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Fructose Linked to Obesity, Diabetes
Engineer-Poet writes "Eurekalert announces that researchers at the University of Florida have demonstrated a link between fructose consumption and metabolic syndrome (a precursor of adult-onset diabetes). In part, it makes you feel hungrier than you should be. This is particularly bad for Americans, because sugar price supports have created a market for fructose as a substitute in almost everything.
Dr. Richard J. Johnson says, "If you feed fructose to animals they rapidly become obese, with all features of the metabolic syndrome, so there is this strong causal link. And a high-fructose intake has been shown to induce certain features of the metabolic syndrome pretty rapidly in people."
Eating fructose causes a rise in uric acid in the bloodstream. Uric acid in turn blocks the action of insulin, which regulates metabolism (including uptake by fat cells). Elevated uric acid levels can eventually cause features of metabolic syndrome, including high blood pressure, obesity and high cholesterol. The good news is that the action of uric acid can be blocked with drugs, and we can change what we eat. If enough of us boycott fructose and corn-syrup products, the market will respond."
I believe you are writing about the tarrifs from an American perspective. I believe most of your carbonated beverages (Pespi, Coke) use corn syrup. I live in Canada and our pop is made with Cane sugar.
I think the larger problem is the amount of sugar in food today. Pepsi and Coke have 40 grams of sugar per can. If people want to drink Pepsi or Coke I have no problem (I do on occasion), but this is way too much sugar. (This says nothing of the health risks of artificial sweetened version of popular soft drinks. I know plenty of people who react to Aspartame, I know I do).
Some processed foods also have corn syrup added: Salami, other cold-cut meats. Some packaged chicken also has some I believe (at least in Canada, depends on the 'brand' of chicken purchased).
When you combine the effects of the high-sugar North American diet and lack of activity with a high fructose intake you have a problem. If you eat within the food 'pyramid' and eat 3 or 4 fruit servings a day there is no harm.
When you combine the
Careful here, sucrose is broken down in the body to roughly equal parts of glucose and fructose.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You missed the "and we can change what we eat" part.
Here are a few links for those who are unaware of the price supports the U.S. Govt. gives out:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0498d.asphttp://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3669
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=10
i used to work at a corn syrup factory.
all corn syrup is not fructose - in fact it's converted to fructose.
corn starch can be converted into many different forms of sugar. dextrose, maltodextrose etc.... heck we can make ethanol with it (yum).
it's converted into fructose because customers want fructose.
fructose in mass quanties may indeed not be good for you (fructose occurs naturally in honey, beets (i think) and probably in other places). i wonder if this is true of other sugars (sucrose, dextrose, etc...)
anyway point is corn syrup != fructose
You know 15 minutes a day using a pair of 5kg/10lb. dumbells in a series of exercises can give you tone and make you look much more solid. 30 minutes a day and you can definitely put on some muscle mass. Keep the reps low and do a circuit of different exercises several times. You don't even have to do the exercise all at once, you can get 2-3 cycles done during the commercial breaks of most network TV shows. Plus lean muscle mass is going to be alot healthier for you than flabby fat that puts you at risk of heart disease/stroke as well as the already mentioned diabetes.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Odds are it costs twice as much as its corn-syrup and diet competitors, just for the cost of sugar alone! Where's the freedom, both for the business and the consumer?
Interesting. For what it is worth, the Hawaiian sugar cane business has been decimated, all the large suger cane plantations went out of business during the 90s - prior to that it was a major cash crop there (the most profitable one was and still is pakalolo). So, somehow the price supports were not enough for that portion of the industry.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Based on what I've seen and heard, the price you pay for pop in the store has little to do with the manufacturing cost and much more to do with market forces: they *can* charge you $X, so they do. As such, if the sugar-based pop is more expensive, it's much more likely to be either a scale issue, a transportation issue, or just another market issue.
If I remember correctly, a pound of sugar is a couple bucks. (I might not be remembering right, though.) That's about 2,200 grams of sugar for around two dollars, or about 10 grams for 1 cent. The cost of the roughly 40 grams of sugar in a can of pop would be about 4 cents. That's probably right to within a factor of two, anyway. And it's probably nearer an overly expensive estimate: buying sugar in bulk would probably decrease the unit price *and* I haven't subtracted out the cost of the corn syrup. Given this, it seems improbable that doubling the price (say from 25 cents a can to 50 cents a can) would be purely due to the cost of the sugar used.
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Whole Foods (organic grocery chain) makes it a -lot- easier for me. I was shocked when I discovered about a year ago that I could not find any bread -without- corn syrup at the local grocery. When I looked at Whole Foods, I couldn't find any bread -with- corn syrup. It's rather nice being able to ignore the labels when shopping and know that whatever I grab will probably be healthy, corn-syrup free and taste great. (and be expensive, sigh) I've lost 30 pounds this year.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
And Brazilians and (in a much smaler scale) Uruguayans, too, because we could sell you cane, and employ people in poor areas.
We make cane sugar here. Using corn for sugar is a waste.
You need fertile fields to make corn, and it's a good crop to feed people.
Sugar cane grows in the worts fields, needs much less care, doesn't need you to use your fertile lands that could be used for actual food, and so is much less expensive to produce.
Here in Uruguay, Pepsi is sweetened with sugar cane, and Coca-Cola, with corn syrup, and most people prefer the taste of Coca-Cola. Corn syrup is mre expensive here than cane sugar, so maybe people like expensive stuff, no matter what it is. I like cold Pepsi, on a glass 1.25 L bottle, but most people seem to prefer fructose around here.