271–280 of 307 posts
I grew up somewhere else and came to US when I was 18 for college. One thing that struck me was, people add sugar to their yogurt. All my life I added salt to my yogurt. I mean, I was perfectly familiar with fruit yogurt, but adding straight up sugar was new to me. My favorite snack is adding cucumber, olive oil and tons of salt to yogurt. The first time my American roommate from LA saw me eating this, he literally l…
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I've never understood the market for skimmed milk; normal milk has so little fat anyway, it seems pointless to remove any, especially since it ruins the flavour. I can only guess that the milk producers want that milk fat for something else, butter and cream perhaps, so created an artificial market by claiming skimmed is healthier.
Some people (myself included) just prefer the taste of skim milk. I know it’s not healthier - compared to whole milk, it doesn’t fill you up but it has the same amount of sugar and almost the same amount of calories - but I still enjoy it more.
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"Lazy" obscures the addiction component, yes. But no other addiction has such an accessible and accepted narrative that the addiction is not your fault , there's nothing you can do about it , and so you shouldn't even try to change.
I'm not obese, but I was. There is a weird Internet cult that celebrates obesity, but I think plenty who live in the "nothing you can do" camp internalized bad advice, got nowhere with it, and gave up.
Giving up is the only option after trying and failing diets and exercise programs your whole life. I started dieting when I was ~6 years old.
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The "selfish-lazy-greedy assholes" hypothesis doesn't do so well in the face of endocrinology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15987666
I wish there was a definitive guide to how to respond to that hypothesis. Many many hn commenters and many outside of the internet normal people strongly align with the obese-are-lazy narrative and I’ve basically given up arguing with them.
This is way bigger than sugar or even one segment of research. This type of corrupting influence (direct or indirect) provides enough uncertainty to allow people to ignore all research that doesn't confirm their personal bias. It also fuels the anti-science groups that claim conspiracies to hide the 'truth'.
Lots of "science" and "research" is obviously and gratuitously corrupt. People who ignore politicized research results (like, for example, the "food pyramid" or pretty much anything out of psychology or nutrition "research") are the sane ones.
Relevant talks by Robert Lustig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmC4Rm5cpOI "Sugar -- the elephant in the kitchen" (20 minutes, year 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (90 minutes, year 2009)
The guy is a quack. Bunch of stuff he says in his Bitter Truth talk is false. For example, Japanese consume much more fructose sugars than an average USA citizen. He somehow skipped that, when he used the Japanese as an example of healthy diet people. Japanese individuals consume 1000kcal less than USA daily average. That's probably the only thing that matters.
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Have a read of books by Nina Teicholz or Gary Taubes. In there is a mountain of data showing the correlation of diets to adopting the national dietary recommendation (which vilified fats). They all make a great case that fat is good for you (proper fat like animal, not vegetables oils which really aren't from vegetables at all). You're right it's more than just sugar, it's carbs in general. Which includes French frie…
>roper fat like animal, not vegetables oils which really aren't from vegetables at all Why is the oil not from vegetables?
And 50 years later I still struggle to find yogurt that hasn’t been stripped of its fat at office snack fridges.
Yogurt in America really sucks. They're either "Greek" (strained yogurt), which tastes horrible IMO, or sweetened to death with artificial flavors. I just want some "traditional" types that are sweetened by just sugar with no whey or whatever stripped out.
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Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" talk when it first appeared on YouTube completely changed my attitude towards refined sugars. I highly recommend it. My parents are European, in childhood my mother (and her mother) would regularly give up sugar completely for months at a time to control their weight. They weren't scientific people, and couldn't explain any of the mechanisms or anything - but they taught us kids tha…
I'm European. Is it not common sense in the rest of the world that sweet things make you fat? Wow.
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Lots of "science" and "research" is obviously and gratuitously corrupt. People who ignore politicized research results (like, for example, the "food pyramid" or pretty much anything out of psychology or nutrition "research") are the sane ones.
This is wrong. Is there nothing to know or learn about nutrition? Yes, it’s hard and there is a lot of bad stuff out there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.