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Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

eurekalert.org

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Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#81

Post by martinpw »

nn3 wrote: post #49
asciimov wrote: post #40

I usually keep to a low carb diet. Recently I had a burger from a local burger joint bun included. The entire time I’m eating this burger I keep thinking this is the best damn burger I’ve had in forever. I chalk it up to being hungry. At the end of the burger I had bite of bun left that was bare of toppings. I ate it and realized this white bread bun is so sweet it tastes more like cake than bread… no wonder I though…

There was a story here about the Irish tax authority classifying Subway bread as a sweet, not as bread, due to the high sugar content. I think that's an accurate description of a lot of american breads. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919189045/for-subway-a-ruling... Usually when I buy bread in the bread isle i discard all that have added sugars. But it's been getting hard recently.

> Usually when I buy bread in the bread isle i discard all that have added sugars. But it's been getting hard recently.

Even companies that try to market their bread as healthy still add sugar but then try to imply that it is a "healthier" kind of sugar. I wrote to one about it and got this reply:

Thank you for checking in with Dave's Killer Bread about the sweetness of our bread. We use sweeteners because we find that our DKB consumers prefer a bread that is sweetened. All of our varieties are sweetened with organic dried cane syrup

So now I mostly make my own.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#82

Post by 14 »

o10449366 wrote: post #15
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

The nice thing about reducing sugar is that after a while your taste buds realize how insanely over-sweetened many products are in the US. My current favorite example is bottled teas. When I was a kid I remember drinking Snapple, now I can't understand how I ever downed that stuff, it's like drinking syrup. If I'm lazy I'll get a bottle of unsweetened tea and mix it about 4-1 with sweetened tea. I get something that…

Yep. Cereals, fruit juices, mainstream coffee (Starbucks, Dunkin, etc.), yogurt, baked goods... It's insane to me that society in the US has been conditioned to consume literally hundreds of grams of sugar for breakfast. If you need caffeine (which is a separate discussion), you don't need to consume what's essentially a frozen milkshake as the delivery vehicle.

I quit coffee New Years and the reason was I was drinking it with a teaspoon of sugar and throughout the day would have about 5 cups like this. Being 240 days into the year I have cut out 1200 teaspoons of sugar from my diet by cutting coffee. I would like to cut out other sugars as well but find it extremely difficult to get ride of things like chocolate.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#84

Post by lkuty »

sjwalter wrote: post #73
ck2 wrote: post #33

Except in the United States that will never be done voluntarily by the manufacturers or most consumers, we just had two years now proving "freedumbs". The only "solution" is the cigarette model, all food now has an "added sugar" nutrition label, add a dollar to price for every added gram. Those dollars go towards health care fund for sugar based diseases. If you don't eat sugar-added foods, great for you and you don'…

IMO this is attacking it from the wrong angle. What I want is a change to insurance industry regulations to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way and not be subsidized by those of us who maintain their health. Could be done a number of ways. Life insurance already sometimes requires a physical at signup. Why not for health insurance too? Could also just be a discount. Could even,…

"to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way" You can make people pay for added sugar in the food but not for them being fat. That is discriminating. BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#85

Post by mint2 »

nimbius wrote: post #26

American here. I generally stick to a vegan/vegetarian diet to try and work on my "numbers" from our company healthcare bio-screening. My woke moment was when I was told exactly how much sugar is in a teaspoon. 4 grams. After that day I started seeing just how criminally insane some food products were and just how far most companies go to make sure you dont accidentally find out how much refined sugar you eat. tricks…

a standard 12 oz can of soda is literally a shot glass of sugar.

Looking at the sugar content of things and then measuring it out that mass of sugar is shocking.

So many thing are like that. Normal hard cider like angry orchard is like syrup. How do people drink it?

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#86

Post by foerbert »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #20
josh_today wrote: post #17

Sounds like a sugar epidemic. Why are these ingredients not banned?

These suggestions are very extreme: ban ingredients, use artificial sweeteners. What about America means that you can’t just use less sugar and eat less sugar? Plenty of other countries don’t have this problem.

If you're willing and able to make everything from scratch, nothing.

But if you're not, or can't... well. Simple lack of availability will be a major hurdle.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#87

Post by caturopath »

nn3 wrote: post #50
caturopath wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure most of the "artificial sweeteners are evil" stuff is just moral panic to how they seem like cheating. It seems so unbelievable that any of them are especially bad for you or your habits, especially when compared to sugar.

So you're saying that all the papers on this made up their data?

No, if there was a preponderance of scientific evidence, I'd accept it of course, but the alternative sweetener story isn't like that. There are papers out there on almost any topic with all sorts of results, many of which don't generalize, don't transfer, don't reproduce, or otherwise don't have the meaning they might point to if you guessed the implications.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#88

Post by crdrost »

caturopath wrote: post #36
hn8788 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how true it is, but one thing I've heard about artificial sweeteners is that your body thinks it's sugar, and will make your body feel hungrier because it expects it to have the same calories as regular sugar. I still prefer them because I hate the sticky feeling sugary products leave on my teeth, but I've talked to people who think artificial sweeteners are pointless from a calories-in/calories-out POV…

I'm pretty sure most of the "artificial sweeteners are evil" stuff is just moral panic to how they seem like cheating. It seems so unbelievable that any of them are especially bad for you or your habits, especially when compared to sugar.

It's bigger than that.

So first off, just about all of these artificial sweeteners are like 200x sweeter than sugar or higher. This kind of means that you have high amplification which comes with distortion—artificial sweeteners do not taste like the real thing. So those chemical aftertastes are probably the biggest contributors to skepticism.

Second, the most common artificial sweetener right now is aspartame, and it is kinda nasty stuff. Don't take my word for it, drink a Diet Coke that's about 1 week before expiration and see if you can stomach it—it's foul. That foulness is the metabolites of aspartame, I want to say one of them is formaldehyde? They are pretty nasty and you do produce them after drinking a Diet Coke, they appear in urine afterwards. The aspartame also bears a cryptic warning for people with phenylketonuria, and it might legit make consumers feel worse, as in reduce their serotonin and dopamine and make them more irritable.

The only silver lining on this cloud is that because this stuff is 200 times sweeter than sugar, you actually only get a very low dosage per each individual beverage. Because of that very low dosage, we are thankfully not seeing huge epidemiological problems from it yet. But yeah, a combination of nothing tasting right and the poster-child being awful is a decent recipe for conspiracy theories.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#89

Post by skoob »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #55
nimbius wrote: post #26

American here. I generally stick to a vegan/vegetarian diet to try and work on my "numbers" from our company healthcare bio-screening. My woke moment was when I was told exactly how much sugar is in a teaspoon. 4 grams. After that day I started seeing just how criminally insane some food products were and just how far most companies go to make sure you dont accidentally find out how much refined sugar you eat. tricks…

these are US measures. Metric 5ml is a teaspoon, 20ml a tablespoon. In case anyone else was confused like me.

I'm assuming you're Australian. In the rest of the world, a tablespoon is 15ml.

Re: Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

#90

Post by laurent92 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #60
o10449366 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Cereals, fruit juices, mainstream coffee (Starbucks, Dunkin, etc.), yogurt, baked goods... It's insane to me that society in the US has been conditioned to consume literally hundreds of grams of sugar for breakfast. If you need caffeine (which is a separate discussion), you don't need to consume what's essentially a frozen milkshake as the delivery vehicle.

> yogurt I don’t think unflavored yogurt has much sugar, does it?

Unflavored yoghurt has 5g of sugar (size of a sugar cube), and I’ve often seen up to 12g… (2 cubes and a half!) still branded as unflavored. It’s a crime we’re doing here, there is no place where we can get unsweetened matter.
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