The sugar you get from fruit is also accompanied by fiber, water and other nutrients. Also harder to overeat and generally gets released into the bloodstream more slowly. I think the argument here is to eat less (highly) processed food in favour of whole foods.
I've known people that think switching to fruit juice from sugar sodas was going to fix them; very much not. Doesn't matter where you get the sugar, sugar is sugar and is not good for you or your arteries or weight loss.
Fruit juice you didn't press yourself have no fibers.
Honestly, the 'avoir sugar' crowd is wrong in its messaging, the correct message should be 'increase your fiber intake'.
Also an effect of fiber is that it increases your transit speed and quality a lot (a lot). I don't know if that also have an effect on how much sugar and fat is absorbed in the small intestine, but I recently managed to loose weight I had a lot of trouble eliminating without changing my calorie intake. Basically I went from 115 kg to 95 with reducing my calorie intake without much trouble (stopped sugar and alcohol basically) in 2-3 years, and didn't manage to go much lower in the last 6 year (I was around 90-88 by starting physical activity, but those 5kg took 4 years to loose and I stabilized again). But I recently had transit issues, and started eating more fiber like 3 months ago. I lost 1 kg over the timeframe, while having a way better time on the toilets, and it was even easier than stopping sugar (just eat more greens, beans and oats), as I didn't change my meal size.
My thoughts are that it's too sweet, though I don't know what quality its fiber has: like is it decent dietary fiber or a nutrition label dodge of some sort.
Yesterday I ate lots of sugar in the form of sweets. It happened during a 100km bike ride (against a strong headwind even) and I would otherwise bonk [0], so I'm pretty sure it was good for me, my arteries and my weight loss.
And that's the issue with simple messaging like 'sugar bad'.
Citing a 100 km bike ride as a counter-example is not very helpful. Sure, technically, the parent was worded as an absolute statement, but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier that it is irrelevant to a discussion about diet. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about relatively normal diets, and clearly biking 100 km is well outside normal.
Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
> but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier
I don't think it is, there are a lot of bikers, runners, triathlon people between my colleagues and friends that regularly do that much energy output. Several of them even do much longer rides. And we are not even that young or sport-mad.
> Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you?
Yes, you don't want to get your bowels very active/full during biking.
As an aside, top road cyclists (and I'm sure also long distance runners etc) are currently consuming up to 120g of glucose/fructose per hour during their performance, and have to train their guts so they are able to consume that much.
> And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
And the point of my post was exactly that I think that either there should be always explicit qualifiers around 'sugar bad' or better just don't write that at all, because it's plain wrong. Sugar as a reasonable part of a quality diet is fine. It's different for children and obviously some other groups of people, but it's not bad in general (and if you want to lose weight, try to eliminate starch, not simple or short-chain sugars, but that's too hard for most people, and might not be healthy either). And messages like that just destroy the credibility of the speaker.
Extreme sports is definitely nothing "normal" - whether I define "normal" as a today's statistic, or as evolutionary history. Your needs and metrics are nothing Joe Regular can use in his daily life, which the OP pointed very clearly and you don't need to refute. Your body is a completely different beast and we would be comparing apples with oranges, only confusing an already confused domain. Because I don't believe that any of your guidelines about guts training is coming from "general surgeon advice" - you are using specialized forums and special indications, while this discussion here is on a general forum, about general indications.
There is nothing extreme about doing a 100km ride from time to time, I don't even have the body of an athlete. That bit about training the guts was an aside and clearly marked as such. I don't do it.
'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.
Arguing that a 100km bike ride is not an edge case seems disingenuous. Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives. "Added sugar bad" is generally good advice for most the population which statistically is fairly sedentary and doesn't require a huge amount of immediately available, low fiber energy.
> Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives.
I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?
"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.
They didn't say "added sugar" they just said sugar. If you want to avoid sugar, you have to realize that fruit does contain sugar (fructose is the culprit here) and it isn't always healthy.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
I'm not trying to lose weight, and I've never knowingly bought a specialty orange. Sugar is in basically every plant food, and saying "give up all sugar" means going carnivore plus eggs and a select few dairy products.
Which, to be clear because some people legitimately believe in this diet, this is bad for you. Diets high in animal fat cause heart disease, and eating this much red meat without fiber is going to cause gastrointestinal distress and increase your risk of colon cancer. Also, it is very difficult to eat a reasonable amount of calories when you consume calorically dense food that's high in fat.
It's a matter of amount of course. A tomato has 1/4th the sugar of a normal orange.
The point here is saying "fruit is healthy" is just not true in any sort of black and white sense. Someone can easily get fat and be unhealthy by eating fruits with lots of sugar, and if they are juicing them, even more so.
See but here is where I get confused. The advice you are saying is to "completely eliminate added sugar" but then you say it's due to fiber, nutrients, and hard to overeat.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.
On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.
Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.
Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.
you can overeat fruit and vegetables and not all fruit is the same. Bananas vs kale is a good example. You should eat more kale, but you should avoid bananas unless they’re green (lots of resistant starch)
I suspect that the vast majority of the population is not overeating fruit and vegetables. Even if someone is eating ripe bananas, that's likely to be much better for them than eating another portion of fries/chips etc.
