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Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" talk when it first appeared on YouTube completely changed my attitude towards refined sugars. I highly recommend it. My par

Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" talk when it first appeared on YouTube completely changed my attitude towards refined sugars. I highly recommend it. My parents are European, in childhood my mother (and her mother) would regularly give up sugar completely for months at a time to control their weight. They weren't scientific people, and couldn't explain any of the mechanisms or anything - but they taught us kids that sugar and sweets make you fat. It was not treated as any special lesson or profound knowledge, it was basic common sense back in their home country. I vividly remember them riffing me for putting so much ketchup on hotdogs or hamburgers whenever we grilled american style, saying it's mostly sugar (and I was getting fat...). As a result I've always controlled my sugar intake in adulthood, but the Lustig video gave a scientific explanation for the mechanism of action behind my inherited vague understanding of sweetened foods being fattening. I went from somewhat moderating consumption to avoiding it and refined carbs in general like the plague. My health has improved substantially. It was impactful enough that I emailed Robert Lustig to thank him years later, he even replied.

TomMarius 8y ago
I'm European. Is it not common sense in the rest of the world that sweet things make you fat? Wow.
- ericd 8y ago
  The conversation around this in the US has been almost entirely around fat, until relatively recently.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  I don't know about the rest of the world, but the American public has been heavily misinformed on myriad subjects. My European parents were constantly baffled by how unexpectedly bad it was, with my father often wondering aloud how they won the war. Raising a family here isn't ideal, but the economy is strong arguably because of the poorly-informed, convenient-entertainment obsessed, consumer society. It's a great place to start businesses and/or earn money. This is what attracted my parents to leave Europe, but they were very young and hadn't predicted how potentially bad the culture and education would be, and seemed to regret not raising us kids back in the motherland.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Do you know other examples of such misinformation?
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      An obvious one which comes to mind from childhood memories is the campaigns surrounding the effects of tobacco smoke. The industry flooded the media with misinformation for a number of years, and it was incredibly effective at turning smoking into a divisive topic where smokers were fighting for something by embracing ignorance just to spite the non-smokers / be "free". It was a serious battle just to get smoking banned from common interior spaces like restaurants then bars, that wasn't very long ago. It's insane. I don't think I need to make some kind of exhaustive list here. Climate change is another obvious large-scale disinformation campaign. EVs vs. gas vehicles is another particularly hot one over the last decade. Countless times I've seen a talking head on a screen claiming EVs are no better, that it's just a longer tail pipe. Completely disregarding the fact that EVs enable options for clean energy production, an impossibility when everyone's physicaly driving the actual oil combustors. Even if we continued using fossil fuels to generate electricity, you can do it a lot more efficiently without being space, safety, and weight constrained like you are under the hood of an automobile. Not even considering solar/wind it's an obvious win. This stuff is so effective on a large subset of the population because we don't do a good job educating people and have long had a strong culture of celebrated ignorance. We don't optimize for producing skeptical, critical-thinking folks in our public education system. Such people don't make good consumers, it's bad for business. An unfortunate effect is when you optimize your population for consumerism/business interests, and politicians are marketed for elections through the same means as commercial products, you don't really have a democracy anymore. It's just something going through the motions of being a democracy. The influence is too reliable and its control too concentrated. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is a good example of how bad it's gotten.

TomMarius 8y ago

I'm European. Is it not common sense in the rest of the world that sweet things make you fat? Wow.

ericd 8y ago
The conversation around this in the US has been almost entirely around fat, until relatively recently.
newnewpdro 8y ago
I don't know about the rest of the world, but the American public has been heavily misinformed on myriad subjects. My European parents were constantly baffled by how unexpectedly bad it was, with my father often wondering aloud how they won the war. Raising a family here isn't ideal, but the economy is strong arguably because of the poorly-informed, convenient-entertainment obsessed, consumer society. It's a great place to start businesses and/or earn money. This is what attracted my parents to leave Europe, but they were very young and hadn't predicted how potentially bad the culture and education would be, and seemed to regret not raising us kids back in the motherland.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Do you know other examples of such misinformation?
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    An obvious one which comes to mind from childhood memories is the campaigns surrounding the effects of tobacco smoke. The industry flooded the media with misinformation for a number of years, and it was incredibly effective at turning smoking into a divisive topic where smokers were fighting for something by embracing ignorance just to spite the non-smokers / be "free". It was a serious battle just to get smoking banned from common interior spaces like restaurants then bars, that wasn't very long ago. It's insane. I don't think I need to make some kind of exhaustive list here. Climate change is another obvious large-scale disinformation campaign. EVs vs. gas vehicles is another particularly hot one over the last decade. Countless times I've seen a talking head on a screen claiming EVs are no better, that it's just a longer tail pipe. Completely disregarding the fact that EVs enable options for clean energy production, an impossibility when everyone's physicaly driving the actual oil combustors. Even if we continued using fossil fuels to generate electricity, you can do it a lot more efficiently without being space, safety, and weight constrained like you are under the hood of an automobile. Not even considering solar/wind it's an obvious win. This stuff is so effective on a large subset of the population because we don't do a good job educating people and have long had a strong culture of celebrated ignorance. We don't optimize for producing skeptical, critical-thinking folks in our public education system. Such people don't make good consumers, it's bad for business. An unfortunate effect is when you optimize your population for consumerism/business interests, and politicians are marketed for elections through the same means as commercial products, you don't really have a democracy anymore. It's just something going through the motions of being a democracy. The influence is too reliable and its control too concentrated. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is a good example of how bad it's gotten.