Saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, discovered in 1879. It was popular in the early 20th century, and is available today as Sweet'n'Low or "the pink packet" (generics). The chemical has an advocacy group: https://saccharin.org/ - the latest news is that Canadians can now use saccharin too (2016). Walmart and Amazon have boxes of bulk sweet'n'low for baking/etc.
~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation (sciencedirect.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574
My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because saccharin has a metallic aftertaste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575
I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand name and generic) use saccharin.
One important thing to mention about the history of saccharin is that it was the subject of a big scare in the 70s and 80s because rat studies showed it caused cancer. Later research revealed that the link between saccharin and cancer was much more tenuous in humans than originally suggested, and the sweetener is generally considered safe today.
When I was a kid in the 70s, our pantry had a bottle of saccharine tablets that my folks would use to sweeten their coffee. They were tiny, not big tablets, more like round little pills. They had an uncanny resemblance to a popular breath mint product.
A common prank was to put some saccharine pills in one of those mint dispensers, walk up to a sibling and asked if they wanted one while putting a real mint in your mouth. They'd take one of the fake mints, put it in their mouth, and half a second later curse you as they ran to the sink to spit it out.
All these artificial sweeteners taste terrible to me. A very "chemical" taste and especially smell to all of them, reminds me of insecticide. For carbonated beverages, I prefer plain carbonated water, though sometimes I will buy a flavored (but unsweetened) variety.
I've settled on no sugar or under 3g of sugar for this reason. They all taste weird to me. Monk fruit, stevia, aspartame, saccharin, allulose, sucralose. All of them.
My problem with monk fruit extracts is that they tend to be full of erythritol (even listing them as the first ingredient [0]), which tends to wreck my stomach. I was in a super market once and not a single product on the shelf was pure monk fruit.
I think they’re using erythritol because it’s not toxic to pets which some of the other sugar alcohols are, and disastrously so.
But all of the sugar alcohols can mess with your gut biome. Mine went nasty during the previous recession when I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
When you live with a pet, who eats what food is a bit of a democratic affair, not an autocracy.
Do you want to get up from the middle of a movie to go to the bathroom and come back and find that you're not going to find out who killed the leading lady tonight because you're going to spend all night in an animal emergency room getting your dog or cat's stomach pumped?
Anything on a table or in your purse or your jacket pocket is fair game.
Monkfruit doesn't come in a nice, familiar crystal form, and monkfruit extract is much sweeter per gram than sugar. For this reason, manufacturers bulk it up with some kind of sugar alcohol to make it easier to use. GP is saying they use erythritol for this purpose because the other options (e.g. xylitol) are toxic to pets.
I'm only quibbling here, and I agree with you, but an amusing factoid is that the ancient Romans used lead acetate as an artificial sweetener. It was made by boiling wine in a lead pot.
When I lived in Texas, it was practically universal to open up a cup of iced tea, grab several packs of Sweet'n'Low, rip the tops off all at once, and pour them in.
That's a good question, and I'm culturally ignorant. When I lived in Texas, my impression was that "tea" was unsweetened iced tea, to which people added their own sweetener. Then when I visited Virginia, "tea" was heavily sweetened.
My friend told me that drinking coffee with a meal instantly identified me as a Midwesterner.
> I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
No, isomaltulose(a.k.a Palatinose) is the best. Not very sweet, but it's literally just glucose and fructose connected differently, no other off-products or metabolic consequences, just a sweet carbohydrate with slow metabolism that doesn't cause cavities and is beneficial to the gut microbiota due to the slow release of sugar, just like a good resistant starch would.
It's not as sweet, low calorie, or inexpensive, but health-wise forget being harmless, it's outright better than almost all other carbs.
These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.
Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's bad for you.
Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all of them are toxic.
Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some (most) say they're bad for you.
Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.
The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health benefits.
I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
> Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
From what I've read it seems likely that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, most of the studies that show moderate as good for you make the mistake of only have 'sober', 'moderate' & 'heavy' drinking, but if you look at the 'sober' folks there's a heavy mix of "I don't drink because I'm in recovery" or other health issues, so if you instead of 'sober by choice', 'sober by recovery/health issues', 'moderate' & 'heavy drinker' the benefit of moderation reverses to being worse than 'sober by choice'.
Almost any "this bad for you thing is actually good for you in moderation" basically seem to come down to:
People who can do common addictive things in moderation tend to also be good at moderating other bad factors too.
Yeah this is a key part. If in small amounts it can reduce anxiety and increase sociability (if desired) then it could be a net positive. Good and bad is vague.
Alchohol isn't really good for you - statistically you will probably get away with reasonably low intake but the observational studies showing a benefit were most likely confounding variables - like studies where the 'non-drinkers' category contained those who had been alcoholics and were forced to stop drinking, or demographic distortions where moderate drinkers had much healthier lifestyles in other areas (exercise, access to healthcare, etc.) than heavy drinkers.
Coffee seems to be good for you, as long as it's only up to a few (3-4) a day, and as long as it's not affecting your sleep. But I have read the fines in methods like Turkish coffees could be somewhat harmful, whereas espresso is fine and paper filtered better. Sweetening it with sugar isn't great for you of course.
One that gets me is dairy and milk, I get the ethical concerns, and one can make an argument that it's not super 'natural' to take another species milk and to drink it after infancy, but that doesn't mean it's unhealthy (almost all medicines are 'unnatural' too, while some poisons are fully natural!). There's some evidence of milk/dairy being protective against bowel cancer for instance, and inconclusive evidence of harms so I do wince a bit at the plant-based milk alternatives (which are highly- or ultra-processed, if you do care about that kind of thing!) being so trendy.
The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids were little since people just throw it out with no qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.
I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over do it.
If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.
> So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.
Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...
It probably has to do with not being American, but at least here in italy it's completely fine to drink water and only that on a regular day. I do give that there's probably more variety, I know some people having preferences for certain bottled waters over others
(I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)
From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few local products such as spuma and that's it
Oh well coffee is definitely a given for a lot of Italians lol. Tea as well although less spread than coffee. I was talking more about drinks taken in cans or bigger quantities than a coffee/cup of tea.
Wine is definitely more prevalent in the older gens, young people drink albeit less. Up until a few years ago - and in some older people is valid for today as well - there was the belief that a small glass of wine a day wouldn't do harm, or that it had a positive effect on your health...
So yeah, alcohol is often on the table, but there's much less choice about the variety of drinks compared in the us. Then, if you have to work in the afternoon you might choose to not drink alcohol, so you're stuck with water or the other more common soft drinks such as coke (...)
I'm specifically sympathetic to kids who are not ( in the US ) given coffee or tea or alcohol and still get scolded about having anything but water. I've been there, it gets dull.
Well, even small kids here are allowed by their parents to drink caffe latte, which is milk with varying amounts of coffee. Then of course, some juices are OK although it's so easy to drink much more than the rda (and I'm quite sure I drank a shitton more of the recommend dose of juice, the few times I drank juice)
no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
Nobody should take advice from nutritionists. It's not a regulated title. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. Take your nutritional advice from dieticians (and licensed medical professionals with relevant training and experience).
>I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)
I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel like I need someone now to reassure her that blending doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.
( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )
I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.
>Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).
Yes they are.
And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.
I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.
People below you in this thread are saying that fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew. Something about nutrition makes people lose their minds.
By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff. Healthy stuff then gets thrown away.
Some juice every now and then won’t hurt anyone but it’s not healthy to drink it every day.
Many years ago, during my lunch at work, I peeled an orange and was eating it. My office mate, who was from Puerto Rico, said I was eating my orange the way his grandmother did. People his age would cut off the end of an orange and just squeeze the juice into their mouth.
> By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff
You’re separating liquids from solids. They each have their merits. The problem is industrial fruit produces a juice that is unlike anything in nature vis-à-vis sugar content.
Pray tell, how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange.
Please explain how the two sugar waters are different.
> how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange
I said industrialised fruit to refer to the orange. They’re much sweeter now than even in the 60s. There isn’t a practical difference between store-bought and fresh-squeezed juice (that I know of) other than, in some cases, preservatives, and the fact that with fresh-squeezed juice you have a tactile measure of the fruit going into the squeeze and so don’t tend to have e.g. a kid pouring themselves a tall glass of orange juice representing the juice of ten oranges.
I agree but no one makes headlines or sells books by talking about nuance and moderation so we get terrible advice from magazines and 'professionals' and all get steadily less healthy.
Of course not. But a kid raised on a high-sugar diet, particularly if reïnforced repetitively through habit, is going to have a tougher time eating healthy than someone who learned to see sugary drinks as a treat.
I met some people who managed this for some years, but it sounds not really practical (or healthy) to me. And they were in no better shape in my perception. Rather the contrary.
Humans use fire to process food since a long time.
You'd more than notice if your water was bad enough to develop enough harmful microorganisms to be bad for you (this goes for drinking water, not random wilderness water of course. always filter and boil that)
People worry about where the drinking water is from and how it's transported etc as well. Whatever you do, you will die soon-ish. I prefer to enjoy the journey.
Naw, that's just big waters psy-op getting you to buy their nectar to fill up the Pacific ocean with plastic.
In all seriousness, I met people that essentially don't drink water. They get water through food. Give them a glass during dinner and it goes untouched. I don't think it's because they're lazy and don't want to get up and fill up their water. It's just that they're not thirsty. It's really quite fascinating
> The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you.
Oooh, I guess I get to throw the wrench in that one. Endurance athletes benefit from the intake of large amounts of sugars during activity. Most sports drinks are primarily a mix of maltodextrin and fructose but the science is increasingly pointing toward something closer to a 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio being optimal at large carbohydrate intake -- in other words sucrose!
Ingested in an appropriate context, it is an excellent and easy to digest fuel source. You get to throw a couple hundred grams of table sugar into a sports bottle and call it healthy.
How about we agree that people making food controversial are the problem and we can just ignore them. It's like they have a religion that refreshes its beliefs on a 5 year cycle.
A secular religion, replacing a million ourFatherWhoYouAreInHeaven to prevent the dwindling disease, with a milliin microfastings.. it lacks the little whips for self flaggelation though.
The latest research indicates that the tolerable amount of both sugar and alcohol without elevated health risk is zero. If you're not eating keto only (almost if not entirely exclusively plants) and drinking water only (or maybe unsweetened tea/coffee occasionally), you are at increased risk for major disease.
I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
Here's one :)
Too much water also erodes your body of salts. If you already are on a low salt diet this could be a problem. For us Indians eating mountain loads of salt, this is a non issue.
Even consuming water can be deadly. Almost anytime can be consumed in moderation. And yes the amount of water you can consume safely is fairly high, there is a limit. Edit: I'm referring to clean water.
Haha, you made me chuckle. But to the facts: the article and application is about directly applying it to the wound or antibiotics directly. No one is advocating for it to be part of a healthy diet.
At some point you realize almost all of these studies are pointless and you're talking about shaving or adding negligible amounts of time off your life while ignoring more serious risks like driving or inhaling smog and brake dust daily. It's not an excuse to go crazy and eat and drink total shit, but I've largely given up on modern medicine and nutrition having any fucking clue beyond calories in / calories out.
I don't fancy kerosene much. Sugar works very well [1]. Salt and ethanol are very effective in mouthwashes, though ethanol is carcinogenic. I stick to the salt.
Salt is painful and I believe the risk with sugar is that it can be metabolized by bacteria or fungi, so the remnants of it can make conditions better for microbes (although I haven't googled to confirm this)
There are a lot of bacteria that live in a dirt and our natural biome that also reduce to antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria thus making antibiotics a more effective.
This general weakness of the bacterial wall is something to be wary of given they didn’t study its effect on a wider range of important bacteria.
Throwing a lot of anything in your gut that can cause an imbalance, ir serious dybosis is a good reason to treat your stomach like a little fermenting aquarium whose bacteria and skin cells cycle every 3-5 days.
I don't think most antibiotics distinguish between good and bad bacteria, you just kill the majority of them and wait until they reproduce themselves again (and hopefully only the good bacterias).
There is a vaccine, which works against SA (including MRSA of course) as both a prevention and a cure: https://www.eapteka.ru/goods/id123804/ The old and mostly unknown legacy of the Soviet medicine. $50 per 20 doses.
It is banned in India for Ice Creams & frozen Lollies / Ice Pops, but allowed within limit for general use (soda, bubble gums, packaged juice, etc).
Health department officials said, "Saccharin is harmful to children especially those under 14 years. It affects bones badly. These ice candies are sold in rural areas and their sale picks up during summer"
Some ice cream producers prefer to use saccharin as it is quite cheaper in comparison to sugar. To earn heavy profits during summer when the demand for ice candies goes up significantly, some of the ice cream producers use saccharin. Officials said that saccharin is more than 300 times sweeter than sucrose (sugar), the officials said.
The dose makes the poison. It doesn't sound THAT toxic, but enough to be a bad idea for sweeteners. But I'd bet the antibiotic itself has more toxicity!
Saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, discovered in 1879. It was popular in the early 20th century, and is available today as Sweet'n'Low or "the pink packet" (generics). The chemical has an advocacy group: https://saccharin.org/ - the latest news is that Canadians can now use saccharin too (2016). Walmart and Amazon have boxes of bulk sweet'n'low for baking/etc.
~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation (sciencedirect.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574
My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because saccharin has a metallic aftertaste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575
I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand name and generic) use saccharin.
One important thing to mention about the history of saccharin is that it was the subject of a big scare in the 70s and 80s because rat studies showed it caused cancer. Later research revealed that the link between saccharin and cancer was much more tenuous in humans than originally suggested, and the sweetener is generally considered safe today.
When I was a kid in the 70s, our pantry had a bottle of saccharine tablets that my folks would use to sweeten their coffee. They were tiny, not big tablets, more like round little pills. They had an uncanny resemblance to a popular breath mint product.
A common prank was to put some saccharine pills in one of those mint dispensers, walk up to a sibling and asked if they wanted one while putting a real mint in your mouth. They'd take one of the fake mints, put it in their mouth, and half a second later curse you as they ran to the sink to spit it out.
I still have a little bottle of those, sold under the brand "Aids".
All these artificial sweeteners taste terrible to me. A very "chemical" taste and especially smell to all of them, reminds me of insecticide. For carbonated beverages, I prefer plain carbonated water, though sometimes I will buy a flavored (but unsweetened) variety.
I've settled on no sugar or under 3g of sugar for this reason. They all taste weird to me. Monk fruit, stevia, aspartame, saccharin, allulose, sucralose. All of them.
They taste weird to me too but I'm not convinced it's an absolute quality rather than just unfamiliarity
My problem with monk fruit extracts is that they tend to be full of erythritol (even listing them as the first ingredient [0]), which tends to wreck my stomach. I was in a super market once and not a single product on the shelf was pure monk fruit.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/RAW-Natural-Sweetener-Erythritol-Suga...
I think they’re using erythritol because it’s not toxic to pets which some of the other sugar alcohols are, and disastrously so.
But all of the sugar alcohols can mess with your gut biome. Mine went nasty during the previous recession when I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
I'm confused, google says monk fruit is ok for pets. Regardless, who's feeding this stuff to their pets?
I love fishermans friend, but I think the sorbitol is guaranteed excessive flatulence.
When you live with a pet, who eats what food is a bit of a democratic affair, not an autocracy.
Do you want to get up from the middle of a movie to go to the bathroom and come back and find that you're not going to find out who killed the leading lady tonight because you're going to spend all night in an animal emergency room getting your dog or cat's stomach pumped?
Anything on a table or in your purse or your jacket pocket is fair game.
Monkfruit doesn't come in a nice, familiar crystal form, and monkfruit extract is much sweeter per gram than sugar. For this reason, manufacturers bulk it up with some kind of sugar alcohol to make it easier to use. GP is saying they use erythritol for this purpose because the other options (e.g. xylitol) are toxic to pets.
- I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
Why the hell would you do that? My life time of chewing gum constantly until my 20s is what I assume to be the source of my TMJ.
Grinding my teeth at night, because I wanted to murder a third of my coworkers and I didn't feel I could find another job.
I'm only quibbling here, and I agree with you, but an amusing factoid is that the ancient Romans used lead acetate as an artificial sweetener. It was made by boiling wine in a lead pot.
When I lived in Texas, it was practically universal to open up a cup of iced tea, grab several packs of Sweet'n'Low, rip the tops off all at once, and pour them in.
With Sweet’n’Low?! Isn’t that considered blasphemy in sweet tea country?
That's a good question, and I'm culturally ignorant. When I lived in Texas, my impression was that "tea" was unsweetened iced tea, to which people added their own sweetener. Then when I visited Virginia, "tea" was heavily sweetened.
My friend told me that drinking coffee with a meal instantly identified me as a Midwesterner.
> I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
No, isomaltulose(a.k.a Palatinose) is the best. Not very sweet, but it's literally just glucose and fructose connected differently, no other off-products or metabolic consequences, just a sweet carbohydrate with slow metabolism that doesn't cause cavities and is beneficial to the gut microbiota due to the slow release of sugar, just like a good resistant starch would.
It's not as sweet, low calorie, or inexpensive, but health-wise forget being harmless, it's outright better than almost all other carbs.
Google Gemini is telling me:
"Saccharin is absorbed primarily in the stomach, with about 85% to 95% of ingested saccharin absorbed and eliminated in the urine."
If this is the case, then why hasn't the antibiotic effect been previously observed in vivo?
Is the concentration too low?
Xylitol is probably safer, and it also kills smutans.
These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.
Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's bad for you.
Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all of them are toxic.
Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some (most) say they're bad for you.
Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.
The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health benefits.
I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
> Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
From what I've read it seems likely that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, most of the studies that show moderate as good for you make the mistake of only have 'sober', 'moderate' & 'heavy' drinking, but if you look at the 'sober' folks there's a heavy mix of "I don't drink because I'm in recovery" or other health issues, so if you instead of 'sober by choice', 'sober by recovery/health issues', 'moderate' & 'heavy drinker' the benefit of moderation reverses to being worse than 'sober by choice'.
Almost any "this bad for you thing is actually good for you in moderation" basically seem to come down to:
People who can do common addictive things in moderation tend to also be good at moderating other bad factors too.
Alcohol is bad for your body but can be quite good for your mood. Just like sugar or othe high calory food.
Yeah this is a key part. If in small amounts it can reduce anxiety and increase sociability (if desired) then it could be a net positive. Good and bad is vague.
It depends ? Has your line adapted to alcohol, like other lines adapted to milk?
[dead]
Some of those are pretty easy to separate -
Alchohol isn't really good for you - statistically you will probably get away with reasonably low intake but the observational studies showing a benefit were most likely confounding variables - like studies where the 'non-drinkers' category contained those who had been alcoholics and were forced to stop drinking, or demographic distortions where moderate drinkers had much healthier lifestyles in other areas (exercise, access to healthcare, etc.) than heavy drinkers.
Coffee seems to be good for you, as long as it's only up to a few (3-4) a day, and as long as it's not affecting your sleep. But I have read the fines in methods like Turkish coffees could be somewhat harmful, whereas espresso is fine and paper filtered better. Sweetening it with sugar isn't great for you of course.
One that gets me is dairy and milk, I get the ethical concerns, and one can make an argument that it's not super 'natural' to take another species milk and to drink it after infancy, but that doesn't mean it's unhealthy (almost all medicines are 'unnatural' too, while some poisons are fully natural!). There's some evidence of milk/dairy being protective against bowel cancer for instance, and inconclusive evidence of harms so I do wince a bit at the plant-based milk alternatives (which are highly- or ultra-processed, if you do care about that kind of thing!) being so trendy.
The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids were little since people just throw it out with no qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.
I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over do it.
If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.
It is that and that the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth.
> the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth
Not an issue for kids with milk teeth. Not an issue for adults who brush. Restricting diet for dental hygiene always struck me as convoluted.
> So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.
Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...
Because no one wants to drink water all day every day and nothing else.
It probably has to do with not being American, but at least here in italy it's completely fine to drink water and only that on a regular day. I do give that there's probably more variety, I know some people having preferences for certain bottled waters over others
(I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)
From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few local products such as spuma and that's it
I drink water in the US every day just fine, I don't think there's anything cultural going on here.
No one drinks coffee or tea or beer or wine in Italy? Pop culture has deceived me.
Oh well coffee is definitely a given for a lot of Italians lol. Tea as well although less spread than coffee. I was talking more about drinks taken in cans or bigger quantities than a coffee/cup of tea.
Wine is definitely more prevalent in the older gens, young people drink albeit less. Up until a few years ago - and in some older people is valid for today as well - there was the belief that a small glass of wine a day wouldn't do harm, or that it had a positive effect on your health...
So yeah, alcohol is often on the table, but there's much less choice about the variety of drinks compared in the us. Then, if you have to work in the afternoon you might choose to not drink alcohol, so you're stuck with water or the other more common soft drinks such as coke (...)
I'm specifically sympathetic to kids who are not ( in the US ) given coffee or tea or alcohol and still get scolded about having anything but water. I've been there, it gets dull.
Well, even small kids here are allowed by their parents to drink caffe latte, which is milk with varying amounts of coffee. Then of course, some juices are OK although it's so easy to drink much more than the rda (and I'm quite sure I drank a shitton more of the recommend dose of juice, the few times I drank juice)
I don’t see anything wrong with drinking only water.
Nothing is wrong with drinking only water. Nothing is wrong with drinking something besides water.
I basically only drink water...
With just enough whiskey so that I don’t have the smell of water on my breath.
Same reason I cut my OJ with vodka.
no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
Nobody should take advice from nutritionists. It's not a regulated title. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. Take your nutritional advice from dieticians (and licensed medical professionals with relevant training and experience).
As Dara Ó Briain put it, dietician is to nutritionist as dentist is to tootheologist.
>I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)
I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel like I need someone now to reassure her that blending doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.
( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )
I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.
> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid
Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).
>Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).
Yes they are.
And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.
I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.
People below you in this thread are saying that fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew. Something about nutrition makes people lose their minds.
By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff. Healthy stuff then gets thrown away. Some juice every now and then won’t hurt anyone but it’s not healthy to drink it every day.
Many years ago, during my lunch at work, I peeled an orange and was eating it. My office mate, who was from Puerto Rico, said I was eating my orange the way his grandmother did. People his age would cut off the end of an orange and just squeeze the juice into their mouth.
> By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff
You’re separating liquids from solids. They each have their merits. The problem is industrial fruit produces a juice that is unlike anything in nature vis-à-vis sugar content.
Pray tell, how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange.
Please explain how the two sugar waters are different.
> how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange
I said industrialised fruit to refer to the orange. They’re much sweeter now than even in the 60s. There isn’t a practical difference between store-bought and fresh-squeezed juice (that I know of) other than, in some cases, preservatives, and the fact that with fresh-squeezed juice you have a tactile measure of the fruit going into the squeeze and so don’t tend to have e.g. a kid pouring themselves a tall glass of orange juice representing the juice of ten oranges.
They are correct in terms of nutrition and sugar, but most kids can process a lot of sugar fine.
Fruit has also been bred to be much sweeter and less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, so there's that too.
Moderation is the key to everything.
I agree but no one makes headlines or sells books by talking about nuance and moderation so we get terrible advice from magazines and 'professionals' and all get steadily less healthy.
> fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew
A reasonable way to look at it is as a flat, fortified Mountain Dew. Great as a treat. Bad as a habit, at least with modern oranges.
That is an impossibly stupid way to look at it. Food is not just a bunch of numbers on a label.
> Food is not just a bunch of numbers on a label
Of course not. But a kid raised on a high-sugar diet, particularly if reïnforced repetitively through habit, is going to have a tougher time eating healthy than someone who learned to see sugary drinks as a treat.
So what is it? And what's a smart way to look at it?
With pulp we're getting somewhere, but without pulp?
there is still the folate and magnesium citrate. and of course vitamin c. It's not completely useless without pulp.
I am. That's a processed food. The sugar is concentrated via a mechanical extraction
> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad?
Yeah, that's fine, but a 16 ounce glass of orange juice has way more than one orange in it, and it's got a hell of a lot of sugar.
Or just do like me and switch to grapefruit juice. Awesome without drinking pure liquid sugar.
Consuming whole fruit is kinda okay because the fiber in the fruit helps buffer sugar absorption.
With juice you're getting lots of sugar but no fiber.
Commercially bottled juices (e.g., Tropicana) are worse but fresh squeezed is still bad.
If it's sweet, spit it out!
> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup
generally, processed foods are bad. You just created a processed food - you extracted the sugar and left the fiber and other good stuff behind.
"generally, processed foods are bad"
So ... you are on a raw food diet then?
I met some people who managed this for some years, but it sounds not really practical (or healthy) to me. And they were in no better shape in my perception. Rather the contrary.
Humans use fire to process food since a long time.
>I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
Micro-plastics, fluoride.. ;)
Or the more traditional ones: bacterias, viruses, worms, ...
You'd more than notice if your water was bad enough to develop enough harmful microorganisms to be bad for you (this goes for drinking water, not random wilderness water of course. always filter and boil that)
"not random wilderness water of course. always filter and boil that"
To be honest, maybe I was lucky, but I drank plenty of wilderness water unfiltered and except for mild stomach problems, I never had any issues.
"except for mild stomach problems" and "I've never had any issues" are contradictory.
With the exception of your comment, I enjoyed this day.
People worry about where the drinking water is from and how it's transported etc as well. Whatever you do, you will die soon-ish. I prefer to enjoy the journey.
> These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.
Tapwater, or artesian well water?
Magnitically left-spun water, or ionically charged crystal-dipped water?
Hermetically sealed water, or Gnostically gestated water?
Distilled or deionated?
Choose wisely.
In worrying about it all you miss all the earthly delights AND you STILL don't live forever
Naw, that's just big waters psy-op getting you to buy their nectar to fill up the Pacific ocean with plastic.
In all seriousness, I met people that essentially don't drink water. They get water through food. Give them a glass during dinner and it goes untouched. I don't think it's because they're lazy and don't want to get up and fill up their water. It's just that they're not thirsty. It's really quite fascinating
> The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you.
Oooh, I guess I get to throw the wrench in that one. Endurance athletes benefit from the intake of large amounts of sugars during activity. Most sports drinks are primarily a mix of maltodextrin and fructose but the science is increasingly pointing toward something closer to a 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio being optimal at large carbohydrate intake -- in other words sucrose!
Ingested in an appropriate context, it is an excellent and easy to digest fuel source. You get to throw a couple hundred grams of table sugar into a sports bottle and call it healthy.
How about we agree that people making food controversial are the problem and we can just ignore them. It's like they have a religion that refreshes its beliefs on a 5 year cycle.
A secular religion, replacing a million ourFatherWhoYouAreInHeaven to prevent the dwindling disease, with a milliin microfastings.. it lacks the little whips for self flaggelation though.
The latest research indicates that the tolerable amount of both sugar and alcohol without elevated health risk is zero. If you're not eating keto only (almost if not entirely exclusively plants) and drinking water only (or maybe unsweetened tea/coffee occasionally), you are at increased risk for major disease.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4109571/
We don't even know if tiny doses or artificial radiation are good or bad for you.
That's the straw that just pushed me to live my life.
I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
Here's one :)
Too much water also erodes your body of salts. If you already are on a low salt diet this could be a problem. For us Indians eating mountain loads of salt, this is a non issue.
Sorry, water has microplastics now.
The only way to prevent it, is to go full recycle, become a human bottle garden .
Even consuming water can be deadly. Almost anytime can be consumed in moderation. And yes the amount of water you can consume safely is fairly high, there is a limit. Edit: I'm referring to clean water.
Haha, you made me chuckle. But to the facts: the article and application is about directly applying it to the wound or antibiotics directly. No one is advocating for it to be part of a healthy diet.
But if the water has fluoride…maybe that’s making your teeth brittle! (Or worse if you’re condemned to believe RFK types)
The residents of Flint, MI, might disagree with you.
Probably the flouride, but RFK will sort that out.
Unfortunately on HN these days, it's impossible to tell if this is sarcasm or not.
At some point you realize almost all of these studies are pointless and you're talking about shaving or adding negligible amounts of time off your life while ignoring more serious risks like driving or inhaling smog and brake dust daily. It's not an excuse to go crazy and eat and drink total shit, but I've largely given up on modern medicine and nutrition having any fucking clue beyond calories in / calories out.
> Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteri
Sugar, salt, kerosene and, for example, ethanol, do the same. What is special about saccharin?
You can't put the other things you've listed on a wound in a hospital without some, uh... unpleasantness.
I don't fancy kerosene much. Sugar works very well [1]. Salt and ethanol are very effective in mouthwashes, though ethanol is carcinogenic. I stick to the salt.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180328-how-sugar-could-...
Salt is painful and I believe the risk with sugar is that it can be metabolized by bacteria or fungi, so the remnants of it can make conditions better for microbes (although I haven't googled to confirm this)
Sure thing you can put sugar or, for example, colloidal silver (an awesome option!).
Hate the taste of the stuff, but glad to hear this.
Wonder if some megacorp will try to patent some formulation of it.
Saccharin adderallide
The gut biome thing.
There have been murmurs on the conspiracy internet about how artificial sweeteners may have been responsible for making gut biomes less effective.
This seems related. The gut biome refers to bacteria in the gut.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweete...
I wouldn't be surprised. Living in US more and more of my immigrant friends discover severe food sensitivities that they've never experienced before.
There are a lot of bacteria that live in a dirt and our natural biome that also reduce to antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria thus making antibiotics a more effective.
This general weakness of the bacterial wall is something to be wary of given they didn’t study its effect on a wider range of important bacteria.
Throwing a lot of anything in your gut that can cause an imbalance, ir serious dybosis is a good reason to treat your stomach like a little fermenting aquarium whose bacteria and skin cells cycle every 3-5 days.
But surely.. we also got a decent amount of research showing how Saccharin causes increased biofilm formation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8156656/
Guess it's all about the usage model..!!
If taken orally, how does the saccharin distinguish between good and bad bacteria when bursting bacteria cell walls?
I don't think most antibiotics distinguish between good and bad bacteria, you just kill the majority of them and wait until they reproduce themselves again (and hopefully only the good bacterias).
The paper describe the effect at 1.4% saccharine in solution.
The oral LD50 in mice is 17 g/kg. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Saccharin#section=...
Maybe ok for topical application?
Well at least it’s not in vitro. Everything kills bacteria in a Petri dish.
But it is topical. So it may do a treat for MRSA but not for resistant pneumonia.
There is a vaccine, which works against SA (including MRSA of course) as both a prevention and a cure: https://www.eapteka.ru/goods/id123804/ The old and mostly unknown legacy of the Soviet medicine. $50 per 20 doses.
All sweeteners are considered harmful.
Please watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkyv1o8Xp_M
This guy advocates for 0 sugar intake, which seems like a very fringe opinion…
I prefer fringe than stupid.
Isn’t saccharine toxic?
It is banned in India for Ice Creams & frozen Lollies / Ice Pops, but allowed within limit for general use (soda, bubble gums, packaged juice, etc).
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/ice-cream-pr... / https://archive.vn/wRTE5The dose makes the poison. It doesn't sound THAT toxic, but enough to be a bad idea for sweeteners. But I'd bet the antibiotic itself has more toxicity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin
There were some suspected links to cancer but they were found to not be a risk at normal intake levels.
So is any prescription pill if you're not respecting the dosage the docs prescribed...
I think so. Seems also toxic to bacteria!