I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up.
One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).
Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.
I think it should be made clear that we simply don't know enough about keto yet to call it "healthy." More healthy than sugar over-consumption? Almost certainly. I will say that it allowed me to cut to under 10% bodyfat with almost no effort, so for that I think it is a valuable tool.
But I also found that I was not making progress in my athletic hobbies until I stopped eating keto. My progress visibly accelerated after I stopped. So I hesitate to recommend it as anything other than a short term body recomposition tool. Fat may not be evil, but carbs aren't either.
I can echo this. I'm on keto right now and I have no trouble for most of the day. What troubles me is strenuous activity. I can still do it, but I take longer to recover. If I'm lifting, I rest twice as long between sets. I went for a run today that shouldn't normally give me trouble but I was knackered by the uphill stretches.
I don't mind much. I feel healthy, I'm losing weight and my mind feels focused the entire day.
After some back-and-forth, I've found that Keto is best for short periods of time, e.g., 1-3 month periods. Physical activity can feel quite strenuous, especially when you first start Keto, and your body isn't adapted to using fat as a fuel source.
It's an incredibly effective tool to help you re-imagine the composition of your diet. For example, after my first time doing Keto, I seriously considered which carb sources I wanted to re-introduce to my diet.
On one end, you have short-chained carbs (sugars), and on the other end, complex carbs. You also have processed foods (which have fortified micronutrients), and whole foods (naturally occurring micronutrients). I now stick to whole foods with complex carbs. You'll get more fiber this way, and complex carbs are a slower-burning food source that keep you feeling fuller, longer. I've re-introduced carbohydrates from things like beans, quinoa, and the occasional potato.
Like anything, Keto is a tool. It should not be considered a silver bullet since we don't know the long-term health consequences of long periods of Ketogenesis.
I think the demonisation of fat might be partly a linguistic problem. “fat” is a derogatory term for someone who is overweight, but it also happens to describe an important component of food, so the (incorrect) connection forms itself: eating fat = getting fat. This isn't the case in all languages, though I don't know if that actually has meant Germany or wherever cares less about fat content.
There seems to be two major camps when it comes to weight loss: this confused thinking of lowering fats to lose weight (as you mention), and conversely, CICO (calories-in, calories-out).
In Western diets, it is all too easy to binge on processed carbs. For people struggling to manage weight, that is usually the main issue. Diets such as Keto or Paleo tend to restrict processed foods which make it hard or nearly impossible to consume processed carbs.
Restrictions from these diets naturally lead to CICO. The body only cares to consume so much whole foods -- you can eat a very large quantity of vegetables before hitting an equivalent amount of calories from processed foods (like potato chips, etc). These diets are essentially an "easy" framework (easy conceptually, challenging in practice for some due to cravings) for following CICO and reducing calories.
My wife and I are doing IF (OMAD - One Meal A Day). And obviously don't eat junk food, sugar etc.
For me the biggest surprise was how little food we actually need. I remember myself few years ago eating a breakfast in the morning, then coffee with a muffin or donut first thing at work, then huge lunch, then another snack, then huge dinner at home (of course! just came from work - need to treat myself) and then maybe another snack before going to bed. Can't even imagine how many calories and sugars we were consuming each day. We were literally overeating every single day.
Now we eat only once a day, avoid junk food and sugars, feel awesome, look and feel much better. And it works for us even with quite intensive hiking trips and with gym/exercises.
I've been trying out carnivore diet for a couple of months. I went from years of yo-yo dieting and pathological binge eating to effortlessly losing 10% of my bodyweight. I think my psychology got rewired somehow, I don't know how else to explain such a drastic change in behavior.
I just finished a month of carnivore and have stopped doing it, as my life had become a living hell from my frequent and urgent trips to the bathroom. Other than that, it was good for my waistline.
That happens a lot, specially in places selling healthy snacks.
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.
How about we start treating alcohol like smoking? For example ban alcohol advertising like we have with tobacco and I bet society would improve in a lot of unforeseen ways (besides the obvious reduction in alcohol related deaths and diseases and family issues).
For most people, alcohol isn’t addictive in the same way that smoking or sugar is. If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse. Whereas drinking alcohol doesn’t make water taste worse or whatever.
Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
If you're referring to the CDC figure, then I doubt you're making an apples-to-apples comparison. That figure's based on the deaths that are easily attributable to serious alcohol over-consumption, like cirrhosis or car wrecks. It doesn't include things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol?
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
I think you are underestimating the costs of alcohol on society by reducing it to "just" a death count. I won't deny that sugar consumption is a public health crisis.
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
> Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
Not to mention there are social limitations to alcohol consumption. Eg. you wouldn't normally drink whisky on the bus or at work (unless you happen to be a character from "Mad Men"), but there aren't many times nor places where eating a chocolate bar is frowned upon.
> If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse.
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
Alcohol consumption is by choice by adults, where as sugar consumption is not - children's food are mostly sugary items today in the market. They get addicted by the time they are teenagers, and for many of them (30% or above of all the kids), due to resulting obesity, rest of their lives are spent fixing/fighting it - depression and health issues.
It’s banned in Iceland. The big breweries simply offer a low alcohol with the same branding and advertise those. Poor tourists end up being the only ones buying them, not knowing they are low alcohol, as they are allowed to sell the low alcohol beers in the grocery stores while regular beer can only be sold at the state run liqueur stores.
Vodka companies in Poland were even more inventive. One of them started a yacht rental enterprise (or something along these lines), and proudly advertised "łódka Bols". "Łódka" meaning a boat, and coincidentally rhyming with "wódka" (or vodka).
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
That it doesn't work in Russia is far from proof that it couldn't work elsewhere.
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to. It's also far less harmful when consumed in moderation, no matter how many elusive studies want to push how "there is no safe alcohol dosage" because you might have 15% more risk of cancer in 30 years or something. I agree advertising is bad but you're going to have a hell of a hard time convincing billions of people that they should stop socializing the easy way.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to – the 1st part of your sentence seems to contradict the 2nd: nowadays people can't think of getting together and not drinking and that's to me exactly because they got addicted to socializing under alcohol so much they can't socialize normally without it.
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
Um, prohibition is the complete ban of all alcohol.
umvi is proposing the ban of alcohol related advertising. One is completely different than the other.
The Scandinavian countries show that if you do not prohibit completely, but just make people jump through some hoops to get it and/or make it very expensive, it sort of works.
I've lived in countries with extremely liberal alcohol laws: low taxes, liberal advertising, 24/7 availability, drinking allowed on the street.
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
I distinctly recall these (and much more restrictive) measures having been tried in the U.S. almost exactly 100 years ago, to a very modest success. Sugar seems to be an easier target, because there are sweeteners like aspartame. Alcohol almost by definition doesn't have a healthy replacement.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm a moderate consumer of wine and I just love it. It's good for health, it supplements food in a great way, it rarely gets you drunk and it tastes great. Sure, if you can't hold your liquor eventually it will kill but so will do everything you eat or drink if you consume it in great quantities.
Would limiting alcohol advertising really have that dramatic an effect on the 'good' wine market? I can't recall the last time I bought a decent bottle of wine because it was advertised.
A small amount of wine has been shown in small scale studies to have a moderate health benefit (though it's possible that's due to economic factors), most wine users consume far more wine than was studied.
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
FYI: This article is referring to requiring sugary products to use plain packaging:
> ...suggested sweets, snacks and sugary drinks should be wrapped in plain packaging to make them less appealing, given the excess consumption of the sweet stuff
(I think some of the responses here are assuming the question is about treating sugar like smoking in other respects.)
I think people are afraid of a slippery slope. Legislation is almost always done in a slippery slope manner - at first you limit things a little and wait until people accept it. After a while you limit some more, then some more and then some more.
You can do whatever you want with sugar, but it's not going to solve the obesity problem. Not only are carbs one of the few macro nutrients we can digest, they're also in pretty much everything.
I don't know about this. For example in many countries around the world cigarettes are now put in unattractive packages but not banned outright.
To get very meta, the argument that regulation is a slippery slope, is itself a slippery slope. As in, I think the fear that government is going to continually encroach upon our freedoms until we live in a police state is misguided. This is the argument that big industry uses to exploit workers, cheat on taxes, spew their externalities over the environment, etc etc.
What we should really aim for is a democracy in which well-minded and level headed politicians work to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Perverse incentives aside, I think if that were really the goal, you'd get some level of regulatory balance that was neither too loose nor too restrictive.
God I hope so. I grew up obese and am now about halfway through undoing the damage using a ketogenic diet. I really do think sugar sweetened drinks should be banned for sale to children under 18, as that causes the most damage.
I feel fortunate to genuine enjoy sugar-free carbonated beverages (from plain carbonated water to the varieties with mild flavorings, e.g., La Croix). So many people can't appreciate the subtleties of these beverages because their high-sugar diets.
I forget what exactly caused me to switch, but I realized in college that buying soda with a meal made it significantly more expensive (e.g., $7.50 meal was now $9.50). Tight on money, it's a quick way to squeeze an extra meal or two. Still wanted something more than water, so I tried the soda machine's carbonated soda water tab. Now, it's my go-to! (Sidenote: a good number of restaurants do not have soda water tabs on their machines. I find it to be a slight annoyance).
Folks that only enjoy sweetened carbonated beverages, I think, can't even imagine enjoyed unsweetened carbonated. But it is totally possible to eventually reach that state.
That would be a good thing. Milk consumption greatly reduces iron absorption (and health benefits are iffy to say the least), and fruit is better eaten than drank. Our digestive system is built on the idea of chewing food (through vagus nerve stimulation).
Parents can buy whatever they want for their kids, I said nothing about banning consumption. Milk would be fine, however most juices and chocolate milk are pretty bad for you.
No need to punish everyone for the problems of a few. If you were to ban it, it would make sense to only ban it for those that cannot be responsible with sugary drinks.
It'd be much harder than cigarettes to define and enforce, and more prone to loopholes. What's a "sugary food"? Grams of sugar? They'd just sell fun-sized. Percentage mass? That could impact fruit. Added sugar? What is "non-added sugar"? Specific product categories like soda and candy? They'd just walk the line with things like "sweetened sparkling water".
I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a way to define it, but it'll be hard.
If I eat a strawberry thats non-added sugar. If I sprinkle sugar on the strawberry, thats added sugar.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
This is probably the right way to think about it at an individual level. Eating berries and fruits in season is probably quite healthy and corn-syrup added processed food unhealthy. But we've already seen how companies obfuscate. For example "Nitrates" have been demonized. So know you'll see "natural" or "healthy" food making using of "celery extract," which is really just "natural nitrates."
It's less clear than you might think. Food producers have already adjusted to parents rejecting high sugar products by producing foods that are similar, but use fruit or fruit juice as the sweetener. They often advertise that there is no added sugar.
And what about a pasta that ends up with some sugars from the process of being made? What's the difference between "natural pasta" and "sugar added pasta"?
> If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
Any items which contains more than 1g sugar per 100 gram, and contains any amount of product that has been process or mixed with something else not found in nature (so no on apples, yes on apple juice, yes on anything that has added sugar).
Out of curiosity, how did you become so knowledgeable about nutrition? This comment, and your other (now deleted) comment make it seem like you are really confident that you know more than everyone else.
My biggest complaint about learning about nutrition is that everyone says opposing things, and it is really difficult for me to know what is right and what is snake oil.
Any tips on learning the “right” way to be healthy?
Sugar is bad in large quantities, but there's no such thing as second hand sugar consumption, which is the main reason why anybody wanted to regulate smoking, since nobody wants to get lung cancer from working in a place where everyone else is doing something harmful.
What we need to do with regard to sugar is get people to have some got dang self control, which starts with proper education K-12 and decent menus for school lunches.
In my amateur opinion, yes. The principal difference is pleasure: sugar and other sweet things are more pleasurable to eat than bland foods like white bread.
This is important because eating when you're not hungry is a huge risk factor for obesity. It's not rewarding or fun to eat bland foods when you're not hungry, but it is still fun to eat candy when you're not hungry. This can be particularly problematic when sugary foods become a form of hedonic substitution or a coping strategy in bored or depressed individuals. Additionally, there are some studies which suggest that the tongue may become desensitized to sweetness when habitually eating sugary foods, potentially motivating individuals to choose sweeter foods at meal times:
Sugar is needed for yeast to raise the dough. It's common everywhere not in the US alone. I'm in Europe and most bread has sugar added during preparation. Small amounts but still sugar.
Some difference - definitely. Does it count as "much"? Depends on your definition of "much". Glycemic index is interesting starting point to look into this.
Not all white bread is identical either. Sugar content may vary a lot from brand to brand. Glycemic index too.
Not all sugar is actually processed by the body the same though.
Fructose gets processed in the liver whereas glucose goes into the blood stream triggering insulin response.
Other very fine points are glycemic index, for example a low glycemic index food breakdown to glucose, bypassing the liver, but is absorbed into the bloodstream relatively slowly for glucose and minimizes the insulin spike/response promoting more stable blood sugar levels.
That's only half the story. Simplest sugars (monosacchrides like fructose) get absorbed almost instantly in your stomach/instentine while more complex sugars/carbs (disacchrides and starches) get finally broken down and absorbed further down your intestine. This can have a dramatic impact on your biome.
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One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).
Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.
But I also found that I was not making progress in my athletic hobbies until I stopped eating keto. My progress visibly accelerated after I stopped. So I hesitate to recommend it as anything other than a short term body recomposition tool. Fat may not be evil, but carbs aren't either.
I don't mind much. I feel healthy, I'm losing weight and my mind feels focused the entire day.
It's an incredibly effective tool to help you re-imagine the composition of your diet. For example, after my first time doing Keto, I seriously considered which carb sources I wanted to re-introduce to my diet.
On one end, you have short-chained carbs (sugars), and on the other end, complex carbs. You also have processed foods (which have fortified micronutrients), and whole foods (naturally occurring micronutrients). I now stick to whole foods with complex carbs. You'll get more fiber this way, and complex carbs are a slower-burning food source that keep you feeling fuller, longer. I've re-introduced carbohydrates from things like beans, quinoa, and the occasional potato.
Like anything, Keto is a tool. It should not be considered a silver bullet since we don't know the long-term health consequences of long periods of Ketogenesis.
In Western diets, it is all too easy to binge on processed carbs. For people struggling to manage weight, that is usually the main issue. Diets such as Keto or Paleo tend to restrict processed foods which make it hard or nearly impossible to consume processed carbs.
Restrictions from these diets naturally lead to CICO. The body only cares to consume so much whole foods -- you can eat a very large quantity of vegetables before hitting an equivalent amount of calories from processed foods (like potato chips, etc). These diets are essentially an "easy" framework (easy conceptually, challenging in practice for some due to cravings) for following CICO and reducing calories.
For me the biggest surprise was how little food we actually need. I remember myself few years ago eating a breakfast in the morning, then coffee with a muffin or donut first thing at work, then huge lunch, then another snack, then huge dinner at home (of course! just came from work - need to treat myself) and then maybe another snack before going to bed. Can't even imagine how many calories and sugars we were consuming each day. We were literally overeating every single day.
Now we eat only once a day, avoid junk food and sugars, feel awesome, look and feel much better. And it works for us even with quite intensive hiking trips and with gym/exercises.
It amazes me how many people make this mistake.
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.
Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
NIDA puts the overall US national cost of tobacco use at $300 billion and of alcohol use at $249 billion.
It's impossible to become physically dependent on sugar, whereas an alcoholic can die if they quit cold turkey.
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
One in eight American adults.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
Deleted Comment
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/alco...
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
Dead Comment
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
> ...suggested sweets, snacks and sugary drinks should be wrapped in plain packaging to make them less appealing, given the excess consumption of the sweet stuff
(I think some of the responses here are assuming the question is about treating sugar like smoking in other respects.)
You can do whatever you want with sugar, but it's not going to solve the obesity problem. Not only are carbs one of the few macro nutrients we can digest, they're also in pretty much everything.
To get very meta, the argument that regulation is a slippery slope, is itself a slippery slope. As in, I think the fear that government is going to continually encroach upon our freedoms until we live in a police state is misguided. This is the argument that big industry uses to exploit workers, cheat on taxes, spew their externalities over the environment, etc etc.
What we should really aim for is a democracy in which well-minded and level headed politicians work to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Perverse incentives aside, I think if that were really the goal, you'd get some level of regulatory balance that was neither too loose nor too restrictive.
I forget what exactly caused me to switch, but I realized in college that buying soda with a meal made it significantly more expensive (e.g., $7.50 meal was now $9.50). Tight on money, it's a quick way to squeeze an extra meal or two. Still wanted something more than water, so I tried the soda machine's carbonated soda water tab. Now, it's my go-to! (Sidenote: a good number of restaurants do not have soda water tabs on their machines. I find it to be a slight annoyance).
Folks that only enjoy sweetened carbonated beverages, I think, can't even imagine enjoyed unsweetened carbonated. But it is totally possible to eventually reach that state.
I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a way to define it, but it'll be hard.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
“I didn’t add sugar, i just put this highly sweet blended fruit in the dish!”
> If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
Extremely disagree.
Deleted Comment
My biggest complaint about learning about nutrition is that everyone says opposing things, and it is really difficult for me to know what is right and what is snake oil.
Any tips on learning the “right” way to be healthy?
Sugar is bad in large quantities, but there's no such thing as second hand sugar consumption, which is the main reason why anybody wanted to regulate smoking, since nobody wants to get lung cancer from working in a place where everyone else is doing something harmful.
What we need to do with regard to sugar is get people to have some got dang self control, which starts with proper education K-12 and decent menus for school lunches.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4224
This is important because eating when you're not hungry is a huge risk factor for obesity. It's not rewarding or fun to eat bland foods when you're not hungry, but it is still fun to eat candy when you're not hungry. This can be particularly problematic when sugary foods become a form of hedonic substitution or a coping strategy in bored or depressed individuals. Additionally, there are some studies which suggest that the tongue may become desensitized to sweetness when habitually eating sugary foods, potentially motivating individuals to choose sweeter foods at meal times:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.13149
White bread isn't good for you, but it lacks these effects.
Not all white bread is identical either. Sugar content may vary a lot from brand to brand. Glycemic index too.
Fructose gets processed in the liver whereas glucose goes into the blood stream triggering insulin response.
Other very fine points are glycemic index, for example a low glycemic index food breakdown to glucose, bypassing the liver, but is absorbed into the bloodstream relatively slowly for glucose and minimizes the insulin spike/response promoting more stable blood sugar levels.