[jelsisi]

Cutting out added sugar and supplementing Vitamin D have both significantly improved the quality of my life. I now have the feeling that all the info we need to live a healthy life is out there and that good health is slowly becoming a choice. I'm optimistic that the internet has dampened the power that some of these corporations have had over our nutrition. I'm looking forward to supplementing omega 3s and seeing if that has any effect.

[swatcoder]

> I now have the feeling that all the info we need to live a healthy life is out there and that good health is slowly becoming a choice

While not incorrect, that's an interesting framing as your great-grandparents and most of their lineage already had all the needed info too. Cultures can't really survive hundreds or thousands of years without sorting out a reliable way for their members to thrive well enough, a knowledge that gets gradually and continuously encoded in their food traditions.

Our modern culture may be gaining insight into how to squeeze a little more wellness out of late life, or take a little more specific control when edge cases need attention, but those gains came on the tails of a dramatic disruption of cultural knowledge that was already there and already encoded in communities' daily intuitive eating practice.

We have finer and more evidenced ideas now, but it's going to take many generations to convert that from the intellectual, explicit knowledge we have now into a widespread practice that people no longer need to invest attention in.

[dullcrisp]

Yes but we’re also not suffering from starvation and disease as much to the best of my knowledge, so that’s something.

[simmerup]

Cutting out sugar made such an improvement to my life that now whenever I see food companies trying to sell us shit and say it’s healthy I get inordinately angry with them.

[hedora]

Remember: Carbs turn to the same thing as added sugar before they even hit your stomach.

My current approach is to look at the % daily value for carbs and for fiber whenever I buy bread, cereal, etc. If the carbs are higher than the fiber I buy something else.

There are a few switches that worked out particularly well: Flour -> Corn tortillas, and the Ezekiel brand (or other recipies-from-the-bible-themed varieties from the same company) sprouted whole grain bread at the store.

Stuff marked "low carb" or "keto" often is primarily mode of bizarre ingredients like extracted starch. Worse, they often contain artificial / organic non-caloric sweeteners that are way worse than just eating sugar.

[ta988]

> Carbs turn to the same thing as added sugar before they even hit your stomach

This is not true, you have amylase in your saliva that has a tiny impact on breaking down starches. While there is a little bit of hydrolysis in the stomach, most of the break down happens in the small intestine for smaller oligosaccharides (pancreatic and small intestine enzymes mostly) and the colon for large ones including most fibers (bacteria are doing it)

[goostavos]

fwiw, your mileage may vary, [insert hedge here], but getting my vitamin D levels up to normal ranges had very outwardly visible changes to my health. I had crazy alopecia barbae (people would ask if I was in some kind of accident). Talked to a doc, doc ran some tests, found my levels were in the gutter, told me to start supplementing, and then over the course of a few months, this whole auto-immune thing, something I've dealt with my entire life, cleared up. Felt like a magic trick.