The sweet danger of sugar (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The sweet danger of sugar (2017)

health.harvard.edu

34 pointsindysigners26 comments

I stopped drinking soda, and switched to coffee. Then I found myself putting sweeteners in coffee so I switched to black coffee.

Drinking coffee black is a completely different experience than cream and/or sugar added.

Now coffees that were formerly indistinguishable from each other have become starkly different. light roast, medium roast and dark/french roast are really important to your experience (and some dark roast coffees taste like turpentine to me)

I usually drink one normal coffee in the morning, then afterwards decaf.

Death before decaf

Yeah, you're right - decaf is usually a step down.

Thing is, I have a drink next to me most of the day and if it had normal caffeine my heart would be racing and I'd be climbing the walls.

oh, and coffee mug warmer. warm coffee all day long? greatest thing ever.

To anyone who is still craving sweetness in their coffee, I would humbly suggest brewing your own cold brew coffee (buy a coffee sock and a giant glass mason jar - you could probably upgrade this to a pillow case and a wooden barrel if you drink enough coffee). A pure cold brew process (use frigid water, and then move the brew cask directly into a refrigerator) eliminates the bitterness of a traditional brew, leaving a cleaner, almost sweet taste. For a pure cold brew process I would suggest an 18-24 hour brew. Be careful though, even though it goes down easy it still packs a punch!

Edit: And if you really want to get it proper, rough grind the beans. Don't grind them into a fine grain, make sure you see plenty of half chopped beans in there.

It's just a matter of habit. I'm still addicted to sugar, but I've been drinking tea and coffee without sugar for the past 10 years, and I don't feel they require any at all. The slight bitterness of coffee is the same as the bitterness in beer: part of its taste profile. Would you put sugar in your IPA?

The downside is that you need to buy better quality ingredients. Instant coffee is awful in that it's too acidic without any sugar and milk (I would skip coffee at all if that was my only choice), and as the parent poster said, you can easily taste the difference in any blend now.

I don’t eat sugar anymore but I noticed that after dropping soda and sweets I still eat a lot sugar. It’s in everything. Even tomato sauce and stuff that you’d think is healthy. I’m not sure it’s even possible to have a full diet without any sugar at all. You can do sugar-free waffles but then it’s for nothing if they’re doused in syrup (very sugary)

It is but you need to shop at the outside edges of your market and pay the labor cost of making most meals from scratch, both of which make nutrition more expensive.

If you're worried about labor, cook using a pressure cooker eg. instant pot. You prepare your ingredients, throw it into a pot, and press a button - coming back to perfectly cooked food with zero monitoring. I work from home and so use mine daily.

Me too. You can even go faster by sealing the food with some insulator (e.g. plastic or tinfoil) to make it retain heat and cook faster in the microwave.

Tinfoil in the microwave? Doesn’t it arc?

That’s what the government wants you to believe.

I believe that depends whether it's actually tin or instead aluminum.

I don't know the answer to this, but my grandma has an old microwave with a metal grill that your food rests on (like a rack in a conventional oven). I am not sure if it is the type of metal or the shape (it has a squiggly bend on each side, in the middle[0]), but it's definitely possible for metal to go in the microwave without sparking.

[0] very similar to this https://i.redd.it/7nakjihppwy11.jpg

yeah I do the no-sugar thing from time to time and I noticed that pretty much all products will have at least 2 - 5% sugar in them, so I ended up just trying not to buy anything that exceeds that.

I have pretty much stopped eating processed foods.

I am also a avid reader of nutrition labels.

Not sure it has made much difference to me, but it lowered my food bill.

The advice I follow, not sure where it si from: Eat food. Mostly plants. As unprocessed as convenient.

> The advice I follow, not sure where it si from

Michael Pollan famously said, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

exactly, I eat a lot raw leeks (the green parts are the best raw of course, for the white part, I let it a few days so it gets less 'spicy'), raw spinach, raw onion leaves, raw green cabbages or kale cabbages and a lot of fruits (clementines, oranges, pears, persimmons, and figs/medlars when it's the season). I find this food either in the nature (you gotta search a bit) or at local farm

I used to eat a lot of honey, completely stopped, not even talking about other stuff like chocolate, or other processed products/meals, I stopped a long time ago, the cooking is done is my belly, no need for fanciness!

Tomato sauce we are buying have tomatoes and salt in it, nothing else.

There is published, credible research about the US sugar lobby influencing health policy to downplay the risks of sugar [1]. Here's a popular media story about the article [2].

I have cut out sugar except for social occasions in the last 10 years and find amazing improvement to my well-being and clarity of mind. The alliance of food mega-industry and politics in the US is one of the reasons the US is morbidly obese.

I routinely score higher on my health checks (we have a once-a-year doctor check-up with blood-work for all employees) than my colleagues that are very fit and engage in more physical activity than me, but consume sugar daily. I also have almost eliminated dental procedures, excluding routine check-ups. Before, I needed a cavity filled every other year.

These are just personal anecdotes, but there is starting to be more and more research out there on just how bad sugar is. Consider doing a personal experiment and see how you feel.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [2]https://psmag.com/news/the-not-so-sweet-side-to-the-sugar-in...

I think this article is relevant too: [0]. Humorous yet honest.

[0]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/crime/drugs/su...

Sugar is such a powerful taste that it actually "drowns out" the flavors of other food. So you lose appreciation for the various flavors of foods.

Thus if you pair soda with other foods, those foods need flavor enhancers (lots of salt, fat, etc) to compete for recognition on your palate's sensory neurons.

Since I cyclically try to do this elimination, I get routinely reminded of this as I try to cycle out soda and excess sugar.

It's strangely similar to the difference between commuting by bicycle and commuting by car, with the car mirroring sugar: a rush of power and convenience that appeals to your id, but all your natural surroundings drowned out inside a car cabin with the radio blasting. Not just visual and sensory separation from your surroundings, social separation.

It's one of the major insights I had into the nature of America. Car entitlement is everywhere.

Anyway, I still drink way too much soda. At least now I have transitioned to 1/3 regular 2/3s diet.

Absolutely true. Whenever someone says "how can you drink your coffee black and without sugar", I reply "because it actually has its own taste like that".

Sweetened beverages lose their original taste and cluster around a common taste that feels like glue in your mouth - at least once you wean yourself off sugar. The spectrum of tastes of sweetened beverages is very narrow.

Is soda a common thing in america? I ask because while there certainly are a lot of soda products here (central europe), we've been thaught from a young age that it is reserved for special occasions. For example, when the parents drink a glass of wine for some occasion, the kids get to drink a glass of soda.

But the thing is, I haven't had much soda since I was a kid. I drink tea, oj and milk but most importantly, I always have a big water bottle that I take absolutely everywhere... This also seems to be really common. I always see lots of people in public transit drinking from their own water bottles.

Maybe it's because tap water is clean and cheap here...

Colleagues at University of Bologna always say to me that it is the first cause of cancer... Anyway we cannot live without, a balanced diet it's just what we need. (i.e. not 3 spoons of sugar in the coffee ;))

We can live without sugar. Like, 0 grams of sugar, or even 0 grams of carbohydrates. The hardest part is to avoid any at all, since even muscle meat contains some.

The real killer though is added sugar, not naturally occurring sugar. Or eating too much fruit I guess would count as too much sugar.

I'm in the process to get my sugar intake down. It fuels inflammation. I can see already improvements in the condition of my skin. So I will go on. A piece of cake every now and then is fine for me.

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