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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

The general health limit for sugar for a person is approximately one small can of Coke per day or less, with no other added sugar anywhere your diet at all. That’s two or three tablespoons of honey or HFCS.

Replacing HFCS with honey is probably technically better for you, but chances are, if you’re an American, your consumption is probably way beyond that limit, and changing out HFCS for honey or sugar won’t make anywhere near enough of a difference to matter.

Avoiding HFCS is good practice for avoiding sugar, but ultimately you should just focus on limiting added sugar at this point and not worry so much about what kind it is. (Especially if you live in America, where the bread on a Subway footlong sandwich has a third of your daily sugar limit in it.)

ps. Fruit juice should be considered water with added sugar, for the purposes of avoiding sugar. Whole fruit is fine enough, since your body knows how to handle overeating fruit.

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If you mean sucrose, say that instead of “sugar”.

The article is about the increased absorption of fructose, not glucose.

Sucrose is 50% fructose and 50% glucose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose

Exactly.

I.e., the glucose is negligible from a public health standpoint, relatively: what matters is the fructose.

Honey is no different from HFCS or sucrose, from that same place: it, also, has no fiber.

Is there any reason to think absorbing lots of simple glucose or sucrose through your stomach lining is much better than than absorbing lots of fructose? A quick google suggests fructose tends to end up as visceral fat while glucose does the normal glucose thing and causes an insulin spike then ends up as glycogen, but it's not clear to me that either of them are very good compared to getting your glucose slowly from complex carbohydrates.

Well, the study suggests that fructose screws with your intestines in a way that promotes obesity, that glucose does not. Slow glucose is fine except when it isn’t fast enough, so there are definitely circumstances to consider like hard mental or physical labor. I wouldn’t recommend zeroing out all sugars and switching purely to bread. Fruit has been cultivated for thousand of years. It’s generally good for us; yes, it has some fructose; eat whole fruit anyways.

> Is there any reason to think absorbing lots of simple glucose or sucrose through your stomach lining is much better than than absorbing lots of fructose?

A better question is if there's any reason not to. You should never blindly assume that biological research on one chemical translates to another. Seemingly small structural differences often (but don't always!) result in wildly different chemical properties. Additionally, biological pathways are incredibly (almost unimaginably) complex.

Well, yes - we already have good alternatives to eating pure simple sugars, whether they're fructose or glucose. One good one is absorbing glucose slowly by breaking down complex carbohydrates, by eating low-GI foods.

In this case, there's not a binary choice between fructose or glucose. You don't have to eat either as 100% of a diet, you can mix and match. Whether there's a reason not to eat pure glucose is not a better question health-wise, it's a much worse question than "should I intentionally eat either fructose or glucose as a large part of my energy intake?"

Absorbing a large amount of glucose at once may be quite bad, but does not cause liver disease.

In particular, large excursions of blood sugar and insulin can cause down-regulation of insulin receptors resulting in insulin resistance, called type-2 diabetes. (BTW, some people can treat this with cinnamon. For others, enough cinnamon would cause even worse problems.)

You can recover from type-2 diabetes in reasonable time by cutting sugar and refined starch (e.g. white flour, white rice) from the diet. It is actually quite easy to do this if you cook for yourself, and surprisingly easy to learn to cook for yourself. It is most fun purely from-scratch, and no more work, and tastier. Start to think of fast-food as not really any sort of food at all.

Many people nowadays seem to find their way to cooking for themselves with an electric pressure cooker, because it is so fast.

It’s common in America to care about whether it’s HFCS or not, but that’s ultimately irrelevant at the quantities of sugar we consume here. Someone else will surely tackle the science-literal answer, so I’m tackling pragmatic-blunt instead.

EDIT: Apparently lots of someone else. I am content with my choice :)

I’m not sure what the correct term is, or what parent should write instead of sugar.

But I feel like parent made a convincing argument that you as a consumer should consider fructose and other sugars as the same thing.

At least until you’ve gotten down to the daily limit, yes.

People in the US might have 50-100g of ‘sugar’ in their non-fat coffee, 50-100g of ‘sugar’ in their smoothie at lunch, and then a ‘sugar’ dessert at night. Whether that’s fructose, glucose, sucrose, honey, HFCS is not important relative to consuming 500% of the daily limit. No food marketing actually says that, so I thought I’d better do so.

> The general health limit for sugar for a person is approximately one small can of Coke per day or less

What about if you are, like most people are, also eating carbohydrates? How does the quantity of carbs being consumed affect this limit of sugar?

If you’re asking “can I have more sugar if I eat less bread?”, no, that’s not really how this works. Eat more whole fruit instead.

ed:

If you're asking "do I have to stop eating carbs", they're releasing these guidelines for normal people on a normal diet that includes carbs. If, instead, you eat an American diet, solve the sugar problem first and worry about the rest once you're past the withdrawal symptoms. You'll have to change your diet enough to avoid the sugar anyways and no point in making that extra-difficult.

What are the withdrawal symptoms?

An insane craving for sugary things. It happened to me with "sodas" which was the only high-sugar thing I was taking.

Irritability, headaches (if you were heavily dosing caffeine through soda and don’t replace it somehow), broken hunger sense and unconscious foraging (“wait, why am I looking in the fridge, I just ate an entire meal”).

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