Is it time to start treating regulation like the cancer that it is? Is it time to start calling people who think they know what's best for everyone what they really are, dictators? I hate to break it to you, but life is gonna kill yah one way or the other.
Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
121–130 of 261 posts
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#122It'd be much harder than cigarettes to define and enforce, and more prone to loopholes. What's a "sugary food"? Grams of sugar? They'd just sell fun-sized. Percentage mass? That could impact fruit. Added sugar? What is "non-added sugar"? Specific product categories like soda and candy? They'd just walk the line with things like "sweetened sparkling water". I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a…
If I eat a strawberry thats non-added sugar. If I sprinkle sugar on the strawberry, thats added sugar. It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar. If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats…
Any dish that is a prepared composite will quickly get into gray areas.
“I didn’t add sugar, i just put this highly sweet blended fruit in the dish!”
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#123How about we start treating alcohol like smoking? For example ban alcohol advertising like we have with tobacco and I bet society would improve in a lot of unforeseen ways (besides the obvious reduction in alcohol related deaths and diseases and family issues).
For most people, alcohol isn’t addictive in the same way that smoking or sugar is. If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse. Whereas drinking alcohol doesn’t make water taste worse or whatever. Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
The local university research hospital emergency room is busiest by far on Friday and Saturday nights due to alcohol-related incidents.
NIDA puts the overall US national cost of tobacco use at $300 billion and of alcohol use at $249 billion.
It's impossible to become physically dependent on sugar, whereas an alcoholic can die if they quit cold turkey.
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#124How about we just let people choose what to do with their body? As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addic…
I don't think it's so much denying people what to do with their bodies, as much countering all the ways they were being manipulated into overconsumption.
The market and social forces, left unchecked, have resulted in a bleak situation: for instance, I've noticed that the frozen goods aisle in most urban supermarkets has slowly become dominated by ice creams and other deserts, pizzas and french fries, together frequently making up > 3/4 of the area, the rest being frozen vegetables, fish and meat.
I think this trend needs to be countered because I don't believe most people made the conscious choice "I'm mostly eating crap now".
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. See my comment re: health care costs (which everyone pays for).
Is the next step forbidding dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing? Maybe taking more than one job to support a large family or accumulate college funds for one's children--"you're not getting enough sleep, which increases health care costs that we pay for."
And... euthanasia is the solution to all health cost problems, also.
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol? I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
The number of "Obese People" far outweighs the number of chronic alcoholics... we are talking about almost 1/3rd of the population being obese (i.e. not just a bit fat, or chubby, just straight out obese).
I’d question if this is purely the result of a sugar addiction. This is a very American figure, other countries have less problems, even though sugar is widely available.
Obesity has a variety of contributing factors, (lack of) access to actual healthy food, lack of physical exercise, high calorie intake (certainly aided by sugar), ...
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol? I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
The number of "Obese People" far outweighs the number of chronic alcoholics... we are talking about almost 1/3rd of the population being obese (i.e. not just a bit fat, or chubby, just straight out obese).
But a BMI in the low 30's is better for you than alcoholism. If you're six foot and 230lbs, that's a BMI of 31, which is obese.
Here's some pictures of guys with that build: https://www.height-weight-chart.com/600-230.html
They're not very fit, but they look "a bit fat/chubby" to my eyes - not dangerously unhealthy like your comment seems to imply.
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#128I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up. One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g car…
I think it should be made clear that we simply don't know enough about keto yet to call it "healthy." More healthy than sugar over-consumption? Almost certainly. I will say that it allowed me to cut to under 10% bodyfat with almost no effort, so for that I think it is a valuable tool.
But I also found that I was not making progress in my athletic hobbies until I stopped eating keto. My progress visibly accelerated after I stopped. So I hesitate to recommend it as anything other than a short term body recomposition tool. Fat may not be evil, but carbs aren't either.
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#129I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up. One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g car…
I've been trying out carnivore diet for a couple of months. I went from years of yo-yo dieting and pathological binge eating to effortlessly losing 10% of my bodyweight. I think my psychology got rewired somehow, I don't know how else to explain such a drastic change in behavior.
Re: Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
#130I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up. One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g car…
That happens a lot, specially in places selling healthy snacks.
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.