7 ms·

"Sweetened the World" is a good phrase and fits well the situation. One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce. It's particularly nefarious be

by rsync 3y ago

"Sweetened the World" is a good phrase and fits well the situation. One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce. It's particularly nefarious because many consumers may be attempting to avoid sugary food and provide healthy foods for children ... only to unknowingly buy, essentially, candy.

parineum 3y ago
Applesauce isn't avoiding sugary or unhealthy food. It already is, essentially, candy before adding more sugar. An apple and a snickers bar have similar sugar content. Fruit is "healthy" because of the fiber and the way it's processed by your body in the whole fruit form. It is, however, very sugary. Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  Fruits are nothing like candy, and it's sad that diet science has gone so backwards as to make this type of statement seem reasonable--that all of diet can be boiled down to carbs, fiber, protein, and fat. A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way. Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating. Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
  - esperent 3y ago
    While you're not wrong, this needs a couple of qualifications: 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. 2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit. 3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added. I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
    - NotGMan 3y ago
      50% is a low number! 10x is a more accurate one.
    - scns 3y ago
      Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though. Thankfully there are other goals than increasing sugar. Almonds were bred to a lower cyanide content to make em edible. Bet there are plenty other examples. Vegetables and don't want to be eaten and protect themselves with mild "poison" or a strong shell. Fruit does and can be eaten raw. Vegetables need to be cooked to destroy antinutrients and help digestion. Egg and meat protein can be digested easier after denaturing the proteins through heat. Milk becomes digestible through the enzymes in Rennet. Cheese would make sense to me, no clue about fermented milk products.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though. The common banana we have today, the Cavendish, is actually a bit less sweet than the common banana before the 1960s. Back then, it was the Gros Michel, which was sweeter and more flavorful[1]. But these bananas are all a monoculture, clones, and the Gros Michel was wiped out by a disease. The Cavendish is currently in the process of being devastated by a new disease as well, so it's very possible that future generations will be eating a different banana than we are. [1] One of the reasons why a lot of banana-flavored candy only roughly resembles banana is because it tastes like a Gros Michel, not a Cavendish. Candymakers don't change it because that's the flavor that people have come to expect and want from that candy.
    - fractallyte 3y ago
      Regarding modern fruit, it's also worth noting that many wild tropical fruits are naturally very sweet.
    - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
      > 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. Interesting. Also of note, fruits and the fruits of vegetables world wide seem to be increasing in size and caloric content while decreasing in nutritional content, correlated with rising atmospheric CO2.
  - krior 3y ago
    But you cannot compare todays fruits to those that our bodies have evolved on. Over the last couple of thousand years we have selectively most (if not all) of them for higher sugar contents. That is not to say that a diet should not contain fruits, it probably should and fruits are most definetly more nutritious than candy, but its not that black and white.
    - cityofdelusion 3y ago
      True, but still on a whole other level than candy. A snickers bar or coke hurts my teeth it is so sweet and a bag of gummies churns my gut. I feel fine after eating an apple. Fruits honestly don’t even seem that sweet unless you’re just eating those genetic modified grapes and new apples. Many (most?) fruits are quite tart. Maybe it’s my equatorial bias speaking and I eat a wider range of fruits than the average person, but I just don’t see fruits I enjoy as particularly sweet.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      You are right about cultivated fruits, but the distance in sugar content between them and candy remains very high. Most cultivated fruits have a sugar content of around 10%, while only a few have a sugar content slightly above 15%, e.g. grapes and (raw) figs. Only the dried fruits have a sugar content similar to chocolate and candy, i.e. starting from around 60% to much more. So dried fruits should be avoided, but fresh or defrosted fruits up to a few hundred grams per day should be OK (when no other sweets are eaten).
  - Lio 3y ago
    It seems the missing things when considering food composition is absorption and availability. Calories alone are measured by burning things but it maters if your body has to do work to access those calories. The more processed or broken down an ingredient is the more available those calories are to the body vs the same amount in its raw form. I suspect, but don’t know, that liquid sugar in sodas is far worse than in fruit form because your digestive system isn’t processing fibre to get to it. Think sweetcorn vs cornbread. They could have the same calories but processing cornflour means you’re unlikely to see it again in undigested form. That same can’t be said for raw sweetcorn.
_gfwu 3y ago
Also sugar in fucking BREAD!!! Turkey is the worst offender i've come across here so far but the US is on a shameful close second.
- esperent 3y ago
  Every single country in Asia would like a word.
- beebmam 3y ago
  Sugar is normal for starting yeasts. It's a small amount.
  - AmrMostafa 3y ago
    Only to “validate” the yeast, e.g. to test a new batch or if it has been unused for a long period of time. In actual bread dough, yeast finds all it needs to activate in the flour itself.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    The type of "bread" they are referring to doesn't use yeast. McDonald's buns are basically sweetened dough with air beaten into it. Definitely suggest people eat McDonald's "food" bit by bit if you're into it. Might just put you off. And, in any case, you don't need to put sugar in for yeast. The best bread has nothing of the sort. Just flour, yeast, salt and water.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Even the salt is optional. I prefer to not include salt in bread, but I add the required daily amount of salt to other kinds of food, where the added salt really improves the taste.
      - bigfudge 3y ago
        Salt really does improve the flavour of bread. I’m impressed you have got used to bread without salt because it tastes awful to me unless eaten with salty foods.
nazgul17 3y ago
Rephrasing some of the comments below, if you are looking to avoid the effects of a candy or a soft drink, you should avoid fruit juice - eat the whole fruit instead, that's actually healthy. Blending fruit makes the entire sugar content immediately available to your digestive system, causing a spike in the glycemic index (aka the level of sugar in your blood), which has unhealthy consequences. I am actually not sure if a candy has enough sugar to cause a spike in an adult, but I imagine the threshold would be lower in a child. Not to mention, children don't understand the meaning of addiction: they just want (more) candies and you had better oblige or else!

by rsync 3y ago

parineum 3y ago

Applesauce isn't avoiding sugary or unhealthy food. It already is, essentially, candy before adding more sugar. An apple and a snickers bar have similar sugar content. Fruit is "healthy" because of the fiber and the way it's processed by your body in the whole fruit form. It is, however, very sugary. Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.

ramblenode 3y ago
Fruits are nothing like candy, and it's sad that diet science has gone so backwards as to make this type of statement seem reasonable--that all of diet can be boiled down to carbs, fiber, protein, and fat. A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way. Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating. Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
- esperent 3y ago
  While you're not wrong, this needs a couple of qualifications: 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. 2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit. 3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added. I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
  - NotGMan 3y ago
    50% is a low number! 10x is a more accurate one.
  - scns 3y ago
    Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though. Thankfully there are other goals than increasing sugar. Almonds were bred to a lower cyanide content to make em edible. Bet there are plenty other examples. Vegetables and don't want to be eaten and protect themselves with mild "poison" or a strong shell. Fruit does and can be eaten raw. Vegetables need to be cooked to destroy antinutrients and help digestion. Egg and meat protein can be digested easier after denaturing the proteins through heat. Milk becomes digestible through the enzymes in Rennet. Cheese would make sense to me, no clue about fermented milk products.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though. The common banana we have today, the Cavendish, is actually a bit less sweet than the common banana before the 1960s. Back then, it was the Gros Michel, which was sweeter and more flavorful[1]. But these bananas are all a monoculture, clones, and the Gros Michel was wiped out by a disease. The Cavendish is currently in the process of being devastated by a new disease as well, so it's very possible that future generations will be eating a different banana than we are. [1] One of the reasons why a lot of banana-flavored candy only roughly resembles banana is because it tastes like a Gros Michel, not a Cavendish. Candymakers don't change it because that's the flavor that people have come to expect and want from that candy.
  - fractallyte 3y ago
    Regarding modern fruit, it's also worth noting that many wild tropical fruits are naturally very sweet.
  - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
    > 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. Interesting. Also of note, fruits and the fruits of vegetables world wide seem to be increasing in size and caloric content while decreasing in nutritional content, correlated with rising atmospheric CO2.
- krior 3y ago
  But you cannot compare todays fruits to those that our bodies have evolved on. Over the last couple of thousand years we have selectively most (if not all) of them for higher sugar contents. That is not to say that a diet should not contain fruits, it probably should and fruits are most definetly more nutritious than candy, but its not that black and white.
  - cityofdelusion 3y ago
    True, but still on a whole other level than candy. A snickers bar or coke hurts my teeth it is so sweet and a bag of gummies churns my gut. I feel fine after eating an apple. Fruits honestly don’t even seem that sweet unless you’re just eating those genetic modified grapes and new apples. Many (most?) fruits are quite tart. Maybe it’s my equatorial bias speaking and I eat a wider range of fruits than the average person, but I just don’t see fruits I enjoy as particularly sweet.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    You are right about cultivated fruits, but the distance in sugar content between them and candy remains very high. Most cultivated fruits have a sugar content of around 10%, while only a few have a sugar content slightly above 15%, e.g. grapes and (raw) figs. Only the dried fruits have a sugar content similar to chocolate and candy, i.e. starting from around 60% to much more. So dried fruits should be avoided, but fresh or defrosted fruits up to a few hundred grams per day should be OK (when no other sweets are eaten).
- Lio 3y ago
  It seems the missing things when considering food composition is absorption and availability. Calories alone are measured by burning things but it maters if your body has to do work to access those calories. The more processed or broken down an ingredient is the more available those calories are to the body vs the same amount in its raw form. I suspect, but don’t know, that liquid sugar in sodas is far worse than in fruit form because your digestive system isn’t processing fibre to get to it. Think sweetcorn vs cornbread. They could have the same calories but processing cornflour means you’re unlikely to see it again in undigested form. That same can’t be said for raw sweetcorn.

_gfwu 3y ago

Also sugar in fucking BREAD!!! Turkey is the worst offender i've come across here so far but the US is on a shameful close second.

esperent 3y ago
Every single country in Asia would like a word.
beebmam 3y ago
Sugar is normal for starting yeasts. It's a small amount.
- AmrMostafa 3y ago
  Only to “validate” the yeast, e.g. to test a new batch or if it has been unused for a long period of time. In actual bread dough, yeast finds all it needs to activate in the flour itself.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  The type of "bread" they are referring to doesn't use yeast. McDonald's buns are basically sweetened dough with air beaten into it. Definitely suggest people eat McDonald's "food" bit by bit if you're into it. Might just put you off. And, in any case, you don't need to put sugar in for yeast. The best bread has nothing of the sort. Just flour, yeast, salt and water.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Even the salt is optional. I prefer to not include salt in bread, but I add the required daily amount of salt to other kinds of food, where the added salt really improves the taste.
    - bigfudge 3y ago
      Salt really does improve the flavour of bread. I’m impressed you have got used to bread without salt because it tastes awful to me unless eaten with salty foods.

nazgul17 3y ago

Rephrasing some of the comments below, if you are looking to avoid the effects of a candy or a soft drink, you should avoid fruit juice - eat the whole fruit instead, that's actually healthy. Blending fruit makes the entire sugar content immediately available to your digestive system, causing a spike in the glycemic index (aka the level of sugar in your blood), which has unhealthy consequences. I am actually not sure if a candy has enough sugar to cause a spike in an adult, but I imagine the threshold would be lower in a child. Not to mention, children don't understand the meaning of addiction: they just want (more) candies and you had better oblige or else!