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by jader201·1y ago·view on hn ↗
These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.

Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's bad for you.

Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.

Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all of them are toxic.

Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some (most) say they're bad for you.

Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.

The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health benefits.

I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.

20 comments
> Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.

From what I've read it seems likely that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, most of the studies that show moderate as good for you make the mistake of only have 'sober', 'moderate' & 'heavy' drinking, but if you look at the 'sober' folks there's a heavy mix of "I don't drink because I'm in recovery" or other health issues, so if you instead of 'sober by choice', 'sober by recovery/health issues', 'moderate' & 'heavy drinker' the benefit of moderation reverses to being worse than 'sober by choice'.

Almost any "this bad for you thing is actually good for you in moderation" basically seem to come down to:

People who can do common addictive things in moderation tend to also be good at moderating other bad factors too.

Alcohol is bad for your body but can be quite good for your mood. Just like sugar or othe high calory food.
Yeah this is a key part. If in small amounts it can reduce anxiety and increase sociability (if desired) then it could be a net positive. Good and bad is vague.
It depends ? Has your line adapted to alcohol, like other lines adapted to milk?
Some of those are pretty easy to separate -

Alchohol isn't really good for you - statistically you will probably get away with reasonably low intake but the observational studies showing a benefit were most likely confounding variables - like studies where the 'non-drinkers' category contained those who had been alcoholics and were forced to stop drinking, or demographic distortions where moderate drinkers had much healthier lifestyles in other areas (exercise, access to healthcare, etc.) than heavy drinkers.

Coffee seems to be good for you, as long as it's only up to a few (3-4) a day, and as long as it's not affecting your sleep. But I have read the fines in methods like Turkish coffees could be somewhat harmful, whereas espresso is fine and paper filtered better. Sweetening it with sugar isn't great for you of course.

One that gets me is dairy and milk, I get the ethical concerns, and one can make an argument that it's not super 'natural' to take another species milk and to drink it after infancy, but that doesn't mean it's unhealthy (almost all medicines are 'unnatural' too, while some poisons are fully natural!). There's some evidence of milk/dairy being protective against bowel cancer for instance, and inconclusive evidence of harms so I do wince a bit at the plant-based milk alternatives (which are highly- or ultra-processed, if you do care about that kind of thing!) being so trendy.

The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids were little since people just throw it out with no qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over do it.

If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.

It is that and that the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth.
> So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...

Because no one wants to drink water all day every day and nothing else.
no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

Nobody should take advice from nutritionists. It's not a regulated title. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. Take your nutritional advice from dieticians (and licensed medical professionals with relevant training and experience).

As Dara Ó Briain put it, dietician is to nutritionist as dentist is to tootheologist.
>I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)

I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel like I need someone now to reassure her that blending doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.

( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )

I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.

> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid

Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).

>Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).

Yes they are.

And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.

I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.

People below you in this thread are saying that fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew. Something about nutrition makes people lose their minds.
With pulp we're getting somewhere, but without pulp?
I am. That's a processed food. The sugar is concentrated via a mechanical extraction
> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad?

Yeah, that's fine, but a 16 ounce glass of orange juice has way more than one orange in it, and it's got a hell of a lot of sugar.

Or just do like me and switch to grapefruit juice. Awesome without drinking pure liquid sugar.
Consuming whole fruit is kinda okay because the fiber in the fruit helps buffer sugar absorption.

With juice you're getting lots of sugar but no fiber.

Commercially bottled juices (e.g., Tropicana) are worse but fresh squeezed is still bad.

If it's sweet, spit it out!

> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup

generally, processed foods are bad. You just created a processed food - you extracted the sugar and left the fiber and other good stuff behind.

"generally, processed foods are bad"

So ... you are on a raw food diet then?

I met some people who managed this for some years, but it sounds not really practical (or healthy) to me. And they were in no better shape in my perception. Rather the contrary.

Humans use fire to process food since a long time.

>I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.

Micro-plastics, fluoride.. ;)

Or the more traditional ones: bacterias, viruses, worms, ...
You'd more than notice if your water was bad enough to develop enough harmful microorganisms to be bad for you (this goes for drinking water, not random wilderness water of course. always filter and boil that)
"not random wilderness water of course. always filter and boil that"

To be honest, maybe I was lucky, but I drank plenty of wilderness water unfiltered and except for mild stomach problems, I never had any issues.

People worry about where the drinking water is from and how it's transported etc as well. Whatever you do, you will die soon-ish. I prefer to enjoy the journey.
> These days, about the only liquid you can consume without controversy is water.

Tapwater, or artesian well water?

Magnitically left-spun water, or ionically charged crystal-dipped water?

Hermetically sealed water, or Gnostically gestated water?

Distilled or deionated?

Choose wisely.

In worrying about it all you miss all the earthly delights AND you STILL don't live forever
Naw, that's just big waters psy-op getting you to buy their nectar to fill up the Pacific ocean with plastic.

In all seriousness, I met people that essentially don't drink water. They get water through food. Give them a glass during dinner and it goes untouched. I don't think it's because they're lazy and don't want to get up and fill up their water. It's just that they're not thirsty. It's really quite fascinating

> The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you.

Oooh, I guess I get to throw the wrench in that one. Endurance athletes benefit from the intake of large amounts of sugars during activity. Most sports drinks are primarily a mix of maltodextrin and fructose but the science is increasingly pointing toward something closer to a 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio being optimal at large carbohydrate intake -- in other words sucrose!

Ingested in an appropriate context, it is an excellent and easy to digest fuel source. You get to throw a couple hundred grams of table sugar into a sports bottle and call it healthy.

How about we agree that people making food controversial are the problem and we can just ignore them. It's like they have a religion that refreshes its beliefs on a 5 year cycle.
A secular religion, replacing a million ourFatherWhoYouAreInHeaven to prevent the dwindling disease, with a milliin microfastings.. it lacks the little whips for self flaggelation though.
The latest research indicates that the tolerable amount of both sugar and alcohol without elevated health risk is zero. If you're not eating keto only (almost if not entirely exclusively plants) and drinking water only (or maybe unsweetened tea/coffee occasionally), you are at increased risk for major disease.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4109571/

We don't even know if tiny doses or artificial radiation are good or bad for you.

That's the straw that just pushed me to live my life.

I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.

Here's one :)

Too much water also erodes your body of salts. If you already are on a low salt diet this could be a problem. For us Indians eating mountain loads of salt, this is a non issue.

Sorry, water has microplastics now.
The only way to prevent it, is to go full recycle, become a human bottle garden .
Even consuming water can be deadly. Almost anytime can be consumed in moderation. And yes the amount of water you can consume safely is fairly high, there is a limit. Edit: I'm referring to clean water.
Haha, you made me chuckle. But to the facts: the article and application is about directly applying it to the wound or antibiotics directly. No one is advocating for it to be part of a healthy diet.
But if the water has fluoride…maybe that’s making your teeth brittle! (Or worse if you’re condemned to believe RFK types)
The residents of Flint, MI, might disagree with you.
Probably the flouride, but RFK will sort that out.
Unfortunately on HN these days, it's impossible to tell if this is sarcasm or not.
At some point you realize almost all of these studies are pointless and you're talking about shaving or adding negligible amounts of time off your life while ignoring more serious risks like driving or inhaling smog and brake dust daily. It's not an excuse to go crazy and eat and drink total shit, but I've largely given up on modern medicine and nutrition having any fucking clue beyond calories in / calories out.