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andrewmcwatters10/11/20242 repliesview on HN

There are a lot of statistics in dietary behavioral studies and dietary reinforcement that are mostly uninteresting because, frankly, people omit details.

You can lose considerable weight at speeds that are actually not recommended simply by dropping added sugar from American diets. So much so that you would need to taper off this removal to stay around 2 pounds of weight loss a week instead of dropping this consumption pattern cold turkey.

The biggest difficulty in sourcing food materials or eating out is that we have sugar in everything. We have added sugar in things that in other countries you would have never added sugar into to begin with.

The reinforcement habit is directly tied to food reward, sugar consumption, and ghrelin production. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying and is simply refuting what we have come to understand about food science over the years.

And frankly, we as a people have not yet completely matured out of the phase of producing or accepting low-fat foods being replaced with high sugar content. Plenty of other nations never had this problem at all, never inherited it, and as a result, don't have to grow out of it.

It is staggering how much of our food is incompatible with healthy weight homeostasis, and all of our common supermarkets absolutely work against you unless you are otherwise taught differently.

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Edit:

If you're baking bread for your family every day, even without added sugar, and you don't see the problem here, I don't know how anyone can help you.

I'm not calling you a liar. I said you were omitting details. You didn't mention that you're frequently eating carbs. Now you mention that you're baking, and presumably eating, bread every day.

This is a big eating habit detail.


Replies

rfrey10/11/2024

I bake bread for my family every day because I can't get bread in Canada that has no sugar. I'm aware of how insidious sugar is.

You obviously deal with a lot of obesity that is caused by excessive sugar consumption. Your conclusion - and smuggled assumption - is that all obesity is caused by sugar. This is trivially refuted by finding obese people in non-high-sugar societies, or from a time period before sugar became ubiquitous.

Calling me a liar does not make your position stronger.

Response edit: I have four school aged children who get a sandwich for lunch every day. It takes no time at all for a family of six to go through a 650g loaf of bread, and it doesn't require overeating - I'm the only one in my family with a weight problem, and I bake the bread I don't eat it. Your assumption that everyone in the world is exactly like you is truly breathtaking.

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rfrey10/11/2024

Of course I eat carbs when I shouldn't. Not the bread, but I eat potatoes sometimes, and too much fruit. I'm not denying that I eat too much.

The point is you claim that if we gluttons would just cut out sugar for 2 weeks and learn to be an adult, our appetites and cravings would disappear. That's nonsense, and your dismissal of data that doesn't fit your narrative makes your accusations towards others of being anti-science both hollow and ironic.