> It made trying to find a snack incredibly difficult, I basically had to eat carrots and hummus.

And fruits, I hope? :-)

Also, you mention carrots, but there's lots of other vegetables that taste nicely when eaten raw that require little to no preparation time. I recognize that this is not mainstream at all but lately I've begun eating all kinds of vegetables as a snack. Eg iceberg salad: if you take the outer 5 or so leaves off, then the rest has not usually been touched by pesticides, so you can just eat that without all the washing cutting prep etc. I've found that just putting an iceberg salad next to my keyboard works exactly the same as just putting a bag of crisps there: when i look up an hour later, it's all gone.

Similar tricks: pointed red peppers only need washing, and then you can eat them as if they're a mars bar. The seeds are only at the very end. bags of pre-cut lettuce. Also, way too few people are aware that cauliflower tastes great raw. It's a bit of work to clean (but not too bad) but cauliflowers tend to be huge so you can cut one into pieces, put the pieces into four bags and bring a bag every next day or so. It also stays good super long.

I also like cabbage (you can also remove the outer leaves and eat the rest without washing), but it has a pretty strong taste and I recognize that this might not be for everyone :-)

Fruits contain a lot of fruit sugar. If you're trying to avoid sugar entirely, they may not be the best choice.

>Fruits contain a lot of fruit sugar

Vegetable contain a lot of sugar too, like the mention he ate a lot of carrots, he ate a lot of sugar, but that's naturally occurring sugar human body can process well, unlike tablespoon of sugar in a sausage made of processed meat.

the sugar is the same in any case, but fiber may reduce how harmful it is, or at least slow down how fast you shove it in your face.

The point you make is an important distinction. It's really effortless to put down 44oz of soda but very hard to eat the sugar equivalent of ~6lbs of carrots (even if you are juicing them 6lbs is a lot of carrot juice).

http://www.sugarstacks.com/carrots.htm

There's an age at which drinking a sugary soda becomes difficult...

Related, it was recently discovered that there is a limit to how much sugar you can (comfortably) consume, unless you are a child. In children there is no limit.

Citation/link, please?

It was a while ago. I remember reading it on reddit, so I googled "no limit sugar children reddit", this is it!

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/09/26/140753048/ki...

“Sugar” is a broad category of chemical compounds, each of which is metabolized differently. Even if they all had the same caloric density (which they don’t), that would give you a woefully incomplete picture of their effect on your health.

Vegetables contains much less sugar then fruits. You can get enough calories if you eat fruits alone, but you can't get all calories you need from vegetables alone.

If you don't finish off that calorie budget with some protein and fat, you're in trouble.

Vegetables contain protein.

They said they were trying to avoid "added sugar," not sugar entirely. It's pretty impossible to avoid sugar entirely unless you eat an extremely limited diet.

I think the OP was referring to added sugars.

> And fruits, I hope?

Why? Fruits are just sweets with fibre and nutrients. Vegetables have everything you need.

Because GP wanted to eat food without added sugars and complained that he could only snack carrots and hummus. Apples, last I checked, have no added sugar.

Also,your mileage may vary but I'm not sure that fruits should be very high on the list of food to avoid when you're trying to eat healthier. Ketogenic diet, sure, but that's not what this subthread is about. Fruits are good for you. Skip the hotdog instead.

The fiber and nutrients make a difference. Fruit is healthy if you don't overdo it.

(Not all fruits are sweet either -- like avocados, tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers.)

Why would you want to avoid fruit? Fruit is GOOD for you. The more variety in fruits AND vegetables the better.

I'm not saying avoid fruit. If you like it then eat it in moderation. Remember plants make fruit because they want you to eat it. But you can do just fine with vegetables (in the culinary sense, so including tomatoes etc).

It is much easier to eat a balanced diet if it includes fruit. Many things are not impossible to do without, but some things do make everything else easier.

Beans are a large part of my largely added-sugar free diet. Also eggs, salsa, and lean meats.

That is one of the reasons I decided to leave the US after I moved there. I found it WAY to hard to live healthy there. Sugar is added to so much stuff in America. Not only that but it is usually added in much larger quantities than I am used to at home.

I also think there is too much exposure to sweet foods in the US. You are offered sweets things so often. It is just part of the culture it seems.

It is 15 years now since I lived in the US and I steel struggle with a sugar addiction from just living one year in the US. I never had any particular desire to eat sweet things before I moved to the US.

> That is one of the reasons I decided to leave the US after I moved there. I found it WAY to hard to live healthy there. Sugar is added to so much stuff in America. Not only that but it is usually added in much larger quantities than I am used to at home.

It is a lot better now. In just the last 2 years the low carb movement has really kicked off, it is super easy to get no sugar or low sugar options. Restaurants now swap out buns (which have added sugar in them of course) without question, no sugar BBQ sauce is finally a thing, no sugar ketchup is a thing now, and there are even a lot of sugar free snack food options.

As someone who has been doing Keto for ~5 years, this last year has been the easiest yet.

> relegated to preparing all my food from scratch

> find a snack incredibly difficult [..] I basically had to eat carrots and hummus

You make it sound as if it was not normal to cook your own food from basic ingredients and not regularly eat processed snacks.

For many people, it is normal to regularly eat packaged foods.

When I was growing up, practically everything I ate came out of a packet, and was usually cooked in a microwave.

My parents never made sauce from scratch or used their own herbs and spices. Any sauce came in a jar or a packet. Gravy was that disgusting mix of maltodextrin, MSG, and colouring that you simply add to hot water. Pasta sauce always came in a bottle, with the inevitable hit of sugar. If we had tacos, the seasoning came in a packet, which is mostly sugar with a little bit of cumin and chilli.

The meat would inevitably be cooked in a microwave so as to not require using oil to cook it. My mother practically had a phobia of fat and salt. The only meats I ate were chicken breast and ultra lean mince with the grease drained off.

It wasn't that my parents were unhealthy, I ate a lot of vegetables, and as I mentioned, I had a very low fat diet. I guess it was a lack of time and creativity that drove them to using packages for everything.

I'm sorry you had this experience. I grew up with a stay-at-home-mother who cooked two fresh meals every day (And usually bread or Müsli for breakfast), my grandmothers did this too. I loved helping her in the kitchen and now with my own family I try to do the same, fresh ingredients, diverse meals - and I always prefer home-made meals even over restaurants, which are pretty high quality here in Austria. Homemade, self-cooked still tastes better, has higher quality (Organic and wholefoods) and you can't beat the price of basic ingredients. And cooking is surprisingly easy once you have some basic skills, surely a much flatter learning curve than software development or other professional skills!

This is down partly to cultural and lifestyle differences. This sort of communal food culture is still alive and rather widespread in continental Europe but largely dead in the US.

Low fat, high carb, is actually quite unhealthy. It is a shame to hear this, with just a little practice and preparation you can learn to make fresh, tasty and healthier food in under 20 minutes every day.

Any resources for meal planning for a time-strapped bachelor-vegetarian? :D

"Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant" is a fantastic cookbook with a vegetarian emphasis.

And Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" is the most read book in my house. My wife and I have taken to calling it The Bible.

Both books have a good number of quick recipies (Bittman tends to write his more like guides), with general cooking tips and history mixed in.

I love "How to Cook Everything".... and I'm working on the newer "How to Cook Everything - Fast" :-)

Cook in big batches -- a big pot of soup lasts most of the week for two people if you eat it as one meal per day (dinner for example). Cook a batch of something else to provide lunches for a week (probably not soup based if you want to bring it to work), whatever you usually eat for breakfast (oats?) and you are set for a week with an our or two of cooking per week. This way you have 3 different meals per day and you only need to reheat them.

This is easier with meat based meals (better calorie density), but works fine with vegetable based meals too. Just get bigger pots. :)

All those people cooking for 30 mins per day are hardcore.

Not a resource so much as a tool, but getting an instant pot was a game changer in a lot of ways for me. I never minded cooking but now when I don't want to cook, I still have it remarkably easy.

Search on 'four hour body' or 'slow carb' -- following the release of Tim Ferris' book there's a huge wealth of blogs, forums, etc that contain lots of fast, tasty recipes that meet the general criteria. Vegetarian complicates matters only slightly -- either way you're looking to consume a lot of legumes unless you're going completely carb-free.

I eat a primarily vegetarian diet, and my advice is to make a big pot of vegetable stew on Sunday. I quite literally just put a bunch of veggies, rice, potatoes, whatever in a pot with onions, garlic, salt and pepper. It freezes great, and I can get about 2 weeks of lunches from it.

Budget Bytes has relatively healthy, cheap, fast vegetarian and meat recipes.

http://budgetbytes.com/

Practically everything I eat comes out of a package these days. I'd prefer it wasn't like that, but it was the easiest way to measure calories when I was losing weight. You don't lose half your body weight by not making extreme sacrifices, despite what charlatans might tell you in an effort to sell you something.

After I hit my lowest weight I decided to ease up on the extreme calorie counting and shift my efforts towards eating simple home cooked meals since they'd be less expensive and, if you believe the common wisdom, healthier. Consequently, I put on about 30 pounds. This was mostly eating tofu, eggs, potatoes, fruit, mushrooms, various vegetables, cheese, and homemade bread (usually whole grain).

So I went back to what worked. One other thing eating packaged foods did was give me a bunch of time back. I'm still about 10 pounds up from that experiment.

I wasn't able to lose weight and keep it off until I permanently eliminated certain categories of food: added sugars, refined grains, all flours, potatoes, dairy, eggs, most oils, and most meat. The only grain-like things I eat are rice (mostly brown rice), amaranth seeds, and buckwheat groats. My staples are things like steamed Brassica oleracea vegetables and legume soup, which are easy to prepare in bulk in advance. The only oil I use during food preparation is a couple of tablespoons of uncooked olive oil per day. I get most other fats from avocados, nuts, seeds, and fish. I cook almost everything from scratch. I also do some calorie restriction and water fasting (3-5 days at a time).

I lost about 70 pounds and now am easily maintaining a normal BMI.

I don't know what you've tried, in terms of home preparation of food. One strategy is to switch to two meals a day, plus one snack. Another is to focus on high-volume, low calorie density foods, such as vegetables and beans, while limiting high-calorie dense foods such as bread, cheese, and meat. This allows you to feel full from fewer calories. Another way to think about this is to dramatically increase your fiber intake (and not just from hard fruits, but from a variety of sources). For example, if you were to make a pasta dish, use half the regular amount of pasta, and greatly increase the amount of veggies in it, so the pasta is just a small component of the dish.

I watched this the other day which was more informative than I'd imagined [0].

Main take away for me was to eat fibre rich foods - so instead of potatoes eat squash and celariac, instead of rice eat bulgar wheat, and so on.

[0] The Truth About Carbs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b5y6c0

I've been fighting my body for the better part of a decade now, trust me when I say that I've probably tried every piece of advice ever parrotted on the internet. For instance the high-volume low-calorie high-fiber plan ultimately just made me extremely bloated and often constipated.

The bloating is caused by the production of gas by the bacteria in your gut. If you add a lot of fiber at once, the bacteria will overpopulate, and produce too much gas, causing bloating/distension. One way to avoid this is to gradually increase the amount of fiber, so your microbiome will adjust slowly, allowing you to avoid the excess gas/bloating. Not sure what to say about the constipation, though it could be a similar issue.

These things are not simple, are they?

One strategy is to focus on the healthy veggies that your genetic ancestors likely ate; your body is more likely to be adapted to those foods.

I didn't ask for your advice and I'm not a moron so I know how to use google just as well as you do.

This is the shit I'm talking about. If you have difficult losing and maintaining weight people crawl out of the woodwork to parrot bullshit advice they got from some clickbait article as though knowledge isn't the easiest part of the process. People don't have difficulty with their weight because they lack knowledge, people have difficulty with their weight because suffering sucks and the human body doesn't like having to eat itself.

The high-volume low fat high-fiber plan works for most people. Apparently there is something different about your body.

> Consequently, I put on about 30 pounds.

Kitchen scale and MyFitnessPal.

Also don't have food around that doesn't require prep! It is super easy to snack on fruit and bread. If everything in your fridge is raw meat or veggies that require cooking, there is no way to over eat.

Also I try to avoid prepping too much food in advance, since if the food is good I am tempted to eat it all without waiting! So I cook each meal individually, which takes a lot more time, but it works for weight loss.

Either that or I do a weeks meal prep and commit to not buying any more food, that way if I am stupid and eat more food per meal than I should, one of my future meals is going to come up short. It is amazing how quickly self control develops under those situations. :)

In comparison, packaged food requires at least a bit of conscious prep work, so people are aware of the time they spent and of the calorie consumption, thus I can see why that route can be easier.

> Kitchen scale and MyFitnessPal.

Yes, somehow I managed to lose half my body weight and keep it off despite a setback from a failed experiment without every knowing how to count calories or properly measure things in a kitchen.

What is it with talking about health and nutrition on the internet that makes everyone come out and offer their unsolicited advice that assumes the person they're speaking with is an idiot?

> Yes, somehow I managed to lose half my body weight and keep it off despite a setback from a failed experiment without every knowing how to count calories or properly measure things in a kitchen.

You mentioned that you had problems with home cooking, and found portion control easier with pre-packaged food. I proposed that measuring out home cooked food gives the same effect as prepackaged food.

I fail to see how that is accusing anyone of being an idiot.

When people reply they aren’t just talking to you but lots of other people also reading this thread. The information may be useful to some.

I think a decent trick is learning to approximate calories/meal sizes for your body. I usually know when I'm eating 1 portion vs 1.5 portions of my home-cooked stuff, just by virtue of having cooked and paid attention to serving sizes long enough.

Another useful tool is a food scale. Everyone has measuring cups and stuff, but having a food scale can make stuff like measuring a serving of mixed nuts for my breakfast way easier.

However, packaged foods vs. from scratch is an element of time and convenience as well. I just make food when I have the time/feel like it (I enjoy cooking as a hobby, but am not always up for it) and use 'easy' meals when I need to: throwing together some pasta and a pre-made sauce jar I keep in the pantry, plus some frozen TJ's meatballs or something.

I'm well aware of the concept of estimation, and I own a food scale. Even when you make things yourself you know that an egg is ~70 calories, 100g of flour is ~400 calories, etc. It isn't exactly rocket science.

Knowing how much of what to eat isn't the problem. It has never been the problem. The problem is actually sticking to that diet when your body is screaming at you to eat more, when the part of your mind that evolved to keep you from starving --which is what losing weight is, since your body literally has to eat itself-- starts playing tricks on you and conveniently forgetting that you ate earlier, and when your metabolism, which has been unavoidably and permanently damaged by the mere act of losing weight at all, requires that you eat substantially less than the daily average.

I'm really sick of people assuming I'm a moron because losing weight is difficult. Do you know what it is like to only eat one meal a day? To have to avoid all social functions at which free food might be present? To ensure that there is only ever enough food in your house for exactly one week of your caloric allotment of 1600/day?

Trust me, whatever parroted advice you're thinking of offering next, I've heard about it and tried it.

Well, this would then probably not work for you, but it worked for me. What helped me to lose weight was to still cook my own food from bought ingredients, and measure everything that I was eating for weight and calories. But mostly what I did was switch the type of food that I was making, and the ingredients I was using to things that were far less calorie dense, that worked for me. It does still suck to go to social events with plenty of food, because then I will totally eat it.

The solution to overeating at social events is to go vegan. Then you'll only snack on some cantaloupe.

Corn chips and salsa, pita chips and hummus, popcorn if it doesn't have butter, and since I live in a relatively liberal town vegan sweets are not even that rare at social gatherings.

I get everything you said but the eternally damaged metabolism. Don't have the source handy on mobile but from what I have read the difference between a so-called fast and slow metabolism is < 10%.

Food is absolutely addictive and we have so much available. Combine that with a car based and sedentary lifestyle and it's a huge problem. The only thing that has worked for me is being a lifelong runner and cyclist. Burn an extra 500 to 800 calories a day and most weight loss goals are much more attainable. I am trying to help my mom lose weight and when you are very overweight adding huge amounts of activity is very hard.

She seemingly also has a 'slow' metabolism but in reality she moves as little as possible. Whereas I am always wandering around doing things at top speed. Activity begets activity because it begins to hurt less to move.

Anyways, best of luck in your efforts.

Your sources about metabolism are wrong. I know because I've done base metabolic rate tests in uni (with one of those hoods) and have seen (repeatedly) that some people breathe out ~4k kcal per day and others only ~1.6k. This is at rest and at different times in the day.

Yes, I know what that is like. While I agree that is is occasionally excruciatingly hard to not eat when there is plenty of food available, it's not impossible for me. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're a moron - loads of people will be perfectly able to just not eat unless it's within a certain timeframe, as you've no doubt repeatedly read.

Keep in mind that there are different levels of 'from scratch.' Making your own sandwich is pretty normal. Making your own bread for your sandwich but with store-bought mayo is probably less common. Making your own bread and making your own mayo is probably even less common, and that was about the level of 'from scratch' that the other user is talking about.

Ok, I'm not talking about sandwiches or making your own bread, but "proper" meals, like aspargus-risotto, (store-bought-)pasta with homemade-sugo, cooked beef with homemade-gravy, vegetables and dumplings as a side, diverse soups made from fresh vegetables/beans/meat, vegetable casserole, mixed salad, grilled fish, curry with rice etc. (Just a selection of the stuff we had in the past days). Guess as a european I'm still naive about life in the USA :-)

I think people are overestimating the quality of products they used to call "fresh." Do you know the source of all the products you use? Preparing your own meal doesn't change much, unless you really trust the source.

If we define "normal" as whatever most people do, then yes, currently in USA it's not normal to cook all (or even most) of your food yourself from basic ingredients; most people do not do that anymore, when they cook themselves, a lot of ingredients are highly processed or pre-prepared.

> I was basically relegated to preparing all my food from scratch.

I don't see a problem with this. It's not hard and doesn't have to be too time consuming if you prepare things in bulk. You can listen to music or the radio while doing it. I find it quite relaxing.

> It made trying to find a snack incredibly difficult

Don't snack. That would solve so many problems that people have with diets. I eat two meals every day. Between meals I do not eat. By eating I mean opening my mouth and inserting things into it. I honestly think some people just don't realise how much they eat by snacking. I get hungry every day but that's fine. I look forward to my next meal. Don't snack when you're hungry. Just look foward to your next meal.

I'm the same as you (one or two meals a day) but I don't think we can generalize our experiences to a recommendation (especially across gender lines).

My partner gets impossible really quickly if she doesn't eat about four times daily, and I've met enough hangry-type people to believe that some people really do have to snack. Although I guess I'd encourage everyone to try not-snacking given how much more convenient and healthy it is if your metabolism can manage it.

No matter which way you cut it, making a proper meal from scratch will take you a while. Especially if you're not used to that kind of cooking, as the people you're speaking to no doubt are. All it takes is a little empathy to see that for some people, what you find easy is indeed hard.

>I don't see a problem with this. It's not hard ...

What's not hard is being able to see a problem with preparing all your meals from scratch. I don't know a kinder way to say that you're just wrong.

I've been doing keto for about six weeks and following along in the community.

You are correct. It's amazing.

Some folks view this as some kind of evil corporate overlord thing, but I think the answer is much closer to home: we like stuff with sugar in it. So other people are going to put sugar in stuff so that we'll like it more. Sadly it looks as simple as that.

I had tried low-carb before and couldn't stay on it. What I didn't know back then was that you can fall off your low carb diet without even realizing it. There are so many items with hidden sugars that it's impossible not to -- unless, as you say, you prepare all of your stuff. (My strategy is to curate items that are safe.)

Carbs past a certain point are addictive, although probably at the low end of the addiction scale. I believe this is because if you live in an environment where fruit only ripens one month a year, it's important to have a biological drive to fatten up on those easy sugars in preparation for the winter months. Of course we don't live in that environment any more.

And you will lie to yourself, making it even worse. I imagine what happens to most folks is that they accidentally eat enough carbs to start triggering perverse insulin responses, then "decide" to go ahead and eat one or two things that they've always loved. After all, those one or two things by themselves are fine, right? And then we've flipped over the tipping point.

I am amazed at the obesity crisis in the West, although it seems like a natural outcome to so many plentiful foods. The part that amazes me is how nutrition experts consistently blew it, over and over again recommending public health policies that only worsen the problem.

"Some folks view this as some kind of evil corporate overlord thing, but I think the answer is much closer to home: we like stuff with sugar in it. So other people are going to put sugar in stuff so that we'll like it more. Sadly it looks as simple as that."

I recommend the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It is widely thought by people who have only heard about the book third-hand (criticizing the people who wrote their second-hand assessments of it) that it's a diet book, but the bulk of it is actually a well-researched history book on how the modern conception of "correct diet" came about, you know, the bad one that we're still oh-so-slowly extricating ourselves from. Basically it answers the question "If the late 20th-century diet consensus was so bad, how did it become the consensus?"

Since I read it, my assessment of the late 20th-century diet consensus has only gone down, and the history itself doesn't change, since, you know, "not changing" is pretty much what history does. You can blip over the bits where it does try to discuss the science of proper diet; even if you're interested in this branch of scientific thought, there's more up-to-date resources now. But the history is good.

The hardest part of Whole30[1] is avoiding food and drinks with added sugar or sweeteners, but I strongly suspect it's also the most effective part for a variety of health benefits, including losing weight. I found that after a month, though, the cravings essentially went away and it was easy to follow (more or less, I don't do it strictly nowadays). I've lost over 20% of my body weight since January.

Drinks were maybe the most difficult for me; I drink coffee with Nutpods[2] and Coffee Booster[3], unsweetened tea, and water now.

For snacking, I like salted cashews, although again, strict Whole30 doesn't really want you to snack.

It does involve a lot of cooking, and (especially when you're following it strictly) makes restaurants difficult. But I think it's worthwhile. I could talk more about it if people wanted but I don't want to divert the conversation.

1. https://whole30.com/new/

2. https://www.nutpods.com/

3. https://coffeebooster.net/

Can confirm. Giving up sugar has been one of the best decisions in my life. I did it gradually, but in the end I gave almost any added sugar whatsoever (no ketchup, no canned fish, no juices, no syrupy breads, etc.). Maybe it's not necessary to go that far, but I feel I don't need it nor crave it anymore. My depression has gone away, I've lost weight, and I don't have fogginess in my head anymore nor mood swings. It's an empty addiction, and my feeling is it's doing you very much harm! Let it go, folks.

>>no ketchup, no canned fish, no juices, no syrupy breads, etc

One of these things don't seem to be like the others. Is there typically added sugar in canned fish? My go to is canned tuna, but the nutritional label checks out to me.

Yes, I was a bit unclear. In certain kinds of canned herrings there are over 15g/100g of sugar, could be in a form of tomato sauce for example.

Weird (to foreigners) swedish canned herring. Dozens of pickles, but one thing in common - sugar.

I assume you live in the US? The difference in what's on offer in supermarkets, restaurants or convenience stores, compared to northern Europe or even South America (halfway in between I'd say) is astounding.

Why pointing "Northern" Europe rather than Europe in general ?

From my experience, I would say you find more and better vegetables in Southern Europe. And Eastern Europe is quite similar to Northern Europe in terms of accessibility and choice (probably still better in quality though).

And South America in my opinion is rather poor in vegetables (but fantastic in fruits!). They can grow perfectly there but people just don't seem to eat them much, apart from a few specific ones. But they do cook at least.

One final factor is also the price of restaurants. In South America and Asia many people just eat at restaurants/cafeteria/whatever local street food you find all the time because it is not expensive at all. And not super healthy. Doing that in Sweden or Norway would lead you to ruin very very fast (and also street food is obviously less popular when it's freezing outside so it doesn't help developing a street food culture).

> Why pointing "Northern" Europe rather than Europe in general ?

I assumed because it's suprising how much worse the American diet is, even compared to countries with similar Western diets, incomes and lifestyles (UK, IE, DE, NL etc).

all of those countries are in Western Europe though. Northern Europe is primarily Scandinavia.

Britain and Ireland are Northern Europe by various definitions, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_E...

that seems like a weird decision given Britain & Ireland are more culturally tied with Western Europe. It looks like the UN made that grouping for "statistical convenience" rather than cultural identity though, whatever that means.

That's debatable.

Especially in Northern England and Scotland, its not difficult to see things that are culturally closer to Scandinavia.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that one - I live in Northern England and half my family are Scottish, and I can't really see the cultural similarities with Scandinavia.

I live in Denmark, but I'm from the English Midlands, with family from the North and South.

Food: roast meats with gravy and (if pork) crackling, pickled herring and other preserved fish, cranachan / rød grød med fløde or rice pudding / risalamande. The strong flavours of whisky are closer to aquavit than a cognac or brandy. Beer, especially in excess.

Traditions: maypole dancing, woollen clothes. Guising is similar to some fastelavn activities.

Poor weather including long nights for many months; leads to a more indoor, cosy culture and excitement at summer.

More feeling of equality between people, not being better than other people.

Long history of trade and cultural links across the North Sea, from the Viking age to the present.

I can certainly agree with some of those similarities but most of them I would attribute to the weather combined with a generally working class culture (at least in the North of England, not sure about Scandinavia). As I understand it, prizing roast meats goes back to its rare availability to working class people from the industrial era (where Yorkshire at least derives much of its modern culture). Beer is common to working class areas and whiskey to cold areas. Woollen clothes help with the cold. Social egalitarianism is more of a working class thing.

Not to say there aren't links, there certainly are, but I wouldn't say they are strongly culturally bound compared to our relationship with Western Europe.

Meant to say Western Europe, still haven't internalized these divisions... in fact I have the impression Sweden, Norway and the UK have a somewhat stronger fast-food presence than other parts of europe, but the bit on food variety still applies.

In Brazil at least, the variety of vegetables, and especially fruit, is surprisingly limited for a place so sunny and rich in nature; but you do get a lot of stuff you won't find anywhere else, and it's very easy, and relatively cheap to have a healthy meal if you know where to look. The most common type of street restaurant is an all-you-can-eat buffet, which offer a ton of fresh food of all kinds. I miss this a lot, the rest of the world seems content with pre-assembled dishes everywhere.

I was living in New Zealand at the time.

It's not as bad as the USA in terms of being a food desert, but it's not amazing either. Fresh meat and vegetables aren't cheap. Being an isolated, mostly self-sufficient country means that vegetable prices are at the whim of the season and the harvest. If there's a bad growing season, vegetables can be up to twice the normal price.

I've done something similar lately (not eliminating sugar but setting a hard daily limit). Some tips, if you don't have a lot of time to prepare food from scratch:

- if you need bread, there are some pitas that are low on sugar. You can also find tortillas with minimal sugar and make wraps instead of sandwiches.

- if you need a prepared meal, some canned soups are very low on sugar.

- a homemade salad dressing made of lemon juice, olive oil, and pressed garlic is delicious, and takes only as long to make as it does to press the garlic - a week's worth takes about 5 min

- no-sugar-added peanut butter can be delicious, especially if it's made with salt, and is easy to find at the grocery store these days. It goes well with carrots, celery, pretty much everything

- cheese generally does not contain sugar. Other dairy, such as milk and plain yogurt has sugar but its natural rather than added sugar.

- eggs are great for quick prep, and you can scramble them up with vegetables and cheese in minutes. Or hard boil a week's worth at a time

- nuts are spectacular for snacking

> I basically had to eat carrots

Carrots are mostly carbs (sugar) [1]. The problem isn't sugar; its an abundance of calories in the form of sugar.

[1] https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetabl...

Re bread, this is one of many great reasons to make your own! It isn’t particularly hard — it takes time, but most of that time is just waiting.

The sugar in bread is rarely there for flavor. It’s a way to cut corners by feeding the yeast and causing the dough to rise faster. Leave it out and you just have to wait a bit longer, but you get a better developed flavor as a result.

I prepare close to 100% of my food from scratch, though not for health reasons, I just enjoy cooking. If you're cooking for taste, I find myself adding sugar/honey to compensate for produce not being up to snuff (hard with supermarket produce sometimes) with some frequency (maybe a couple times a week.) Most often I'm adding sugar to fix sauces made from fresh produce that turn out bitter or sour just because of the produce.

I can't imagine most packaged food companies are using amazing produce. I would bet that most packaged meals would taste terrible without some added sugar.

Nuts, cheese, boiled eggs, and fruit are all widely available, pre-made, snacks.

It should be noted that The Longevity Diet, promoted by Valter Longo, recommends nuts as the "go-to" snack. Super easy, and healthy too.

Nuts are extremely calorie dense. A small handful of nuts is like 1/6 of my BMR.

Nice effort!

And I will use that as my reason for picking up my next bottle of Single Malt.

A good takeaway. I have similar priorities haha.

(Sorry for long quote, but this is good...)

"The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.

By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jun/11/why-our-foo...

I didn’t cut out sugar completely, but choose as low sugar as possible. For example, most bagels contain around 6 grams of sugar at the supermarkets I go to, but one brand only has 3 grams. So I go with 3 grams, even if zero would be better. My daily sugar in take is still under 30g.

Also, many sports nutrition bars will rely on sugar alcohol, which has its own problems but isn’t (probably) as bad as sugar.

My diet is mostly bananas, oranges, apples, almonds, cashews, carrots for snacks.

Onion, mushrooms, garlic, spinach, with baked chicken or a steak for dinner.

Protein shake with a banana and almond/coconut milk (with no sugar added) for breakfast.

I don't think it's that hard to avoid added sugar you just have to keep things a little more basic.

I've found Muscle Milk to be great if I'm in a hurry. It's basically whey isolate, vegetable fiber and aspartame. The fiber and protein make it really filling. I wish I knew where they got their fiber because I want to add it to my own whey.

I throw a soup spoon full of Benefiber in my shake every morning. It's been very helpful. Smile/amazon link below:

https://smile.amazon.com/Benefiber-Prebiotic-Supplement-Dige...

Learn some knife skills! It's fun and easy. Make sure you have a sharp knife and practice safe cutting skills

I love having random fruit and veggies in my kitchen and just being able to grab one and cut it up in 1 minute or so. Call me weird, but it's fun.

sharp knives are safer than dull knives

Funny that you split the hair on the caramel colouring in the fermented, distilled sugar.

The fermenting process gets rid of almost all of the sugar.

Yeah, I used the past tense up there. It also wouldn't be added sugar if it was there from the start, it would be remaining sugar.

But ethanol probably isn't a whole lot better as excess calories than sugars are.

By turning it into alcohol, at only about 20 % loss of caloric content (if my math is correct).

Bread has sugar in it to feed the yeast. You should avoid HFCS in bread but as long as sugar isn't the first thing in the ingredients list it's probably just feeding the leavening.

Bread doesn't need added sugar to feed the yeast, though. There's plenty of food for the yeast in the flour itself.

Bread may benefit from added sugar if your primary goal is trying to increase your yield from an industrial process. Sucrose is also really easily digestible for yeast, so I wouldn't be surprised if a dough with added sugar rises faster than a bread that's made with regular ingredients.

I think that this sort of thing is part of the general problem with added sugar: There are all sorts of practical reasons why you might want to add a little bit of sugar to products. (As another example, a lot of commercial hummus contains it as a preservative.) But a bunch of individual products using a little bit of it for their own individual purposes adds up to a whole lot of excess sugar consumption for the people who are eating all that food.

Saying bread doesn't need sugar is disingenuous. It depends on the type of bread you are baking. Sourdough doesn't need sugar because the fermentation process is what makes it a sourdough. Italian bread on the other hand, does need sugar due to its effects on the crumb/crust.

Well, I said it doesn't need it to feed the yeast. I hope I wasn't implying any controversy over whether adding sugar to a product can alter its flavor or texture.

But even if you include sugar-for-flavor on top of any practical uses, my point still stands: Spread across all the different kinds of foods you can get at the grocery store, a little sugar here and a little sugar there adds up to a whole lot of sugar overall. Maybe it's worth accepting a somewhat less carmelized crust on your paninis in the interest of having a healthier diet.

>a lot of commercial hummus contains it as a preservative

How does this work? I thought sugar works as a preservative by reducing the water activity, and for it to be effective requires a high concentration (like jam or honey) that would be inappropriately sweet in hummus.

there's no reason to consume bottled mayonnaise at all. Don't be extremely strict, food with reasonable % of sugar will not harm you if you will be below daily limit with sugar...

You're right on both counts.

I don't really use mayo, I prefer vinaigrette dressings. I was just using mayo as an example though, if you make mayonnaise yourself, it's just oil, egg yolk, and vinegar. There shouldn't be sugar in mayo.

On the second count, you're right that you don't need to be extremely strict. I went sugar-free for a month because I made a bet with a friend, rather than for any actual health reason. A small amount of sugar is fine for you.

The problem is that practically every shelf stable packaged food contains added sugar. If you have a diet that consists of a lot of packaged food, the sugar starts to add up quickly, especially if you're in a habit of using ketchup, which is astoundingly high in sugar. Granola bars (and granola in general) are also a food that people seem to forget contain a boatload of sugar too.

Consider replacing anything that has sugar in it, with an organic sugar alternative. Trader Joes, Whole Food, Costco, local organic store/coop have many alternatives, and many of them taste better than the popular brands.

Organic sugar isn't a panacea, it's still almost completely sucrose and organic sucrose is absolutely chemically identical to non-organic. It often tastes way better, but it's a stretch to assign significant health benefits to it.

By all means, steer clear of HFCS (operative word: fructose, not sucrose). It's probably less bad than it's reputation suggests, but its also probably worse than sucrose. More pertinently, it's indicative of cheap, low-quality food that has way too much sweetener because it otherwise has no flavour.

But more on point for this thread: Don't replace a food that shouldn't have sugar in it at all (mayonnaise) with a variant that just has a different kind of sugar. Find a variant that is better quality and doesn't have sugar at all. Good mayonnaise requires really good eggs and those are expensive.

The problem is sometimes these "variants" are very difficult to find.

Pasta sauce for instance IMHO should not have any sugar at all (tomatoes, spices, and a little bit of olive oil). If sugar is added, it should be very modest. But try finding a typical pasta sauce in the store with no sugar or even only a modest amount of sugar. This is more difficult than it sounds.

Options definitely exist and Googling, it seems with keto being more of a thing, there are a few more options compared to when I searched a few years ago -- haven't honestly made pasta in a while. But it's still relatively few, your typical Ragu type bottles will have sugar or HFCS as one of the top 3 ingredients. The options that do exist tend to cluster around more expensive "organic" offerings. And you have to keep checking ingredients lists continuously for changes. One report for instance said Aldi's used to have a pasta sauce without sugar. This is not the case now... http://ggfgourmet.com/en/index.php/aldipastasauce/

Pasta sauce is one of those things that takes time to make. If you don't have the time to make it, and can't find a quality variety without the unnecessary sugar... you're out of luck.

It's pretty easy to buy a couple 28oz cans of tomatoes, a jar of minced garlic, and some olive oil and simmer for a half hour. That's like, what, 15 minutes more than it takes to make pasta to begin with. Generally I agree with you, though.

I'd like to be able to buy ground sausage, but a lot of packaged ground sausage has added sugar, as do a lot of packaged broths and bouillon cubes. Broth and sausage are great ways to add some flavor to staples like beans and lentils and it's really unfortunate that it's so hard to find packaged versions without sugar.

>Organic sugar isn't a panacea

I didn't say it was.

>...organic sucrose is absolutely chemically identical to non-organic.

Have any evidence to support this? Also, many things are "chemically" similar but affect the body in very different ways.

Sucrose refers to an arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that form a specific molecular shape.

Whether organic or not, the process to make it yields the same molecule.

You are assuming that sucrose is the only component that causes any sort of problems.

The "assumption" is that when you ask someone what the difference between sucrose and sucrose is, that you don't mean a second hidden question about something else entirely.

I didn't, that was assumed by the replier.

I was arguing there is a difference between raw unprocessed extract from the sugar cane plant vs processed white sugar.

The issue here is consuming fructose and sucrose. Organic or not won't factor in.

I'd argue that organic can make all the difference, if the problem with sugar is the processing, not the substance.

You definitely free to argue that, but is there some scientific basis or any study you can point to?

The issue with sugar is how the body processes fructose and glucose. Unless there is indication that substances present in non-organic vs organic sugar modify digestion of sucrose and fructose there isn't much to the theory organic makes sugar less harmful.

I am not a scientist that can argue how the body processes fructose/glucose. But I can argue the difference between raw unprocessed sugar cane plant vs processed white sugar.

Processed white sugar has a detrimental effect on the body, and unprocessed sugar does not. Or if it does, it's so minimal as to be unnoticeable in my own tests.

This includes ability to concentrate, lethargy, dental health, sleep, hyperactivity and general health like colds and the flu.

This is from my own experimentation with multiple people, first hand, not just reading what others have said.

I'm curious : did this diet changes made any significant difference on your wellbeing?

I know a few people who've done the "Whole 30" diet which includes cutting out added sugar, among many things (although some of which, like legumes, seem completely arbitrary).

One friend's severe eczema completely cleared up, others pretty much universally reported sleeping better and feeling more alert. Some just lost a lot of weight (as was their intention, although as with most diets probably mainly retained water weight).

We live in a rural area of the UK where farm shops are common so it's relatively easy around here, but I could see it being much more difficult for city dwellers.

I personally wouldn't do it myself and am not a fan of short term "fad" diets but the results are hard to deny.

I was also exercising a lot more and drinking less, so I can't really say what in particular helped the most, but I felt a lot healthier and fitter in general.

It also had a positive effect on my mental health, which was an unintended but nice side effect.

> It also had a positive effect on my mental health, which was an unintended but nice side effect.

Do you think this could be a result of improved sleep? It's one of the benefits I've heard reported by people following a similar diet.

I guess it could. I was definitely sleeping better as a result of one of the things I was doing, or all of the things.

Tried something similar. One thing I noticed is that i became more mentally focused not feel constantly hazy and low energy all the time. Eating lots of carbs and sugar is fucked and affects your mental ability.

I did this back in 1995. I can count on one hand the times I've been sick since then, and every single time has been because I drank too much coffee, not enough water and didn't sleep properly or at all for days.

I do eat organic sugar and honey though, but because I don't eat any white/processed sugar (nor corn syrup) this automatically cuts out 95% (guess) of the bad food I would normally have been eating.

There's no one solution for "wellbeing" of course, but this sure is a big thing to change.

‘Organic’ (brown) sugar and honey are mostly sugar with a little extra stuff.

I've heard this many times, but my experience, and those of many others I've met or read about, is that there is a substantive difference between processed and non-processed sweeteners.

I make my own brown sugar at home, its white sugar + molasses. I don't know how you could consider it less "processed" than white sugar without molasses.

Most people don't know that store bought brown sugar is actually just processed white sugar + molasses.

That is not my argument. I never said "brown sugar", I said "organic sugar", which includes the growing and any processing of the sugar. True brown sugar is something like succanat [0], and it doesn't look anything like what we normally consider "brown sugar".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Foods-Sucanat-Organic-Sugar/dp/B0...

What is the difference that you have experienced, precisely?

>Even bottled mayonnaise contains sugar!

As someone with sugar problems who loves mayo, I hate this.

Mayo is easy to make at home using a stick blender and a jar: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/10/two-minute-mayon...

I’ve done this myself. It’s amazing how much healthier I was after just 30 days.