So food producers started making fat-free versions of everything. Only problem is it tasted like shit. So what did they do? They added sugar. So now you have sugar added to everything from salad dressing to pasta sauce to bread and muffins. The latter probably had some all along but the fat free varieties had a lot more.
Edit: I'll add that saturated fat was considered especially evil, which begat trans-fats substituted everywhere. Turned out they were even worse.
Bottom line, eat minimally processed meats and plants and you can stop worrying about it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/...
“Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said: "There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected.
"The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."”
I find the history of that fascinating since the Nixon administration felt pressure to do something about the then-dramatic obesity crisis on a time-scale which was too short for the scientific process. They had some of it right (eat your vegetables!) but the big mistakes with fat and salt made the problem so much worse.
But to make a good trade, you need to know the relative benefits of two parts of the advice. Giving up fats might be good and/or neutral; but if it exhausts your willpower to avoid sugar, and you indulge, then you are worse off.
There's also an angle about how this pushed a lot of people to heavily processed foods because leaving out everything on that bad list left a much narrower list of things you could make at home which were also tasty.
I can't imagine a scenario where that cereal/grain recommendation in GP quote isn't sponsored or populistic at the time though.
And while their method/reasoning wasn't flawed if they indeed had no research opposing their recommendation, that's kind of a straw man from the main issue of avoiding fat being legitimately bad.
You need energy, and you get some from protein which you desperately need, but you can't get all your energy from protein, and that leaves you fats or carbs. Of those it's so much worse to avoid fat than carbs.
Olive oil is one of the four basic ingredients. (In addition to tomatoes, garlic, and salt.)
In terms of taking the edge off of tomato sauce, shredded carrots works pretty well. I don't use sugar in any of my cooking, and no one has noticed.
If you think that's not true, simply take a sugar-low bread (check the food label, don't just go for organic/whole-grain, those usually have more sugar) and taste it for a while in your mouth. You'll notice it starts to become sweeter in your mouth.
As long as you stick to proper bread without the crazy added sugar, and preferably whole grain (actual whole grain, not just marketing "whole grain"), it's not an issue. Unless you try to subsist on literally only bread, of course.
Sugar content in pasta sauces is almost random. Varies from 3 to 10 grams per serving at least. It seems to vary more than almost any other premade item I buy.
And yet, even though I still eat junk too often, and like some treacle, I would not sort sauces based on sugar content.
I can't tell if there's no correlation or if it is literally reversed for my taste buds, but often the high sugar ones are the worst to me.
Just a theory, but maybe the sugar enhances some flavors, like garlic, but masks others, like basil, rather than drawing them all out equally?
I'm not sure how well sugar's complex affect on taste is understood by food scientists, let alone smaller or newer food brands. (What do the generic brands have, a couple chefs and a couple rounds of taste tests? No idea.)
Maybe there are too many possible combinations of ingredients and market segments for producers to all agree on the proper role of sugar, and maybe they're mostly guessing.
If that's true, then we could all probably stand much less added sugar than we/they realize.
The end result is that most people find the taste of non-pumped chicken unappealing, because they're simply used to the faked-up salt/sugar chicken.
There was some lab-rat study super long ago where they got mice/rats addicted to sugar and cocaine, then let them pick between the two - and they chose the sugar every single time.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-sh...
The only diet* I've had any luck with is the No S Diet: No Snacks, No Sweets, No Seconds, Except (sometimes) on days that start with "S".
So while I agree that cutting out added sugars is a damn good idea, I very much disagree with the unfounded "all carbs and grains are BAD!" alarmism.
It's not perfect, it doesn't make huge promises and it's not going to make the weight magically disappear instantly or even over a period of weeks, it's a long-term thing. But it is straight-forward and (most importantly) relatively easy to adhere to, and it doesn't require massive amount of effort, like diets where you have to count every calorie and in-depth micromanage your nutrients. Of course there is plenty of room for cheating (you could eat a whole plate of chocolate and call it a "meal"), but that's a fault of all diets where you're not actively forced by someone else to adhere to the rules.
Short-term diets are stupid and counterproductive. We don't need diets or temporary crash weight loss, which just leads to yo-yoing. We need actual, lasting lifestyle changes to make sure the weight stays off and we stay healthy.
That said, I think it's obvious that most people need to challenge the status quo of their diet. For Grain Brain to remind them "you are what you eat" is a step in the right direction. For both to suggest that you can be sensitive to gluten so give it up for 30 days...well, that's not going to hurt anyone either.
Moi? I read them as guidelines and suggestions. Sure, perhaps not 100% pure science, but there was a time when science said the world was flat, smoking was ok, etc.
To say "this things are worth looking at as you revist your health" might not be ideal. But neither is a bag of chips and a stack of cookies.
Ultimately it's about:
- Changing your relationship with food. Food is for health, not to experience an aural orgasm.
- Lifestyle. Diet is just one way to mind your health. Junk is junk, whether that's food, friends, or information. Trying to fix your health only via diet is, as you note, a fool's errand.
I'll have to check out those books, they sound really interesting. You might want to check out the book "The Case Against Sugar", it tells the story of sugar and is really interesting.
I imagine people were also eating much more whole foods as well, so saturation could have been lower regardless of what was in the junk food on the shelves at the time.
A study linked on HN recently also showed that sugars relationship to obesity snd diabetes may be that it changes your metabolism over time, and that change to your metabolism is what has you put on fat.
The guy claims he gained about 15kg over a one month period by substituting sugary foods into his diet while keeping his caloric intake the same. That's a massive claim which you'd expect to be backed up by pretty rigorous testing, yeah? Not even close. He doesn't even count his calories.
The whole time I was watching I was waiting to see the numbers. Spoiler alert: there aren't any. Halfway through the 'experiment' he states that he's never counted calories before, proceeds to do it just once, and then claims that his intake appears to be the same as it was before. To embark on a project like this and only measure your caloric intake once throughout the entire thing is incredibly disingenuous behaviour.
For instance, the evidence against trans fats is seriously overwhelming and convincing. The evidence against carbohydrates? Eh, not so much.
Avoid added sugar, don't worry so much about bread (as long as you avoid the stuff with added sugar, obviously) or rice or paste or potatoes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Health
It's pro-veganism and the narrator is a goofy manchild, but has credible (to me anyway) medical experts.
It was an eye opener to me how many packaged goods have sugar (HFCS) added, when intuitively it seems there was no good reason for any added sweet flavor to be present. By (mostly) assiduously reading the ingredients (the only source of truth, which is why it is often in the smallest print), I am often able to avoid purchasing rubbish that has no business driving me ever faster to a painful death.
There are some goods that are proudly sugar free (on the marketing speak and in the ingredients list) and I make sure to buy these when possible.
IMO, we need to have a big fat "This is Candy!" label on anything that's got more than 1 gram of sugar/hfcs/whatever per serving. Yes, that includes Apple Juice and other 'hidden' sweeteners.
I think you're attempting to redefine a word to fit your narrative, and I'm not having it.
Peanuts are frequently used as part of a wide range of sweets for texture. But, they are also sweet enough to not be out of place and in no way make them heathy by proxy. Similarly, eating a full serving of penuts regularly is generally a bad idea.
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/531013/the-hacking-...
He gave an example of Japanese and their healthiness, yet they eat way more fructose than the USA citizen he cites. There's a whole other bunch of misinformation in his speech and his studies are filled with flawed design (no control group, p hacking etc.).
I swear every time I'm in a nutrition related thread I see somebody mention his name or a book he wrote or talk he did. I used to be pretty deep into weightlifting and nutrition, and I don't know that I ever once ran into his name in all my reading, and I spent a stupid amount of time reading about macro + micro nutrients.
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
You can check the sources yourself too.
Although, I believe Lustig changed the narrative and is currently promoting diets rich in starch (which means high volume - low calories) and most of his studies produce a caloric deficit (while he denies it despite the fact that less calories are metabolized due to digestion of starch).
I believe he also likes referencing fructose extract consumption studies that have no direct mapping to a real diet. For example, consumping 100g of fructose through fruit won't do you any harm.
Sugar and high fructose corn syrup get added to a ton of foods that don't need extra sweetening. Some varieties of Vlasic dill pickles, for example, have HFCS added. It's insane.
For the past few months I've been trying to avoid added sugar in everything except for some baked goods (like zuchini bread or birthday cake). It took a couple weeks to get used to, but now I prefer food without it and when I try something with added sweetener it tastes too sweet.
But seriously dumping sugar in food, so it actually tastes noticeably sweet? That's just insane.
Source: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mhVolO...
[Google cache, the original PDF is 404 Not Found]
Edit: looks like one can find erythritol for as little as $15, which is still 34 times more than sugar.
That being said: I'm not sure if it's enough to make it cheaper than sugar.
Personally, I'd prefer they just kept the original fat and call it a day as there seems to be absolutely nothing wrong with it health-wise.
Erythritol is actually 70% as sweet as sugar. So you actually need to supplement it with something else to match sugar.
> Doses over 50 grams (1.8 oz) can cause severe diarrhea, plus a significant increase in nausea and stomach rumbling.
I don't know what the weight ratio would be to substitute that for sugar, but a can of soda has ~40g of sugar so I'm guessing you need to be careful with it similar to other sugar alcohols.
... and that's "just" 50 grams.
Processed food isn't engineered and manufacturered to benefit the consumer. It's designed to increase consumption.
What's most troubling is, it seems, plenty of people can't connect the dots between what they consume and their health. It's disheartening that we need a law that says, "You can't look down and see your penis when you pee...watch what you eat." Where do ppl think all that extra weight comes from, sunshine?
It may be absurd, ridiculous, perhaps even criminal or genocidal, but it is certainly within the realm of comprehension:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordi...
We're hard-wired to be attracted to sweet and fatty foods, because those were important back when food was scarce and a calorie surplus was basically unheard of. Now that food is abundant (at least in the developed world) that same hard-wired attraction is a burden that we need to consciously challenge every day.
I'm a big fan of the No S Diet (http://nosdiet.com/ - no affiliation) because it's straight-forward, easy to adhere to and has worked for me. It also doesn't try to sell you anything, it just asks you to cut out added sugars, limit your meals to single servings and to not eat between meals.
My editorial: Thanks Uncle Sam.
Why not just stop sweetening things. When I took my family to the US for three months the children were astonished at how sweet everything was. You can tell that something is wrong when even children complain that things are too sweet to eat.