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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>These products should be outright banned. Folks can make wonderful pastries at home.

Sugar is sugar. What's the difference between a homemade pastry and store bought pastry?

A homemade pastry has fewer preservatives and additives, you have greater control over the contents, requires a time and effort investment, and is not heavily marketed with prominent placement in grocery stores and appealing, colorful packaging. There are both nutritional and psychological differences between the two that make the homemade version effectively much less unhealthy for you.

>A homemade pastry has fewer preservatives and additives

Sugar is sugar.

Those things aren't sugar though.

I'm not sure if you're missing the point intentionally or unintentionally but while those chemicals sometimes can cause health problems later in life but the sugar is what's causing the calories that are causing the obesity that is causing the health problems we want to mitigate.

The sugar is the problem and both the pastries have the same sugar. The homemade one may be marginally better but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. The problems caused by oddball chemicals used in industrial food manufacturing are less than a rounding error compared to the problems caused by obesity.

No, it is actually both things. The sugar causes people to eat the stuff and does contribute to obesity, but sugar is only a contributer. The additives and ingredients like vegetable oils (which cause health problems of their own due to their chemical structure) also contain a lot of calories (fat contains more calories per gram than sugar).

In Australia obesity increased while sugar consumption decreased. The additives really matter and have a huge impact on human health--they are not a rounding error, but it was a great marketing tactic on behalf of various food industry groups to vilify sugar while deflecting from the other ingredients that are similarly problematic.

>ingredients like vegetable oils (which cause health problems of their own due to their chemical structure) also contain a lot of calories (fat contains more calories per gram than sugar).

Which are present in home cooked baked goods too.

I know it's not as simple as just "sugar=fat" but the difference between home cooked junk food and industrially cooked junk food is vanishingly small.

> but the difference between home cooked junk food and industrially cooked junk food is vanishingly small.

In terms of chemistry/nutrition I agree. However there is a huge difference in convienence. Pastries are a huge pain in the ass to make, and consequently I only make two or three pies a year. Store bought pastries are trivial to acquire and gorge on seven days a week.

Not really. There's a difference between cane sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

Not that too much can sugar is good for you either, but it's more expensive, so before the advent of corn syrup, less was used.

False and irrelevant. False, because there's way more than one kind of sugar - glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and more, not to mention cane sugar vs. HFCS. Irrelevant, because there are other non-sugar things in commercial food products that cause you to want to consume the products more, which causes you to consume more sugar. Finally, who says that I put more sugar in my pastries than Hostess does?

> What's the difference between a homemade pastry and store bought pastry?

People consume less when consumption is less convenient. A billion people aren't going to start baking cupcakes every day.

I make sugar-free pastries at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythritol

What kind of flour do you use? Usually it contains sugar too.

Where do you find flour that contains sugar? I've never seen that in NL and a few countries around it.

Maybe they consider all carbs sugar? ~shrug~

What kind of flour has sugar in it? Most flours are a mixture of starches and protein from grinding up a grain. Starches take more work to digest than sugars, so they don't spike blood sugar levels as quickly.

Flours do contain some naturally occurring sugar, usually less than 1%.

You can choose to put less sugar in your homemade pastries. I sometimes bake cookies at home and I use less than half the "recommended" sugar amount, and they still taste sweet. I've never really liked commercial sweet baked food because the high amount of sugar causes a "burning" sensation when I eat them.

You can also buy sugar free pastries. You can also add extra sugar when you bake your pastries.

I don't understand how this invalidates my point that sugar is sugar. That there is no difference between sugar in commercial goods, and sugar you add when you bake at home.

Sure, I think the parallel you're trying to draw is that you can also buy diet coke instead of regular coke, but many will vehemently argue that it's not the same thing.

I'm sure given enough effort, I _could_ find cookies made with half the sugar and dark chocolate, but if you asked me right now, I honestly couldn't tell you where to find such a thing, let alone at a price comparable to run-off-the-mill chips ahoy (never mind the cost of baking them from scratch).

We can certainly be pedantic and say one molecule of glucose is identical to another, but the logistics of buying cookies on impulse at the supermarket vs taking out a mixer to make them on a saturday morning will realistically not likely yield identical amounts of sugar intake. There's also something to be said about the shock of learning how much butter goes into these things!

> What's the difference between a homemade pastry and store bought pastry?

I can't effortlessly and cheaply acquire a honey bun when I've had a bad day if I have to make them at home.

> Sugar is sugar. What's the difference between a homemade pastry and store bought pastry?

You can control the amount of sugar within something you bake yourself for starter.

The amount of sugar in them, very often.

You can certainly buy low-sugar/no-sugar commercial goods. You can also bake pastries with extra sugar. Quantity of sugar does matter but sugar is sugar.

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