overboard. You can have a can of coke every now and then and not have your enamel slough off.
Mostly from own experience I know poor people drink sodas and as you get used to the taste you don’t like taste of plain water - even when you have decent tap water.
As an adult I started drinking tap water and now I don’t like taste of sodas anymore. I am happy that I got over with it but still have some people I know stuck on sodas and disliking plain water taste.
I think "don't like the taste of water" accurately describes me. That being said I do have a rule of "never drink anything with calories" specifically to avoid the sugar. But I don't know what you plain water drinkers are on about, the added flavor tricks me into drinking way more than I would naturally.
Humans have been constantly flavoring our water for thousands of years, I think the verdict is in that water tastes kinda meh. I would take tea or flavor extracts every time.
I like my water flavored. I tend to keep some lime/lemon juice around and that works well for me, maybe something can work for you
Well exactly plain water doesn’t really have a taste so it is meh and requires getting used to.
Especially when all you drink are sweet sodas it is really hard to get used to plain water.
We had a family friend who is in her late 50s stay for a couple of days over Christmas, all she drunk was Diet Coke. Even going to bed at night she took a bottle of Diet Coke with her. The thought of waking up through the night for a swig of Coke grosses me out a bit. And yes, she is the absolute picture of health...
eh, Diet Coke is primarily water, aspartame, phosphoric acid and caffeine. I drink 5/6 of them a day (don't like water much). The paper linked actually says short term effects of diet soda are less problematic, but recent evidence suggests that aspartame may have harms on the microbiome and glucose tolerance generally.
That said, the idea of drinking anything either sweet or carbonated before bed, during the night, or in the morning, mind boggling to me, that does sound really gross.
Have you ever tried plain carbonated water? It's more interesting than still water, and for me more thirst quenching. Easy to make at home with a Soda Stream or similar, just don't add any of their syrup.
alright fine, you win universe. SoftTalker, I'll drink more water ok?
I mean, diet coke explicitly doesn't have the kind of sugar in this study.
Can you not buy more or less as unhealthy products in countries with universal healthcare as in US?
e.g. smoking rate is considerably higher in France or even in Spain
Sugar consumption isn't relatively that high either compared to most European countries:
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
That isn't the argument I made. Processed food industries actively block healthcare reforms because they fear being regulated for the now obvious public good.
Perhaps. But I don't think that's the public consensus. So it's hard to accept such arguments without any evidence.
AFAIK in Europe most food safety regulation is coming from the EU directly and not the national governments. Also it's not like all countries in Europe have public tax funded healthcare systems.
Fundamentally some are inherently not that different from the one in the US (i.e. semi-private or even entirely privatized) it's just that they much better regulated and much more efficient.
Even if we exclude private spending the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than most other countries so why would anything change if e.g. Medicare was extended to a higher proportion of the population?
Any source of that claim? That processed food manufacturers lobbied against universal healthcare for fear of regulation against their products?
> > smoking rate is considerably higher in France or even in Spain
But they somehow compensate with other good habits considering that lifespan and healthspan is greater than the US.
Then we can get into a whole different conversation about the intensity of one's life in the US v. Europe not just the lenght, but that is a whole different conversation.
America's poor use EBT/food stamps to buy massive amounts of junk food, including billions on soda. Those same people are almost 100% on ACA or state health insurance plans and milking the tax payer on treatment for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. There is no way, in my mind, it is feasible to fund these lifestyles and provide the treatment for it. Its absolutely insane.
Do they? Food stamps in most states have restrictions on what you can buy with them. My impression is soda is not on the list. Of course this is (mostly?) the states and every state has different rules so you probably need to cite 50 different state rules to verify this and thus an exception state is likely.
This is an ongoing debate, but afaik you can use them for soda [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/well/eat/food-stamp-snap-...
The soda is not consumed by the food stamp holder. It's used as a medium to convert the balance to cash.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
Counter argument: Pretty much every other nation has socialized healthcare and still allows sugary beverages and tobacco products.
>I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
I'd be fine with that to be honest. I'd drink soda water going forward just to not have to smell cigarettes, but be fine with people backyarding some tobacco to make their own cigars.
It would probably even be healthier to force people to make their own syrup for soda at home vs the ease of obtaining it now.
Canada has universal healthcare and they drink plenty of sugary drinks there too.
Yes, but we call them pop, not soda :-)
Or at least used to. 51st-ifying is underway.
Before we go here, what is the alternative. If restrict soda and people switch to beer even if they will be driving that could be much worse. (I don't otherwise know how the effects of alcohol vs soda come up but that too is a question worth asking)
I don't think that's a relevant comparison. They're both beverages, sure, but that's about where the similarities end. As drugs they're entirely different. May as well add Ayahuasca to consideration as well.
I could see tea or coffee (particularly the sweetened varieties) and sparkling water, but honestly I think the most likely alternative will just be plain ol' water.
> what is the alternative
Shrubs [1]!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrub_(drink)
There are many alternatives, but what is important here isn't what you recommend, it is what people choose.
> what is important here isn't what you recommend, it is what people choose
Do we have any evidence soda drinkers sub Coke for alcohol? I'd have guessed artifically-sweetened soft drinks would have been the substitute.
I wasn't intending to imply that is what would happen. That is the worst substitute I can think of. If high sugar coffee would also be counted as soda for the laws - something that isn't a given - this seems even more likely.
If I recall correctly part of the origin of soda was doing the reverse, from efforts to actively substitute for alcohol. Hence why they emphasized as "soft drinks" as a marketing category.
As for other substitutes, we've seen highly sweetened coffee drinks as the common one, to the point where soda taxes started to face accusations that they are actually thinly veiled classism due to exclusion of more white collar "Starbucks" type drinks. Rightfully or wrongly they have a point about it at least looking bad.
I don't know anyone who would switch from soda to beer?? probably tea, or coffee, or lemonade or flavored sparkling water
I think you strike a good balance between personal freedoms and health of the population.
You’re right in that availability is the problem.
If I go across the road to the store, there’s a whole WALL covered in hundreds, maybe thousands, of sugar drinks, all very very cheap.
You know what there isn’t any of in the whole store? Something healthy and low sugar / high protein.
I have the luxury of time and a little bit of money so I can choose, but what about the busy parent who just needs energy? The busy office worker with a bunch of projects due, or just the poor individual with not much money, I don’t think it’s fair to setup these kind of situations and then blame the individuals for their choices, we have to step in at a governmental level
I went little further. I could not find low or no sugar Nestle cereals at the local supermarket, then I asked their support if they have something with low sugar. Their rep wrote that they have lowered the sugar amount by 34% from 2000 to 2010, but it is still not clear if those amount are OK, when I taste the sugar amount is definitely high. I do think the government should step in and promote healthy food and habits
So many of these "we lowered X" things are simply "We cut the portion size down by 34% to hit calorie/sugar goals".
That's where you get dumb things like "Here's a candy bar with 3.5 servings" to try and trick a consumer into thinking it's not as calorie dense as it is.
It's really tragic that lots of Americans think this kind of garbage is a healthier alternative to other kinds of breakfast. It may actually have less sugar than pancakes drenched in some disgusting syrup, but it's still garbage. There's a real problem with nutritional literacy in this country. The manufacturers of these products really aren't helping here either. Cheerios have a big 'CAN LOWER CHOLERSTEROL' plastered on the front of the pack, but the contents are still literally 24% added sugar.
From the Cheerios box in my cupboard: 140 calories per serving, 1g added sugar per serving. 1g carb = 4 calories. 4 / 140 = 3%.
I would not be at all surprised if some flavor of Cheerios is 24% added sugar, but regular Cheerios are not so bad in the sugar department.
> 1g added sugar per serving
That is still a good amount of sugar given it’s every day and setting your morning baseline. If taken with e.g. a refined juice or sweetened coffee, that’s probably setting one up for sugar cravings in a few hours.
A slice of bread (in the U.S.) has more than 1g of added sugar (and less than 140 calories). (If you know of any besides Ezekiel that have less sugar, I would like to hear about it.) I don't think it is fair to villainize Cheerios when it is one of the least offensive options among ultraprocessed breakfast cereals. Especially based on... other things that aren't Cheerios? Juice (20+ g sugar) and coffee sweetener (4+ g sugar) would be the villains in this scenario.
> don't think it is fair to villainize Cheerios when it is one of the least offensive options among ultraprocessed breakfast cereals
You’re correct. I’m damning the whole category within the context of this discussion.
1g of sugar per serving is hardly anything. You are weakening your argument by being hyperbolic.
> 1g of sugar per serving is hardly anything
I'll stand by it being "a good amount" given it's incorporated into a daily ritual.
What is the serving size and more importantly how does the serving size compare to what people actually eat?
Serving size is 1.5 cups. Regardless of how much people eat, it's still only 3% added sugar.
There's nothing wrong with the "can lower cholesterol" banner on it because it's a source of whole grains and it has no saturated fat. That combo generally does lower cholesterol when put to the test, and it probably is one of the best cereals in the aisle.
Directing people towards better alternatives is a good thing.
Is this regular Cheerios, or Honey Nut?
The Honey Nut Cheerios are glazed in sugar, but the plain Cheerios (to my taste) don't have much if any. Don't have any here to check the ingredients though. If I want cereal for breakfast I generally make plain oatmeal.
FWIW - the convenient stores near me sell the Core Power Elite Protein drinks. I have picked them up and it helps make my protein goals on days where I come up short. They do taste pretty good but more expensive than a soda.
It's possible people are depressed and looking for the most tasty option.
One thing 7-11s have started stocking in recent years is packaged hard boiled eggs. The price is insane if you compare it to boiling your own, and they are a bit tasteless, but you don't have to peel them and the price is reasonable compared to other stuff there if you're stuck eating lunch from 7-11.
It is more than twice the price of Wal-Mart! Well, I guess that's the price of convenience.
2/hard boiled eggs - $2.09 @ 7/11
6/hard boiled eggs - $2.96 @ Wal-Mart
6/raw eggs - $2.62 @ Wal-Mart
You're paying for footprint. There's 320 Walmarts in California and almost 2000 7-Elevens. There's zero Walmarts in SF and San Mateo county, and at least 50-Elevens. Those 7-Elevens are often in premium locations downtown.
I am not sure I follow the discussion and its tie into California - I am in the South US
I just picked a market.
Next compare the price of a donut vs the price of a bag of flour and sugar ;)
Two hard-boiled eggs and an apple is a pretty nutritious lunch for about $2-$3 tops.
It’s cheap but not nutritious. It’s less than 300 cal and 12g of protein + 4g of fiber. You would be hungry. Need fiber and protein to keep you full
Nice. "Tea eggs" are big in East Asian corner stores.
I don't know that that's true. Most healthcare is subsidized. And so is the sugar. There's very little movement to restrict the sugar. There are profits to be made on both ends (selling the sugar and the insulin for example) by those who have captured the relevant parts of the government.
> One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold.
Yeah that not it boss. Never did I come across something getting banned in France because of healthcare costs.
It's good to see more studies come on this but it's not exactly news. Researchers have known for quite some time now that there's an entire constellation of diseases (diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, fatty liver disease, heart disease, etc, etc) known as metabolic syndrome that are all caused by diet and lifestyle.
Also good that GLP-1s have been found to help people patch the reward center around unhealthy diet demand signals. We know these things are bad, we know will power isn't a solution, and we have a fix we can deploy at scale relatively inexpensively.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988285 ("HN: GLP-1 for Everything")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579445 ("HN: Weight loss drugs seem to be driving down grocery bills")
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5073929 | https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5073929 ("The No-Hunger Games: How GLP-1 Medication Adoption is Changing Consumer Food Purchases")
Saying will power isn’t a solution is insulting to everyone that successfully made lifestyle and diet changes to become healthier without pharmaceutical intervention.
It may not work for everyone all the time, but I know a lot of people that have made these changes.
This is just an uncharitable / strawman interpretation of what they said. They are concerned with all the people left over once you remove the people that just had to muster up "willpower". And they are concerned for the people who weren't dealt the same hand of traits that us fit people have.
Their willpower doesn’t appear to have solved the issue on a societal level, and it is not an insult to say that.
If one is insulted, they should revisit their mental model and emotional state. There is no gold star for will power because someone lucked out with genetics and brain chemistry/structure. “Be more lucky” is not actionable for the body you are issued.
We can patch bugs in the human, and we should whenever possible and desired by the person. This helps them make their own luck.
You are transferring the problem from the foods industry to the pharmaceutical industry. I hope "one" knows that.
The "bugs" are not in "the human," they're in the food industry. Fixing our food supply would be far better for individuals and society than fighting fire with fire by leaving our food broken and using drugs to work around it.
In the meantime, doing what you can to unbreak your diet without using drugs is still far smarter than relying on an artificial "fix" for the "machine" that is literally you (and can't be tossed and replaced when you find out your "fix" caused other issues, which happens almost every time the pharma industry provides shortcuts for people). Doing it this way also moves your demand as a consumer to the unbroken parts of the food supply, which will help everyone else as food companies are incentivized to cater to that instead of continuing on with what they're doing.
If this is your belief, then you do not understand the mechanisms by which GLP-1 agonists work. They silence the signals in the brain craving the unhealthy foods in question. You will never win against your brain chemistry.
Pharmaceutical companies would love for you to believe that. They salivate over the idea that they can convince you that you need their products for the rest of your life. They aren't any different from the common street dealer in many ways. They don't really care about your health, only that you keep coming back.
"You will never win against your brain chemistry" is a defeatist way to dismiss taking basically any action, ever. People selling you artificial solutions will, of course, be incentivized to convince you that it's true.
Humans lived for thousands of years (without the widespread diet-related ailments we're seeing epidemics of today) without artificially "fixing" their own brain chemistry. This is not an internal medicine problem, it's an external food supply and societal lifestyle problem.
If you want to say it's too hard for you (you, only) to do what's required to not get sick and you'd rather rely on medicine, fine. But it is actually insulting to pretend like everyone needs a crutch just because you do. The main thing is that the crutch should be a last resort, and "willpower isn't a solution" should not be a common mantra to push the crutch as the first option.
Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale and your theory is not? We tried the silly will power way, that did not work. We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it. If you want to ignore data out of a belief system, that’s a choice. You believe the intervention is inferior to will. But the evidence clearly shows the vast majority of humans are assisted by an intervention versus “will power” which does not work (gold stars to those who need to feel better about themselves they don’t need an intervention).
I don’t take GLP-1s, but I support getting them to everyone who wants them and ignoring anyone who tries to stop that, or says that is a lesser path for lesser people. I hope you learn to give grace, because lucky people are just lucky, not special.
> We tried the silly will power way, that did not work.
They still work for plenty of people, just not you. They can work for more if we enable healthy diets and lifestyles as a society.
And no, that's not a "gold star" to the people who were able to literally have their "machine" work as designed. It's rather a gold star for you to not acknowledge if you needed artificial assistance to exist.
> Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale... We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it.
None of the articles you cited in your earlier comment address "scale" at all, nor provide evidence of "shifting industries." Two of them address changes in the spending patterns of high-income consumers who are already using the drug (unrelated to the proportion of the total population using the drug), and the third is a blog post by a doctor literally selling GLP-1s as a miracle drug ("It's getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren't good for"-- yikes).
Your most recent KFF link (which it looks like you removed) claims 12% of adults have taken GLP-1 drugs (going off of a single poll taken by a health-tracking organization-- probably biased towards people actively working on their health). If that number was true, it would be alarming that over 10% of humans needed an artificial fix for a problem created by the food industry and socially sanctioned sedentary lifestyles, not something to parade around like you've actually fixed the underlying problem.
By this logic I, a person who has never been at risk of financial insolvency partially due to my lack of consumer addiction/upbringing with financial literacy, should be insulted by someone who says that budgeting isn't a solution to systemic poverty.
No, by this logic, you should be insulted by someone saying paid professional accountants managing all of your money is the only way for society to avoid widespread debt because "most people" haven't managed to bring themselves to do the basic at-home budgeting that you're used to.
> by this logic, you should be insulted by someone saying paid professional accountants managing all of your money is the only way for society
But toomuchtodo didn't write that GLP-1s were the only way to address the issue. So maybe there's no reason to be insulted. Perhaps you could exercise your willpower and not feel insulted by things that didn't happen.
That is true but I think emphasizing liquid sugar is particularly important. When I was young I tried to bulk (for sports) several times and ate an obscene amount of carbohydrates and protein, think like 8 hot dogs and half a gallon of milk for lunch... roughly 4k calories a day of carbs/protein/fat.
I never got past 220. I would get terrible heartburn and bloating and be too full to eat enough, 220 seemed to be about the max my body could obtain without severe discomfort. It always made me wonder how people get up into the 300+ range. Liquified sugar seems like the only food that your body can process efficiently enough to get you into those massive weight categories.
Just to clarify metabolic syndrome isn't the umbrella term for all of these things.
Metabolic syndrome is when you have 3 or more of: central adiposity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low HDL.
You can have any of these independently, it becomes metabolic syndrome when you hit the bingo.
Those are the most obvious and easy to spot signs. Metabolic syndrome is dysfunction at the mitochondrial level.
> Metabolic syndrome is dysfunction at the mitochondrial level.
It might or might not be involved. At this point, it's not clear. Obesity and insulin resistance are the most likely proximate causes.
The study quantifies the effect. The paper doesn't just say "Drinking too much sugar is bad for you."
Say one group drinks six cans of coke a day per person vs another group drink only water. Overall they have similar caloric intake and expenditures. What is the increase in type 2 diabetes for the first group vs the second? Yes, it is not surprising it would be higher, but is it 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%? more?
> It's good to see more studies come on this but it's not exactly news. Researchers have known for quite some time now
A growing body of studies signals consensus - that’s newsworthy. This ties two specific factors together rather than any general metabolic syndrome.
[dead]
It's not propaganda. Saturated fat is bad. That's a common internet belief that runs rampant because saturated fat tastes good and it sounds awesome to believe some conspiracy against it.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/10/21/advisory-replacing-...
Most of it always tracks back to Nina Teicholz. I wonder how many people she is sending to the grave?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I know it's hotly debated and I don't imagine I could convince you :). This is my opinion.
If I read right, you're saying that an entire food group that people have been eating for eons is simply "bad", specifically, meat, dairy, and eggs, in their unprocessed form. The argument I've seen is that it's better to eat a new kind of food that people have only begun eating in quantity within the last hundred ish years requiring industrial technology. (Specifically, oils extracted from plant material using solvents like hexane.)
I'm open minded but this is a really serious claim and I'd need really solid evidence which I haven't seen, and I've looked. There are a lot of studies; those that I've looked into have too many confounding variables for me to take their conclusions at face value.
I could also see the possibility that saturated fat in someone who already has metabolic syndrome might increase their risk of heart disease, and maybe be considered the proximate cause, in cases where the root cause is the metabolic syndrome caused by sugar in the first place.
There's also the question of there being different kinds of LDL cholesterol and it perhaps actually serving a function in the body that isn't categorically bad, even if in some circumstances the metric correlates with atherosclerosis.
I'm from latam. I never saw anyone drink water growing up. Anytime you try to drink water, people label you as boring, even your parents. Whenever we go to a restaurant, the first thing you ask the waiter is "what sodas do you have?". If you're not feeling like drinking soda and want something "healthier", you ask what kinds of fruit juices they have. If you don't like the options, you settle on a hyper-sweetened tea.
I frequently ask my parents to drink more water, and they get defensive saying they drink a lot of water but I just don't see it. The truth is they only drink half a small cup in the middle of the night...
Latin America is very big, I don’t think you can generalise your experience to a whole subcontinent.
And how are latam's doing? From your writeup seems to be enjoying life
I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
I'd take the other side of that bet.
https://imgur.com/a/4b0O4AW
Prior to early 2000s when sugar consumption started going down, it was probably a reasonble guess as one of the drivers of increasing disease. But since then sugar consumption has tailed off while disease rates have continued to rise, so I don't think it's plausible anymore.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7666899/
My bet to flatten the chronic disease curve would be reducing n6 fat consumption, especially from foods fried in vegetable oil.
Provactively, the steep upturn in diabetes rates around 1990 conincides with a broad movement in the fast-food industry to replace animal fats like tallow with vegetable oils.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900724/1083993/ch...
While I don't disagree that omega-6 oils are suspect - especially when heated/reheated - the evidence for sugar being bad for you is still far greater than the evidence that seed oils are bad for you.
The US State system lends itself to natural experiments so I'm all for iterating on what taxes incentives actually lead to the desired outcomes (higher healthspan and lower healthcare costs).
There very well could be multiple contributing factors to the epidemic- generically if the behavior increases chronic disease burden on the population it needs to be disincentivized via taxes so that you can incentivize moving to alternatives without the negative externalities.
Yeah, I agree it would be great to do some regional experiments.
Are there any chains that still use tallow to fry food?
I love fried food and would pay a premium for high quality oil options. Most of the time you don't know what it is, at best it's peanut (five guys). I'd much prefer avocado oil or tallow.
The only one I know of is Popeyes -- they famously never stoped frying their chicken in beef tallow. Probably unhealthy for about a million other reasons, but hey, at least it's not fried in vegetable oil!
Shops will just sell the sugar and the soda separately, mix it yourself :)
Or people will pay more.
Not what has happened in the UK, where sugar tax has been a thing since 2018. It's now actually quite hard to find a sweetened drink - almost all soda-style beverages now are "zero sugar", sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Nobody is buying sugar and pouring it in. Nobody.
It's a little too early to determine if this has slowed the prevalence of diabetes in the population. One problem is that other studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages with foods means many people end up eating more calories of food - the brain is looking for calories indicated by the sweet taste its not getting from the beverage, so compensates.
It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
Last time I was in the UK, nearly everywhere that sold soda offered the full calorie, full sugar version of Coke. Pepsi and other drinks were often only available in lower or zero sugar, but Coke was almost always available in the full sugar version, for some reason.
It is a choice manufacturers made.
Pepsi and Dr. Pepper decided to go lower sugar with supplemental artificial sweeteners to keep their price down, whereas Coca-Cola kept the original formula, but it costs more.
To put figures to this:
- Pepsi (11g sugar per 250 ml): 8.8p/100ml
- Dr. Pepper (11g sugar per 250 ml): 10.0p/100ml
- Coca-Cola (27g sugar per 250 ml): 14.2p/100ml
"full sugar" Dr. Pepper also contains: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
"full sugar" Pepsi contains: Sucralose, Acesulfame K
So after the sugar tax some people moved to these hybrid drinks whereas others just moved whole-hog to Pepsi Max and Diet Dr. Pepper which are commonly cheaper and have the same aftertaste as their "full sugar" variants.
It would be interesting to see the effect of a sweetness tax. See if the manufacturers can make desirable beverages that don’t taste so sweet (and don’t have whatever effect triggering sweetness receptors so intensely has).
In Poland there's a tax for both sugary and artificially sweetened drinks since 2021. Also caffeine and taurine.
In one year the effect for beverages over all was 36% raise in proce and 20% drop in sales. Surprisingly sales of energy drinks rose by 4%.
Caffeine drinks can't be sold to non-adults now so that probably dropped too.
In two years 60% of beverages altered their ingredients. Tax income was less than you expected.
> It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why?
When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff.
Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well!
Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.
> When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary
Are you aware that you're supposed to dilute squash to taste? It's just concentrated juice. If it's too sweet, you haven't added enough water.
Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.
I bet adding the sugar yourself would reduce consumption considerably. Which would be the goal of the tax.
Unfortunately Internet people like to point out the hypothetical 99th percentile person who would evade/be immune to such incentives and suggest that therefore, it would not be worth doing.
It’s such a common and lazy pattern on HN :(
When I read those, I don't actually think those people believe their own arguments. They started with a conclusion, like "sugar taxes are bad," and then worked backwards to find an argument to fit it. That's why when you challenge them they just shift the goalposts.
they'll optimize the packaging to help you out. My mom tells me about how margarine used to come with a yellow color packet to mix into your white spread. The dairy board lobbied to make it illegal to sell yellow margarine because "it looks like butter". Didn't seem to hurt Oleo much...
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-th...
Both would reduce demand so a sharp drop off would still be fairly realistic. Of course, getting anything done at the federal would be impossible in the US today.
You're proposing something like a 500% markup on sugar? For context, that's like 400% higher than even the highest cigarette taxes.
about 40% of adults in the US are obese. Doesn’t seem that crazy to me (as an experiment one could run for a couple years, to see if it has a positive impact on society)
Yeah but then again, selling addictive sugar shit is lucrative AND treating diabetes is lucrative. Very few people in charge care about your health, the world would be a very different place if it was the case.
The solutions are extremely simple, and it's the same for many of our modern issues, the will simply isn't there.
> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas).
It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place.
It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively.
The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now.
I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore.
Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price.
I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax).
In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.
I would expect it to work badly whenever a person could easily cross a boundary. In larger cities -- say, New York -- it would suffer similar, but fewer, problems simply because the average effort of getting outside the city would be higher.
You see this between states when tax regimes differ. Sure, those who live near the border "cheat". But most people live far enough away that they are affected by the tax.
There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
I'm curious if you have data showing this? Last I heard, which a quick google seems to back up, is that Seattle's similar tax had modest benefits. (https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/sph-blog/sugar-sweete...) Took a brief look to see if there were strong challenges to this, but I didn't find anything.
> I'm curious if you have data showing this?
Regarding the sugar tax? Only empirical/anecdotal, I'm afraid: the fact is, as mentioned in my statement and in a response below, is that it's a geographical based tax, which while annoying can be trivially circumvented. (And even then black-markets emerge to meet that demand, or better known as System-D.)
A better analysis would be the effects of better health and the decrease in tobacco smokers in younger generations over the last decades, which is mainly a product of discretion. I can assure you having lived with a pack a day people no amount of advertising, gross tumor pictures on the side of the box, high costs/taxes came close to people just realizing it's a horrible thing to do to your health.
Arguably this led to the mass vaping trend, and a myriad of other ailments associated to that, but still what remains is that tax while a deterrent is no match for proper market-product-fit--how ever dangerous, or stupid one may think said behavour is.
> There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
Here is the thing, I spent a lot of time in Europe where smoking is still incredibly prevalent and culturally relevant and the taxes are still incredibly high, the result: people just buy loose tobacco and roll it themselves to bypass the higher tax on pre-roll stuff offered every where.
The ancillary products sold in 'head-shops' become a niche market unto themselves for these people and divert that tax money into another sector, proving that while markets have many flaws they tend to be effective at navigating any and all legislative hurdles even in an incredibly highly regulated market-place.
I think this specific matter seems to be a bigger issue with people who feel the need to judge or deem people's actions 'right or wrong' based on their own subjective values when it comes to personal body autonomy, and think they know better and want to deter them in any way possible which I think this is ultimately what this is about: not Society's health.
If that were the case, I think resources are better utilized in helping people address the MASSIVE mental health crisis in the US.
I'm confused on where the quote on cigarettes comes from? Isn't in my post, is it?
And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study. I fully agree that, on the merits, this is easy to circumvent. I further agree that this sort of tax is almost certainly regressive. Largely for the reason you give of how easy it can be to get around. The study shows that, despite that, it still saw gains to the goals.
My gut would be some of the gains will have come from advertising around the ideas. Having a tax is one thing. But prices typically go up with people being none the wiser. So, the messaging that went with the taxes could have also given a pause.
That is beside the point, though, being that I don't know why it could have had modest results. Study shows that it did.
> And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study.
I don't have much to say, other than personally I feel it's a tacit nod to the fact they found the results they wanted from this study, because it resoundingly relies on justifying a higher sales tax and this further encourages other parts of WA to adopt it and further establish it as a form of tax revenue while trying to provide a 'social good' which can be monetized.
Again, it's not entirely hard to bypass and because it 'may' show some minor benefit to justify itself seems like how most poorly formed versions of bureaucratic gate-keeping works.
But, to take the contrarian position [0] to even my own argument it seems that in the 5 states they launched this with income taxes have also 'benefited' from these taxes. But its hard/impossible to properly measure that these consumers didn't just purchase things in a nearby city with no additional tax or just online so I think it's parameters can derive the favourable results it claims. And the following claim regarding 'significant evidence' doesn't really compel me to say it was vastly evaluated:
> But the study also looked at adjacent zip codes to the SSB-taxed cities: finding no statistically significant evidence that purchases had increased in these neighboring areas.
Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
0: https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2024/01/11/US-sugar-ta...
PS: That 2nd quote was not yours, but the other users who wanted to address tobacco use: I keep doing this having grown up on IRC/forums but since HN doesn't do attribution. I should find a solution to this, but making 2 posts seems tedious, I guess I can pre-fix with @ or something.
Ah, 2nd quote being a sibling post makes sense. I typically look at things in threads after I post, so didn't see it.
I want to stress that logically, I fully agree with your position. I am always hesitant to go with logical arguments that aren't supported empirically, though. Would love to see some critical studies that go into why this stuff isn't the case.
I can say that, at a personal level, we thought we would shift buying of juices and sodas to outside of Seattle when the law passed. We largely didn't, though. Just started getting smaller servings from places in the city. I hesitate to say we are representative, though; as we don't do that much on the sweetened side, all told. Were buying small juices for the kids, but not many of that, even.
> Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy ? As far as I can see, you are free to continue putting sugary water into your body. Is the argument that even a small increase in tax is an encroach upon bodily autonomy ? Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production) as a bodily autonomy issue then, since it lowers the cost of corn / fructose and making them available in more food ?
> Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy?
Simply put, you are arbitrarily punishing those who consume these products (which I will repeat I do not purchase myself) in often high cost areas (eg Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder) to align with a specific ideology that these areas ascribe to, at least on the surface.
I feel like a boomer saying this and it seems like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because it's something that on the surface makes sense to a degree--relying on the old adage of tax it and you get less of it--and even appears to be well intentioned way to make people make 'healthier' choices, but from what I've seen in practice is a bureaucratic way to modify behaviour in people's everyday lives that ultimately only causes a minor inconvenience/friction for those resolved to circumvent and the initiative's results seem dubious at best and over-reaching at worst.
I genuinely don't think in practice it's about health either as you can easily go around the other aisle and buy all the high sodium, poly-saturated chips with as much or more HFCS and MSG and countless amounts of dyes and food preservatives to your hearts content with no tax implication and are often encouraged to be purchased in bulk, so it seems perplexing that this is really the success they make it out to be.
It seems to me like a bike-shedding initiative if I have ever seen one as it avoids the much bigger issue of how un-healthy the American diet really is.
> Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production)...
Because as you have mentioned, the obscenely lucrative farm subsides of corn for mega farms is the crux of the issue here and by extension all of the lobbying by big business that takes place for these chemicals that are actually shaping what the American diet itself is; I believe we would be better served addressing that obvious and glaring problem, and forcing producers of these products to have to do without these highly subsidized and addictive chemicals in their products and letting consumers decide whether to consume them of their own volition at actual market rates rather than this window dressing approach.
You want a can of Coke to cost $35?
In Berkeley we have a 1¢ per fl. oz. soda tax and it cut soda sales by over 20%.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024386/
It cut soda sales 20% in Berkeley but increased them 4% in comparison cities (SF and Oakland), among low-income households only.
No, that is an incorrect reading of the result. San Francisco is not a neighbor of Berkeley, and nobody started traveling 15 miles to SF to save a dime on Coke. The 4% increase in the comparison cities was exogenous.
I don't think we can attribute causality to the decline in Berkeley any more or less than we can attribute causality to the increase in comparison cities. If it was causal in Berkeley, it was causal in SF and Oakland. (Whose rates actually went up by like 20%? But at some point that gets cut down to 4%, I'm not sure why.)
And still: Among low income households only. We don't know what the effect was on the whole population.
Anyway, I'm sympathetic to the idea that sugar taxes work, just being critical of this particular study and your claim which is stronger than the actual study outcome.
How did this article get past the sugar mafia? That too in nature!
Yudkin [1] must be chortling ;)
Warren Buffett, have your boys been slacking off? Somebody is gonna get really hurt...bad!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure,_White_and_Deadly
[dead]
Fruit smoothies are an interesting case of a "sugar beverage" which doesn't quite act how you'd think. Intuitively, you'd think that speedy ingestion of that much fructose with all its fiber obliterated in a blender could potentially cause spikes in blood glucose. However this study showed that when the fruits had seeds, like blackberries and raspberries, the glucose peak was lower with blended fruit than whole.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9657402/
fiber isn’t ’obliterated’ in a blender, it’s only removed with juices. in juice you strain all the pulp and seeds out, smoothies retain the seeds and fiber.
I know several people who’ve undergone bariatric surgery.
One of the post-surgery ‘rules’ is … “Don’t drink your calories.”
It's odd to me that zero-calorie sodas aren't the default by now.
I used to drink a lot of soda but stopped 15 years ago and have had a total of three or four cans since. I switched to unsweetened green tea instead of a zero-calorie soda because I don't like the taste of artificial sweeteners, and I am somewhat suspicious of the unknown long-term consequences of their use.
> I am somewhat suspicious of the unknown long-term consequences of their use.
Can you elaborate on what you mean?
You're suspicious that sweetened drinks are more harmful than advertised? Less harmful? Something else?
Aspartame metabolises into methanol. Sugar alcohols give you the squirts. Lots of them have downsides.
Allulose seems promising, I'd love to find some pop sweetened with it.
The older diet sodas definitely didn't taste like sugar but the new ones (Coke Zero) are pretty great? Idk, I almost never drink full sugar soda but I'm a fan of Coke Zero.
Coke Zero still has aspartame and so still has a bit of that "aspar-tang" to its taste. But there's something in its formulation that masks that somewhat and makes it tastier than Diet Coke. The advertisements used to say "Diet Dr. Pepper DOES taste more like regular Dr. Pepper!" and it's true: something about the spices? they add to Dr. Pepper causes the aspartame flavor to blend right in and be less noticeable.
I drink sugar-free (or occasionally, low-sugar variants like Olipop) soda from time to time but I find I'm drinking way less soda -- and everything else except maybe water and coffee -- these days. Being on a dietary protocol for early T2D has brought my liquid cravings way, way down.
They are in some countries. The sugar tax in the UK quickly led to many places only selling non sugar variants or charging a premium for the sugared versions.
Not a native English speaker but, isn’t the word “attributable” in the title at least misleading?
Shouldn’t it be “linked” instead?
The paper indicates correlation, not causality.
Based on the abstract it's not a study showing that "Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease [are] attributable to sugar beverages", it's a paper quantifying the "[Amount of] Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease [that are] attributable to sugar beverages [in various countries]". The link and causation is already well established. This is trying to determine how much harm it's doing in different parts of the world.
It's "good" that this is in Nature, but does any health-aware person not already know this?
Our real problem is that most people aren't health-aware, and advertising (including the pharma-funded healthcare system) absolutely overwhelms common-sense truths about health.
Over the past few years I have improved my own health by greatly limiting my intake of sugars, including by cutting out "healthy" smoothies, but I learned all this from Dr Internet, and NOT from any physician who was being paid to treat me. US physicians' knowledge of nutrition is stuck at whatever they were taught in med school, which was probably 20+ years behind the research at that time.
The HN title shortening is a bit misleading. The paper systematically analyzes the burden of this known effect on 184 countries.
There is almost nothing* like sugar drinks in the natural world our bodies evolved in. Sugar drinks are about as different as tea leaves and pure cocaine. It's is no coincidence that both are refined white powders.
*honey
I take it you haven’t tried a nice ripe mango from subtropical regions, or a pineapple, white grapes (or grape juice), watermelon, navel oranges? They can be sweeter than Dr. Pepper.
Sugarcane also exists and you can chew it.
They just tended to 1) come with fiber, 2) not be as easy to acquire or eat in large quantities 3) not available all year, or all at once
The fiber is afaik a big factor for slowing rate and amount of sugar absorbed (amount because apparently some of it makes it far enough to feed gut bacteria in the large intestine).
This is nonsense:
100g of mango has 14g of sugar
100g of watermelon has 6.2g of sugar
100g of navel orange has 12g of sugar
100g of sugar has 100g of sugar, 1 can of Dr Pepper has 40g of sugar
It's both pure sugar AND more sugar. You have to eat more than half a pound of mango to get to the same sugar as a Dr Pepper.
Why you switched from grams to cans when compared to Dr Pepper? A can of Dr Pepper is 350 ml, so about 350 g. Therefore:
100 g of Dr. Pepper has 11g of sugar
Because no one eats 1 pound of mango.
People drink 10 cans of Dr. Pepper.
I know lots of people that eat 1 pound of dried mango, usually sugared but often not.
As mentioned in the sibling comment, your numbers are not comparable, and anything >10% is already an absolutely unhealthy amount of sugar.
Point being that sugary drinks/foods didn’t suddenly come to existence.
There are sugary products everywhere because we want them - or you might say we were made to want them. We made it central to our culture in many ways, and accepted terrible dietary habits as the norm. The wide availability of something like Dr Pepper is as much a cause as a reflection of that.
Well still different, as I could never possibly drink 300ml of honey, without choking or something worse.
On the other hand, grape juice, while not 100% natural, I’m not sure how it fares against cola (just considering sugar, not the rest of the junk)
Once I drunk some not-still-done wine, basically grape juice where the fermentation started, and so some bubbles were present. That was the most natural and delicious soda I’ve ever tasted… I do bot even hope it can be healthy to the body… but my soul ;)
When in human history could you drink 1L+ of fruit juice for $2 every single day regardless of the season?
No question. Until VERY recently (in terms of evolution anyway).
If you allow fermentation first, then perhaps Greece? They diluted it, but it still may well have added up to 1L+.
Most of our animal relatives obtain the vast majority of their calories from fruit, that is, sugar. The tarsier is the closest one that doesn't.
Good point. Natural fruit is different from sugar drinks in a few ways: takes effort to collect and consume, contains fiber that increases satiety, and is much less sweet (even when compared to the extra sweet varieties humans have bred).
Well this article scared me. Guess I will have to quit Mountain Dew. But what if I switched to the sugar free one? (Am I swapping diabetes and heart disease for cancer?)
Weird software X diabetes story. CFO at my small startup had type 2. We only had sugar free sodas and water bottles and, oddly, Capri Suns at my 15 person startup. I distinctly remember wracking my brain working on some code for long day and my brain was like "give me sugar!". I didn't realize that attempting to feed it many (sugar-free) sodas, it wasn't getting what it wanted. It needed the glucose. I began surreptitiously drinking Capri Suns. My CFO sees me chugging aforementioned childrens' drink and informs me those are his emergency sugar drinks and please don't accidentally kill him if he ODs on insulin. Never learned so much biology while writing software in my life.
First you should take a few long minutes and think hard about why you drink this shit in the first place.
Cuz it tastes good? Because I’m addicted? Because the caffeine is great. Because I hate the taste of coffee. Because I can? I dunno.
The human experience is all about controlling your urges. I also like to eat until I feel stuffed and sleep 12 hours a day, but I don't because I value my long term health above short term pleasures. Sadly for us modern life is all about short term pleasures and convenience, if you're not careful you can lose yourself real quick
Try sparkling water, home made water kefir, herbal teas, &c.
why are you lecturing somebody on the internet about personal lifestyle choices? as if the whole world doesn't know what they consume can negatively affect their health...
If you're addicted to the sugar, then the sugar-free version won't satisfy your cravings.
Artifical sweeterner are pretty safe, go for it.
Not true, artificial sweeteners lead to the same addiction effects as sugar. There was some paper about this recently.
Also is is not entirely researched what these artificial sweeteners really do to your body if consumed over long periods of time.
"Tendency to manifest consumption of sugar beverages attributable to predisposition to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."
Hm. I thought the "switcheroo test" would create an obviously false "what if" statement in this case, but not so sure.
What was hard to read from the article was if there’s a weekly or daily intake of sugar from SSB’s that’s “safe”?
There is a classic book about the effects of sugar named "Sugar Blues" for the interested. I have a bad reaction to sugar so have to avoid certain foods -- e.g. bananas are a no-no for me.
Tangentially related: a while ago i used to drink aspartame-sweetened drinks (sugarfree coke) but I did quit that as well after reading thst the sweet taste is still going go stimulate insulin production.
Speaking with a relative eho is a medical doctor they told me that yes, that’s a thing.
I’m not sure to what degree this might fit into the discussion, but just wanted to write this down.
Nowadays i just drink water.
I still have the occasional beer or the occasional glass of proper wine if i’m out with friends.
When I researched it in the past I thought that multiple studies corroborated that while blood sugar doesn't increase from drinking artificially sweetened drinks that people who drink them still tend to gain weight. I'm not sure how those studies adjusted for things like people that already have metabolic syndrome who simply choose artificial sweetener for health reasons though?
It seems the most I would be comfortable concluding from recent reviews of studies is that there are some worrying findings, enough to warrant caution. If you can simply reduce your consumption of sugary foods and beverages I suspect it will reduce your craving better than a replacement stimuli. You can review some studies here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=obesity+artificial+swe...
It's a fallacy to draw conclusions from the number of studies/reviews supporting a given hypothesis, but the majority conclude that artificial sweeteners are associated with negative health effects and not a helpful tool for adiposity-related diseases.
I've known multiple with glucose monitors and all of them told me they saw no increase after drink a diet soda. I think the "aspartame causes sugar spikes" is an urban legend. I never get the sugar rush from them like I do if I drink a sugary soda.
>> I've known multiple with glucose monitors and all of them told me they saw no increase after drink a diet soda. I think the "aspartame causes sugar spikes" is an urban legend. I never get the sugar rush from them like I do if I drink a sugary soda.
IANAD, but my reading of Dr. Jason Fung's book "The Obesity Code" suggests that while artificial sweeteners do not spike glucose immediately, they elicit an insulin response, which over time causes insulin resistance, which over time increases glucose.
Yeah absolutely taking artificial sweetener can't cause a glucose spike itself (no glucose or minimal amount to be derived), but maybe it could contribute to spikier glucose in general (due to sweetness contributing to hormonal dis-regulation/lack of satiety and overeating)
Wouldn't the insulin w/o sugar cause a drop, instead?
>> Wouldn't the insulin w/o sugar cause a drop, instead?
In the short term, but as I understand, the constant insulin response would also cause insulin resistance over time.
Yeah, long term.
But I understood parent as doing immediate measurements and expecting blood sugar increase despite insulin produced with no carb intake.
I only ever drink coke when I'm mixing with whisky... not sure which one is worse...
I drink coke in very small dose, mixed with Fernet branca. And I know positively, that if somebody upvotes this, is coming from a very specific country, where I’ve been, where it is very popular :)
I do not think is so bad, as I drink it a couple of times a month (tops).
Same, but with rum. Just doesn't work as well with the diet stuff for some reason, too.
Classic coke + Cuban rum + lime == very good time. :D
The Coke is definitely worse, unless you're flying an airliner, of course.
People who have serious health issues from drinking soda are usually drinking 1+ liters per day. A liter of whiskey per day would be extremely bad for you.
My goodness – I've been doing it all wrong!
Also, you are quite wrong on the amount of soda. Depending on your genetics, it takes a lot less than that to mess up your A1c.
Yet another article implying causation from association. The theory that sugar CAUSES diabetes type 2 fails when you look at people that eat a ton of carbs but keep the fats low: low fat vegans, fruitarians. Find one that's diabetic. They should be dropping like flies. But look at people that eat high fat >40% of calories, and the rest in carbs, and there you'll find the population of the metabolically compromised.
I’m not an expert but pretty sure fibers helps a lot regarding diabetes 2, microbiote and many other thing related. Vegans and fruitarians usually gets a lot more fibers than others regimes. But a diverse omnivorous diet including many vegetable is better than tofu+potatoes only. I recommend tempeh (0) instead tofu.
I agree with you sugars can’t be seen as the only one cause.
0 http://tempeh.info/
Can you please cite sources for your claims?
Really? I thought it was salad’s fault.
If A causes diabetes, then it causes C outcome of diabetes. It’s a tautology.
((A → B) ∧ (B → C)) → (A → C)
That's not how biology works.
In biology, instead of "necessary but not sufficient", we have "sufficient but not necessary".