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Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions

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

#101

Post by namanyayg »

rajnathani wrote: post #44
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…

> When I was a kid I remember drinking Snapple, now I can't understand how I ever downed that stuff This is because as we grow older, our sweet taste receptors become more sensitive [0]. This is a finding from research last year by UIUC. This finding also makes evolutionary sense, as children have higher energy needs due to their growth. A quote from the research post link: “Compared with adults, children and adolesc…

But is this confounded due to the phenomenon mentioned above? i.e. it's due to children consuming more daily sugar vs adults that's causing the difference.

Might an obese soda chugging adult have the same sensitivity as a child? Or would a child living in a remote village (i.e. no processed sugar in their diet ever) have the same sensitivity as the children mentioned in this study?

It does feel like a large part of the sensitivity is related to how much one normally consumes sugar. I know that since quitting processed sugar even some fruits taste too sweet to eat.

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

#102

Post by schobi »

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?

We have "natural" joghurt in all stores (Germany) without any sugar. A breakfast with <1g of sugar is possible but requires some searching

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

#103

Post by joecool1029 »

ksaj wrote: post #52
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…

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.

>As a Canadian, may I offer you a double double?

Ordering coffee black up there used to be hard, now it's not seen as too unusual.

Related, but I spent half my time in the Toronto area in the early 2010's and being from NYC-area I would get a craving for unsweetened iced tea. I remember I spent a week or so asking every restaurant I went to if I could order it unsweetened and this was not possible. I think Timmy's was finally able to do it in the last few years I was up there, but not without a lot of looks of confusion 'please, no base... just plain tea and ice'.

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

#104

Post by samsonradu »

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…

Same applies to the most common drink out there, Coca-Cola. Used to be a heavy consumer, now it feels my jaw gets stuck from all that sugar stickiness.

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

#105

Post by avelis »

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'…

I like the corporate responsibility aspect here. However, this always gets labeled as a sugar tax and the food industry lobbies to stop any bill like this from passing.

I would offer a cap n trade alternative. Each business gets a fixed amount of sugar they can put in their food based products. They can buy credits from businesses who are sugar free. This shifts the messaging that this isn’t a sugar tax. Businesses can sell sugar. Just dial it down, buy credits, or find a way to spread the sugar across all your products.

Would it work? I honestly have no clue since I don’t know if that incentivizes the right behavior.

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

#106

Post by MandieD »

EamonnMR wrote: post #3
guerrilla wrote: post #2

But if sugar is addictive, as it seems it is, this would cost a significant fraction of annual revenue to food producers, so there's no way they'd do it. Even if it's not literally addictive, it's clearly attractive and they'd take a big hit.

What baffles me is that artificial sweeteners exist and yet there is enough (imo) unfounded FUD about them that leads people to instead choose Sugar or Nothing (which inevitably translates to Sugar because of the pseudo-addictiveness you mention.) Is wireheading bad? Maybe, but if I'm going to be doing it either way I'd rather reduce the harm.

After college, I started gaining weight (like many Americans), so I switched to using Splenda (sucralose/E955) in my coffee. Taste was fine, “after effects” were not. Pity, because I liked the taste a lot better than other artificial sweeteners.

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

#107

Post by rajnathani »

namanyayg wrote: post #101
rajnathani wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was a kid I remember drinking Snapple, now I can't understand how I ever downed that stuff This is because as we grow older, our sweet taste receptors become more sensitive [0]. This is a finding from research last year by UIUC. This finding also makes evolutionary sense, as children have higher energy needs due to their growth. A quote from the research post link: “Compared with adults, children and adolesc…

But is this confounded due to the phenomenon mentioned above? i.e. it's due to children consuming more daily sugar vs adults that's causing the difference. Might an obese soda chugging adult have the same sensitivity as a child? Or would a child living in a remote village (i.e. no processed sugar in their diet ever) have the same sensitivity as the children mentioned in this study? It does feel like a large part of t…

That is assuming that all children (in the study) consume higher amounts of sugar than the adults. This may not necessarily be the case, at least for more conscious parents of children today. There is also an example case of the US federal government having mandated that school lunches be of high nutritional quality [0].

On a side note: Even as I quit processed sugar, I noticed that fruits taste slightly sweeter than normal. However, the bigger personal observation I've had is that my cravings for sweets has reduced. IMO this likely has to do with less drastic blood sugar swings during the day.

[0] https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/obama-era-school...

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

#108

Post by chithanh »

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.

Plenty of countries have this problem. WHO recommends a "sugar tax", to decrease market viability of products that are high in added sugar.

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/260253

Whether artificial sweeteners are the answer is less clear, given lack of evidence that increased use of artificial sweeteners leads to reduced sugar consumption.

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

#109

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

This is why the EU mandates all products to have their nutrients listed the same way, it's always amount/100g of product.

They can add the per-portion or per-whatever, but the per/100g MUST be there.

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

#110

Post by theshrike79 »

josh_today wrote: post #17

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

Because the US produces WAY too much corn. Like insane amounts of corn.

And to make use of all that production, they make sugar out of it. High-fructose corn syrup to be exact. And then they put it EVERYWHERE because it's so cheap - because of the overproduction.

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