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Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

nature.com

91–100 of 397 posts

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 medi…

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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#92
post #41

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.

Shops will just sell the sugar and the soda separately, mix it yourself :) Or people will pay more.

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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#93
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#94
post #4
post #2

> 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 ben…

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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#95
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#96
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 medi…

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 ve…

> 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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#99
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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