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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

#151

Post by phonypc »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #149
phonypc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the qualifier "unless you have existing cardiovascular or renal issues" they probably understand the relation between sodium and blood pressure. (Dare I say understand it better than you?) Trans fats (more specifically partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) are understood to be harmful in any amount. Sodium is essential in some quantity and only harmful in excess. It really doesn't make sense to group them toge…

> only harmful in excess. Tell that to the American Heart Association: https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s... When there’s extra sodium in your bloodstream, it pulls water into your blood vessels, increasing the total amount (volume) of blood inside them. With more blood flowing through your blood vessels, blood pressure increases. It’s like turning up the water supply to a garden hose — the…

Literally the third word in your excerpt is "extra".

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

#152

Post by phonypc »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #148
phonypc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s also just plain maple syrup which is better than using pure sugar. How do you figure? It's practically pure sucrose, just like table sugar.

Table sugar has a glycemic index of 65. Maple sugar's is 54. Not a huge difference but if sweeteners are important to you, maybe every bit counts.

The same reasoning would imply pure fructose is a better option. Or that eating a potato is worse.

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

#153

Post by fortran77 »

Smaug123 wrote: post #126
fortran77 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape If you are obese or overweight you are, by definition, not healthy.

You're pulling a sleight of hand here with your definitions. To rephrase the sibling: if you are obese or overweight, you have, by definition, a certain BMI. (According to the WHO and many national entities, anyway.) The intended common-sense definition of obesity is "accumulation of fat to an unhealthy level", but the diagnosis of obesity is usually based on a statistic which merely correlates with that. Similarly,…

Harvard Medical School:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-you-be-ov...

UCSF:

https://generalsurgery.ucsf.edu/conditions--procedures/healt...

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

#154

Post by sizzle »

14 wrote: post #82
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.

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.

I can’t drink coffee with sugar for the same reason, just some 2% milk and I’m happy.

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

#155

Post by Smaug123 »

fortran77 wrote: post #153
Smaug123 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pulling a sleight of hand here with your definitions. To rephrase the sibling: if you are obese or overweight, you have, by definition, a certain BMI. (According to the WHO and many national entities, anyway.) The intended common-sense definition of obesity is "accumulation of fat to an unhealthy level", but the diagnosis of obesity is usually based on a statistic which merely correlates with that. Similarly,…

Harvard Medical School: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-you-be-ov... UCSF: https://generalsurgery.ucsf.edu/conditions--procedures/healt...

Naturally, this is all phrased in general terms, and all hedged with e.g. the direct quote "While there is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to a person's ideal weight, men should not ignore significant weight gain and the implications it has for their future health." Again, of course, you're pulling exactly the same sleight of hand: confusing a risk factor with an actual health problem. It's certainly not "true by definition" that being overweight means you are unhealthy, as you claimed.

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

#156

Post by sjwalter »

james4k wrote: post #80
sjwalter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment "should reduce oils" is silly. Oils as a category are hugely important to good health. Presumably, eliminating the bad oils is the way to go. The way I do it is to have a palette of base ingredients for each of fat, acid, and heat. You can create a lot of beautiful, artful meals with a very limited palette. My fat palette, for instance, is primarily rendered animal fats (pork lard, then beef tallow…

What do you think oil is? It's processed food. And I never said you have to get rid of it entirely. But there's no doubt we use too much of it. Why is that controversial? And there is too much consensus around saturated fat being involved in both cardiovascular disease and diabetes for me to say animal fats are a good substitute. It's a step in the wrong direction, even. The only thing worse might be palm oil.

True, oil is processed food. By that same argument, all cooked food is processed.

The animal fats I eat are from my own farm, processed by me, lard rendered by me. I realize not everyone can do this, but quality control (and lack of preservatives and other bullshit) is much easier to do when you're the one doing the cooking.

Just like roasting a chicken yourself is making "processed food", there's a big difference between that and, say, getting some chicken from Chili's, or some canned whole chicken.

When I speak of "processed foods" I guess what I mean is highly processed foods, usually processed in factories, surrounded by incentive structures directly opposed to healthful food production (because it's invariably more expensive).

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

#157

Post by sjwalter »

james4k wrote: post #128
spiderice wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found both your and GP's comment very interesting. The one thing that drives me crazy about nutrition is that everyone is literally saying exact opposite things. It makes it impossible to know what is actually right. It's crazy to me how little we actually seem to know about nutrition. I don't get the same feeling from other areas of study. Most physicists seem to agree on pretty much everything besides the super n…

Yeah, it is frustrating. I'm no expert, either. Part of the problem with nutrition is it's hard to get quality data, like how do you get long-term studies where you can control every aspect of each participant's diet and lifestyle? The best data we have is all over relatively short periods. Saturated fat is one thing there is strong consensus on. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s... https:/…

I've made similar comments before, but this is a neutered attitude. Needing some studies before you agree or disagree with something as fundamental as healthful eating. You can do your own scientific studies by changing your diet and feeling the results.

Nutrition "science" is, like all science these days, inherently untrustworthy.

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

Richard Horton, current editor of The Lancet.

When it comes to nutritional studies, which are basically impossibly to ethically control, and are most often funded by large agribusiness concerns, and with a huge problem of only publishing studies that agree with a certain incentive set, you not only CAN but SHOULD ignore it all.

And finally, anything that winds up saying meat is bad for you should raise huge amounts of skepticism. Our entire history as a species indicates that we were built for healthy meat. (Obviously notwithstanding garbage, factory-farmed tortured flesh.)

If you're of the mind that you can't make decisions about your health without a bunch of highly-motivated sophists telling you what's right, you should probably take a step back and rethink.

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

#158

Post by BoorishBears »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #56
ksaj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian, may I offer you a double double? I love coffee. Not Timmie's -- good proper coffee. And I only ever add a dash of milk and about 1/4 tsp of sugar. The rationale behind making a weak cup of coffee sweeter than the accompanying donut has never made sense to me. It's so hard to drink like that. I'm clearly outnumbered by people who are used to taking in that much sugar with every syrupy mouthful.

I think part of the issue with coffee, at least in the US, is that most mainstream coffee is ghastly over-roasted (hence the nickname Charbucks), so you need to add sugar to make it palatable. I'm big into home espresso, and my morning breakfast drink is a 5-6 oz cappuccino. With a delicious, medium roast coffee and properly steamed milk the drink is more than sweet enough (heating milk to the right temp makes it tas…

Starbucks did introduce one non-burnt base for drinks, the "blonde espresso"

But burnt Starbucks also sets the standard that a lot of people now expect, and then smaller places try to follow that so...

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

#159

Post by gregsq »

phonypc wrote: post #141
gregsq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person whose lived mostly in the UK and Australia, and now the US for six years, I still can’t eat many American versions of things I know. Ordinary things like Kit Kat’s or any chocolate, supermarket cakes and so on. They’re almost unpalatable to me. Cadbury’s chocolate, made under license here, is another example. In a shop the other day and the lady at the checkout was discussing with the lady she was serving…

> some salt she had in store had sugar in its ingredients list. We were all bemused. That's common in iodized salt. It's not nearly enough to taste or make a difference in your diet.

Thanks I didn't know that. Potassium iodate mostly elsewhere and iodide in the US, stipulated by the FDA, which seems the right conservative decision. Now I’m amused by our bemusement.

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

#160

Post by caturopath »

EamonnMR wrote: post #137
crdrost wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This is the exact kind of FuD that I'm talking about. There is a whole world of low-calorie sweeteners, Aspartame isn't the only one by a long shot. As you pointed out It's uncanny potency means that the amount of metabolites you end up with is vanishingly small. For most people it does not cause any problems. Certainly fewer than the 100% of people who art consuming calories when they consume sugar. My suggestion is…

Both aspartame and stevia have definite tastes. I don't mind either and I actually like aspartame in a lot of places.

Sucralose and allulose have virtually no taste other than sweet.

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