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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
http://www.freakonomics.com/pdf/whatmakesfoodfatte ning.pdf
The Dietary and Nutritional Survey of British Adults, Gibson (1996, p. 405) concluded that "sugars
appear to have a weak negative [italics added] association with BMI that is not totally explained
by confounders such as dieting, under-reporting or the inverse correlation between energy from
sugars and fat."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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!
Thanks to those motherfuckers, the sugar growers, and the congresscritters, we pay about three times what the rest of the world pays for sugar. That's why we get that corn syrup crap in soft drinks, and so much of the rest of our food.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
All dem commy pinko leftists wanna do is hurt the American farmer and its just a damn shame. /sarcasm
Corn is the one of the most powerful forces in America. This will get filed away with global warming as libral propaganda.
If you don't like it, you can leave. We don't need no whinny Euro-cans telling us not to devour copious amounts of corn syrup and sugars. And stop calling me an American. America is huge, I just live in the best part of it, the USA. That makes me a Citizen of the United States of America, but you can shorten that down to a CUSA. From now on when you want to badmouth the best nation on Earth, you can address us as Cusans. It's about time we had our own identity.
I think all the corn syrup has gone to my head...
Well, fructose isn't the worst of problems. Regular granulated sugar, glucose and glucose syrup are much more fattening, because they have that sugar-dip effect.
When you eat granulated sugar or glucose, when the sugar-low kicks in, you'll get hungry again to replenish you bloodsugarlevels, hence you'll search for that candy bar again. Fructose's effect to your bloodsugar is much less, thus will make you eat less.
Also, high fructose corn syrup, is for about half of it glucose syrup, so there you have it.
Manuals are your last resort only
No more ketchup?...snapple? Mexican Coke still uses sugar so I'm cool there...but ketchup?
This ran a few years ago and was REALLY interesting. Corn in america == money. Farmers have a corn glut to deal with. 100 years ago, they put the extra corn to work as alcohol (whiskey), and soon we had a nation of alcoholics. So then they came up with corn syrup. That hasn't worked out too well considering how fat Americans are.
Next up-- ethanol!
...but where is a link to the paper or actual report? I just don't trust an interview as easily when it comes to scientific claims as I would the scientific data and whatever fallacies it may hold.
On another note, there have been plenty of studies already demonstrating how nutritionally bad fructose is bad for an individual. Here's a compilation I found awhile back of the cons of using fructose so widely in consumables: http://curezone.com/art/read.asp?ID=32&db=6&C0=17
Here's a decent rule of thumb when it comes to eating food: If you don't know understand what the ingredients are when you may not want to consume it. Pick up any random piece of junk food and read the ingredient panel. Kudos to you if you can even pronounce everything correctly.
In Soviet Russia CIA spoils Cuban sugar for you.
Have you US cubicle jockeys ever thought about how much you are locked into corn syrup?
A few sick fat 'end users' will not stop the protectionism, tariffs and congress critters.
You have a huge set of new tax credits, grants and loans flowing into big corn for 'ethanol'
Then you have state subsidies.
Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life and own the world?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants,
There is something to what you write. But, here in Japan vending machines are absolutely everywhere - really, it's crazy; I walked about 3km every morning to my previous job, in a partly rural area and I realized that there was not a single spot along the route where I could not see at least one vending machine. And there has always been lots and lots of fast-food here as well as takeout meals; many traditional Japanese dishes like soba, onigiri, oden and so on are meant to eat quickly from a counter or street vendor cart, or while going from place to place, and the bento meal is ubiquitous. A traditional Japanese meal, furthermore, is an orgy in "grazing" behavior, with dozens of small dishes to eat in turn.
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; while you often have some part of the meal that is fatty or calorie-rich, you don't get much of it, while you often do get large amounts of vegetables, pickles and other lean stuff. A steak, for instance, may be 100 grams or so, and be just one dish of a dozen you get for your meal.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
LOL - when the rest of your countrymen accept the title cusans we might start using it, until then you are all Americans. The others we will continue to call Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians or whatever is appropriate. By the way, not everyone from outside America is from Europe nor, according to your logic, should all those who do live in that continent be addressed as Europeans, but they can be called British, French, German, Italian etc. Unless you personally know TheEmptySet, I think that you are making an assumption that he is European, but you might well be correct.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Fructose used responsibly is actually beneficial. Fructose is substantially sweeter than glucose, so consuming it could allow you to reduce your sugar intake. Consuming as much fructose as you would otherwise consume glucose is clearly bad for you, but there is an opportunity to reduce intake.
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical. It seems unlikely therefore that there is any substantial difference in health effects, and most of the studies quoted in the wikipedia article linked from the main story tend to agree with that.
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?
Fructoses are simple monosaccharides. I don't remember them having corn-atoms
Bart: You could brush your teeth with milkshakes.
Dr. Nick: Hey, did you go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College too?
-----
Homer: So you think you know better than this family, eh? Well as long as you're in my house you'll do what I do and believe what I believe! So butter your bacon!
Bart: Yes father.
Lisa: Mom, dad, my spiritual quest is over!
Homer: Hold that thought... Bacon up that sausage, boy!
Bart: But dad, my heart hurts!
Having been thin most all my life but finding I had high cholesterol, I was prescribed a popular anti-cholesterol medicine. I began to gain weight passing up what is normal for my height. But my doctor and chiropractor wanted me to lose weight, just 10 pounds. I found out about HFCS and eliminated it from my diet and within a few months lost 30 lbs.
And all I did was remove HFCS from my diet.
I suspect since the anti-cholesterol medicine has an effect on the liver, and apparently HFCS is mostly processed by the Liver, has something to do with my weight gain once on the meds.
Now this article suggest other sugars also contribute. I suppose I need to further reduce my sugar intake.
But here is a HFCS tip: Bread! I would buy bread that didn't have HFCS in it and git used to which brand I'd buy. Then I discovered that all the bread I was buying had the ingredients changed to include HFCS. And this I discovered after the cola industry said they would stop selling their HFCS drinks at schools. I guess the HFCS industry simply shifted what they include it in. So the school kids still get it????
Nasty corn industry!!
Seems to me the corn industry needs to be heavily taxed where teh tax is used for health care..... like cigarettes..
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.
No, you just need an English lesson.
When A comprises B, it means A is within B, whether it is in whole or in part.
When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part.
Consider another verb for a simpler example:
Baked dough makes cookies.
Cookies are made of baked dough.
Everytime I travel to the US and look at the ingredients its there on the side of the can every single time. Over in europe we use this amazing new invention called "sugar" instead.
So its not quite true to say that America are shipping the crap that is High Fructose Corn Syrup on the rest of the world, its actually that AMERICAN companies are using that on AMERICANS and using more natural ingredients outside of the US. This appears to be due to costs (its cheaper to use HFCS in the US, as sugar imports are penalised) meaning that the world's richest economy is using the cheapest and crappiest ingredients.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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).
Yes, the contents are rather different. In most drink vending machines, most drinks are cold or hot green teas and coffee, with a smaller amount of juices, water and sports drinks. Actual carbonated soda is very rare; it's not that unusual to see even Coca Cola vending machines that don't actually sell cola.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Don't the British use corn sugar as table sugar?
Nope
The sugar on British tables comes from either sugar cane or sugar beet. It's possible that some corn sugar is used in ready-made foods, but seems a bit unlikely as we don't grow a vast amount of sweetcorn.
... am the great cornholio! I must obey my bumholio!
C|N>K
The difference is that Japanese vending machines mainly sell soiled schoolgirl panties.
"There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't."
Ok so you don't, I do, but who is in the 3th group?
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?
1. Lustig says:
So if we eat significant fiber with everything we ingest does everything become low GI? Or what? This will definitely make me eat French bread (if that has bran?) and no more white bread (which I have known is a "slab of sugar" but didn't really use that knowledge). And what is a compact source of fiber? I doubt you could drink a cola with HFCS and neutralize its evil with a graham cracker (if that has bran in it?) but what's the score there?
2. The experiment in which a drug was administered to children whose brains could not detect leptin resulted in the kids spontaneously working out, doing sports, eliminating soda from their diet, etc. I'd like to know what the kids thought / felt during the study, and want to know if we can "fool" ourselves into doing the same kind of activities and getting a similar effect, in effect bootstrapping a similar kind of health benefit without taking the drug Octreotide. (and what is that drug, sounds pretty strong!)
3. Extremely refreshing and seemingly sensible comments about why it is important to exercise. This has got to be massively important for geeks. Personally I had an obese father who as a doctor unfortunately must have been an ultrageek since he didn't want to do any sports that could hurt his hands (since he couldn't do surgery). He got diabetes. I've been heavy (not astoundingly, but overweight) since I was little and he encouraged me to sit in my room and play with my Apple II all summer I remember well, and now after he got diabetes and bypasses he said "turns out I was wrong, exercise is important!" I coulda killed him!
So anyway this is quite important and felt like a revelation: While calories are one thing I thought exercise was basically to boost the metabolism to burn food faster. Well this article says exercise increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity (so less insulin is made so less blood sugar is shunted into fat), lowers cortisol (which is a "megastress hormone" that the article says triggers deposition of bad fat, and finally detoxifies fructose.
These are all awesomely understandable reasons why you gotta exercise and at least to me at this moment it makes me want to throw this glass of diet cola (who cares! anything unhealthy!) off the table and never look a piece of white bread in the face again. Now we need some "best practices" or programming style guides that include exercise with this info in it, of course optimized for maximum concentration and efficiency with minimum weight gain.
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.
When I asked what happens if people don't have enough change on them, I was told that generally they pay a bit more the next time they ride. I'd love to have a system like that here, since it would save a lot of time with people buying bus tickets when they got on at each stop, but I can't imagine it working with the average British person, who would just see it as a way to avoid paying for the service. It seems to be not so much an issue of how law-abiding the Japanese are as the culture of respect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Use rice syrup, which contains no fructose. You can substitute it 1:1 for corn syrup.
I use it to make all sorts of treats, including marshmallows.
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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Clearly people aren't taking the time to read the article (I'm shocked), so here's a summary of the fructose info...
Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.
high fructose corn syrup came on the market after it was invented in Japan in 1966, and started finding its way into American foods in 1975. In 1980 the soft drink companies started introducing it into soft drinks and you can actually trace the prevalence of childhood obesity, and the rise, to 1980 when this change was made.
it's not the calories that are different it's the fact that the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let's take 120 calories of glucose, that's two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc.. Now let's take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what's in orange juice. So it's going to be all the fructose, that's 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that's another 12 out of 60 -- so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.
fructose [does] three things that are particularly bad in the liver. The first is this uric acid pathway that I just mentioned, the second is that fructose initiates what's known as de novo lipogenesis...Which is fat production...Excess fat production and so VLDL [the bad form of cholesterol], very low density lipoproteins end up being manufactured when you consume this large bolus of fructose in a way that glucose does not, and so that leads to dyslipidaemia.
And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme called Junk one, ...and when you initiate Junk one what happens is that your insulin receptor in your liver stops working...that means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise.
put all of this together and basically you've got a feed forward system of increased insulin, increased liver fat, liver deposition of fat, increased inflammation -- you end up with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You end up with your inability to see your leptin [**leptin tells your brain you are full**] and so you consume more fructose and you've now got a viscious cycle out of control.
In fact fructose, because of the way it's metabolised, is actually damaging your liver the same way alcohol is. In fact it's the exact same pathway, in fact fructose is alcohol without the buzz.
I took organic chemistry so I understand what the ingredient are (at least on the basic structural level) and can pronunce them very well ;).
Anyway the argument is a bad one (and remind me of the argument of people saying "oh god they are adding chemicals in our food") If you took normal organic growing food and we told you the list of stuff inside it, you would not understand half of it, still that would not make it more or less dangerous. 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol is an example of it. Naturally I could call it L-ascorbate too. Or maybe vitamin C. The problem are not that people don't understand what the smallest ingredient part in ppm or milli% of their food composition is, the problem is that people ignore totally the composition of the main ingredient, like fat, and refuse to do sport, and eat a lot during the day way way more than is necessary for their activities, and not equilibrated. It is a LIFESTYLE problem. It ain't one signle factor but a combination of many. And no, the ingredient you can't pronunce without having being in university ain't the problem.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Time to coin another useless acronym. Where's The Fucking Article!
"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."
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories. The sensitivity of these triggers seems to differ from person to person, which is one reason some people can eat anything they want without gaining weight, while others can count calories and still become obese.
I was in the latter group. Exercising daily and eating quite well, yet ending up in my mid-twenties at an overweight 230 pounds. It turns out carbohydrates -- and especially sugars like fructose -- cause a rapid blood sugar spike and insulin production, which in turn triggers your body to conserve excess calories in fat cells. At last, I stopped eating less and started eating differently -- no sugars and starches, but plenty of protein and fat -- and dropped 75 pounds so quickly I astonished everyone I knew. Without the carb/insulin trigger, your body naturally uses only the calories it needs and eliminates the rest.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Fear not, there are misunderstandings aplenty to share round -- on your part, and in the gpp, and in the sentence you quoted in your ggpp. "Comprise" is a notoriously difficult verb because it can mean either "include" or "be included", pretty much at the whim of the speaker. (Just as a sign of this, I note that the Oxford English Dictionary lists nine primary meanings of the verb, some of which contradict each other, and somewhere between 20 and 25 secondary meanings. Yikes.)
When the gpp said, "When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part", that does conform to common usage; but the bit about "When A comprises B" can go either way depending on context. (The line you originally quoted, "Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar", does indeed strongly imply that "fructose" contains 50% of all table sugar in the universe. Whatever that could possibly mean, i.e. not much.)
Personally I try to avoid this verb ...
Less about respect, and more about fear of being ostracized. Sure you'll get away with it a few times, but not too many times. People have eyes, and you really never get to hear what other people say about you in Japan. Pretty important stuff when you generally end up getting to know your community better since your on foot allot more, and on public transportation. Once you are caught, and have a black mark for doing something bad, you'll spend a damn long time clawing your way outa that hole if you ever can. It's easy to sluff off personal guilt in other countries, but in one thats so entrenched with the idea of personal guilt...it's hard to have it not rub off on you after a while. Theres others, but thats a big one I've noticed.
Personally, I can't stand all the corn syrup the Americans seem to have in everything they eat. Maybe this is my body's way of saying "get the hell out of this silly country before you become one of them!"?
Personally, I'm an American, but I hate American food. If I could afford it, I'd just shop at the international shops and bring home 50lbs of Japanese snacks. Of course I'm sure your not supposed to eat that in large quantities either, but for some reason pocky and ramen never makes me feel fat.
But more seriously, I think the problem is more cultural than anything else. Most popular American foods are deep fried (Mmmm... Onion Rings) and probably not meant for human consumption (Mmmmm... Pulled Pork Sandwhiches) and that the reason for obesity in America is that we haven't really scaled our fatty foods to match our supply.
As in... These were good for you in the 1920's when the lack of food was an issue for most Americans, but now... Not so good.
We need to focus on just not cooking foods in fat or deep fry them. Plenty of good stuff out there that you can eat a lot of and still not get fat.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
Is it bad that hearing things like that or watching movies like Super Size Me make me want to go to McD's even more?
But from the article, taking in lots of fructose can dramatically boost your body's insulin production, which in turn blocks the hormone leptin. Leptin regulates the appetite.
If your appetite is not out of whack, a small Pulled Pork Sandwich or medium portion of Onion Rings will fill you up. Then you're done. It may not be great for you, but it shouldn't be dangerous. On the other hand, if something (fructose or otherwise) has interfered with your ability to feel full after eating a healthy portion, then you might have extra helpings of both. Then there's a problem.
Ok, I call bullshit on this one. People lacking any clue what they are talking about keep writing about fructose as being the culprit, and of course jumping on high fructose corn syrup as the same. It is not. Here are some facts, feel free to try to dispute or verify them.
o n#Foods_with_high_fructose_content Remember, they called it fructose because it initially came from fruit.
Sucrose - table sugar - is composed of two molecules, one fructose and one glucose (also called dextrose) molecule, joined together as a disaccharide. As soon as this hits any of the enzymes in your mouth or stomach, the connecting bond is hydrolized and you get 42% furctose and 58% glucose (weight difference, fructose is a 5 carbon sugar, glucose a six)
High fructose corn syrup is sold in ratios of 42, 55, and 90% fructose, the remainder being glucose and trace higher saccharides. The bulk of the material used in foods is either 42 or 55, 42 being the ideal proportion to sucrose. 90 is used mostly for special applicaitons and not as a sweetener. Soft drinks use the 42, meaning it is exactly the same as sucrose as soon as it hits your mouth and stomach.
Finally, all health effects of fructose are compared to pure glucose, not sucrose, and they are using the pure fructose, not high fructose corn syrup. If you compared high fructose to sucrose, guess what, not a bit of difference. This is a charlatans comparison, and pretty effective in fooling intelligent people who know little or anything about food chemistry.
You want to ban fructose, try this, give up apples, pears, oranges, berries, every fruit has fructose in it, I don't see any doctors (sorry "cough" nutritionists) calling for a ban of fruit. Hell, look it up in a real source, or here's wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorpti
You want to reduce obesity, reduce all sugars, reduce starchy foods low in fiber, increase unrefined (aka -non bleached) foods, fat under 30% of calories, less salt, and get off your goddamn computer chairs and take a freakin walk!
Now, Lustig may have credentials to study insulin hypersecretion, but his conclusions are clueless. He relates fructose intake of 1/2 lb a year in 1970 to 56lbs now, but fails to account for the bound fructose in sucrose, all he did was cheat the facts and sensationalize his main source of income, research on obesity.
Good news is, with the government stupidly touting the inefficient production of ehtanol from corn, the bulk of the corn crop in 2015 will be going to ethanol production, and most food makers will have to revert back to sucrose (and making ethanol from sugarcane is much more efficient than corn, ask Brazil) and of course all your food will triple in cost (as well meat, dairy, anything that was corn fed, so, look forward to being fat and broke in the future, food, gas, everything will skyrocket, everything but our salaries, as we will all be outsourced to China or Bolivia by then.
Largely because they seem to have made no attempt to really buy cheap foods. The biggest one would be rice. You can get an amazing amount of calories from rice and that shit is dirt cheap. It is also soaks up flavours really well so you can season it easily, and cheaply. You should be able to get rice in a 50 pound bag for around $14. Now given that you get about 220 calories per cup and a cup weighs 7 oz or so that's about 25,000 calories per bag, or a while weeks worth of calories for one large person.
Using that as a staple, you find that you now have more to spend on other things. You also will discover that rice is quite healthy.
Now please don't think I'm arguing that people should have to live off of a couple bucks a day for food, but realise that these congress people aren't doing it right. When it comes to really cutting food budget, you don't go to White Castle. You concentrate on materials which are cheap and have good calorie content. Rice is essentially the unbeatable champ in that area and hence forms your staple (it is not such a coincidence that it often forms the staple of diets for people more poor than is even conceivable in the US). Beans also work well, especially when purchased bagged and not canned, and they supply protein. Beans and rice, though not glorious, are just about enough on their own to sustain you.
If they are serious about seeing how to live on an extremely low budget for food, they should at least make an honest effort.
The school-girl undie thing is a bit of a red herring. There is apparently one single machine in the country, in a red-light district in Tokyo, outside an adult store that owns and operates the machine mostly as a PR gimmick (which seems to have worked splendidly, seeing as to how well-known it is).
There are quite a few "normal" weird machines here though. I lived in a semi-rural area for a couple of years, and there were rice vending machines (2kg bags), and fresh egg machines. The idea is, people driving by can get local rice and other fresh produce without having to find and disturb a farmer or find some store in the area. Some stores have vending machines for off-time purchases; tourist spots tend to have battery and film vending machines; and there's some food vending machines with stuff like cup Ramen, canned oden and stuff like that. Beer and liquor machines do exist, but mostly in places like hotels, and they're apparently disappearing, outcompeted by convenience stores.
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If you've never done it, go low-carb for a month. For many Americans, you can kind of cheat on this by simply not drinking sweet drinks and not eating candy or other sweets for a month -- you don't have to go full anti-bread and pasta and rice. Cut out diet drinks too and just drink water or unsweetened tea.
Somewhere over the course of this month, you will begin to realize just how much sugar is hidden in fast food. McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal. I've tried to avoid fast food ever since I did this a few years ago by accident when I tried to switch to only drinking water to save money and lose weight. It's really obscene.
(Unfortunately, after long enough not drinking sugary drinks, you do become used to the flavor and learn to ignore it in fast food again, but it's still an eye opener as long as you remember it.)
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Yup. Convenience isn't necessarily to blame. What do you buy from the jidouhanbaiki? I get Soukenbicha (tea) every frickin' time. My US friends and family who have come to visit over the years all hate it the first time (like I did), and then can't stop drinking it the rest of the trip, and leave wondering why something like that isn't available in the states. It's even a Coca-Cola product.
Something is very rotten in the state of the US when it comes to foodstuffs. I don't really watch my weight that much here; and I don't even walk/bike very much since I got my yansha 50cc and scored a parking place at work for the rainy days, and I still stay pretty svelt. Every time I see a picture of my in the US, I go, "good lord I was tubby." At the time, I felt thin--I was certainly thinner than my friends and most of the people on the street, but compared to what I look like here, I was right portly.
Even with all the carbs from the gohan and sugar in everything and more work-related alcohol than I'd touch in the US, I still am much more healthy here. And this is the third time I've lived here, and the third time I've noticed this. Hontou ni fushigi da yo. Nanka okashii.
I'm sure that somebody else is better qualified on that issue and I heard the same story. But my experience from a 2001 visit to Tokyo is quite different. While vending machines are ubiquitous (and a good thing too. Nothing better then some ice cold green tea drink after a hard night of partying on a hungover morning; but I digress) I had to see yet one vending machines selling panties. Used or not.
May be that this is a thing of the past, maybe that we weren't in the seedy enough parts of town to find such vending machines, maybe that it's just an urban legend (and it's not that Japanese gentlemen don't have quite a reputation when it comes to kink), but the most likely explanation is that this was cleaned up in the 90s.
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The BS is the /. article summary. From the transcript:
Robert Lustig: Well high fructose corn syrup, it should say that, now in Australia for instance the sodas don't have high fructose corn syrup they have sucrose. Well sucrose is half fructose. You know a lot has been made over this high fructose corn syrup being particularly evil. In fact high fructose corn syrup is either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest is glucose. Well sucrose is 50% fructose the rest is glucose. In fact high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are equally problematic.
Norman Swan: Basically table sugar.
Robert Lustig: Table sugar -- that's right. We were not designed to eat all of this sugar, we're supposed to be eating our carbohydrate, particularly our fructose, with high fibre. Well the fact is we have 100 pound bags of sugar that go into the cakes, and the donuts.
Norman Swan: So we don't need to get obsessed on fruit sugars, it's sugar itself, sucrose.
Robert Lustig: Absolutely, it's sugar in general.
---
So don't blame the article, blame the summarizer. I've read (but can't link) that the difference between the current American diet and the diet in the 50's is almost exclusively the amount of sugar eaten.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Well, excess calories certainly are a problem. But Fructose in large doses has the peculiar (and unintuitive) property that much of it is converted more or less directly to fat rather than energy in the liver. Glucose OTOH is metabolized throughout the body. The body seems to be designed to work with a carbohydrate mix that consists of mostly of glucose derived from starch and sugar plus a bit of fructose from fruit and sugar, as well as (for infants and those of European ancestry) a bit of galactose from dairy products.
The body can convert fructose to glucose and burn it. But only in modest doses. When the fructose level gets high, the bod stashes the excess for future consumption ... as fat.
Here's a link to a lengthy article that addresses all this http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrat e_metabolism.htm
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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.
The fact of the matter is, some Phd for some company somewhere came up with the idea that high fructose corn syrup was a better, lower cost way to sweeten food. While its great that, two generations of heart attacks down the road, that other scientists have stepped up to the plate and said that it wasn't, one has to ask, what else is new that is really safe? Cell phones, pervasive wireless, the use of plastics? It seems like every new technology that we've created has had a dark side discovered a generation later, and I wonder if, any more, the smart strategy is that, if something new does come out, to maybe not so blindly trust it?
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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.
I know you meant this as a joke, but, as always, life is one step ahead, at least if you go to a Gateway Grizzlies Baseball Game. From the press release on "Baseball's Best Burger"
They credit at Atlanta restauarant for inspiration, so a bacon donut cheeseburger is probably older than that. And we need studies to figure out why there is an obesity epidemic?
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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The body regulates the rate of breakdown of sucrose (into fructose and glucose) through the enzyme sucrase. Ingesting fructose-glucose mixtures bypasses your body's regulation mechanism, resulting in faster uptake and greater stress on the body's other sugar-regulation mechanisms, such as insulin.
In the end, greater stress on a body system results in it wearing out sooner, hence the epidemic of adult-onset diabetes.
High-fructose corn syrup is NOT the same as sucrose. People with sucrose intolerance lack the enzyme and cannot properly digest sucrose.
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.
I was also struck by some of the 'honesty-based' systems in Malaysia. E.g. some restaurants had a buffet-like system where there are various types of dishes and you just go and dish up whatever you want and then eat it. At the end you go stand in a queue and then tell the cashier what you had, and they simply take your word for it and ring it up. And it works.
On a side note of how unhealthy fast food is, Zaxby's puts 32 cups of sugar into 5 gallons of ice tea. (The one I worked at tended to put 64 though).
From the article: The second reason that exercise is important is because it's the single best treatment to get your cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone, it's the hormone that goes up when you are mega-stressed, it's the hormone that basically causes visceral fat deposition which is the bad fat and it has been tied to the metabolic syndrome. So by getting your cortisol down you're actually reducing the amount of fat deposited and it also reduces food intake. People think that somehow exercise increases food intake, it does not, it reduces food intake.
What is this guy talking about? Ever since I started regularly exercising I am more hungry, more often. And actually hungry, not the confusion of eating out of boredom when I wasn't in shape. Just look at marathon runners, they need to eat tons of food to give them the energy they need. What this guy is saying seems so counterintuitive. Can anyone explain what he means or he is just crackers?
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.
It hasn't been mentioned because it is nonsense. HFCS contains the same two molecules that sucrose contains (mostly, in similar proportions, except for HFCS 90). As one poster said above, once it hits your tongue, its damn near indistinguishable from regular sugar or sucrose. You would be correct, though, if you said that fructose leaves out the "fattening" effect (i suppose you meant to say filling or bloated).
Actual carbonated soda is very rare; it's not that unusual to see even Coca Cola vending machines that don't actually sell cola.
4 -2006/jihanki.jpg
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Carbonated soda is not "very rare". And Coca Cola machines without soda only exist when other Coca Cola machines *with* soda sit right next to them.
Japanese vending machines almost always exist in multiple units - it's actually uncommon to see a single vending machine by itself. In the event that you *do*, that vending machine will *always* have at least one, and usually two or more flavors of carbonated soda. When vending machines are paired together, they have one particular kind of drink in each, so yes, of course you will only find carbonated drinks in one out of the four or five machines in any given spot. But they're always there.
This is a typical single-unit Suntory machine installation:
http://www.japonophile.com/wp-content/uploads/200
And the same for Coke:
http://z.about.com/d/gojapan/1/0/8/2/machine2.gif
This is a more common multi-machine installation:
http://www.tjf.or.jp/deai_korea/contents/teacher/
(I know the url says "korea", but that's Japan. Here is the original page it's from.)
It is true that Japan has much more variety of drink types in their vending machines than we do. But I disagree that their drinks are all that much healthier. Their vending machines contain drinks of the following types:
a) Canned iced coffee - always sweetened
b) Soda
c) Beer
d) Sweetened, processed juice drinks (their equivalent to "Sunny Delight")
e) Iced tea (unsweetened)
Of those, only tea is even remotely healthy and calorie-free. And it's true that it's usually available for those who want it. But then, diet soda is always available at vending machines here too; not as healthy as tea, but at least calorie-free and non-obesity forming. Most people choose something else, in both countries.
Our problem is portion control. The standard bottle size in vending machines here is 20oz. A Japanese canned coffee is I think 7oz. Big difference. We're drinking almost three times the sugar in our sugar drinks as they are, just because we're drinking a lot more of it. (This extends beyond vending machines too; go to McDonald's there and the "large" drink is the same size as a "small" here.)
Combined with the rest of their diet, which is a lot less fatty and rich in calories, and with a lot smaller portions, and of course they're in better shape. Though with the rise of fast food there, they're fattening up now just like we already have. (Most articles on this are a bit alarmist, IMO - it's still obvious that they're in pretty good shape, but obesity rates are rising.)
It's really not rocket science why we're all getting fat. Too many calories, too big portions. It drives me crazy how people read stuff like "fructose makes you fat!" and think they can just cut out fructose and lose weight. Meanwhile, they're still eating double quarter pounders with cheese, a large fries and two apple pies for lunch and wondering why they're still getting fat. The culprit to gaining weight is calories. That's it. Simple laws of physics. All of these foods that supposedly "cause" obesity do so because they are high in calories and low in nutrients. That includes fructose. The bottom line is you need to control your calorie intake, which means both controlling the types of food you eat as well as the amounts.
That's just the opposite of greater Vancouver's SkyTrain system. There are ticket machines in the lobby of every station. You buy a ticket before getting on, or you carry your monthly pass with you. There are no turnstiles, and fare fraud is rampant, up to 40% by some estimates. It's not just walking on without paying, but paying for a lesser fare. (You have to pay more to go into a more distant zone.)
Before adding a second line a few years ago, they did a cost/benefit analysis, and decided that it was cheaper to hire more enforcement staff than to install a mechanical enforcement system. So now, when you ride, there's a one in five chance that a pair of enforcement officers are going to get on and check tickets. Almost every time I've seen enforcement officers on the train, they've caught at least one person.
They're usually pretty lenient if a person seems sincere about forgetting an extra zone fare... total BS almost every time, but they want to maintain good PR. But I saw a couple of kids get caught a little while ago, and they must have shared half a brain cell among the three of them. The officer told them she was giving them a break, and they just had to pay the fare upgrade at the next station. They kept mouthing off to her as she checked other passengers' fares. Sure enough, when she pulled them off at the next station, she got out her ticket book.
I could imagine a couple of Japanese passengers staring dumbfounded at these morons, who were essentially saying, "Yes, I want a ticket! No lenience for me; give me the maximum penalty!"
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That must explain why Arctic grown olive oil is so good for you.
And if you think Canola oil is good for you I suggest you keep reading. Keyword: hydrogen.
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Somewhat related to a number of the comments....
A book was published about a year ago, "Mindless Eating". It discussed the various factors that cause us to overeat and undereat. (The latter is a serious problem in combat situations in the military. It's one thing for a civilian to lose 20 pounds of fat, it's another thing for a fighting soldier to lose 20 pounds of muscle.)
It's easy to say "eat less/eat healthier", but that requires far more attention than you realize. Marketers are NOT trying to get you to eat poorly, they just want you to buy from them instead of the competitor. If everyone wanted broccoli, there would be broccoli stands on every corner.
Most people want something fast, cheap and filling. Chains have tried introducing healthier fare periodically (e.g., Taco Bell had 'lite' choices for awhile), but they weren't popular enough to be economically viable. But offer a larger standard drink or more fries and your sales climb, so you get a downward spiral that results in a pound of french fries and people drinking 64 ounces of soda.
Worse, this "renormalizes" what people expect. Did you know that coke bottles were originally 8 fl oz? Then pepsi introduced a standard 10 fl oz bottle as a marketing gimmick. Vending machines stabilized things at 12 oz for a while (since you had to stay at the standard size to be sold in the machine), but fast food restaurants competed with each other with larger and larger cups, free refills, etc. You could always buy a smaller size but that's psychologically hard when you get half as much drink but pay nearly the same price.
Ditto coffee. It used to be a cup or two in the morning, perhaps with a bit of cream. Then Starbucks came into the market and the sizes have not only increased, the amount of fat and sugar has exploded. People who would never consider drinking a milk shake every day (or even twice a day!) do this without thinking twice when it's a fancy Starbucks drink. If you want a cup (8 oz) of black coffee... good luck!
I think the most telling story was some guy at a yard sale(?) who asked if the seller had any more dinner plates in a set from the 40s. He was holding a serving platter. Historically dinner plates were around 8", but now they're usually 12" (iirc), or over twice as much area. People tend to fill their plates so we're eating a lot more food without thinking about it. Now look at sit-down restaurant chains (Chili's, Olive Garden, etc.) They're selling presentation so they use larger plates than you have at home, and they fill those plates. It's not an exaggeration to say that they serve 3 or 4 solid servings, nutritionally speaking.
This is gradual enough that most people aren't aware that it's happening, but we are eating a lot more food and finding it harder to eat the correct portions. How often have you seen a 6'+ adult order from the child's menu?
Does this excuse people from TRYING? No, of course not. But arrogant "people should know better" tirades don't help since changes requires us to be aware of the subtle changes that have lead us to the current selections and portion sizes.
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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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Funny how you insist that American sugar farmers can get 'real jobs' - but somehow the African farmers can't change crops or jobs?
Funny how you don't believe in capitalism OR social responsibility.
Let me get this straight you believe the government is right to increase the taxes (in the form of enforced, artificially high prices) from the rest of America to subsidize American sugar farmers because they are not competitive with the growing seasons and labor around the world. This hurts typical Americans because they pay higher prices. This hurts the third-world farmers because they aren't allowed to participate in a market they're good at (and move on to other areas like taking over IT jobs like you suggest or starve). That is socialism that only helps American sugar farmers.
Let's put it another way, if say Kansas raised the prices on all imported wood to raise it to the price of local grown lumber, wouldn't you think that hurts both residents of Kansas who's business is not lumber and wood exporting states like Washington? Is it really different if it is separate countries and not states within a country?
It should be noted that colas in Japan (and everywhere in the world except the U.S.) are sweetened with sugar because it is cheaper. In the U.S., due to heavy corn subsidies and import duties on sugar, corn syrup is cheaper, so sodas are made with that instead.
Just as an experiment, I stopped drinking sodas almost entirely a couple of months ago. I found myself eating a lot more (almost twice as much) and my overall calorie intake increased significantly as a result. However, I dropped almost 10 pounds in a single week, and I'm still slowly losing weight, though at a much slower rate.
There is no question whatsoever in my mind that fructose is the primary cause for obesity in the U.S., and the attempt to blame overconsumption for this epidemic is yet another case of the government trying to sidestep responsibility for its poor policy decisions under Gerald Ford more than 30 years ago.
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The drink may taste horrible, but the cans are crazy. I think they are made out of reinforced steel, have you tried smashing one?
I drink corn-free beer almost exclusively, and it hasn't helped my weight at all.
I used to work in a drink factory that used HFCS, we had huge tanks of it. Anyway, I thought it would be clever to stop putting sugar in my coffee and instead using the free HFCS that was on tap from the tank. HFCS has a definite, distinctive, horrible taste. Unfortunately, due to this experiment, I can taste the HFCS in any drink that has it, and it makes me gag. It's the same taste as cheap American beer.
It's water and electrolytes to replace what you lose when you sweat. The name makes a lot more sense considering this, and also considering that Japanese people don't really understand English all that well. They, like many other nationalities, just think it sounds cool.
You've got a lot of valid points there in your reply, but there is really no need to oppose the fructose theory, just because overeating other stuff exists as well. Fructose resorption is different: it gets into your bloodstream really late, from your guts, that is, while glucose and saccharose (the 'better' sugars) hop over from your stomach on. This is one of the reasons why glucose kicks in so quickly if you're low on blood sugar and hastily chew a dextrose plate, btw. The effect: fructose doesn't saturate your hunger nor your appetite, so you order another plate.
And maybe you forgot to point out that lots of fructose is in that quarter pounder as well. And in that cheese that comes with it. And in the ketchup and whatever dressing there might be. Not to mention the bread it is sandwiched between.
Finally, I'm sure you'll have a hard time finding lots of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) products inside any sample of those Japanese vending machines (Personally, I just love them and am positively addicted to Pocari Sweat, C.C.Lemon and one more, which I never can remember the name of, plus all those coffee and tea varieties, yum!). And people drink lots of those drinks as well. Some people say you wouldn't be able to even survive the Japanese summer if there weren't any vending machines around. They're an insane waste of electrical energy, though. But that's another discussion.
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