You make a good point, that some people who drop out of weight-loss studies might have experienced health problems caused by the study, and quiting was the right decision for them.
But I believe that the average obese person in general population is not this case. There are many situations where people eat refined sugar not because they have a strong craving, but simply because it is easily available or there are even habits built around it.
To give an example, in my family it was for some reason considered a good idea to drink tea with sugar at breakfast. As a child I didn’t have an opinion on this, I was given the breakfast and I consumed it. But as I grew up and started making my own breakfast, out of sheer laziness I starting drinking water instead. I didn’t fall into coma and die. Actually it made the breakfast better, because when you drink tea with sugar first, then everything you eat afterwards tastes bland, but if you drink water, you discover that some things are surprisingly delicious. Recently my kids spent one week with my mother, and then reported to me that they had “cereals” for each breakfast (in this context, “cereals” refers to those cheap hypermarket products that contain the word on the box, but consist mostly of refined sugar with some added fibers; the advertisement tells you to pour milk on them and pretend that the result is healthy somehow, because, you know, milk and cereals). I am not making a big deal out of it, one week is not going to hurt anyone, but sigh, of course most people in my family are fat.
Similarly, if you buy things in a hypermarket, check how many of them contain added sugar. So people eat this sugar not because they had a craving, but because they bought a processed food in a shop, and someone added the sugar for them. (There is often no easily available sugar-less version.) They probably add sugar to your food in a restaurant, dunno.
If you are curious what would it be like to not eat any refined sugar, probably the only solution is to cook for yourself from scratch. Even things like mustard or canned vegetables typically contain refined sugar. So we regularly eat lots of sugar without deciding to, often without being aware of it. (And then we drink coke on the top of it. But hey, the advertisement said that coke had zero sugar now, could they possibly be lying?)
So, avoiding lots of extra sugar is technically possible, but it is a lot of work, and some people cannot afford it, or have never learned the necessary skills. Because of course they don’t teach cooking at schools anymore; why would anyone need such useless skill in the modern economy, where you can buy anything (but have little control over the content).
You make a good point, that some people who drop out of weight-loss studies might have experienced health problems caused by the study, and quiting was the right decision for them.
But I believe that the average obese person in general population is not this case. There are many situations where people eat refined sugar not because they have a strong craving, but simply because it is easily available or there are even habits built around it.
To give an example, in my family it was for some reason considered a good idea to drink tea with sugar at breakfast. As a child I didn’t have an opinion on this, I was given the breakfast and I consumed it. But as I grew up and started making my own breakfast, out of sheer laziness I starting drinking water instead. I didn’t fall into coma and die. Actually it made the breakfast better, because when you drink tea with sugar first, then everything you eat afterwards tastes bland, but if you drink water, you discover that some things are surprisingly delicious. Recently my kids spent one week with my mother, and then reported to me that they had “cereals” for each breakfast (in this context, “cereals” refers to those cheap hypermarket products that contain the word on the box, but consist mostly of refined sugar with some added fibers; the advertisement tells you to pour milk on them and pretend that the result is healthy somehow, because, you know, milk and cereals). I am not making a big deal out of it, one week is not going to hurt anyone, but sigh, of course most people in my family are fat.
Similarly, if you buy things in a hypermarket, check how many of them contain added sugar. So people eat this sugar not because they had a craving, but because they bought a processed food in a shop, and someone added the sugar for them. (There is often no easily available sugar-less version.) They probably add sugar to your food in a restaurant, dunno.
If you are curious what would it be like to not eat any refined sugar, probably the only solution is to cook for yourself from scratch. Even things like mustard or canned vegetables typically contain refined sugar. So we regularly eat lots of sugar without deciding to, often without being aware of it. (And then we drink coke on the top of it. But hey, the advertisement said that coke had zero sugar now, could they possibly be lying?)
So, avoiding lots of extra sugar is technically possible, but it is a lot of work, and some people cannot afford it, or have never learned the necessary skills. Because of course they don’t teach cooking at schools anymore; why would anyone need such useless skill in the modern economy, where you can buy anything (but have little control over the content).