A homemade pastry has fewer preservatives and additives, you have greater control over the contents, requires a time and effort investment, and is not heavily marketed with prominent placement in grocery stores and appealing, colorful packaging. There are both nutritional and psychological differences between the two that make the homemade version effectively much less unhealthy for you.
False and irrelevant. False, because there's way more than one kind of sugar - glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and more, not to mention cane sugar vs. HFCS. Irrelevant, because there are other non-sugar things in commercial food products that cause you to want to consume the products more, which causes you to consume more sugar. Finally, who says that I put more sugar in my pastries than Hostess does?
I'm not sure if you're missing the point intentionally or unintentionally but while those chemicals sometimes can cause health problems later in life but the sugar is what's causing the calories that are causing the obesity that is causing the health problems we want to mitigate.
The sugar is the problem and both the pastries have the same sugar. The homemade one may be marginally better but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. The problems caused by oddball chemicals used in industrial food manufacturing are less than a rounding error compared to the problems caused by obesity.
No, it is actually both things. The sugar causes people to eat the stuff and does contribute to obesity, but sugar is only a contributer. The additives and ingredients like vegetable oils (which cause health problems of their own due to their chemical structure) also contain a lot of calories (fat contains more calories per gram than sugar).
In Australia obesity increased while sugar consumption decreased. The additives really matter and have a huge impact on human health--they are not a rounding error, but it was a great marketing tactic on behalf of various food industry groups to vilify sugar while deflecting from the other ingredients that are similarly problematic.
>ingredients like vegetable oils (which cause health problems of their own due to their chemical structure) also contain a lot of calories (fat contains more calories per gram than sugar).
Which are present in home cooked baked goods too.
I know it's not as simple as just "sugar=fat" but the difference between home cooked junk food and industrially cooked junk food is vanishingly small.
> but the difference between home cooked junk food and industrially cooked junk food is vanishingly small.
In terms of chemistry/nutrition I agree. However there is a huge difference in convienence. Pastries are a huge pain in the ass to make, and consequently I only make two or three pies a year. Store bought pastries are trivial to acquire and gorge on seven days a week.
What kind of flour has sugar in it? Most flours are a mixture of starches and protein from grinding up a grain. Starches take more work to digest than sugars, so they don't spike blood sugar levels as quickly.
You can choose to put less sugar in your homemade pastries. I sometimes bake cookies at home and I use less than half the "recommended" sugar amount, and they still taste sweet. I've never really liked commercial sweet baked food because the high amount of sugar causes a "burning" sensation when I eat them.
You can also buy sugar free pastries. You can also add extra sugar when you bake your pastries.
I don't understand how this invalidates my point that sugar is sugar. That there is no difference between sugar in commercial goods, and sugar you add when you bake at home.
Sure, I think the parallel you're trying to draw is that you can also buy diet coke instead of regular coke, but many will vehemently argue that it's not the same thing.
I'm sure given enough effort, I _could_ find cookies made with half the sugar and dark chocolate, but if you asked me right now, I honestly couldn't tell you where to find such a thing, let alone at a price comparable to run-off-the-mill chips ahoy (never mind the cost of baking them from scratch).
We can certainly be pedantic and say one molecule of glucose is identical to another, but the logistics of buying cookies on impulse at the supermarket vs taking out a mixer to make them on a saturday morning will realistically not likely yield identical amounts of sugar intake. There's also something to be said about the shock of learning how much butter goes into these things!
You can certainly buy low-sugar/no-sugar commercial goods. You can also bake pastries with extra sugar. Quantity of sugar does matter but sugar is sugar.
This kind of comment asking for it to be banned is always from an extremely uninformed person. Addictive poison, really? Wait til they see what's in fruit. Or just talk to a sports scientist about why it's in sports drinks. Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.
A 20oz bottle of Coke, which is a very common consumption choice given it's prevalence, has 65g of sugar. That is not normal sugar consumption. Fruit sugars are offset by the fiber content. Sugary beverages have no redeeming nutritional qualities.
Just avoid eating sugar when sedentary, the specific amount isn't so important. When you eat, and what other activities you're doing also matter. Chugging Gatorade and playing basketball is no big deal. Sipping Gatorade while surfing the internet is not so great.
> This kind of comment asking for it to be banned is always from an extremely uninformed person.
Shifting the responsibility for solving a problem from the government towards individual consumers so that corporations can keep making money is a tried, extremely dirty and old PR strategy, originating at least with BP: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
There is a book called Sweetness and Power by the anthropologist and historian Sidney Mintz with a thesis that the way we consume sugar is not actually so arbitrary.
According to Mintz, the production of sugar was at the heart of the transition from pre-modernity to industrial modernity. Pre-modern human diets all over the world varied widely but consisted of very little or no sugar. The production process required a ton of technological sophistication and intensive labor. Colonial era economic slavery regimes developed mostly in service of the production of sugar.
Sugar is now a huge part of diets in just about every modern culture. It really is addictive in a sense, both for individuals and in a collective economic sense (like oil, sugar consumption and production processes are dialetically self-reproducing, the argument goes).
Myself, I don't really know if we should try to constrain sugar consumption via law for moral reasons. Those efforts sometimes reek of a moralizing paternalism that I don't much care for. But the way we consume sugar, like everything else, has a history. We didn't always do it this way. We need not do it this way forever. And there's more to it than just disparate isolated individual consumption choices.
EDIT - To summarize, the way we consume sugar today is not arbitrary or "natural," but an outcome of the particular way that industrial modernity has developed.
> Addictive poison, really? Wait til they see what's in fruit.
Is that supposed to be a contradiction? It is in fruit and therefore it can't be bad? The poisonous fruit of Atropa belladonna comes to mind.
> Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.
The thing is, though, that normal sugar consumption is borderline impossible in a modern diet. You have to go out of your way to avoid sugar, it requires informed decision-making and -- all too often -- purchasing relatively expensive products. Consequently, people who lack education and/or have a low-income are particularly vulnerable.
I agree with the original comment, these products should be outright banned.
As much as I am a libertarian on allowing people to choose what to eat, the outrage reminds me of an addict being told they need to cut down/remove their addictive substance.
I don't think that rage has anything to do with addiction. If someone took away the healthy foods I like to eat I would be enraged too. People just don't like outsiders micromanaging their daily lives.
Taking away someone's preferred food can mean taking away part of their culture, a connection to memories of their childhood, the only part of their day they look forward to, etc.
People can love and care about unhealthy things without being addicted to them. Most white people would hate to give up cancer-causing time out in the sun, but that doesn't mean it's an addiction.
Maybe, but there doesn't seem to be much danger in them being enacted on a global scale. Even the OP article is treating added-sugar products like age-restricted alcohol, not an outright prohibition. We've seen what happens to laws that try to prohibit consumption in adults (soda ban).
The danger is not in banning products with added sugar, but in the government having the power to regulate what one may do with one's body. If I wish to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and drink/do coke, that is my decision.
The primary argument against that is that it puts strain on society to provide for people when they experience health issues from that. I have paid my entire life for social health programs and health insurance though, why? So I will be nannied until the age of 90, eating only approved healthy food and doing no activity that may be in some way risky?
If we are going to ban dangerous things which people do for no reason other than they enjoy it, should we go after scuba diving and mountain climbing too after we ban Snickers?
The government does have the power to regulate what you do with your body when your body interacts with the public. Cigarettes are rightly banned in enclosed spaces and shared public spaces. Alcohol is rightly banned if you combine it with operating heavy machinery. I agree that drug use should be decriminalized (complex topic), and that the outright banning of sugary products is a dumb idea.
> The government does have the power to regulate what you do with your body when your body interacts with the public.
I agree, and think this is probably for the best. My opinion is that these laws are rightful when the interaction is direct and obvious. If I smoke in enclosed spaces, I am directly increasing other peoples' chance of cancer, giving them no choice over their bodies. This is analogous to how one's freedom to move their body doesn't extend to hitting other people in the face.
I do not agree with the government imposing restriction based on indirect, ambigous harm, like the "harm to society" that drinking sugary drinks which might lead to obesity causes. Harm to society has been used to justify a myriad of harmful policies. Unless there is a very clear, direct link between an action and harm to a person, the government has no business stepping in.
(Of course, this is all just my opinion, I'm presenting this as a justification for my viewpoint.)
> The danger is not in banning products with added sugar, but in the government having the power to regulate what one may do with one's body.
But... that's not what Mexico's proposal is. It's also not the goal of any of these public health bans.
The goal of the bans is to prevent people from selling and profiting from unhealthy products. It doesn't stop individuals from producing and consuming whatever they want.
It would be a lot easier for statists if humans were merely cogs to plug into machines to advance the state, and spent all their free time at home doing nothing.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/8187/obesity-and-metabolic...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM