Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by fomine3 » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 12:27 AM UTC

phonypc wrote: post #146

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read things like this, I feel that a nutrition class should be required in US high school. Not a unit about nutrition during health class, but a full semester on nutrition. Salt (sodium) is terrible for blood pressure. Just search keywords “salt blood pressure”. And if you don’t know why high blood pressure is bad for you, that’s ok. Spend 2 minutes reading about it, that’s all you need.

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…

Sodium is considered to more problem than trans fats for Japanese people because average Japanese takes more sodium than recommended and takes less trans fats than it meaningfully harm.

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

#172

Post by rteuionwiv » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

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.

What about xylitol? I use it all the time putting it into morning coffee. I'm avoiding table sugar as much as i can, and generally prefer stuff that is not sweet, but coffee is the only thing that needs to be sweetened a bit to kill bitterness.

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

#173

Post by caturopath » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

rteuionwiv wrote: post #172

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.

What about xylitol? I use it all the time putting it into morning coffee. I'm avoiding table sugar as much as i can, and generally prefer stuff that is not sweet, but coffee is the only thing that needs to be sweetened a bit to kill bitterness.

There tends to be more fearmongering about non-nutritive sweeteners (like sucralose and aspartame) than sugar alcohols, for whatever reason.

FWIW, in the last few years two new low-concentration sweeteners have grown a lot: erythritol and allulose. These tend to be tolerated gastrointestinally by more folks than traditional sugar alcohols. Erythritol is in some popular mass-produced food products like Vitamin Water Zero and Halo Top--it has a bit of a cooling sensation. Allulose tends to really just read 'sweet'. It's a little behind erythritol adoption, but I've started to see it in stores (Trader Joe's now carries it) and in random drinks (I've seen a couple smaller canned coldbrew coffees with it).

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

#174

Post by krolley » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 6:40 AM UTC

Dwolb wrote: post #67

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…

Oh yeah. Try an elimination diet that zeroes out sugar and you’ll see how hard it is to find anything on grocery stores that doesn’t have an added sweetener. Yogurt, bacon, sauces are all sweetened (outside of high end speciality brands). Eggs, raw meat, and raw vegetables are basically the only way to avoid sugar.

It is sometimes hard (or impossible) to completely remove sugar, as some items contain natural sugars e.g. even natural yogurt without added sugar contains sugar from sucrose. There was a diet that gained popularity in my country that was the "5% sugar" diet. Here on the labels of items there is always the per 100g reference, so if the sugar is <=5 on that column, you're good to go. So it's easy to stick to and it's interesting what gets filtered from eating in this way.

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

#175

Post by dorchadas » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

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.

See about Nature's Own 100% Whole Wheat. I get it from Kroger. Total sugars are <1g, all of which seems to be added. The only sweetener I see on the ingredients list is brown sugar, but the FDA defines that as an added sugar so it's taken into account.

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

#176

Post by labawi » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #117

paraph1n wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on a second, the linked research is about sugar. I've seen a lot of similar studies suggesting sugar consumption is a problem. Is salt consumption also unhealthy? I was under the impression that it's not.

For most healthy people, salt is not problematic, your kidneys do a great job of maintaining your blood salinity. However, if you have kidney disease, or if you have genetic mutations that cause you to retain salt (as is, apparently, common in certain subpopulations), then too much salt really messes you up. In population studies, this averages out to "excess salt is moderately bad for you", but the distribution of "…

Unlike sugar¹, salt is also necessary in small quantities. It is also quite useful/needed even in moderate quantities (say 1/10 - 1/2 teaspoon) in cases where it got flushed out.

For example, you eat too much sugar/saccharides/food for body to process, blood sugar rises and salt is flushed to keep osmotic pressure. After a couple of hours, sugar is spent, you get cravings from falling (normalizing) blood sugar, but you're also hypotonic so you get headaches as your brain is swelling against your skull.

Eating/drinking some salt (say 1g), some time after eating, when sugar levels fall (~1-3h) can do wonders. Eating more sugar also relieves the pain, but only by delaying the issue. Of course, not overeating sugar in the first place is even better.

¹ sugar in the sense of mono and disaccharides. Not sure if any saccharides are required in diet.