>what can you really do about it?

You can write articles for popular online news sites that inform people.

The generalizations made in the article are completely valid for the audience they're targeting: specifically, the x% of Americans who are at increased risk of a heart attack because of the government subsidies you mentioned, as well as their own addiction to sugar.

Can you speak to exactly why the specific regulations mentioned -- the ones that were allegedly successful in Mexico -- won't work or are otherwise harmful?

FTA:

>The key interventions they implemented included taxing soda, banning junk food television advertising, and eliminating processed foods, junk food and sugar-sweetened beverages from schools. More than 15 countries have targeted sugar-sweetened beverages by taxing them — a strategy that’s proven successful.

All of these sound completely reasonable to me.

Can you provide some counter evidence to the NIH study cited in the article? [0]

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19759377

Is it not possible that perhaps government regulation and the elimination/reduction of corn subsidies could be reasonable steps to take?

Sugar is addictive. The availability of low-sugar products is as relevant to the sugar addict as the presence of a basketball hoop is to a heroin addict. Sure, the heroin addict could spend his time playing basketball instead of shooting up, but that doesn't make heroin intervention an unreasonable solution.

> Is it not possible that perhaps government regulation and the elimination/reduction of corn subsidies could be reasonable steps to take?

Absolutely! And that's the thrust of my comment: A huge contributor to these issues is suspiciously left out.

I'm always surprised how hard it is to get artificially sweetened yogurt. I know of only one brand at only one chain of grocery store in my area. It seems like a natural combination.

I'm always surprised how hard it is to get completely unsweetened yogurt (natural or artificial). The only brands I've seen locally are "organic" yogurts with a hefty price tag.

Making unsweetened yogurt (plain or greek style) is surprisingly easy. It takes about 1/2 hour and I leave it overnight (in a cooler) to 'develop'.

I would recommend more people try it. It's generally better than store bought plain style yogurt and super-cheap.

I can get a gallon of milk (on sale, non hormone BST stuff) for about $2 (in CO, US). That will yield the same in yogurt (4 quarts.. I use quart mason jars).

Any pointers to a good recipe?

IME most of the plain varieties lack added sugar. There's still plenty of sugar from the milk.

I've been eating whole fat greek style US yogurt lately. It tends to have less sugar than other plain yogurts and I am less inclined to add it.

I have no idea about the economics, but making your own yogurt is extremely easy. You get rather more control of the contents at that point.

Fresh yogurt is also naturally sweeter

Look for Dannon Oikos Triple Zero next time (black packaging). It's sugar free and sweetened with stevia.

But why would you want to sweeten your yoghurt? Milk has enough sugars on its own.

I agree! I wonder if there's a substantial overlap between the set of people who buy yogurt frequently and the set of people who are averse to ~artificial chemicals~ in their food (tildes denoting a bit of sarcasm at chemophobia).

> You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it

You make sauce without added sugar although tomatoes do have some natural sugar. Granted it's not really an amount to be concerned about, but it's not sugar-free.

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/much-sugar-average-tomato-80...

You're absolutely correct, but largely when someone thinks of fruit yogurt they largely think of those cone-shaped packages.

It really doesn't help that so many things are advertised as healthy-low-fat stuff either. Fat in large quantities isn't the best, but replacing all the fat with sugars is much worse.

>Fat in large quantities isn't the best, but replacing all the fat with sugars is much worse.

You're on the right track there, but there is no evidence that fat (with the exception of trans fats) are bad, as stated in the article.

Yikes! Maybe it's time I switch to using fresh tomatoes when making red sauce. It's not that hard to skin tomatoes anyways so maybe it makes sense to go in that direction, especially when they're adding that much sugar.

I happen to have 3 brands of tomato sauce in the cupboard. Each 8 ounce can appears to have less sugar in it than a serving of Oreos (14 grams for the Oreos. 5, 7.5 and 10 grams for the sauces). Only the 10 gram sauce has any added sugar.

The cans each say 2.5 servings (to be clear, above I've done the math for the entire can), and I think for many foods, it will be the case that less than 1/2 the can is a serving. So there is something iffy about the comparison in the article (and 20 or 30 calories of sugar in a meal is not a huge concern for most people).

>> Most of us don’t know that a serving of tomato sauce has more sugar than a serving of Oreo cookies

>Most store-bought jar sauce has sugar in it (and tastes gross). You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it, and some of the nicer jar sauces are that way also.

I don't think the article was necessarily talking about added-sugar sauce. It's not clear exactly how much a serving of tomato sauce is, but calorie for calorie tomato sauce (cooked tomato) does contain more sugar than Oreos.

Comparing calorie-dense food like Oreos to tomato sauce seems a bit disingenuous. Especially when the sugar in tomatoes is regular fructose and provokes no insulin response.

Everything I've seen, including my own blood testing, shows that fructose increases your blood sugar response just as much as table sugar, thus provoking a similar insulin response. I've not seen any evidence that naturally occurring fructose is any better for you than added sugars.

The fructose-to-glucose ratio of a ripe tomato is about 1.25.

A few years ago, some studies came out finding that any fructose consumption may be harmful.

I'm probably behind the times but I haven't heard it said that any amount may be harmful. Even fructose's harshest critic, Dr. Lustig, says that fructose's harm comes when an large acute volume of it overloads the ideal metabolic pathway and results in the using metabolic pathways with harmful byproducts. This is why he says whole fruit consumption is generally ok. The fiber in the fruit slows down absorption and gives your liver time to process the fructose without resorting to the harmful fallback methods.

There may be a threshold response, but from what I remember, the threshold might be low. I wonder if much of the fiber in tomato is destroyed when reducing it to a sauce?

Cooking doesn't destroy fiber, it just softens it. As opposed to pulp-free fruit juice, from which all fiber is removed, and is unhealthy. Even if tomato sauce were the equivalent of fruit juice, you'd usually have it with pasta, bread, etc. which all have fiber as well.