[health] This is why I generally avoid sugary drinks

[nasu_dengaku]

This is a nice visualization of how much sugar is in many common drinks.

http://worldmysteries9.blogspot.com/2010/05/harmful-drinks-in-america.html

Comments

[ekesobriquet]

I felt physically ill by the end of that! Very effective.

[eccentrific]

That page is awesome. Now I feel sooo much better about my (very) occasional indulgence in a krispy kreme doughnut... at least I'm not drinking energy drinks ;-)

[arethiel]

I like how the alternative to the first is "Smart Water". How about delicious, free tap water, eh?

[digitalsidhe]

Ohmigod, those pictures look soooo delicious...

Um, maybe this isn't quite the effect they were going for? As someone on a diet (and suddenly a very hungry person on a diet), I kind of wish they'd shown me pictures of the things I should be consuming, instead of the ones I shouldn't.

I'm gonna go try to find ways of avoiding devouring all the chocolate in the house now.

[nasu_dengaku]

It's funny. I used to like some junk food, but now it kind of makes me ill. This is going to sound odd, but I think junk food is an acquired taste, and if you don't have any for a while your body loses its ability to handle it.

If my theory is correct, if you managed to completely avoid junk food for several months you'd lose the taste for it.

[amoken]

Yeah, that works for a lot of people. But some people have interesting (metabolic?) side effects for particular types of food, because they are easily re-addicted after long lapses. I suspect when it works it's because you were eating those things as a social habit rather than because they made you feel good.

i agree

[ext_235031]

I went completely raw food (not vegan, just all-raw) for a few years, and found that junk food became *completely* unpalatable.

You really do forget what it tastes like after just a few months. Maybe it takes longer for others.

But when you finally go back to it, and you've had a diet that's much more moderate in terms of taste-boundaries, your brain has a very hard time even registering the junk as food. It's TOO sweet, TOO salty, TOO meaty... you get the picture.

When the tastes and smells in your diet fall within a moderate range, you become much more attuned to subtleties. You will find that plain, raw fruit and plain, raw fish with no salt or soy sauce are actually exquisitely delicious all on their own.

I liken this to the reason why meditation is so valuable: both the practice of fasting or raw food dieting and the practice of meditation are ways to "zero you out"...

To recalibrate your batteries.

[plymouth]

You think that's a GOOD visualization? It's utterly useless! It's as irritating as those "it's like taking 50,000 cars of the road" comparisons for carbon reduction. I hate those.

When you said it was good I was expecting to see pictures of bottles with sugar in them up to how much dry table sugar it would equate to. That way I could actually compare them.

[nasu_dengaku]

I think people who are less quantitative than you are will find it more useful. I think they are looking to insert mental imagery in people's heads so that when they see, for example, a Red Bull, they think of the big stack of Krispy Kreme donuts. It's less accurate than just looking at the sugar amounts, but it helps get the point across that a lot of drinks are more sugary than people think.

Since you look at labels, I'm sure you already were aware of this. They're trying to reach people who don't look at labels.

[bennj]

Same feeling here! They picked the fattiest foods people think of as really sugary to illustrate the volumes of sugar. The reason 12 donuts are different from 12-donuts-worth-of-sugar is the 12 donuts worth of fat and other carbohydrates which make them much worse for you.