I know it's going to generate a bunch of responses and consume a bunch of attention, but what value does this drive-by comment add to the discussion, really?
Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.
They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.
As you see in other comments, people are debating the relative net effects of other inventions of modernity. I think it is interesting and very HN to think about screens vs sugar. What value does your pearl clutching add to this discussion?
Yes but it's not just sugar - people are really missing the forest for the trees with this sugar stuff.
Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.
Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.
Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)
No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.
Thank you for saying it. Ever be around to watch kids grow up or have them yourself? The exposure and cultural, regulatory control that the junk food industry has here in USA is kind of amazing. Especially in schools. It's really insane but it's become accepted here it's normal for kids, toddlers to consume hundreds of grams of added/free sugars per day. Even infants if you think about it, when ever in human history does an infant grow up sucking down pulverized fruit packets multiple times a day, 365 days a year? This is totally normal and acceptable for most people today.
Did you ever go and eat a bag of pure sugar? Or rather a bag of sweets, which usually contain other stuff, not just sugar.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Thats my philosophy too. If you're full, you have no cravings at all. I have zero sugar cravings unless im really hungry, at which point real food is still the better option. Focusing on what you Should eat (nuts, berries, greens, etc) is much more rewarding than obsessing over what not to eat.
> We're not addicted to sugar, (...) Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings".
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
I think this might be an issue that’s independent of sugar. Something something dopamine and serotonin. I also do not have issues with sugary foods, but I did in the past when my life was more stressful.
Look down the cart of your fellow shoppers the next time you go to the super market. Odds are some of them will have only huge bottles of sugar drink, sugar cereals and cookies.
> You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Now take pure sugar, add a dash of mint essence and a little oil, dissolve in hot water then dry in a warm oven. Kendal mint cake.
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
The difference you’re tasting is primarily flavoring, not sugar density, so that’s not a great test. People can’t really tell the difference by taste between hard candy made of pure sugar and hard candy made of sugar plus cornstarch, especially when other flavors are added. But anyway, candy generally tastes insanely sweet and sugary to me. What is the point here? The fact that candy is mostly sugar and people say so predates TikTok by a bit… centuries? Isn’t candy defined as anything sweet where sugar is the primary ingredient?
By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.
(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)
Ah yes I you're right, I was reading too quickly and read the carbs as sugar. That said having candies that are like 60-70% sugar is basically sugar in my book, especially since the rest is corn syrup.
(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)
A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.
Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.
Some other chewy candies:
Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).
Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.
Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.
> especially since the rest is corn syrup.
Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".
Hence my tiredness of that soundbite, because it's almost never actually true. But I guess it depends on if you see "60% of contents is sugar" as "pure sugar with food coloring" or not, at least for me it's a difference but I understand for others it's basically the same.
There is a difference between 60% sugar and 100% sugar. Why is the difference between pure sugar and Jolly Ranchers meaningful to you? Is there a different outcome or recommendation? It’d certainly help to explain what difference you see and how that difference impacts your choices, rather than state that once exists without elaborating.
So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...
@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?
Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club.
Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself.
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
> now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
Almost every cuisine Singapore serves will be sweeter relative to the authentic recipe. For example Korean food here is so sweet my wife thought she doesn't like Korean cuisine until she went to Seoul.
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system
This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one
Restaurant food is optimized for everything but healthfulness.
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
The reason it isn't, is because it's automatic. Your brain keeps you breathing as much as it can (if you hold your breath until you pass out, your brain will start breathing again for you). Breathing isn't reward driven. It doesn't engage the dopamine system the same way, eg cocaine does. You don't become tolerant to breathing the same way you do, eg cocaine. Lastly, for something to qualify for Substance Use Disorder (SUD), they need to keep doing it, despite social and health ramifications of continued use in the face of developing a tolerance for it. Other than some edgelord shit, no one's gonna give you shit for continuing to breath.
Sugar, anyone?