Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tofof | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tofof

Ah, yes, replace 'sweets' with 'fruits' which are about 50-75% sugar by non-water mass.

Eg strawberries - 100 g is 7.7g of carbohydrates (4.9g sugar), 0.7g protein, 0.3g fat. 56% sugar.

Or oranges - 165 g without membrane or peel is 20.7g carbs (14g sugar), 1.5g protein, 0.2g fat. 63% sugar.

As opposed to, say, a snickers bar. 9.1g carbohydrates (7.6g sugar), 1.1g protein, 3.6g fat. 55% sugar.

Or a kitkat. 27.1g carbs (20.4g sugar), 2.7g protein, 10.4g fat. 50% sugar.

Granted, the fruits have way way more water content so by mass are substantially lower fractions of sugar. It can be (but is not necessarily) more satisifying to eat the increased mass and volume of fruit, or to eat the same total mass/volume but ingest substantially fewer calories (about tenfold, by mass).

But really this advice is just 'swap sweets for smaller quantities of sweets'.

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices...

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5461/2

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5418/2

View on HN

I think the issue isn't just the pure carb content. 100g of strawberries is a lot of strawberries. 100 g of Snickers bars is... two bars. I can easily eat two and then crave another one right away. After 100 g of strawberries, I'm pretty much done for a while. Same with say, apples.

I think one thing that is usually overlooked in these discussions is the "feeling" part of it, for lack of a better term. Some things make you want to keep on eating, while others are satiating. Of course, if you're able to only eat one Snickers bar a day while the cupboard is full of them, then that's great! I know I can't, so I avoid them altogether.

Carb content (calories, actually) isn't important per se, what matters is the total consumed quantity, and usually calorie-dense foods have a tendency to incite overconsumption.

> make you want to keep on eating

Junk food recipes are a/b tested and statistically evaluated just like in ad tech.

I remember an ad I once saw on TV about some snack, and the tagline was something like "you can't eat only one". I can't remember the product, though...

One example I have in mind about products being made like this is Nestlé's Extreme ice cream cones. They're fairly sugary throughout, but right at the end there's a small "chocolate bomb", super sweet, that just gives you that "I have to have another one" craving.

Yeah this is what a lot of “food science” is these days.

Not to mention all the effort that goes into studying how different food constituents affect human consciousness and behavior, which results in products that are habit-forming and increase impulsive buying.

I’ve often wondered how many secondary impulse buys are made because someone makes an extra trip to the store to satisfy their primary craving for tobacco, coffee, energy drinks or just sugar.

In retailing those are known as magnet products and are more promoted within the store.

I think it's more the opposite, no? You go to the store for something you need, but then on your way out you pick up a bag of chips or a chocolate bar or whatever. I suspect that's why they often put them on display in the check-out line.

At least with my young single male peers, trips to the store are primarily for beer or tobacco or sugar. The 1 & 2 of video game junk food cross sponsorship has messed up a lot of their bodies

Lay's Potato Chips. I remember that one. Pringles was Once you pop, you can't stop.

Most useless invention: resealable bag of potato chips.

To be fair, so is all of our fruit these days. Just through a couple thousand years of selective breeding.

Our fruit is tested for many things other than simply, "can we get you to eat more of this." One of the most common being, "does is stay shiny while we ship it," as opposed to, "does this taste good?"

I don't disagree. But much like the sugary (or "sugary") treats I'd say it's one of the highest priorities.

At this point, most of our fruit is much more recent vintage than a few thousand years.

Strawberries, as we know them, only came into being in the 18th century.

Also, fruit is being actively manipulated to fit consumer's tastes and producer's profitability. The Honeycrisp apple is one of the biggest recent success stories.

> calorie-dense foods have a tendency to incite overconsumption

Key quote that refutes GP's perspective.

To your point, I bought a food dehydrator recently and made a batch of dried apples. I was watching a movie and midway through realized that in my snacking while watching I had eaten 9 whole apples. That water content really prevents a lot of abuse.

Fruit is fructose + water + fibre + natural flavouring.

Confectionery is sucrose + other carbs + filler + appetite enhancers.

While you can over eat fruit, the water and fibre make it very difficult.

With confectionery, it's literally designed to be easy.

Eating only one snickers isn't impossible - I do this. It is mostly habit. I'm used to eating about a half of a candy bar at a time, but I'm also basically just having a bit of candy when I want a bit.

While I don’t disagree with you in general, I disagree on strawberries. 100g of them is a very small amount and a snickers bar (or in my case, some artificially sweetened protein bar) is far more filling.

100g of strawberries is 33 calories. 1 cliff bar is 240.

You can eat a pound of strawberries and feel full for an hour. Try that with a candy bar.

Volume and digestability is key to eating less.

> a snickers bar (or in my case, some artificially sweetened protein bar) is far more filling.

Come on, this is just incomparable. Protein is satiating.

A protein bar is a very different experience from a Snickers

100 grams of strawberries looks to be about 8-10 large strawberries

http://www.wholefoodsplantbasedhealth.com.au/wp-content/uplo...

100g of strawberries really isn't that much strawberries. I eat 400g of berries each morning with breakfast and would gladly eat more if calories didn't exist and that already weren't too much fruit at once.

Yeah, no.

100g is half a cup. It's about 5 large strawberries. See https://findanyanswer.com/how-many-grams-are-3-strawberries for more numbers.

I buy strawberries in 500g boxes, and let me tell 1/5 isn't all that filling (definitely less than a Snickers bar).

It's not just the sugar, it's the sugar in combination with other ingredients. Even the example you gave the fat is 10x as high and obviously has no fibre.

The nutrient density of fruits is magnitudes higher than sweets.

And water mass matters as it contributes to satiety vs grams of food consumed.

OP didn't say anything about reducing fat intake. Aspartame is a sugar substitute, OP talked about switching from sweetened beverage to unsweetened beverage neither of which has any fat. OP also said "your teeth will thank you" which again is an association between sugar and tooth decay, of which fat plays no part. Fat is a nonsequitur here; the linked article is about a sugar substitute.

The nutrient density of desserts is magnitudes higher. Carbohydrates, protein, and fat are the primary nutrients. You must mean micronutrients, i.e. individual amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Of these, the snickers bar does quite well with amino acids thanks to the peanuts, but yes, a serving of strawberries will give you vitamin c which the snickers won't.

However, that single vitamin is the only real difference in micronutrient quality!

The fruit and candy are both negligible 2-10% amounts for the remainder. They're also very similar on mineral content, with the candy providing 8-10% dv on 5 minerals, while the fruit provides 7% and 29% of two minerals, the rest negligible in both, averaging 5.6% dv for the fruit or 7.6% dv for the candy across the ten minerals.

I already addressed water mass and caloric density, but for completeness I will say again that you're getting these very comparable amounts of micronutrients for a tenfold caloric difference.

Notice how the parent didn't say to wean yourself off 'sugar', but sweets. It he had said sugar, most of the advice about fruits would be contradictory. 'Sweets' generally refers to processed junk food, generally high in sugar and fat. I think following up the conversation by saying fruits are better than sweets because they have water, fiber, and micronutrients, and none of the bad fats most sweets have, is perfectly reasonable.

I believe in that theory too, non processed foods have a lot of stuff beside sugar, fibers will change your gut processing and the metabolic impact can be different. Also you rarely binge on strawberries, you get sick way faster than on kitkats.

Everyone says this but it misses the point. Fruit in it's natural state is a complete package of nutrients, fiber, and unrefined sugar. It has less of an impact on blood sugar than processed food with the same amount of sugar.

Why? Why is “processed” automatically bad?

It’s not automatic, but the processing is guided by whatever processing scales (both in manufacturing and delivery of the “food”) and has been honed by a/b testing and statistically evaluated to be addictive.

Maintaining the complex structure of the unprocessed ingredients isn’t even on the radar.

Fiber slows down the absorption, so there's less spike in blood sugars as when eating candy which is all easy to digest refined sugar.

Processing is by definition used to extra more of something (usually calories) than would otherwise be present. It doesn't have to be bad, but it's definitely something that doesn't occur naturally and so we may not be well adapted to it. Thus, the chance of it being "worse", health-wise, than the natural thing is higher.

Processing almost invariably means taking out and throwing away the fiber. But the fiber plays an absolutely vital role. Leaving the fiber in is so anomalous they have to note it in big print on the label, e.g. "whole grain".

There are very serious reasons to treat the fiber as deeply precious, and removing it as deeply harmful.

Is this actually evidence backed? I adore fruit. When I wanted to lose weight I had to go off fruit and substitute with diet cola. It worked really well.

Ultimately, all the evidence I see points to the fact that most people can’t eat large amounts of fruit. I can, though. I’m like 170 lbs (77 kg) and I can easily devour pounds of apples or strawberries or mangoes in a sitting and eat more tomorrow. So the pro fruit argument usually ends up on CICO which I am willing to accept.

So I stay away from fruit when I know I need to control weight.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

I’m sympathize and want to believe but this is stating a whole bunch of correlative “why fruits are good for you” not a difference in the mechanism between added sugar and sugar in fruits.

Nobody is saying it's impossible to eat enough fruit to be fattening.

We've arguably evolved to do exactly that, since fruits are seasonal crops with brief periods of availability before rotting and vanishing until next season. We binge when they're available (and love sweets accordingly), storing some energy for the coming period of scarcity.

But it's true that intact fruits include soluble dietary fiber. The soluble fiber interferes somewhat with the small intestine's access to the sugars locked up in the goop as it passes through, to become flatulence via your guests living in the colon.

Just look at an insulin index including fruits to see how they compare, there's a small example on wikipedia @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index#Explanation_of_I...

Right. That makes sense and is what I am familiar with. Is it evidence-backed as a causative mechanism?

I like the Insulin Index page. That seems like reasonable evidence.

> Is it evidence-backed as a causative mechanism?

My understanding of the role soluble fiber plays in fruit digestion comes entirely from talks by ucsf professor of pediatrics Robert Lustig. There's a bunch of his stuff on youtube, you may have heard of the famous one Sugar: The Bitter Truth. In some talks he goes more into the role of soluble fiber, but I don't recall which, and it's a bit of a rabbithole to go digging through again. Plus it's been years since I spelunked this particular hole, it's presumably even deeper now.

I'm sure if you do some digging you could find reliable info on the subject. It's not my impression that we're breaking new ground here, pretty sure dietary fiber's effects on digestion are at least partially understood scientifically at this point.

Unfortunately you'll still encounter a lot of folks fixating on "the physics" and calories in vs. calories out, which ignores the fact that your body is full of living organisms. The composition of your food largely determines how much of its calories get taken up by your body vs. your guests vs. simply pass through.

Oooh. Thanks for the Lustig recommendations! Much appreciated.

I have recently started appreciating the gut flora stuff after discovering that there’s a whole class of artificial sweeteners that not only gives me the runs (easy to handle) but also wrecks my mood (harder to detect since it borks my detection mechanism).

On the bright side, if I’m willing to accept the pain, weight loss is trivial. Smash the Nick’s and Halo Top for a week, compensate for mood with a Barry’s Bootcamp every day, come out the other side stronger and lighter.

When I visited a small island in Belize, I went out on a tiny sailboat with a middle aged local and his teenage son. At lunch time, he grabbed his gut and proclaimed that he ate too many bananas, and then promptly diced up a pineapple for everyone.

> easily devour pounds

The real problem—don't do that. Eat a salad beforehand and then keep the fruit to a serving or two. Zero doesn't work in the long term, there is no need for deprivation that squeezes out the fun in life.

Well, right, but that’s just CICO in the end. It’s not a sugar thing. That’s fully understandable. It’s the added sucrose vs fructose in fruit discussion that’s interesting.

Need to keep high-glycemic foods to a minimum to keep a moderate blood sugar level.

How many obese/overweight people are so because they eat too many apples? I can't imagine many.

> is a complete package of nutrients

You'll die of malnutrition on a fruit-only diet. It lacks fat, for example, which is essential.

I don't mean complete as in, its all that you need, just that food is more than simply tallying sugar content.

People seem to think fruit == candy since both contain lots of sugar. It's a lot more complicated than that.

It is also simply difficult to eat enough fruit to cause problems. For example, I've never gotten a sugar rush from eating fruit, but just one cookie will do it.

P.S. I'm not talking about juicing fruit, I mean chewing and eating fruit in its natural state.

Can you explain what you mean by a sugar rush? I thought that was a myth

It's hard to describe, but I can feel it when my blood sugar levels spike.

As I understand it, the body's self-regulation systems maintain blood sugar within a range that doesn't typically permit a 'sugar high'.

If you regularly experience a 'sugar-high', I wonder if it might be indicative of problems with your body's blood sugar regulation.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324896#Acute-sugar...

> You'll die of malnutrition on a fruit-only diet. It lacks fat, for example, which is essential.

Ever heard of Avocado?

"Fruitarians" also include nuts in their "fruit" diet.

https://www.byrdie.com/fruitarian-diet

You can get fats from nuts.

"Anyone following a fruit diet may be missing out on vital nutrients, including: iron calcium vitamin D zinc omega-3 fatty acids B vitamins, including B-12"

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/fruit-diet

If they allow any "botanical" fruits, wouldn't that also include grains and legumes? In which case it's basically just a vegan diet.

I always throw my hands up when people mention refined vs unrefined sugar, there is practically no difference between the two except one has been extracted from the other, and the body readily reacts the same to both.

There is a massive difference: sugar with fiber is digested completely differently from sugar without fiber.

Without, it all goes straight into the bloodstream, and has to be processed immediately. If there is too much, the fructose gets processed to fat in the liver. Fructose has to be processed by the same pathway as alcohol, because the rest of the body doesn't know what it is. American children are getting cirrhosis like alcoholics now. The appetite system doesn't know about fructose: eating any amount fails to make you less hungry.

With, much of it gets to the lower intestine, where it feeds gut bacteria, instead. They need it. We need them. What gets absorbed takes longer, resulting in much smaller swings of concentration of various blood chemicals.

> Ah, yes, replace 'sweets' with 'fruits' which are about 50-75% sugar by non-water mass.

What constitutes the rest of the non-water mass matters quite a bit (especially if l, as much of it is with many whole fruits, it is fiber, which is demonstrated to mitigate Type 2 diabetes risk and severity.) Sugar + fiber is much less bad for you than sugar alone.

Fruits contain dietary fiber and potassium. Both are nutrients Americans tend to consume not quite enough of [1,2]. Both help to mitigate the physiologic disorders (hypertension [3], diabetes [4]) associated with sugar consumption [5]. In addition, fruit contains vitamin C, which reduces uric acid [6]; the detrimental effect of fructose on hypertension is thought to be mediated by uric acid [5]. Consumption of fruits, even moderate amounts of juices, is associated with reduced risk of CVD [7].

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221226721...

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6181280/

3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11906-011-0197-8

4: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200005113421903

5: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/899/4649308?login...

6: https://www.jrheum.org/content/35/9/1853.short

7: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

Gotta love the internet, where you can find people trying to convince themselves that a candy bar is healthier to eat than fruit by posting the nutritional contents of a Snickers bite sized mini. The confirmation bias is strong with this one.

I can't even tell if the comments here are serious or trolling any more.

Fruits contain micronutrients in addition to the regular nutrients they have. There's no comparison that just about any fruit would be a healthier choice than a candy bar. I thought it would also go without saying that it is essential to have a diverse diet because a person needs a lot of different nutrients, not just one.

The comment was arguing that fruits are also bad since they have a very high sugar content. It was in no way stating that candy is good.

Many diets forbid fruits on account of the simple carbs.

I think you've sort of lost something in your study of macros there. As an anecdote, I can eat and enjoy an orange, or a banana but typically no more. I can absolutely crush a package of oreos though. I've got a rule about junk food, that the total size of a container needs to be an appropriate single serving.. because no matter how big it is, one package has consistently been 'one serving'. I won't speculate because I don't know why, but I've consistently noticed that fruit, while appealing and satisfying, are more difficult to unthinkingly binge than processed sweets.

Basically, I think you're losing something when you compare the macros of a pear to a snickers bar.

Except cherry, cherry is definitely bingeable.

But other than that it's a very good analysis.

Is it because fruit sugar is fructose and not saccharose?

Most fruits approximate 50% fructose and 50% glucose, like sucrose or "high-fructose corn syrup". Pears and, particularly, mangos have a much larger fraction of fructose.

The important difference is that they all (except grapes!) have enough fiber to modulate absorption. Juice, any juice, is as bad as candy. Amount matters. Rate matters.

Regular corn syrup and corn sugar are just glucose, so relatively harmless. You can't find corn sugar at a supermarket, but can online: "Homebrew" sells it for $2/lb, nominally for home beer brewers to boost carbonation, but it is good for anywhere you would use cane sugar. (Sometimes a pinch of the latter may still be needed, e.g. in hot cocoa.)

Motivated reasoning, much? You're comparing a 15 g "fun size" snickers or a 42 g kit kat to 100 and 165 g of fruit. And non-water mass is a strange calculation to make - we don't live in a freeze-dried society. Snickers and kit do have higher fat percentages than fruit, what's your point?

Wean off sweets with less sweet things, which do have other nutritionally redemptive qualities.

Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period? Let alone comparing fruits to processed/refined sugars?

I never understand these claims of fruits being unhealthy — or an unhealthy substitute for processed/refined sugars — yet there are many sources stating that fruits are fine/healthy [1].

There’s more to the story than just comparing the amount of “sugar” from nutritional facts between fruits and candy.

Yes, juices aren’t great. But be clear that whole fruits and fruit juices are vastly different, and shouldn’t be thought of as equally unhealthy.

[1] https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2016/08/natural-...

>Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period?

Fruits are healthy in the same sense that dihydrogen monoxide is. Infinitesimal amounts have no health consequence, moderate amounts are healthy, amounts that exclude other foods will cause nutritional deficiencies, and excessive enough amounts will result in suffocation.

Sure, but if you eat a kilo of apples a day you'll get sick of apples and eat a light lunch worth of calories. Eat a kilo of chocolate and you're eating double your daily calories. Nobody got obese because of their 10kg-a-day apple habit.

Your numbers for the Snickers bar seem too small - a 44g candy bar has 11g fat, 20g sugar.

If you meant some smaller bar, then you are comparing a very small candy bar against 100g or 165g or fruit; not very fair.

They are using numbers for a fucking fun size snickers, ie the tiny ones people give out at Halloween that are a single bite.

It's not just about sugar though. Salt can make you hungry, and more likely to eat more than you should.

According to Google, Snickers has 189 mg of salt per 100 grams. Strawberries have 0.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/25/sa...

Anecdotally, I have noticed I can basically eat an entire large pizza and still want more. Once we switched to making our own pizza from dough at trader Joe's, I'm stuffed after about 2 slices. I think the difference is that we don't add a ton of salt and cheese like a pizza place does.

Fruits have fiber which moderate the glucose release, so they are generally a healthy alternative to sugar. A simple sugar content comparison does not tell the full story.

Fruit juices or any sort of fruit product where the fiber is removed, however, is just as bad as sugar.

First, the snark in the first sentence is unnecessary to try to make your point.

Second, the presence of fibers is the differentiator here, meaning that the same amount of sugar in fruits will bring a lot more satiety.

Fruit also contains fiber, which most sweets do not.

No matter what they say, nobody likes fruit enough to get fat off of it.

Can't say that about candy bars.

Seasonal strawberries and peaches I can eat all day.

They taste better than any candy bar I’ve ever had, and come without the guilt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com