[fouric]

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.

[macspoofing]

>A homemade pastry has fewer preservatives and additives

Sugar is sugar.

[ehutch79]

Not really. There's a difference between cane sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

Not that too much can sugar is good for you either, but it's more expensive, so before the advent of corn syrup, less was used.

[fouric]

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?

[jeffreyrogers]

Those things aren't sugar though.

[throwaway0a5e]

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.

[jeffreyrogers]

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.

[throwaway0a5e]

>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.

[liability]

> 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.