That would be helpful. And at the end of the day, you’re right to discount anything but the total amount (dose). But that just gets it to your mouth. Once you swallow it, other stuff happens and that other stuff depends on what kind of sugar you’re body is dealing with exactly.
So, dose + speed of absorption. Both are important to our health. Like, we can’t take the same amount of sugar orally or inject it into our veins and the health results are the same. The difference is the absorption speed (obviously the method is different, but just making a dramatic point about speed also playing a role).
I’d say metabolizing a normal dose of sugar fast is worse that metabolizing an unhealthy amount of sugar more slowly. If that’s true, then total amount of sugar on a label is not enough information to make a healthy decision on. This is why Nova doesn’t care about nutrition labels because what should have been true/improving health was not happening. Nova only cares about ingredients and processing methods. Generally, UPF type sugars absorbs much quicker into our body than the same amounts of sugar in Cat 1-3 foods. That’s intentional. Same nutrient description, same amounts, different internal results. Don’t know exactly why or how, yet, but using the ingredients over the nutrition label is a good predictor of whether the food is healthy.
To me, I think it’s pretty scientifically clear different types of sugar are absorbed at different speeds, and that going too quickly can be harmful to our health. I would like to know if this is accurate or not because I have a history of talking sugar gibberish.
I was careful to only use “sugar” to match the info on a nutrition label (and the depth of my knowledge).
But yea. And the form of say fructose, etc. The same type of sugar in a fruit is structurally different and/or has other structures with it than in UPF. The (lack of) structural difference usually means it absorbs quicker.
Late: I’ll just make clear here and my post above, this is a possible mechanism that Nova says could explain poor health outcomes. Nova doesn’t claim it’s proven, though.
So those definitions of how much sugar or sodium food should have that are the exact opposite of confusing?
Can’t say I understand the point of anything you wrote; just that that you said there are these opposite of confusing definitions and I asked for them and don’t see them in the response.
Clear that would be; reflective of healthfulness it would not be. It really does matter if it the sugar is contained in a bowl of berries or if it is added. (And you are correct that juices, while minimally processed, are best considered as sugar water, not as “food”. The minimal processing there is still of dramatic impact.)
Same sugar by the way, @CoolHandCox . Same grams of fructose and glucose. The packaging is key.
Children generally don’t have a lot of choice on what they eat, excepting varying levels of finicky and those who indulge them. But I first had to learn about and be tested on “Canada’s Food Guide” (first proposed in 1942) in school in the third or fourth grade. No doubt parents and advertisers more directly impact how children think about food. But few adults are formally tested on the pyramid.
The gut microbiome is not well understood and in one person consists of 100 trillion microorganisms. The old microbiology saw was that only 1% of microorganisms can be cultured. Obviously, bacteria and viruses that cause known disease were prioritized. And with new cultivation techniques a higher percentage of microorganisms can be compared to something named. But 100 trillion microorganisms likely includes many things we have not named and can’t grow.
The microbiome barely got a few hours of lecture time when I went to med school. Sweeteners do seem to affect the microbiome and we now know 1/3 of the body’s nerves are in the gut and profoundly affect the brain and disease (again, barely mentioned during my med school). Sweeteners have become much more popular in recent decades, but dementia rates are declining. I would not be surprised if sweeteners affected many things but the evidence they do is still fairly weak. Red meat seems to increase cancer rates, just not by very much, and processing makes a difference. A steak is probably not the same as a sausage.
I read a lot about Nova awhile back and now refreshing what I knew. With that in mind, I don’t think Nova was meant to be a public facing driver of food choices. It was just meant for research to determine if it might be better to focus on ingredients over nutrition. Would doing it that way explain the obesity epidemic in Brazil.
Then it started getting proven true. And it took off. But it’s still just research type definitions.
I definitely fall into the trap of using it to decide what to eat, but it was never meant for that. If I’m not careful, I can get real pseudoscience real quick doing that. Others definitely use it that way. People make claims Nova (science) would never make. I read just now one of the main Nova researchers at NIH was fired last year for merely wanting to explain what was actually known / not known.
But I agree. It’s out in the wild now and hopefully someone will match up what is proven to be good / bad with an easier system.
And those who try to force them, which is of equal or greater long term harms.
Cite?
My impression is that there has been a slight but real gradual decline. Soda pop sales for example have had decades of decline. So has HFCS overall. Sweeteners in general in kids through young adults have decreased for sure
Red meat, and yes in particular processed red meats such as sausages, are in particular associated with increased respiratory disease mortality.
But sometimes, the bowl of berries is how the sugar is added. And “ultraprocessed” is not the same thing as “added sugar”, anyway: You can ultraprocess foods in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with the sugar.
But sure, I’ll accept that it’s possible to have different kinds of sugar that have unequal impact. I’m not a dietician; I don’t know these things. But if that’s the case, then the dieticians need to define an equivalent-impact index of some sort, like this amount of this kind of sugar is equivalent to 1 gram of pure sucrose, or whatever, and then lobby the FDA to put that index on food labels, and tell people that they shouldn’t eat more than whatever number of impact-equivalent-grams. That wouldn’t be quite as clear as just total grams of sugar, but it’d still be pretty clear, and definitely clearer than “avoid foods that have colorful plastic wrappers”.
A challenge is that feeding is (almost certainly) not nearly that reductive.
Sugar X in the presence of protein Y reacts like this, but sugar X in the presence of fat Z reacts like that. We have very high level correlations that a million people who eat sugar type and quantity X suffer harms that a million people who eat sugar type and quantity A do not. But why? No clue. Yet.
Yes. And for the general population that sugar is just fine (with the caveat that diabetics need to watch the totals even then but still of less impact as in a bowl of berries than the same amount of glucose and fructose as added sugar.) MORE than fine in general. Berries intake being high is healthy.
See Table 3 in below for the subgroup associations of processed meats with respiratory mortality and added sweeteners all types for neurodegenerative mortality.
But intervention study of Mediterranean Diet, either heavy olive oil (at least 4 tablespoons per day) or heavy nuts, compared to low fat, huge positives in a high risk population.
There is a difference between US and global consumption. HFCS has declined somewhat in the US from its peak in 1999, but the global market for sweeteners and US market analysis predict future growth. The cites tend to be technical, but here you go.
I don’t think things are always that complex. Berries have a lot less sugar than many sweet alternatives (5-15 grams per cup). These sugars are also absorbed more slowly because berries contain fibre and also the sugars are in intact plant cells that must be metabolized.
Yes. And the age stratified modest decrease in dementia rates is specifically a US thing; worldwide overall it is stable to modest increases.
Of course it is just one factor among many and likely current use is less likely the issue than use through decades previous to current dementia risk.
The evidence of association of heavy added sweeteners use with adverse outcomes is pretty strong. Causation is a harder thing to be sure of.
Ding ding! Fiber. Hosts of micronutrients. And a process to get the sugar out of the cells. “Flat curves” may be overhyped for most in my view, but delivery to various expanses of the intestines I think matters. The real food matrix matters.