In "Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximisers", Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:
"Fifty thousand years ago, the taste buds of Homo sapiens directed their bearers to the scarcest, most critical food resources—sugar and fat. Calories, in a word. Today, the context of a taste bud's function has changed, but the taste buds themselves have not. Calories, far from being scarce (in First World countries), are actively harmful. Micronutrients that were reliably abundant in leaves and nuts are absent from bread, but our taste buds don't complain. A scoop of ice cream is a superstimulus, containing more sugar, fat, and salt than anything in the ancestral environment."
This contradicts with my personal experience, since last week I followed a diet consisting almost exclusively of pasta and sugar, and then came to long for vegetables while sugar became distasteful. Perhaps I am committing the typical mind fallacy, but I should at least try to verify Yudkowsky's claim.
So, what about you? This site mentions that women should take no more than 24 grams a day of sugar, and men no more than 36 grams. The average American takes 88.
Can you please:
-state how much sugar you usually take daily
-state how you usually feel about eating sugar
-change your habits today
-report on how that influenced your feelings?
(I don't have the means to organize a real study, am not aware of any done on the subject, and I hope anecdotal evidence might still be overwhelming enough to give a result.)
Approximate amount: 50-60g maybe? I like to add juuust a little to tea and other drinks, about 1-2g / 100ml. Completely unsweetened (and I count nut milks as sweetener too) irritates my stomach for some reason. (And plain unflavored water causes nausea, so teas it is.) There's also often a teaspoon or two in some meals to balance acidity or bring out spices. Rarely some chocolate (80-99% cocoa) or a slice of home-baked cake. (I tend to halve the amount of sugar in recipes.) Fruits (fresh or dried) also contain non-negligible amounts.
How I feel about sugar: A little is somewhere between fine and awesome (seriously, add a sprinkle to your carrots when boiling/frying them!), a lot is just disgusting. (Most sodas are too sweet for my tastes. I still have a pack of gummy bears sitting in the sweets drawer that's been there for almost two years by now... still untouched.) I can absentmindedly absorb about half a bar of (dark) chocolate of the course of a few hours, but then it just stops - I won't eat the rest within the next 2 or 3 days. Dried fruits are more "dangerous", here I can fairly easily eat serious amounts before having enough of them. (But even that saturates.)
Change your habits today: Nah, would be very unpleasant. Less would mostly mean stomach ache, which this isn't worth it for me. More... nah, just no.
If I really wanted to, I could probably force myself to eat a pack of dates for about 2-3 days before having enough of them. That would probably get me about 150-200g extra sugar on each of those days. (Oof!) More refined versions of sugar don't really work for me. (Even eating a spoon of raw cane sugar isn't pleasant, I just tried. It tastes nice, has a lot of complexity, but overall it's still unpleasant and not something that I want to repeat. Plus nearly all of the appeal is in the complex aromas, not the sweetness.) With sweets, eating just 2 or 3 gummy bears is usually enough to really not want more for the next couple of days.
Actually, I tried that too now. 8 was more than enough, don't really want to eat more. (Wolfram estimates a single dried date to weigh about 16 g and contain roughly 10 g sugar.) So if that's right, this was about 80g of sugar. That's less than half of what I estimated. (Even adding the (tea)spoon of sugar from before as 1-2 extra dates doesn't make much of a difference.)