[kekebo]

[Disclaimer: Not a doctor or nutrition expert]

From what I've read about postprandial glucose levels, the question seems less about whether or not something elicits a glycemic response, but by how much and how that compares to glucose/fructose.

Another useful measure would be comparing satiation after consumption of sugar vs non-caloric sweeteners, to determine if the significant drop in calories leads to more food ingested overall.

Stevia in particular seems to be one of the lesser studied sweeteners, based on a handful of papers postprandial glucose levels doesn't seem to differ a lot compared to sugar. But there seem to be somewhat consistent findings that satiety levels remain largely the same given the same mass of ingested food ( e.g. [0][1]).

To your second question, from my view the understanding of the human microbiome is still rather poor, especially in terms of health implications on various physiological systems (including neurological), optimal composition and applicable ways to maintain it. Although the last time I checked was probably 1-2 years ago, if anyone is aware of useful new data here I would welcome a link.

[0] https://sci-hub.ee/10.3390/nu11123036

[1] https://sci-hub.ee/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I'd argue both those studies are insufficient to come to any conclusions because people do not exist for only one day, and they do not exist in only a healthy state.

A healthy subject, say in their mid twenties, should be able to consume 60g glucose almost instantaneously and have little to no affect on blood glucose. That same subject, if they were to repeatedly do that, multiple times a day, for four decades, is highly likely to have Type 2 diabetes and a heart condition, also likely to have a kidney condition, peripheral neuropathy, macular degeneration, etc take your pick.

The interesting question is what are the long term effects. There are no positive outcomes for a long term high sugar content diet, and I argue that taking any one plant derived, or synthetic chemical, concentrating it and consuming it, is either nutritively, or medically, beneficial, or, if not beneficial, will work, at least to some extent, to tax the body by making healthy homeostatic more difficult.

As an aside, and this isn't directed at you in particular, but at the HN community, if such a thing can be said to exist, more broadly: frameworks.

What frameworks exist within which do make sense of nutritional / health information. How are we to live? What are some (any?) of these frameworks, and where should we go to read about them?

[kekebo]

It's good you point that out. Two studies should almost never sufficient for a conclusive argument, especially not in a field where physiological variability may be more decisive than probability distributions derived from group studies (On average peanuts don't kill people but that's not a useful metric if you happen to be allergic).

In terms of informational frameworks regarding nutrition I have to say the landscape is quite bleak. Understanding broccoli or its effects on the human body make big pharma no money, publications are only slowly picking up speed with new (crowd-) funding options. Even worse, the lack of funding and publishing set a rather low barrier for food industry players to manipulate the field in their favor, which makes for even less solid ground (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in... ).

But there are exceptions, Rhonda Patrick comes to mind, she's mostly or fully crowdfunded, including her papers iirc. She can go very deep but is usually aimed at non specialists: https://www.youtube.com/c/FoundMyFitness/videos

And Andrew Huberman who finances his podcast through sponsors, quite dense but always trying to explain medical terms and concepts he brings up: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrewHubermanLab

As for "how are we to live" I think a good starting point nutritionally is to try and watch/feel the body reacting to different foods and maybe reading up after something feels really good or bad to maybe gain some theoretical insights. There are no studies for your body in particular but you have full production test access pretty much all of the time (I would try to prevent restarts though).

[xorcist]

It's a baffling thought that so much research is spent on which type of sugar water might cause the least amount of bad long term effects.

It's not like there is any medical need for the body to consume sugar water at all.

As recreation, sure, but doing something daily is routine, not recreation. That last part is the strange bit. Consume it every tenth meal and you can pick any type of sugar, an otherwise healthy individual would suffer no long term effects. Consume it every meal and you will.

As a though experiment, it would be interesting to think about how much research would be made into finding out which alcohol we could ingest 50 g of to every meal while minimizing long term damage.

[tene]

It doesn't baffle me; it seems pretty obvious.

Given that huge populations are consuming sugar water daily, and given the health consequences of this, information on which type of sugar water has the least-bad long-term effects is extremely valuable for harm-reduction efforts.

If "everyone should just stop drinking soda" was actually a strategy that worked, then the problem would have already been solved. It didn't work, or hasn't worked yet, so it's worth trying to check whether the variations advertised as less-harmful are actually less-harmful or not.

[xorcist]

Lots of people drink alcohol daily. But we don't collectively act as if that was something completely normal. We spend huge resources to spread the importance of drinking in moderation.

The same is true of sugar water too. Nobody has to stop drinking it. Just do it sensibly and it's not a problem.

[vanilla-almond]

Thank you for the links. I agree, it would be really useful to see more research. Newer products likes monkfruit sweetener and allulose have even less research.