Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sugar Love

ngm.nationalgeographic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Sugar Love

#21

Post by cbhl »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #14
001sky wrote: post #7

Americans are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. But they eat too much and exercise too little because they’re addicted to sugar, which not only makes them fatter but, after the initial sugar rush, also saps their energy, beaching them on the couch. “The reason you’re watching TV is not because TV is so good,” he said, “but because you have no energy to exercise, because you’re eating too much sug…

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed that a balanced diet includes 5-7 servings of rice and grains a day, 2 servings of fruits and veggies, 2 servings of protein, and a small amount of fat. That's one of the biggest problems here. What people have been taught is patently incorrect. It's a recipe for riding a blood sugar roller coaster. We teach our kids from an early age to eat sugary foods. We us…

This is why I love the work of Dr. Maya Adam out of Stanford; I took the 1.0 verison of her "Just Cook For Kids" MOOC[0][1] and found it really beneficial.

Granted, getting parents to sit down and spend an hour or two a week watching videos on eating right (and then spending more hours buying groceries and cooking at home) is difficult if they're working minimum-wage jobs and barely making ends meet, and the children of those parents seem like they'd be most vulnerable.

Government initiatives in Canada to improve healthy eating in Nunavut, for example, ended up with passion fruit and coconuts[2] being shipped up to the arctic. I'm not convinced that resulted in better diets for children.

[0] http://justcookforkids.com/

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/childnutrition

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/why-i...

Re: Sugar Love

#22

Post by jdkuepper »

Peter Attia wrote a great article on sugar here: http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/is-sugar-toxic

The conclusion at the end of that article is:

"So, in response to the question, “Is sugar toxic?” it seems to me the answer is, “yes, sugar is probably chronically toxic to many people.” And so is water. And so is oxygen. My sincere hope, however, is that you now understand that this is probably the wrong question to be asking. The better question is probably “What dose of sugar can I (or my child) safely tolerate to avoid chronic toxicity?” The goal should be to figure out your toxic dose, then stay well below it. (It’s probably not wise to consume 95% of the toxic dose of APAP just because you have a really bad headache.) What makes this important, of course, is that with water and oxygen, the toxic doses are so far out of the range of what we normally consume, it’s not really necessary to expend much mental energy worrying about the toxicity. But with sugar, at least for many of us, the toxic dose is easy to consume, especially in world where sugar resides in almost everything we eat."

Re: Sugar Love

#23

Post by makomk »

wavefunction wrote: post #3

An interesting article about one of the worst enemies of health for modern humans. It seems like it completely discounts sugar-beets and other sources of sugar available outside the tropics though. I assume their refinement into sugar is a result of exposure to the arab techniques of sugar-cane refinement mentioned throughout the article, but the history of that other thread of sugar would have been another interesti…

Yeah, beet sugar is a relatively recent innovation that postdated the widespread availability of cane sugar.

Re: Sugar Love

#24

Post by crazygringo »

> The solution? Stop eating so much sugar. When people cut back, many of the ill effects disappear.

I understand the article focuses just on sugar, but when it starts getting to the health effects, the focus shouldn't be on just sugar but rather all high-glycemic-index foods, including bread, pasta, potatoes, and so on -- at least from what I understand. It doesn't do much good to cut back on sugar if you replace it with bread.

Re: Sugar Love

#25

Post by [deleted] »

sparkie wrote: post #20
crusso wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the…

I see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science". Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (althoug…

[deleted]

Re: Sugar Love

#26

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #25
sparkie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science". Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (althoug…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Sugar Love

#27

Post by sparkie »

sparkie wrote: post #20
crusso wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the…

I see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science". Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (althoug…

Of course, it's always easier to bury dissenting views - it makes it look like there's a "consensus".

Re: Sugar Love

#28

Post by grannyg00se »

crazygringo wrote: post #24

> The solution? Stop eating so much sugar. When people cut back, many of the ill effects disappear. I understand the article focuses just on sugar, but when it starts getting to the health effects, the focus shouldn't be on just sugar but rather all high-glycemic-index foods, including bread, pasta, potatoes, and so on -- at least from what I understand. It doesn't do much good to cut back on sugar if you replace it…

Would a 100 calorie quantity of bread not be better than a 100 calorie quantity of sugar cereal?

Assuming of course that you don't buy bread with sugar in it.

"Although the Glycemic Index provides some insights into the relative diabetic risk within specific food groups, it contains many counter-intuitive ratings. These include suggestions that bread generally has a higher glycemic ranking than sugar and that some potatoes are more glycemic than glucose." - Wikipedia

Re: Sugar Love

#29

Post by benjohnson »

doesnt_know wrote: post #10
001sky wrote: post #7

Americans are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. But they eat too much and exercise too little because they’re addicted to sugar, which not only makes them fatter but, after the initial sugar rush, also saps their energy, beaching them on the couch. “The reason you’re watching TV is not because TV is so good,” he said, “but because you have no energy to exercise, because you’re eating too much sug…

> If you want to eat healthy just pick a balanced diet. If people could easily do that we wouldn't be facing an epidemic of obesity. It's sort of crazy you're so willing to ignore the major point of the article and blame those have historically tried to enact change. As far back as 1675, when western Europe was experiencing its first sugar boom, Thomas Willis, a physician and founding member of Britain’s Royal Societ…

The possibility of saving life tends to override squeamishness.

Re: Sugar Love

#30

Post by wmil »

crazygringo wrote: post #24

> The solution? Stop eating so much sugar. When people cut back, many of the ill effects disappear. I understand the article focuses just on sugar, but when it starts getting to the health effects, the focus shouldn't be on just sugar but rather all high-glycemic-index foods, including bread, pasta, potatoes, and so on -- at least from what I understand. It doesn't do much good to cut back on sugar if you replace it…

It's still disputed, but there's a lot of evidence the problem is fructose, not glucose. Meaning that bread and potatoes aren't particularly bad on their own.

Here's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" that lays out the theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Post reply on HN