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Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic
drewtheman writes "According to an interview with Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology from the University of California, San Francisco, fructose, once touted as diabetic-friendly because it doesn't raise insulin levels directly, could be a major culprit for the obesity epidemic, high blood pressure, and elevated blood levels of LDL in Americans and others worldwide as they adopt American-style diets. Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup, both ingredients found in copious quantity in most American prepared foods."
Excessive quantities of anything is not good for the diet. It has been known for decades that high quantities of carbohydrates can cause weight increase. The confusion here is linking fructose as being good for diabetics (yes, and it still is in reasonable quantities) and excessive consumption of fructose leading to obesity.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
At least as long as Fat Land has been out, but probably a bit longer than that. The story of American obesity is the story of American corn subsidies, which is therefore the story of high-fructose corn syrup and omnipresent, cheaper-than-water soda; and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants, 'family-style' Applebee's-like chains that exist solely to help burn off the excess corn stock by selling almost nothing but corn and its byproducts.
Don't tell the presidential candidates though, they have to win in Iowa!
But the smart money is still on "Burgers".
/ and no concept of portion control.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Pie is tasty and the sky will be blue tomorrow. No shit fructose is bad for us. It is pure simple sugars. The only fructose that IS good for humans is the fruit kind. And that is not simple sugar. Don't drink Soda Pop and always check the labels for High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is says it has it, don't buy it. That shit should be illegalized in most foods.
I'm sorry but this is a stupid argument that's been pulled out over and over by people who don't want to take responsabilities. You have lung cancer? Damn those tobacco lobbyists. You have obesity? Damn the junk food lobbyists...
Guess what: everybody knows tobacco is bad for you, and excess sugar is bad for you. Anybody who tells you "eat/drink/smoke this, it's safe" should trigger your bullshit alarm and make you wonder whom exactly this person is paid by. What's more, good common sense should tell you that levels of sugar and fat modern westerners consume can't be good for health. Just like inhaling smoke, it's just completely obvious that the human body wasn't designed for this. If you let lobbyists win over common sense, you deserve to be fat.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ever been to Mexico? Germany? Russia? God damn there are a lot of F-A-T F-U-C-K-E-R-S there. And man, are they U-G-L-Y to boot.
I hate articles like this. The reader should not be blaming a single food as a CAUSE for obesity. The cause is that the consumer should not be eating large quantities of anything. Personally if anything is to blame then its the consumer for not getting off their ass and actually preparing food, going for a bike ride, or doing some running. Simple exercise like washing up has now been replaced with a dish washer, we mow lawns with electric/petrol mowers, and we don't even write letters by hand either, soon voice recognition will replace keyboard work. When will the world learn that as physical creatures we depend on a good, fresh diet and plenty of exercise.
Why UNIX?
First of all, you walked about 6 times the distance that might be considered the maximum for an American before getting into a car and driving :) . But yeah, of course, it's what is in the vending machines that counts. Next time you're in the States, see if you can buy something from a vending machine without some type of corn or corn-syrup or corn-byproduct as a major ingredient (sometimes it's even in 'diet' products, which have their own set of health threats). I won't say it's impossible, but it's not easy either. The stuff is cheap as dirt to produce, and has long been known to be extremely efficient for conversion and storage as fat.
Fast-food in the States is essentially cheap food. It's there because its corn-syrup ingredients are so cheap to produce and easy to maintain and transport (bonus: it doubles as a preservative). Most of this vending-machine / fast-food / suburban-feed-bag (TGIFriday's et al.) industry is built around this cheapness and ease. They are symptoms. I would guess that vending machines in Japan are the result of a different economic cause.
Are you honestly telling me that if I eat all burgers and fries (supersized!) in the world, BUT pass on the sugar water, I'll be thin?
I hate "silver bullet" articles.
Fructose has been known to be not diabetic friendly for ages now. Where's the news?
One way or another, fructose is but one of the reasons for obesity. There are plenty of ways to get obese and, yes, shockingly, the most common ones include eating all sorts of calorie rich food without giving your body a way to expend those calories (the other include illnesses messing with the ability of the body to metabolize properly).
You know the laws of thermodynamics. Energy doesn't come from nothing (much to Steorn's shock), and doesn't become nothing.
People prefer there was a simple way they could eat pizzas and coke all day long and sit on their asses, and just flip a switch, and it's all gone!
But the GP is right too. You don't HAVE to buy pre-processed foods. 95% of the crap sold in grocery stores just isn't good for you. You can buy the ingredients and make it yourself like your mother may have done. In fact, you may find that it tastes better, is less expensive, as well as being better for you. My wife and I enjoy cooking together, recreating some of the things we had in fine restaurants. Sometimes it's even better since it's not mass produced. Good food is aphrodisiac...
You have 80,000 or so meals in your life, and they may as well be good for you and great tasting.
The frustose is from Corn Syrup, not sugar cane. Your rant against sugar farmers should be directed at the corn lobby. Why do you think soft drinks here use corn syrup instead of cane sugar?
The Japanese meal you describe sounds somewhat healthier than the American fast food diet of:
Two beef patties slathered with carbohydrate-rich condiments sandwiched between carbohydrate-rich bread, served with a side of carbohydrate-rich french fries and a 32 oz. cup of high fructose corn syrup. All super-sized because the marginal cost of the ingredients is so low, it is profitable for the restaurants to offer extra portions for a premium.
The innocuous-seeming bun, even, is so loaded with refined carbohydrates that you might as well be eating your hamburger in the middle of a donut sliced in half.
Not to mention that some people's mothers are busy working two or more jobs and don't have time for anything besides a McDonalds quality dinner.
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Voluntarily eating at/below the poverty level will change your perspective.
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A few years ago I became aware of HFCS, and was amazed at how pervasive it is. With the birth of my son I needed to lose weight, and was starting to really be aware of what I ate. I changed two things about my lifestyle. I eliminated almost all HFCS (mostly sodas), and started exercising more regularly. I lost 60 pounds, and have kept it off. I don't know about any of the scientific arguments, but my experience tells me HFCS has a big role to play in out society's weight issues. There are other factors, including exercise which I mentioned. But if you want to get creeped out, go to a convenience store and try to find something without corn syrup in some form. Perhaps the weight loss can party be credited to the fact that I eat better foods and drink more water by avoiding HFCS. But the bottom line is this. For me, getting rid of HFCS either caused me to lose weight directly, or forced me to eat healthier by avoiding it.
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Sorry, but the less expensive arguement doesn't hold water. Homecooked food is faster than any restaurant food, but it's certainly not cheaper than boxed meals. Better, yes. Not cheaper.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Well, you clearly didn't RTFA.
No, while "fast-food" style serving may contribute to creating bad habits, the main culprit is still what people eat, and how much of it, not how you eat it. Most Japanese meals just aren't very fattening;
You're on the money here. I'll just add from my own observation a few years ago staying with a Japanese family in the countryside: What you get in Japanese restaurants is not really representative of Japanese food (or rather, of what Japanese families eat). What they ate was a great deal of vegetables, mainly boiled (stews and so on), a little oily fried fish, lots of pickles, hardly any meat (and I don't think I had sushi even once while living with them, although of course we did have it when we ate out).
The father of the family seemed to spend most of the time he wasn't working out picking wild herbs and plants, fishing and hiking, obviously a very healthy lifestyle.
It's really no wonder they all live to be 90.
Rich.
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Time to coin another useless acronym. Where's The Fucking Article!
Difference is people have far less cars, drive them far less, people cooperate with the police here, and if you did such a thing theres an over 90% chance you'll get busted for doing that whether or not it's reported. Not to mention if you got picked up in a sweep of people they were looking for who did such a thing, and you were in the area, that can affect your reputation pretty badly. General populous has a guilty until proven innocent mentality, and even then it's debatable (what were you doing in the area a crime was committed anyways?). It's a big reason why Japanese won't allow trial by peers. If you think judges can be assholes, try pleading your case to a bunch of people that made up their mind the moment they walked into the room, and saw you in the defendant's chair. Once your convicted of something you better hope your pretty because prostitution will probably be the only thing that can pay your bills when your get out. There are no 2nd chances with such things.
Sorry I just don't buy that. If it takes more than 20 minutes to cook a decent meal you should look into getting better at cooking. Yes you can spend hours preparing food but really you can make good healthy meals in less than 20 minutes. Now granted that is not stick in microwave for 5 or in the oven and does require a bit of effort but really the extra effort might go some way to reducing your damn weight.
That and I imagine lots of fat people spend a lot of time on their asses watching TV...
Or stir fry, pasta, some curries, steak and new potatoes. In fact most good food can be cooked relatively quickly. Not perhaps a roast or lasagne but even they don't take much actual time to do, just time to cook.
Heh, the seem a bit gross to me too, even without a soda-fast, but after one week, I'm still craving the damn things. It doesn't help that my town (actually, every town I've ever lived in) has let the water supply get all awful-tasting.
I think you're looking at the obesity epidemic the wrong way, though. Every culture until the modern age has had starvation and malnutrition as a leading, if not the leading, cause of death. We've technically still got malnutrition, but not because of any problems in producing or procuring food, so at least for a little while, we should be proud that the leading cause of death currently is an abundance of inexpensive food.
It's not like it's catching. If you're in a room with fat people, you're not going to also get fat (unless you adopt the same diet and exercise regimen of course). So the key thing here is not to blow things out of proportion with panicky knee-jerk actions.
The most important thing we can do is to remove what I call the "fat safety net." Those damn scooters they give to people who can't walk. Apparently, being too heavy for your own knees is considered disability enough to get a subsidized scooter, which obviously isn't going to help you get less fat.
News Flash: "Too Fat to Move" isn't a disability. It's a self-control problem. Go to the damn pool and wiggle around a bit. And get infected with tapeworm. From what I've seen it looks a lot safer and reversible than gastric bypass...
Not to mention the airlines not charging double for people who clearly need two seats. It's all well and good for the airlines to try to be compassionate with people who are sensitive about their weight, but if their weight is oozing into seat-space I've paid for, then the airlines are being compassionate at my expense and not their own.
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It's funny with people: you threaten to take away their donuts and their soda, and they get all riled up, but you take away their civil liberties, and they don't seem to care very much.
Most people who smugly criticize America from abroad are European. If they angrily criticize America for what it did to their country, they're from South America or the Middle East. If they laugh at how much money they make off stupid Americans, they're from Asia.
The one exception is that Britons seem to have some understanding that their food is scarcely better than ours.
Huh? News to science - they've long believed that fat is designed to store excess calories against lean times, like pretty much all of the animal kingdom.
(From the remainder of your message it appears you get your information the diet industry, and parrot it without understanding.)
Corn syrup is excluded from most baby food. Gee, I wonder why?
You can demonize carbohydrates all you want -- but you're wrong. The real problem here is that it takes 1500 calories at McDs to temporarily feel like you're eating 400 calories of real food.
Many societies (Asian, Italian) have fewer obese people than America does, however they eat carb-rich diets, so what you're claiming is really bunk.
The real problem is that HFCS is deadly, and cane sugar is not. Artificial sweeteners as well as unnatural HFCS is the real culprit to tricking the body into a starved state, which consequently causes obesity. Unprocessed, or lightly processed foods are closer to what nature intended, and that is what our bodies process best.
It's all well and good for the airlines to try to be compassionate with people who are sensitive about their weight, but if their weight is oozing into seat-space I've paid for, then the airlines are being compassionate at my expense and not their own.
Astute observation.
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Blame the mentality of the stupid people that have absolutely no self-control and societies that promote the concept that its 'ok to be who you are' no matter how gluttonous or morbidly obese that may be.
The only reason for obesity "epidemics" is sedentary lifestyles that a lot of people are leading. Sitting for hours in front of a computer or TV does no good to you. And coincidentally computers and TVs weren't widely available in 1975.
I weighed nearly 300 pounds (around 135Kg for metric folks). I have a huge frame, but there's still around 35Kg of fat that I need to lose. About three years ago I had stopped drinking soda containing sugars, as well as sweet fruit juices. Didn't make even a bit of difference as far as my weight is concerned. Granted I started to feel much better, because my blood sugar wasn't on a roller coaster all the time, but that's about it. I did not make any other changes to my diet, though, so I still consume quite a bit of carbs as breads (and no, I don't eat donuts or sweets every day either).
So I bought a bicycle. So far it helped me to lose about 10Kg. This is not much, considering, but I'm making a slow, steady progress. In a few years I _might_ hit my target weight. Maybe even sooner if I change my diet.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that there's no "epidemic". It's that people walk a hundred yards/metters a day and sit on their ass all day. No matter how many calories you consume (within reason), diet alone is not gonna make you leaner if you don't exercise. At least not for long.
Those prices are in the States? I've read that all the foods that are actually good for you to eat do NOT get subsidies, while corn and other grains (mainly used to feed pigs and cattle) get the subsidies. See Slow Food for more information.
We import our vegetables except for July and August, and they are still cheaper than that what you listed. In fact, buying only fresh fruit, veggies, and meat will make my grocery bill about 30% to 50% lower than if I buy processed foods. We import from the USA and and S. America.
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You can discuss the content of the food all you want, but as a foreigner who has visted the US many times I can say that what you need to look into is your portion sizes. As a rule, when I go to a restaurant in the US, I order an appetizer; if I'm really lucky I might have room for dessert after that, but usually not. The only time I ever consider ordering an entree/main is when I am with someone else non-American who is willing to split it with me. So as far as I can tell the average American meal is enough to feed two people comfortably (as long as they're both non-American). In that case, is it really a surprise that you gain weight?
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Is the redefinition of obesity to include what used to be considered healthy - and which health statistics indicate -is- healthier than the new standards.
By the 'stroke of a pen' tens of millions of people who were previously considered healthy are now considered overweight to obese.
Instant 'obesity epidemic' and taxpayer money pours in.
Right on all counts for things here in the USA. Having minimized my budget for groceries for several years now, I've noticed that even buying stuff on sale nets me a buttload lot of sugar and salt and few vitamins and minerals. For the most part, if you want healthy food (outside of rice and beans), you have to pay extra.
However, what a lot of folks don't realize is that this applies (for the exception of artifical market pressures generated by subsidies) mostly to chain stores that have min/maxed their business model to cater to customer tastes. As people get more accustomed to eating garbage, stores just put more of that crap on the shelves. For instance, I had to stop shopping at the local Safeway simply because the produce was routinely rotting in the bins since nobody was buying it. Stand outside for five minutes and you can easily see that few folks here know how to take care of themselves - it's just cart after cart of microwave dinners and sugar filled "juice-boxes" and ramen for the kids.
One thing I have done is to go to "ethnic" grocery stores where everything is substantially cheaper, rather than shopping a large chain grocery store. Mark my words: immigrants know how to eat! The produce is plentiful and fresher, the meat is half the cost and tastier, I can get "exotic" ingredients unavailable elsewhere... who cares if nobody speaks English? In the case of the local Korean market, there's even a fishmonger where they'll clean your fresh fish however you want. The hispanic/latin markets around town also routinely have stuff like plantain and avacado for half of what you'd pay at the "normal" store.
Cash-only staples stores (like Aldi) are another way to go, but I haven't gone that route in 7 years. They're awesome for budget shopping. I'd imagine that non-gourmet co-op stores might also be good move for most people.