Study links sugar-filled drinks to millions of heart disease and diabetes cases
bgr.com97 points by hochmartinez 7 hours ago
97 points by hochmartinez 7 hours ago
IMO a substantial (not 100%) root cause of all this is that many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible. This leads to all kinds of medical issues down the road, which then is handled by emergency medical services, or very severe health problems that are very difficult to treat.
Perhaps, and we should continue to work on that, but exploitative and exhausting labor has been an issue for ten millenia or so at least. We may well not see it fixed in our lives.
But the particular failings of the modern western diet are relatively new and might still be remedied or reversed without waiting for the whole labor and exploitation issue to be sorted.
The difference is that the previous methods of exhausting labor provided physical exercise as a side effect.
As brutal as that was on the body, it did have some health benefits.
In contrast to modern American/Asian work culture, which is high stress and sedentary.
While there exists a lot of sedentary work in the US and that has consequences, there's still a great deal of physical work done in the US as well, and a very high number of non-working people with plenty of time for personal exercise if they wanted to pursue it. Yet the profound wellness problems we're talking about apply to all of those groups.
There's some truth there, but no matter how active one is, one can still out-eat the exercise with sugar.
And since the Industrial Revolution, any labour is highly repetitive and therefore leads to RSI.
> which is high stress and sedentary
Soon, we might even reach low stress and not back-breaking! *Gasp*!
Some of us grew up with childhood friends who cleaned the meat plants at night. A practice that continues to this day. You can always tell - they stink of bleach.
Before the industrial age sustained exhausting labor was still a temporary thing reserved for planting and harvest times, and even then you were still deciding your own hours, it was just obviously the most profitable time to put in the most work so people did it.
Workers in industrial societies work way more hours than their ancestors did. There's enough resources for people to work less hours.
I'm with you that things suck now and don't need to be this way, having carefully not said otherwise.
But I also think you might be underestimating how many people's ancestors were slaves, serfs, miners, and laborers during hose prior several millenia of settled, urbanizing civilization. We don't all come from aristocratic or even subsistence farming stock.
It can be less bad than it is, we might want to strive to make it less bad than it is, but it's been pretty darn bad for a long while. For pressing modern problems we also need to commit to more immediate tactics.
I'm not saying everyone had it better. Chattle slavery is definitely worse. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think we needed to have slaves to make progress. I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do. A worker today is significantly more productive. We could probably make life a lot easier for everyone by finding a more equitable way to distribute resources and by breaking up and regulating all the rent-seeking monopolists who makes things more expensive than they need to be.
> I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do
I'm with you. Has anyone here said that?
Yes, someone responded to me saying just that and it's also a position I've seen frequently on HN. I think plenty of people have that as a gut reaction to any proposed change in the status quo.
Your first sentence is a false factoid repeated online [0][1]. And anyway, there is always more work to be done, so I don't understand why people think working hours would ever decrease; as soon as we build one thing, another problem crops up. We would only stop working until all problems in the world would have been solved, which is never.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/z38k5p/i_h...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/im1lqu/is_...
Maybe we could get off the hedonic treadmill and be content with a certain level of material affluence.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to die of now-curable diseases that were only able to be cured due to the hard work of many, many humans over generations. To think that that human progress is akin to a personal hedonic treadmill is misguided.
Which goods would you cut out?
Most people I know spend a lot of time doing unnecessary things for their job. I don't have a magic solution to fix all the bureaucratic bullshit people are subject to but acknowledging it's a problem is a start.
Sure, there are lots of things that are inefficient. I think everyone recognizes that. That doesnt mean there is an obvious and viable alternative.
Stock buybacks. They serve nothing but short term driving up of profits purely to increase the value of management's stock options. They have no place in the functions/purpose of a healthy stock market.
How would that free up worker time while preserving the same amount of physical goods and services available for consumption?
Lets say every company stops buybacks, that doesnt mean workers can make more "stuff" with fewer hours.
It's because the people who say things like the above have no real alternative solution in place and simply say things that sound good in theory (or are even wholly unrelated, as you explained) but fundamentally don't change anything about the world.
> exploitative and exhausting labor
That was necessary because of the low productivity of people.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it is objectively true that people in the past were less productive than today, not necessarily because they were lazier, but because technology has gotten better. It has been the case since civilization started, as we were 99% farmers until we became productive enough to stratify our division of labor, something that every world history student learns.
What does that have to do with eating more sugar which seems to have a direct causal effect on becoming fatter and getting diabetes? Lots of countries over millennia have worked hard and have been stressed, often much more than us today, yet they were by and large not obese (no pun intended), the only thing that changed in the last century was the rise of processed foods with high amounts of sugar.
>> IMO a substantial (not 100%) root cause of all this is that many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible.
I'm sure there are many truths and probably different realities for different cohorts of individuals. I will share a personal story which might seem almost shocking for GenZ+ as they enter the workforce:
- My dad had a normal degree from a normal university in Accounting
- My had had a normal 9-5 job. No family connection/etc, he was an immigrant
- My dad was able to afford a home for us -- in the city -- on his salary alone (not a dual income). The homeprice:annualsalary ratio was 2:1. If he God-forbid lost his salary both my mom and dad would have tried to look for a job to help finances, most normal jobs would cover the mortgage/taxes
Not to say there werent laborers in the 1970s, etc, but this was a very common scenario. It allowed you to work to meet needs and spend the rest of your time with family. You didnt have 5 espressos to try and crank more pull-requests at night after the kids fall asleep.
People always quote the 1950s to 80s as some golden age, and surely it was for some, not all who lived it, like your father, but it was due to the very specific circumstances of World War 2 and how only the US was not destroyed while much of Europe and Asia was. We were able to lend a lot of money to these countries and rise our standard of living significantly, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Recency bias especially is prevalent for this sort of thinking. Unless you want another world war, that time period is simply irreplicable.
I think this was also true 50 years ago. I’m unconvinced that we’re working harder today compared to the past.
I do agree society overall is higher stress mainly due to the internet and constant attention grabbing in all directions.
Couple that with lack of in-person communities. They are ephemeral at best now.
The repetitiveness of modern labor has moved full body physical labour to single point of failure on your body tasks with the likelier end result being you will end up crippled in some way (and having to just work with it) or have other overuse injuries which then leads to constant chronic pain.
It may not be physically as hard but I think the work is more precarious, and the cost of living is much higher for basics like housing, so the stress may be higher.
> but I think the work is more precarious
It was a lot easier to fire people in those days.
> the cost of living is much higher for basics like housing
Around Seattle there are still a number of older homes. They are tiny and cheaply built compared to modern homes.
It has more to do with the food industrial complex in the US. A lot of the "sugar" in US foods is corn syrup, which has been subsidized ~$48B in the last 25 years. Most low fat foods are just replaced with double the sugar to make them more palatable.
Although it as gotten slightly better, the food pyramid is somehow still the responsibility of the USDA; whose job it is to great food surplus. It should always been part of HHS because of the massive cost consequences, especially by the time people are on Medicare.
I imagine this is a substantial cause. And, sugar is also a physical addiction, and many children are given it in varying degrees of excessive amounts from childhood even if they're not particularly subjected to stress. There is a spectrum of kinds of sugars but I imagine they could be weighted by something like glycemic index for measuring the degree of impact.
You don't need to be busy to guzzle down soda, Gatorade, sweet tea, etc. Its just pervasive.
Don't forget they are working multiple zero hour jobs. I.E. the job is at most part time so you need at least two, but the job also doesn't only not guaranty what days/shift hours you will work next week, it doesn't guarantee you will work any hours at all. Hence it is a zero hour job.
Personally I think having more than 10% zero hour jobs should be illegal, as well as having multiple 'part time' positions to take the place of having full time positions.
I confess I'm not clear what you are looking for the root cause of?
I would be interested in seeing the costs of, for example, emergency medical services laid out by demographics. My understanding was that emergency services are very localized to where they are used. With perverse incentives hitting their uses.
That said, in specific context of this article, this comment reads as a deflection away from the high levels of sugar being consumed in the US. Curious to hear why you'd think we are not high on those numbers.
There's always decent paying jobs for more beauracratized elements that require relatively little effort and pay at least enough to live off of! People enjoy working hard, and with a college degree there is often no need to work hard if you don't want to.
Bone studies of American colonists showed they regularly overloaded their bones, and died young.
These are the same kind of vague, hand wavy distractions that would have been used to excuse or muddy the waters around tobacco 30 years ago. "Probably just stress" is not an excuse that explains the systemic health problems that come from excess sugar.
Has bigSugar been tweaking the formula of the additives used to make the product more addicting? Let’s not forget how heinous bigTobacco behaved.
Refining corn into high fructose corn syrup still isn’t the same to me, but their lobbying campaigning is the same. If it comes out that they have knowledge of adverse effects of their product and still pushed that hard, then they should be dealt with in the harshest of punishment.
Otherwise, comparison to bigTobacco isn’t quite right
Of course they have knowledge of the adverse effects of sugar and are lobbying to prevent any legislation trying to curtail putting it into literally everything
Additives have nothing to do with it and are a complete distraction. Sugar has detrimental health effects and excessive sugar has more extreme health effects. The important thing now is that this is accepted and understood instead of people casting doubt like "maybe it's just stress".
What matters is that the most conveniently accessible food isn't the damn dear worst thing you should be regularly eating large quantities of.
Our food environment is the opposite of that.
The stress only exacerbates the impulsive/comfort eating side of things, but it wouldn't be such a big deal if everyone were om nomming tasty organic carrots all day every day. Orange skin, sure, but not obesity and heart disease.
japanese diet is low on sugar, so your point is wrong
They have the same problems of overwork and stress as the US though- plus adding in western diet getting more and more popular. Looking at numbers from 2021 Japan had about half the rate of diabetes compared to the US: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/diabetes-rates-by-countr...
"toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible."
I've basically succumb to everything you list to survive working in a maddeningly dysfunctional school. And it's precisely "function as long as possible ". I have to disassociate somehow from the incompetence and corruption around me. Ativan and diet Coke help.
I assume billions globally are doing the same thing to cope. The best metaphor I've come up with is that it feels like I play for a sub 60 win baseball team.
What does this have to do with sugary drinks though?
It’s very easy to isolate out people who drink sugary drinks to people who don’t who are in the same general environment with similar life pressures.
Also, you are getting kind of loose with your definition of negative substances. Coffee is on your list despite being generally known to be neutral to good for you: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/top-evidence-based-heal...
Psychologization of disease is often an indicator of the fact that we don't fully understand the cause-and-effect yet.
Note how "stress" has taken approximately the same explanatory role that "sin" used to have two or three centuries ago.
> many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort
That seems spun. I don't think any of that is substantiated in any kind of rigorous way. Median americans today are wealthier than any population in human history, are working more than their compatriots elsewhere in the world but less than their parents, have more leisure time, travel more, etc...
There's lots of things to complaint about, and there always will be. But really this kind of "Everything is Awful" rhetoric is just vibes. Yes, life sucks. It sucked worse for your ancestors.
We may be wealthier materially overall, but we're poorer mentally and socially. TANSTAAFL. And as others have pointed out, a higher aggregate level of wealth hides immense disparities.
It's always so strange to see this kind of "rigorous" posturing as a reply to people pointing out the obvious declination in their own living standards in the current moment. The vague notion of "national wealth" obscures the staggering wealth inequality that also is unique with respect to the current moment in human history, as does many of the theoretical parameters or models invoked by many economists or journalists in arguments like these.
I'm not going to comment on that sweeping over-generalization of the totality of human history because it is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
> people pointing out the obvious declination in living standards and increase in societal problems
But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.
The only thing really factual here on your list is wealth inequality, although as recently in history as the gilded age it was the same or worse. You barely have to go back more than 100 years to witness children working in factories with no safety standards in the USA.
And really we don’t have to involve the totality of human history to talk about major problems in the 1960s/1970s or even 1990s that we don’t have anymore.
- Lack of regulations that led to the EPA. Your parents probably grew up in a more polluted environment today breathing leaded gasoline.
- Extremely recent prevalence of easily immunized diseases. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980 which wasn’t all that long ago. Polio also comes to mind.
- Developing countries like China where living standards have very obviously shot up by magnitudes in living memory
- Crime in the US at generally declining levels since the 1990s, which has resumed its decline since the pandemic spike.
- Arguably a decent amount less societal friction than the mid-century in America and more recently like with the LA riots. You don’t have to go far back in time to have civil rights problems like gay people being excluded from marriage, women being disallowed from opening a bank account on their own, Black people being prohibited from getting mortgages.
- Just the last decade of cancer treatment technology improvements has been incredible for late life longevity, and America’s best universal healthcare program (Medicare) has better outcomes than other wealthy countries’ universal healthcare systems.
- The continuation of life expectancy gains has only recently stalled and IMO this will likely tick up again as obesity becomes a treatable disease with simple pharmaceuticals.
- Safety standards and behavioral changes related to common causes of premature death. Factors like a more regulated tobacco industry and lower rates of smoking and motor vehicle safety improvements come to mind. A society that allowed cigarette companies to advertise with doctors as spokespeople is a society where you’re more likely to die early. A society where the youngest generation has lower usage of alcohol and drugs like Gen Z/Gen Alpha does is one that is going to have better life outcomes compared to one that has higher use rates, and that behavior is a result of improvements to the environment around them.
I could go on and on…yes things like housing and university have become very expensive, yes there are problems, but holistically you’d probably right rather be alive now than in 1970.
Cherry picking problems that have been solved in the last few decades are not relevant to a discussion focused on declining standards of living in relation to the economy and it's structure and how the average person experiences it - it's a specific problem related to wages, inflation, productivity, inequality, and how revenue has been chosen to be distributed etc.
For someone interested in "rigor" I'm not sure how useful it is to weigh an arbitrary collection of goods like the EPA, eradicating smallpox and polio, etc. to a time before them in order to encourage me to answer that "I would rather be alive now". Angels on a pinhead etc. Seems a lot more useful to actually acknowledge the problems people complain about and think carefully about the specific dynamics that generate them rather than try convince them that everything's fine actually and they should just think about how good the polio vaccine is compared to Victorian work-houses.
>But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.
Huh?
Let me shorten my point and maybe it’ll help you understand what I mean:
Increasing income inequality does not automatically mean that living standards are declining.
It can mean that the living standards of the wealthy is growing faster than the living standards of the less wealthy.
As an example, jump over to your LLM of choice and ask it to compare the rate of air conditioning in homes of people at the poverty line, comparing now to 1995. The numbers have jumped substantially since the cost including running cost (energy efficiency) of that technology has improved greatly.
You were confused at that statement of mine that you quoted. What I was trying to say is that you complained about posturing but then engaged in very similar posturing. You’ve made the baseline assumption that living standards are decreasing obviously without any substantiation.
And maybe you’re right, but you haven’t substantiated it, you’ve just engaged in the same style of posturing that you criticized.
Here’s a couple pieces that substantiates my point, which is that global poverty is decreasing (certainly with continuing challenges but overall decreasing): https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor...
To keep my reply brief, wealth can refer to many things including material goods but let's restrict ourselves to money, since both of the articles you've cited does the same. Money is not a resource. You cannot eat or build with it. Money is a tool used to determine the distribution of resources. If total wealth has increased but inequality has also increased, it means the majority of people are increasingly losing the ability to decide the distribution of resources. This is bad even if you ignore the fact that the majority of people are also responsible for the production of said resources.
Side-note but the articles you cited are funded by various non-profits including Bill Gates' foundation, departments of the british government and so on. It's a discussion for another day and I'm obviously not accusing it of outright fraud or anything but in my experience such "non-profits" and think tanks are tend to be most guilty of unhelpful or outright obscurest analysis of wealth inequality, unequal development and so on (as you one would probably expect of any institution funded by capital benefiting from such dynamics)
If it's obvious, maybe you could show numbers?
Thomas Piketty's book on the matter should have enough for you.
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf
https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequa...
Piketty is all about wealth inequality. I'm asking for numbers substantiating the contention about "obvious declination in [American] living standards" upthread, which isn't something Piketty speaks to.
I'm all for discussing other issues in their own space and with clarity, but if people come to a discussion about income and start citing things that are not about income, I'll be honest I don't tend to want to engage. It's vibes, like I said.
> Yes, life sucks. It sucked worse for your ancestors.
Most of the time you are right, but the Baby Boomers are a pretty big outlier in this regard
There is no question that the average Baby Boomer has had it much better than their children and grandchildren have
For the average white Baby Boomer with Anglo or Central/Northern European protestent ancestry and two resident parents, one of whom being unionized or a white collar professional, no question at all.
And while there were enough of those to write and televise a mythos about that America in counterpoint to the communist threat overseas, it actually represents a narrow slow that the "average" Baby Boomer did not get to enjoy and doesn't live in much benefit of today.
Not numerically. Median real income today is more than twice what it was in the 60's.
FWIW: there's a... sociological problem with arguments framed around that. When you measure US citizen wealth in the 1960's it looks unimpressive[1]. When you picture a "baby boomer", you see a working class family with no debt behind a white picket fence in a beautiful new subdivision living a great life on just the one income. And those families existed! So what gives?
You're looking at a family headed by a working class white man. Not everyone could get those "working class" jobs that supported a family in the suburbs. There was plenty of poverty in the 60's, it was just hidden along with the single moms and minority communities we didn't record.
Things today are a lot more even, which means that the "white picket fence" demographic perceives things going in the opposite direction from what's actually happening.
[1] Relative to today, anyway. The US in the 60's was obviously an extremely wealthy country!
> Not numerically. Median real income today is more than twice what it was in the 60's
The 60s is not really relevant to any discussion about Baby Boomers, who would have been teens at the oldest in the 60s
Compare the years they were in their prime
OK, median income has "almost" doubled since the 70's and 80's. I don't see how you think that helps the case?
Income is not the same as purchasing power
Purchasing power is around 7-8x less today than the 70s
...or it's just the default choice and people choose the default choice when they're thinking of other things?
When I eat a hamburger bun, it tastes like cake. The amount of sugar added to everything is horrific.
Even "healthy" supplements like protein powder are filled with sugar. Sheesh. If I wanted it to be sweet, I could just dump a cup of sugar in it.
And no, I don't want artificial sweeteners instead, either.
We’ve already seen EU courts saying Subway bread couldn’t be called bread and listed it as cake because of the sugar. At some point one has to hope moments of clarity will break out on this side of the pond too
Actually, that's not correct. The controversy you might be thinking of was about Subway's bread in Ireland, where in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that Subway's bread couldn't be legally classified as "bread" for tax purposes because it contained about 5 times more sugar than allowed under Irish law - around 10% of the flour's weight, not 10% of the total bread composition.
The Irish law stated that for bread to be considered a "staple food" (and thus qualify for tax exemption), the sugar content couldn't exceed 2% of the flour's weight. This is different from saying the bread is 10% sugar overall.
The actual sugar content in Subway bread varies, but it's typically around 5-6 grams of sugar per half a bread. That’s higher than traditional bread but lower than many other commercial ones.
Yeah, well in typical ‘murican style, anything from that side of the pond is EU. The differences are too small for me to care to learn the details. All I know is that what ‘muricans call food is not what Europeans call food, and ‘muricans are wrong
Ireland is within the EU and uses the Euro as its currency (unlike when the UK was in the EU and stuck to the Pound Sterling), so you were never wrong.
> differences are too small for me to care to learn the details
Better response than doubling down on being corrected, which makes the original comment look like a lie, might be in editing.
I'm more than a little curious what buns you are eating. :D That or what cake?
It has surprised me how hard it has been to find a protein powder that isn't sweetened. Usually by stevia, nowadays.
By far the thing with the most sugar added that I was late to give up, is a standard yogurt. Tried making our own vanilla yogurt, once. I don't think we succeeded at making it as sweet as what we went in expecting. Despite an absurd amount of sugar added in.
FYI you can buy raw organic pea protein powder at your local sprouts grocery market. I used to use it religiously because whey would give me stomach problems and all the other pea proteins had stevia in them
I use protein from Naked Nutrition. Its fairly expensive but the version I buy is plain protein. No added favors or sweeteners.
https://nakednutrition.com/products/grass-fed-whey-protein-p...
> By far the thing with the most sugar added that I was late to give up, is a standard yogurt.
The yogurt Nazi in me feels compelled to point out that standard yogurt has no added sugars, and is offended that someone conflates that with vanilla yogurt. :-)
Reminds me of twenty years ago where stores routinely sold yogurt makers. Except they didn't make yogurt. They made frozen yogurt. You needed yogurt as an ingredient. Face palm.
Plain yogurt - without gelarin, pectin and sugars - is really awesome food. People should try it! Really easy to make at home as well with an instant pot.
And yes. Plain yogurt is sour. It hasn't gone bad.
Kefir is a lot easier to make than yoghurt as it's not very temperature sensitive - cold temps just make it slow down a bit and room temp is fine for it to ferment. It's also cheaper as once you have some Kefir grains you just keep feeding them with milk and they'll continue growing so you end up throwing away unwanted grains.
I’m currently visiting the Americas and it’s insane how hard it is to find yogurt without sugar. Just yesterday I bought some by mistake that looked like plain yogurt- upon closer inspection it turned out it had sugar added to it (masquerading as honey but we all know that that’s just sugar in almost all cases)
For no sugar added, You can find Fage all over the place at least on the west coast. Many greek yogurts also have no sugar added. I also personally really like redwood hill farms goatgurt.
You are correct, other yogurts are all deserts in the us. I was sorely dissapointed in chobani. When I'm eating yogurt I'm usually doing fage or goatgurt and frozen berry mix.
Plain greek yogurt usually has no added sugar -- Fage, Siggi's, Oikos, Chobani, etc. It's also significantly higher in protein than regular yogurt.
That’s what I thought too - but I’ll just read the labels extra carefully next time and don’t rely on the “natural Greek yogurt” title
The quart size plain will generally not have added sugar, and is widely available (national brands package it like that).
The single serve packages are "ready to eat" for people that want a sweetened snack.
Totally fair, on plain yogurt. I was not a regular eater, so didn't know that at the time.
I always thought it curious that we crave sugar so much yet have zero interest in eating straight sugar.
Try cycling (the world of).
Explain.... On long rides, I drink 500ml of water to 200g of sugar. Actual sugar. My max-best is greater than 400km in 24hrs. No sugar, no go. Monday (tomorrow for me) I have an up-to-125k group ride planned. I added 25g of sugar, to get my body fueled, and ready, to my potatoe-based meal. I try not to bonk (sugar crash), but gummi bears and Coke (ahem! [tm]) are your friends.
I stopped eating sugar and carbs completely and it changed my life. No brain fog, more energy, no anxiety, no depression. I cant communicate to people enough how much it improved my life. Nothing else worked, no therapy, no talking through things. It was a biological problem with my diet. I used to think I had ADHD, turns out I just needed to eat healthy. Prime steak and chicken, veggies, some dairy, lots of nuts. That's about it
Do you mean refined sugars and processed carbs, or carbs in general (i.e. going Keto)?
Full keto
https://www.renalandurologynews.com/features/ketogenic-diet-...
You're going to destroy your kidneys. Our bodies are evolved to eat mostly carbs, not protein. It may make your head "clear," but just because you feel good doesn't mean its a genuine improvement to your physical health.
Ha, man, this link is basically a dialysis industry propaganda page.
Our bodies evolved to survive -- whether with or without glucose. And you liver makes whatever those your body needs, from far, if necessary. Also keep in mind, industrialized wheat products would've been hard to come by back in the stone age -- if you ate at all, depending on whether your hunt was successful.
Well the human body cannot survive without outside consumption of vitamin C because our ancestors consumed so many berries and leafy greens that we probably would poison ourselves otherwise.
Your analysis is off, the human body is not infinitely adaptable. There are limits; running 5 miles a day is not going to completely offset heavy alcohol and tobacco consumption, but those with BMIs in the range of obesity who run 30 miles a week are far healthier than those who have a normal one but practice no physical exercise.
We are perhaps experiencing, currently, a broad shift in the evolutionary history of humanity; I'm not an AI nut but one could argue that one reason why health is such a concern is because there are a number of adaptations at odds with one another at the social and biological levels. One could imagine that the completion of this arc would result in a new stasis of living patterns in the same way that hunter-gatherers persisted for almost 2 million years, and our current moment is just a brief one of upheaval.
potatoes are a carb. I don't get what your point is. we haven't been hunters only for a really long time, and even then the gatherers mostly got berries and sugars and fruits
But you eat vegetables?
Once started, your body will usually stay in ketosis even with a modest and non-trivial budget of carbs, on the order of maybe 10-20g, excluding fiber.
That allows for a wide variety of veggie choices, as well as a some wiggle room for modest servings of nuts, legumes, beans, etc
But basically there's no room at all for stuff like breads or rice or potatoes or sweetened drinks except as the finest accents. Never as the centerpiece of a meal.
It's a very different way of living and eating, but can feel extremely invigorating and seems to be broadly healthy for most people.
Some vegetables are OK on keto IIRC. Leafy greens, asparagus, squash. Avoid the starchy ones.
I don't eat a lot of refined sugars but not eating any carbs feels extremely boring to me, and basically anathema to my Asian heritage where we eat rice daily. But yes, if it worked for you then that's great.
could eat rice and pasta, it's mostly the misunderstood artificial manufactured carbs like pizza and tortilla chips and Hostess donuts that could be underlying.
it's also extremely convenient cheap and measurable to eat rice at home
What is misunderstood about them, don't they also use wheat and other grains? Maybe you mean that they are calorically dense and/or greasy thus causing lethargy?
you may still have adhd. eating well, having good habits and receiving accountability from your environment are all factors that manage the negative effects of the disorder.
also would be interesting to know your time frame for how long you've done this - to rule out the honey-moon phase
Nah I do't have ADHD, I was sick from the american diet
your anecdata is not really data though, to be broad enough to provide such generalized recommendation
I've done similar in the last year and can anecdotally say I've seen a huge reduction in brain fog, I feel full for longer and enjoy a far more consistent energy release throughout the day. I'll never go back.
What are your actual parameters? Are you doing keto? Do you count your carbs - if so what's your limit?
I used keto the first time I lost weight, and it also somehow cured my binge eating forever. But it's hard to keep up long term.
I don't count anything. I just cook all of my own food and never eat carbs or sugar. When I get hungry I eat
I can see people that drink a lot of coke type sodas are trying to find a different study to dispute it.
lol insurance beverage rich people games are funny
How is this news? At this point isn't this like saying "smoking linked to lung cancer cases"?
I'm sure the study itself has merit but I don't get why it's on the front page.
The number of companies peddling “0 sugar” drinks but the list of ingredients shows a shit ton of sugar substitutes is wild to me.
Have met people that think their “diet” drink is healthy because the stupid label says “zero sugar!!” Thus this gives them a reason to consume it many times in the day.
Yet a glance at the ingredients list shows synthetic sugar or “sugar substitute”.
Interesting data for sugar in products scraped from Walmart: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart
I was really excited to read this, but it's very shallow and barely presents any data at all.
It's main and mostly meaningless conclusion is that there are more skus in the Walmart catalog for sugar-dominated products than for any protein- or fat-dominated ones, and that online reviewers generally tend to leave better reviews for those.
Nothing about actual sales volume, promotional actions by Walmart, or monetary or nuyitional share of food consumed (or even purchased), etc -- any of which might say something more impactful.
It’s worth mentioning that artificial sweeteners and ultra-processed foods that are advertised as low-carb/low-sugar are probably worse for you than sugar water.
Minimally processed foods that don’t have all the fiber ripped out of them (like sugar and white flour do) seem to be the best bet these days.