The agency wants to lower how much salt we consume over the next three years to an average of 2,750 milligrams per day. That’s still above the recommended limit of 2,300 mg.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday laid out fresh goals to cut sodium levels in packaged and processed foods by about 20%, after its prior efforts to address a growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases showed early signs of success.
The FDA in October 2021 had set guidelines to trim sodium levels in foods ranging from potato chips to hamburgers in a bid to prevent excessive intake of salt that can trigger high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.
The agency is now seeking voluntary curbs from packaged-food makers such as PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Campbell Soup. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
a former coworker sat and tried to convince me that sugar is neither bad for you nor addictive. the sugar lobby psychological manipulation propaganda machine is the behemoth that has to be dismantled before any meaningful change can even be attempted
this coworker was an instructional academic librarian who included confirmation bias and how to avoid it in her teaching
Sugar is NOT bad for you. Too much of anything is what’s bad.
Drinking too much water can kill you.
yea, the whole “everything is bad for you if you do enough of it to kill yourself!” is a pretty common response. and yes, that’s true. there IS a threshold for everything. one cigarette won’t kill you either.
Agreed but the cigarette analogy is not really accurate.
Sugar is arguably good for you in moderation. We evolved to seek out sugar in the form of fruits, berries, etc. Quick energy, fast acting carbohydrates etc.
Can’t think of how this translates to a single cigarette lol.
“In moderation” being the key part. As in, not selling drinks and snacks that are like 30% sugar
Agree 100%. And arguably “in moderation” is much lower than people might want it to be. Plus most of this stuff is processed with high fructose corn syrup trash.
HFCS is literally just liquid sugar.
HFCS isn’t even just one product. There are different blends that are all HFCS. At the extreme, HFCS-90, is far FAR different than table sugar. HFCS-55 is close to table sugar (which would be numbered “50” if table sugar used that same numbering scheme), and there’s HFCS-42 which is farther away from table sugar.
The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) have been successful in rebranding HFCS under a bunch of different names so you don’t know it anymore. Current labeling has HFCS-90 (the worst kind) simply called “Fructose” on ingredient labels now. source
source2 which is a bit more sketchy to me
edit: corrected first source link
TIL thanks but source one is just a betting website ad from the link.
On the flip side, those snacks and drinks are ideal for athletes.
I wouldn’t want to stop having those foods available, simply because the majority of the population are idiots when it comes to fueling their bodies.
People need to have some self control, ffs.
why not? if you’re going by “too much of anything is bad for you,” then doesn’t it follow that “NOT too much of anything isn’t necessarily bad for you”?
so yea, one soda won’t kill you = true. also one cigarette won’t kill you = true.
what i’m getting at is that your “argument” isn’t one
The human body doesn’t need nicotine to survive
The human body also doesn’t need added sugars to survive.
But it does need sugar to survive. Comparing sugar to cigarettes is kinda dumb. But you keep making whatever false equivalencies support your argument, boo.
You absolutely do not need to consume any sugar to survive.
What little sugar you do need (an absolutely tiny amount) your body can easily make itself.
Yes, sugar is needed to survive, but a normal diet with little processed foods will supply more than enough. OP is talking about added sugars which are known to increase risk of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, etc.
I agree that the comparison is dumb. Regardless, I think a better way to frame your previous statement is nicotine is a known carcinogen while glucose itself is not. Thanks for the snark lol not everything is confrontational. Ease up on your quills, hedgehog.
i never said it did, nor did i imply that it’s good for you
Comparing cigarettes to nicotine is a bad analogy. The body needs sugar (albeit a small amount) to survive. Cigarettes contain nothing the body needs.
the body needs glucose which is A sugar. but “sugar” in the context of the conversation is referring to refined sugar, which the body absolutely doesn’t need, and when it contains fructose (as in sucrose or HFCS, by far the most consumed sugars), then sorry, it’s not good
We evolved to seek out sugar because it is energy dense in a time when food wasn’t plentiful
Today we have more food than we know what to do with
Nicotine helps with neural degeneration and things like dementia and alzheimers.
Processed sugar is arguably never good for you, even in moderation.
I think you’re conflating natural occurring sugars to manmade sugars.
The natural sugars in fruits is okay. Adding 75-80% of the daily value of man made added sugars to ONE drink are what we are talking about.
Interesting. The fearmongers at school told us it could.
Yeah except that every can of coke is too much, and most people don’t have a problem with water addiction
100% of the people that come in contact with dihydrogen monoxide die.
That’s like saying arsenic isn’t bad for you, but too much is.
Sugar is indeed bad for you. Like any refined carbohydrate.
Too much sugar as it happens is an insanely small amount. Most people have had too much sugar before they’ve left the house in the morning.
We need carbohydrates, but as it happens we only need a little and we can get everything we need from a few servings of green vegetables.
Arsenic actually does seem to have a role in the human body. We might need 12-25 μg per day.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246629/
Huh. TIL.
Lead? Heroin?
I stand by my point, refined sugar isn’t even arguably good for you. A handful of jolly ranchers won’t kill you but it’s not a good source of carbohydrates.
No arguing about it. You need sugar to live. You should be getting it alongside other nutrients in regular food.
You don’t need soda to live. Empty calories are what’s bad.
You need some carbohydrates.
In no universe do you need refined sugar. You absolutely don’t need hundreds of grams of carbohydrates a day. Your body needs less than 100 grams a day and that’s being generous.
You can literally get all the carbohydrates your body needs from green vegetables or a single piece of fruit.
In other words, you should be getting it alongside other nutrients in regular food.
Which is fructose. Do you know what “refined sugar” (HFCS) is?
Well, about fructose…
In nature, fructose is usually found in about equal parts with glucose, but high-fructose corn syrup (at least the stuff used in beverages, maybe more) has more fructose than glucose.
Weird quirk about our digestion, fructose is absorbed 1:1 with glucose, so if there’s less glucose than fructose, some fructose gets left behind as excess free fructose, and that fructose can go and play with other parts of the body. It’s been found to cause childhood asthma, hypertension, coronary heart disease, and allergic sensitization.
Not all sugars are the same.