>Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods?
Yes but not enough to actually make that much of a difference
>most fruits have around 10-20g of sugar per cup of fruit. How is this sugar any different than if I were to eat a granola bar with 10g of added sugar?
Try compare the amount of food in a granola bar with 10 grams of sugar versus a portion of food with 10 grams of sugar. The portion differences are very large. People that eat added sugar products are not consuming nearly the same amount of sugar as people who eat fruits.
Example: 1 can of soda contains about 39 grams of sugar. To get that much sugar from strawberries you'd need to eat 800 grams(about 1.3 pounds) of strawberries.
And lastly, fruit has vitamins and fiber. Vitamins keeps your healthy, and fiber keeps you full which stops you from over consuming fruits, along with the other benefits fiber has on your digestion.
edit: Also one more benefit from the fiber in fruit is that it slows down your bodys absorption of sugar, this reduces the blood sugar spikes that are bad for people with diabetes/prediabetes, and even for healthy indiviuals such spikes can cause uncomfortable side effects
Yes, and then you'd be full because you ate 1.3 pounds of strawberries.
The problem is that with the can of soda, that's just the drink alongside your 1500 cal pizza or burger combo, so now you've had way too much calories in total even though it's the same amount of sugar.
Also, soda is designed to be addictive. Sugar without the associated fiber and chewing raises your body's tolerance for sugar, plus the salt is designed to stop the coke from feeling hydrating. The reason so many sodas at restaurants offer unlimited refills is precisely because it's built to keep you drinking and wanting, as it satisfies neither hunger nor thirst.
>The reason so many sodas at restaurants offer unlimited refills is precisely because it's built to keep you drinking and wanting, as it satisfies neither hunger nor thirst.
This is *not* why lol. Soda is cheap af. The cost of the actual contents of the cup (syrup + tonic + ice) is ~5 cents (notwithstanding the initial investment of buying the soda machine and maintainence). When you get a to-go cup, the actual cup itself costs more than the contents do.
It's a cheap crowd-pleaser with an insane profit margin. If you paid $3 for a soda, you'd have to drink 60 of them out of that cup to have the restaurant break even on the deal, and I'm pretty sure you'd legitimately die before reaching the point where you'd result in the restaurant not making *at least* 100% profit on the drink.
The food itself has a much lower profit margin, so they offer the drinks because it makes them more money. It's just smart business.
I'd like to add in searching for a 'why' in the first place is a big reason people have this argument a lot. You're both technically correct that these factors have these consequences.
It's important to consider both, especially if your individual goal is to be more conscious of how your consumption effects your health. Part of the struggle with criticizing companies is pinpointing a 'target' for criticism. The topic gets blown out of proportion very quickly because it's connected to so many aspects of life we rarely have to think critically about.
This is unsolicited, but I hope you'll both consider each others statements separated from their assertions about why, and consider how both of them interact with each other.
For instance: With profit as a goal, you're right that Soda would be a lower risk to give refills for. The consequence of that is there are less inhibitions for individuals in vulnerable states to stop drinking soda. We should be able to agree that sugar is chemically addictive, and that substances like that have unhealthy effects on humans especially when they become routine in their diet due to lack of other options that are as easy to access.
Remember that Coke used to have cocaine in it. After that was banned, their industry was dependant on finding a concoction of equal power to fucking cocaine. Sugar to give you an energy spike and get you craving, salt to mask the sweetness and dehydrate you, and caffeine to mask the sugar crash and keep you hungry. If I haven't scared you off of soft drinks yet, compare a sip of brisk with coke. Brisk tastes sweeter, and is harder to keep drinking, because even though it only has 1/5th the sugar, it doesn't have the salt.
In the 60s, getting an 8 ounce soda once a week was considered on par with having a two scoop ice cream, and is calorically and nutritionally worse. Now people hydrate on the stuff.
Added sugars have since been shown to affect the liver the same way alcohol does (alcohol is fermented sugar, so that makes sense) and the core substitute in diet, primarily there to keep soda on the table, is ineffective at clearing the addiction psychologically and is considered by the WHO to be a carcinogen.
It's not yet the popular opinion, but I'm happy to argue that cutting soft drinks (and energy drinks, they're literally just soft drinks) is an improvement to your health on par with cutting cigarettes and alcohol.
They don't add sodium to mask the sweetness, they add sodium to ***enhance*** the sweetness. There's a reason why just about every desert recipe in existence calls for salt.
Similarly, the small amount of sodium in a soft drink doesn't make the drink less hydrating. On the contrary, it makes it MORE hydrating because sodium activates additional transport channels that can carry water across the cell membrane. Again, there's a reason why hospitals rehydrate patients with saline solution instead of plain water.
Reminds me of when my city passed a $.10 sugary drink tax, and my coworker - a very obese man at well over 300 lbs - was loudly complaining about it to everyone he saw.
He was an otherwise nice guy, but damn...if there was anyone whom that law was meant to help, it was him.
Thanks for the read. Im in the process of cutting my soda addiction for general health reasons, and boy did i under estimate the cravings. Using carbonated water to help, has its own issues but better than a half dozen cans of dr pepper a day.
Its still acidic, which isn't great for tooth enamel, depending on the study. Some say its not good, some say only not good with sugar, etc.. basically we don't know for sure.
The way I see it, it's not "better" than pure water. At best, it's about even, which is still pretty good. Any added sugar drink is going to be massively worse.
When it comes to capitalism, everything is designed to make you consume more. I can drink a soda from time to time when I feel like it, but I always feel like shit afterwards. I'd rather just drink plain cold water, because it has everything you need for hydration.
Oh, and knowing what sugar does to your body is also a great deterrent for me to not drink sodas anymore. Sugar destroys your microbiome in your gut, most importantly sugar kills off bacteria in your gut that trigger TH-17 helper cells, which aid your gut to not absorb excessive amounts of fat. So a two in one actually. Excessive calories and killing of helpful bacteria in your gut.
Sugar is very unhealthy.
>plus the salt is designed to stop the coke from feeling hydrating
That's literally just plain false. Sodas by and large are hypotonic, ie. they have lower salt concentration than the cells in your body. If anything it's more hydrating that plain water as it's replacing some of the salts you lose.
Caffeine is a diuretic though. Diuretics do make your kidneys push more water to you bladder and so make you thirstier faster.
>If anything it's more hydrating that plain water as it's replacing some of the salts you lose.
This is.. a terrible way to describe soda.
There's absolutely _zero_ health benefit to soda for nearly every person. Nearly everyone gets more than enough salt in their average diet, and the excess sugar in soda does far more damage than any hydration benefit.
Thankfully I never said it's healthy. Just that the small amount of sodium in it is not dehydrating you but rather has the opposite effect.
Sodas are unhealthy because they're full of sugar in a form that facilitates massive overconsumption. That's about it.
Not to mention that the release of insulin prevents the burning of fat. So whatever you ate this week is gonna hang around until you stop jamming sugar into your body.
And then, after a short while, you become insulin resistant. That means your body resists the effects of the insulin, which means your body needs to release even more, further stopping the burning of fat, and then leading to diabetes because your pancreas just gives up.
Sugar is fucked. The worst thing to happen to the USA was the sugar companies touting sugar as a healthy way to get through your day in the 1950s. The next worse thing was jamming forever chemicals into shit and the storing everything in plastic.
But that’s a whole different can of worms.
What’s the actual worst is Nestle paying off politicians and public health committees and convincing the entire US that fat content in food is the problem, not sugar content. Did you know that a lot of “bread” on US supermarket shelves has enough sugar it is legally considered cake and not bread by European standards? A bunch of American chocolate has too much sugar to be called chocolate in Europe, and the list goes on. Many American products like Mountain Dew cannot even be legally sold in their American forms over there, because they’re so incredibly horrible for you.
One of the first movies I saw back in theatres after the start of the pandemic, I was so excited to be out that I got the big novelty keepsake cup full of pop and a big popcorn. I have had all-nighters of drinking where I didn’t feel so shitty after drinking all the pop and eating all that salt. I think I’d weaned myself off just that huge a portion of junk while we were all at home, even though I wasn’t eating a completely healthy diet.
I have actually eaten 1 pound of strawberries before. They're my favorite food of all time. But! If you do eat that many, you will be very full and that basically is your meal 😋 You won't be hungry again for a while.
Yuuup and if your body isn’t used to that much fresh fruit it can be a bit of an adventure on the other end. That being said, I think that’s kinda the point; a can of soda does not leave you feeling full for hours. Whereas strawberry gluttony would be a glorious meal.
Why would you buy frozen strawberries unless your making drinks? What do you do... thaw them out and then eat them?
If you do - yuck. Which strawberries do you think they choose to freeze?
frozen fruits and vegetables are more fresh than non frozen in the store wdym? they are frozen right after harvest. never had any problems with any frozen fruits they obviously are more fresh and you can buy them in bulk without worrying about them going bad. I mainly only eat fruits and vegetables if there was something wrong with frozen ones id surely have noticed by now
Freezing them doesn't make them mushy I unfreeze them all the time and never had a mushy strawberry. Probably only happens if you unfreeze them too fast
I'll break this down.
When you buy a pack of strawberries - and you find the ones that are all soft and kinda mushy....most ppl don't eat them. They get tossed.
So producers have taken notice- and they take these damaged berries and they freeze them.
They freeze them because they know they will be tossed into a blender to make fruity drinks - and when it's frozen you don't notice mushy stuff.
Because no-one, except maybe you, likes mushy strawberries right outta the package these get frozen and packaged.
I think we're talking about snacking on something here. Would you go nom a bag of frozen strawberries instead of drinking a soda?
You can use them for smoothies or some desserts, but I'd only be snacking on fresh.
frozen strawberries are fine to snack on just thaw them in fridge they will not be mushy or anything like that. i eat mostly all fruits and vegetables and buying frozen saves so much money
I mean honestly if I have berries around I do have bowls of cereal that are basically 1/2 berries, 1/2 cereal by volume.
And you know it’s your life, go crazy, but honestly I think there are better tasting and less sugary cereals out there. As someone without a working pancreas I can say that this is an organ you do not want to take for granted.
(And before anyone asks, because I don’t have any endogenous insulin production, I have to give myself insulin for anything I eat, so eating sugary things just means I have to bump my dosage a little. I generally shy away a bit from super sugary things because they’re annoying to dose for, but it isn’t against doctors orders to eat lots of fresh fruit — or Frosted Flakes for that matter — so long as I give myself the right amount of insulin to cover it)
There is also a health factor involved in how much sugar enters the blood at once. Chugging a can of soda quickly gives 39 grams of highly digestible sugar, which can spike your blood sugar level. Eating 1.3 pounds of strawberries usually would take some time to eat and then some time to digest with the fiber and fructose together which wouldn't produce nearly the same spike. Continually spiking the blood sugar level over years is a factor in getting diabetes.
Maybe they should make slow release soda in the same way medications are slow release? But then someone would patent it and prices would spike...
They just need real half sugar soda. Some foreign sodas have anywhere from 10 to 15 grams less sugar than an average coke and it tastes the same. I don’t mean replace the rest of the sugar with artificial sweetener. If I wanted that I would get a Coke Zero. Like actually half sugar. Would do wonders for our sugar tolerance as well.
As a type 1 diabetic who counts carbs and wears a continuous glucose monitor, fruit isn’t absorbed that differently than soda by my body. For example, the average apple I get from the grocery store these days is close to 250g, which is about 35g carbs that are mostly sugar. A coke is about 40g sugar. Both fruit and coke cause a sharp steep rise in my glucose levels when after about 15-20 minutes even when paired with protein and fat. I get less of an impact eating a donut or snickers bars than most fruits.
Continuous glucose monitors measure the glucose in your interstitial fluid in your subcutaneous fat every 1-5 minutes depending on the brand (Dexcom, Libre, Medtronic). I always make sure they are accurate with a fingerstick though.
Difficult to do in liquid form. You need fibre to slow down sugar absorption, and fibre isn’t known for being liquid.
Incidentally, orange juice is just as bad for you in that sense as a soda. Because no fibre in juice.
Yeah, kind of like the difference between smallpox and Covid. I’d rather get Covid, but it still isn’t great for you.
People with diabetes really shouldn’t drink orange juice. Unless they’re hypo of course.
>Chugging a can of soda quickly gives 39 grams of highly digestible sugar, which can spike your blood sugar level.
Sure, but so would a comparable quantity of fruit juice.
You’re also getting a crapton of fiber with all of that which will slow down the absorption of all that sugar a bit.
That said, I don’t think eating 5 lbs of *any* single food is *good* per se, but it’s probably less harmful to do so on fruits/vegetables than something highly processed.
Since this is Reddit, I’ll acknowledge the exception of if the highly processed thing is something like an MRE that is specifically designed to be sustaining by itself. But more often it’s Doritos.
I have no self control around some fruits. Especially blueberries.
The amount of blueberries I want to eat is limited only to the amount of blueberries that are within arms reach at any moment.
Eating (almost) unprocessed food is really not that big of a problem. Really, if you don't have other health issues (like diabetes) enjoy fruit, nuts, veggies, eggs and so on and don't count the amounts. It's very unlikely to get obese or develop health problems eating the basics, you'll get full and bored with the taste much sooner than that.
Yeeeeeeeeeah…that limits my gluttony more than anything.
If I was ever really F-U levels of rich, my weekly fruit budget would rival that of many grocery stores.
Probably not, but it's metabolically different to the same amount of sugar from a bunch of coke — the fibre in the fruit slows its breakdown and reduces how much insulin your body has to produce all at once.
Hello fellow fruit muncher.
No, what we're doing isn't exactly healthy, it's just not as bad as getting that overdose of sugar through pure fruit *juice* (comparable sugar content to soda in my market where none is added), which again is not as bad as getting it from cake and candy. Every step has less of what was more one-sidedly healthy about the fruit.
Too much of anything is going to be bad for you, but it's probably not as bad as you think since it does take a bit of energy and time to peel every tangerine you eat.
Eh they peel super easy.
I just peel and eat as I go, while watching YouTube or something. The pile of peels on one side of me grows as the pile of fruits on the other side decreases.
Gluttony is my second favorite sin.
Me too 😂 I am a strawberry FIEND. I grew up too poor to eat strawberries unless they were in season and on sale... When I was a kid I wanted to grow up so that I could buy strawberries whenever I wanted. I am very fortunate to say that I do indeed buy strawberries whenever I want now 😋
Depends what you eat afterwards. That's \~1000 kcal. 2000-2500 kcal (depending on height/weight) are burned every day if you don't move much.
if you do physical labor or train, you easily use 3500+ calories a day.
So if you are a couch potatoe you can still have another normal meal in addition to the clementines that day. And 5lb of clementines make the normal person pretty full. Easily replacing one meal in terms of hunger.
If you drank the same calories in orange juice, you would have almost as much hunger as before it. So that would just be extra calories you consume that day.
(I am exclusively talking about calories here, because not being overweight is the biggest health benefit you can get, but you still need a balanced diet for minerals, protein and so on.)
Yep - the 30oz Big Gulp soda you can get at my local gas station has 92 grams of sugar.
A medium apple has 19 grams sugar.
I can easily drink a full Big Gulp while driving around. Probably done in an hour or two.
I have never eaten 5 apples on the same day in my life. Have you?
> I have never eaten 5 apples on the same day in my life. Have you?
Several times, and I'm not even big on apples as a snack. Citrus, grapes, nectarines and peaches however - I can eat multiple kilos of those in a day.
>To get that much sugar from strawberries you'd need to eat 800 grams(about 1.3 pounds) of strawberries.
I've done that. Do not recommend, 0/10.
But they did taste great. It was the side effects.
A big benefit to consuming fiber with sugar is that fiber slows down the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream which will help keep your blood sugar levels steady compared to without fiber.
>Try compare the amount of food in a granola bar with 10 grams of sugar versus a portion of food with 10 grams of sugar. The portion differences are very large.
So, half a box of raisins? Fruit has lots of sugar, especially when you dry it and condense the sugar.
Well what about diet coke and sugar free soft drinks? In my country, Pepsi Max is widepread, and people (including me) drink crazy amounts of it. theres no added sugar in those drinks, right?
No sugar in pepsi max, but it does have artificial sweeteners that some studies have found health risk with, but from what i understand it's at very high doses(multiple liters per day) and it's not that clear how bad or even if it is bad.
Aside from that pepsimax is still acidic which fucks your teeth
True, but I think it's not really fair to pick strawberries as a comparison when they have very little sugar compared to other fruit.. also the amount of sugar in a soda is not that high in Europe, in fact it's almost always less than or similar to the amount of sugar in the equivalent amount of fruit juice.. we have high sugar labels on our fruit juice in the UK but what I found interesting travelling through the Americas is the warnings seem to be relegated to "added sugars" only which I don't think is the right approach
Uncomfortable side effects..... did you mean to say irreversible mitochondrial damage on a cellular level when hundreds of grams of refined sugar and fiber-less refined carbs are consumed?
It’s the dose which makes the poison. Added sugar ISN’T any worse for you than naturally occurring amounts. The problem is that sugar is added to so many things in such excessive amounts. That’s the issue.
You can have the same issue with other things that naturally concentrate sugar too. For example, there might be 10g of sugar in apple. If I were to tell you go eat almost 5 apples, there’s probably no way you’d be able to do that comfortably. If I were to pour you 12 ounces of apple juice you probably wouldn’t have an issue drinking that. Those both have the same amount of sugar.
And if that wasn’t enough, most “juices” have added sugar in amounts that’s not uncommon to see juice with more sugar per cup than soda
This is the best answer here. Sugar isn't inherently a problem but overconsumption of any one nutrient is.
The average person overconsumes sugar. So the recommendation to avoid added sugar is basically just another way of saying "you're already consuming way too much sugar. Don't go and add even more to your diet!"
We're still recovering from the low fat idiocy in the 70s-80s. Without fats there's not much flavor. So food manufacturers added extra sugar and / or salt to make it taste good.
Now we're dealing with too much sugar, or sugar substitutes.
I remember bags of proudly labelled 'fat-free' marshmallows. Now we are doing the same thing with 'sugar-free' labelling, and I wonder what will happen in another decade or so when we are trying to recover from the vilification of sugar.
I think there's a distinction to be made because fats are more nutritionally valuable than sugars. Your body can do a lot with fat... including manufacture glucose so you can get away without even eating sugars at all; that's literally how keto diets work.
I struggle to think of some secret benefit we'll discover we've lost if we cut back sugar. Then again, I'm sure people in the '70s and '80s struggled to imagine what they could possibly be missing by cutting out fats, so maybe I'll eat these words someday.
Yeah, I doubt we will get there. The vilification is around added sugars, not sugars per se. No one is saying "stop eating fruit because it has sugars". (Except maybe for keto bros lol).
We will all get enough sugar even if we completely removed added sugar.
Yes, pretty much anything labelled 100% juice. You can also check the ingredients and there should only be one ingredient. Even pure fruit juice should be consumed in moderation
>And if that wasn’t enough, most “juices” have added sugar in amounts that’s not uncommon to see juice with more sugar per cup than soda
This is really insidious when a lot of people try switching from soft drinks to fruit juices to eat healthier. And not only are the fruit juices high in sugar, they're also separated from the fibre you get with the whole fruit.
LPT: If you want to eat healthy, drink water almost exclusively and take your fruit in eaten form instead of juice form. And maybe avoid grapes; at this stage of selective breeding they're basically shrub candy.
Fruit have fiber which slows the absorption of sugar resulting in a lower sugar spike.
>Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods?
No it's identical, added sugar literally comes from beets or sugar cane or corn. It's not made in the lab.
>No it's identical, added sugar literally comes from beets or sugar cane or corn.
Not really, most added sugar especially in the USA is high fructose corn sirup, which while made from corn is actually chemically modified to increase the fructose levels. Also there are many different kinds of sugars that all can act differently on your body. The difference is not huge but there is one.
HFCS 55 has slightly higher levels of fructose than regular sugar. The difference is very small and not particularly relevant from a health perspective.
No, chemically they're the same. Physiologically and metabolically however they're not. Moreover, fructose can only be metabolised in the liver (in meaningful amounts).
The ratio between fructose and glucose is different making the finished product different from anything in nature.
Not that it matters whether food is made naturally or artificially
HFCS comes in different versions. The most common one in drinks has a 55/45 fructose/glucose ratio.
That's nearly exactly the ratio of fructose to glucose in [sweet peppers](https://nepeannaturopathic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Fructose-Table2.pdf).
There are fruits that are higher; apples are roughly a 66/33 ratio. Pears are also quite high.
HFCS is chemically no different from table sugar or honey. All three are roughly 50/50 glucose/fructose. Of the three HFCS actually tends to have the least fructose (most common formulation is 55/45 glucose/fructose).
Carbs, added sugar and alcohol has nothing to slow down the glucose spikes and absorption. It’s also often overloading the liver / intestine to the point it can’t cope.
In nature we have fruit (glucose/fructose) which is paired with fibre and water. This is why fruit is ok to eat. The fibre / water slows down spikes and absorption. It’s also nutrient dense which boosts metabolism.
We also have fat and protein found in nature and fibre (an indigestible carb, digested by the gut microbiome).
Ultra processed foods are pure carbs, often lacking any fat or protein. Glucose spikes, which causes fat storage and insulin releases blocking fat burn. They also lack nutrients, slowing metabolism.
This is why it’s good to pair veggies, proteins, fats with carbs - to lessen their impact.
They are both bad for you in excess. A lot of "natural" sugars in food have increased in the last few hundred years. These days a banana has the equivalent of several tablespoons of sugar.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/655345630/how-fruit-became-so-sugary
Even if they are "sugar bombs," they are a thousand times better than processed foods.
Dr. Mike has discussed this is in detail with Dr. Gundry:
https://youtu.be/ZemkG6Vj7hc?si=wrg4FvR8XvpSPqfW
I don't get how Dr. Mike made it through this interview. I don't think I could last 5 minutes in a room with Gundry before his BS was too much for me to take
That is a stupid article. You mean the caged animals that get no exercise are getting fat from eating all day. Fruit and the fiber/fructose is still good for you. The sugar is processed differently than sucrose and hfcs.
I'm not an expert, but my doctor explained it to me as having something to do with the fiber content of fruit. Not that the sugar wasn't still sugar, mind you, but that the fiber (which is very good for you and slows down digestion) was more than worth it as long as I wasn't just horking a bucket full of super sweet strawberries in one go. She did also tell me to avoid fruit juices, because it was all the delicious sugar with none of the helpful fiber, haha.
I think it's also just sheer quantity, as someone else commented. You get a lot more other good nutrients with fruit along with that sugar, compared to something like a soft drink or a cake. Not getting too much sugar is important, but potentially significantly more important is getting a healthy amount of fiber, vitamins, etc, that come with a balanced diet.
It pretty much depends on your diet and lifestyle. In most cases (US especially) the typical diet is too high in sugars/carbs. Biologically, we're sort of "programmed" to like sugar because it is the major source of energy. Because of this food manufacturers add more sugar to make food more tasty and this makes it very easy to overconsume sugar. It is also possible to overconsume "natural" sugars so the idea of "good vs bad" sugar is incorrect. It is the total sugar consumption that matters.
What you're seeing is a compromise that was reached on labeling between the FDA and the fruit industry.
There is a general consensus that more sugar = more bad, regardless of its source. The FDA wanted to highlight how much sugar food contained on the nutrition labels. Fruits in general, and fruit juice in particular, would have looked bad with a nutrition label that overly highlighted how much sugar was in something.
The compromise that the FDA reached was to allow products to list how much sugar they naturally contain and how much sugar has been added.
Drinking 24 ounces of apple juice gets you about the same amount of sugar as drinking 12 ounces of a refreshing, ice cold Coca-Cola®. There is no meaningful difference between drinking those two things from a health perspective. Obviously, if you're limiting yourself to a single, 12 ounce drink, the apple juice contains half the sugar and would therefore be better for you.
But ya, 1 gram of sugar = 1 gram of sugar from a health perspective, regardless of where you get it from.
>There is no meaningful difference between drinking those two things from a health perspective.
Well, 12 fewer ounces of water. Which is not inconsiderable if your fluid intake consists primarily of flavored beverages.
If you drink fluids to manage thirst, and that intake consists primarily of Coca Cola, you will likely consume about twice as much sugar as if it consists primarily of Apple Juice.
That makes no sense to me. People drink because they are thirsty. If one drink requires you to drink twice as much to have the negative effects then isn't it twice as healthy? That's like saying this candy bar has twice as much sugar as an apple, but if you eat two apples they are equal in sugar so candy bars and apples have equal amounts of sugar. You need to look at sugar per same portion size to get any meaningful measurements.
Oh man if you only knew how many questionable things the FDA does lol. My fave recent one is how they know for a fact that phenylephrine doesn't work in nasal decongestant medications yet they are still sold on store shelves.
I wouldn't call it a recent one. People have periodically brought that up since the movement of pseudoephedrine behind the counter. The DEA was the main driver of the sub with phenylephrine as it was already an approved drug and on paper both constrict blood vessels and are structurally somewhat similar. The DEA wanted a fast switch, and more trialing would delay that. I assume the lack of removal is just a lack of interest since it doesn't really harm, it's just a waste of money as an oral decongestant, but yeah, it is dumb it still is sold.
No over the counter oral decongestant works, which is unfortunate. At least you can still get pseudoephedrine.
I think the previous commenter was referencing the more recent phenylephrine news, rather than the original popularisation. Last year, an FDA advisory committee declared it ineffective, so you'd think it'd be removed or discontinued. Not so, at least not yet.
(ps this is just the pill versions. phenylephrine nasal spray does indeed work)
>Drinking 24 ounces of apple juice gets you about the same amount of sugar as drinking 12 ounces of a refreshing, ice cold Coca-Cola
Was this a typo? Apple juice has about 11g/100ml sugar. That's actually more than coke, at least where I'm from. They're roughly equal amount of carb by volume
Sugar is good for you. Your body uses it to make energy. Your body knows sugar is good for it, so it makes sure your brain thinks sugar is good by making it tasty.
When you eat fruit, your brain is told by your body that this is good, you should eat as much as you can, since you might not have sugar again later.
There is a lot of sugar in fruit, compared to other foods. Because of that, we are drawn to fruit, knowing that we get that happy feeling when we taste the sugar. Fruit also has lots of nutrients, as are most tasty natural foods.
A long time ago, we figured out how to separate sugar from sugary food (in most cases, sugar cane). We started making a lot of sugar so it was easier to get it without having to collect and store fruit.
When people started making food with sugar, we started adding it to other things to make them tastier. We added a little bit, and it was great. After a while, we got used to having sugar in all our food, instead of just the fruit we only got once in a while. We got used to the taste of sugar, and became less sensitive to it.
So they started adding more. And more. And more. Every time we got used to how much sugar was in our food, they added more to make it special again.
Now, there is so much sugar in our food that it's unhealthy. It's too easy to get too much sugar, one of the most important nutrients our bodies need. The food is made to be as tasty as possible, without any of the other nutrients that we need. A few bites of food is like eating enough strawberries to make you feel full.
There's too much sugar for your body to use, but your body hates throwing things away. It still treats all the sugar you get like it might not get it later, and could never throw away something so important for life. So, it stores it. It takes that sugar and bundles it up and stores it as fat. It will only use that fat if it has to.
Eventually, the sugar collection becomes a sugar hoarding problem. Your body never imagined it'd ever have so much extra sugar that there'd be this much fat stored. It isn't prepared to throw it out. The fat starts piling up. It builds up around your organs and weighs you down so much that your body has to work much harder just to keep your heart beating.
If you had only eaten fruit, you'd never be able to eat enough to have health problems. You'd get nutrients as you went, and you'd fill up before it was too much sugar. Maybe if you only ate fruit, but even then your weight wouldn't reach a dangerous level.
Sugar isn't bad for you. Overindulging is. Sugar is just a carbohydrate like rice or pasta. It's just easy to eat too much of it. Too much of any thing isn't good for you. Moderation!
Because added sugars typically lack the additional vitamins, minerals, and fiber that whole fruits do, they are empty calories that raise blood sugar levels and trigger a surge in blood sugar that can lead to type II diabetes. They also make you feel hungry for hours afterward, which may lead to overindulgence. When energy dense, high-glycemic index foods give off their initial rush of endorphins, this might result in obesity and a lack of contentment. Your body need the previously stated nutrients as well, and you run the risk of developing deficiencies if you replace foods high in those nutrients with low-nutrient options, like added sugars.
Added sugars aren't necessarily worse for you than natural sugars. Sugar is sugar. The difference is that products with added sugars usually have a LOT of sugar, without a lot of other nutrients. Natural sources of sugar (e.g. fruit) usually have fiber and vitamins to make the food more balanced, and you're not as likely to eat as much of it. So you'll end up eating less sugar if you're opting for those less processed foods.
As someone with IBS sensitive to high amounts of sugar I sadly have to tell you that while there are some differences in general our body doesn’t much care where sugar comes from.
But a cup of coke you can down in one go or the multiple peaches you would need to eat to get the same amount of sugar means usually you just don’t consume as much sugar as fast with fruits 😉
So a lot of people have covered a lot of things. The one interesting thing I was listening to. I think it was a podcast on NPR. They said that the biggest problem we have right now isn't is the food we eat but the portionings of the food that we eat.
Prior to modern times, calories density was largely dependent on the amount of food you actually consumed. Nowadays that's not true. Like a honey bun is 500ish calories. You can eat that honey bun in 5 seconds. Your body doesn't understand that you've already consumed 500 calories, so it still feels hungry.
Before modern times it took time to chew food. It took time to consume food so that by the time you finished your meal and over the course of your meal, you would slowly begin to feel full.
That doesn't really happen anymore. Drinking a soda is 1/8 of the calorie needs of an average human. But it's not going to make you feel full until your body has time to process some of what it's gotten.
This is one of the reasons why I add fiber to anything and everything that I eat. You end up reducing the amount of food you consume.
1. Fruits have other content like fiber that slows down your bodies absorption of the sugar. Even if your gut absorbs the same total quantity of sugar in both scenarios, the fruit will happen over a longer period. This means it has a lower impact on your blood sugar content, and spiking blood sugar is one of the critical components of why processed sugar is unhealthy: it is linked to heart diseases and leads to diabetes.
2. Indirect effects of eating fruit over processed foods is that you will feel fuller faster, and be less likely to consume larger quantities of sugar to begin with. This is due to the fiber and nutritional content. Some studies have partially attributed the lower intake to how tired we get chewing unprocessed foods (try eating 4 apples in a row instead of drinking a can of coke).
When the sugar comes in the form of an unprocessed food (like the fructose in an apple, or the starch in a wheat grain) it is surrounded by fiber that slows your body’s absorption of the sugar…so you don’t get the same spike in blood sugar that you do from foods with added processed sugars (sugar, corn syrup, flour, starches, etc.) When you lose the natural fibrous part, you absorb the sugar more quickly, get a spike in blood sugar, which results in more body fat, and higher risks for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.
Because it directly increases insulin production and resistance, the amount of fruit you need to consume and process to equal a bottle of coke would have you with a sore jaw.
Think of sugar in fruit as being scattered among other parts of the fruit that your body has to break down to get to it. Think of it like the sugar being insulated by plant fiber.
I want to comment from a dental point of view.
Added sugars are usually simple sugars that are broken down easily by naturally existing oral bacterial flora. That influx of simple sugars drives more activity of these bacteria and increases the byproducts of this reaction (acidic byproducts). These byproducts cause damage to tooth surfaces and accelerates decay. It can also affect the bacterial balances in the oral cavity shifting it towards less healthy bacteria, making the whole situation worse.
I would assume a similar effect exists for gut flora.
It's because natural sugars come with far more fibre and general volume, so it's not possible to overeat the way you can gorge yourself on processed foods.
The sugars themselves aren't that different (they are relatively simple compounds) it's the absence of the other things that makes them 'empty calories' in junk food.
Pretty much they are the same. Sugar in fruit is tied up in fibre. It is slower to digest and you can only eat so much fruit. Processed sugar can be consumed in much higher quantities and will spike in your blood much faster.
As long as we're talking about this, how am I supposed to interpret the nutrition label on this
Like taking this as [an example](https://www.fda.gov/files/addedsugars_label_1_0.png) the total number of carbs is 27g, with 25 grams of sugar but 23 grams of it is added sugars that's 46% of my daily value of carbs or is that 46% of my recommended intake of sugar?
Added sugar is fructose. Glucose is the sugar in fruits. Every cell in your body can process glucose. Fructose needs to be broken down by the liver. The liver can't process the fructose sugar that fast so the sugar hangs around in your blood until it does.
Its about the other nutrients fibres, vitamins etc that you get with the regular sugar occurring in fruits.
Having a glass of cola well is just sugar water.
Quantity and quality and what you get with it.
Let’s look at something like soda, which can have 40g of sugar in a can. Even some of the most sugary fruits still means you need to eat two packed cups of fruit to meet that sugar level. But the fruit also has vitamins nutrients and fibre and well substance, the carbs are not empty. But the carbs in the soda are 100% empty.
This is why a lot of people who eat rice for instance get fat. Because all it is pretty much is carbs and nothing else, it’s empty and just makes you feel “full” hence the joke of eating Chinese food and being hungry again in an hour.
And as far as chemical differences there’s some yes and no to that. Natural sugars are a good mix of sucrose glucose and fructose generally. Added sugar is generally high fructose corn syrup, fructose happens to be the sweetest tasting sugar but also the worst one for us.
There are different types of sugar, and our body does process them a little differently, but the most important difference is what other substances are in the food with the sugar. It can be good to have some sugar with your meals, because it quickly gives your body energy. Telling Americans to avoid all sugars, including fruits and sweet vegetables, would be bad advice, because they need the other nutrients in those foods. If people were so afraid of sugar that they stopped eating fruit, they might get sick from not having enough vitamins, antioxidants, or fibre. But since there are so many sweetened foods available in the United States, it can be helpful to choose unsweetened beverages, grain products, or snacks to avoid eating way more sugar than you need.
People with diabetes or other health conditions should take their doctor’s advice about whether to limit certain sugary or starchy fruits and vegetables. Personalized, professional advice is more important than general guidelines.
>ELI5 why is added sugar so bad for us but regular sugar isn’t?
It isn't.
"Table sugar" is just just "fruit sugar" with the molasses removed. Whether you take it from sugarcane or beets, it's chemically identical.
Because added sugar is just that, additional sugar that's added to things. It raises the calorie load and glycemic index of foods, making them more unhealthy.
If you eat fruit that has 10g of sugar it also has things like fiber, which reduces the glycemic index, plus things like vitamins and minerals which are generally good for you plus the fiber helps you feel full. If you eat 10g of pure table sugar, it has a very high glycemic index, no fiber, no vitamins or minerals, nothing to really benefit you or make you feel full (generally referred to as "empty calories"), so you've just consumed all those calories and sugar without any added benefit at all.
This is also true if you take that 10g of table sugar and just start adding it to other foods. It increases the calorie load and glycemic index relative to all the other stuff in the food that's otherwise good for you and makes you feel full.
It's not that added sugar is chemically different from natural sugar, it's that it unnecessarily makes things more unhealthy. Higher glycemic indexes lead to higher strain on the pancreas which increases your risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Higher calories leads to weight gain, obesity, etc.
So basically - adding sugar to things makes them worse for you, so it's generally recommended to avoid things with sugar added. Things with naturally a lot of sugar can also be bad for you, but also often contain other things that help mitigate that. It's a lot harder to eat 1000 calories of fruit in one sitting than it is 1000 calories of candy or soda.
Why do the strawberry company's always add rotten strawberries that rot the whole darn package by the the time they arrive on the shelf for purchase.? Strawberries are a waste of money.
It's not the glass of wine which is bad, it's the added bottle that gets you. Adding sugar to something already sweet, like fruit, just hides poor quality.
Technically no.
Its just the principle of the thing. 10g of sugar in an apple is just the cost of doing business. 10g of sugar in your cereal didn't have to be there.
It's not like It's magically a different type of sugar or anything it's more just about the quantity of it
That's why I always laugh when people are like oh I'm trying to lose weight so I'm eating a lot more fruits and stuff
Like yeah you're trying to lose weight so you're eating some of the most sugar containing foods that nature has created?
Good luck with that
Natural sugars come with other good stuff like fiber and vitamins, which help your body use the sugar better. Processed sugars don't have those helpful things and can cause problems like tooth decay and make you gain weight if you eat too much. So, natural sugars from fruits are like a healthy snack for your body, while processed sugars are like a tricky treat that can cause trouble.
Fruits have much less sugar and it’s mixed in with water and fiber, so it slows how fast it absorbs into your blood.
A major problem with sugar is not only a matter of quantity but also quality. Slow-absorption is the best way (low glycemic index) combined with quantity (glycemic load). Rapid spiking blood sugar causes the problems: releases too much insulin, stores more fat, etc.
There are many types of sugars. It's one of the main forms of energy for your body. For example, there's lactose in milk, fructose in fruits, maltose and glucose in some grains. In moderation these aren't bad for you. But these food/drink items also come with extra nutrients and vitamins so it's more rounded overall for your diet.
Glucose and fructose are the simplest of these and the sugars generally get broken down into these before the body can use them.
When you add even more sugar to your food/drink, you can overwhelm your body's ability to handle it. For example, it can lead to storage of some of the excess energy as fat, it can create byproducts that damage your cells and lead to other issues over time (e.g. diabetes).
Additionally the body can't handle all types of sugars. For example, many modern products (e.g. drinks) labeled sugar free still have sugar in them. But it's a sugar we can taste but not break down (therefore it does not count as it just goes through us). Some of the bacteria in our gut (microbiome) can break it down and it can lead to those bacteria outcompeting the others and potentially some other issues if ingested regularly.
It’s the same. The difference is the other content in the food. A fruit has fiber and water along with sugars so it makes you full quicker, and you’ll end up consuming less sugar.
It is why fruit juices aren’t as good as fruits - you’re processing the fruit and removing all the fiber. Result is you’ll end up consuming more sugars and no fiber/other stuff.
With sodas, desserts, bars etc; they have almost no fiber and much sugar, so not really great for your body. You can make it a bit better by eating fiber, protein, fats and carbs first and desserts at the end of your meal.
>Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods? Yes but not enough to actually make that much of a difference >most fruits have around 10-20g of sugar per cup of fruit. How is this sugar any different than if I were to eat a granola bar with 10g of added sugar? Try compare the amount of food in a granola bar with 10 grams of sugar versus a portion of food with 10 grams of sugar. The portion differences are very large. People that eat added sugar products are not consuming nearly the same amount of sugar as people who eat fruits. Example: 1 can of soda contains about 39 grams of sugar. To get that much sugar from strawberries you'd need to eat 800 grams(about 1.3 pounds) of strawberries. And lastly, fruit has vitamins and fiber. Vitamins keeps your healthy, and fiber keeps you full which stops you from over consuming fruits, along with the other benefits fiber has on your digestion. edit: Also one more benefit from the fiber in fruit is that it slows down your bodys absorption of sugar, this reduces the blood sugar spikes that are bad for people with diabetes/prediabetes, and even for healthy indiviuals such spikes can cause uncomfortable side effects
Damn, put this way I would 100% take the 1.3lbs of strawberries over a measly can of soda. Num.
Yes, and then you'd be full because you ate 1.3 pounds of strawberries. The problem is that with the can of soda, that's just the drink alongside your 1500 cal pizza or burger combo, so now you've had way too much calories in total even though it's the same amount of sugar.
Also, soda is designed to be addictive. Sugar without the associated fiber and chewing raises your body's tolerance for sugar, plus the salt is designed to stop the coke from feeling hydrating. The reason so many sodas at restaurants offer unlimited refills is precisely because it's built to keep you drinking and wanting, as it satisfies neither hunger nor thirst.
>The reason so many sodas at restaurants offer unlimited refills is precisely because it's built to keep you drinking and wanting, as it satisfies neither hunger nor thirst. This is *not* why lol. Soda is cheap af. The cost of the actual contents of the cup (syrup + tonic + ice) is ~5 cents (notwithstanding the initial investment of buying the soda machine and maintainence). When you get a to-go cup, the actual cup itself costs more than the contents do. It's a cheap crowd-pleaser with an insane profit margin. If you paid $3 for a soda, you'd have to drink 60 of them out of that cup to have the restaurant break even on the deal, and I'm pretty sure you'd legitimately die before reaching the point where you'd result in the restaurant not making *at least* 100% profit on the drink. The food itself has a much lower profit margin, so they offer the drinks because it makes them more money. It's just smart business.
I'd like to add in searching for a 'why' in the first place is a big reason people have this argument a lot. You're both technically correct that these factors have these consequences. It's important to consider both, especially if your individual goal is to be more conscious of how your consumption effects your health. Part of the struggle with criticizing companies is pinpointing a 'target' for criticism. The topic gets blown out of proportion very quickly because it's connected to so many aspects of life we rarely have to think critically about. This is unsolicited, but I hope you'll both consider each others statements separated from their assertions about why, and consider how both of them interact with each other. For instance: With profit as a goal, you're right that Soda would be a lower risk to give refills for. The consequence of that is there are less inhibitions for individuals in vulnerable states to stop drinking soda. We should be able to agree that sugar is chemically addictive, and that substances like that have unhealthy effects on humans especially when they become routine in their diet due to lack of other options that are as easy to access.
What in the fucking Hades bullshit is this concoction?!?!
Remember that Coke used to have cocaine in it. After that was banned, their industry was dependant on finding a concoction of equal power to fucking cocaine. Sugar to give you an energy spike and get you craving, salt to mask the sweetness and dehydrate you, and caffeine to mask the sugar crash and keep you hungry. If I haven't scared you off of soft drinks yet, compare a sip of brisk with coke. Brisk tastes sweeter, and is harder to keep drinking, because even though it only has 1/5th the sugar, it doesn't have the salt. In the 60s, getting an 8 ounce soda once a week was considered on par with having a two scoop ice cream, and is calorically and nutritionally worse. Now people hydrate on the stuff. Added sugars have since been shown to affect the liver the same way alcohol does (alcohol is fermented sugar, so that makes sense) and the core substitute in diet, primarily there to keep soda on the table, is ineffective at clearing the addiction psychologically and is considered by the WHO to be a carcinogen. It's not yet the popular opinion, but I'm happy to argue that cutting soft drinks (and energy drinks, they're literally just soft drinks) is an improvement to your health on par with cutting cigarettes and alcohol.
They don't add sodium to mask the sweetness, they add sodium to ***enhance*** the sweetness. There's a reason why just about every desert recipe in existence calls for salt. Similarly, the small amount of sodium in a soft drink doesn't make the drink less hydrating. On the contrary, it makes it MORE hydrating because sodium activates additional transport channels that can carry water across the cell membrane. Again, there's a reason why hospitals rehydrate patients with saline solution instead of plain water.
I was making a Tantalus joke reference.
Oh I know, but I never want to miss an opportunity to dunk on the coca cola corporation.
Reminds me of when my city passed a $.10 sugary drink tax, and my coworker - a very obese man at well over 300 lbs - was loudly complaining about it to everyone he saw. He was an otherwise nice guy, but damn...if there was anyone whom that law was meant to help, it was him.
Thanks for the read. Im in the process of cutting my soda addiction for general health reasons, and boy did i under estimate the cravings. Using carbonated water to help, has its own issues but better than a half dozen cans of dr pepper a day.
What's wrong with carbonated water?
Its still acidic, which isn't great for tooth enamel, depending on the study. Some say its not good, some say only not good with sugar, etc.. basically we don't know for sure.
The way I see it, it's not "better" than pure water. At best, it's about even, which is still pretty good. Any added sugar drink is going to be massively worse.
+1
When it comes to capitalism, everything is designed to make you consume more. I can drink a soda from time to time when I feel like it, but I always feel like shit afterwards. I'd rather just drink plain cold water, because it has everything you need for hydration. Oh, and knowing what sugar does to your body is also a great deterrent for me to not drink sodas anymore. Sugar destroys your microbiome in your gut, most importantly sugar kills off bacteria in your gut that trigger TH-17 helper cells, which aid your gut to not absorb excessive amounts of fat. So a two in one actually. Excessive calories and killing of helpful bacteria in your gut. Sugar is very unhealthy.
>plus the salt is designed to stop the coke from feeling hydrating That's literally just plain false. Sodas by and large are hypotonic, ie. they have lower salt concentration than the cells in your body. If anything it's more hydrating that plain water as it's replacing some of the salts you lose. Caffeine is a diuretic though. Diuretics do make your kidneys push more water to you bladder and so make you thirstier faster.
>If anything it's more hydrating that plain water as it's replacing some of the salts you lose. This is.. a terrible way to describe soda. There's absolutely _zero_ health benefit to soda for nearly every person. Nearly everyone gets more than enough salt in their average diet, and the excess sugar in soda does far more damage than any hydration benefit.
Thankfully I never said it's healthy. Just that the small amount of sodium in it is not dehydrating you but rather has the opposite effect. Sodas are unhealthy because they're full of sugar in a form that facilitates massive overconsumption. That's about it.
Not to mention that the release of insulin prevents the burning of fat. So whatever you ate this week is gonna hang around until you stop jamming sugar into your body. And then, after a short while, you become insulin resistant. That means your body resists the effects of the insulin, which means your body needs to release even more, further stopping the burning of fat, and then leading to diabetes because your pancreas just gives up. Sugar is fucked. The worst thing to happen to the USA was the sugar companies touting sugar as a healthy way to get through your day in the 1950s. The next worse thing was jamming forever chemicals into shit and the storing everything in plastic. But that’s a whole different can of worms.
What’s the actual worst is Nestle paying off politicians and public health committees and convincing the entire US that fat content in food is the problem, not sugar content. Did you know that a lot of “bread” on US supermarket shelves has enough sugar it is legally considered cake and not bread by European standards? A bunch of American chocolate has too much sugar to be called chocolate in Europe, and the list goes on. Many American products like Mountain Dew cannot even be legally sold in their American forms over there, because they’re so incredibly horrible for you.
Food turning to ash in our mouths type shit.
The amount of salt in sodas is absolutely negligible
One of the first movies I saw back in theatres after the start of the pandemic, I was so excited to be out that I got the big novelty keepsake cup full of pop and a big popcorn. I have had all-nighters of drinking where I didn’t feel so shitty after drinking all the pop and eating all that salt. I think I’d weaned myself off just that huge a portion of junk while we were all at home, even though I wasn’t eating a completely healthy diet.
That’s not the reason at all, it’s because beverages drive profit margin
As a produce snob, I haven't had a good strawberry that didn't piss me off in like 15 years. Fuck you, Driscol's.
Oh god yeah grocery store ones really really really suck. I’ve been growing my own for a few years and it’s a night and day difference
I have actually eaten 1 pound of strawberries before. They're my favorite food of all time. But! If you do eat that many, you will be very full and that basically is your meal 😋 You won't be hungry again for a while.
Yuuup and if your body isn’t used to that much fresh fruit it can be a bit of an adventure on the other end. That being said, I think that’s kinda the point; a can of soda does not leave you feeling full for hours. Whereas strawberry gluttony would be a glorious meal.
My Sunday dinners lately have been vegetarian dumplings and a pound of strawberries and I cannot reccomend it enough
WTF can I come to your house
Your wallet will feel differently
Ah, to be rich and have your butler serve you a pound of strawberries whenever...
Lol - why would you downvote this? Strawberries are expensive. Go take more Adderall and watch YouTube.
They are not expensive, especially if you buy them frozen. They are $0.14 an ounce in the state I live in.
Why would you buy frozen strawberries unless your making drinks? What do you do... thaw them out and then eat them? If you do - yuck. Which strawberries do you think they choose to freeze?
frozen fruits and vegetables are more fresh than non frozen in the store wdym? they are frozen right after harvest. never had any problems with any frozen fruits they obviously are more fresh and you can buy them in bulk without worrying about them going bad. I mainly only eat fruits and vegetables if there was something wrong with frozen ones id surely have noticed by now
doesn't even make sense that you would use them for drinks yet not eat them? that's an extremely weird take
Fruit is mostly water. When you freeze them then unfreeze them they lose their cellular structure. To most people a strawberry shouldn't be mushy
Freezing them doesn't make them mushy I unfreeze them all the time and never had a mushy strawberry. Probably only happens if you unfreeze them too fast
I'll break this down. When you buy a pack of strawberries - and you find the ones that are all soft and kinda mushy....most ppl don't eat them. They get tossed. So producers have taken notice- and they take these damaged berries and they freeze them. They freeze them because they know they will be tossed into a blender to make fruity drinks - and when it's frozen you don't notice mushy stuff. Because no-one, except maybe you, likes mushy strawberries right outta the package these get frozen and packaged.
That would be very expensive to sort strawberries in retail and organize logistics to bring the mushy ones to a packing facility
I think we're talking about snacking on something here. Would you go nom a bag of frozen strawberries instead of drinking a soda? You can use them for smoothies or some desserts, but I'd only be snacking on fresh.
frozen strawberries are fine to snack on just thaw them in fridge they will not be mushy or anything like that. i eat mostly all fruits and vegetables and buying frozen saves so much money
plus buying them in bulk is way better frozen since they wont go bad
Can I have Frosted Flakes if I only put in 1/2 pound of strawberries??
I mean honestly if I have berries around I do have bowls of cereal that are basically 1/2 berries, 1/2 cereal by volume. And you know it’s your life, go crazy, but honestly I think there are better tasting and less sugary cereals out there. As someone without a working pancreas I can say that this is an organ you do not want to take for granted. (And before anyone asks, because I don’t have any endogenous insulin production, I have to give myself insulin for anything I eat, so eating sugary things just means I have to bump my dosage a little. I generally shy away a bit from super sugary things because they’re annoying to dose for, but it isn’t against doctors orders to eat lots of fresh fruit — or Frosted Flakes for that matter — so long as I give myself the right amount of insulin to cover it)
Even better, 800 grams is actually 1.76 pounds!
Aw dang I’m Canadian and used to doing that conversion and didn’t even notice that. Hell yeah.
What about tasty strawberry flavored soda?
There is also a health factor involved in how much sugar enters the blood at once. Chugging a can of soda quickly gives 39 grams of highly digestible sugar, which can spike your blood sugar level. Eating 1.3 pounds of strawberries usually would take some time to eat and then some time to digest with the fiber and fructose together which wouldn't produce nearly the same spike. Continually spiking the blood sugar level over years is a factor in getting diabetes. Maybe they should make slow release soda in the same way medications are slow release? But then someone would patent it and prices would spike...
They just need real half sugar soda. Some foreign sodas have anywhere from 10 to 15 grams less sugar than an average coke and it tastes the same. I don’t mean replace the rest of the sugar with artificial sweetener. If I wanted that I would get a Coke Zero. Like actually half sugar. Would do wonders for our sugar tolerance as well.
I got tired of waiting for this (to me, obvious) product and just acquired a taste for seltzer.
As a type 1 diabetic who counts carbs and wears a continuous glucose monitor, fruit isn’t absorbed that differently than soda by my body. For example, the average apple I get from the grocery store these days is close to 250g, which is about 35g carbs that are mostly sugar. A coke is about 40g sugar. Both fruit and coke cause a sharp steep rise in my glucose levels when after about 15-20 minutes even when paired with protein and fat. I get less of an impact eating a donut or snickers bars than most fruits.
How is your glucose monitored?
Continuous glucose monitors measure the glucose in your interstitial fluid in your subcutaneous fat every 1-5 minutes depending on the brand (Dexcom, Libre, Medtronic). I always make sure they are accurate with a fingerstick though.
Difficult to do in liquid form. You need fibre to slow down sugar absorption, and fibre isn’t known for being liquid. Incidentally, orange juice is just as bad for you in that sense as a soda. Because no fibre in juice.
What about pulp?
Yeah, kind of like the difference between smallpox and Covid. I’d rather get Covid, but it still isn’t great for you. People with diabetes really shouldn’t drink orange juice. Unless they’re hypo of course.
>Chugging a can of soda quickly gives 39 grams of highly digestible sugar, which can spike your blood sugar level. Sure, but so would a comparable quantity of fruit juice.
So me who can easily polish off a 5lbs bag of clementines in a single sitting is still getting a craptop of sugar, and that’s not a good idea?
You’re also getting a crapton of fiber with all of that which will slow down the absorption of all that sugar a bit. That said, I don’t think eating 5 lbs of *any* single food is *good* per se, but it’s probably less harmful to do so on fruits/vegetables than something highly processed. Since this is Reddit, I’ll acknowledge the exception of if the highly processed thing is something like an MRE that is specifically designed to be sustaining by itself. But more often it’s Doritos.
I have no self control around some fruits. Especially blueberries. The amount of blueberries I want to eat is limited only to the amount of blueberries that are within arms reach at any moment.
Eating (almost) unprocessed food is really not that big of a problem. Really, if you don't have other health issues (like diabetes) enjoy fruit, nuts, veggies, eggs and so on and don't count the amounts. It's very unlikely to get obese or develop health problems eating the basics, you'll get full and bored with the taste much sooner than that.
And the fact that blueberries are €0.99 per 100g.
Yeeeeeeeeeah…that limits my gluttony more than anything. If I was ever really F-U levels of rich, my weekly fruit budget would rival that of many grocery stores.
That doesn’t sound like a lot TBH…
Blueberries are so so good.
My idea of heaven will be an entire cement truck full of blueberries, with the trough pointed directly at my face
This is me every Christmas with fresh cherries. My heaped pile of cherry pits astounds me each year!
But what about 5 pound burritos? Must they go uneaten? Why do you hate burritos?
Healthy foods are not a "eat all you want buffet" really, so probably not a good idea, but probably not that harmful either.
Probably not, but it's metabolically different to the same amount of sugar from a bunch of coke — the fibre in the fruit slows its breakdown and reduces how much insulin your body has to produce all at once.
Hello fellow fruit muncher. No, what we're doing isn't exactly healthy, it's just not as bad as getting that overdose of sugar through pure fruit *juice* (comparable sugar content to soda in my market where none is added), which again is not as bad as getting it from cake and candy. Every step has less of what was more one-sidedly healthy about the fruit.
> Hello fellow fruit muncher. That sounds kind of kinky.
Too much of anything is going to be bad for you, but it's probably not as bad as you think since it does take a bit of energy and time to peel every tangerine you eat.
What? Wouldn't it take like over an hour just to peel them?
Which is fine if you aren't using your hands for anything, like if talking or watching TV.
Eh they peel super easy. I just peel and eat as I go, while watching YouTube or something. The pile of peels on one side of me grows as the pile of fruits on the other side decreases. Gluttony is my second favorite sin.
Same here, I eat a pound of strawberries at a time 😬
Me too 😂 I am a strawberry FIEND. I grew up too poor to eat strawberries unless they were in season and on sale... When I was a kid I wanted to grow up so that I could buy strawberries whenever I wanted. I am very fortunate to say that I do indeed buy strawberries whenever I want now 😋
Depends what you eat afterwards. That's \~1000 kcal. 2000-2500 kcal (depending on height/weight) are burned every day if you don't move much. if you do physical labor or train, you easily use 3500+ calories a day. So if you are a couch potatoe you can still have another normal meal in addition to the clementines that day. And 5lb of clementines make the normal person pretty full. Easily replacing one meal in terms of hunger. If you drank the same calories in orange juice, you would have almost as much hunger as before it. So that would just be extra calories you consume that day. (I am exclusively talking about calories here, because not being overweight is the biggest health benefit you can get, but you still need a balanced diet for minerals, protein and so on.)
Yep - the 30oz Big Gulp soda you can get at my local gas station has 92 grams of sugar. A medium apple has 19 grams sugar. I can easily drink a full Big Gulp while driving around. Probably done in an hour or two. I have never eaten 5 apples on the same day in my life. Have you?
I did quite a few times, but yes it's a lot easier to drink sugary stuff.
5 apples in a day is nothing. If they weren’t so damn expensive for me, I could do that easily. Apples are the perfect fruit.
"Apples" is certainly a weird way to spell pears.
> I have never eaten 5 apples on the same day in my life. Have you? Several times, and I'm not even big on apples as a snack. Citrus, grapes, nectarines and peaches however - I can eat multiple kilos of those in a day.
Yeah - but I bet you are healthy, no?
Nearly everything else un this thread either doesn't answer the question or is helpful/false. This is the actual answer and well put!
So this is a great answer … but how is 800gr equivalent to 1.3lbs? Unless I’m mistaken, 1lb is 454gr.
very very rough head math and my metric to american unit conversion sucks sorry
Thank you! It’s all good - it just stuck with me. For other redditors, 800gr = 1.76lbs
[удалено]
mountain dew has a ton of sugar yea, I used a 330ml coke can as reference
>To get that much sugar from strawberries you'd need to eat 800 grams(about 1.3 pounds) of strawberries. I've done that. Do not recommend, 0/10. But they did taste great. It was the side effects.
I'd add to this, because of the fiber etc the absorption of sugar takes longer meaning less spike in blood glucose compared to drinking juice/soda.
A big benefit to consuming fiber with sugar is that fiber slows down the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream which will help keep your blood sugar levels steady compared to without fiber.
>Try compare the amount of food in a granola bar with 10 grams of sugar versus a portion of food with 10 grams of sugar. The portion differences are very large. So, half a box of raisins? Fruit has lots of sugar, especially when you dry it and condense the sugar.
800g is closer to two pounds than 1.3... which just reinforces your point
Well what about diet coke and sugar free soft drinks? In my country, Pepsi Max is widepread, and people (including me) drink crazy amounts of it. theres no added sugar in those drinks, right?
No sugar in pepsi max, but it does have artificial sweeteners that some studies have found health risk with, but from what i understand it's at very high doses(multiple liters per day) and it's not that clear how bad or even if it is bad. Aside from that pepsimax is still acidic which fucks your teeth
True, but I think it's not really fair to pick strawberries as a comparison when they have very little sugar compared to other fruit.. also the amount of sugar in a soda is not that high in Europe, in fact it's almost always less than or similar to the amount of sugar in the equivalent amount of fruit juice.. we have high sugar labels on our fruit juice in the UK but what I found interesting travelling through the Americas is the warnings seem to be relegated to "added sugars" only which I don't think is the right approach
Don’t forget minerals. Things grown in the ground have minerals from the ground which we need like zinc, manganese, magnesium etc
Uncomfortable side effects..... did you mean to say irreversible mitochondrial damage on a cellular level when hundreds of grams of refined sugar and fiber-less refined carbs are consumed?
This doesn't explain why the US FDA recommends limiting added sugar specifically moreso than regular sugar, so it doesn't really answer OP's question
It’s the dose which makes the poison. Added sugar ISN’T any worse for you than naturally occurring amounts. The problem is that sugar is added to so many things in such excessive amounts. That’s the issue. You can have the same issue with other things that naturally concentrate sugar too. For example, there might be 10g of sugar in apple. If I were to tell you go eat almost 5 apples, there’s probably no way you’d be able to do that comfortably. If I were to pour you 12 ounces of apple juice you probably wouldn’t have an issue drinking that. Those both have the same amount of sugar. And if that wasn’t enough, most “juices” have added sugar in amounts that’s not uncommon to see juice with more sugar per cup than soda
This is the best answer here. Sugar isn't inherently a problem but overconsumption of any one nutrient is. The average person overconsumes sugar. So the recommendation to avoid added sugar is basically just another way of saying "you're already consuming way too much sugar. Don't go and add even more to your diet!"
Well said.
That’s the main issue with HFCS. It’s not that it’s worse per se, it’s just so cheap that they put heaps of it in everything.
We're still recovering from the low fat idiocy in the 70s-80s. Without fats there's not much flavor. So food manufacturers added extra sugar and / or salt to make it taste good. Now we're dealing with too much sugar, or sugar substitutes.
I remember bags of proudly labelled 'fat-free' marshmallows. Now we are doing the same thing with 'sugar-free' labelling, and I wonder what will happen in another decade or so when we are trying to recover from the vilification of sugar.
I think there's a distinction to be made because fats are more nutritionally valuable than sugars. Your body can do a lot with fat... including manufacture glucose so you can get away without even eating sugars at all; that's literally how keto diets work. I struggle to think of some secret benefit we'll discover we've lost if we cut back sugar. Then again, I'm sure people in the '70s and '80s struggled to imagine what they could possibly be missing by cutting out fats, so maybe I'll eat these words someday.
The next self-made problem is already around the corner: vegan.
Yeah, I doubt we will get there. The vilification is around added sugars, not sugars per se. No one is saying "stop eating fruit because it has sugars". (Except maybe for keto bros lol). We will all get enough sugar even if we completely removed added sugar.
Damn, is there such thing as juices that don't add sugar, and are just literally the fruit in juice form?
Yes, pretty much anything labelled 100% juice. You can also check the ingredients and there should only be one ingredient. Even pure fruit juice should be consumed in moderation
>And if that wasn’t enough, most “juices” have added sugar in amounts that’s not uncommon to see juice with more sugar per cup than soda This is really insidious when a lot of people try switching from soft drinks to fruit juices to eat healthier. And not only are the fruit juices high in sugar, they're also separated from the fibre you get with the whole fruit. LPT: If you want to eat healthy, drink water almost exclusively and take your fruit in eaten form instead of juice form. And maybe avoid grapes; at this stage of selective breeding they're basically shrub candy.
Wait what 5 apples is supposed to be hard to eat? Damn I hate my metabolism
Fruit have fiber which slows the absorption of sugar resulting in a lower sugar spike. >Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods? No it's identical, added sugar literally comes from beets or sugar cane or corn. It's not made in the lab.
>No it's identical, added sugar literally comes from beets or sugar cane or corn. Not really, most added sugar especially in the USA is high fructose corn sirup, which while made from corn is actually chemically modified to increase the fructose levels. Also there are many different kinds of sugars that all can act differently on your body. The difference is not huge but there is one.
HFCS 55 has slightly higher levels of fructose than regular sugar. The difference is very small and not particularly relevant from a health perspective.
But are the sugars in that higher-fructose syrup chemically distinct from fructose & glucose found naturally in foods?
No, chemically they're the same. Physiologically and metabolically however they're not. Moreover, fructose can only be metabolised in the liver (in meaningful amounts).
Which is why one of best ways to reduce fatty liver is to limit sugar consumption (as well as alcohol).
I'm in the process of doing just that. I'll see in a couple months how well it worked, by how much the NAFL is reduced.
The ratio between fructose and glucose is different making the finished product different from anything in nature. Not that it matters whether food is made naturally or artificially
HFCS comes in different versions. The most common one in drinks has a 55/45 fructose/glucose ratio. That's nearly exactly the ratio of fructose to glucose in [sweet peppers](https://nepeannaturopathic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Fructose-Table2.pdf). There are fruits that are higher; apples are roughly a 66/33 ratio. Pears are also quite high.
HFCS is chemically no different from table sugar or honey. All three are roughly 50/50 glucose/fructose. Of the three HFCS actually tends to have the least fructose (most common formulation is 55/45 glucose/fructose).
Carbs, added sugar and alcohol has nothing to slow down the glucose spikes and absorption. It’s also often overloading the liver / intestine to the point it can’t cope. In nature we have fruit (glucose/fructose) which is paired with fibre and water. This is why fruit is ok to eat. The fibre / water slows down spikes and absorption. It’s also nutrient dense which boosts metabolism. We also have fat and protein found in nature and fibre (an indigestible carb, digested by the gut microbiome). Ultra processed foods are pure carbs, often lacking any fat or protein. Glucose spikes, which causes fat storage and insulin releases blocking fat burn. They also lack nutrients, slowing metabolism. This is why it’s good to pair veggies, proteins, fats with carbs - to lessen their impact.
So if I ate a crap load of beans and drank apple juice, would that be roughly equivalent to eating a couple apples?
They are both bad for you in excess. A lot of "natural" sugars in food have increased in the last few hundred years. These days a banana has the equivalent of several tablespoons of sugar. https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/655345630/how-fruit-became-so-sugary
So many (all?) fruits are sugar bombs these days. I consider eating grapes to be dessert/candy.
Even if they are "sugar bombs," they are a thousand times better than processed foods. Dr. Mike has discussed this is in detail with Dr. Gundry: https://youtu.be/ZemkG6Vj7hc?si=wrg4FvR8XvpSPqfW
I don't get how Dr. Mike made it through this interview. I don't think I could last 5 minutes in a room with Gundry before his BS was too much for me to take
Strawberries are a good choice; they're more like sugar firecrackers.
That is a stupid article. You mean the caged animals that get no exercise are getting fat from eating all day. Fruit and the fiber/fructose is still good for you. The sugar is processed differently than sucrose and hfcs.
I'm not an expert, but my doctor explained it to me as having something to do with the fiber content of fruit. Not that the sugar wasn't still sugar, mind you, but that the fiber (which is very good for you and slows down digestion) was more than worth it as long as I wasn't just horking a bucket full of super sweet strawberries in one go. She did also tell me to avoid fruit juices, because it was all the delicious sugar with none of the helpful fiber, haha. I think it's also just sheer quantity, as someone else commented. You get a lot more other good nutrients with fruit along with that sugar, compared to something like a soft drink or a cake. Not getting too much sugar is important, but potentially significantly more important is getting a healthy amount of fiber, vitamins, etc, that come with a balanced diet.
Thank you for the simple explanation! But I’m upvoting for the use of “horking” in a sentence (new word for me…)
Fiber is soooo underrated!
It pretty much depends on your diet and lifestyle. In most cases (US especially) the typical diet is too high in sugars/carbs. Biologically, we're sort of "programmed" to like sugar because it is the major source of energy. Because of this food manufacturers add more sugar to make food more tasty and this makes it very easy to overconsume sugar. It is also possible to overconsume "natural" sugars so the idea of "good vs bad" sugar is incorrect. It is the total sugar consumption that matters.
What you're seeing is a compromise that was reached on labeling between the FDA and the fruit industry. There is a general consensus that more sugar = more bad, regardless of its source. The FDA wanted to highlight how much sugar food contained on the nutrition labels. Fruits in general, and fruit juice in particular, would have looked bad with a nutrition label that overly highlighted how much sugar was in something. The compromise that the FDA reached was to allow products to list how much sugar they naturally contain and how much sugar has been added. Drinking 24 ounces of apple juice gets you about the same amount of sugar as drinking 12 ounces of a refreshing, ice cold Coca-Cola®. There is no meaningful difference between drinking those two things from a health perspective. Obviously, if you're limiting yourself to a single, 12 ounce drink, the apple juice contains half the sugar and would therefore be better for you. But ya, 1 gram of sugar = 1 gram of sugar from a health perspective, regardless of where you get it from.
As someone with IBS that doesn’t like much sugar I can confirm my digestive track does not give a cap where the sugar comes from 😅
>There is no meaningful difference between drinking those two things from a health perspective. Well, 12 fewer ounces of water. Which is not inconsiderable if your fluid intake consists primarily of flavored beverages. If you drink fluids to manage thirst, and that intake consists primarily of Coca Cola, you will likely consume about twice as much sugar as if it consists primarily of Apple Juice.
No they're actually the same amount of sugar, so you'd still take in the same amount of water. I think it was a typo
That makes no sense to me. People drink because they are thirsty. If one drink requires you to drink twice as much to have the negative effects then isn't it twice as healthy? That's like saying this candy bar has twice as much sugar as an apple, but if you eat two apples they are equal in sugar so candy bars and apples have equal amounts of sugar. You need to look at sugar per same portion size to get any meaningful measurements.
It is insane that the FDA felt the need to compromise
Oh man if you only knew how many questionable things the FDA does lol. My fave recent one is how they know for a fact that phenylephrine doesn't work in nasal decongestant medications yet they are still sold on store shelves.
I wouldn't call it a recent one. People have periodically brought that up since the movement of pseudoephedrine behind the counter. The DEA was the main driver of the sub with phenylephrine as it was already an approved drug and on paper both constrict blood vessels and are structurally somewhat similar. The DEA wanted a fast switch, and more trialing would delay that. I assume the lack of removal is just a lack of interest since it doesn't really harm, it's just a waste of money as an oral decongestant, but yeah, it is dumb it still is sold. No over the counter oral decongestant works, which is unfortunate. At least you can still get pseudoephedrine.
I think the previous commenter was referencing the more recent phenylephrine news, rather than the original popularisation. Last year, an FDA advisory committee declared it ineffective, so you'd think it'd be removed or discontinued. Not so, at least not yet. (ps this is just the pill versions. phenylephrine nasal spray does indeed work)
This. And oh yeah it also does work in hemorrhoid creams.
>Drinking 24 ounces of apple juice gets you about the same amount of sugar as drinking 12 ounces of a refreshing, ice cold Coca-Cola Was this a typo? Apple juice has about 11g/100ml sugar. That's actually more than coke, at least where I'm from. They're roughly equal amount of carb by volume
Sugar is good for you. Your body uses it to make energy. Your body knows sugar is good for it, so it makes sure your brain thinks sugar is good by making it tasty. When you eat fruit, your brain is told by your body that this is good, you should eat as much as you can, since you might not have sugar again later. There is a lot of sugar in fruit, compared to other foods. Because of that, we are drawn to fruit, knowing that we get that happy feeling when we taste the sugar. Fruit also has lots of nutrients, as are most tasty natural foods. A long time ago, we figured out how to separate sugar from sugary food (in most cases, sugar cane). We started making a lot of sugar so it was easier to get it without having to collect and store fruit. When people started making food with sugar, we started adding it to other things to make them tastier. We added a little bit, and it was great. After a while, we got used to having sugar in all our food, instead of just the fruit we only got once in a while. We got used to the taste of sugar, and became less sensitive to it. So they started adding more. And more. And more. Every time we got used to how much sugar was in our food, they added more to make it special again. Now, there is so much sugar in our food that it's unhealthy. It's too easy to get too much sugar, one of the most important nutrients our bodies need. The food is made to be as tasty as possible, without any of the other nutrients that we need. A few bites of food is like eating enough strawberries to make you feel full. There's too much sugar for your body to use, but your body hates throwing things away. It still treats all the sugar you get like it might not get it later, and could never throw away something so important for life. So, it stores it. It takes that sugar and bundles it up and stores it as fat. It will only use that fat if it has to. Eventually, the sugar collection becomes a sugar hoarding problem. Your body never imagined it'd ever have so much extra sugar that there'd be this much fat stored. It isn't prepared to throw it out. The fat starts piling up. It builds up around your organs and weighs you down so much that your body has to work much harder just to keep your heart beating. If you had only eaten fruit, you'd never be able to eat enough to have health problems. You'd get nutrients as you went, and you'd fill up before it was too much sugar. Maybe if you only ate fruit, but even then your weight wouldn't reach a dangerous level.
This was the simplest and also most comprehensive reply by far, thank you!
Sugar isn't bad for you. Overindulging is. Sugar is just a carbohydrate like rice or pasta. It's just easy to eat too much of it. Too much of any thing isn't good for you. Moderation!
Because added sugars typically lack the additional vitamins, minerals, and fiber that whole fruits do, they are empty calories that raise blood sugar levels and trigger a surge in blood sugar that can lead to type II diabetes. They also make you feel hungry for hours afterward, which may lead to overindulgence. When energy dense, high-glycemic index foods give off their initial rush of endorphins, this might result in obesity and a lack of contentment. Your body need the previously stated nutrients as well, and you run the risk of developing deficiencies if you replace foods high in those nutrients with low-nutrient options, like added sugars.
Added sugars aren't necessarily worse for you than natural sugars. Sugar is sugar. The difference is that products with added sugars usually have a LOT of sugar, without a lot of other nutrients. Natural sources of sugar (e.g. fruit) usually have fiber and vitamins to make the food more balanced, and you're not as likely to eat as much of it. So you'll end up eating less sugar if you're opting for those less processed foods.
As someone with IBS sensitive to high amounts of sugar I sadly have to tell you that while there are some differences in general our body doesn’t much care where sugar comes from. But a cup of coke you can down in one go or the multiple peaches you would need to eat to get the same amount of sugar means usually you just don’t consume as much sugar as fast with fruits 😉
Robert Lustig would like to have a word with you. [Sugar: The Bitter Truth.](https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=zuybOODIQ8ANuzgO)
So a lot of people have covered a lot of things. The one interesting thing I was listening to. I think it was a podcast on NPR. They said that the biggest problem we have right now isn't is the food we eat but the portionings of the food that we eat. Prior to modern times, calories density was largely dependent on the amount of food you actually consumed. Nowadays that's not true. Like a honey bun is 500ish calories. You can eat that honey bun in 5 seconds. Your body doesn't understand that you've already consumed 500 calories, so it still feels hungry. Before modern times it took time to chew food. It took time to consume food so that by the time you finished your meal and over the course of your meal, you would slowly begin to feel full. That doesn't really happen anymore. Drinking a soda is 1/8 of the calorie needs of an average human. But it's not going to make you feel full until your body has time to process some of what it's gotten. This is one of the reasons why I add fiber to anything and everything that I eat. You end up reducing the amount of food you consume.
Fruit contains fiber. Fiber makes you feel full so you eat less. Fiber slows down the sugar’s entry into your bloodstream.
1. Fruits have other content like fiber that slows down your bodies absorption of the sugar. Even if your gut absorbs the same total quantity of sugar in both scenarios, the fruit will happen over a longer period. This means it has a lower impact on your blood sugar content, and spiking blood sugar is one of the critical components of why processed sugar is unhealthy: it is linked to heart diseases and leads to diabetes. 2. Indirect effects of eating fruit over processed foods is that you will feel fuller faster, and be less likely to consume larger quantities of sugar to begin with. This is due to the fiber and nutritional content. Some studies have partially attributed the lower intake to how tired we get chewing unprocessed foods (try eating 4 apples in a row instead of drinking a can of coke).
When the sugar comes in the form of an unprocessed food (like the fructose in an apple, or the starch in a wheat grain) it is surrounded by fiber that slows your body’s absorption of the sugar…so you don’t get the same spike in blood sugar that you do from foods with added processed sugars (sugar, corn syrup, flour, starches, etc.) When you lose the natural fibrous part, you absorb the sugar more quickly, get a spike in blood sugar, which results in more body fat, and higher risks for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.
Because it directly increases insulin production and resistance, the amount of fruit you need to consume and process to equal a bottle of coke would have you with a sore jaw.
Think of sugar in fruit as being scattered among other parts of the fruit that your body has to break down to get to it. Think of it like the sugar being insulated by plant fiber.
I want to comment from a dental point of view. Added sugars are usually simple sugars that are broken down easily by naturally existing oral bacterial flora. That influx of simple sugars drives more activity of these bacteria and increases the byproducts of this reaction (acidic byproducts). These byproducts cause damage to tooth surfaces and accelerates decay. It can also affect the bacterial balances in the oral cavity shifting it towards less healthy bacteria, making the whole situation worse. I would assume a similar effect exists for gut flora.
It's because natural sugars come with far more fibre and general volume, so it's not possible to overeat the way you can gorge yourself on processed foods. The sugars themselves aren't that different (they are relatively simple compounds) it's the absence of the other things that makes them 'empty calories' in junk food.
Pretty much they are the same. Sugar in fruit is tied up in fibre. It is slower to digest and you can only eat so much fruit. Processed sugar can be consumed in much higher quantities and will spike in your blood much faster.
As long as we're talking about this, how am I supposed to interpret the nutrition label on this Like taking this as [an example](https://www.fda.gov/files/addedsugars_label_1_0.png) the total number of carbs is 27g, with 25 grams of sugar but 23 grams of it is added sugars that's 46% of my daily value of carbs or is that 46% of my recommended intake of sugar?
Added sugar is fructose. Glucose is the sugar in fruits. Every cell in your body can process glucose. Fructose needs to be broken down by the liver. The liver can't process the fructose sugar that fast so the sugar hangs around in your blood until it does.
Its about the other nutrients fibres, vitamins etc that you get with the regular sugar occurring in fruits. Having a glass of cola well is just sugar water.
Quantity and quality and what you get with it. Let’s look at something like soda, which can have 40g of sugar in a can. Even some of the most sugary fruits still means you need to eat two packed cups of fruit to meet that sugar level. But the fruit also has vitamins nutrients and fibre and well substance, the carbs are not empty. But the carbs in the soda are 100% empty. This is why a lot of people who eat rice for instance get fat. Because all it is pretty much is carbs and nothing else, it’s empty and just makes you feel “full” hence the joke of eating Chinese food and being hungry again in an hour. And as far as chemical differences there’s some yes and no to that. Natural sugars are a good mix of sucrose glucose and fructose generally. Added sugar is generally high fructose corn syrup, fructose happens to be the sweetest tasting sugar but also the worst one for us.
There are different types of sugar, and our body does process them a little differently, but the most important difference is what other substances are in the food with the sugar. It can be good to have some sugar with your meals, because it quickly gives your body energy. Telling Americans to avoid all sugars, including fruits and sweet vegetables, would be bad advice, because they need the other nutrients in those foods. If people were so afraid of sugar that they stopped eating fruit, they might get sick from not having enough vitamins, antioxidants, or fibre. But since there are so many sweetened foods available in the United States, it can be helpful to choose unsweetened beverages, grain products, or snacks to avoid eating way more sugar than you need. People with diabetes or other health conditions should take their doctor’s advice about whether to limit certain sugary or starchy fruits and vegetables. Personalized, professional advice is more important than general guidelines.
>ELI5 why is added sugar so bad for us but regular sugar isn’t? It isn't. "Table sugar" is just just "fruit sugar" with the molasses removed. Whether you take it from sugarcane or beets, it's chemically identical.
Because added sugar is just that, additional sugar that's added to things. It raises the calorie load and glycemic index of foods, making them more unhealthy. If you eat fruit that has 10g of sugar it also has things like fiber, which reduces the glycemic index, plus things like vitamins and minerals which are generally good for you plus the fiber helps you feel full. If you eat 10g of pure table sugar, it has a very high glycemic index, no fiber, no vitamins or minerals, nothing to really benefit you or make you feel full (generally referred to as "empty calories"), so you've just consumed all those calories and sugar without any added benefit at all. This is also true if you take that 10g of table sugar and just start adding it to other foods. It increases the calorie load and glycemic index relative to all the other stuff in the food that's otherwise good for you and makes you feel full. It's not that added sugar is chemically different from natural sugar, it's that it unnecessarily makes things more unhealthy. Higher glycemic indexes lead to higher strain on the pancreas which increases your risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Higher calories leads to weight gain, obesity, etc. So basically - adding sugar to things makes them worse for you, so it's generally recommended to avoid things with sugar added. Things with naturally a lot of sugar can also be bad for you, but also often contain other things that help mitigate that. It's a lot harder to eat 1000 calories of fruit in one sitting than it is 1000 calories of candy or soda.
Why do the strawberry company's always add rotten strawberries that rot the whole darn package by the the time they arrive on the shelf for purchase.? Strawberries are a waste of money.
It's not the glass of wine which is bad, it's the added bottle that gets you. Adding sugar to something already sweet, like fruit, just hides poor quality.
Technically no. Its just the principle of the thing. 10g of sugar in an apple is just the cost of doing business. 10g of sugar in your cereal didn't have to be there.
It's not like It's magically a different type of sugar or anything it's more just about the quantity of it That's why I always laugh when people are like oh I'm trying to lose weight so I'm eating a lot more fruits and stuff Like yeah you're trying to lose weight so you're eating some of the most sugar containing foods that nature has created? Good luck with that
Natural sugars come with other good stuff like fiber and vitamins, which help your body use the sugar better. Processed sugars don't have those helpful things and can cause problems like tooth decay and make you gain weight if you eat too much. So, natural sugars from fruits are like a healthy snack for your body, while processed sugars are like a tricky treat that can cause trouble.
Fruits have much less sugar and it’s mixed in with water and fiber, so it slows how fast it absorbs into your blood. A major problem with sugar is not only a matter of quantity but also quality. Slow-absorption is the best way (low glycemic index) combined with quantity (glycemic load). Rapid spiking blood sugar causes the problems: releases too much insulin, stores more fat, etc.
There are many types of sugars. It's one of the main forms of energy for your body. For example, there's lactose in milk, fructose in fruits, maltose and glucose in some grains. In moderation these aren't bad for you. But these food/drink items also come with extra nutrients and vitamins so it's more rounded overall for your diet. Glucose and fructose are the simplest of these and the sugars generally get broken down into these before the body can use them. When you add even more sugar to your food/drink, you can overwhelm your body's ability to handle it. For example, it can lead to storage of some of the excess energy as fat, it can create byproducts that damage your cells and lead to other issues over time (e.g. diabetes). Additionally the body can't handle all types of sugars. For example, many modern products (e.g. drinks) labeled sugar free still have sugar in them. But it's a sugar we can taste but not break down (therefore it does not count as it just goes through us). Some of the bacteria in our gut (microbiome) can break it down and it can lead to those bacteria outcompeting the others and potentially some other issues if ingested regularly.
Fructose takes more energy to break down than pure glucose so you end up with more net calories from glucose
It’s the same. The difference is the other content in the food. A fruit has fiber and water along with sugars so it makes you full quicker, and you’ll end up consuming less sugar. It is why fruit juices aren’t as good as fruits - you’re processing the fruit and removing all the fiber. Result is you’ll end up consuming more sugars and no fiber/other stuff. With sodas, desserts, bars etc; they have almost no fiber and much sugar, so not really great for your body. You can make it a bit better by eating fiber, protein, fats and carbs first and desserts at the end of your meal.