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Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in West
by vallassy 4y ago
Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup).
Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn't want to talk about.
- loopdoend 4y agoSugar and seed oils (vegetable oils). Practically impossible to avoid especially in "food deserts".
- arbitrage 4y ago
- imchillyb 4y agoSo avoid "food deserts". It's not difficult. -arbitrage > Food Desert: Urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food. Yeah, just move somewhere else! Lol. This is the kind of half-baked bullshit answer I expect from reddit not from Ycomb. Troll somewhere else dude.
- decremental 4y ago
- cestith 4y agoI'm fairly certain imchillyb is a member of the group of humans who need to eat food and think other humans also need to eat food.
- revscat 4y agoAnd are you not upset because of psychopathic tendencies? You certainly seem to be disdainful when someone expresses empathy. I’m upset about climate change because it personally affects me, but I’m also upset about armed agents of the state murdering Black citizens without repercussion. I’m white. Do you find my response to be “overly-emotional”?
- decremental 4y ago
- imwillofficial 4y agoThere is a good point to this though. Poor people immigrate all the time, for better work, better opportunities, family, whatever. My guess is rarely for access to higher quality food. When I was poor I wasn’t incapable of moving. It’s an interesting idea, migration based on quality food.
- ketzo 4y agoSo true — I don’t understand why so many people choose to be poor!
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoYeah. It's not difficult. Unless you are poor, that is.
- travisjungroth 4y agoDid you mix up desert (sand) and dessert (cake)?
- serf 4y agoa food desert is a (usually) hyperbolic phrase used to describe areas where access to nutritionally balanced food is hindered by something like scarcity or economy and replaced with access to food that is cheap and plentiful but nutritionally unsound.
- travisjungroth 4y agoI'm familiar with the phrase. I just wanted to see if they meant something more like "don't eat cookies" than "don't be poor".
- JTbane 4y agoI've seen a lot of broscience that says "seed oils and PUFAs are bad". Is there actual evidence for this?
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoThere is a great book that goes into this whole topic called Deep Nutrition. Also, anecdotally, I see a lot of correlation between PUFAs and FUPAs.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoYes, broscience exaggerated the point, but they are not far from correct. It depends on genetics and the amount and type of PUFA consumed. The Fatty Acid Destaurase genes will dictate how bad short chain PUFA's (Seed oil's) are for a person. These people should stick to fatty fish. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0026049509004533 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00260... Omega 6 PUFAs are more inflammatory than long chain PUFA's. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7990530/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7990530/ It just so happens that most seed oils contain tremendous amounts of Short Chain Omega 6 fatty acids.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoFor balance, here’s a rebuttal to the fad that seed oils are our nemesis: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-to-seed-oil-sophistry https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
- docandrew 4y agoWhether or not peer-reviewed studies show an impact on health, seed oils are just kind of gross: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI Compare this to making butter - shake up some cream for a little bit to separate out the buttermilk.
- Ozzie_osman 4y agoIt could be both, and might even include other factors as well.
- bena 4y agoHere's the answer. It's a factor. As is sugar. No one thing is going to solve the problem, but everything helps.
- jjallen 4y agoI'm American living in Europe. There is sugar in every packaged food here too just FYI. And not just in the country I live in, it's basically everywhere in grocery stores. So sugar is not the only culprit.
- dorchadas 4y agoI'm an American in Europe, and really, what I've noticed here is it's natural sugar in stuff, whereas in America it's HFCS. I can't help but wonder if that's part of the difference. I list 5-10kg easily without watching what I ate (and drank much more cause there's nothing else to do of an evening in Ireland), while keeping the same activity level or slightly less. There's something different in the food, and I can't help but think real sugar and lower levels of it is a key thing.
- scoofy 4y agoThis is going to be an extremely challenging thesis to explain the phenomena, as HFCS and sucrose are effectively chemically identical once they hit the stomach.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoYes, but HFCS is cheaper. Cheaper means it ends up in more products. Cheaper means more gets consumed. I mentioned in another comment above that circa 2003-ish the NYT Sunday mag ran an opinion piece that proposed that gov subsidies of corn were contributing to the obesity crisis. Lower corn prices === lower price for HFCS === more HFCS in more products === more products at lower prices === more sweetener calories being consumed. Our gut microbes aren't evolved for this type of diet.
- jjallen 4y agoSugar is negligibly expensive. It's just so cheap. In a wealthy region such as W. Europe, I can't even see the price differential mattering.
- wyre 4y agoI’ve seen it discussed here in the past that when controlling for sugar consumption there isn’t any correlation with obesity and that the causes of the obesity epidemic are more enigmatic than blaming it on sugar.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI've tracked my diet pretty regularly over the last several years. The one constant in every weight-gain cycle for me is a sugary treat after a meal. This is true even when I've otherwise kept my caloric intake constant.
- imtringued 4y agoBlood sugar spikes do strange things to our hunger response. If your blood sugar is too high the body may produce an emergency response to keep blood sugar down and it may overshoot which makes you hungry much sooner.
- frankzander 4y ago> Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky But that's packed with fat calories as well and fat has a much higher energy density as carbohydrates. As an European I'm very very astonished over the size of the food portions in fast food restaurants in the US. If this portion size is the same on the diner table than it's not only sugar but a lot of non necessary calories. I don't think it's entirely caused by sugar but by a big surplus of calories in day to day food (combined with too little physical activity)
- CodeSgt 4y agoBut fat increases satiety much more quickly than sugar. 500 cals of fats will make you feel "fuller" than 750 or even 1k cals of sugar. That's what makes sugar so much worse. Is may not be as colorically dense, but we can comfortably guzzle down far more empty calories from sugar than from fat.
- edanm 4y agoI think separating the two is not a good idea. Very few people will just eat a spoon of white sugar. Very few people will eat a stick of butter. But almost everyone can binge on a box of cookies, where the main ingredients are butter and sugar (and flour I suppose.)
- CodeSgt 4y agoDrink a soda. There's a couple of spoons of white sugar.
- analog31 4y agoUS restaurant portions are huge. If you eat like that every day, it will kill you. I think one reason is that the ingredients are cheap relative to other costs including labor. It used to be rationalized by saying that a restaurant meal was supposed to be a rare indulgence, but I don't think that's true any more for a large swath of the population. Anecdote: I had two long meetings at work last week, that crossed over the lunch hour, so they brought in lunch. Each was from a "fast casual" or "fast food" sandwich shop. There was like 1/2 inch slab of processed meat on each sandwich. I would typically put one thin slice of the same meat on a sandwich that I make for the lunch that I bring to work. I discreetly removed most of the meat and threw it away. I know some people who will take a delivered meal like that, cut it in half, and save the second half for the next day. Another anecdote: There was an article about a town in Texas that was losing its last restaurant, and the author wondered how people would eat. Of course to maintain a higher body weight, you need to eat more.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago> even bog standard bread Yes, we definitely have too much sugar in everything, but as an amateur baker I will defend sugar in bread. Sure, you don't need it in a baguette or a rustic boule, but it is indispensable for a nice, soft sandwich loaf. It's not there to make the bread sweeter. It makes the bread softer, it boosts the yeast for a nicer rise, and it keeps it from going stale as quickly. Granted, I don't use a ton of it. My favorite sandwich bread recipe[0] is 8g of sugar to 500g flour, and with my long loaf pan I typically get 20-25 slices, so maximum 400mg a slice. Quite good compared to my favorite supermarket bread at 2g a slice. Sure, "bog standard" bread could have less sugar, but some sugar is essential for this style of bread. [0] https://www.nigella.com/recipes/old-fashioned-sandwich-loaf https://www.nigella.com/recipes/old-fashioned-sandwich-loaf, omitting the butter and oil and using cultured buttermilk instead of spoiled milk or sour cream. I say "omitting the butter", but I do still butter the loaf pan. I just don't include any in the dough itself.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoI'll add to this: A lot of home cooks were taught to add a bit of sugar to the bread to help the yeast. I used to mix yeast, water, and a bit of sugar together to get the yeast started. I mostly did this because I learned to make bread before the internet, and this was common in instructions that I could access.
- Tyr42 4y agohttps://youtu.be/AqFeXxa_NTk https://youtu.be/AqFeXxa_NTk This guy experiments with sugar levels and how it affects yeast. Turns out the water absorbing properties of sugar also has a large effect in the other direction, so maybe it doesn't really help the yeast
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoSugar can inhibit yeast development: This is generally only an issue with sweet doughs, though. A teaspoon of yeast won't have that effect, especially if it is in a half cup of water. But more importantly, in the times before the internet, you just couldn't reason like that. If your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother all start bread by dissolving yeast and a small amount of sugar in some water... well, you do it too. The cookbooks sometimes told you this if it wasn't too terribly old (old cookbooks expect you to know a lot, and directions get sparse).
- ThePadawan 4y agoI've found myself looking at 8 different kinds of mayonnaise now, and still can't find one that has added sugar (apart from the ingredients listed under 'contains less than 2% of..."). There is Miracle Whip but that is a bit of a reach to call mayonnaise.
- briefcomment 4y agoI consume multiple times more sugar than the average person, and I'm thin as a rail with a healthy metabolism. Sugar in itself isn't likely to be bad. Sugar in addition to a deranged metabolism is probably bad. Fixing the deranged metabolism, (which is likely to be caused by various environmental factors) will probably be the best solution.
- ac29 4y ago> I consume multiple times more sugar than the average person, and I'm thin as a rail with a healthy metabolism. The average American consumes around 125g of sugar per day [1, 2]. This is about 500 kcals. Multiple times that would mean most of your daily calories are coming from sugar, unless you are very physically active. [1] https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/ https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/ [2] https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/45-alarming-statistics-on-americans-sugar-consumption-and-the-effects-of-sugar-on-americans-health/ https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/45-alarming-statistics-on...
- briefcomment 4y agoYesterday, I had 3 bottles of coke at 40g of sugar each, 4 cups of OJ at 25g of sugar each, and 1/3 a pound of fudge, which I think is about 50g. That's around 270g of simple sugars. If you care about carb intake, I also had 7 idlis, which is an indian rice cake, and a dosa, which is a rice crepe, which probably adds a significant amount of starch. I probably reliably have 2x the average for simple sugars
- paulryanrogers 4y agoMay I ask if you're under 45?
- briefcomment 4y agoYes haha. I'm sure my habits will change as I age
- 4y ago
- pengaru 4y ago> Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? The two are not mutually exclusive. We know fructose is a problem. We know bisphenols and phthalates (endocrine disruptors found in plastics) are problems as well. It's both.
- tarboreus 4y agoTimeline doesn't work out, really. People ate a lot of sugar before the 80s and 90s where the obesity epidemic took off. Timeline points more to plastic and/or lithium, as suggested by Slime Mold Time Mold. Sugar is pretty bad for you, though.
- gwbas1c 4y agoLook for real sourdough bread. ("San Francisco style") The loaf is round, and the bread has to rise more slowly. Years ago I dug through every bread in the aisle to find the one with the least amount of sugar. I went home with a weird-looking sourdough loaf, and I've been hooked ever since. In CA, most grocery stores carry it, because it's a local style. In MA, I have to go to Trader Joes to get it at a good price.