[tpm]

Yesterday I ate lots of sugar in the form of sweets. It happened during a 100km bike ride (against a strong headwind even) and I would otherwise bonk [0], so I'm pretty sure it was good for me, my arteries and my weight loss. And that's the issue with simple messaging like 'sugar bad'.

0. https://www.ride25.com/cycling-blog/bonking-birds-bees/

[prewett]

Citing a 100 km bike ride as a counter-example is not very helpful. Sure, technically, the parent was worded as an absolute statement, but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier that it is irrelevant to a discussion about diet. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about relatively normal diets, and clearly biking 100 km is well outside normal.

Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.

[tpm]

> but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier

I don't think it is, there are a lot of bikers, runners, triathlon people between my colleagues and friends that regularly do that much energy output. Several of them even do much longer rides. And we are not even that young or sport-mad.

> Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you?

Yes, you don't want to get your bowels very active/full during biking. As an aside, top road cyclists (and I'm sure also long distance runners etc) are currently consuming up to 120g of glucose/fructose per hour during their performance, and have to train their guts so they are able to consume that much.

> And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.

And the point of my post was exactly that I think that either there should be always explicit qualifiers around 'sugar bad' or better just don't write that at all, because it's plain wrong. Sugar as a reasonable part of a quality diet is fine. It's different for children and obviously some other groups of people, but it's not bad in general (and if you want to lose weight, try to eliminate starch, not simple or short-chain sugars, but that's too hard for most people, and might not be healthy either). And messages like that just destroy the credibility of the speaker.

[soco]

Extreme sports is definitely nothing "normal" - whether I define "normal" as a today's statistic, or as evolutionary history. Your needs and metrics are nothing Joe Regular can use in his daily life, which the OP pointed very clearly and you don't need to refute. Your body is a completely different beast and we would be comparing apples with oranges, only confusing an already confused domain. Because I don't believe that any of your guidelines about guts training is coming from "general surgeon advice" - you are using specialized forums and special indications, while this discussion here is on a general forum, about general indications.

[tpm]

There is nothing extreme about doing a 100km ride from time to time, I don't even have the body of an athlete. That bit about training the guts was an aside and clearly marked as such. I don't do it.

'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.

[overflow897]

Arguing that a 100km bike ride is not an edge case seems disingenuous. Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives. "Added sugar bad" is generally good advice for most the population which statistically is fairly sedentary and doesn't require a huge amount of immediately available, low fiber energy.

[tpm]

> Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives.

I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?

"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.