I agree with every point here, and they all make a lot of sense... yet most alcoholic beverages are shipped to the consumer in glass bottles, including even the cheapest beers.
I have seen some drinks shipped in plastic, so it is possible to do, I wonder if glass packaging is a 'premium' thing. Though, if they can do it for cheap beer, then I'm sure they can do it for non-alcoholic drinks on scale.
It's about reducing costs for the producers and supermarkets, ignoring externalities. That is, tons of plastic that doesn't get recycled and goes to the landfill. Now the issue seems worse as another important externality are adverse effects to human health.
I can't believe costs of switching to glass or ceramic are that high. I've bought tons of inexpensive dairy and desserts that came packaged using those materials. But since most customers don't care, they tend to use plastic.
I've seen and had alcohol in plastic. They generally seem to do fine.
But damn did it feel cheap in a bad way. Being cheap is obviously one of the reasons we use plastic containers, but the feeling associated with plastic alcohol is just plain irrationally bad.
a 500 ml Al can weights 13 grams. life knows if we can skim down its weight if we don't have self openers, the price if we develop a better recycling system etc.
if plastics have impact on human health, how many $ we can save for using re-usable glass and metal?
I still haven't found a tactful way to bring this up, but have you considered a low- or zero-carb diet?
As far as I underdstand it, if you don't eat carbohydrates, you don't require insulin to deal with the spikes, and apart from a few grams in the bloodstream, humans require extremely little to no exogenous carbs.
I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've looked into this already.
Imho you can't really do a zero carb diet that's healthy. Keep in mind that even leafy vegetables have a bit of carbs in them. Low carb is possible and does indeed generally keep your blood sugar levels more stable. But even a meal that's mostly low carb vegetables and some meat still requires insulin if your pancreas has stopped working entirely.
I'm obviously a patient and not a doctor, but from what I've read as a Type 1 diabetic with (next to) no insulin production you have a life expectancy in the order of weeks, no matter what your diet is.
I didn't mean 'requires no insulin at all,' I know T1D requires some insulin to regulate blood sugar and to perform other functions in the body.
What I meant was that, for example in the OP article, a 60g bolus of carbs brings blood sugar from the bottom of healthy range all the way to the top of the healthy range in one go.
It just seems like an unnecessarily large and (for most) difficult to control jump in blood sugar. A lower-carb diet, say under 50g total carbs per day, should reduce blood sugar swings and increase their controllability, letting patients be in the healthy range of blood sugar for a higher percentage of the day.
In general yes, but again, unfortunately there are a lot of complicating factors. I can eat meals with 60g carb content and have my blood sugar levels barely move at all and I can also have, for instance, a beer with 15-20g of carbs that causes a 6 to 8 point rise. The trickiest part for me is finding the right balance between not having a massive meal peak, but also having stable levels in between meals. What works best for me personally is eating 'slow' meals i.e. meals that have a low glycemic index. These don't necessarily have to be low on carbs, but should be high in fiber, protein and unsaturated fats, which again is also very personal since each of our guts responds differently resulting in different rates of blood sugar production for different meals.
The problem with just eating low carb meals in my case is generally that it offsets the balance in between meals, i.e. I'll start seeing a consistent rise that might be something like 0.5-1 point per hour which eventually adds up. Of course you could increase your baseline insulin to offset that again, but it requires a lot of experimentation to get that balance right.
I do occasionally switch out my somewhat carb heavy lunch for a lighter low carb meal if I'm really busy and don't have time to go for a walk for instance. Generally that does work just fine to keep the initial rise low, but requires another 2 units of insulin about 2.5 hours after the meal because my blood sugar level keeps rising.
So in short, yes moderating your carb intake and especially ensuring your meals are slow are ways to make managing your blood sugar levels easier, but in my opinion it still requires experimentation to find out what works or does not work for you personally.
Type 1 diabetic as well here - I do this and I can confirm that I have much better control over my HB1C (average blood sugar reading) since I eat mostly a keto and plant based healthy diet (composed of minimally processed foods). One issue that I have though deals with hypoglycemia (low-blood sugar levels) since type 1 diabetics don't just require immediate insulin after meals - they require long-term acting insulin which works throughout the day. I've had multiple cases where I lost consciousness and woke up either in an ambulance or in a hospital feeling like someone hit me with a truck and having no recollection of how I got there. There is no 'magic' in managing type 1 diabetes unfortunately. The issue with us is that our blood sugar can swing in both directions - with the lower swing possibly resulting in death.
> As far as I underdstand it, if you don't eat carbohydrates, you don't require insulin to deal with the spikes, and apart from a few grams in the bloodstream, humans require extremely little to no exogenous carbs.
To put it bluntly: You don’t understand it.
Type 1 is different from Type 2.
A Type 1 person without insulin will die.
> “I will see that in someone with 0 percent insulin production, they’ll begin to fall ill within 12 to 24 hours after their last insulin injection, depending on its duration of effect. Within 24 to 48 hours, they’ll be in DKA. Beyond that, mortal outcomes would likely occur within days to perhaps a week or two. But I could not see someone surviving much longer than that.”
A lower carbohydrate diet is key to improving mental and physical health. More fat, less sugar. Read Big Fat Surprise [0].
Social interaction also seems to be key to healthy longevity, frailty can be a barrier to socialisation, as can be hearing loss.
However, your parents are their own people. You won't be able to force them to do anything they don't want to do, but you still need to love them even if they won't listen.
I cannot believe this showed up on HN front page. I was thinking about anarchy and secession on the way home, and remembered Hutt River, then bam, there it was.
Hutt River has been a media curiosity for decades in Australia, Prince Leonard would get trotted out every couple of years on a slow news week. Sad to learn of his passing.
"In the reviewed studies, there was a high prevalence of Adv36 in all age groups, which exceeded 64% among adults and 73% among children and adolescents with obesity and/or metabolic disorders. The vast majority of the reviewed studies have shown a statistically significant association between Adv36 and obesity, adiposity, and related alterations, whereas only a few studies presented divergent results."
Adenovirus 36 prevalence and association with human obesity: a systematic review
"The obvious reason for obesity is eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates. But statistically how much does this add to the risk of obesity?
A 2019 meta-analysis of different food intake studies and weight gain showed that consumption of refined grains increased the relative risk of obesity by 5% and the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages increased the relative risk of obesity by 10%. Eating more legumes, fruit, and fish all tilted the scales in the other direction, reducing the risk of obesity by 5-15%. The study concluded, “The dose-response meta-analytical findings provided very low to low quality of evidence that certain food groups have an impact on different measurements of adiposity risk.”"
Food Groups and Risk of Overweight, Obesity, and Weight Gain: A Systematic Review and Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies
I was slack and didn't read your links last night, sorry.
From what I can gather, infection with adenovirus-36 basically improves glycemic control... ostensibly a good thing? I couldn't find whether adenovirus-36 was a persistent infection, or whether it only affected patients for a short time, but then they failed to lose weight after the infection had cleared.
This author states that the reason for obesity is eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates. Why is there a distinction between refined and unrefined carbohydrates? There's no explanation for this, it's treated as given. It's the same chemical makeup, all that changes is the glycemic index. In other words, it's the same poison, it just takes longer to absorb.
The linked study backs this up, but makes no sense from a glycemic load point of view. I notice that vegetables are lumped in one category. Potatoes are not the same as celery. As are fruits, yet blueberries and mangoes have a vastly different sugar content. To add insult to injury, this is a meta-analysis of observational studies, which are notoriously unreliable.
Let me back all this up with a different meta-analysis of interventional trials which treats all carbohydrates the same.
Ketogenic Diet Benefits to Weight Loss, Glycemic Control, and Lipid Profiles in Overweight Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trails
Just be sure you're supplementing enough. If you've been vegan for 4 years, you're starting to enter the danger zone for running out of certain vitamins that your body stores.
B12 is the big obvious one, but you should also check out vitamins K2 and A (beta-carotene is only converted by about 70% of people), as well as carnitine, zinc, iron and iodine.
I take zinc, B12, D, K2 and algal omega-3. B12 is the big one, you're just trading diabetes and heart disease risk for stroke risk without that one. And everyone in northern climes should be taking vitamin D. Our salt is iodized.
I have seen some drinks shipped in plastic, so it is possible to do, I wonder if glass packaging is a 'premium' thing. Though, if they can do it for cheap beer, then I'm sure they can do it for non-alcoholic drinks on scale.