91–100 of 131 posts
Anything that is derived from something else, distilled, converted or chemically altered is not good for you. Can't be.
It's been my experience that these companies don't care about your health and never will. They just want a compound that will make you addicted to it, so you can keep on buying and consuming it.
It's good to see that Splenda isn't the potential toxic substance we began to wonder it was, but I agree that it tastes icky. That said, I wonder why Stevia isn't considered to sweeten drinks? It's very sweet, it's natural like sugar (meaning it's not synthetic or lab-grown), it also has zero calories, and it doesn't taste icky!
> it's natural like sugar, Why is that relevant? That's orthogonal to whether it is healthy or unhealthy. There's no reason, based on that information, that I should expect it to be any more or less toxic than Splenda. I mean, the wrong 100% natural mushroom will kill you pretty dead.
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Most things can be toxic in high doses. Yes, being natural doesn't say much but I wasn't trying to relate that it's healthy for you just because it's natural.
Sure, I'm just wary of the term 'natural' when it comes to food. As far as I know it confers no benefit on the food item except making consumers feel good about it; i.e., as a descriptor it has little beyond marketing value.
[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...
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Stevia (the plant) naturally has kind of a slight bitter-ish anise aftertaste in the background. Not something I mind personally, but I'm sure others do. Personally I don't know how much this taste is in the purified compounds themselves. I know many of the early "stevia packets" also exhibited these same sort of characteristics, but it seems to have lessened over time. (Then again, some of this may be due to reformu…
You beat me to the punch on the mention of anise (licorice) aftertaste. IME, the liquid stevia preparations produce better results than any of the powder forms. I use it in my coffee exclusively and have tried 'em all. WRT the question, then, about stevia's relative lack of popularity: I think it comes from the aforementioned anise-like note, which seems to operate below a threshold in smaller amounts (such as to swe…
I know HN hate anecdotal stories, but here goes anyways. 6 months ago, despite my regular exercise routine, I was about 20 pounds over my college weight and prediabetic. Instead of following my doctor’s recommendations and going on Metformin, I cut all nearly sugars out of my diet and replaced it with sucralose, fat, and fiber. Now, exactly 5 lbs sugar equivalent of sucralose later, and I’m back to my college weight.…
> While I hate the idea of artificial sweeteners Don't take this as a personal attack on your opinion, but I just don't understand this. The distinction that we make between artificial chemicals and natural chemicals seems to be whether it was invented by humans or invented by evolution. That's a fine distinction to make, but why are human invented chemicals seen as the _worse_ of the two? When evolution invents a ch…
This is where I think your argument breaks down a bit. Let's take your example of sugar: humans have been consuming sugar since before it would be reasonable to call them humans. That's why our bodies have adapted to crave sugars and seek them out--because they have been tested by evolution and found to contribute to survival and reproduction.
And when you say that sugar is decidedly toxic at average consumption levels, you're correct, but that's a human-created problem: the levels of sugar naturally occurring in the fruits a person could obtain, say, 10,000 years ago, were much, much lower than the levels we can obtain by harvesting massive fields of sugar cane, sugar beets, and corn, and refining the sugar from them.
So evolution did test sugars, and then humans refined them to a far greater extent than nature did and, without adequate testing, integrated sugars into our diet to an extent that's culturally very difficult to reverse even though we now know it's deadly.
And the same goes for a lot of things: coca, consumed in leaf form, is relatively safe and effective for treating altitude sickness, but when refined and mass produced becomes cocaine. Alcohol when consumed from rotting fruit has little danger until it's produced in quantity and consistency that enables alcoholism. Chances are, if there's a whole chunk of plant that humans have been interacting with for millennia, it's pretty safe because it has been tested, but refinement processes invented by humans bring otherwise safe chemicals into concentrations and quantities that become unsafe. And while we do test these things, it's often after-the-fact, too late, or just completely ignored.
To be clear, I'm not advocating a "things from nature are better" stance. GMO grain has saved millions of lives. Most of the medicines out there are the results of human innovation. And there are plenty of poisonous plants out there which are perfectly natural.
What I am advocating is that the human track record versus evolution track record is pretty bogus, and vulnerable to selection bias. The fact is, that's just not even a good way to choose whether to consume something. We rarely have enough information to make an informed choice. Even when we study something for a decade we don't completely understand that. So in the absence of information, basing our decision on "organisms pretty biologically similar to me have survived by interacting with this other organism for millions of years" is not a metric to be dicarded.
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> While I hate the idea of artificial sweeteners Don't take this as a personal attack on your opinion, but I just don't understand this. The distinction that we make between artificial chemicals and natural chemicals seems to be whether it was invented by humans or invented by evolution. That's a fine distinction to make, but why are human invented chemicals seen as the _worse_ of the two? When evolution invents a ch…
I'm on the fence on this one. Here's the logic of the anti-artificial crowd, as best I can put it... Humans have evolved alongside natural systems. And if humans have been eating something for a very long time, it's probably alright to eat. If a new sugar-like substance came into existence, it would probably come into existence as incremental changes to an existing system. Let's say that existing system was a staple…
And to be clear, at one point, refined flour was a sign of wealth and status: http://contemporaryfoodlab.com/hungry-world/2015/09/white-is... .
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Well that's not true. Saying it's natural suggests that we have atleast evolved with it in the environment, likely interacted with it at times and have developed biological means of interacting and dealing with it. If something is not natural (i.e. doesn't normally exist in nature), then we would not have developed a biological response to it yet, which means it frankly more dangerous because the body does not know h…
I get your point, but as the above poster said, often the body's way of dealing with things is to suffer and/or die. So...how is having an existing way to "deal with it" terribly helpful? (Not trolling, seeking honest clarification)
But, looking at what generations of long-lived people tend to eat[1] is probably a reasonable guide to nutrition and health. Manufactured/artificial stuff simply isn't on that list since that stuff hasn't been around long enough to be part of a multi-generational study.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100...
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Sure, I'm just wary of the term 'natural' when it comes to food. As far as I know it confers no benefit on the food item except making consumers feel good about it; i.e., as a descriptor it has little beyond marketing value.
This. The term "natural" when it comes to food doesn't even necessarily mean it's not synthetic! Just that it is "derived" from something natural. [1] [1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...
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I'm not a chemophobe by any means. I'm also not anti-lab grown products. Providing for a world with 7+ billion population requires some of this. However, we have decades of studies proving what natural food does to the bodies and we're still learning what synthetic and lab-grown foods do. And yes, I realize this statement can't really apply to Stevia considering the lack of studies into its health on the human body.…
> we have decades of studies proving what natural food does to the bodies You are making the false assumption "natural" foods are a correlated group as far as health goes. This is empirically false (ignoring the fact that natural has no scientific definition to begin with). Studying sucrose won't inform you of the dangers of cyanide though both are "natural".
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I'm not trying to state its health compared to sugar, just that it's not synthetic
Please just be cautious not to fall into the trap of the 'vital principle'[1]. If you had a bottle of L-ascorbic acid ("vitamin C") in your right hand synthesized in a laboratory and a bottle of L-ascorbic acid in your left extracted from rose hips, you'd agree that except for making arguments about impurities (certainly as likely in the 'natural' extract) that the molecules are identical in every sense in both cases…
The problem with vitalism is that it's unfalsifiable; that doesn't mean that it's wrong, simply that science doesn't have the ability to refute it.