One day about 3 years ago I quit sugar "cold turkey." At the time I was rather highly motivated by seeing a friend nearly killed by necrotizing fasciitis. (Not that his illness was sugar related. It's just that seeing a close friend nearly die puts things in perspective.)
My taste changed within just a couple of weeks. By the third or fourth week if I accidentally drank sweetened iced tea instead of unsweetened I would nearly spit it out due to the awful taste. I also cut out all artificial sweeteners, effectively eliminating any experience of sweetness from my diet. I think previously I had drunk so much Diet Coke and eaten so many sugary things that I had conditioned myself to need that sweet taste on a regular schedule. I think one thing that helped was that I started making tea using high-quality, whole-leaf teas from adagio.com. They have such interesting flavors, I find they don't need sugar.
I'm not sure I can speak to the work-related effects of not eating sugar since I was spending most of the time in the hospital with my friend. I can say that my overall mood became much more stable; there were no more mid-afternoon crashes and I genearlly found I had more energy. Being about 360 pounds at the time, this one dietary change was enough for me to lose 60 pounds over the next 12 months while still leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle.
I have just quit sugar cold turkey. Carbohydrates in general, actually. (< 20 grams per day.) One thing that I will highly recommend to everyone who is trying to do this: small amounts of powdered Psyllium supplement. The best known brand in the US is Metamucil. This might set off some mental alarms, as it is marketed as a "laxative." However, it's just a concentrated source of soluble fiber that acts to bulk up material passing through the gut, helping to keep it passing through. This prevents many of the disadvantages of eating mostly foods that are rich in proteins and fats. The instructions on this stuff allow for 1 to 3 doses per day. I'm only taking 1/2 a dose at any one time, so it's acting more as a fiber supplement.
That said, I also cook and eat lots of vegetables. (Green beans are quick and great! Just rinse them, steam them, and don't eat any inedible looking ends. It's best if you don't overcook them.) I never feel run down after meals any more like I used to, though I can still feel a bit tired after a particularly high fat meal. On the whole, I have a lot more energy, though I have been told that I'm a lot more irritable now. Maybe it's time to do some programming "in anger?"
It's interesting you mention diet coke, the whole artificial sugars are probably doing as much damage and your right to mention them as any artifical sugar substitute is designed to feed into that sugar addiction/stimulate taste buds and will effect how you taste and eat food.
I'm still on my transition phase, having moved from desert spoons to teas spoon in my coffee and diet softdrinks, though I do like a full fat cola with food. But have been interested in this berry they have which makes bitter/sour things taste sweeter. That is something that does seem to be a more palatable approach to quelling sugar addiction and could make for a rather nice cup of coffee, evern the cheaper stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum is the bean which I'm on about and you may of heard of it already in the name `miracle fruit`.
All that said, I don't think anybody can name a person that has regretted giving up sugar, though I'm happy to sit in the moderatly decling usage and wont deny it.
But we all blame the sweets as children, even though as children we have a bias towards sweet tasting foods. This is genetic and a health preserving one as well as sour/bitter foods are in general covers most posioness edibles and it is not until we get older do we loose that bias and aquire a more palatable acceptance to bitter/sour tasting foods and drinks. Our eyesight also is biased to the red spectrum when were younger and biases towards blue as we get older, again red being dangerous in nature.
So geneticly there are reasons we are all born sugar addicts, and given the reasons and the way civilisation is modernising forward then it is a trait that may eventualy drop from our genetic code, though that will still be a long way away due to the benifit it serves babies and small children who are still learning what and what they can and can not eat.
Congratulations! But I should note that it is very very difficult to quit refined sugar completely. Many things that are not sweet at all can have sugar or hfcs added to them. This includes most bread, pizza, ketchup, all kinds of sauces and marinades, most salad dressings, etc.
Tragically, when cheap hfcs appeared, the food industry decided to start putting the stuff everywhere. Now it is very hard to avoid it even if you do not eat anything sweet.
I also love interesting teas and find that Red Rose orange pekoe tea is delightful without any sweeteners. It used to advertise as being "only available in Canada" but surely that's no longer true. (What fool would limit their business to such a small market?)
As a kid, my Grandmother weaned me off soda (and she wasn't sly about it---she outright told me what she was doing). At first, she got me to drink iced tea with as much sugar as I wanted. Once I got to the point of drinking tea out of habit, she then had me slowly lower the amount of sugar I added.
These days, I prefer unsweetened iced tea. I may add sugar to hot tea (usually black teas) but not often. I also found that soda tastes a bit odd to me these days.
While the entry notes some well-known harms of sugar, it fails to note a few thing points:
- Sugar withdrawal can be modestly severe, but it's not physiologically habituating, and a couple of weeks of abstinence will get you through the worst of it.
- Quantity, quality, and timing matter. Keeping total carbohydrate low (~50 - 150g day) will minimize much of the effects. Keeping sugars/carbs mostly low-glycemic minimizes the negative impacts. Consuming carbs in the morning or post-exercise (when body stores are naturally depleted) puts them where they can be utilized immediately (liver and muscle glycogen stores, not converted to fats).
- Much of the sugar in the standard American / standard western diet (SAD/SWD) is in the form of hidden, added sugars in processed foods. A teaspoon of added sugar in tea is minimal. The 10 teaspoons in a 12 oz. can of Coke (or any other soft drink) are rather more. Or the sugars in various canned, prepared, baked, or other foods. Make your own food or eat raw / natural / unprepared foods and you'll greatly reduce your sugar intake.
- Exercise, both strength training and cardio, change how your body processes sugar, and greatly reduces the negative effects of same.
> Sugar withdrawal can be modestly severe, but it's not physiologically habituating, and a couple of weeks of abstinence will get you through the worst of it.
Simple carbs spike serotonin levels, and then collapse them soon afterwards. People want to feel good, so they eat more sugar, which leads to another spike. This is by definition addictive!
It is also a vicious cycle. Too much sugar consumption can lead to obesity, which can then lead to depression, and of course sugar is already a person's go to treatment for feeling "down".
Off the top of my head, a large part of his problem seems to be the need to overdramatize issues like this.
If he's that biorythmically dependant upon sugar, then the likely problem is that he's not getting sufficient sugar elsewhere in his diet. He could reduce the sugar in his tea while adding fruit and likely achieve the same end more effectively (while upping fibre intake, for example).
But phrasing this as a problem of addiction to a "poison" is a loaded approach that closes off less dramatic and likely much more effective measures. And honestly, if his weight's not a problem, then relax and enjoy your addiction--you could have it a lot worse :)
Just a sidenote: fruits are carby, so you still have the same problem if you replace wheat/sugar with fruit. They are slightly better for you because of the balance of fiber, but if you just replace wheat and sugar for fruit you are likely to end up similar health issues.
The reason that peer pressure to do drugs is so intense is that for those doing the pressuring, you look like a crazy person.
They look at the vast majority of people in their environment who do drugs on a regular basis, often throughout their entire lives, and appear to be fine and happier for it. Then they look at you and, since you are in the minority, immediately conclude that you are overreacting.
I grew up with a few friends who abstained from drugs completely. As they grew older and gained perspective, they slowly let down their guard and most of them fell into familiar patterns of reasonably healthy, occasional drug use. A few others had drug problems.
The fact is that a minority of people have the right mix of personality, circumstances and chemistry to become addicts. To make the decision to abstain from any kind of drug use, you are eliminating the small chance that you could become an addict, which is commendable. But what you don't know is that eliminating that chance comes at a great cost. What your peers were trying to tell you was "dude, trust us, it's worth the risk!" A good friend might have said, "friend, if you never take risks, you'll never experience the full richness of life!"
If I were your friend, I would say, quite honestly, that I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances. The insight that they provide is, in my opinion, essential to developing an open mind and a deeper perspective on life. Moreover I would be wary of anybody so, to me, risk averse.
But your argument would still be that I don't properly understand the risks. Perhaps that is true, but here is my point:
I respect your decision to eliminate the risk of your becoming an addict, but I don't think that it is appropriate for you to be indignant. Rather, you should be sorrowful.
> I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances.
EXCUSE ME? I'm sorry, but give me a fucking break!
I work hard, hit my deadlines, contribute to open source, am loyal to my friends, ready to help at the drop of a hat, and I'm risk-taking enough to be an entrepreneur, yet, look out, I can't be trusted because I choose not to smoke it up? How does that follow logically?
I've attended many parties through the years (the early ones were what are so commonly called "drinking parties" because, well, they're college and high school kids getting drunk), and I grew up in a family who enjoy with a few beers after work and on the weekends.
And throughout this exposure, I've never once had even the slightest itch to actually partake, despite the incredible amounts of peer pressure. But I attended the parties, I hung out with my friends and watched them get drunk (and later high, as they experimented further), and never once I did think "Hey, these conversations are so stimulating, I should totally do this too to improve my cognitive faculty."
No, I thought "Hey, you continue doing what you're doing. Me? I'm going to go back to playing the piano and talking with whomever is coherent enough to hold a conversation, and tomorrow, we'll laugh about all the stupid shit you won't remember doing."
Instead, watching folks get drunk, and holding conversations with folks who were high has only helped to strengthen my complete lack of desire to do these drugs. Not because of some aversion to risk, but because I just frankly don't like what I see in people when they are under the influence - they're generally just idiots.
And yet, despite all this, I know I can trust the trustworthy and not trust the untrustworthy, and I do not hold it against someone if they choose to enjoy certain recreational drugs. Indeed, despite my teetotalism, I paid for the open bar at my wedding.
Frankly, your almost complete trust-wise dismissal based on such a trivial criterion as "willingness to do drugs" is as closed-minded as I can imagine. At least I haven't completely written off an entire section of the population because of a disagreement in how we spend free time.
Let me guess, do you smoke tobacco? If so, have you tried to quit?
It is very untrue that only a minority of people have the right mix of personality, circumstances and chemistry to become addicts. There are indeed drugs which are not particularly addicting for most of us (eg marijuana, LSD). There are other drugs which most people who try them will not do them enough to get addicted (eg heroin and alcohol - though alcohol is one of the few where withdrawal symptoms can kill addicts). And then there are drugs which really do wind up causing addiction in a large portion of people who use them (eg tobacco, caffeine, crack).
Furthermore even if the odds of getting messed up by drugs is small, the potential consequences are not. For instance if I look at relatives I find one who died from lung cancer caused by smoking, another whose brain is still scrambled many years after quitting meth, another who has a constant battle to avoid becoming a crack-head, and yet another who is permanently messed up from fetal alcohol syndrome. Note, I'm not going to friends here - just looking at siblings, nieces, and nephews, including those by marriage. (Yes, I do come from a large family...)
I personally use mind-altering substances responsibly and in moderation. But given how wrong it can go, I would NEVER push someone to use them who was not comfortable. And I would NEVER pooh pooh the risks.
Every single person I know that does drugs performs at or less than their potential. I've never done anything except for caffeine and alcohol, but this perspective you write about is overrated when it comes at the cost of performance, work ethic, and the possible risk of life altering addiction. It should, of course, be legal to do so.
That's pretty disingenuous. 23 million Americans have used drugs/alcohol to the point of needing treatment: http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/08/study-22-million-am...
That's 7% of the population, including children under 12. Take the pre-peer-pressure group out and it starts to look more like Russian Roulette. I'd hardly call that a risk worth taking.
If I were your friend, I would say, quite honestly, that I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances. The insight that they provide is, in my opinion, essential to developing an open mind and a deeper perspective on life. Moreover I would be wary of anybody so, to me, risk averse.
Disagree strongly. I won't discuss personal experiences (real name) and my own usage history is actually quite moderate and I haven't used any (including alcohol beyond one drink) in 4 years, but I've known some heavy users, studied a bit of psychopharmacology, and probably know more about these drugs than you do.
It's true that most people who use psychedelics have positive experiences. These drugs probably shouldn't be illegal (even though I think it is extremely unwise, for most people, to use them). Some of them are probably safer than alcohol.
Still, I think you exaggerate the insight you get out of drug use. You had that creative and spiritual potential inside of you. It's just that most adults are too uptight to unlock it without a chemical crutch, but it's there and people have been experiencing it for centuries without using psychoactive substances.
People who start using drugs regularly start attributing everything that is interesting, creative, or spiritual in their life to the substances they ingest, the "plant teachers". I'm not talking about addiction because the most interesting drugs are generally non-addictive psychedelics, so much as a kind of subtle reliance that creeps up on a person. It can be very destructive in the long term, and yes, I've seen people destroy their minds with psychedelic overuse.
It's important to separate artifacts (visuals, strange thoughts, perceptions of paranormal ability) from the real stuff-- insight, clarity, spiritual experience. Drugs provide a lot of artifacts and some insight. Meditation provides almost no artifacts but more insight. At my age (29) I'm pretty solidly convinced that artifacts are not desirable. Some are beautiful, some are terrifying, but all involve divorce from reality. What we should be doing is diving into reality and figuring out ways to improve it (mostly through mundane processes like being better people, learning, and treating each other better). Karma's real, and the better your actions are, the better your experiences will be.
Psychedelics seem to be karmic accelerators. They seem to speed up time 100-1000x in that regard: months or years of psychological change, growth or decay, and karmic fruition in a few hours. That might seem like a good thing, but it's often dangerous. You might be "3 months away" from a psychological crisis that, if you actually had that much time to address and resolve the issue, you could weather.
I'm not saying no one should use drugs-- indigenous Americans who use low doses of psychedelics for spiritual purposes seem to have no problem-- but if you do it, you're on the bleeding edge of something that no one understands very well, and in a very demanding (if you're a typical drone, you should never go on a trip on a normal weekend; you need at least 2 office-free days on each end) and intolerant society like ours, it can lead to some really bad outcomes. Worse than the drugs themselves is the way society reacts to them and the changes in people who use them. I've seen people lose jobs because of otherwise manageable HPPD and spiral out of control from there.
Finally, drugs are unnecessary. You can have interesting experiences without them. Most of what makes a good shrooms trip great is spending 6 hours in nature in a somewhat meditative state. How many adults go out into park and sit and think for 6 hours? Almost none, and if they had the mindfulness skill to do this, we'd have a better world. If you learn how to meditate (I don't want to trivialize this because spiritual growth is a lifelong effort, but you can become basically capable pretty quick) you can have experiences of similar quality-- if it's important to you and you make the time. No, you won't get many artifacts through meditation, but I've seen enough people go actually insane not to want artifacts.
Why should I try recreational drugs? I see very little benefit and a noticeable risk.
Conversely, I fly airplanes for fun and have a wonderful time doing it. Should I look down on people who have never tried that, the way you stupidly look down on people who don't agree with you on drugs?
Personal anecdote: I just started a ~30-50g carb a day diet 15 days ago. I had maybe 2 days of withdrawal from all the sugar/carbs I used to consume, but afterwards had way more energy than I ever did in recent memory. (Assuming you eat the right amount of fat/protein.) After 2 weeks I've also lost 10 lbs (4.53 kg). I recommend everyone give it a try to see how it changes your daily routine and general sense of health.
I've done that a number of times, and I always feel like I have more energy, lose weight, etc. It's fantastic.
But the problem is, carbs are so damned tasty. I always wind up starting to eat a few french fries, a piece of croissant in the morning, a bit of crusty baguette, a bit of cherry pie, a homemade chocolate-chip cookie, a buttered toasted English muffin, a waffle, kettle potato chips, a hamburger with bun, a slide of brick oven thin-crust pizza...
...and pretty soon you're back to where you were before. I eat a lot less carbs now than I used to, and make sure they always have high fat content so I eat less (lots of olive oil on bread/pizza, cookies with lots of butter, etc.), and also try to make sure they're tasty enough to be worth it.
But it's really hard to say no to so many of the delicious things out there!
I can see it now; Soft drink cans with sugar will start having to do pictures akin to the smoking ones. First there will be the small label warning, then the larger ones, then the full blown pictures of somebody out of a horror movie type extreme. Heck even a picture of dirty British teeth (I'm a Brit so I'm allowed that one pandering to cliché). It will happen eventually.
But that is only if people start using it irresponsibly, like anything, be it water, any vitamin, in excess will not work out great for you. It is when it starts having a noticeable effect upon many that laws and acts change. That is one drive of change, but probably the first sign will be insurance forms asking how many sugars you have in your coffee and how many per week/day.
But as long as I don't have to hovel outside a fire door in the poring rain to get my sugar fix then I'm not too worried about my addiction, worry causes more ill health than the excess sugar I consume and in that I raise my cup (though I did use brown sugar and I'm talking the supermarket version).
I'm kind of surprised to see this one on HN, it definitely wasn't the intention, there is no link to hacking here as far as I can see.
That said, now that it is there it is a great source of feedback, for all those that have made constructive suggestions in this thread and in the comments on the blog post, thank you very much, and I will certainly take some of those suggestions to heart and implement them.
I skimmed the comments and did not see this obvious suggestion: you are not really drinking tea, you are drinking tea-coke. Just start drinking the real stuff, a few leaves of green Chinese tea in hot water. I usually go for longjing tea. It is a tad sour with chocolate fragrance. No one would ever add sugar in this dope.
It also sounds like you're addicted to caffeine. You're probably addicted to Gluten as well.
The paleo/primal food lifestyle would probably interest you greatly.
(notably, sugar is my most major vice - I kicked gluten, caffeine, alcohol, and many other substances a long time ago. I still consume wheat here and there, but sugar (particularly in juice) is the worst.
You're not alone: sugar is the only thing I'm really addicted to, other than maybe the Internet.
The only thing that has worked for me is going completely cold turkey for my two big sugar vices: candy and soda. I haven't had candy in about a year, and I haven't touched soda in three or four years. It gets easier...I don't really crave either of those things ever anymore. I still eat things that have sugar, but I don't really go overboard with anything other than candy and soda, so it's not a problem.
Quit cold turkey; some of us can't handle moderation for some things.
"Extra frustrating because I know just how bad taking in these quantities of sugar is."
Well, the same thing can be said about anything. Drink water in excess and it can and will kill you (the dose makes the poison). These pieces are frustrating because they take something (fats, sugars, carbs, etc.) that is perfectly healthy in moderation and within a balanced diet and position it as a vice when in fact the vice is the person's over-indulgence. A better title would have been: "Something that I consume too much of will kill me one day".
I'm reading this article while drinking bottle of Red Bull and eating chocolate. Through the first paragraph I'm telling to myself "he is going to talk about sugar, he is going to talk about sugar".
Then it comes. He says "Sugar" and I scream "Fuck!!!"
I too was pretty much addicted to sugar. Mostly dessert-like foods and soda. There are a few things that will help reduce the sugar cravings:
- Eat a little more protein. No need to go crazy, but just have more protein.
- Eat more fiber. Very few people eat enough fiber. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Fruits are a great way to get some sugar, but the fructose in fruit is absorbed more slowly than a cookie.
- Have some cinnamon. I sprinkle a little cinnamon on everything. Occasionally I'll even take a cinnamon tablet. Supposedly helps with cravings.
- Drink more water. When I pretty much stopped having sugar I was having 3-4 liters (roughly a gallon) of water a day.
- Eat good fats. Nuts, peanut butter, almond butter, avocados, etc. Helps with cravings too.
- And of course exercise. There are too many good things exercise does for you.
I have pretty much stopped having sugar (other than in social situations i.e. given a piece of birthday cake). I drink my coffee black, no sugar in my tea, and don't drink any more soda.
First I thought that, too, but he mentions explicitly that tea alone doesn't work for him. So I tend to agree with what someone else on this thread said, that he might need to simply up his intake of nutrients in his diet. Especially protein and fat which produce more stable energy levels.
And yet there are multiple cogent (though possibly/probably specious) comments already about the evils of sugar with not so much as a nod to the caffeine. It's an apt illustration of the pseudo-scientific and faddish stuff that proliferates about diet, fitness, and mental health even on otherwise intelligent forums online.
A computing parallel would be "All this bloatware is killing my machine. It's so bad I have to regularly run [well-known heinous, performance-killing malware] to fix it."
I honestly wouldn't be that surprised to see a follow-up post later where the author reveals that he was checking to see whether this would exactly happen.
Something to consider regarding artificial sweeteners: your digestive tract has the same sweet-taste receptors as the taste buds on your tongue. It uses these to decide when to activate sugar metabolizing/storage pathways. Since artificial sweeteners activate the receptors on your tongue, it is reasonable to assume that they also activate the ones in your digestive tract, thus misleading your body about how much sugar it has consumed and causing it to respond inappropriately, probably causing something like a sugar crash as your body releases insulin to combat an influx of sugar that never arrives.
I can only speak for myself, but this is exactly what happens when I consume artificial sweeteners. I get tired, cranky, and hungry about 30 minutes afterwards. I switched from the 'milkshake' style protein drinks after workouts to pure whey isolate and my late night food cravings stopped completely. Too bad the whey isolate tastes, well, awful isn't strong enough of a word.
I can't tell if this article is completely serious or partially tongue-in-cheek. The bit that really stuck out at me:
"If I don’t use sugar ... then I simply get ... very low on energy. ... I’m not sure what the link is here, all I know is that without that chemical in my bloodstream for some reason I can’t get my head in first gear, let alone second or third."
I found it hard to take that seriously, given that your body will put sugar in your bloodstream regardless of what you eat, and without any sugar in your bloodstream you would quickly die.
Of course, the overall point of the article still stands.
Dunno about any one else, but I suddenly went right off sugar, suddenly it tasted foul.
I have no idea why at all. I used to have 2 teaspoons in coffee, like normal coke, sprinkle it over cereal and fruit, and so on. One day I made my usual coffee and it was just sickly. I chucked it down the sink and made a new one with out sugar and its was fantastic. Same for everything else. Weird, but there it is.
Try keeping a glass of water by you and drink that whenever you feel like having a cup of tea. If you can swap even half of your tea intake for water you'll start to feel much better within a few days since the caffeine and sugar is actually dehydrating you.
I can't help but wonder if you had acquired a taste for beer as a teenager whether you would have less of a sweet tooth now...
Abstaining from sugar, tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana seems kind of silly to me. I know that the culture on HN is to try to empower people to be supermen and do extraordinary things. But, when I think of the dedication required to abstain from all these things given the environment I live in, I feel anxiety.
I think anxiety and stress is something that is much more harmful to me than smoking a blunt or drinking a glass of whiskey. I never understood why some people take such a black and white (simple) perspective on this. I guess the only reason I could see is if someone very close to them died from one of these vices, but that is kind of an irrational reaction. I understand it, but wouldn't advocate anyone reacting that way.
In short, I don't really see how soft drugs or unhealthy foods in moderate quantity are really harmful in the grand scheme of things.
Your brain consumes a lot of energy, and it feeds off the sugar. I am not sure what studies have been done about intense concentration and conscious brain activity involved in coding and so forth, but I can see why your brain has developed a habit of relying on sugar.
Sugar is actually more addictive than many other drugs. Rats often preferred it to cocaine and got addicted to it just like a drug.
You might try varying the sugar to brown sugar or honey. Or eat fruits such as grapes which are a source of glucose! Also, apples have been known to wake you up in the morning better than coffee.
[+] [-] santry|13 years ago|reply
My taste changed within just a couple of weeks. By the third or fourth week if I accidentally drank sweetened iced tea instead of unsweetened I would nearly spit it out due to the awful taste. I also cut out all artificial sweeteners, effectively eliminating any experience of sweetness from my diet. I think previously I had drunk so much Diet Coke and eaten so many sugary things that I had conditioned myself to need that sweet taste on a regular schedule. I think one thing that helped was that I started making tea using high-quality, whole-leaf teas from adagio.com. They have such interesting flavors, I find they don't need sugar.
I'm not sure I can speak to the work-related effects of not eating sugar since I was spending most of the time in the hospital with my friend. I can say that my overall mood became much more stable; there were no more mid-afternoon crashes and I genearlly found I had more energy. Being about 360 pounds at the time, this one dietary change was enough for me to lose 60 pounds over the next 12 months while still leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle.
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
That said, I also cook and eat lots of vegetables. (Green beans are quick and great! Just rinse them, steam them, and don't eat any inedible looking ends. It's best if you don't overcook them.) I never feel run down after meals any more like I used to, though I can still feel a bit tired after a particularly high fat meal. On the whole, I have a lot more energy, though I have been told that I'm a lot more irritable now. Maybe it's time to do some programming "in anger?"
[+] [-] Zenst|13 years ago|reply
I'm still on my transition phase, having moved from desert spoons to teas spoon in my coffee and diet softdrinks, though I do like a full fat cola with food. But have been interested in this berry they have which makes bitter/sour things taste sweeter. That is something that does seem to be a more palatable approach to quelling sugar addiction and could make for a rather nice cup of coffee, evern the cheaper stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum is the bean which I'm on about and you may of heard of it already in the name `miracle fruit`.
All that said, I don't think anybody can name a person that has regretted giving up sugar, though I'm happy to sit in the moderatly decling usage and wont deny it.
But we all blame the sweets as children, even though as children we have a bias towards sweet tasting foods. This is genetic and a health preserving one as well as sour/bitter foods are in general covers most posioness edibles and it is not until we get older do we loose that bias and aquire a more palatable acceptance to bitter/sour tasting foods and drinks. Our eyesight also is biased to the red spectrum when were younger and biases towards blue as we get older, again red being dangerous in nature.
So geneticly there are reasons we are all born sugar addicts, and given the reasons and the way civilisation is modernising forward then it is a trait that may eventualy drop from our genetic code, though that will still be a long way away due to the benifit it serves babies and small children who are still learning what and what they can and can not eat.
[+] [-] hristov|13 years ago|reply
Tragically, when cheap hfcs appeared, the food industry decided to start putting the stuff everywhere. Now it is very hard to avoid it even if you do not eat anything sweet.
[+] [-] troymc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spc476|13 years ago|reply
These days, I prefer unsweetened iced tea. I may add sugar to hot tea (usually black teas) but not often. I also found that soda tastes a bit odd to me these days.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
While the entry notes some well-known harms of sugar, it fails to note a few thing points:
- Sugar withdrawal can be modestly severe, but it's not physiologically habituating, and a couple of weeks of abstinence will get you through the worst of it.
- Quantity, quality, and timing matter. Keeping total carbohydrate low (~50 - 150g day) will minimize much of the effects. Keeping sugars/carbs mostly low-glycemic minimizes the negative impacts. Consuming carbs in the morning or post-exercise (when body stores are naturally depleted) puts them where they can be utilized immediately (liver and muscle glycogen stores, not converted to fats).
- Much of the sugar in the standard American / standard western diet (SAD/SWD) is in the form of hidden, added sugars in processed foods. A teaspoon of added sugar in tea is minimal. The 10 teaspoons in a 12 oz. can of Coke (or any other soft drink) are rather more. Or the sugars in various canned, prepared, baked, or other foods. Make your own food or eat raw / natural / unprepared foods and you'll greatly reduce your sugar intake.
- Exercise, both strength training and cardio, change how your body processes sugar, and greatly reduces the negative effects of same.
Something's going to kill you. Need not be sugar.
You have agency.
[+] [-] com2kid|13 years ago|reply
Simple carbs spike serotonin levels, and then collapse them soon afterwards. People want to feel good, so they eat more sugar, which leads to another spike. This is by definition addictive!
It is also a vicious cycle. Too much sugar consumption can lead to obesity, which can then lead to depression, and of course sugar is already a person's go to treatment for feeling "down".
Thus the cycle continues.
[+] [-] fatbird|13 years ago|reply
If he's that biorythmically dependant upon sugar, then the likely problem is that he's not getting sufficient sugar elsewhere in his diet. He could reduce the sugar in his tea while adding fruit and likely achieve the same end more effectively (while upping fibre intake, for example).
But phrasing this as a problem of addiction to a "poison" is a loaded approach that closes off less dramatic and likely much more effective measures. And honestly, if his weight's not a problem, then relax and enjoy your addiction--you could have it a lot worse :)
[+] [-] JohnsonB|13 years ago|reply
Just a sidenote: fruits are carby, so you still have the same problem if you replace wheat/sugar with fruit. They are slightly better for you because of the balance of fiber, but if you just replace wheat and sugar for fruit you are likely to end up similar health issues.
[+] [-] msutherl|13 years ago|reply
They look at the vast majority of people in their environment who do drugs on a regular basis, often throughout their entire lives, and appear to be fine and happier for it. Then they look at you and, since you are in the minority, immediately conclude that you are overreacting.
I grew up with a few friends who abstained from drugs completely. As they grew older and gained perspective, they slowly let down their guard and most of them fell into familiar patterns of reasonably healthy, occasional drug use. A few others had drug problems.
The fact is that a minority of people have the right mix of personality, circumstances and chemistry to become addicts. To make the decision to abstain from any kind of drug use, you are eliminating the small chance that you could become an addict, which is commendable. But what you don't know is that eliminating that chance comes at a great cost. What your peers were trying to tell you was "dude, trust us, it's worth the risk!" A good friend might have said, "friend, if you never take risks, you'll never experience the full richness of life!"
If I were your friend, I would say, quite honestly, that I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances. The insight that they provide is, in my opinion, essential to developing an open mind and a deeper perspective on life. Moreover I would be wary of anybody so, to me, risk averse.
But your argument would still be that I don't properly understand the risks. Perhaps that is true, but here is my point:
I respect your decision to eliminate the risk of your becoming an addict, but I don't think that it is appropriate for you to be indignant. Rather, you should be sorrowful.
[+] [-] chops|13 years ago|reply
EXCUSE ME? I'm sorry, but give me a fucking break!
I work hard, hit my deadlines, contribute to open source, am loyal to my friends, ready to help at the drop of a hat, and I'm risk-taking enough to be an entrepreneur, yet, look out, I can't be trusted because I choose not to smoke it up? How does that follow logically?
I've attended many parties through the years (the early ones were what are so commonly called "drinking parties" because, well, they're college and high school kids getting drunk), and I grew up in a family who enjoy with a few beers after work and on the weekends.
And throughout this exposure, I've never once had even the slightest itch to actually partake, despite the incredible amounts of peer pressure. But I attended the parties, I hung out with my friends and watched them get drunk (and later high, as they experimented further), and never once I did think "Hey, these conversations are so stimulating, I should totally do this too to improve my cognitive faculty."
No, I thought "Hey, you continue doing what you're doing. Me? I'm going to go back to playing the piano and talking with whomever is coherent enough to hold a conversation, and tomorrow, we'll laugh about all the stupid shit you won't remember doing."
Instead, watching folks get drunk, and holding conversations with folks who were high has only helped to strengthen my complete lack of desire to do these drugs. Not because of some aversion to risk, but because I just frankly don't like what I see in people when they are under the influence - they're generally just idiots.
And yet, despite all this, I know I can trust the trustworthy and not trust the untrustworthy, and I do not hold it against someone if they choose to enjoy certain recreational drugs. Indeed, despite my teetotalism, I paid for the open bar at my wedding.
Frankly, your almost complete trust-wise dismissal based on such a trivial criterion as "willingness to do drugs" is as closed-minded as I can imagine. At least I haven't completely written off an entire section of the population because of a disagreement in how we spend free time.
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
It is very untrue that only a minority of people have the right mix of personality, circumstances and chemistry to become addicts. There are indeed drugs which are not particularly addicting for most of us (eg marijuana, LSD). There are other drugs which most people who try them will not do them enough to get addicted (eg heroin and alcohol - though alcohol is one of the few where withdrawal symptoms can kill addicts). And then there are drugs which really do wind up causing addiction in a large portion of people who use them (eg tobacco, caffeine, crack).
Furthermore even if the odds of getting messed up by drugs is small, the potential consequences are not. For instance if I look at relatives I find one who died from lung cancer caused by smoking, another whose brain is still scrambled many years after quitting meth, another who has a constant battle to avoid becoming a crack-head, and yet another who is permanently messed up from fetal alcohol syndrome. Note, I'm not going to friends here - just looking at siblings, nieces, and nephews, including those by marriage. (Yes, I do come from a large family...)
I personally use mind-altering substances responsibly and in moderation. But given how wrong it can go, I would NEVER push someone to use them who was not comfortable. And I would NEVER pooh pooh the risks.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squonk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
Disagree strongly. I won't discuss personal experiences (real name) and my own usage history is actually quite moderate and I haven't used any (including alcohol beyond one drink) in 4 years, but I've known some heavy users, studied a bit of psychopharmacology, and probably know more about these drugs than you do.
It's true that most people who use psychedelics have positive experiences. These drugs probably shouldn't be illegal (even though I think it is extremely unwise, for most people, to use them). Some of them are probably safer than alcohol.
Still, I think you exaggerate the insight you get out of drug use. You had that creative and spiritual potential inside of you. It's just that most adults are too uptight to unlock it without a chemical crutch, but it's there and people have been experiencing it for centuries without using psychoactive substances.
People who start using drugs regularly start attributing everything that is interesting, creative, or spiritual in their life to the substances they ingest, the "plant teachers". I'm not talking about addiction because the most interesting drugs are generally non-addictive psychedelics, so much as a kind of subtle reliance that creeps up on a person. It can be very destructive in the long term, and yes, I've seen people destroy their minds with psychedelic overuse.
It's important to separate artifacts (visuals, strange thoughts, perceptions of paranormal ability) from the real stuff-- insight, clarity, spiritual experience. Drugs provide a lot of artifacts and some insight. Meditation provides almost no artifacts but more insight. At my age (29) I'm pretty solidly convinced that artifacts are not desirable. Some are beautiful, some are terrifying, but all involve divorce from reality. What we should be doing is diving into reality and figuring out ways to improve it (mostly through mundane processes like being better people, learning, and treating each other better). Karma's real, and the better your actions are, the better your experiences will be.
Psychedelics seem to be karmic accelerators. They seem to speed up time 100-1000x in that regard: months or years of psychological change, growth or decay, and karmic fruition in a few hours. That might seem like a good thing, but it's often dangerous. You might be "3 months away" from a psychological crisis that, if you actually had that much time to address and resolve the issue, you could weather.
I'm not saying no one should use drugs-- indigenous Americans who use low doses of psychedelics for spiritual purposes seem to have no problem-- but if you do it, you're on the bleeding edge of something that no one understands very well, and in a very demanding (if you're a typical drone, you should never go on a trip on a normal weekend; you need at least 2 office-free days on each end) and intolerant society like ours, it can lead to some really bad outcomes. Worse than the drugs themselves is the way society reacts to them and the changes in people who use them. I've seen people lose jobs because of otherwise manageable HPPD and spiral out of control from there.
Finally, drugs are unnecessary. You can have interesting experiences without them. Most of what makes a good shrooms trip great is spending 6 hours in nature in a somewhat meditative state. How many adults go out into park and sit and think for 6 hours? Almost none, and if they had the mindfulness skill to do this, we'd have a better world. If you learn how to meditate (I don't want to trivialize this because spiritual growth is a lifelong effort, but you can become basically capable pretty quick) you can have experiences of similar quality-- if it's important to you and you make the time. No, you won't get many artifacts through meditation, but I've seen enough people go actually insane not to want artifacts.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
Conversely, I fly airplanes for fun and have a wonderful time doing it. Should I look down on people who have never tried that, the way you stupidly look down on people who don't agree with you on drugs?
[+] [-] apaprocki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|13 years ago|reply
But the problem is, carbs are so damned tasty. I always wind up starting to eat a few french fries, a piece of croissant in the morning, a bit of crusty baguette, a bit of cherry pie, a homemade chocolate-chip cookie, a buttered toasted English muffin, a waffle, kettle potato chips, a hamburger with bun, a slide of brick oven thin-crust pizza...
...and pretty soon you're back to where you were before. I eat a lot less carbs now than I used to, and make sure they always have high fat content so I eat less (lots of olive oil on bread/pizza, cookies with lots of butter, etc.), and also try to make sure they're tasty enough to be worth it.
But it's really hard to say no to so many of the delicious things out there!
[+] [-] olliesaunders|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|13 years ago|reply
But that is only if people start using it irresponsibly, like anything, be it water, any vitamin, in excess will not work out great for you. It is when it starts having a noticeable effect upon many that laws and acts change. That is one drive of change, but probably the first sign will be insurance forms asking how many sugars you have in your coffee and how many per week/day.
But as long as I don't have to hovel outside a fire door in the poring rain to get my sugar fix then I'm not too worried about my addiction, worry causes more ill health than the excess sugar I consume and in that I raise my cup (though I did use brown sugar and I'm talking the supermarket version).
[+] [-] jarin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
That said, now that it is there it is a great source of feedback, for all those that have made constructive suggestions in this thread and in the comments on the blog post, thank you very much, and I will certainly take some of those suggestions to heart and implement them.
[+] [-] gbog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meric|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ixiaus|13 years ago|reply
The paleo/primal food lifestyle would probably interest you greatly.
(notably, sugar is my most major vice - I kicked gluten, caffeine, alcohol, and many other substances a long time ago. I still consume wheat here and there, but sugar (particularly in juice) is the worst.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|13 years ago|reply
The only thing that has worked for me is going completely cold turkey for my two big sugar vices: candy and soda. I haven't had candy in about a year, and I haven't touched soda in three or four years. It gets easier...I don't really crave either of those things ever anymore. I still eat things that have sugar, but I don't really go overboard with anything other than candy and soda, so it's not a problem.
Quit cold turkey; some of us can't handle moderation for some things.
[+] [-] zdean|13 years ago|reply
Well, the same thing can be said about anything. Drink water in excess and it can and will kill you (the dose makes the poison). These pieces are frustrating because they take something (fats, sugars, carbs, etc.) that is perfectly healthy in moderation and within a balanced diet and position it as a vice when in fact the vice is the person's over-indulgence. A better title would have been: "Something that I consume too much of will kill me one day".
[+] [-] eavc|13 years ago|reply
Sugar may be a red herring here. That sounds like a massive caffeine dependency.
[+] [-] crazygringo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lubos|13 years ago|reply
Then it comes. He says "Sugar" and I scream "Fuck!!!"
[+] [-] fingerprinter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kishin|13 years ago|reply
- Eat a little more protein. No need to go crazy, but just have more protein.
- Eat more fiber. Very few people eat enough fiber. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Fruits are a great way to get some sugar, but the fructose in fruit is absorbed more slowly than a cookie.
- Have some cinnamon. I sprinkle a little cinnamon on everything. Occasionally I'll even take a cinnamon tablet. Supposedly helps with cravings.
- Drink more water. When I pretty much stopped having sugar I was having 3-4 liters (roughly a gallon) of water a day.
- Eat good fats. Nuts, peanut butter, almond butter, avocados, etc. Helps with cravings too.
- And of course exercise. There are too many good things exercise does for you.
I have pretty much stopped having sugar (other than in social situations i.e. given a piece of birthday cake). I drink my coffee black, no sugar in my tea, and don't drink any more soda.
[+] [-] gburt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eavc|13 years ago|reply
A computing parallel would be "All this bloatware is killing my machine. It's so bad I have to regularly run [well-known heinous, performance-killing malware] to fix it."
I honestly wouldn't be that surprised to see a follow-up post later where the author reveals that he was checking to see whether this would exactly happen.
It's pretty frustrating to watch.
[+] [-] rcthompson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pault|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcthompson|13 years ago|reply
"If I don’t use sugar ... then I simply get ... very low on energy. ... I’m not sure what the link is here, all I know is that without that chemical in my bloodstream for some reason I can’t get my head in first gear, let alone second or third."
I found it hard to take that seriously, given that your body will put sugar in your bloodstream regardless of what you eat, and without any sugar in your bloodstream you would quickly die.
Of course, the overall point of the article still stands.
[+] [-] alan_cx|13 years ago|reply
I have no idea why at all. I used to have 2 teaspoons in coffee, like normal coke, sprinkle it over cereal and fruit, and so on. One day I made my usual coffee and it was just sickly. I chucked it down the sink and made a new one with out sugar and its was fantastic. Same for everything else. Weird, but there it is.
[+] [-] wldlyinaccurate|13 years ago|reply
I can't help but wonder if you had acquired a taste for beer as a teenager whether you would have less of a sweet tooth now...
[+] [-] sbochins|13 years ago|reply
I think anxiety and stress is something that is much more harmful to me than smoking a blunt or drinking a glass of whiskey. I never understood why some people take such a black and white (simple) perspective on this. I guess the only reason I could see is if someone very close to them died from one of these vices, but that is kind of an irrational reaction. I understand it, but wouldn't advocate anyone reacting that way.
In short, I don't really see how soft drugs or unhealthy foods in moderate quantity are really harmful in the grand scheme of things.
[+] [-] EGreg|13 years ago|reply
Sugar is actually more addictive than many other drugs. Rats often preferred it to cocaine and got addicted to it just like a drug.
http://sarvahealthandwellness.com/?p=402 http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/12/12/22428/
You might try varying the sugar to brown sugar or honey. Or eat fruits such as grapes which are a source of glucose! Also, apples have been known to wake you up in the morning better than coffee.