
Average 10-year-old has eaten 18 years' worth of sugar - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/02/average-10-year-old-18-years-worth-of-sugar-public-health-england
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will_brown
All this money, time and effort in an attempt to market _new low sugar
cereals_ , these are the same company’s who: 1. Have been marketing their
product as part of a balanced breakfast for decades, and 2. Continued
increasing the amount of sugar while actively lobbying against any attempts to
regulate marketing their sugary products to kids.

Here is an idea...get rid of the sugary cereals and sugary milk entirely and
feed your kids bacon and eggs for breakfast, with water.

~~~
flareback
I love the idea of having bacon and eggs for breakfast in the morning. The
reality is though that bacon and eggs take time and effort while pouring a
bowl of cereal is quick and easy.

~~~
dangus
Take a whole package of bacon, put it on a cookie sheet. Bake 15 minutes in
the oven at 350 degrees to your liking. Remove, Drain/cool. Place bacon in
freezer.

Take eggs. Boil in water. Place in refrigerator.

Voila, you now have bacon and eggs in the morning for multiple days with zero
effort.

Another easy one - McDonald’s style Egg McMuffin:

You’ve got your frozen English muffins because you’re lazy and don’t want to
deal with moldy bread. Throw one in the microwave for 30 seconds. Remove and
place in toaster to toast. In the meantime crack an egg into a cereal bowl and
microwave to poach. I think that’s 30 seconds? Now your egg and muffin are
done, add cheese and ham or that frozen bacon from the above, microwave to
melt the cheese and such.

Not the healthiest stuff out there but it’s by no means difficult. I think
many people wanting to transition from buying pre-made food to making actual
food need to do so in baby steps.

~~~
emptyfile
Reheated boiled eggs? Wtf...

~~~
dangus
I didn't say _reheated_ hard boiled eggs. You just keep it in the fridge and
eat it cold.

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cletus
I wonder if we're approaching the point of recognizing sugar addiction as a
real thing.

Just watch a number of children and you'll see, even from a young age, a wide
variety of reactions to sugar.

For example, one I cna think of has always (and continues to be) "sensible"
with sugar. Like if she has a soda, she'll stop when she's had enough. If
there are chocolates there she'll have one or two.

One of her sisters just can't help herself. She literally can't stop eating
any chocolates that are available. If she gets a soda, she'll literally inhale
it and then try and drink her sisters' sodas.

Having seen this from such a young age I can't help but think that there's
just luck involved here as in some people have a genetic predisposition to
what I can only call sugar addiction.

What probably mitigated this in the past was that foods were lower sugar and
sugary food and drinks were less available to many people. Like I'm just
comparing what I had in the house growing up compared to what I see in
pantries now.

But yes, cereal is pretty much universally terrible but it is convenient.

~~~
erikpukinskis
It’s interesting that you attribute a difference among sisters to genes.
Sisters are similar genetically, but cannot occupy the same social space. They
cannot occupy the same material space.

My explanation for the difference you observed is that siblings somewhat have
non-overlapping coping strategies. If one gets angry, the other is being
yelled at. If one eats more than their share, the other eats less. If one is
asking people to leave them alone, the other is being left alone.

This creates major difference in subjective experience and coping strategies
just by virtue of being socially juxtaposed.

~~~
cletus
So what I think you're referring to is something I might otherwise call the
Pauli Exclusion Principle for Children (or PEPC) for short.

Just like fermions, children it seems can't occupy the same state. This means
that if one child is the "good one", a sibling won't be. They'll find their
own niche. They could be the clown, or the athlete or the bookworm or
whatever.

So if I read your comment correctly, you're essentially saying something
similar with coping strategies. I can't and don't disagree with that idea but
it's not mutually exclusive with genetic predisposition either. Just imagine
two sisters do have a genetic predisposition to "sugar addiction". It doesn't
mean they'll both become sugar addicts.

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kop316
One thing I have been working on recently is cooking, especially from scratch
and attempting to keep it healthy. One big thing I have noticed is that a lot
of food (once cooked) has a very short shelf life (usually days), and if you
have something with few ingredients, it requires quality ingredients.

For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer
than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a
store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a
restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have
a significant amount of premade food.

Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective,
lesser quality ingredients are needed.

It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is
what happens.

~~~
mholmes680
Kudos for focusing on cooking. It really changed my life when i started
focusing on things like making bread, growing my own vegetables (at least to
supplement store-bought), and learning the science and history behind
foods/meals. I lost about 10 pounds just by learning how to cook and gaining
an understanding of portion control and managing salt/nutrition levels. Also,
I'm pretty confident my daycare-enrolled kids are less sick than their
classmates who eat out one or more meals daily or are reliant on the bag of
chicken nuggets and yellow-weird mac and cheese.

check out these youtube channels for some motivation (which i've picked up
here on HN):
[https://www.youtube.com/user/BrothersGreenEats](https://www.youtube.com/user/BrothersGreenEats),
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPzFLpOblZEaIx2lpym1l1A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPzFLpOblZEaIx2lpym1l1A).
Also, I recently fell upon Alton Brown's new Good Eats Reboot... good stuff.

~~~
kop316
I will have to look at them, thank you! I have been going through the Good
Eats, and I like them. Something else I found that has been amazing is that
there are a few cooking lecture series from the Great Courses. They are
expensive at full retail, but it is possible to get sales on them. I cannot
recommend those enough.

I have also been going to my local library, and they have been indispensable
for finding gems of cookbooks and find books on how to cook. I can basically
try out a few recipes and see if I like them or not.

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neom
Very grateful to my parents for not allowing me sugar added foods when I was a
kid, even though I thought it was so lame and had the worst packed lunch out
of my friends. I actually ended up being 300lbs in my late teens early 20s
because all I did was IRC all day. That said, it didn't take much effort to
get to the 150/160 I am today. I'm not sure if it's correlated but
coincidently I can't stand anything sweet as an adult.

~~~
crescentfresh
> 300lbs...it didn't take much effort to get to the 150/160

Uh, holy crap. Good job. How did you do it?

What are some lunch ideas from your parents for my kids? Serious question lol.

Since tree nuts and things aren't allowed I find nearly all the options in the
"kids lunches" section of the store are all carb/sugar heavy, everything from
the yogurts -> granola bars -> fruit. About the fattiest/healthiest thing I
can think of are milk (still a lot of sugar but better than juice), cheese
strings, or I make these celery + cream cheese things (instead of peanut
butter, lol). I also found they like a tomato + mini bocconcini salad but by
the time they go to eat it the salt has already "liquified" much of the cut
tomatoes.

~~~
neom
I grew up in rural Scotland. Mum got up at 5am and made herself coffee and
two, stilton, cucumber and tomato ham sandwich for my sister and I. No
pudding, maaaaaayyybbbeee we'd get carrots and broccoli with mayo as a side if
we were lucky. We got on the bus at 7am. Amazingly I _still_ got fat because I
was sedentary.

~~~
crescentfresh
> coffee and two, stilton, cucumber and tomato ham sandwich

To me that actually sounds like a fucking delicious lunch, were I to pack that
for myself lol.

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cirrus-clouds
For some global context, this article from 2015 shows sugar consumption across
the globe. The data comes from market research company Euromonitor:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/05/where...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/05/where-
people-around-the-world-eat-the-most-sugar-and-fat/)

Countries with high sugar consumption levels include the US, Germany,
Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium and the UK.

A more recently published report (some of which uses 2008 data) looks at the
consumption of "ultra-processed" foods in 19 countries in Europe. "Ultra-
processed" refers to food made in a factory with industrial ingredients and
additives invented by food technologists: salty snacks, sugary cereals,
industrially-made bread, desserts, ready-meals, reconstituted meats, and
sweetened soft drinks

The top European countries for consuming "ultra-processed" foods are: UK,
Germany, Ireland and Belgium:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/02/ultra-
proces...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/02/ultra-processed-
products-now-half-of-all-uk-family-food-purchases)

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pessimizer
This is an overly dramatic way of saying that the average 10 year old has
consumed 1.8 times the current sugar recommendation.

Average 51-year-old has read 4 years' worth of books

~~~
oblib
If you look at the longer trend lines you find the "average 10 year old" is
consuming over 30% more sugar that one 30 years ago.

That's significant.

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MistahKoala
Based on the current guidelines, how many years worth of sugar would the
average 10-year old from 30 years ago have consumed?

