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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

  But what about sugar? We should acknowledge that when I, 
  and many others, address sugar in contexts like these, we  
  are talking about added sugars, not the naturally occurring 
  sugars or carbohydrates you find in things like fruit. 
  Those are, for the most part, not the problem. *Added* 
  sugars are.

In a world where extremely sugary products such as fruit juice and even sugar cane juice can claim "no sugar added" prominently on the label, I find this statement to be problematic.

It seems a little bit akin to implying that you can drink all the applejack you want without worrying about intoxication because it has "no alcohol added" - instead, water was removed. I can guarantee your liver is not playing pedantic word games around the process by which that beverage got to 40% ABV, all it cares about is whether you're drinking too much alcohol or not.

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Too true, fruit juice and smoothies can be very bad for you. If you tried to eat the same fruit that was juiced into your drink you would struggle. There is a lot of fibre and other things which limit sugar consumption from unprocessed fruit.

Same goes for green juices. Our bodies were not meant to receive an immediate intake of 10 freshly pressed celeries or 3 bunches of kale in one sip.

Let us not forget the current asserted risk of kale being an accumulator of thallium - hence panic (however: http://m.snopes.com/kale-not-safe/ )

Wait long enough and every substance we eat will be associated with a study which calls it into question. Then, if chance associates that study with a "slow news day", a relative panic will ensue. As a crusty old medicinal chemist, i offer the best rule of thumb (circa 16th century): [no matter what source it is] the dose makes the poison.

"the dose makes the poison" - Nice, I've always wanted a concise way of wording that same basic idea. Thanks!

> Our bodies were not meant to

Not to nitpick but this phrasing always bothers me.

Our bodies, most likely, weren't "meant to" do anything by anyone. They've just pondered along adjusting to their environmental stimuli like everything else does.

"our bodies weren't meant to eat bread."

"Our bodies weren't meant to eat meat."

"Our bodies are only meant to eat meat and nuts."

I love when a nerd forum like HN uses modern conjecture over fact.

It's been a common trend to actually add sugar via this method too, using e.g. pear juice concentrate as an ingredient to sweeten the resulting product. This is not really any less "adding sugar" than sweetening a product with sugar concentrated from sugar beets or corn.

This seems like a problem easily fixed by a simple regulation. Any product containing an ingredient which has a higher sugar content than it's natural range may not use the "no sugar added" label. Might have to define the range for various ingredients since I'm sure breeders/engineers would figure out how to increase the brix on a pear.

The problem is that the majority of products with added sugar don't really have a natural range. You might be able to come up with one for apple juice, but what about a blended fruit drink?

Coca Cola company:

  Revenue: US$ 46.854 billion (2013)
  Operating income: US$ 10.228 billion (2013)
  Net income: US$ 8.584 billion (2013)

Not sure that's going to happen any time soon :(

Soda consumption has been going down every year, why CC and others are diversifying.

This probably stems from the incorrect belief that fruits are somehow "natural" when they are in fact the result of millennia of artificial selection, selecting in particular for sugar content.

I've seen this argued before, but I don't believe it because of blackberries. Blackberries are very rarely "selected"...in fact, they are almost always treated as a scourge because of how they negatively affect other plants in their vicinity, choking them to death. And despite the fact that we have been trying to get rid of them for the better part of a millenia, they are one of the sweetest plants we know of.

... and it's no accident that berries* are favored by low carb dieters for their low sugar content: blackberries have about 5g of sugar per 100g, rapsberries 4.4g, bananas 12g.

*meaning small, tasty, slightly tart, colorful fruits that grow on bushes and tend to be fairly wild, not the botanical definition

and yet blueberries have 10g of sugar per 100g.. the same as apples and pears.

You're looking at cultivated blueberries. Wild blueberries have between 5g and 7g sugar per 100g. They're typically smaller than their cultivated cousin. Their flavor is more intense, but their texture is slightly grittier.

Are those cultivated genetically different than wild varieties? Because as far as I can tell, sugar content is wildly affected by photosynthesis, which varies wildly by farm vs wild conditions. I have even more strong doubts that artificial selection is the cause of this.

Wild blueberries have between 5g and 7g sugar per 100g.

I just searched for that, and saw 10g.. link please?

http://www.wildblueberries.com/health-research/nutrition/ or https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/wymans/fresh-fr... 10g/140g ~ 7g/100g

http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-frozen-fruits-w... 5g/100g

interesting... wild vs cultivated blueberries might be the strongest example of your original point.

Not the most striking though, look at wild bananas: https://dokmaidogma.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/musa-forest-...

Idk, perhaps that is true, but you can't just cherry-pick blackberries.

Nice pun, but the same holds for any other berry or fruit that grows in the wild: by definition humans aren't the primary consumer or propagation vector of wild sweet things, so the idea that fruit sweetness is the product of millenia of phenotype guiding by humans is only very narrowly true.

Of course, not all of fruit sweetness is the product of selection, but cultivated fruits tend to be much sweeter than their wild counterparts. Relatively wild species like blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and their relatively low sugar content actually illustrate that point.

The way I like to word this is..

"The evidence supports eating foods that are balanced in their portions of carbohydrates, protein, and fiber".

This (long) lecture by Steve Simpson illustrates this rather well.

[Law of the locust: a tale of swarms, cannibals, ageing and human obesity]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rV7zAGdbyA

In fairness, this is really down to where you live. If you live in the EU you will see exactly how much sugar is in the drink by looking at the label because that's what the law says.

It's up to regulators to hold companies to account. They certainly aren't going to print things that could possibly harm sales on their labels by themselves.

In the USA it's on the label (though on the back, usually) too. They're just allowed to say that no additional sugar was added. The real push is moving from something that people in the US can't readily parse (like grams of sugar) to something they can (like teaspoons of sugar).

For a second I thought you got these backwards. Having it in grams is so much clearer. I get really annoyed when recipes tell me to add X teaspons/tablespoons/cups of something - these are not units of measure!

A teaspoon is basically 5ml, which is around 5 grams. Most Americans have experience measuring foodstuffs with teaspoons, not with scales, and even if they did, it wouldn't be in grams.

Yes they are. Just because you're not familiar with them doesn't mean they're not units of measure.

Are they defined anywhere officially? Like is there a standard which says how much volume or weight is held by one teaspoon or one cup? Because I have teaspoons which vary widely in sizes, the same with cups. And even if you use a teaspoon to measure - is it with the contents flat? Or in a little pile? It's too ambiguous, and therefore - not a unit of measure.

It's obvious this is some kind of pet peeve, but a little googling would answer your own questions. It seems like the NIST is the regulatory body in the US presiding over official measurements, and they provide a brief overview here: http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/metric/cooking.cfm

Wikipedia has more information on exact conversions and the domestic and international agreements that set the sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

You're welcome to do more research to confirm Wikipedia's assertions. As for whether it's flat or a little pile, 1 tsp is flat (5ml). What you're thinking of is the commonly used cooking instruction "heaping tablespoon", because yes, when cooking you don't have to have everything down to the exact ml.

EDIT: And again, more research done for you: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59711/rounded-he...

Alright, I stand corrected. My apologies.

Exactly this. I don't understand this need for introducing additional units of measurement.

Again, for many Americans, using grams is introducing additional units of measurement. Obviously, the US should've moved to metric forever ago, but we didn't. When addressing a public health crisis, it's good to put things in a way the majority of the public understand.

Yes, but they still manage to sidestep the issue by printing information based on "serving sizes". Yes, Doritos, I clearly meant to eat this medium-sized bag in four sittings!

We should sit down and figure out a way to show nutritional information without these cheap tricks. For example, you have to show the nutritional information per unit of wrapping. That way, a bag can't be thought of as four servings, one bag = one serving.

>That way, a bag can't be thought of as four servings, one bag = one serving.

How is that any better, really? You still have to do the same basic math if you eat less than the full package. Knowing that a large bag of chips is 1200 calories is irrelevant to the serving size I'll actually be eating.

Because people eat the whole bag the vast majority of the time, so the people who need to do math are now the minority.

Probably untrue for any of the larger sizes of bags. I routinely buy the one pound bags of tortilla chips because they're cheaper, but I have never once consumed the whole thing in one sitting.

It gets even more ridiculous for other foods. Do you eat/drink gallons of milk, whole watermelons, quarts of chicken stock or several pound bags of rice in one sitting?

Are you seriously arguing for arbitrary units rather than consistent ones, because "you buy larger sizes of bags"? Every piece of food has nutritional information at the back, with columns for 100 grams and one serving.

You're arguing that the serving size should unrealistically small, rather than the whole bag, because it doesn't work for every case? For every coke bottle this fails, I have five cans it succeeds for. Nobody drinks a third of a can of coke.

>>Are you seriously arguing for arbitrary units rather than consistent ones,

Actually, no, that's what you're doing. You said that that whatever amount is in the container should be "one serving." That's clearly ridiculous and arbitrary in many cases, which was my point. I would contend that they (manufacturer, regulator, whoever) should choose some reasonable, non-arbitrary size and stick with it. Then at least I can compare two different-sized packages with a hope of figuring out what's going on. Using 100 grams would actually be a reasonable idea, but is not what you actually said in your prior messages.

>>You're arguing that the serving size should unrealistically small, rather than the whole bag, because it doesn't work for every case?

You're arguing that the serving size should be unrealistically large, rather than a some reasonable size, because you think everyone always eats the entire package?

Incidentally, I'm curious - when they sell a 24-pack of Coke, are they supposed to show the values for the individual cans, or for the entire case? You keep saying that people consume the entire unit - so that would be the entire case, right? What about for 2-liter bottles? What about for things that aren't junk food?

"Total calories in this product" should be the metric.

The problem is defining "this product". A package that contains 3 snickers bars isn't the product, each snickers bar is.

Accurate nutrition labels are also required in the US, and there are requirements that other statements be true, and there are rules banning certain types of true statements, there just aren't rules banning every stupid true statement.

I'm speaking from the USA, where food also has to be labeled. But nobody really pays attention to the back of the package, and there's very little regulation over what you're allowed to say on the front of the package.

So you get sugar bombs like this prominently claiming "no sugar added", and many consumers are confused into believing that this somehow means the contents of the package are healthy: http://www.healicsu.com/art/photos/643-juicy-juice-no-sugar-...

Considering how little we know about nutrition, you should try to eat food that is as little processed as possible because that's what our bodies have adapted to for thousands of years. So an apple is better than apple juice which is better than apple drink (which is a processed food item that may or may not have anything to do with apples).

In spite of our desire to reach for the stars, humans are not isolated creatures, they are figures in a landscape. Remove the landscape and you remove the human (or in this case, the heath of the human).

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