[djtango]

Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself.

Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".

So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.

I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...

[porridgeraisin]

> now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter

Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.

Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:

- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]

- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]

- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]

- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.

If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.

[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".

[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.

[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.

If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.

[balamatom]

>local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland"

sure sounds like someone needs a 10kg bag of sugar to be emptied down the back of his shirt on instagram live

[badgersnake]

Sugar is a pretty important component of human aerobic respiration, so about as difficult to unplug from as breathing:

glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) + oxygen (6O₂) → carbon dioxide (6CO₂) + water (6H₂O) + energy (ATP).

[djtango]

No one is debating whether glucose is or isn't a building block for life, the problem is that humans have evolved from an existence that has of food scarcity but now lives in a world of food abundance.

Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.

This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.

Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.

My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:

"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"

Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.

Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

[logicchains]

Try the Japanese food there, it's less sweet. Singaporean local food is Southern-Chinese style food, which is always very sweet.

[djtango]

Almost every cuisine Singapore serves will be sweeter relative to the authentic recipe. For example Korean food here is so sweet my wife thought she doesn't like Korean cuisine until she went to Seoul.

Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.

Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup

[linhns]

I lived in SG for 6 years of my life, have to resort to self cooking and western food because of exactly what you pointed out here.

[tayo42]

Sushi rice might as well be candy