8 ms·

The reason is that in the 1970s and 80s people started freaking out about fat. Everyone from the FDA to USDA to family doctor was telling people fat was bad. S

• tinha 9y ago
  There's a documentary on Netflix about this, I think it's called Sugar x Fat.
  • Fnoord 9y ago
    There's 2 good documentaries I remember about the subject (though there's likely many more): That Sugar Film [1] and Fed Up [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sugar_Film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sugar_Film [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fed_Up_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fed_Up_(film)
    • perseusprime11 9y ago
      +1 to Fed Up.
    • gukov 9y ago
      That Sugar Film is good and fun.
    • pgsandstrom 9y ago
      I dont know about Fed Up, but at the very least That Suger Film is very dishonest and not good science. Unfortunately the only good source I have is in swedish, but here it is: https://traningslara.se/hur-du-gor-en-storsaljande-men-usel-dokumentar-om-kost/ https://traningslara.se/hur-du-gor-en-storsaljande-men-usel-...
      • KozmoNau7 9y ago
        I am inherently distrustful of anything that tries to demonize a specific foodstuff or nutrient, without bringing some serious evidence to the table. For instance, the evidence against trans fats is seriously overwhelming and convincing. The evidence against carbohydrates? Eh, not so much. Avoid added sugar, don't worry so much about bread (as long as you avoid the stuff with added sugar, obviously) or rice or paste or potatoes.
    • dorkwood 9y ago
      'That Sugar Film' is incredibly dishonest. The guy claims he gained about 15kg over a one month period by substituting sugary foods into his diet while keeping his caloric intake the same. That's a massive claim which you'd expect to be backed up by pretty rigorous testing, yeah? Not even close. He doesn't even count his calories. The whole time I was watching I was waiting to see the numbers. Spoiler alert: there aren't any. Halfway through the 'experiment' he states that he's never counted calories before, proceeds to do it just once, and then claims that his intake appears to be the same as it was before. To embark on a project like this and only measure your caloric intake once throughout the entire thing is incredibly disingenuous behaviour.
  • jessaustin 9y ago
    Does anyone have an opinion on this one, also on Netflix? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Health It's pro-veganism and the narrator is a goofy manchild, but has credible (to me anyway) medical experts.
    • BhavdeepSethi 9y ago
      If you read reviews about What the Health online, you'll see that lot of it is vegan propaganda. They've manipulated facts (like mentioning relative probability as opposed to absolute) so that they seem more dangerous than it actually is.
    • mhomde 9y ago
      Yeah, I second that. I starts out very credible but if you examine what they say, especially regarding sugar and carbs it becomes very clear that it's vegan propaganda and skewing its facts heavily
      • huhhhhy 9y ago
        Can you clearly state a non-vague example of the "sugar and carbs" misinformation being perpetuated there?
    • SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
      It was funded by a vegan propaganda group and has been widely discredited.
      • huhhhhy 9y ago
        What is "vegan propaganda"? Someone asking you to please stop unnecessarily abusing animals and polluting the Earth is propaganda to you? This takes a truly mediocre mind to think.
• chiefalchemist 9y ago
  I just finished reading "Grain Brain" (as a follow up to "Wheat Belly" a couple yrs ago. GF aside, both books are - or should be - a wake up call. We're eating ourselves ill. So much so we don't even realize it.
  • AtTheLast 9y ago
    The odds are stacked against us. Working in the nutrition and fitness space has really opened my eyes into how poor nutrition over time really starts impacting lives. Even people who don't eat 'bad', still are having lots of health issues. So much sugar and other stuff in foods that are typically billed as healthy. I'll have to check out those books, they sound really interesting. You might want to check out the book "The Case Against Sugar", it tells the story of sugar and is really interesting.
    • chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Yes. But those odds are not impossible. If you make an effort to be smart about what you consume you can over come the odds. No effort? Well, that's never a formula for victory. I mean there are plenty of alternatives to soda. But people don't choose them.
  • KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Both books are filled with pseudoscience and unfounded speculation. As with any "avoid these specific foodstuffs!" diet, it is destined to fail, because we humans are imperfect, we will not be able to adhere to such diets in the long term, and we will do everything in our power to find loopholes and excuses. http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-shaky-science-critics-say-1.2974214 http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-sh... The only diet* I've had any luck with is the No S Diet: No Snacks, No Sweets, No Seconds, Except (sometimes) on days that start with "S". So while I agree that cutting out added sugars is a damn good idea, I very much disagree with the unfounded "all carbs and grains are BAD!" alarmism. It's not perfect, it doesn't make huge promises and it's not going to make the weight magically disappear instantly or even over a period of weeks, it's a long-term thing. But it is straight-forward and (most importantly) relatively easy to adhere to, and it doesn't require massive amount of effort, like diets where you have to count every calorie and in-depth micromanage your nutrients. Of course there is plenty of room for cheating (you could eat a whole plate of chocolate and call it a "meal"), but that's a fault of all diets where you're not actively forced by someone else to adhere to the rules. Short-term diets are stupid and counterproductive. We don't need diets or temporary crash weight loss, which just leads to yo-yoing. We need actual, lasting lifestyle changes to make sure the weight stays off and we stay healthy. * http://nosdiet.com/ http://nosdiet.com/
• gech 9y ago
  And who pray tell had these organizations and the public direct their focus to fat instead of sugar? Guess.
• mattm 9y ago
  That's really strange that it was that early. If you look at pictures or videos of normal people from that time period, the main thing I always notice is how thin everyone looked.
  • ehnto 9y ago
    It's likely processed foods and junk wasn't quite as prolific yet, and it also takes time to put on weight. I imagine people were also eating much more whole foods as well, so saturation could have been lower regardless of what was in the junk food on the shelves at the time. A study linked on HN recently also showed that sugars relationship to obesity snd diabetes may be that it changes your metabolism over time, and that change to your metabolism is what has you put on fat.
• gregcrv 9y ago
  There was no fat to remove from pasta sauce. Maybe they also figured out that sugar was addictive and added it everywhere to sell even more food with sugar?
  • whathaschanged 9y ago
    If everything you are eating has sugar added, the item you eat without it will taste bitter and/or bland. Or the sugar made the bland (picked early etc) tomatoes used in the sauce more palateable.
    • chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Sodium gets paired with sugar to manipulate the tastebuds. Taste has become a hyper-surreal experience.
      • KozmoNau7 9y ago
        Most chicken sold is pumped up with water (because water is cheaper than chicken). To bind the water, they add a ton of salt. To counteract the salty taste, they add sugar. As a side effect, it makes skinless boneless chicken breasts less likely to dry out if you overcook them slightly. The end result is that most people find the taste of non-pumped chicken unappealing, because they're simply used to the faked-up salt/sugar chicken.
        • chiefalchemist 9y ago
          Yup. Bought a precooked whole chicken at Wegmans a couple weeks ago. The small printed said up to 12% was water and other ingredients (e.g., salt). All we wanted was chicken.
          • KozmoNau7 9y ago
            You're basically paying chicken prices for salted sugar water, it's crazy.
• acdha 9y ago
  Here’s one of the members of the 1970s guidelines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/recommending-drastic-diet-changes/a3c005b5-2b89-4784-8782-83c0055b7aa4/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/... “Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said: "There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected. "The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."” I find the history of that fascinating since the Nixon administration felt pressure to do something about the then-dramatic obesity crisis on a time-scale which was too short for the scientific process. They had some of it right (eat your vegetables!) but the big mistakes with fat and salt made the problem so much worse.
  • jeffdavis 9y ago
    I find it interesting why that doctor's reasoning is flawed: in reality, people don't just follow advice wholesale, they follow some of it based on how much willpower they have for change. By choosing some things to follow over others, they are implicitly making a trade-off. But to make a good trade, you need to know the relative benefits of two parts of the advice. Giving up fats might be good and/or neutral; but if it exhausts your willpower to avoid sugar, and you indulge, then you are worse off.
    • croon 9y ago
      > I find it interesting why that doctor's reasoning is flawed I can't imagine a scenario where that cereal/grain recommendation in GP quote isn't sponsored or populistic at the time though. And while their method/reasoning wasn't flawed if they indeed had no research opposing their recommendation, that's kind of a straw man from the main issue of avoiding fat being legitimately bad. You need energy, and you get some from protein which you desperately need, but you can't get all your energy from protein, and that leaves you fats or carbs. Of those it's so much worse to avoid fat than carbs.
• alphaalpha101 9y ago
  >The latter probably had some all along but the fat free varieties had a lot more. Of course they 'had some all along'. You can't make muffins without sugar. It's impossible.