[HN Gopher] Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption and Executive F...
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Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption and Executive Function in
Children
Author : prostoalex
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-01-02 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mdpi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mdpi.com)
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| i wouldn't be surprised if causation were reversed and children
| who have slower executive function development drink more ssb's
|
| is caffeine controlled for?
| questiondev wrote:
| if you want to really know what types of hazards chemicals in
| your food check out the app yuka. i just started using it about 3
| weeks ago, you'd be surprised what is in some food products. it
| gives you science data on the additives in a product. you just
| scan the upc code
| beebeepka wrote:
| This is nothing. Back in high school, I used to drink 100 cans of
| cola a week, right up until my third heart attack.
|
| Futurama quotes aside, I don't know what to make of adults doing
| this to themselves and their children. Water is fantastic.
|
| If taste is what one is after, one can easily drop a couple bags
| of chai/tea in a liquid vessel of choice. Don't even need to brew
| it. And if one really "needs" their instant sugar kick - use some
| actual honey.
|
| Cheaper, healthier, better. In every way.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Honey is more or less chemically identical to high fructose
| corn syrup unless there is some magic protective tiny component
| to honey or poison in HCFS.
| oblak wrote:
| Both are more or less sugar, obviously. Devil is in the
| details. No need to polarize things by introducing words such
| as magic or poison.
|
| Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty
| much the same thing? Cause I just did some searching and
| literally all results (ddg, if that matters) are obviously
| politically motivated. To me, that means that no, they're not
| the same thing and there's been a lot of money spent on
| pushing that "agenda", if you will.
|
| Edit: Thanks for your input, guys. It would seem the problem
| with sugars is quantity, not quality. I am agreeing to that
| not so shocking fact.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| " _The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose, but
| the ratios in the individual honeys ranged from a high of
| 64% fructose and 36% glucose (one type of flower honey;
| table 3 in reference) to a low of 50% fructose and 50%
| glucose (a different floral source)._ "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Sugar_profile
|
| " _' HFCS 42' and 'HFCS 55' refer to dry weight fructose
| compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being
| glucose_"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
|
| So they're broadly similar.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Honey has only trace amounts of anything except sugar. In
| particular, it has no fiber.
|
| If you can find anything that shows an important difference
| from sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, report that.
| gruez wrote:
| >Do you have any links to support the notion they are
| pretty much the same thing
|
| "The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey
|
| >"HFCS 42" and "HFCS 55" refer to dry weight fructose
| compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being
| glucose.[5] HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and
| breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for
| production of soft drinks.[5]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
| colechristensen wrote:
| Wiki articles linked below confirm.
|
| Both honey and HCFS usually contain a bulk composition of a
| 40:60 to 60:40 ratio of fructose to glucose. There are
| variations in honey and different grades of HCFS. Honey
| contains a few other sugars in considerably smaller
| amounts, and a few percent of "other" stuff, HCFS likewise
| contains a bit of other material.
|
| So either you believe that the minor components of one or
| the other is what is "good" or "bad" for you or you're the
| victim of magical thinking that something "natural" is
| better than something "synthetic" despite being
| substantially identical.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I've heard it contains natural anti microbials.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Mostly owing to the fact that the concentration of sugar
| causes bacterial cells to rupture. Dry granulated sugar the
| same property. Most of the health claims I've encountered
| about honey seem highly suspect at best.
| jerkstate wrote:
| Sugar isn't just a problem in drinks.. we thought our kids were
| lactose intolerant until we talked to our pediatrician, turns out
| diarrhea in kids is commonly caused by too much sugar and not
| enough fat in the diet, so we reviewed our common meals and
| snacks, and found a LOT more than the daily recommended sugar
| intake in the "healthy" snacks like granola and yogurt, and
| chewable vitamins we gave our kids every day.. made some changes
| and the kids are much healthier, and it certainly impacts
| behavior/compliance at meal time; kids who need calories are a
| lot more willing to eat something even if it isn't their favorite
| treat.
| ObnoxiousProxy wrote:
| While the findings are quite believable and corroborates some
| other similar studies where increased sugar intake for kids may
| lower executive function/cognition, this study relies on
| executive function assessments reported by the parents which
| doesn't feel like it would be very reliable to me.
|
| Furthermore, while they account for diet in their covariate
| analysis, it's not very detailed or granuar so it doesn't account
| for other sources of sugar that these kids might be having (the
| authors acknowledge this). Based on this study it's hard to
| conclusively say whether it's the sugar that negatively impacts
| cognition or other ingredients, or vice versa whether kids with
| poor executive function prefer sweet drinks. Probably still a
| good idea to limit refined sugar intake for your own kids though.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Reasonable explanation: Those with poor executive function
| consume more beverages that taste nice but are well known to
| negatively impact your health long term.
| ineedasername wrote:
| They're kids, so parents make a lot of these choices for them,
| in which case it wouldn't be the kids' poor executive function
| causing them to drink more. Perhaps the general causal threads
| are overly indulgent parents, and SSB's are just one facet of
| that indulgence, which as a whole is what impacts executive
| function. A behavioral (instead of chemical) cause.
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| well, executive function issues are quiet heritable
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I find the idea that excessive sugar intake messes with all sorts
| of our systems entirely plausible - we definitely aren't designed
| to consume the quantities of sugar that we on average do consume;
| and especially not non-stop for years and decades.
|
| Teasing out all the causal chains will be hard work, though.
| Metabolism is really complicated. Sugar increases levels of
| insulin; fructose kicks liver into overdrive; how does that
| excessive metabolic activity work out in remote parts of the body
| such as the brain?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Well we're not designed. Plenty of our primate relatives eat
| mostly high sugar fruit based diets.
|
| More important than what we eat, we didn't evolve in an
| environment where we had infinite easily available calories.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Everywhere sugar appears in nature (with the exception of
| beehives), it comes with fiber that slows its absorption.
| Uniquely (with the exception of bees) we separate it from the
| fiber and deliver the sugar without. The whole food-
| processing industry is largely devoted to removing and
| discarding the fiber we need to remain healthy.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Just bees? What about maple syrup?
| cdot2 wrote:
| I believe theres a lot of processing before you get the
| maple syrup that you find in stores so its not really
| found in nature
| ipython wrote:
| But most people don't consume maple syrup, they consume
| high fructose corn syrup with artificial flavoring. You
| have to go out of your way and pay a lot more $$$ to get
| "real" maple syrup. For example, the ingredient list from
| Aunt Jemima syrup:
|
| CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE
| GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR,
| SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID PRESERVATIVES , SODIUM
| HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE
| katbyte wrote:
| maybe its because I'm Canadian but no one I know would
| consume anything but real maple syrup, I never
| encountered anything else until I went to the states.
| briHass wrote:
| Maple syrup is highly, highly concentrated sap. The sap
| itself is mostly 99%+ water, with just a slight sweetness
| to it. To make syrup, you have to boil away almost all of
| that water, going from gallons of sap to only a small
| amount of syrup.
|
| That boiling process and amount of sap required is partly
| why it's so expensive. It's like aged whisky: you lose so
| much of what you started with.
| wfhpw wrote:
| Making maple syrup from sap is an illuminating
| experience. You have to reduce something like 40x the
| volume of sap to create the desired quantity of syrup.
| coolso wrote:
| > Well we're not designed.
|
| At least, that's currently the prevailing theory among
| scientists.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I know, it is a metaphor.
|
| Some of our primate relatives live off fruit, but a) wild
| fruit is generally way less sugary than whatever we produce
| now, b) they are fairly far from us in many other regards
| (lifespan, anatomy, the ability to swing in the trees), so we
| cannot really derive relevant lessons on human metabolism
| from them.
|
| Our closest living relatives are chimps, who can eat tree
| bark and some leaves that we are unable to digest (they do
| not prefer them, but can eat them without ill consequences).
| Even at this relatively short evolutionary distance, our food
| requirements diverged.
| gruez wrote:
| >we definitely aren't designed to consume the quantities of
| sugar that we on average do consume; and especially not non-
| stop for years and decades.
|
| That's a poor argument. We're also not "designed" to consume
| cooked foods, drink filtered tap water, and have access to
| modern medicine (eg. prescription/OTC drugs).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Cooked food is a fairly old addition to our diet. Ancient
| humans learnt to control fire long before they evolved into
| the species that we now are. Some kind of adaptation must
| have happened - just look at our small teeth that are no more
| suitable for tearing raw meat apart.
|
| Filtered tap water isn't that different from natural water in
| streams, but I do not know nearly enough about water to
| dispute this.
|
| Prescription / OTC drugs can mess with us fairly seriously if
| not used carefully and in recommended quantities, so this is
| actually a good analogy.
|
| It is the dose that makes the poison. One Tylenol and/or 10 g
| of sugar per day won't probably harm you, but 20 Tylenols and
| half a pound of sugar per day, consumed every day for years
| and years, is another story.
| gruez wrote:
| >Filtered tap water isn't that different from natural water
| in streams.
|
| complete with chlorine and flouride added? also, from a
| microbial activity and/or organic contaminants point of
| view, tap water probably has orders of magnitude less than
| most streams.
|
| >Prescription / OTC drugs can mess with us fairly seriously
| if not used carefully and in recommended quantities, so
| this is actually a good analogy.
|
| What's the equivalent statement for "the quantities of
| sugar that we on average do consume", but for drugs? I'd
| say that a big chunk of the population consumes
| _infinitely_ more antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering
| drugs than we were "designed to consume".
| com2kid wrote:
| > complete with chlorine and flouride added? also, from a
| microbial activity and/or organic contaminants point of
| view, tap water probably has orders of magnitude less
| than most streams.
|
| > I'd say that a big chunk of the population consumes
| infinitely more antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering
| drugs than we were "designed to consume".
|
| Connecting these two topics together, there are
| localities that have naturally occurring lithium in their
| water supply. Depression and suicide rates in these areas
| are lower than average.
|
| See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-
| journal-...
| 323 wrote:
| Actually we are designed to eat cooked food:
|
| > _Human beings evolved to eat cooked food. It is literally
| possible to starve to death even while filling one's stomach
| with raw food. In the wild, people typically survive only a
| few months without cooking, even if they can obtain meat.
| Wrangham cites evidence that urban raw-foodists, despite
| year-round access to bananas, nuts and other high-quality
| agricultural products, as well as juicers, blenders and
| dehydrators, are often underweight._
|
| > _Cooked food, by contrast, is mostly digested by the time
| it enters the colon; for the same amount of calories
| ingested, the body gets roughly 30 percent more energy from
| cooked oat, wheat or potato starch as compared to raw, and as
| much as 78 percent from the protein in an egg._
|
| > _In essence, cooking--including not only heat but also
| mechanical processes such as chopping and grinding--
| outsources some of the body's work of digestion so that more
| energy is extracted from food and less expended in processing
| it. Cooking breaks down collagen, the connective tissue in
| meat, and softens the cell walls of plants to release their
| stores of starch and fat. The calories to fuel the bigger
| brains of successive species of hominids came at the expense
| of the energy-intensive tissue in the gut, which was
| shrinking at the same time--you can actually see how the
| barrel-shaped trunk of the apes morphed into the
| comparatively narrow-waisted Homo sapiens. Cooking freed up
| time, as well; the great apes spend four to seven hours a day
| just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the
| intellect._
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-
| makes...
| mrfusion wrote:
| It would be interesting to study the metabolisms of animals that
| live entirely on sugar. Hummingbirds, nectar eating insects,
| sugar cane weevil.
|
| How does insulin work for them? Do they get intense blood sugar
| spikes whenever they eat?
| ineedasername wrote:
| It could simply be that parents who let their children have SSB's
| regularly also indulge them in general, and that indulgence is
| what leads to the change in executive function.
|
| Also this sounds like changing the goal posts a bit too much
| after the study protocol was already set:
|
| _The distribution of SSB consumption status was highly skewed,
| and transformation of data was not feasible owing to the large
| number of people who reported never drinking SSB. Therefore, the
| frequency of SSB consumption was aggregated and then a new intake
| category was categorized in order to ensure an adequate number of
| participants in each group._
| mlyle wrote:
| Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are
| "bad", and so letting your kids have a lot of soda shows that
| you don't really care about parenting norms or data about
| what's good for kids.
|
| And a lot of people who don't care about parenting norms at all
| are probably dubious parents in other ways...
|
| There's no attempt here to case control for other factors.
|
| Worse, the parents' own reported measures of children's
| executive function were used.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are
| "bad",
|
| 20 years ago juice was good. In the US (linked study was done
| in China), I saw older friends having kids bringing home
| pamphlets from the doctor's office extolling the virtues of
| 100% fruit juice. Juice being bad is a very recent thing, and
| it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that some
| parents didn't Get The Memo, but they are otherwise still
| "good parents".
|
| Or they may just have given up the fight over juice. Pick
| your battles and all that, and without any research showing
| juice was really "that" bad, parents may have figured it
| wasn't a battle worth fighting over.
| wffurr wrote:
| Or those juice pamphlets were planted by Big Juice in a
| psyops move to increase juice sales and juice being "good
| for you" is a semi-recent invention, only recently
| overturned in favor of "juice is not good for you".
| com2kid wrote:
| > Or those juice pamphlets were planted by Big Juice in a
| psyops move to increase juice sales
|
| It wasn't psyops, it was just marketing.
|
| The problem is, without evidence to the contrary, doctors
| are as want to go along with "common sense" as everyone
| else.
|
| Thus, when "common knowledge" because "fruit juice is
| good for you" doctors just nodded their head and agreed
| with the advice, until evidence to the contrary come out.
| m1ckey wrote:
| Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, MD
|
| https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
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