It’s the Sugar, Folks

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/its-the-sugar-folks/?smid=tw-share

by joecurry • 13 years ago

175 219 13 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

3am• 13 years ago

They had better change the messaging. I'm in favor of common-sense regulation of mass-production food ingredients, and "sugar is toxic" even rubs me the wrong way.

kansface• 13 years ago

We need to tax sugar like we tax tobacco for the same reasons. It will decrease consumption. Those taxes will pay for the medical expenses of people with diabetes.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

An apple a day is the doctor's pay?

TDL6• 13 years ago

So we should be taxing fruits then, right?

deelowe• 13 years ago

When is this going to stop? Endless government regulation is not the solution to everything. Look, there's a huge health movement going on in the country right now. Just like there was an anti-smoking movement starting up before the government ever got involved with that. The people who fund this crap aren't looking to do good, they just want more tax revenue (or more grant dollars from those who want more tax revenue). That's what they've always wanted.

Don't believe me? Restaurants are now voluntarily adding calorie numbers to menus, because the lower calorie stuff is higher margin and people buy it. Vitamin water, coke zero, pepsi one/0, izze, baked chips, etc... etc... etc.. take up much more room in the grocery stores than they used to. Trader joes and whole foods are massive businesses now and threatening the big boys like kroger. I'm not saying obesity isn't a problem, but I do think we'll see the trend start changing for the better soon.

There's no need for regulation. The public will shift on it's own. All we need is better education. Almost everyone I know(in my age group and younger) eat much more healthily than their parents do/did simply because they are better informed. Contrary to popular belief, people do make rational decisions when it comes to eating (excluding socioeconomic factors).

jlgreco9• 13 years ago

Would taxes on sugary things actually decrease consumption? I doubt you would actually be able to tax a 50 cent drink enough to make anyone reconsider purchasing it, particularly considering people will pay up to several dollars for that same beverage in other contexts. Nobody is going to be doing the "can I afford this, with the tax price included" calculus with things that cheap. (The fact that we seem to always display prices pre-tax only aggravates this)

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

No, we need to stop subsidizing sugar and flour production. I'm visiting the US after living elsewhere, and the #1 thing I notice about the meals is how carbo-loaded and sugar-loaded they are -- including most people's home cooking!

Not to say I don't enjoy some of the sugar-loading, but the carbo-loading is just annoying. When I help friends make a vegetable stir-fry with noodles, I don't want a bowl that's 75% rice noodles. I don't want to feel hungry again 3 hours later despite eating a large meal, because the large meal had little in it other than kilocalories from simple carbohydrates.

I want the kind of veg-and-protein filled meals I've gotten more used to, in which I can measure sugar levels by whether something tastes sweet and I feel full all day/evening because most of the meal's content was "thick" stuff like vegetables, legumes, eggs, meat, cheese, olive oil and/or fish rather than "thin" foods like milk or sauce, or "very thin" foods like bread, pasta, or rice.

josefresco• 13 years ago

Agreed. Using the same logic, they could wage the same campaign against water.

themgt3• 13 years ago

Because your chance of diabetes goes up 1.1% for every glass of water you drink?

stretchwithme2• 13 years ago

Yes, its an indiscriminate expression. Sort of like saying metal can kill you when its actually bullets.

Its isolating fructose from its natural packaging that is the problem. Metabolizing large amounts of it must be done by the liver and it has side effects.

The other half of table sugar is glucose and it is handled by releasing insulin. Insulin releases leptin as a side effect, which makes you feel satisfied.

Starches break down into glucose. And glucose can be used by every cell in the body.

Lustig's video on this goes through all the biochemistry.

awolf2• 13 years ago

>In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.

Sigh. No, according to this study, there is a stronger correlation between sugar and diabetes than between obesity and diabetes.

>Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence.

Much better! Lead with that next time, medical research reporter.

All in all, this seems like a pretty good study that controls for a lot of confounding variables that a lot of diet related studies completely neglect. I just wish the reporting here, and in general in all medical research reporting, wasn't so sloppy. The goal should be to spread awareness of new findings, not to spread misconceptions.

JPKab5• 13 years ago

"The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics)."

As far as observational studies, (of which I am a huge skeptic), this one is pretty well controlled for. It's not like they studied 7 nations, or 11 nations. They studied 175 nations. That allows for a whole lot of controllability for various factors.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Not on that list: family history/genetics. I believe that has already been identified as a significant risk factor for diabetes. So it's not just the sugar.

jobu• 13 years ago

This is commentary, not reporting: "Opnionator - Exclusive online commentary from The Times". It's little more than a guy on a soap box or one of the talking heads on TV. Unlike the article, the study itself does appear to be legitimate however.

I would be interested to see if the arguments about sugar we're having now are similar to the arguments about cigarettes in the 60's.

jerf2• 13 years ago

This study doesn't do the impossible and prove causation, but it goes beyond mere correlation in several key ways; follow Uhhrrr's link to http://epianalysis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/sugardiabetes/ . It's not something you can casually dismiss with a wave of the "correlation is not causation" mantra.

sukuriant• 13 years ago

I'm sitting here, dumbfounded, in a mix of response between "no shit" and "this isn't something that needs to be regulated".

mbreese4• 13 years ago

This is ridiculous. Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

Yes, we know that over-eating causes diabetes and obesity. And this study says that foods high in sugar pose the greatest threat. But seriously, are we going to start to say that sugar is toxic in the same way that cigarettes are toxic? We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising. The damage done by smoking... not so much.

This reminds me of a pet peeve that my grad advisor had. In our area it was common to see signs that said something to the effect of "No dumping of chemicals". He loved to point out that water was a chemical.

sophacles2• 13 years ago

Actually yeah, just like a cigarette here and there is not the same in effect as smoking a pack a day, some fructose and other sugars here and there are probably not going to hurt you, but there are noticeable long term effects of constantly having too much sugar.

Further comparison: sugars and nicotine both trigger dopamine cycles that can turn into mental dependence on higher doses, feeding the negative affects even more.

Finally, I can't wait to see all the backpedalling from food companies about how the healthy staple foods they load up with sugar (e.g. whole wheat bread) are actually and 'obviously' just meant to be treats. 'the added sugar should be a give away, its right there in the small print on the back of the label, under the "this is super healthy" label'.

barney542• 13 years ago

The backpedalling needs to come from the federal government. After all, they have been promoting the idea of the food pyramid and "a calorie is a calorie" for decades. The food companies are definitely influenced by what the federal government says is healthy and what they convince people is healthy.

awolf2• 13 years ago

I agree with your general sentiment, but one thing you said bears correction:

>We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

No, not really. Our bodies run on glucose yet our diets are rife with fructose which must be converted by our livers into a usable form. The metabolic pathway responsible for this conversion is a bottleneck and has nothing to do with how much exercise we get.

JPKab5• 13 years ago

Thank you. It's frustrating how much ignorance there is related to the blind "a calorie is a calorie" and "calories in = calories out = health" lunacy.

mbreese4• 13 years ago

I was thinking more in terms of glycogen and lipid getting burned up during exercise. Whatever glucose you can't use gets converted in one way or another. I'm sure there are nuances, and it's been a while since I had to be able to recite the TCA pathway, but isn't fructose converted to glycogen? So, can't it be burned for energy like anything else? It's one of the metabolites for the TCA cycle, right?

Not to mention, this article (and this thread) are all playing fast and loose with all sorts of scientific terminology... :)

themgt3• 13 years ago

Again, this is not just some blind data cherry-pick, "zucchini-eaters live longer". Robert Lustig has written and spoked extensively about his hypothesis for why fructose is toxic for the human liver and metabolism[1]. It's a controversial idea, but IMO he has made a compelling argument and is now gathering data which supports the hypothesis.

If you want to argue against the hypothesis, please do.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...

JPKab5• 13 years ago

I think the point that is left out by the article, but emphasized by Robert Lustig (Dr. mentioned in the article) is that sugar, in nature, is almost always accompanied by large quantities of fiber, which prevent it from being absorbed too quickly.

Sugar isn't toxic, but refined sugar, or sugar that has been separated from the fiber it sits with (fruit juice) is indirectly toxic. Dr. Lustig's research has demonstrated this, and he has some very detailed lectures on the subject. He isn't some quack: he is a leading researcher in both understanding AND TREATING pediatric Type II Diabetes, which is a newly occurring disease.

When I drink a beer, I understand that the alcohol I love so much in it is essentially a toxin, that in low enough quantities won't hurt me. I also know that regualr, periodic consumption of it will negatively effect my health. Oddly enough, Lustig's research has shown that fructose, in quantities which are completely normal for someone who has just consumed a moderate amount of refined sugar or fruit juice, has a very similar effect on the liver to alcohol. Not completely identical, but similar. I suggest you watch the video.

I have a 6 year old son and a second child on the way. The only fruit juice he gets to have is extremely diluted with water. This isn't me overreacting as an ignoramus. I've looked at the data, evaluated the research, and found it extremely compelling. Ever use a juicer? Think about how many oranges it takes to make an 8 oz. glass. (It takes several, and if you tried to eat that many, you would be full halfway through due to the fiber.) Refined sugar is just juiced sugar cane with extra chemical preparation.

Oranges are good for you. Orange juice is bad for you. I know it screams out BS, but I assure you, look at the science. You will, as I was, be shocked. How the hell can this stuff I've been eating all my life be THIS bad for me, without me knowing it.

lawtguy• 13 years ago

Moderate alcohol consumption actually increases longevity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_alcohol. So regular periodic consumption of a reasonable amount of alcohol is actually helping you.

bostonOU3• 13 years ago

I made juice this morning: 2 oranges, 2 kiwi, and 1 grapefruit. Made two cups of juice for my wife and me. I don't know about the science of sugar, but eating 1 orange, 1 kiwi, and half a grapefruit doesn't seem excessive to me.

kokey2• 13 years ago

The juice thing is a bit more complex, because it depends on the type and form of the juice and what you do or eat along with it. I find that clear apple, grape and pineapple juice is not ideal, but very pulpy orange juice or very cloudy apple juice is fine, especially combined with exercise or the right meal as long as it's in proportions of how much of said fruit you would normally consume.

shrikant• 13 years ago

I'd like to thank you for bringing some sanity into this thread, and (hopefully) provoking some of the commenters here into doing some further reading.

The kind of thought process that causes someone to go "Fructose is a sugar, fructose is in fruit, article says sugar is bad, therefore article says fruit is bad!!11one" is quite frustrating to watch. The levels of uninformed snark in this thread is quite depressing, and is one of the main reasons I usually prefer not to see non-technical discussions on HN.

(Not that I know any better, but I recognise my lack of knowledge and attempt to address it before spouting forth opinions.)

kscaldef• 13 years ago

> We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

The assertion being made is that that's not true:

"The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity"

(emphasis added)

Semaphor2• 13 years ago

The title is pure linkbait. What they are trying to hide behind their typical populist wording is that the confidence levels linking increased sugar intake to an increase in diabetes are just as high as those linking cigarettes to lung cancer.

jlgreco9• 13 years ago

I'm seeing this as yet another attempt by people to justify their own poor health. Clearly it cannot possibly be their portions that are to blame, but rather society, big bones, genetics, and now the food itself being "toxic". Anything to avoid reality.

Fructose is not the problem. Too much fructose is the problem. I think it is no coincidence that the sensational spin the news has put on this story also happens to be a spin that makes their readers feel better about themselves.

nitrogen4• 13 years ago

I'm seeing this as yet another attempt by people to justify their own poor health. Clearly it cannot possibly be their portions that are to blame, but rather society, big bones, genetics, and now the food itself being "toxic". Anything to avoid reality.

This paragraph demonstrates a widely held, thinly veiled contempt for those with a less fortunate metabolism. This contempt is disgusting, because it is willfully ignorant of all the scientific research that indicates there is a lot more than mere willpower that determines a person's behavior, including eating habits.

As with any religiously held position of superiority, people will continue to justify this contempt with all manner of carefully worded excuses for their desire to feel better than those fat people over there. When does it end?

I think it is no coincidence that the sensational spin the news has put on this story also happens to be a spin that makes their readers feel better about themselves.

What point are you trying to make? That the news should be trying to make people hate themselves more than they already do? Good grief! This research isn't about justifying behavior, it's about identifying the chemical processes driving various metabolic phenomena so they can be controlled and corrected!

You know what about this reseasrch would make an obese reader feel better about himself or herself? It's the fact that, finally, someone has identified a specific mechanism that is causing their problems! It's the hope that comes from having a direction of attack that's more effective than self deprivation.

goblin89• 13 years ago

> Too much fructose is the problem.

Or maybe the problem is that your portions could be small and still contain too much fructose. I remember watching a talk where speaker claimed it's not easy to find just some bread without added fructose at a grocery store nowadays (I think it was Dr. Lustig's presentation, actually).

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

Sugars may not be "toxic" per se but dietary intake of sugar or carbohydrate is certainly not essential for human life. Your liver will create glucose when needed and your brain will happily burn ketone bodies when it isn't available. You can easily survive on a diet of mostly animal fat.

anonymous• 13 years ago

You fail reading forever.

It's not sugarS. He didn't talk about sugar>S<. Nobody is claiming that the entire family of sugar>>>>>>>S<<<<<< is toxic. The title is "SUGAR is toxic" (see, no sugar>>S<<. It's not sugarS. He isn't talking about a class of molecules.)

SUGAR - a.k.a. sucrose, saccharose, one part glucose and one part fructose, either bound in a single molecule or alone in what's called HFCS. Extracted. Alone by itself or mixed in a liquid. IS TOXIC.

THAT sugar.

NOT sugarS.

dekhn• 13 years ago

No, if you read the article, the Methods section says "sugars". They don't have data for just sucrose.

mbreese4• 13 years ago

In science, "sugar" is a class of molecules, of which sucrose is one. One thing I'm trying to point out the difference between common language uses of scientific terms.

The other is the sheer ludicrous nature of the statement "sugar is toxic" (meaning sucrose). No, it isn't. Too much sugar in your diet can lead to health problems, but you will not die from eating sugar.

In sufficient quantities, even water is toxic to some degree (and I'm not even talking about drowning).

So, why don't you tone it down a little.

Natsu• 13 years ago

The article unhelpfully uses the term "sugar" broadly when a more specific term would be clearer, using a few specific terms only in passing. Then mentions the causality problem by claiming it's also impossible to "prove" climate change or that smoking causes cancer (???). It says in one place that fructose is the problem, but concludes that "sugar" is toxic.

I feel bad for the authors of this study.

twoodfin• 13 years ago

Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

So is carbon dioxide, but in the political vernacular it's now a "pollutant".

Obviously there is a sense in which it's true that sugar can be toxic and carbon dioxide can pollute, but these kinds of word games aren't meant to convey that sense, they're designed to confuse people. I think less of the writers and politicians who use them.

fredsted2• 13 years ago

>Sugars are fundamental bio-molecules and are essential for life.

That's not necessarily true. Humans do not need sugars from external sources to survive.

>“The amount of sugar needed by the body is zero as the body can produce and absorb sugar from consumption of other daily food supplements.

http://www.theborneopost.com/2010/01/10/human-body-can-survi...

Also see:

http://www.theiflife.com/the-inuit-paradox-high-fat-lower-he...

The no-sugar diets are unsurprisingly popular these days in one of their many forms: Atkins diet, paleo, keto, primal, etc: I personally tried Keto for 6 months and lost 30 kilos and plateaued at a normal weight. I felt great and had lots of energy.

I would actually opine that consuming more sugars than, say, a couple pieces of fruit or a loaf of bread every day, is quite toxic.

It's only relatively late in human evolution we obtained access to lots of sugar.

Uhhrrr2• 13 years ago

Two comments from the article that I liked:

As the principal author of this study, I wanted to clarify some of its details for scientifically-minded readers, in order to avoid misinterpretations: http://epianalysis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/sugardiabetes/

-----

The opening line ("Sugar is indeed toxic.") is distorted and inane. Sugars are not toxic, as evidenced by our evolution of taste buds that respond so positively to them. Sugars are a dense source of energy, which is why our metabolic systems cherish them. Let's leave such excessive, unsubstantiated commentary to The Onion or Mad Magazine, and just apply common sense to our diets.

base698• 13 years ago

Dr. Lustig does indeed claim sugar is toxic in the same since that alcohol is toxic. He goes through the complete cycle of metabolizing 1 molecule of sucrose (1 half glucose linked to 1 half fructose). The fructose metabolism is the problematic part, which was hard to follow for me, and I have an undergrad degree in Biochemistry and graduated with a 4.0. Here is the original talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

JPKab below has a good high level overview.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

As with sugar, most toxins are only toxic at a certain level of intake.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

If you are talking about toxicity, this is a useless observation. Everything is toxic at certain levels. Did you know that there is an LD50 for water?

Nathanael47• 13 years ago

It's a problem of translation between the chemistry definition of toxic (it will kill you in short order) and the common definition (poisonous, noxious). Bittman was using the latter, with an understanding that the dose makes the poison.

Uhhrrr2• 13 years ago

I don't think either of those definitions are well served by evidence.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

And which sugars too? Most of us would assume this means glucose, but what if fructose is also a factor? Could fruit cause diabetes? Or perhaps the galactose in milk? Sugar alcohols?

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

It doesn't even mean glucose. Glucose is, as best we can tell, just fine. Which is almost a given, considering "blood sugar"- a key way your body distributes energy to your cells- is glucose.

Most studies that conclude "sugar" is "toxic" are talking about fructose, which is metabolized differently than glucose. This means fructose (e.g. HFCS) and sucrose (table sugar, e.g. cane sugar)

juan_juarez• 13 years ago

Important to note that this is the opinion section, not news. I wonder how many people are going to miss that detail?

JumpCrisscross3• 13 years ago

Toxicologists are far more likely to emphasize dosage, eschewing the categorisation of chemicals as toxic or non-toxic . Non-toxicologists “tend to view chemicals as either safe or dangerous and they appear to equate even small exposures to toxic or carcinogenic chemicals with almost certain harm" [1].

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1992.... Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks (2006)

tptacek• 13 years ago

Wouldn't it be better for us to link directly to the study, rather than to Bittman's editorial about it? I find the study harmonizes nicely with my view of the world, and I'm even ok with Bittman, but he's not a subject matter expert at all. He's the NYT's former food writer who recently decided to write more about food policy.

tocomment2• 13 years ago

Is there something special about sugar compared to other carbs? If I had to choose between eating bread or cake for the same calories will cake hurt me more?

ashmud• 13 years ago

If the bread is a typical "pedestrian" loaf, there's probably little difference. There is a bigger difference if it's something like Ezekial sprouted grain bread.

frankus• 13 years ago

The difference is that table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are about 50% fructose (the rest glucose).

While glucose (which is what bread is mostly metabolized into) can be used by every cell in the body, fructose must be broken down by the liver using a metabolic pathway similar to that used by alcohol.

There is a hypothesis that once a person's metabolism has been damaged by enough fructose, that any carbohydrate is likely to cause obesity. Basically, that insulin resistance seems to affect fat cell last and once it sets it glucose will be preferentially absorbed by fat cells.

So people with a well-functioning insulin response should be able to eat relatively large amounts of (non-fructose-containing) carbohydrates without issue, but those in whom the insulin response is damaged (probably a majority of Americans over age 25) might need to cut back on all carbohydrates to stay lean.

But again, this is very much an untested hypothesis.

tocomment2• 13 years ago

What do they mean by sugar "availability" in the study? How is that measured, by the price in a given country, imports?

scottjad• 13 years ago

I wondered the same thing. For the most important variable in their study they sure don't explain it very well.

I looked all over FAOSTAT but couldn't find an explanation. http://faostat3.fao.org/home/index.html#METADATA

mamoswined2• 13 years ago

I was going to publish a comment on the study about that- my background is in agricultural economics so I'm very familiar with the database they used. I am curious to know which FAOstat data they used. Was it Sugar, Raw Equivalent or Sugar, Refined Equivalent? Either way, the FAO data is calculated based on production + imports - exports. They admit in the paper itself that this is not a perfect proxy ("It is thought that much of the FAO data on foods and nutrients in the food supply have limits to their reliability") for consumption so it is alarming, but predictable to see this being termed as such by the media.

I don't know if it's the best series of data to use for this. I would have used a much longer series if possible because to be honest the past ten years have not seen a dramatic change in sugar consumption, but I guess their diabetes prevalence dataset only spanned that long. But that brings up the question of the lag for developing diabetes itself, it's not like 50 extra calories. I also couldn't find if they threw out countries with weird or obviously low quality data. Israel's data, for example, is a bit strange. It goes from around 500 kcal/capita/day sugar to 230. I find it hard to believe that consumption habits changed so drastically there.

They also do not discuss much about why they, as non-economists, chose to use econometric rather than epidemiology or biostat methods. I also hate that their final graph is totally unlabeled and there is no option to download a format that would allow one to see which dots correspond to which country.

It would be wise for some of the alarmists on this thread to read the paper and this sentence in particular " Hence, any of the findings we observe here are meant to be exploratory in nature, helping us to detect broad population patterns that deserve further testing through prospective longitudinal cohort studies in international settings, which are only now coming underway."

iaskwhy• 13 years ago

Is aspartame a good alternative?

vixen99• 13 years ago

No it isn't. If you're going to use it or products containing it, I strongly suggest you research this subject for yourself since this is not the place to argue the toss. When you do so, as ever, look to the money.

jff• 13 years ago

Big Sweetener.

mynameishere4• 13 years ago

look to the money

What is that supposed to mean? Coke (et al) probably make more money per volume on the diet drinks. So now that we've looked at the money, so what? As for health, you've got conspiracy nuts on one side, and a clear link with obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay on the other.

derleth2• 13 years ago

Yes, it is.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070102024642/http://www.fda.gov...

> FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.

Semaphor2• 13 years ago

Every time I see an article related to Medicine on HN it seems a high amount of people comment without reading or at least comprehending the article. It's pretty and remind me of the negative parts of Reddit.

bcoates5• 13 years ago

There's an interesting idea in this article:

  ... and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar 
  that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” 
  list, because that’s what gives the industry license to 
  contaminate our food supply.

Ignoring the loaded language, does anyone know what the consequences of removing fructose from the GRAS list would be?

lnanek22• 13 years ago

Industry would find the next cheapest alternative to making the food sweet.

derleth2• 13 years ago

If fructose is removed from the GRAS list, that would imply fruits are no longer considered safe to eat.

bcoates5• 13 years ago

Does not being GRAS imply a duty to test edible plants for containing something? That seems difficult. Of course, it wouldn't be the first crazy regulation...

Pkeod2• 13 years ago

There is no mention of it in this thread so far, so here: http://reddit.com/r/keto Check the sidebar out.

See the transformations which happen to people when they (mostly) give up consuming sugars: http://www.reddit.com/r/keto/search?q=progress&sort=top&...

drivers99• 13 years ago

Keto cuts out carbs including those that are converted to just glucose, not just sugar (which is 50% fructose). It's not the same thing at all.

Pkeod2• 13 years ago

Uh, sorry, what exactly did I say? I said mostly giving up sugars, which is why I mentioned keto.

pdeuchler3• 13 years ago

A NYT Editor's Pick Comment:

""" I'm glad the smoking gun has been found.

High fructose corn syrup is in virtually everything people buy to eat. It needs to go. Enough people's lives have been ruined. The design and engineering of prepared foods people commonly buy is toxic and addictive.

Now we need to re-educate people and make sure long-held views are erased. People have long blamed gluttony for obesity and obesity for diabetes. We now know it isn't true and that the super-sugars we are being force-fed are the culprit. We must all, together, demand that processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup be banned or, at the very least, severely restricted. I don't use the words force-fed lightly. Those among us who are on food stamps or a limited income have no choice but to buy the cheapest foods. Those are the ones that most commonly have the highest amount of sugars added. Anyone with a busy lifestyle eats out a lot. Fast foods, including the ones that claim to be "better," are laced with sugars, sodium, and fat.

We must demand policies that protect us from harm and the greed-driven irresponsible practices of Big Food.

Thank you, Mr. Bittman, for keeping us informed. """

So is "Big Food" the new scapegoat? I guess the next article we'll see a comment proclaiming how "Big Grocery" prices unhealthy foods too low, so now it's their fault.

This is a great study, and it's results are extremely interesting, but this article, and the inferences people are getting from it border on witch trials. The article does a great job of doing everything but coming out and saying what the commenter does "They're force feeding us toxins!". There is such a clear departure from responsibility in today's culture it's almost astonishing. The blame lies 100% with nobody, but the individual has just as much a part to play as those producing the food.

Edit: Does anyone notice the language used in the comment? "Force-fed", "re-educate", "We must all, together", "Enough people's lives have been ruined". It sounds almost like something from 1984.

Also, look how easily the commenter provides inclusion to victimhood... anyone "with a busy lifestyle", or those who "are on food stamps or a limited income". Limited income is pretty broad. It's interesting also, how they "have no choice but to buy the cheapest foods".

Strang2• 13 years ago

> next article we'll see a comment proclaiming how "Big Grocery" prices unhealthy foods too low, so now it's their fault.

And here it comes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01...

This is a backhanded attack on "Big Grocery." Wal-Mart is being "responsible" with an initiative "to offer more healthful foods and push its suppliers to do the same."

Of course, Wal-Mart's competitors can't afford to manhandle their suppliers at the same scale.

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

It's not exactly the worst thing Wal-Mart does. Maybe now their employees will be able to afford the mental and physical strength to change or displace Wal-Mart.

contingencies• 13 years ago

People buy crap. They buy on taste, they buy on price, they buy on marketing. The problem, in fact, is the consumer. Demand will always be filled, and demand is not subject to law.

Here in China, I witnessed a commercial, western-style, pre-packaged apple juice drink yesterday that was sold for 6元 (just under 1USD) for 500mL. On further inspection, it contained 10% 'real' apple juice (which could mean anything...), some artificial flavoring and colouring, glucose syrup, aspartame, and preservatives. They must be making a killing: it was 90% water. Health impact? People used to drink tea - you be the judge.

ahoyhere11• 13 years ago

Yes, the wording is sketchy, but are you aware…

* one of the reasons HFCS is so prevalent in the US is because it's effectively government subsidized? * which is also why the worst foods are often the cheapest? * that HFCS is in all kinds of food you'd never expect, like "grilled" chicken in the salads at mid-level (or worse yet, fast food) restaurants?

If you're a label reader, you will find HFCS in a million places it oughtn't be. Since nobody expects their grilled chicken strips to stuffed with sugar, they are being tricked -- an angry person might say "force-fed."

"Big Food" may be inflammatory but it's also true, in this case. Agribusiness is an enormous industry and in the top 10 lobbyist groups in the US.

Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

jordan0day• 13 years ago

> Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

Nothing in your post appears to justify a ban on HFCS. Are "it gets used in foods you wouldn't expect" and "other countries ban it" justification enough? I'm not trying to defend HFCS, but if you're going to call for something to be banned, you need to provide better reasoning.

Strang2• 13 years ago

You make a very good point: between tariffs, subsidies, FDA and UDSA regulations, etc., the government has effectively shaped the US food industry into what it is today. However, that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to ban HFCS. But I agree we should stop subsidizing it.

pdeuchler3• 13 years ago

The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fresh, unprocessed foods. A whole chicken, rice, and fresh broccoli can feed a family of up to 8-9 for under $20. There are very easy ways to eat healthy for cheap without ever having to resort to sketchy Tyson pre-packaged chicken, or suspicious Wonder Bread.

There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.

JumpCrisscross3• 13 years ago

Evidence does not suggest that high-fructose corn syrup is any unhealthier than other sugars. The problem isn't so much HFCS as the consumption of refined sugars without the fibrous padding that accompanies them in nature. Note that sucrose is almost immediately broken down into glucose and fructose in your gut.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991323/ Health implications of fructose consumption: A review of recent data (2010)

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup_and_he...

JumpCrisscross3• 13 years ago

One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal individualist world-view. The best of us make terrible decisions in almost everything we don't consciously analyse, i.e. almost everything. The rest busy ourselves with illustrating Murphy's Law in strings of bad decisions. When a system provides individuals with easy bad decisions it should not be surprising when people behave per expectation, and thus, not sufficient to blame them.

pdeuchler3• 13 years ago

It's extremely dangerous to excuse someone of not wishing to make conscious, good decisions.

Florin_Andrei• 13 years ago

> One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal individualist world-view. The best of us make terrible decisions in almost everything we don't consciously analyse, i.e. almost everything. The rest busy ourselves with illustrating Murphy's Law in strings of bad decisions.

That's also a pretty trivial truth in psychology.

Those who claim that people are rational agents probably spend too much time interacting with computers, and then make unwarranted (and, I should say, spectacularly naive) generalizations.

bcoates5• 13 years ago

The hard part isn't condemning the decisions of busy people operating in an environment of limited information, it's determining a system that works better and isn't vulnerable to bad actors, which is AFAIK an unsolved problem.

When you put out an ad for someone to decide what everyone in a country will spend billions of dollars on, you don't get fair-minded public servants, you get the most compelling villain moneyed interests can afford.

jerf2• 13 years ago

The rational economic agent is fictional, of course.

The problem with leaping to grand conclusions on that basis is that you must first establish that whatever putative replacement you want to propose is actually better than what people are already doing in the aggregate, and not merely theoretically better. Given that you have the same raw material to work with as the economy as a whole (irrational agents), this is a great deal harder than people are willing to admit. For instance, the very popular "regulate it" answer generally completely ignores the high likelihood that the irrational regulators will simply rigidly lock in some irrational answer; "regulators" or "government" are simply assumed or asserted to be somehow rational, even though it consists of the same irrational agents as anything else. (Bearing in mind that we are generally talking about sorts of irrationality that are difficult or impossible to eliminate with "education", education itself coming from other irrational agents, and with incentive structures in place to embrace irrationality if it suits an agenda.)

I'm a libertarian primarily because I believe letting people choose, then experience the consequences, then communicate with each other in a free society about those consequences, is the fastest way for both the individual and the society to learn about what works and does not. Anything else extends the feedback loop, impeding its functionality, and in many cases, such as the regulated irrationality, actively destroys it entirely.

I'm not a libertarian "despite" the irrationality of the public, I'm a libertarian because of it. If people could be counted on to be perfectly rational and logical, that's when the whole "regulate everything" would be logical and correct; we could assume the regulators were cold and rational in their choices and therefore it's rational to offload judgment to them, because we'd come to the same decisions they would anyhow. But that's not the world we live in.

Getting back to the original topic, I currently consider it highly likely that nutrition is precisely one of those cases, and if it does turn out that nutrition has been grossly wrong, the damage done by it is literally one of the top five crimes against humanity in the 20th century in terms of death and destruction. And to emphasize, yes, I mean fully literally; millions upon millions upon millions of cases of preventable "metabolic syndrome", a passionless name for a horrific, life-altering and life-destroying disease, even before it kills you decades before your time. I'm still waiting to see how it all plays out but someday this is likely to be considered one of the greatest failings of irrational agents being allowed to regulate individuals in the history of mankind. In the meantime, I strongly commend to everyone to read up on all sides of these issues and come to their own conclusions; your life depends on it.

recuter3• 13 years ago

You have a point here, the 1984-ish attitude is unpleasant. However, a broken clock is right twice a day.

From earlier in the week, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307

Junk food is designed to be addictive. Furthermore, there's no truth in advertising, the fact is that people are being manipulated en messe. In the article they full admit to it.

Finally, it is marketed at kids. (Besides, I've been to the US - I know what passes for cheese over there! Heh)

Personal responsibility is all well and good but surely you can't expect the general population to watch the lectures of Dr. Lustig or even know what HFCS is to begin with, never mind that it is bad for you and why.

Once upon a time doctors recommended smoking. What's obvious to you in the present is not necessarily 'common' sense.

Have big warning labels, skull and bones, the works, just like cigarette packs. And ban them from marketing it at kids at least. "If you eat more than one pack of these a week, you will gain weight and increase your risk of diabetes" - I bet you MOST Americans have yet to connect those dots.

cooldeal3• 13 years ago

There are heavy subsidies on corn and not enough on fresh vegetables and fruits.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fresh-fruit...

So yes, lopsided subsidies indeed shape what some people eat.

frankosaurus2• 13 years ago

If subsidies were put in place for fresh fruit, agribusiness would switch from corn sugar to sugar extracted and refined from, say, grapes. The end result is that the market finds a cheap way to put large quantities of sugar in foods. These are the unintended consequences of subsidies.

Avshalom• 13 years ago

I have an infographic for that:

http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/why-does-a-...

ImprovedSilence• 13 years ago

>>> The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list, because that’s what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply."

Oh fer cryin out loud, just try to educate people a little better on how to MODERATE intake of everything, don't go overboard here and try to get a ban on sugar.... What is this world coming to when everybody expects some bigger force to make all the decisions for them and keep them safe. Learn how to think for yourselves and take some vested interest in you actions and decisions. Gotta strike a balance between natural selection and idiotracy I suppose...

anigbrowl8• 13 years ago

I don't want a bigger force to make the decisions for me, but I am quite happy to delegate some of my authority to the government and have it act on my behalf by requiring more accurate labeling and so forth. I eat a very healthy diet, but I don't have the time or inclination to keep up with every last additive and food manufacturing process out there. In fact, I'm happy to pay some of my taxes so other people can study that as their full-time job.

thatswrong0• 13 years ago

There's a huge difference between banning sugar and regulating labeling. Even Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson supports food labeling (though purists might be opposed to that).

Nux• 13 years ago

I think many people know by know sugar is "toxic" and is responsible for pandemic obesity, type 2 diabetes and 99% of the dental mafia, erm... industry; at least I for one preach against sugar every time there's a discussion on diets and food.

This might have just reached a level where authorities need to get their shit together and do something about it... And this is the sad and hard part as many of our politicians may be "subsidised" by the food industry.

degenerate• 13 years ago

A very related, and VERY WELL PRESENTED and scientific video explanation of why sugar is poison, presented to residents at the University of California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

If you like TED talks, this will just blow your mind. It gets highly medical at one point of the talk, but HN should be able to follow along. I recommend watching this when you have an hour of absolute free time and want to learn.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

With luck, this will encourage people to cook their own food. It isn't that hard to do, doesn't really take that much time, and the benefit of knowing what you are eating really helps inform your diet choices.

zmmmmm• 13 years ago

I'm uncomfortable with how this article keeps repeating that because it's "not possible" to do a better study, that the result must be conclusive. That simply does not follow. The fact that you can't do a better study doesn't mean we should believe the result of the best study we have uncritically - and it certainly doesn't mean by itself that the "smoking gun" has been found. So many health myths have been conclusively believed in the past that we should know better than this by now.

It’s the Sugar, Folks

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