As a non American some of these numbers are just mind boggling. Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar, a 'medium' Dr Pepper with 67g of sugar and a large with 96g.
Sugar content is a function of serving size, of course.
The astonishing thing to me is that we can sell a 32 fl oz (950 mL) drink as "large", instead of "a week's supply of empty calories that you should never consume in one sitting".
I distinctly remember having my mind blown by fast food drink sizes when I visited the US. A "small" there felt like what we would call "large" here in Russia. Our small soda is usually 300 ml at most.
Activity level matters a lot. Genetics matter a lot. There are a lot of late teen boys (teen boys are likely in sports at school, and hormones means they will use a lot of energy anyway) who need 6000 calories per day. There are a lot of adults only only need 1700 per day (they really should exercise more!). We can talk about the 2000 calories daily requirement, but that is a round number that is close enough for discussion but not really relevant to any individual.
What you grew up with matters - if your body is always low on calories it will compensate by growing less, so if you someone young gets calories they will tend to be larger (there is a lot of genetic variation between humans that makes hard to measure at levels smaller than national population over decades), in various ways and need more calories to maintain the same weight. It isn't clear if this shows up in anything other than body size though some suspect it does.
There is also the question about what people eat between meals. Some people eat big meals but never snack between meals. Some people don't eat much at a meal - but they always have snacks in between. There is a lot of variation. I know some people who get half their calories from soda (beer is another large source of calories for some people, but that starts to get into alcoholism).
There is probably more that you don't know about others and so be careful about drawing any conclusions.
You're missing the forest for the trees, and the point of OP.
That growing young male teen you reference (not sure why we need to focus on boys, here) would not in any circumstance choose a 500ml Coca Cola to satiate their "hormones". Nor word any trained dietican.
That's the point of this discussion. There is enough information to learn everything about a healthy balanced diet. Your point is not that; rather your point is that there are....different habits of animals. Yes, agreed.
> Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”
My immediate thought while reading the article was both "What counts as 'added' sugar?" and "Who is making this 'daily recommended amount of added sugars'?"
Of course, all of this information is already available via nutrition facts for most sold foods.
The root problem here doesn't seem to be the availability of information, I expect it to be more about the availability of time and effort to spend on priority of personal health. I don't think the issue is that people don't know that food isn't bad for them, it's that their health is lower priority than their immediate needs of feeding themselves and their families.
If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers. The _fact_ (X Grams of Sugar) is on the package but the logo indicates that the food contains more than x grams of "recommended" "added" sugars, two things that can be misunderstood and/or gamed.
> If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers
Drinks in particular are tricky here. Take apple juice for example. You can have 2 brands with vastly different sugar levels and neither has added sugar. Just different concentrations.
Consumers (especially kids) will generally prefer the sweeter brand. And it all sounds healthy because it’s marketed as pure fruits! It’s even true, the juice is pure fruit. Just in concentrations that are extremely unhealthy.
The stats say it has greatly decreased sugar consumption in soft drinks. From my point-of-view (someone who rarely drinks soft drinks) it seems that most soft drinks now mix artificial sweeteners and sugar, so effectively all soft drinks are now "diet" varieties.
It's really annoying. I also drink soft drinks very rarely but if I want, say, tonic water that doesn't taste like crap I need to splash out on a premium product. Other things (e.g. cranberry juice drink) are simply unavailable without artificial sweetener. Reduced salt snacks are also shite. It is hard to find a treat that is still actually a treat.
Sizes tend to be a lot smaller. One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre! In the UK it's roughly half that size at 500ml.
As the sugar level is directly proportionate to the overall volume, it can be quite surprising how much sugar there is when you aren't used to such massive servings.
> One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre!
There are two sizes of single-serving sodas sold commercially in the US.
A small one, a can, is 12 oz, 355 mL.
A large one is 20 oz, 591 mL.
To buy a 32-ounce soda, you'd have to do something very strange.
(There is another common commercial size, the two liter bottle of exactly 2000 mL. Those aren't intended to be bought and drunk; they're intended to be bought, taken home, and stored in your refrigerator over time.)
A gas station? No, they'd be selling prepackaged sodas in the 20-oz size.
You might be able to do it at a 7-11, since they sell empty cups that you're meant to fill with a slurpee. I don't know if they also have soda fountains to fill those cups.
I don't think they do, people move around and swap seats. I expect they just find the losses small enough to write off. I was once travelling shortly after being issued a new debit card, but still had the old one in my wallet and used it by mistake and I wasn't charged. They never tracked me down for the cost of that packet of crisps!
I often enjoy movies that are unexpected and don't fit neatly into one established genre, but I think these tend to get lower audience ratings, while films that deliver to expectations do better, even if most of a randomly selected audience would dislike them.
If a movie is a comedy, with a poster with big red letters and a white background, people know it's a certain kind of movie, and mostly those who enjoy those movies will go see it.
Likewise with documentaries about some niche interest - those who watch it mostly sought it out because they're into that.
When cutting potatoes into chunks, for something like a stew, I often find myself thinking about this problem, and how I would write a program for a robot to do it.
They are fairly well approximated as ellipsoids of different sizes. Typically, I want pieces around half the volume of the smallest potatoes, but with the range of sizes, this means cutting the larger ones into at least 5 pieces.
While it would be simple to make parallel slices giving equal volume, these would have very different shape to the halved smalls. Some can be quartered to give nice chunks, others into thirds with 2 perpendicular cuts...
That was one part of the article I found questionable-
"If the body needs salt, those chips will cause a surge of pleasurable dopamine to flood the brain. If the body doesn’t need salt, that dopamine drip disappears"
Surely this second part is false? Most of us have got used to high levels of salt in modern diets, and prefer the taste of salty things even when we've had way more sodium than we need.
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