Not to blindly defend erthyritol, we should definitely look at it closer. But "less bad" doesn't mean good. Sugar is still very unhealthy.

As far as history: let me give you an extremely quick rundown. Diabetes was known to the ancients, but was extremely rare until the 18th century, when British sugar plantations made it affordable. (The slave labor involved wasn't very healthy, either). That's when diabetes, obesity, and extreme amounts of tooth decay reached the British working class.

Sugar was a very popular trading commodity for native populations. And they were even less equipped to deal with it: tooth loss, diabetes, obesity and cancer skyrocketed in these populations soon after Western diets were introduced (British Empire medical records are a great source for this).

Maybe we are back to that 'over processed foods' problem. None of the sugar replacements can be made in your kitchen because they need to be 'refined' way more than cane sugar.

Sugar is a massively processed food, and it's subsidized to make it artificially cheaper. It's really easy to spot new threats, but we it's hard to recognize the dangerous things we do every day.

I'm sorry, but that's a complete non sequitir. Look at housing prices, inflation or anything else that's gone up in the last 60 years. The amount of change is completely orthogonal to personal choices.

The obesity crisis is the flip side of smoking cessation. People didn't just decide to stop smoking: doctors/government agencies/NGOs ran a decades-long pressure campaign designed to highlight the risks.

Starting in the 70's, many of the same well-meaning people started demonizing fat and protein. The USDA, doctors (who are really good at medicine and surgery, but not at dietary advice) started recommending less and less fat and protein. Bad pop science associated dietary cholesterol with heart problems.

Something had to fill that dietary gap: cheap (and government-subsidized) carbs from corn and wheat. That's just about all poor people eat, because it's all they can afford. And guess who suffers the most from diabetes, obesity, heart attacks etc? The poor. Are you still so sure it's a choice?

Portraying obesity/metabolic diseases as a personal failure instead of a health crisis that affects the MAJORITY of Americans is a very Republican move. Are you sure you're not voting for Trump?

> “The amount in sugar substitutes is thousands of folds higher than what is made in our bodies, so to call it ‘natural,’ it’s not,” he [study author Dr. Stanley Hazen] said.

And what is the amount of sugar in the diet of a typical American? If we compare that to the amount of sugar in the human diet since the beginning of time, would we consider that "natural"? What about those "natural" fruits? Most are giant sugar globes, deliberately engineered to increase sweetness and reduce fiber.

Based on the article description, this study does nothing but implicitly back the Standard American Diet. You know, the one packed with modern strains of corn, sugar, and wheat? Before we freak out about some new sweetener, maybe we should start asking ourselves why the MAJORITY of Americans have metabolic diseases. It ain't from eating a few grams of sugar alcohols.

As it is, this article is like freaking out about a purse snatcher when your entire government is run by the mob.

PLEX is losing track of why they even have paying customers in the first place. My Smart TV does the multi-platforms content search quite well ,thank you very much. I no longer care for other platforms' content when I open PLEX; I want to browse and then stream my local content FAST and with no excuses for transcoding especially on LAN.

Amen to that! The American way isn't "stop doing the harmful thing," it's "I can do whatever I want, then take a pill/have surgery/use technology to fix it." Ignoring the massive amount of wasted resources, preventable illness, that entails.

Unfortunately, food is a political issue. Healthy eating threatens the agribusiness giants, farmers who live off subsidies, expensive drugs/medical interventions etc. That's why we're mostly fat and sick in this country.

>> The thing about capitalism and free markets is, it tells you exactly how much you are worth to your fellow humans and under what circumstances.

"The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor." - Martin Luther King Jr.

If free markets are such a good thing, why does the ruling class avoid them at all costs?

>> it was a bit much to ask for Americans to elect a Socialist.

The voters disagree. Hilary Clinton wouldn't have won the nomination without superdelegates (well-connected Democratic party operatives whose primary votes count ~10,000x more than your vote). When the (extremely undemocratic) Democratic party decided to put their thumbs on the scale for Hilary, all those working-class white voters who went for Obama moved to Trump (search for "Obama/Trump voters" if you don't believe me). Hilary was a historically terrible choice, but the Democratic Party apparatus would rather blame Russia than admit they don't know what they're doing.

>> basically no cheating in the next primary (just a little shenanigans in Iowa and if you're as politically astute as you seem to be you should know Iowa isn't really that big a deal) and Sanders still lost by 30 points

Here's the story of the 2020 primary: Corporate interests dug up the mummy Joe Biden, because they were terrified of a President Sanders or Warren. All the moderates all dropped out at the same time, while Liz Warren (who said she'd never take PAC money) took PAC money to prop up her campaign, just long enough to split the progressive vote.

>> We want US hegemony so that we can have cheap oil because we all depend on it to get to work.

If by "we" you mean the ruling class, sure. Polling shows that the majority of Americans want action on climate change, they support the Green New Deal, etc.

>>Instead the left wants to vote for shit candidates like Nina Turner who tell Democrats in a Democrat primary election that they're all a bowl of shit because they like how she "tells it like it is". That's the Trump playbook, and it doesn't work without the racism.

Maybe you should look into how many MILLIONS were dumped into that primary by AIPAC and corporate interests to oppose Nina Turner. Tell me that "the left" is the problem. Hell, take the last 40 years of corporate Democrat neoliberal policy. Is life better or worse the average American? If it's worse, what is the corporate Dem playbook for things to get better? It's not stuff that 70% of Democratic voters want (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, etc), so what is it?

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>> [Complex carbs] ...have to be digested slower. Resulting in longer satiety, lower glycemic load, and hence your insulin system not panicking.

You are mistaking "less bad" for "good." Complex carbs still get absorbed very quickly compared to fat and protein. They still spike your insulin response, and still keep you from being hungry.

Modern fruits are mostly giant sugar globes, so you should avoid them. A homemade doughnut would probably be better for you.

Fructose has a delayed glycemic response, up to 24 hours after ingestion. So it's low on the glycemic index, because that only measures the first 3 hours after you eat it.

The giant sugar globes we call fruit are at least as bad for you as raw sugar, particularly if they don't have a lot of fiber to slow digestion (think grapes and pears).

>> Authoritarian rule is not a technology problem, it's a people problem.

Technology makes it much easier to run an authoritarian government, and pretty much impossible for those in power *NOT* to abuse it. Post-Snowden especially, do you really believe the alphabet agencies aren't directly violating the Bill of Rights all of the time? That's when Congress isn't using the threat of regulations to cajole Facebook and Twitter into censorship on their behalf.

Maybe you didn't see the the quote I already pulled. The one that you wrote, about how it's not fair to punish the ruling class because WE were begging them consumerism?

I don't a life of ascetic simplicity, but I can goddamn well bitch about the government and the ruling class if I feel like it. Being a human means being a hypocrite. Hopefully, we can get past that and still do something positive. Or should we do nothing about anything because there's a chance we might be hypocritical?

We understand, you have a very limited vocabulary.

Kinda like how cavemen had "1", "2", or "many." Or how the Smurfs called everything "smurfy". You have "Capital-S Socialist" for anything that upsets you.

Grass-fed and wild-caught animals are carbon-neutral.

The crazy things we do to get more farmland (damming/rerouting rivers/draining swaps) are not, and actually kill entire populations of animals (sorry, salmon). Non-organic crops use fertilizer created by fossil fuels (Haber process); organic crops typically use slash-and-burn. How's that for carbon-neutral?

And let's not even get into the massive subsidies for corn, wheat, and soybeans. These GMO and/or atomic gardening-created concoctions are in just about any processed food sold in the US. No one in history has eaten as much gluten or soybeans in their entire life as the average American eats in a year. But yeah, we need to focus on meat, because THAT'S the problem.