I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up.
One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).
Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.
I think it should be made clear that we simply don't know enough about keto yet to call it "healthy." More healthy than sugar over-consumption? Almost certainly. I will say that it allowed me to cut to under 10% bodyfat with almost no effort, so for that I think it is a valuable tool.
But I also found that I was not making progress in my athletic hobbies until I stopped eating keto. My progress visibly accelerated after I stopped. So I hesitate to recommend it as anything other than a short term body recomposition tool. Fat may not be evil, but carbs aren't either.
I can echo this. I'm on keto right now and I have no trouble for most of the day. What troubles me is strenuous activity. I can still do it, but I take longer to recover. If I'm lifting, I rest twice as long between sets. I went for a run today that shouldn't normally give me trouble but I was knackered by the uphill stretches.
I don't mind much. I feel healthy, I'm losing weight and my mind feels focused the entire day.
That's temporary. It goes away during long term ketosis. I've been in ketosis for over a year and have found my endurance to be fine but my top end power to be decreased (cycling). I'm still competitive but I think if I was eating carbs I could add ~20% to my max power based on historical numbers.
I use soy protein isolate, virgin coconut oil and virgin olive as my staples. I also eat 3 eggs a day. I'm around 10% calories from fruit but zero starch. You can play around with what works best for you but the first question I wild ask is why do you want to do keto? I do it due to an idiosyncrasy between my diet and my genetics which causes unbearable inflammation if I eat lots of carbs and sugar like a normal western diet. If I didn't have ankylosing spondylitis there is no way I would be doing this.
Since Keto is mostly fat that is pretty easy for vegetarians to source, no added sugar X nut butter and avocados sort out your fats.
For protein which in proper Keto should be kept at very moderate levels you can use any source of vegetarian protein you like, if you are willing to eat eggs it’s even better since you have a carb free source of protein.
After some back-and-forth, I've found that Keto is best for short periods of time, e.g., 1-3 month periods. Physical activity can feel quite strenuous, especially when you first start Keto, and your body isn't adapted to using fat as a fuel source.
It's an incredibly effective tool to help you re-imagine the composition of your diet. For example, after my first time doing Keto, I seriously considered which carb sources I wanted to re-introduce to my diet.
On one end, you have short-chained carbs (sugars), and on the other end, complex carbs. You also have processed foods (which have fortified micronutrients), and whole foods (naturally occurring micronutrients). I now stick to whole foods with complex carbs. You'll get more fiber this way, and complex carbs are a slower-burning food source that keep you feeling fuller, longer. I've re-introduced carbohydrates from things like beans, quinoa, and the occasional potato.
Like anything, Keto is a tool. It should not be considered a silver bullet since we don't know the long-term health consequences of long periods of Ketogenesis.
Isnt it obvious, Keto in the cold months and carbs in the hot months. Eating seasonally is key and you cant chase much or do much exercise in the dead of winter with snow and ice lying around. Its also why the Inuits have a keto diet and can survive the extreme cold.
No, ketogenic diets are mainly fats and protein. Ketosis is the burning of fats which happens when you water only fast. You can live on a diet which is 100% fat, you cant live on a 100% protein diet or a 100% carb diet. Its also why the body stores excess energy in what ever form it was eaten in, as fat. Periodic water only fasting is also the balance to todays modern lifestyles where we have so much food to choose from. Water only fasting, not only starves bacterial colonies in the body, it also helps to starve viruses and parts of the immune system become more effective than during the times when we can eat. The main known risk of water only fasting is diabetic ketoacidosis.
The eight teaspoons of sugar in a can of coke can reduce the hormone Testosterone in young teenage males by 25% within 2hours. The study only concentrated on Testosterone, but it would be interesting to find any studies, if they exist in the public domain, that shows what other effects sugar has on hormone levels, besides insulin and its increased risk of diabetes.
I think the demonisation of fat might be partly a linguistic problem. “fat” is a derogatory term for someone who is overweight, but it also happens to describe an important component of food, so the (incorrect) connection forms itself: eating fat = getting fat. This isn't the case in all languages, though I don't know if that actually has meant Germany or wherever cares less about fat content.
There seems to be two major camps when it comes to weight loss: this confused thinking of lowering fats to lose weight (as you mention), and conversely, CICO (calories-in, calories-out).
In Western diets, it is all too easy to binge on processed carbs. For people struggling to manage weight, that is usually the main issue. Diets such as Keto or Paleo tend to restrict processed foods which make it hard or nearly impossible to consume processed carbs.
Restrictions from these diets naturally lead to CICO. The body only cares to consume so much whole foods -- you can eat a very large quantity of vegetables before hitting an equivalent amount of calories from processed foods (like potato chips, etc). These diets are essentially an "easy" framework (easy conceptually, challenging in practice for some due to cravings) for following CICO and reducing calories.
My wife and I are doing IF (OMAD - One Meal A Day). And obviously don't eat junk food, sugar etc.
For me the biggest surprise was how little food we actually need. I remember myself few years ago eating a breakfast in the morning, then coffee with a muffin or donut first thing at work, then huge lunch, then another snack, then huge dinner at home (of course! just came from work - need to treat myself) and then maybe another snack before going to bed. Can't even imagine how many calories and sugars we were consuming each day. We were literally overeating every single day.
Now we eat only once a day, avoid junk food and sugars, feel awesome, look and feel much better. And it works for us even with quite intensive hiking trips and with gym/exercises.
Sure, but nobody sees cigarette adds, and actually says "I smoke because it makes me look cool". Nobody sees beer ads and says "I drink because it makes pretty girls hang out with me". Yet many many people say "I buy the diet food because I am watching my weight".
Generally speaking, people are pretty good at rationally analyzing advertisements. The ads may still be effective, but almost nobody believes them at face value. Except for diet/low-fat/natural products. It's like people turn off their bullshit detectors for them. I just don't understand why.
I've been trying out carnivore diet for a couple of months. I went from years of yo-yo dieting and pathological binge eating to effortlessly losing 10% of my bodyweight. I think my psychology got rewired somehow, I don't know how else to explain such a drastic change in behavior.
I just finished a month of carnivore and have stopped doing it, as my life had become a living hell from my frequent and urgent trips to the bathroom. Other than that, it was good for my waistline.
That happens a lot, specially in places selling healthy snacks.
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.
How about we start treating alcohol like smoking? For example ban alcohol advertising like we have with tobacco and I bet society would improve in a lot of unforeseen ways (besides the obvious reduction in alcohol related deaths and diseases and family issues).
For most people, alcohol isn’t addictive in the same way that smoking or sugar is. If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse. Whereas drinking alcohol doesn’t make water taste worse or whatever.
Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
If you're referring to the CDC figure, then I doubt you're making an apples-to-apples comparison. That figure's based on the deaths that are easily attributable to serious alcohol over-consumption, like cirrhosis or car wrecks. It doesn't include things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
Fair enough, even if it kills 5% of Americans instead of 3.6% though, I doubt that more advertising restrictions would make much difference. I’d much rather reinstate the ban on DTC prescription drug ads.
Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol?
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
The number of "Obese People" far outweighs the number of chronic alcoholics... we are talking about almost 1/3rd of the population being obese (i.e. not just a bit fat, or chubby, just straight out obese).
Is obesity a sign of sugar addiction? I don’t think so. People addicted to substances like alcohol and heroin will go out of their way to obtain these substances breaking laws and ruining others’ lives if necessary. While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous. Their mind don’t get wired by sugar to put sugar in front of decency and laws.
Not to mention sugar is not the only cause of obesity anyway. Sedentary lifestyle, hormones, gut bacteria, and the portion sizes in the US are all likely causes.
> While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous.
If you could wave a magic wand, wouldn't most obese people prefer a healthy weight? In aggregate, we can add up individual decisions and call the average "human nature." The actions of society have forced individuals to live with bodies that don't function as well as they could, so it makes sense for us to do something about the problem.
How well do we understand the causes of the obesity epidemic? Is sugar responsible for, say, 10% or 90% of the total? If we wish to progress toward a low-sugar future, then it would be good to have an estimate of how much good it would do.
I’d question if this is purely the result of a sugar addiction. This is a very American figure, other countries have less problems, even though sugar is widely available.
Obesity has a variety of contributing factors, (lack of) access to actual healthy food, lack of physical exercise, high calorie intake (certainly aided by sugar), ...
31 BMI is highly unhealthy, i know it was mine 2 years ago. You don't look "obese", but when fat start to show on your cheeks, you have to stop eating that much sugar immediatly. I'm less than 30 and i my ankle/knees are hurting like i was 40. I couldn't run, and running is still really, really hard on my ankles (after 40 minute i start to feel lot of pain). Even walking too much (more than ~7/8 kilometers) hurts. It's not beause you don't "look" obese than you are not. And i have freaking hearth issue (it's not genetic, none of my grandparent ever had heart issues, and most of my great-grandparent lived to 100 yo or near that.
I still have 26.8 BMI and i'm aiming 23-24 as i'm not a very muscular guy.
I'll have to agree though, alcoolism is worst than low obesity. Etanol is as bad as fructose for the liver, and worst for everything else too.
Sugar isn't the cause of obesity though. I think people that try to blame it all on sugar are simply looking for a scapegoat. It's easier to actually over eat on fat than on sugar because of a higher caloric density. Carbs are just cheaper so they get added to everything as bulk.
Just a sidenote, sugar addiction starts way earlier fe. 6-7 year old kids are much more likely to eat too much sugar. Alcohol kicks in quite later and likely causes more damage to people around the subject, I agree with that.
I think you are underestimating the costs of alcohol on society by reducing it to "just" a death count. I won't deny that sugar consumption is a public health crisis.
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
Is the next step forbidding dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing? Maybe taking more than one job to support a large family or accumulate college funds for one's children--"you're not getting enough sleep, which increases health care costs that we pay for."
Yes, if people need to work multiple jobs that is an indication of a huge societal problem. The workers in those jobs are being abused by the society and collectively we should fix it.
We should change the law to make sure that every job pays a living wage, so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc. just to survive. We should increase social support for families and children. We should strive to reduce the cost of housing, transportation, healthcare, and education.
Our society is rich enough to dramatically increase public funding for primary and secondary education and adequately train and support career teachers, dramatically increase funding for social workers, mental health professionals, etc.
> and adequately train and support career teachers
I always love the 'teachers' pay discussions and argument. While there are many teachers that are dedicated and do a great job there are also many who go into it for the (at one point not sure if it's true everywhere still) guaranteed retirement money and summers off. Also if a career doesn't pay enough for whatever lifestyle you want or place you want to live perhaps you can give thought to either relocating somewhere else or before you pick that career (for whatever reason) what the pay and benefits are for your choice. For sure not everyone is in a position to do this but my guess is most don't even give that thought. Meaning for example they decide to become a teacher in a very expensive place (NYC let's say) and then even at $90k per year can't afford to lead a decent life style. They could probably move 60 miles west from NYC (to say rural Pennsylvania) and earn less and have a better life. But then they wouldn't be in NYC, right? And they've decided
they have to be there. As any immigrant who has left their family and the familiarity of a foreign country would tell you sometimes you have to relocate somewhere else if it's not good where you are.
> so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc
You'd have to look at the total picture of how they are spending their money though.
> forbidding dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing?
Well not that it would ever happen but why should I pay for someone's dangerous and/or foolish risky activity? (Rescue, health care and so on). People often act as if there is a large pot of money sitting around to cover any and all mistakes and life choices someone makes.
Sure. But there are 300,000 obesity-related deaths per year. Obesity- and sugar-related issues are less likely to result in ER-type scenarios, but are nevertheless pervasive.
> Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
Not to mention there are social limitations to alcohol consumption. Eg. you wouldn't normally drink whisky on the bus or at work (unless you happen to be a character from "Mad Men"), but there aren't many times nor places where eating a chocolate bar is frowned upon.
> If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse.
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
the second is not a good source. The title is misleading as the article itself says experts don't agree.
I don't think it's clear what is an "addiction", as addiction is part of how humans (and all brains) work. reinforcement of reward is necessary for normal function. The most discrete sign of addiction would be the molecular switch DeltaFosB which is manifest in behavioral and drug addictions. However, for things like sugar things are more nuanced.
The two are also hard to compare side-to-side because alcohol addiction is like 50-70% genetic, and the effects tend affect other people more severely while sugar basically harms the person who eats it.
That's the genetic fallacy. They link to a number of other sources from that article with supporting information such as a Connecticut College study and a Princeton University study. I would deem university sources "good" (although you're still subject to cherry-picking and the like)
Alcohol consumption is by choice by adults, where as sugar consumption is not - children's food are mostly sugary items today in the market. They get addicted by the time they are teenagers, and for many of them (30% or above of all the kids), due to resulting obesity, rest of their lives are spent fixing/fighting it - depression and health issues.
It’s banned in Iceland. The big breweries simply offer a low alcohol with the same branding and advertise those. Poor tourists end up being the only ones buying them, not knowing they are low alcohol, as they are allowed to sell the low alcohol beers in the grocery stores while regular beer can only be sold at the state run liqueur stores.
Vodka companies in Poland were even more inventive. One of them started a yacht rental enterprise (or something along these lines), and proudly advertised "łódka Bols". "Łódka" meaning a boat, and coincidentally rhyming with "wódka" (or vodka).
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
No, the government shouldn't be restricting behavior unless there is a good reason to do so.
German constitutional principles only permit restricting basic rights (this seems to affect free speech, at least in its US definition) if it is "proportional" (verhältnismäßig) - restricting only what is absolutely necessary to reach a legitimate goal.
More specifically, it has to be suitable, necessary, and appropriate/non-excessive ("geeignet, erforderlich und angemessen").
A law that doesn't achieve the stated goal would fail the "suitable" test.
That it doesn't work in Russia is far from proof that it couldn't work elsewhere.
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
{ "Advertising increases demand for a product.", "Banning advertising does not reduce demand for a product." }
I think you really do gotta pick one there, because each implies the other's opposite.
You don't really even need two different studies to demonstrate "demand is higher in the presence of advertising" and "demand is lower in the absence of advertising". It's mathematically impossible to experimentally demonstrate one without also demonstrating the other.
Not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I would say that failure to prove that a group of people responds to advertising is not the same thing as proving that a group of people does not respond to advertising. So, if we really have demonstrated that banning advertising didn't have an effect on demand for alcohol in Russia, we'd expect to also see that alcohol companies don't even want to advertise their products in Russia, because they know it would just be wasting money. Do we see that?
Isn't a third option for advertising simply to increase brand awareness? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but I remember ads for laundry detergent for example.
Is it reasonable to say that people wash their clothes more often because there's ads for laundry detergent on tv? I think these ads were designed to make you grab their product when you're in the super market because you've seen their brand before. I remember I recently bought a bottle of shampoo and realized the only reason i grabbed this particular one was that i immediately recognized it because i saw their ads on TV over a decade ago.
If we assume that most people drink socially, then I think it's not unreasonable to think that consumption doesn't really increase with advertising. You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
Alcohol as a party drug now competes with other party drugs in many markets. Particularly cannabis. This is one reason performance of advertising bans might differ from region to region. Cannabis as a party drug has a pretty broad advertising ban in most places, but alcohol does not. If it's a matter of convincing consumers to buy one party drug instead of the other, an alcohol advertising ban could be highly effective in these particular regions.
>You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
That's an unjustified assumption. It may very well be the case that "go out with friends for a beer" is such a popular default because it's depicted in advertising and media so often. If your only choice was to drink, then it's easy to see that advertising for alcohol is solely about influencing which alcohol you pick. But that's not the real world, where drinking does compete for attention with other activities.
Alcohol consumption is primarily a cultural phenomena (consumption rates vary GREATLY from country to country. In France people drink 12.2 liters of pure alcohol a year, while in Turkey they drink 2 per year. Neither of these countries are even on either extreme...) Cultures can be changed; history has shown that there is no such thing as an immutable culture. Advertising impacts culture, that is well documented. All of these things we should know. So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
> So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I suggested this. I'm also not interested in an emotional discussion on alcohol advertisement bans, because I frankly don't care.
It's a third option, but it doesn't seem all that likely to me. It's much easier to see how demand for laundry detergent would be inelastic than to see how demand for alcoholic beverages would be inelastic.
It could also be the case that advertising changes which particular product people choose (say, which brand of beer), but doesn't affect the demand for beer overall.
All good points. Furthermore it's easy to consider the possibility that in different cultural contexts the consumer demand for alcohol is driven by different factors. It may be the case that in one region alcohol consumption is driven by advertisements that promote it as a party drug, while in another region alcohol consumption is driven by oppressive poverty and bleak outlooks on life.
In other words, the reason a 40 year old coal miner with black lung drinks every day might be different from the reason a 19 year old frat bro drinks on friday and saturday evenings.
I dont have a strong opinion on the topic of alcohol advertising, but, on your core point advertising can also attempt to take market share rather than grow the market.
If you advertise a craft beer to take share from budwiser, its possible that no additional beer was drank, but the ads were still effective
It significantly shifts the onus on people who want it banned to prove it would work though. "In country X they do policy Y and it works/doesn't work" is a much stronger argument than "Yeah but in our country it's different."
I guess it depends on what you mean by "helped". I've seen a few figures, none of which indicated that it had no effect on alcohol consumption in the US, and none of which indicated that it came anywhere close to eradicating alcohol consumption, either. It's naturally hard to estimate, given that it was all done clandestinely so there aren't really any official figures to use, but I got the impression that you could say with some measure of confidence that it reduced consumption by somewhere between 30% and 70%.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to. It's also far less harmful when consumed in moderation, no matter how many elusive studies want to push how "there is no safe alcohol dosage" because you might have 15% more risk of cancer in 30 years or something. I agree advertising is bad but you're going to have a hell of a hard time convincing billions of people that they should stop socializing the easy way.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to – the 1st part of your sentence seems to contradict the 2nd: nowadays people can't think of getting together and not drinking and that's to me exactly because they got addicted to socializing under alcohol so much they can't socialize normally without it.
And that’s reinforced by advertisement over and over again.
While there are so many fun activities not involving alcohol. Seems like most of team building events nowadays boils down to pretentious dinner plus drinking to celebrate?
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
I'm talking about typical usage in a social setting. People may drink a few beers a couple days in a week for months, or even years, and quit without any issues. Hardly the same with an equivalent "social dose" in cigarettes.
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
Um, prohibition is the complete ban of all alcohol.
umvi is proposing the ban of alcohol related advertising. One is completely different than the other.
The Scandinavian countries show that if you do not prohibit completely, but just make people jump through some hoops to get it and/or make it very expensive, it sort of works.
I find that there is much more smoking (including indoor) and drinking in Denmark than most of any other place I lived, or maybe I am just older now and can’t the hangovers are much longer??
Maybe they meant Sweden/Norway only? I'm not sure. I think the alcohol tax in Sweden is like a full 7x higher than Denmark. I could be wrong there. This is second hand from an old co worker, and years out of date.
I've lived in countries with extremely liberal alcohol laws: low taxes, liberal advertising, 24/7 availability, drinking allowed on the street.
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
I distinctly recall these (and much more restrictive) measures having been tried in the U.S. almost exactly 100 years ago, to a very modest success. Sugar seems to be an easier target, because there are sweeteners like aspartame. Alcohol almost by definition doesn't have a healthy replacement.
AFAICT, there's not much definitive research that shows the harms of cannabis consumption. I'm aware of the research that clearly counterindicates usage by teenagers and young adults due to continued brain development issues, but is there evidence that cannabis consumption is unhealthy otherwise?
I think even the larger cohort studies failed to connect joint smoking with ear/nose/throat/lung cancer, much to the consternation of people who like to throw down the "combusting and inhaling anything has to be bad for you" statement.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm a moderate consumer of wine and I just love it. It's good for health, it supplements food in a great way, it rarely gets you drunk and it tastes great. Sure, if you can't hold your liquor eventually it will kill but so will do everything you eat or drink if you consume it in great quantities.
Would limiting alcohol advertising really have that dramatic an effect on the 'good' wine market? I can't recall the last time I bought a decent bottle of wine because it was advertised.
Yes because I don't trust reviews. I do on the other hand trust specific brands that I've tried before. So if they have a new label I'd like to know it. And the best way to know that is from ads on printed magazines.
A small amount of wine has been shown in small scale studies to have a moderate health benefit (though it's possible that's due to economic factors), most wine users consume far more wine than was studied.
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
FYI: This article is referring to requiring sugary products to use plain packaging:
> ...suggested sweets, snacks and sugary drinks should be wrapped in plain packaging to make them less appealing, given the excess consumption of the sweet stuff
(I think some of the responses here are assuming the question is about treating sugar like smoking in other respects.)
I think people are afraid of a slippery slope. Legislation is almost always done in a slippery slope manner - at first you limit things a little and wait until people accept it. After a while you limit some more, then some more and then some more.
You can do whatever you want with sugar, but it's not going to solve the obesity problem. Not only are carbs one of the few macro nutrients we can digest, they're also in pretty much everything.
I don't know about this. For example in many countries around the world cigarettes are now put in unattractive packages but not banned outright.
To get very meta, the argument that regulation is a slippery slope, is itself a slippery slope. As in, I think the fear that government is going to continually encroach upon our freedoms until we live in a police state is misguided. This is the argument that big industry uses to exploit workers, cheat on taxes, spew their externalities over the environment, etc etc.
What we should really aim for is a democracy in which well-minded and level headed politicians work to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Perverse incentives aside, I think if that were really the goal, you'd get some level of regulatory balance that was neither too loose nor too restrictive.
People stopped being poor. It's difficult to become obese when you simply don't have enough food. The solution to the problem isn't going to be in the past, because we want people to live a better life and not worse.
I think what will solve the obesity problem is education. The basic ideas of nutrition (in terms of physics and biology) should be taught to everyone. It should not be possible for someone to graduate high school and find the basics of a nutritional label difficult to understand.
This should also be coupled with a better cultural attitude. People should feel encouraged to try to lose weight when they're obese, rather than told some form of "healthy at every size" nonsense or be made fun of when they are at the gym. It should be seen as an ailment that can be improved rather than something shameful. If you have a broken arm, then you're not told that it's fine to have a broken arm, nor are you made fun of for trying to get your broken arm fixed.
I used to be overweight and I understood that it was bad, but it was difficult to try to improve it. The people around you notice that you're doing things differently and you'll hear snide remarks or encouragement, but this leads to expectations, so you try to hide it instead. That way nobody expects anything.
Serving sizes have increased. Fat has been removed from a lot of dairy foods and replaced with extra carbohydrates. Sugar is unnecessarily added to bread. People work a lot and commute a lot and don't feel like putting in time to cook when they can just stop by the drive thru. A lot of cities are very car-centric and people walk less or bike less. We are very stressed and eating a pizza feels good man, a slight relief from our terrible lives. Our jobs are very sedentary, take 8 hours of our time, drive home, eat, go to sleep, wake up, do it again.
Snacks are mostly carbohydrates: bagels, donuts, chips, chocolate, granolas. It's hard to eat healthy, you have to make it yourself, but that costs time and effort, which you don't have much of because we work a lot.
It takes a conscious effort to say no to all of these delicious things, and that's hard to sustain.
I think the environment we've created is setting us up for failure in the sense that the easiest and most available options for us in food and jobs, are not good for us in the long run.
God I hope so. I grew up obese and am now about halfway through undoing the damage using a ketogenic diet. I really do think sugar sweetened drinks should be banned for sale to children under 18, as that causes the most damage.
I feel fortunate to genuine enjoy sugar-free carbonated beverages (from plain carbonated water to the varieties with mild flavorings, e.g., La Croix). So many people can't appreciate the subtleties of these beverages because their high-sugar diets.
I forget what exactly caused me to switch, but I realized in college that buying soda with a meal made it significantly more expensive (e.g., $7.50 meal was now $9.50). Tight on money, it's a quick way to squeeze an extra meal or two. Still wanted something more than water, so I tried the soda machine's carbonated soda water tab. Now, it's my go-to! (Sidenote: a good number of restaurants do not have soda water tabs on their machines. I find it to be a slight annoyance).
Folks that only enjoy sweetened carbonated beverages, I think, can't even imagine enjoyed unsweetened carbonated. But it is totally possible to eventually reach that state.
That would be a good thing. Milk consumption greatly reduces iron absorption (and health benefits are iffy to say the least), and fruit is better eaten than drank. Our digestive system is built on the idea of chewing food (through vagus nerve stimulation).
Parents can buy whatever they want for their kids, I said nothing about banning consumption. Milk would be fine, however most juices and chocolate milk are pretty bad for you.
No need to punish everyone for the problems of a few. If you were to ban it, it would make sense to only ban it for those that cannot be responsible with sugary drinks.
It'd be much harder than cigarettes to define and enforce, and more prone to loopholes. What's a "sugary food"? Grams of sugar? They'd just sell fun-sized. Percentage mass? That could impact fruit. Added sugar? What is "non-added sugar"? Specific product categories like soda and candy? They'd just walk the line with things like "sweetened sparkling water".
I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a way to define it, but it'll be hard.
If I eat a strawberry thats non-added sugar. If I sprinkle sugar on the strawberry, thats added sugar.
It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.
If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
The new version of the nutrition label specifically calls out added sugars [1], so it sounds like if there are gray areas the FDA has been able to decide on a standard.
Right, but right now there's not a super strong incentive for companies to try and manipulate their added sugar label. It can be a marketing thing for some brands but if added sugar was actively penalized then you would start seeing better attempts to keep foods sweet with "non-sugar" sources.
This is probably the right way to think about it at an individual level. Eating berries and fruits in season is probably quite healthy and corn-syrup added processed food unhealthy. But we've already seen how companies obfuscate. For example "Nitrates" have been demonized. So know you'll see "natural" or "healthy" food making using of "celery extract," which is really just "natural nitrates."
It's less clear than you might think. Food producers have already adjusted to parents rejecting high sugar products by producing foods that are similar, but use fruit or fruit juice as the sweetener. They often advertise that there is no added sugar.
And what about a pasta that ends up with some sugars from the process of being made? What's the difference between "natural pasta" and "sugar added pasta"?
> If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.
This is not true; juice has useful nutrients. You can make vegetable and fruit juices which are fairly low in sugar and are packed with vitamins and minerals.
And you tend to get enough of those nutrients from other sources of food nowadays. While it's true that some juices can have less sugar in them, the most common ones don't. Apple juice will not have less sugar than a soda.
Any items which contains more than 1g sugar per 100 gram, and contains any amount of product that has been process or mixed with something else not found in nature (so no on apples, yes on apple juice, yes on anything that has added sugar).
Out of curiosity, how did you become so knowledgeable about nutrition? This comment, and your other (now deleted) comment make it seem like you are really confident that you know more than everyone else.
My biggest complaint about learning about nutrition is that everyone says opposing things, and it is really difficult for me to know what is right and what is snake oil.
Any tips on learning the “right” way to be healthy?
I would recommend getting a variety of sources of information while staying very skeptical of any outlandish claims. However, the reason why diet is more important than exercise is that exercise doesn't burn many calories compared to how many calories you need for your body's upkeep during a day.[0]
Look at those numbers and keep in mind that a daily recommended caloric intake is at 2000 kcal. Now look at caloric values of food - carbs and protein are at around 4 kcal per gram and fat is 9 kcal per gram. Take pineapple juice for instance - it has around 60 kcal per 100 ml. If you drink 2 glasses of that (400ml) then that's already more than 10% of your daily calories. People often drink an entire liter per day though.
Not the person you’re replying to but I suggest listening through Chris Masterjohn’s “mastering nutrition” podcast. I am a huge fan of his evidence-based approach. He has a PHD in nutrition and while that in and of itself is not the reason I hold his opinion in high regard, at least he’s credentialed. Highly recommend.
Sugar is bad in large quantities, but there's no such thing as second hand sugar consumption, which is the main reason why anybody wanted to regulate smoking, since nobody wants to get lung cancer from working in a place where everyone else is doing something harmful.
What we need to do with regard to sugar is get people to have some got dang self control, which starts with proper education K-12 and decent menus for school lunches.
In my amateur opinion, yes. The principal difference is pleasure: sugar and other sweet things are more pleasurable to eat than bland foods like white bread.
This is important because eating when you're not hungry is a huge risk factor for obesity. It's not rewarding or fun to eat bland foods when you're not hungry, but it is still fun to eat candy when you're not hungry. This can be particularly problematic when sugary foods become a form of hedonic substitution or a coping strategy in bored or depressed individuals. Additionally, there are some studies which suggest that the tongue may become desensitized to sweetness when habitually eating sugary foods, potentially motivating individuals to choose sweeter foods at meal times:
Sugar is needed for yeast to raise the dough. It's common everywhere not in the US alone. I'm in Europe and most bread has sugar added during preparation. Small amounts but still sugar.
Added sugar is not necessary for yeast. The yeast is breaking down and using the carbs naturally present in wheat. The simplest breads, like french baguettes, are only made with flour, water, salt and yeast. Sugar is added to many commercial breads because it can make production easier and more consistent and sell more to consumers, but it's not added because it's necessary.
Ok, of the carbs in white bread here there is 0.6% sugar. That's completely negligible and now what I'm referring to at all. I am talking about added sugar where it will be 10-20% of the carbs in the white "bread" (I consider that pastry :D).
I think people are talking about adding sugar for taste, beyond what the yeast can metabolise, which is common in US food culture but not generally elsewhere.
That’s only true if you eat the same quantity of both. The other problem with sugar is that it doesn’t satisfy hunger as effectively as starch so you typically end up consuming more of it. The best bang for the caloric buck in terms of hunger satiation is actually fat and protein.
Don't forget fiber. Honestly, a good, high-fiber carbohydrate is about as good as you can get for satiety/gram, except maybe for fat.
I think you'll find a bowl of oatmeal hard to beat for satiety, and that's super high in carbohydrates (~70% carbs). Compare that to a glazed donut, which has fewer carbs and more fat, and I think you'll find that the oatmeal is more satisfying.
I think most diets ignore perhaps the most important part of successfully losing weight: feeling reasonably full. IMO, the macros don't matter nearly as much as the satiety of the food you eat, since feeling full is a huge help when trying to avoid excess calories.
Some difference - definitely. Does it count as "much"? Depends on your definition of "much". Glycemic index is interesting starting point to look into this.
Not all white bread is identical either. Sugar content may vary a lot from brand to brand. Glycemic index too.
Not all sugar is actually processed by the body the same though.
Fructose gets processed in the liver whereas glucose goes into the blood stream triggering insulin response.
Other very fine points are glycemic index, for example a low glycemic index food breakdown to glucose, bypassing the liver, but is absorbed into the bloodstream relatively slowly for glucose and minimizes the insulin spike/response promoting more stable blood sugar levels.
Yes that's definitely true I meant they will end up as the same end result. The fast sugars will end up causing you want more of it again in a shorter amount of time so it is ofcourse better to eat veggies instead of a candy bar to get your required energy.
That's only half the story. Simplest sugars (monosacchrides like fructose) get absorbed almost instantly in your stomach/instentine while more complex sugars/carbs (disacchrides and starches) get finally broken down and absorbed further down your intestine. This can have a dramatic impact on your biome.
I think a smaller but still effective first step would be to label sugary products as such. Many people may be unaware of the number of things they consume which are more than 50% refined sugar by dry weight. A great deal of "fruit" products fall in to this category.
Should we trust the government to decide what food is “healthy”? Absolutely not. Just look at how many times the “recommenced diet” has changed in the past few decades. There’s no reason to expect that the current evidence against sugar is more correct than previous (now debunked) evidence against fat.
What’s more, what’s healthy depends on who you are. People with eating disorders, for example, need easy access to caloric foods, including sugary foods, to weight restore and eat healthily.
Instead of focusing on trying to figure out what is and isn’t good for you, we should focus on making sure people have access to foods we already know are healthy by eliminating urban food deserts.
Eating disorders can be some of the most dangerous things you can suffer from (anorexia has a mortality of 30% if I remember correctly); however on a population scale the damage is dwafted buy the damage from obesity because so many more people are seriously fat.
Right, so there needs to be solutions that work for everyone. That’s why I think food access is key (i.e. more grocery stores in low income neighborhoods). People who need more food can get it, and people who need healthier food will have access.
In early treatment of extremely restrictive eating disorders, calorie consumption has to be increased slowly over the course of about a week to avoid electrolyte imbalances. That’s usually done under the supervision of a doctor. After someone’s later on in recovery, it isn’t a concern.
How about we just let people choose what to do with their body?
As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addicted to it, eating sweets with every meal or as a snack. Earlier this week I heard someone at work talking about how their child has never eaten any kind of sweets before and personally this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I don't think it's so much denying people what to do with their bodies, as much countering all the ways they were being manipulated into overconsumption.
The market and social forces, left unchecked, have resulted in a bleak situation: for instance, I've noticed that the frozen goods aisle in most urban supermarkets has slowly become dominated by ice creams and other deserts, pizzas and french fries, together frequently making up > 3/4 of the area, the rest being frozen vegetables, fish and meat.
I think this trend needs to be countered because I don't believe most people made the conscious choice "I'm mostly eating crap now".
The problem with this approach is, the vast majority of people pick the default option when presented with it (e.g., states that, by default, mark you as an organ donor have proportionally more organ donors).
Public policy has real, measurable implications. We don't need to treat sugar like smoking or alcohol, but when you find a way to move people away from it as their "default" setting, you will find, in aggregate huge savings in health care expenses and better outcomes (a sizable amount of health care spending is due to preventable conditions, like Type II diabetes).
I agree, in principle, people can still consume sugar, if they want. The occasional slice of birthday cake is not the problem with sugar. It's the consumption of a 2-liter of soda, multiple times per week, that's the problem (regular consumption). But we need to make it easier for people to avoid processed, simple carbohydrates.
One possible solution is increasing the ubiquity and ease-of-access to whole foods. Eating healthy needs to have the convenience of going to a fast food restaurant -- they're everywhere, they're cheap, and it's fast. We desperately need this as a society. Consider it more as a preventative, or we can pay for it on the other end (higher health care costs).
I do agree with you that access to cheap/convenient healthy foods is certainly lacking. This is definitely a problem I think we can and should tackle. I think giving people more choices is a great thing and I would happily support this. The "default" also makes a lot of sense here. Really at the end of the day what I'm skeptical of is trying to force people's hands into cutting sugar out of their diet.
There's varying degrees of "force". For example, we could "force" people to get their children vaccination, but that panders to fears of conspiracy theories. Instead, you can take away access to public education (e.g., vaccination mandatory for schooling). Then it comes at a steep price, yet you still maintain the freedom of choice. I don't think of vaccination as an analogous example here, since nobody really sees sugar as dangerous. In small quantities, it isn't. The danger is the context of the overall diet. Decades of lots of sugar consumption undoubtedly leads to negative health outcomes.
Yes. The fiction that sugar is somehow equivalent to hard drugs has continuously been pedaled without any basis in reality. Opioids have measurable and easily observable psychoactive effects and cause physical dependence. They limit one's ability to function as a normal human if consumed on a regular basis and an overdose of opioids can result in instant death. Even if you claim that eating sugar is "as addictive as cocaine" as the catch phrase goes, sugar lacks the power to cause you to nod off for hours, wake up with withdrawal symptoms like diarrhea/vomiting/flu-like symptoms, and kill you on the spot from an accidental overdose. Sugar also isn't regularly consumed in ways that destroy your arteries or nasal cavity. And when is the last time you've seen somebody crash a car because they were inebriated from eating too much sugar? The comparison between the two is complete non-sense and I believe that you can see just as clear as me why that is the case.
There is at least some evidence that the root cause of sugar addiction is limiting sugar consumption [1], and this definitely reflects my childhood experience. Blindly taking a position of taking sugar away from children could actually cause an increase in sugar addiction in the long-term.
In my younger, smoking years, when the anti-smoking lobby grew stronger and managed to land more and more restrictions on smoking, to the degree that you almost felt like a leper...
I remember telling my anti-smoking, chocolate-eating friends “you know one day they will come for you too, right?”
That sure didn’t take long. Let’s see how they feel about it this time around.
Did you not eat chocolate? Did all of your anti-smoking friends had the urge to eat chocolate during breaks or social events? That’s a very odd characterization.
Smoking is banned for under 18 already, and affects others around you, while chocolate does not (an I really saying this?). As seen in the article, sugar is a bigger issue for the 4-18 age range. I’m sure your friends feel absolutely fine.
That's simply not going to happen because there is no "second hand sugar" scenario. Even alcohol, which is incredibly destructive to third parties by any measure (domestic abuse, drunk driving, etc), hasn't successfully been publicly vilified to the same extent as smoking.
Well there are children, not exactly “2nd hand sugar” but it’s a good faith arguement...alcohol and tobacco are age regulated whereas sugar isn’t.
The incidences of both fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes in children is pretty alarming, and just saying that and focusing on the number of incidents is alarming rather than the fact a single child has either of those diseases, whereas the first medical cases of either only occurred in the 80’s. I don’t think the first case of childhood type 2 was even diagnosed in the UK until the 90’s. Now we have 1.25 million kids in the US with the disease whereas 100% of all cases could have been prevented through diet.
It was a moral panic though, rather than a reflection on the legitimate bodily harm of consumption. The prohibitionists were not arguing to save alcoholics livers, they were arguing to ban perceived unchristian behavior.
Domestic abuse was a large part of it; the temperance movement was largely and at times primarily comprised of women, and the temperance movement was closely linked to the women's suffrage movement.
Sugar addict in next plane seat in long haul flight is definitely "second hand sugar".
Some people being addicted to sugar makes food makers add sugar where it's not needed or increase it's quantity a lot. So you have harder time limiting your sugar input.
> What we should have is health insurance premiums based on risk factors such as obesity, even in public systems.
Next thing we know we're all constantly monitored for every single health metrics and pay more for every one that is slightly off.
"Bacon every morning ? Well sorry sir but that'll be $30 more per year. Oh and you drive to work instead of cycling, that's another $60. Our tracking system tells us that you were sitting more than 7 hours per day on average for the last month so we'll have to charge you $0.55 per seated hours for the next 6 months. You should also think about your monthly running goal, you only have 3 days left and 36km to go."
We could also stop insuring people when they start getting unhealthy. Imagine the profit !! /s
What we should do is better educate people about health and stop trying to get them addicted as much and as early as we can.
You’ll get your premium raised for high glucose or cholesterol levels in the Netherlands. Prices are regulated though, and you can’t be denied insurance.
That could get exciting. Think of all the factors we could base health insurance on. Risky outdoor activities? Higher premiums. Biking to work? Higher premiums.
Alternatively, we could work to help everyone become healthier, and then use as large a risk pool as possible to leverage the benefits of insurance.
Well, life insurance does that. I recall having someone over to check my health and they had me fill out a form detailing the types of activities I do (it even covered skydiving).
Since I'm healthy, I got a fantastic rate.
However, nothing like that happened for my health insurance. The closest I have is a program that helps pay for my gym membership if I go regularly. The really silly thing is that I'm not able to go regularly because I ride my bike a lot, yet I am likely more healthy because of that than many of the people who go to the gym regularly.
Honestly, I would totally be down with a voluntary system like that for things like obesity, smoking, etc. If I present a lower risk to the insurance company, shouldn't I be rewarded with lower rates? If that were the case, I think more people would make real changes to their lives instead of fiddling with fad diets, pedometers, and gym memberships. Saving $20/month on a gym membership or getting a free Fitbit is less motivating than saving $100/month for being healthy.
Shrug; I'm honestly just grasping at a straw there to form a plausible hypothesis of how someone else's sugar consumption affects me in the way that cigarette smoke does. Since I have to pay taxes and forced public health insurance premiums (that are based on my income rather than claim history or health), that's what it must be. Anything unhealthful indulged by a large segment of the population is increasing that burden.
The problem with "we can work to help" is that "we" will at times be helping even if another "we" doesn't see it as particularly helpful.
I have a problem with the presumption of unrelenting competence, good faith, and humaneness in a bureaucratic organization despite the inevitable pressure from various political factions and lobbying groups.
Smoking has second hand smoke, but I think sugar is internal to your body rather than all everywhere like smoking is. So, it is not same kind of thing and should not be treat like same kind of thing, due to that.
I have a feeling most of the addiction came from the food and drink industry. Perhaps the amount of sugar contained in the industry provided foods should be restricted to some sane amount and not a quantity to induce you to eat it. This way, the home cook can control their sugar intake and the home cook cannot produce the number of available goods one eats by just picking it off the shelf at a store.
Higher end restaurants that cook their own food won't be restricted this way either and that's a good thing because one goes to such places for food you don't normally get at home but fast food restaurants get most of their food from factory stores where sugar content can and should be restricted for the same reason grocery store food should--sweetening foods makes you want them more.
Why do we consider smoking to be bad for you? Because, while you may get lithium, you also get things that can and do cause cancer. If I give you "lithium plus carcinogens", the lithium doesn't make it "healthy".
What? No! Fucking hell. Speak to a nutritionist. You need carbs! They aren't bad when eaten in the correct amount and type. The body uses glycogen and glucose for energy, the problem isn't sugar, the problem is a lack of understanding by the public on the topics of exercise, food and health. I don't know about anyone else but all three school types (private, public, and charter) in America seem to neglect this type of information when teaching PE. We seem to treat PE as strictly a means to burn off excess energy for overactive adolescents instead of using this as an opportunity to understand the biological mechanisms involved in converting food to fuel. That is not to say that this information is not taught but it seems that its only ever taught as an extracurricular when a student picks up a sport such as football. Even then its almost treated like tribal knowledge passed down from the coach to the players.
All of this is further hampered by other factors as well such as the disappearing HomeEc curriculum, the general faddness of dieting in the press (this article being a good example) and a misconception on the behalf of the public on matters related to food consumption. There is almost a mysticism/dogma about how food works that seems to prevail over discourse related to nutrition these days. Furthermore, there is a return to quackery lately with things such as alkaline diets and such despite the fact that most of the foods that they suggest to eat, such as fruit, are often more acidic rather than basic. I blame this on MLMs trying to sell water to middle class retards too stupid to understand that they are being swindled. Sugar is not the Great Satan of food. It's simply people that are too ignorant to understand what they are eating will continue to make poor choices.
One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).
Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.