Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yjftsjthsd-h 1225 days ago
Sugar - sadly - isn't a spice.
1 comments

The title is implying tasting good = healthy.
My point is that there's room for a little more nuance than that; "your body likes X because it's good for you" doesn't imply a universal rule, just a specific correlation.
It's really more like tasting good = evolutionarily useful.
Which is true for sugar. It's good if you get a few grams of sugar while running around the forest all day. It's not good to get half a pound of sugar from big gulp softdrinks while you're sitting in traffic.
Not necessarily, even in the evolutionary biology model. Something can taste good to humans entirely by accident, and be evolutionarily neutral (or even a small amount negative). Just like the reason men have nipples.
This is probably more true of sweet-tasting poisons like lead diacetate than sugars.
This is one of the dangerous concepts pushed by the “Intuitive Eating” pro-obesity folks.
When in doubt: Paracelsus!

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”