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This Time article details enforcement action by the FTC against a sugar industry ad campaign for their fake claims: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/

This Time article details enforcement action by the FTC against a sugar industry ad campaign for their fake claims: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4088772/sugar-information-history/%3fsource=dam https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4088772/suga... It’s pretty good as it includes some of the original ads...”sugar is part of a balanced diet” “sugar doesn’t just fast good, it’s good food” “eating sugar will help you lose weight”.

village-idiot 8y ago
"Eating sugar will help you lose weight" has got to be up there for the most bold faced lies of the decade, if not the century.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Sure, but you could shorten it to "Eating will help you lose weight" and that'd still be true.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    People trying to lose weight imagine so many ways to believe this is true. Yes there are many details about nutrient profiles and how types of foods affect hunger levels and metabolism and so on. but the first order thing to do, if you want to weigh less, is put less stuff in your mouth, and move around more. all the rest are 2nd and 3rd order details.
    - bena 8y ago
      Simple, but not easy. Smokers can stop smoking. Drinkers can stop drinking. Gamblers can stop gambling. Over-eaters cannot stop eating. Eating is sort of a prerequisite for survival. It's weird that we have this complete blindspot with regards to people with unhealthy relationships with food when we show a lot more compassion for other kinds of addicts. But the things most addicts get addicted to is completely voluntary. Food is one of the few vices that you are required to participate in to some degree. You tell an alcoholic just "to drink less" and you're the asshole. And rightly so. They have a problem. It's best for them to avoid the source. But we find it perfectly acceptable to tell people with food addictions to "eat less". Why is that? So, it is understandable why people would like to find a way that can make it easier. Either a way to make what they have ingested not count, a way to ingest the same amount but get fewer calories from every ounce, etc. And even your advice is wrong. Moving around more doesn't move the needle enough. "You can't outrun your mouth".
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      Those details are important, though. If what you are eating is increasing your hunger levels, most people are going to go with the built-in hunger, rather than whatever their app is telling them they should be eating. Bet on millions of years of evolution over reason every time.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        > If what you are eating is increasing your hunger levels In my experience as someone who has lost-- and been keeping off, for years-- 150lbs, what you eat makes very little difference in your hunger levels. Unless you're talking about eating amphetamines.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      Putting a tapeworm egg in your mouth would be much more effective than either of your suggestions. But tapeworms are contagious.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      I think that’s completely and utterly wrong. First off, available evidence says that exercise alone for weight loss doesn’t really work. The amount of exercise it takes to “burn” off an Oreo is insane. Tons of Americans start exercising every year and lose no weight. Exercise is great for cardio strength, endurance, power, etc. but if you’re hoping to lose weight on a treadmill alone, good luck. Second, different types of food do different things to the human body. 400 calories of sugar and 400 calories of whey protein powder will do radically different things on a biochemical level. While fine tuning the amount of food you eat might be necessary to lose the final pounds, an astounding amount of weight can be lost by changing macros and ingredients without changing calories. Also calories are bullshit. They represent how a good burns, not how humans actually metabolize their food. Finally, food affects how you eat. Foods affect satiety in different ways, which feeds back into how much of it you will eat. Trying to eat less of a food that doesn’t make you feel full (or is engineered to not make you feel full) is a path to exhausting your will power and failing.
      - nradov 8y ago
        This is false. No large scale controlled study has shown that people can lose weight by changing macro nutrients while maintaining the same caloric intake. Please cite your sources.
        village-idiot 8y ago
        Carefully measuring my own calories and losing 40lbs. And in the other corner we have your advice of “move more and eat less”, which given the state of America’s health right now doesn’t work at all.
        nradov 8y ago
        I doubt that you accurately measured your caloric intake. Research shows that most people are unable to do so. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812565 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812...
    - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
      Unless that strategy only ends up lowering you basal metabolic rate, while keeping your body set weight stable, just making it harder to loose weight. Look into the follow up studies from biggest looser contestants. It does not look good. And I think the success rate from you suggestion in the medical studies in general is somewhere around 2%, not encouraging. Edit: I do believe you advice is valid for healthy people though.
- spraak 8y ago
  It's an indirect lie. Fat is what causes you to gain weight, and then excess calories. If your diet is not in excess of fat and calories then you can lose weight with sugar, but no, it doesn't have some magical weightloss chemical in it.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    That’s not quite right either. You need fat and sugar together. Humans can’t synthesize fat easily, so dietary fat is what gets stored. But insulin is the chemical responsible for storing said fat, and insulin levels are heavily modulated by sugar and other simple carbohydrates. The rub is that humans need some level of dietary fat. Without it we go into “rabbit starvation” and die. What we don’t actually need is carbohydrate, we can live just fine without it for arbitrary periods of time. Since any human in a non-extreme situation will have dietary fat and can control their carbs, it’s colloquially correct to say that “sugar causes weight gain”, even if the technical answer is more complicated.
    - spraak 8y ago
      The human body is physiologically a complex (starch) and simple (sugar) carbohydrate machine. There is enough fat in rice or oats, for example, to survive. Yes the human body can live without carbohydrates, but it's basically in adaptive illness that it does. If you start talking about the Eskimo or Inuit, I'll point to their extremely short lifespan and epic numbers of heart disease.
  - will_brown 8y ago
    >It's an indirect lie. Fat is what causes you to gain weight, and then excess calories. Sugar triggers insulin, insulin triggers storage of glucose in fat cells. There is a lot more to energy production/atp/Krebs cycle than calories in/calories out.
    - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
      Glucose triggers insulin, fructose does not. Yet fructose probably contributes more to insuline resistance long term than glucose does. The mechanism, as I understand it is that fructose essentially turns into fatty liver, which increases the insuline resistance, the increased IR in turn causes higher insulin levels from ingesting glucose at a later time causing higher median levels of insulin, also causing increased IR. Point being, the damage done from fructose isn’t measurable from the effects of a single meal. And the insulin raise from glucose is probably not that bad given a healthy start state.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jnordwick 8y ago
And the intro to the article sensationalizes in the other way: "A new study showing that sugar is definitely 'toxic'".

village-idiot 8y ago

"Eating sugar will help you lose weight" has got to be up there for the most bold faced lies of the decade, if not the century.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Sure, but you could shorten it to "Eating will help you lose weight" and that'd still be true.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  People trying to lose weight imagine so many ways to believe this is true. Yes there are many details about nutrient profiles and how types of foods affect hunger levels and metabolism and so on. but the first order thing to do, if you want to weigh less, is put less stuff in your mouth, and move around more. all the rest are 2nd and 3rd order details.
  - bena 8y ago
    Simple, but not easy. Smokers can stop smoking. Drinkers can stop drinking. Gamblers can stop gambling. Over-eaters cannot stop eating. Eating is sort of a prerequisite for survival. It's weird that we have this complete blindspot with regards to people with unhealthy relationships with food when we show a lot more compassion for other kinds of addicts. But the things most addicts get addicted to is completely voluntary. Food is one of the few vices that you are required to participate in to some degree. You tell an alcoholic just "to drink less" and you're the asshole. And rightly so. They have a problem. It's best for them to avoid the source. But we find it perfectly acceptable to tell people with food addictions to "eat less". Why is that? So, it is understandable why people would like to find a way that can make it easier. Either a way to make what they have ingested not count, a way to ingest the same amount but get fewer calories from every ounce, etc. And even your advice is wrong. Moving around more doesn't move the needle enough. "You can't outrun your mouth".
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Those details are important, though. If what you are eating is increasing your hunger levels, most people are going to go with the built-in hunger, rather than whatever their app is telling them they should be eating. Bet on millions of years of evolution over reason every time.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      > If what you are eating is increasing your hunger levels In my experience as someone who has lost-- and been keeping off, for years-- 150lbs, what you eat makes very little difference in your hunger levels. Unless you're talking about eating amphetamines.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Putting a tapeworm egg in your mouth would be much more effective than either of your suggestions. But tapeworms are contagious.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    I think that’s completely and utterly wrong. First off, available evidence says that exercise alone for weight loss doesn’t really work. The amount of exercise it takes to “burn” off an Oreo is insane. Tons of Americans start exercising every year and lose no weight. Exercise is great for cardio strength, endurance, power, etc. but if you’re hoping to lose weight on a treadmill alone, good luck. Second, different types of food do different things to the human body. 400 calories of sugar and 400 calories of whey protein powder will do radically different things on a biochemical level. While fine tuning the amount of food you eat might be necessary to lose the final pounds, an astounding amount of weight can be lost by changing macros and ingredients without changing calories. Also calories are bullshit. They represent how a good burns, not how humans actually metabolize their food. Finally, food affects how you eat. Foods affect satiety in different ways, which feeds back into how much of it you will eat. Trying to eat less of a food that doesn’t make you feel full (or is engineered to not make you feel full) is a path to exhausting your will power and failing.
    - nradov 8y ago
      This is false. No large scale controlled study has shown that people can lose weight by changing macro nutrients while maintaining the same caloric intake. Please cite your sources.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Carefully measuring my own calories and losing 40lbs. And in the other corner we have your advice of “move more and eat less”, which given the state of America’s health right now doesn’t work at all.
        nradov 8y ago
        I doubt that you accurately measured your caloric intake. Research shows that most people are unable to do so. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812565 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812...
  - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
    Unless that strategy only ends up lowering you basal metabolic rate, while keeping your body set weight stable, just making it harder to loose weight. Look into the follow up studies from biggest looser contestants. It does not look good. And I think the success rate from you suggestion in the medical studies in general is somewhere around 2%, not encouraging. Edit: I do believe you advice is valid for healthy people though.
spraak 8y ago
It's an indirect lie. Fat is what causes you to gain weight, and then excess calories. If your diet is not in excess of fat and calories then you can lose weight with sugar, but no, it doesn't have some magical weightloss chemical in it.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  That’s not quite right either. You need fat and sugar together. Humans can’t synthesize fat easily, so dietary fat is what gets stored. But insulin is the chemical responsible for storing said fat, and insulin levels are heavily modulated by sugar and other simple carbohydrates. The rub is that humans need some level of dietary fat. Without it we go into “rabbit starvation” and die. What we don’t actually need is carbohydrate, we can live just fine without it for arbitrary periods of time. Since any human in a non-extreme situation will have dietary fat and can control their carbs, it’s colloquially correct to say that “sugar causes weight gain”, even if the technical answer is more complicated.
  - spraak 8y ago
    The human body is physiologically a complex (starch) and simple (sugar) carbohydrate machine. There is enough fat in rice or oats, for example, to survive. Yes the human body can live without carbohydrates, but it's basically in adaptive illness that it does. If you start talking about the Eskimo or Inuit, I'll point to their extremely short lifespan and epic numbers of heart disease.
- will_brown 8y ago
  >It's an indirect lie. Fat is what causes you to gain weight, and then excess calories. Sugar triggers insulin, insulin triggers storage of glucose in fat cells. There is a lot more to energy production/atp/Krebs cycle than calories in/calories out.
  - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
    Glucose triggers insulin, fructose does not. Yet fructose probably contributes more to insuline resistance long term than glucose does. The mechanism, as I understand it is that fructose essentially turns into fatty liver, which increases the insuline resistance, the increased IR in turn causes higher insulin levels from ingesting glucose at a later time causing higher median levels of insulin, also causing increased IR. Point being, the damage done from fructose isn’t measurable from the effects of a single meal. And the insulin raise from glucose is probably not that bad given a healthy start state.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

jnordwick 8y ago

And the intro to the article sensationalizes in the other way: "A new study showing that sugar is definitely 'toxic'".