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>More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Though one can't pin this staggering number on one thi

>More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Though one can't pin this staggering number on one thing (the article mentions 10 factors[1]) sugar-sweetened beverages are a nice first target. Soda is looking more and more like cigarettes in terms of health effects and nutrition. At a bare minimum we should stop subsidizing the production of corn syrup and other raw materials than enable soda to be so cheap. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2608221 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2608221

degenerate 7y ago
Obligatory "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" link for those that haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Best watched on a lazy Saturday morning or train ride. It's a long (but rewarding) lecture on how sugar is somewhat like poison to our bodies in the quantities we consume. It starts out jovial and gets very scientific.
- benatkin 7y ago
  He's not the only doctor to suggest that the average person eat less sugar, but he does it in a way that oversimplifies it and makes people susceptible to fad diets with excessive meat consumption. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-really-toxic-sifting-through-the-evidence/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-rea...
benatkin 7y ago
That sounds intuitively right, but that this might not be the main cause. Fried potatoes (french fries and chips) are causing obesity, which in turn causes diabetes. They also are high in carbs, though not sugar.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Where does that statement come from? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's not exactly an opinion. The problem with (refined) sugar is that it's in damn near everything (processed foods anyway).
  - strict9 7y ago
    It goes even further. An experiment: go to the pet food aisle of a grocery store, and try finding a dog treat/biscuit that doesn't have added sugar. Treats labeled as "chicken" or "bacon and cheese" have sugar as the second, third, or fourth ingredient. Sugar is omnipresent even in pet food.
  - benatkin 7y ago
    French fries top this list, are processed, and contain no sugar. https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items-can-cause-excessive-weight-gain-2554744 https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items-ca... It is strange that bread has sugar in it now but it's typically a small amount like one gram per serving: https://saraleebread.com/our-breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-bread https://saraleebread.com/our-breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-... It does make snacking more harmful though, as a blood sugar spike can be added where not expected.
    - anaphor 7y ago
      French fries contain no sugar? What? What do you think starch is?
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        This sort of context ignorant pedantry is extremely tiresome. The comment they replied to literally says "(refined) sugar". They are talking about added sugar, not the constituent molecules of the food.
        anaphor 7y ago
        Okay, but lots of people don't realize the effect things can have on your blood sugar. Potatoes can raise your blood sugar just as quickly as white bread, or even sugary drinks depending on how you cook them (i.e. baked potatoes get processed differently than french fries). It isn't just added sugar, it's also how you cook it, and the other things you eat with it.
- moneil971 7y ago
  I’d argue it has more to do with the fat/salt/fried factor than just the carbs. Foods with a combo of fat, salt and certain textures make you both thirsty and more likely to crave more.
- anaphor 7y ago
  Could you explain what you think the difference is between "carbs" and "sugar"? Fried potatoes have a very high glycemic index, making them pretty much no different from eating candy IMO.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think it's a distraction to try to find the main cause and argue whether it's sugar for fried potatoes and other junk food. Both are very bad and need to be reduced. Arguing about sugar vs. fat gives the food industry an opening to say "the science not in yet" and do nothing. Spearing this kind of uncertainty is their favorite PR strategy.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Sugar is like processed carbs with more badness.
ergothus 7y ago
I had a friend that ran a small food shack (basically a food truck that didn't move) serving hot dogs and nachos and the like. He said the cups cost more than the soda in them.
timthorn 7y ago
They introduced sugar taxes in the UK, and now almost the only carbonated drinks available with sugar are Coke and Pepsi. Everything else has swapped sugar for sweeteners, which for those of us who find their taste foul has been an unpleasant reduction in choice
- ctrl-j 7y ago
  Isn't that the desired outcome? Ideally it seems like coke and pepsi would be extremely expensive and a rare treat. Meanwhile the non-sugary beverages would be the ones most people drink.
  - timthorn 7y ago
    Desired by whom, and for whose benefit? Drinks I used to like no longer exist, but have just been substituted by coke so there is zero reduction in sugar consumption, but my quality of life has been reduced.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      The drinks are all still available, but have been reformulated to avoid the sugar tax. Fanta, Sprite, Dr Pepper, Irn Bru - they're all still on the shelves, but they have little or no sugar. Aside from a brief outcry about the reformulation of Irn Bru, nobody really noticed or cared. The sugary drinks tax follows on from a highly successful salt reduction programme. https://publichealthengland.exposure.co/salt-reduction-programme https://publichealthengland.exposure.co/salt-reduction-progr...
    - ctrl-j 7y ago
      > Desired by whom, and for whose benefit? Desired by the lawmakers who passed the tax. And for the benefit of the larger group. A public health crisis is taking place - and if the sugar tax lowers the amount of resources spent on treating the widespread occurrence of diabetes, it will be a net benefit for society. Yes, at the cost of your personal freedom to have readily available sugary drinks.
  - 7y ago
knightofmars 7y ago
Agreed, I can't help but believe that subsidizing sugars in general is ridiculous.
shadowoflight 7y ago
Honestly, I'd say an even bigger problem is that we add sugar to everything. Ketchup? Sugar added. Some brands of milk? Sugar added. Lunch meat? Sugar added. Bread? Made with so much sugar that people from other countries complain that American bread is practically cake. Sure, sugarry drinks are a problem, but they're a part of the larger overarching problem that is everything has sugar, so for something like soda or dessert to taste particularly sweet, we add even more sugar.
- magashna 7y ago
  It's hard to get away from. Unless you're having plain salad/meat meals every time, you're getting an overload of sugar in one way or another.
  - excessive 7y ago
    A lot of salad dressings have sugar in them, and they add sugar (corn syrup) to most sausage and some bacon now too.
    - orev 7y ago
      I think you missed the part about “plain salad”. As soon as you add dressing, you’ve shot yourself in the foot.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    It's not correct to conflate complex and simple carbohydrates into "sugars", as the complex ones have a significantly different profile.
- openasocket 7y ago
  Interestingly, sugar was originally added to mass-produced Ketchup to act as a preservative. I'm not sure if that was the only reason, mind you, but it was a part of it. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a lot of public outcry about the use of preservatives in various food items. I actually wouldn't be surprised if a lot of food manufacturers switched from using some of those chemical preservatives like sodium benzoate to sugar to avoid some of that public scrutiny, and kept using it to improve the flavor. Which of course raises a question. I suspect most food products could cut back on the majority of the added sugar and be fine, but for some of those food products some portion of that sugar is necessary as a preservative. So, in those cases, would the public prefer to have some added sugar, a more "artificial" preservative like nitrates, another preservation method (freezing, canning, pickling, etc.), or accept food products that will have a much shorter shelf life?
hanniabu 7y ago
I hate how some people are completely fine with making drugs illegal, but when you mention putting some restrictions on food it becomes the end of the world, as if something edible can't be a drug.
- emsy 7y ago
  It makes much more sense to regulate food if you think about it. Taking drugs is more or less a choice. Eating is indispensable. We're wired to favor fat, sweet and salty food. The damage is done by merely following our evolutionary programming. But I don't think this will ever happen in the US, mainly because of the lack of socialized health care.
- izzydata 7y ago
  People have trouble thinking outside of the limited world view that was forced upon them as children. It's much easier to put things into containers in your mind that can't be overlapping.
- wincy 7y ago
  On the alternative, I’m both opposed to drugs being illegal and food restrictions. Look at Switzerland and how they’re handling heroin. The US government pushed the lie that fat is bad for you for decades, and everything became sugar laden because of it. If the US eliminated sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, we’d have far less high fructose corn syrup in our diet overnight. They’d also need to stop strong arming public schools into serving all this low fat no taste nonsense. Government intervention got us in this mess, even more regulation by incompetent (or worse, competent) bureaucrats won’t get us out.
  - wavepruner 7y ago
    Right on. The government gets things so so wrong sometimes that they cause massive epidemics much worse than anything they solve. Good Ted Talk on the diabetes epidemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLBPPtlrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLBPPtlrY
pizza 7y ago
Diabetes seems to be one of the main causes of heart disease. > People with diabetes tend to develop heart disease at a younger age than people without diabetes. In adults with diabetes, the most common causes of death are heart disease and stroke. Adults with diabetes are nearly twice as likely to die from heart disease or stroke as people without diabetes [0] [0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/preventing-problems/heart-disease-stroke https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overvi... [1] "What if Heart Disease and Diabetes had the same cause?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofq-8ToY2fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofq-8ToY2fc
- tempsolution 7y ago
  Diabetes is the cause of nothing. Diabetes is not a disease, it is a status. Like a runny nose when you have the flu. What you can say is that people with Diabetes tend to develop something... Sure. But causality is not causation.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    How do you explain diabetic foot or diabetic retinopathy or diabetic neuropathy or a host of other stuff caused by diabetes?
emsy 7y ago
The US cup sizes are ridiculous. In Germany (and most of Europa IIRC), the biggest cup size in McDonalds is 500ml compare that to the smallest US size of about 450ml (there are smaller ones but only on request).
- wincy 7y ago
  Our cups (US) are absolutely filled with crushed ice. I’ve heard that in Germany ice isn’t provided with the drink, is this not the case? It’s certainly not good to chug soda and I’ve met a few people who both get a large and specify “no ice”, but maybe it’s not quite as bad as it seems.
  - emsy 7y ago
    You usually get ice, though not the same amounts as in the US. Free refills are also not available in every restaurant.
sh-run 7y ago
I grew up thinking you could substitute fruit for fruit juice. It turns out fruit juice has just as much sugar as soda and almost none of the benefits of raw fruit. I think better health education would go a long way.

degenerate 7y ago

Obligatory "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" link for those that haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Best watched on a lazy Saturday morning or train ride. It's a long (but rewarding) lecture on how sugar is somewhat like poison to our bodies in the quantities we consume. It starts out jovial and gets very scientific.

benatkin 7y ago
He's not the only doctor to suggest that the average person eat less sugar, but he does it in a way that oversimplifies it and makes people susceptible to fad diets with excessive meat consumption. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-really-toxic-sifting-through-the-evidence/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-rea...

benatkin 7y ago

That sounds intuitively right, but that this might not be the main cause. Fried potatoes (french fries and chips) are causing obesity, which in turn causes diabetes. They also are high in carbs, though not sugar.

EpicEng 7y ago
Where does that statement come from? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's not exactly an opinion. The problem with (refined) sugar is that it's in damn near everything (processed foods anyway).
- strict9 7y ago
  It goes even further. An experiment: go to the pet food aisle of a grocery store, and try finding a dog treat/biscuit that doesn't have added sugar. Treats labeled as "chicken" or "bacon and cheese" have sugar as the second, third, or fourth ingredient. Sugar is omnipresent even in pet food.
- benatkin 7y ago
  French fries top this list, are processed, and contain no sugar. https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items-can-cause-excessive-weight-gain-2554744 https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items-ca... It is strange that bread has sugar in it now but it's typically a small amount like one gram per serving: https://saraleebread.com/our-breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-bread https://saraleebread.com/our-breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-... It does make snacking more harmful though, as a blood sugar spike can be added where not expected.
  - anaphor 7y ago
    French fries contain no sugar? What? What do you think starch is?
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      This sort of context ignorant pedantry is extremely tiresome. The comment they replied to literally says "(refined) sugar". They are talking about added sugar, not the constituent molecules of the food.
      - anaphor 7y ago
        Okay, but lots of people don't realize the effect things can have on your blood sugar. Potatoes can raise your blood sugar just as quickly as white bread, or even sugary drinks depending on how you cook them (i.e. baked potatoes get processed differently than french fries). It isn't just added sugar, it's also how you cook it, and the other things you eat with it.
moneil971 7y ago
I’d argue it has more to do with the fat/salt/fried factor than just the carbs. Foods with a combo of fat, salt and certain textures make you both thirsty and more likely to crave more.
anaphor 7y ago
Could you explain what you think the difference is between "carbs" and "sugar"? Fried potatoes have a very high glycemic index, making them pretty much no different from eating candy IMO.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think it's a distraction to try to find the main cause and argue whether it's sugar for fried potatoes and other junk food. Both are very bad and need to be reduced. Arguing about sugar vs. fat gives the food industry an opening to say "the science not in yet" and do nothing. Spearing this kind of uncertainty is their favorite PR strategy.
Gibbon1 7y ago
Sugar is like processed carbs with more badness.

ergothus 7y ago

I had a friend that ran a small food shack (basically a food truck that didn't move) serving hot dogs and nachos and the like. He said the cups cost more than the soda in them.

timthorn 7y ago

They introduced sugar taxes in the UK, and now almost the only carbonated drinks available with sugar are Coke and Pepsi. Everything else has swapped sugar for sweeteners, which for those of us who find their taste foul has been an unpleasant reduction in choice

ctrl-j 7y ago
Isn't that the desired outcome? Ideally it seems like coke and pepsi would be extremely expensive and a rare treat. Meanwhile the non-sugary beverages would be the ones most people drink.
- timthorn 7y ago
  Desired by whom, and for whose benefit? Drinks I used to like no longer exist, but have just been substituted by coke so there is zero reduction in sugar consumption, but my quality of life has been reduced.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    The drinks are all still available, but have been reformulated to avoid the sugar tax. Fanta, Sprite, Dr Pepper, Irn Bru - they're all still on the shelves, but they have little or no sugar. Aside from a brief outcry about the reformulation of Irn Bru, nobody really noticed or cared. The sugary drinks tax follows on from a highly successful salt reduction programme. https://publichealthengland.exposure.co/salt-reduction-programme https://publichealthengland.exposure.co/salt-reduction-progr...
  - ctrl-j 7y ago
    > Desired by whom, and for whose benefit? Desired by the lawmakers who passed the tax. And for the benefit of the larger group. A public health crisis is taking place - and if the sugar tax lowers the amount of resources spent on treating the widespread occurrence of diabetes, it will be a net benefit for society. Yes, at the cost of your personal freedom to have readily available sugary drinks.
- 7y ago

knightofmars 7y ago

Agreed, I can't help but believe that subsidizing sugars in general is ridiculous.

shadowoflight 7y ago

Honestly, I'd say an even bigger problem is that we add sugar to everything. Ketchup? Sugar added. Some brands of milk? Sugar added. Lunch meat? Sugar added. Bread? Made with so much sugar that people from other countries complain that American bread is practically cake. Sure, sugarry drinks are a problem, but they're a part of the larger overarching problem that is everything has sugar, so for something like soda or dessert to taste particularly sweet, we add even more sugar.

magashna 7y ago
It's hard to get away from. Unless you're having plain salad/meat meals every time, you're getting an overload of sugar in one way or another.
- excessive 7y ago
  A lot of salad dressings have sugar in them, and they add sugar (corn syrup) to most sausage and some bacon now too.
  - orev 7y ago
    I think you missed the part about “plain salad”. As soon as you add dressing, you’ve shot yourself in the foot.
- pizza234 7y ago
  It's not correct to conflate complex and simple carbohydrates into "sugars", as the complex ones have a significantly different profile.
openasocket 7y ago
Interestingly, sugar was originally added to mass-produced Ketchup to act as a preservative. I'm not sure if that was the only reason, mind you, but it was a part of it. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a lot of public outcry about the use of preservatives in various food items. I actually wouldn't be surprised if a lot of food manufacturers switched from using some of those chemical preservatives like sodium benzoate to sugar to avoid some of that public scrutiny, and kept using it to improve the flavor. Which of course raises a question. I suspect most food products could cut back on the majority of the added sugar and be fine, but for some of those food products some portion of that sugar is necessary as a preservative. So, in those cases, would the public prefer to have some added sugar, a more "artificial" preservative like nitrates, another preservation method (freezing, canning, pickling, etc.), or accept food products that will have a much shorter shelf life?

hanniabu 7y ago

I hate how some people are completely fine with making drugs illegal, but when you mention putting some restrictions on food it becomes the end of the world, as if something edible can't be a drug.

emsy 7y ago
It makes much more sense to regulate food if you think about it. Taking drugs is more or less a choice. Eating is indispensable. We're wired to favor fat, sweet and salty food. The damage is done by merely following our evolutionary programming. But I don't think this will ever happen in the US, mainly because of the lack of socialized health care.
izzydata 7y ago
People have trouble thinking outside of the limited world view that was forced upon them as children. It's much easier to put things into containers in your mind that can't be overlapping.
wincy 7y ago
On the alternative, I’m both opposed to drugs being illegal and food restrictions. Look at Switzerland and how they’re handling heroin. The US government pushed the lie that fat is bad for you for decades, and everything became sugar laden because of it. If the US eliminated sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, we’d have far less high fructose corn syrup in our diet overnight. They’d also need to stop strong arming public schools into serving all this low fat no taste nonsense. Government intervention got us in this mess, even more regulation by incompetent (or worse, competent) bureaucrats won’t get us out.
- wavepruner 7y ago
  Right on. The government gets things so so wrong sometimes that they cause massive epidemics much worse than anything they solve. Good Ted Talk on the diabetes epidemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLBPPtlrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLBPPtlrY

pizza 7y ago

Diabetes seems to be one of the main causes of heart disease. > People with diabetes tend to develop heart disease at a younger age than people without diabetes. In adults with diabetes, the most common causes of death are heart disease and stroke. Adults with diabetes are nearly twice as likely to die from heart disease or stroke as people without diabetes [0] [0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/preventing-problems/heart-disease-stroke https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overvi... [1] "What if Heart Disease and Diabetes had the same cause?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofq-8ToY2fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofq-8ToY2fc

tempsolution 7y ago
Diabetes is the cause of nothing. Diabetes is not a disease, it is a status. Like a runny nose when you have the flu. What you can say is that people with Diabetes tend to develop something... Sure. But causality is not causation.
- DanBC 7y ago
  How do you explain diabetic foot or diabetic retinopathy or diabetic neuropathy or a host of other stuff caused by diabetes?

emsy 7y ago

The US cup sizes are ridiculous. In Germany (and most of Europa IIRC), the biggest cup size in McDonalds is 500ml compare that to the smallest US size of about 450ml (there are smaller ones but only on request).

wincy 7y ago
Our cups (US) are absolutely filled with crushed ice. I’ve heard that in Germany ice isn’t provided with the drink, is this not the case? It’s certainly not good to chug soda and I’ve met a few people who both get a large and specify “no ice”, but maybe it’s not quite as bad as it seems.
- emsy 7y ago
  You usually get ice, though not the same amounts as in the US. Free refills are also not available in every restaurant.

sh-run 7y ago

I grew up thinking you could substitute fruit for fruit juice. It turns out fruit juice has just as much sugar as soda and almost none of the benefits of raw fruit. I think better health education would go a long way.