Just eat less sugar. Like once a week is fine.

The problem with sugar isn't consuming it, but rather consuming it all the time. And of course I mean excessive sugar, not the 4 grams that are in every 100 grams of bread.

Interesting to note that bread in the US tends to have a significantly higher sugar content than in Europe, as much as 13g per 100g.

Yeah you have to be picky and go for keto branded options to find 4% carb bread

Well, they were talking about (added) sugar, not carbs in general. How can you have bread without carbohydrates? What is it made of then?

Maybe making "bread" which is almost entirely cellulose would be possible. Still a carbohydrate, but not a digestible one.

This is what most keto breads are. Source: the two loafs in my bread drawer that report 23g of carbs and 19g dietary fiber. Some of that 19g is cellulose.

And how’s the taste in those?

It varies by brand and type. Some are pretty bad. Aunt Millie's has a couple of really good ones, particularly their 5 seed and white. Aldi's white keto is good, too. Lewis has a good keto Hawaiian loaf. For whatever reason the keto wheat breads I've tried are a little too... woody for me. I'm not sure if they are available outside the Midwest. To be honest, I'm really happy keto bread exists because for about two years, I couldn't eat sandwiches (I have to eat less than 50g of non-fiber carbohydrate per day... so just the bread on a sandwich usually takes 90% + of that).

It usually is made of almond or coconut flour. Most "keto" bread isn't devoid of carbs, but often has a lot of dietary fiber, which is undigestable.

Almond and coconut flour are likely to have more (natural) sugar in than wheat flour. Bread made with coconut flour in particular is surely going to have more total sugar than regular bread with a little added sugar.

A more reasonable explanation is that the comment that triggered this discussion was just from someone who used the wrong word by accident or totally misunderstands what carbs are.

The gut doesn't absorb sugar as well in the presence of fibre so I think people tend to subtract the amount of fibre from the total carbs to come up with something called net-carbs. No idea how well this works in practice of course but there is definitely some high percentage of sugar not absorbed for every gram of fibre added.

I'd say at that point just give up on eating bread. Something bread-shaped and fluffy could be made of anything.

Sorry brain fart there!

Anyway now I have changed the subject here is an example

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/164022

I'm convinced this meme persists because tourists trying to save a dollar get the absolute dirt cheapest bread they can find in some random gas station, that no normal person would eat unless they were dying.

13g of sugar is absurd and is not normal bread in the US.

Even Bimbo, the poster child for "cheap nutrition-less imitation bread" caps out at 4g

To be fair, they did say 'as much as'.

First cheap looking bread I found at Wallmart at $1.32, just over 4g sugar/100g

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-White-Sandwich-Bread-...

Another one, but with honey added, 8g sugar/100g

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Nature-s-Own-Honey-Wheat-Sandwich...

The closest I found was Cinnamon Bread, with 15.7g sugar/100g, which is expected as it's basically a dessert (though oddly, they list all of the sugar as added sugar ! What are those raisins made of??)

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cinnabon-Cinnamon-Bread-Bakery-In...

And, to be fair again, you can buy comparable bread in Europe.

Here's a Dutch raisin bread with 23.2 g:

https://www.jumbo.com/producten/goudeerlijk-rozijnenbrood-ha...

* * *

... and that's exactly how it's viewed here.

You won't find many families with Cinnabon as their bread provider.

Yeah I was just going to say that even in Sweden there is sweeter bread. I just get the bread that is in the range of 4-7 grams so I spoke from personal experience.

It ranges from 3-10 grams iirc. Maybe even higher.

Let people get unhealthy food, that's not what we need to focus on, we need to focus on proper and correct labels on food so people can make an informed decision.

> Just eat less sugar. Like once a week is fine.

The problem is that most stuff you can buy is so full of sugar that it tastes horrible if you only eat it once a week.

People seem to live wildly different lives in this regard. Nothing I purchase regularly has sugar in it.

But that's a feature, not a bug. That's your tongue telling you not to eat that food. It's better to find taste and satiation with e.g. fats, herbs, spices instead.

What? Have you tried lowering your tolerance for sugar?

Try it, because it'll make everything taste wonderful. All other flavors come out when you have a lower sugar tolerance.

I make my own bread, it's cheaper and waaaay less sugar.

Wonder bread isn't bread, plus if you have gut flora issues with gluten, leave the dough in fridge for a week to ferment and then bake that up with some olive oil brushed on-top and some nice big salt chunks.

I got into it because my son is severely autistic and the store bought stuff additives drive him crazy.

We tracked it down to mostly soy products that he had a reaction to and then it translated into organics and home made everything.

Honestly I don't miss any of the bad food and just can't buy the garbage any more

That's how I feel about 99% of stuff in grocery stores now. I barely buy anything but fresh and frozen veg, meat, dairy and coffee :)

Side note, the flour I use is organic we get from Costco and is grown in Quebec.

The inflationary pressure did not effect the price of organics from our side.

Flour, chicken and pork organics have stayed basically the same price over the last few years.

The premium on organics appears to be closing due to the lower fuel/transport costs not really changing much for them and already having a premium built in.

It's an example of shorter supply chain migration I did not expect.

Regardless of added sugars, all bread is about 50% carbohydrates. As far as your body is concerned the only real difference between straight sugar and more complex carbohydrates is how long it takes to metabolize. Complex carbohydrate are less of a sudden jump to your blood sugar, but about the same net effect overall.

You’re better off limiting carbohydrates in general than just refined sugar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculin is cool as shit, but the FDA said no.

I'm not sure that scaling is an option outside of GM crops - I can't imagine that it's being synthesised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum

I tried an extract of this as a kid. Maybe I’ll try growing it again.

I'm a huge fan of sour beer. My favourite brewery released a beer last year, each bottle with a small ziplock bag elastic band-tied to the neck containing a dehyderated "miracle berry" (the full name referenced in the first sentence of that Wiki article: "Synsepalum dulcificum"). You can get them for around a dollar (Canadian) each on amazon. It was an awesome gimmick. The different in taste of a sour beer, as with many foods, before the berry and a couple of minutes after chewing/swallowing it is night and day. I bought as many as I could, it is such a cool experience. I've heard anecdotes that it makes even vinegar palatable.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to take it regularly though. I never would have considered it as a tool to reduce sugar intake, I can imagine it working for some, though.

For reference: https://www.smallponybarrelworks.com/products/miraculous-pri...

This may be difficult as for half of the products scraped from Walmart, sugar is the main ingredient: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart

I wish I could understand that article, but it just doesn't have enough emojis :(

Eat what people ate a hundred years ago

There is no magic but,most of what we eat in the west is shit

Eat the best of what people ate a hundred years ago.

Plenty of people at that time were either:

Starving or near starvation.

Eating a profoundly limited diet for much of the year, relying heavily on salting, drying, pickling - freezers didn't exist for most people, food imports were brutally expensive and too slow anyway for short-life fresh produce.

Eating food contaminated with all sorts of garbage (sawdust in bread..) as food safety inspection and enforcement was only starting to become a thing.

Eating offal. So much offal. Roasting a whole chicken was a few times a year treat for my mother's family, middle income, UK, 1940s/50s. "A chicken in every pot" was a US campaign slogan circa 1930 - before factory farming, lean meat was unaffordable for many. People on upper middle class incomes in well-connected parts of the world had it pretty good by the 1920s, but the average citizen, not so much.

Are you suggesting eating offal is a negative?

Depends which. Chicken or duck hearts, most types of liver, sure, once in a while. Oxtail soup.

Tripe, cow tongues, kidneys, trotters, chicken feet, lungs, brains? Know they're big in some cultures, but no thanks.

Lungs are delightful in haggis, and I'm rather partial to kidneys in a steak pie. I've had brains in Asia plenty times, and they are actually quite tasty - but I stopped eating them when I learned of prions.

I've tried chicken feet once... and to my great shame, I almost vomited all over the table! Using my teeth to scrape gelatinous skin off a chicken toe provides a visceral reaction :(

I guess we all have our food red lines!

I had what I'm pretty sure was under or over cooked cow? stomach cut in strips and served with a pretty unexciting sauce. It was so chewy. Made me queezy. I also refused the one time I was given the choice of blood sausage or just lettuce.

Huh, blood sausage is really common in Europe, we call it "black pudding" in the UK.

I love cow tongue, it’s delicious. I won’t try pigs testes though.

Considering generational trauma left in my family by mass famine, no thank you.

Why do people get so dumb every time we talk about nutrition ?

Its impossible to have a sane conversation about nutrition, especially in a historical context, when addressing folks' anecdotal cultural notions of what foods make their body feel good. Whatever point you're trying to make is meaningless without offering science or anthropological-historical context to back it up.

In the US (and many other places actually):

- 70% obesite/overweight rate

- 20% of kids are obese before hitting 18

- The 2 leading causes of deaths are lifestyle related, with diet being a big part of both

Every single study and scientist you will find will tell you our diet is dog shit, they'll tell you we eat too much sugar, too many carbs, too much salt, too much processed food

People discussing if artificial sweeteners are better or worse than sugar are like drug addicts discussing if heroin is less worse than fentanyl

Just cut that shit out of your life, there are no drawbacks and an infinite amount of benefits. They're not necessary, they're not needed, you're just addicted to them. We see the results, we have the stats, the science tells us why, we know. I don't get how anyone can argue the opposite, we eat shit, the vast majority of things sold in supermarket is shit, most people eat shit and they visibly suffer from it

People eat sugar around the globe though it’s not just an American thing.

This, all day long.

Find a local Farmer, buy meat, vegetables, and dairy from them.

Not only will you have great quality products straight from the source, but the farmer will get good profit too. Also, the food is so much better for you than the processed shit that you find in most supermarkets nowadays.

Local food, and local people is so much better for all the things.

Dairy? There's literally no evidence dairy in a modern diet is healthy, and much evidence of it being unhealthy.

Regular pasteurized milk is problematic due to the presence of nucleic acids that are biologically active in humans. Fermented food products like yogurt are fine. UHT milk is OK.

Milk is not just food but most likely a genetic transfection system activating mTORC1 signaling for postnatal growth https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23883112/

Yes it contains (natural) growth hormones. And we (milk binging nations) wonder how we got so fat?!

No, you do not quite understand: it is much more serious than "growth hormones" like rBST.

Milk drinkers are inserting bovine RNA into their cells (unless it is heavily fermented or UHT)

> Milk is rich in miRNAs that appear to play important roles in the postnatal development of all mammals.

https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

> There is compelling evidence that human and bovine milk exosomes play a crucial role for adequate metabolic and immunological programming of the newborn infant at the beginning of extrauterine life. Milk exosomes assist in executing an anabolic, growth-promoting and immunological program confined to the postnatal period in all mammals. However, epidemiological and translational evidence presented in this review indicates that continuous exposure of humans to exosomes of pasteurized milk may confer a substantial risk for the development of chronic diseases of civilization including obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, osteoporosis, common cancers (prostate, breast, liver, B-cells) as well as Parkinson's disease. Exosomes of pasteurized milk may represent new pathogens that should not reach the human food chain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6317263/

How did dairy ever become a health food is beyond me. (lobby + tradition probably)

The whole "calcium" argument is also totally debunked.

Cows convert grass to something drinkable and caloric so it's good for surviving on the steppe with your cows.

Half of Americans aren't obese because of dairy. The leading cause of death isn't cardiovascular disease because of dairy.

Everything is unhealthy if you look hard enough, before looking at dairy I'd look at sodas, sugar/carbs in everything, &c.

Was there ever a study?

Yes, we're all part of it right now. Feel free to check pretty much any study about obesity or western diet.

Or just go for a walk down the street or in an hospital

The question is how many of them don't consume dairy I guess. Probably most do.

How do you know? Dairy (especially high processed and in large quantities) is certainly a contributing factor.

No one thinks that peanuts and vegetable oil combine into some magic superfood, yet Plumpy'nut is concretely beneficial to keeping people fed and healthy. Now, consider this same rationale into to a kind of poverty close to home. There is plenty of evidence that milk in school lunches is often the only reliable daily source of calcium and protein for millions of impoverished children worldwide.

Contextualized one way, milk is a meal replacement or nutrition supplement, and one that is more practical than most other options. A serving of whole milk requires zero on-site prep time, is relatively portable once packaged, and perhaps more importantly, it is often the most palatable option for picky eaters. Public health is complicated.

Those impoverished kids you talk about are often lactose intolerant.

Sure the benefits of the dairy nutrition may outweigh the problems of the intolerance.

> Those impoverished kids you talk about are often lactose intolerant.

Exactly. Same goes for other common allergies options like legumes, seafood, and gluten. That's why you provide options.

> for millions of impoverished children worldwide.

Did you read I wrote "modern diet". Those are not the typical HN reading crowd.

Also: you could give them leafy greens can lentils to achieve the same.

> what people ate a hundred years ago

So depending on where you are, not much [0]

Or a lot of what we would now shy away from, if you had the means [1]. And probably wine at lunch, a lot of alcohol and tobacco otherwise, and some other funny gummy stuff to chew if you fancied that.

My point is, we're probably looking at the past with way too rosy glasses, regular people ate a lot of junk as well. If they could afford to.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/famine/

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/67/f6/25/67f6253ac36145bf9d0b392af...

Some scientists or shall we say experts on ancient diets estimate that prehistoric man ate as much as 100 to 200 g of fiber a day... Which could make sense because the vegetables we eat these days have been so domesticated that their starch content is far higher than it was in the past.. people ate a lot of different plant items from undomesticated plants, these plant parts were not high starts they were like low starts but they had some starch and some protein and some fat... But the fiber part of it was much greater because it was hard to separate the fiber from the starch.. so it's quite possible that these prehistoric people say 20,000 years ago 30,000 years ago whatever ate well over 100 g of fiber a day..

The fiber requirement today is supposed to be 23 g of fiber, maybe 24.. the average American eats maybe 20 grams of fiber a day..

But we need to know if those hundreds of grams of fiber have value or not. The prehistoric man on average also ate many less pineapples than us - does that mean pineapples are bad?

I'd recommend upping you fiber intake, the results are almost instantaneous. 99% chance you don't eat enough of them

That's not really a response to my question - what results are expected? What are the long term impacts? I believe it's probably good for you, but I don't like claims about health that only appeal to popular wisdom, feel, or "our ancestors did this".

Also, I'd love for the "more fiber" proponents to have talks with the "only eat meat" proponents.

> prehistoric man ate as much as 100 to 200 g of fiber a day

Not all prehistoric men. The Inuit around the world have a very low fiber diet and the difference is reveled in their genetics.

https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...

It would be best to know your genetics before jumping any dietary bandwangon.

I have Sami heritage and I cannot eat a high fiber or anything close to a southern world high vegetable diet.

There seems to be a segment of the population that has the rosiest glasses possible for the past and actively tries to get us to go back Personally I don't understand it, we have made so much progress in nearly every area

We all know exactly what I meant... people jumping to "muh famine" &co are arguing in bad faith

The bottom line is: if you couldn't grow it/make it/process it a hundred years ago you most likely don't want to ingest that every day

If what you eat contain 50 ingredients, 45 of which you can't identify, and you couldn't make it yourself at home with basic ingredients and utensils it most likely isn't any good for you

> regular people ate a lot of junk as well. If they could afford to.

20% of the population is obese before hitting adulthood, 70% of americans are obese or overweight, the leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease, lifestyle related cancer show no sign of decline quite the opposite, &c.

We came a long way, we now know what kill us, people don't die of starvation, but they still die of malnutrition. There is a systemic, world wide issue with food, a very very bad one

What you meant is probably more complex and needs more context than you are giving credit to.

You probably have a very specific image of what people ate a century ago, but I wouldn't expect that you assumed rice, beans and fish, with as much fat as affordable. For better or worse, there's little "you know what I mean" culture common ground on HN I think.

> The bottom line is: if you couldn't grow it/make it/process it a hundred years ago you most likely don't want to ingest that every day

That's kind of an amish approach to food. I'd prefer to benefit from better food than a century ago (we have a ton of better crops, better processed products, tastier varieties etc .), but at least it's a pretty clear position you have.

> Eat what people ate a hundred years ago

Why not go back nearly two thousand years then? Let's eat like Roman aristocrats!

This isn’t advice. People get a lot older nowadays. I recon food(safety and available) makes a big contribution to that.

Moderns food is pretty good. Just keep your diet varied and sane.

Stevia and xylitol.

PSA: Be careful with xylitol. It's lethally toxic to dogs and still 60% of the calories of regular sugar. I would prefer stevia for sweetening.

Furthermore, polyols are suspect after this erythritol paper came out recently. We can't have nice things.

> multiple lines of evidence indicate that elevated erythritol levels can directly contribute to heightened platelet reactivity and thrombosis risk by enhancing platelet intracellular calcium release and aggregation in response to multiple agonists. Specifically, the use of a preclinical in vivo thrombosis model similarly indicates higher rates of clot formation and increased thrombosis potential following arterial injury when plasma erythritol levels are elevated. Our findings suggest the need for further safety studies examining the long-term effects of artificial sweeteners in general, and erythritol specifically, on risks for heart attack and stroke, particularly in patients at higher risk for CVD.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9.epdf?shar...

Sugar is not bad. Use eating refined sugar is bad.

Eat fruit, where sugar comes with fiber and vitamins/minerals and you will be fine (you are biologically a primate and they binge on fruit -- fruit and thereby sugar should thus be fine as our main source of calories).

One note to add: primates do not eat fatty foods and humans do. In the presence of fat, we cannot handle sugar (and thus fruit) very well and may lead to type2.

This sounds right, but probably isn’t. Humans moved from an all fruit diet probably a million years ago. It seems clear that adding high quality protein to our diet is what allowed us to grow our larger brains.

Which is not to say that eating fruit is bad for you.

The fruits we eat are nothing like what our non human primate ancestors ate. Fruits have become significantly sweeter within my lifetime. What goes for fruit now is artificially selecred fruit candy.

Did you taste wild figs and (wild) papaya? Stuff's hella sweat.

Sure we've cultivated sweet fruits that work in colder climates (apples and pears come to mind).

I'd love to see what your body looks like vs. the average fruitarian.

> The question is, what is the least worst option?

Normal sugar in moderation with large time periods between meals.

Sugar is bad in large quantities.

I've concluded personally that it's still probably the best option - a teaspoon here and there, even daily, probably won't do much if it's near or in a meal. You know what you're getting: simple sugars have been part of the human diet for milennia, and we understand their metabolism reasonably well.

People who use the alternatives are making a much riskier bet on the null hypothesis of future research.

Exactly, the summary states "these findings suggest that a high intake of sucralose can dampen T cell-mediated responses". They fed mice the equivalent of the maximum advised dose for humans, 250 mg per kg body weight. So don't do that.

> simple sugars have been part of the human diet for milennia

The stuff you put in your tea is super concentrated compared to the natural form, though. It takes like 50 kilos of raw sugar cane to make a kilo of table sugar, using an intensive industrial process.

Learn to value the taste of not excessively sweet food and drinks. It makes me crazy that every drink and food needs to be sweetened even when their natural flavor is very good or even better (once you acquire the taste). Coffee, fruits juice, cookies and so on, most people consume super sweet versions of those.

My philosophy has been "if you eat something for 4 months, you will like it"

It was something I discovered by doing thruhikes, eating the most protein and calorie dense light foods on the shelf of whatever tiny town I hitchhiked into and drinking fresh spring water every day. Now soda tastes terrible to me compared to ice cold spring water with balanced minerals and I can appreciate the texture and earthy flavor of unflavored and unsalted lentils.