[richardwigley]

The article summaries as 'we eat too much sugar', 'here's some science that suggests it can be bad in rodents', and finally 'maybe you should swear off sugar'.

I agree, we eat too much sugar. However, it is a step to go from rodents to humans and they have not addressed it.

We're apes that lived in Africa. We spent a lot of time in trees eating fruit all year around.

We have eyes that are adapted to find fruit - so much so that while most of our furry mammal relatives, like rodents tested in the article, are red-green color blind (dichromats) [1] we are mainly trichromatic, color vision. Trichromatic helps you to pick out a red fruit from a green background [2]. So, for some reason, our ancestors that could see fruit, did better than those that didn't, which was not the case with rodents.

I suggest we evolved on different diet than what rodents evolved on. Before comparing sugar to an addiction you should reproduce the results on primates - I'd be happy to be in the control group and snack on a Snickers bar ;-)

[1] http://www.ratbehavior.org/RatVision.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision

[thro1237]

I can't find a source quickly -- but I remember reading that many years back (like when we were apes in Africa), the sweetest fruit was probably as sweet as a carrot. We increased the sweetness of fruits through selective breeding to current levels.

[rthomas6]

This looks like a pretty good article on that subject: http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/

A quick browsing indicates that while our modern fruits are all domesticated, there are plenty of wild, sweet, and large African fruits. Apparently some modern wild berries also have similar sweetness profiles as their domesticated counterparts.

The article points out that one prominent difference that does seem to exist is that wild fruits are harder to eat, due to big seeds, thick and tough exteriors, and lower water content. So you might have to do a lot more work to get the good stuff with wild fruits.

I've eaten wild Muscadine grapes in Georgia that someone found in the woods (I'm not sure if this counts as a wild fruit or not due to potential Native American cultivation, but close enough imo), and they were fairly sweet. They had thick skins and giant seeds in them, so they weren't great actually, but they were sweet.

[saosebastiao]

That doesn't explain blackberries which have only been cultivated in the last 100 years, due to more advanced farming techniques. They have been seen as more of a scourge for centuries, because of their knack for strangling other cultivated plants.

[wnevets]

Not to mention a lot of fruit are loaded with fiber which reduces the glycemic spike.

[cylinder]

And I imagine the fruits wouldn't be eaten as ripe as they are now - people prefer sweeter fruits, and they sweeten as they ripen. I prefer more sour and tart fruit, so I tend to prefer less ripened fruit.

[jdub]

They're also talking about processed and refined sugars, not naturally occurring sugars.