Slashdot Mirror
High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats
krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"
That is because HFC is absorbed by the body in the same way that beer and alcohol is. In the liver. HFC also suppresses the satiety (hunger) signal so people tend to eat more.
Queue Corn Lobby response in 3 . . . 2. . . . 1 . . . .
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
HFCS is bad, but not NEARLY as bad as Crystalline Fructose, which makes an appearance in beverages like Vitamin Water. Do some google searching on it...it's much harder to break down in your liver than HFCS.
http://www.thefitshack.com/2007/03/28/what-is-crystalline-fructose/ for some examples.
Living With a Nerd
High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad for you. If you do want to loose weight, don't ingest any. Cut out wheat as well. Enjoy meats and vegetables.
Well, that isn't going to matter as long as Iowa and the corn farmers have the political power that they do.
If there is one good thing about the new "Obamacare" bill, it's that unhealthy things will cost the government money. The downside is they will now have one more reason to regulate.
It's pretty much common knowledge that cheaper substitute ingredients are almost always unhealthy. Did we really need scientists to tell us about it? Next they'll be spending federal funding to study how diet soda is making us fatter...
So, how's that unregulated capitalism thing working out for you ?
Problem solved.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Stop giving our tax money to farmers to over-grow corn and lower the price to the point where corn syrup is cheaper then sugar. Problem solved.
This would also solve the hemorrhagic ecoli problem in cattle farms by making grass cheaper then corn husks for feed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
So soft drinks and sweet foods are worse for you in the USA than other places where they are more likely to be sweetened with cane or beet sugar? Did the sugar cane industry have anything to do with the research?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
There's a great video explaining this I found a while ago.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Bottom line: don't eat sugar, specifically fructose. It's turned directly into VLDL in your liver.
Playmate of the month standing in Iowa cornfield in cutoffs and a red-checked shirt tied around her breasts. She looks into the camera, smiles and says "There's nothing sweeter..."
HFCS sales triple the next week.
Madison Avenue kicks Princeton's butt every time.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
That it's EXACTLY THE SAME as regular sugar and IT'S FINE in moderation!
Arstechnica.com covered this same study the other day. Their writeup is better than mine would be so why don't you read their article? http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars
The abridged version of the abridged version is that this study does not conclusively prove much of anything.
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
in a comment a few months ago and everyone dismissed me as a lunatic, now here is some more newer scientific documentation and evidence backing it up, HFCS is bad.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What, no "correlation is not causation" tag? I thought this was Slashdot's response to question the validity of any and all scientific research reported here.
You want cheap, you got cheap. Angus beef is also low quality beef. Suckers.
Gatorade in the past has had high fructose corn syrup, but over the past several months have begun phasing in a sucrose/dextrose blend. I've actually begun switching from Powerade to Gatorade because of this, even though it's 15% or so more expensive.
Does anybody know of research that compares this to regular corn syrup (i.e., that which has not been "treated" to convert some of the glucose into fructose to bring the sweetness to table-sugar levels)? I'm just curious if it's corn syrup in general or if there's something peculiar to HFCS.
In any case, I think people need to realize that neither table sugar nor HFCS is "good"--they're both concentrations of sweetness far greater than those found anywhere in nature, and they are purely empty Calories. Avoid them both and eat whole foods as much as you can--and, of course, get some exercise. (If only you could put that into the US healthcare bill!)
R.Mo
I was just about to mention this. I'm not sure the title here is warranted, namely that it "causes" weight gain. That's a fairly unqualified conclusion.
That's two articles I didn't read on the same thread!
Clark: Where's Eddie? He usually eats these goddamn things.
Catherine: Not recently, Clark. He read that squirrels were high in cholesterol.
Blog,Twitter
Does anyone have a mirror of this article? My institution doesn't subscribe and I'd really like to get a look at it.
My main question is this: They allowed rats free access to either HFCS or Sucrose water. Rats with HFCS got fatter than sucrose rats. Does this represent a difference in consumption by the rats? Or are they consuming the same amount of sugar either way, and HFCS just causes more obesity.
Given that sucrose is just glucose and fructose (the components of HFCS) linked by a water molecule, I would strongly doubt the second case. The first case is a pretty trivial result. But without reading their actual methods, who really knows? I couldn't find a preprint on the authors site, and google scholar is no help either. Any help?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Switch the rats to diet soda. Now were is my grant money?
Yeah, I know you're snarking, but seriously, healthy rat meat would have a lot more nutritional value than the caloric equivalent of soda pop.
As for rats raised on high fructose corn syrup, they actually have nice marbled flesh. Fries up real good, and smells like cola on the grill.
for imported softdrinks that contain cane sugar. Because HFC SUCKS!
. . . that nature INTENDED you to drink.
Coffee.
Cane sugar is far more efficient to produce than corn sweetener but is primarily produced in tropical and subtropical regions outside of the United States . The agribusiness lobby in in the United States pays off politicians to restrict imports, driving up the price of sugar within the the U.S. to above that of corn syrup. Without import restrictions on sugar, all those products you buy which are sweetened with corn syrup would be sweetened with sugar instead. And cost less.
You can blame the agribusiness lobby and the protectionist whores in the U.S. congress for this situation. It is a clear-cut case of government power expended to benefit he corrupt few at the expense of the many.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
All fructose is processed by the liver in the same way as alcohol. That includes fruit juice.
All this changes in the presence of fiber. If you eat a piece of fresh fruit, the fiber in the fruit changes the way the fructose from the fruit is absorbed so it's not such a huge shock to the liver.
The bottom line is that if you eat carbohydrates, you should make sure it's with plenty of fiber. In other words, eat pieces of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, just as nutritionists have been telling us for years. On food labels, I look for a % USRDA of fiber greater than or equal to the % USRDA of carbohydates, or grams of fiber at least 1/10 the grams of carbohydrate. It makes you feel more full with less food and prevents the sugar rush and crash from your liver absorbing the carbs too quickly.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Just watched this yesterday. Fructose is proper bad for you, unless you eat plenty of fiber with it(hint: you don't). Sucrose isn't much better for that matter.
So you've got two things in both sucrose and high fructose corn syrup -> glucose and fructose. The ratio in high fructose corn syrup is slightly more fructose.
There are two things that happen when you eat this poison. #1) the glucose raises insulin levels, which cause fat cells to stop releasing fat back into the bloodstream. #2) the fructose heads to the liver, where it causes the liver to package up more fat to move into the fat cells. The combination of stopping up the bathtub, and putting more water in, makes fat cells fatter and fatter.
Frankly, there probably isn't that much difference between a sucrose diet and a high fructose corn syrup diet. It looks like they found some signal in the noise, but the real killer is carbohydrates. Cut the carbs, and your fat cells stop behaving in a destructive manner (draining your body of calories and storing them away while the rest of your body starves).
Google for "gary taubes berkeley" for a very informative lecture on the subject.
The guys at ArsTechinca say that a review of the actual publication shows much more questionable results, with contradictory findings between different groups (12hr and 24hr access to HFCS)and variations between repeated tests cycles. HFCS might be bad, but this research is apparently not the smoking gun. Try not to drink a gallon of softdrinks a day and you'll probably be just fine.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars
Also, some doctors are over hyping the evidence.
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
That, from now on, posting that crap about 'Calories in vs. Calories out' is an offense punishable by death.
I've got a list of medical studies that show *what* you eat has a dramatic affect on your body composition; even when the calories are the same.
And yet - I still hear it....all the time....'Calories in vs. Calories out'.
It's worked for tens of thousands of years, with no weight gain, and it actually rehydrates you, instead of causing insulin shock from too much sugar.
If it costs more it must be better.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Since HFCS may or may not be worse for you than sugar, and sugar, in just about any doses higher than you find in an apple or berries, in quantities greater than you can consume by actually eating said apples and berries is also bad for you (disclaimer: yes, over time, in sustained quantities, not in the presence of suitable amounts of more complex carbs, yada, yada) why not make an end run around the entire hulabaloo and... *gasp*... not eat sweetened foods?
Ok, have some cake once in a blue moon. But just stop eating sugar (in whatever form) three to five meals a day, and for snacks in between. Because once the HFCS storm blows over in one direction or the other, that real issue that high sugar intake (or, it seems from some evidence, even moderately elevated sugar intake) puts you at risk from all sorts of things --diabetes, insulin resistance, weight gain on the one end of the scale down to temporary fatigue and impaired athletic performance on the other-- is still gonna be sitting in exactly the same spot: fact (and your fat ass :>)
Script Cat is quoting a serious of pushy Corn Industry commercials that play here in the United States. He should have been modded "Funny" and not "Flamebait."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'm more in the "let's all get our caloric intake to a reasonable level before we start bothering with this kind of diatary micromanagement" camp.
It's not an insightful "Duh". While it's not totally new, this is one of the first long term studies comparing consumption of different forms of sugar. The study showed there's a distinct difference between consuming equal amounts of sucrose from sugarcane and fructose from corn. Even the rats that were fed twice as much sucrose didn't gain weight like the rats being fed fructose.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars
:)
Don't you love how the extension in the url fits ?
I'm not a coward by any name.
Can we please, for fucks sake, end corn subsidies and terminate sugarcane tarrifs? Soda tasted better when actual sugar was in it anyway.
I'm sick of corn. Everything we eat has corn in it. Corn corn corn corn corn. Iowa and Nebraska farmers could learn to grow something else.
Disclaimer: I am a physicist, not a biologist.
HFCS is fructose and glucose. Table sugar is sucrose. Sucrose is decomposed into glucose and fructose by an enzymatic reaction in the small intestine. This study purports that ingesting equal-energy amounts of one set of molecules versus the other allows accrual in the body of a larger amount of energy (i.e. fat). The addition of the step decomposing sucrose into fructose and glucose is somehow dissipating a large amount of energy.
Where is all that extra energy going? Are we just excreting extra sucrose? Does the body somehow need to spend energy producing more sucrase when you ingest sucrose? Does the mere presence of sucrose trigger some other energy-expending mechanism that we don't understand? WTF is going on in there?
TFA postulates that the 42-55 HFCS glucose-fructose ratio might be to blame. That would be trivial to test with a 50-50 HFCS concoction. If slightly rejiggering the ratio of sugars in HFCS could radically reduce obesity, it would be a huge health breakthrough.
Really you're going to split hairs on this? Are you a long distance runner? I'm guessing no, so just drink water. It's really not that hard to just jump cold turkey and drink water all the time. It's free and there's no sugar or chemicals.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
I quit drinking Coke and other pop's for about 4 months. It was hard as hell as I missed how comforting a bottle of Cooke felt in my hand. When ever I was stressed out all I had to do was to go for a soda and my stress level was reduced by half. Four months later "just" by not drinking any pop I lost 10+ lb's of weight. My gut also reduced in size.
Now I'm back on the pop program and feeling as bloated as ever.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Seems to me that on a study that is basically about biochemistry, you'd think Princeton could have found a biochemistry researcher to run it. Instead, they have a psychology professor. WTF?
While most people here are characterizing this as "well duh!" or otherwise obvious, these sorts of studies have to be conducted over and over again by as many accredited parties as possible. We will not be able to make the case for the FDA to ban or restrict the use and distribution of this crap without overwhelming evidence. IT CAUSES HEALTH PROBLEMS. We all know it. The FDA knows it. It is now presently very obvious. It has to become EMBARASSINGLY obvious before they will stop taking money from the food producers and do the right thing.
It breaks-down in the body the same way (fructose and glucose). There's no real difference.
If you had the article, you'd know that this isn't true.
Bah, if you had READ the article, that is.
Hey, we only yell about how correlation != causation when the article doesn't tell us what we want to hear, hmkay?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
One thing seems for certain, Laboratory Rats are a miserable lot. They seem to be susceptible to cancer and just about everything else you can imagine. Why not test something really hardy instead? Why not politicians? Nothing seems to effect them, thus if you find something that does, we should eschew it for sure. After all, if it can effect a politician, it would lay waste to the normal person. We also wouldn't have the trauma of them dying to tests that we do with laboratory rats. Imagine the damage we could save to the psych of lab technicians and scientists by testing politicians instead of poor laboratory rats? The latest grief ratio of death of politician to laboratory rat is rated 5,684 to 1,(USD Grief Ratio 1998) so the numbers are there for support of such a protocol change. Another point, I feel if we tested politicians instead, could we not anticipate a more urgent response to the very issues we are testing over? After all, politicians are embedded in the heart of the political system and have much more influence politically than laboratory rats do, even though the rats are generally more liked by the public and their support comes from grass roots, literally...anyway, it's 2010, it's it time we took the rat out of the laboRATory? Hmm?
Take the Red Pill.
ketosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
yes, its sort of the atkins diet, or the caveman diet: its how our caveman ancestors spent pretty much their entire lives, its what our biochemistry is idealized for, pre-agricultural revolution
all it means is you eat fat and protein, and no carbohydrates. the pounds melt right off
it forces your body to manufacture ketones from fat, and use that to power the krebs cycle (where you get your energy from), and to go into gluconogenesis (sugar from proteins)
eat ALL YOU WANT: eggs and bacon, butter on everything, fish, chicken, cheese, nuts. eat fistfuls of macadamia nuts all day. even hard liquor (no sugar). but absolutely NO sugar or carbs, no rice, no bread, no milk, nothing sweet or starchy at all, period
you won't be hungry, but the monotony of the diet will leave you hating fat and protein, and just the thought of popcorn will turn you into a craven vampire
so what you do is carb cycle: you give yourself a break, say on weekends, where you get to pig out on sweets. trust me: ketosis during the week will more than make up for your indulging on weekends. it will also take you out of danger from the vague stresses you are putting on your body (see negatives below)
funny thing: i felt more lethargic, but slept with less quality, when eating carbs again. this diet, for whatever its worth, really makes you realize that high carb diets are not what homo sapiens is optimized for. our biochemistry has not yet caught up with our recent (evolutionarily speaking) agricultural revolution
i also have tinnitus, and i noticed that without sugar, the ringing in my ears was lessened, then, when i ate sugar, it came roaring back. they also use the ketosis diet to control people prone to seizures, so high ketones and no sugar seems to have a neurological impact. i would be interested in a study showing if the kind of inflammation which is alzheimer's is due to high carb diets: that's wild ass speculation on my part. i did read of a woman who put her alzheimer's husband on a ketosis diet of palm oil, and his symptoms got better (google it). again: THIS IS WILD ASS CONJECTURE, but a potentially interesting line of thought, the connection between carbs and inflammation in various disease systems
drink tons of coffee, it seems to help with hunger. but it has to be BLACK: no sugar, no milk. also drink a lot of pepsi max/ coke zero: the sweetener in those is actually a tiny protein. drink gallons of the stuff, it will fill your stomach
important: get your vitamins. since you're not getting many veggies (low carb veggies like broccoli and lettuce is pretty much ok, but you're missing out on wonderful foods like blueberries with this diet), you need supplements
negatives:
ketosis makes your blood slightly acidic (its not ketoacidosis, that's far worse, like with anorexics, who don't eat at all), which means you will be leaching calcium and magnesium, and stressing your kidneys and weakening your bones (this is all happening on a minor basis, relax). take calcium citrate supplements. paradoxically, eating more calcium will help you avoid kidney stones (the most common kind of kidney stone is caused by oxalate, and calcium inhibits oxalate absorption from the intestines), and the citrate helps in ketosis for... some reason i forgot. potassium and magnesium citrate supplements are good to, i forgot exactly why
your breath will stink: you're exhaling acetone through your lungs while in ketosis. but remember, chicks don't like fat guys, and your diet is not permanent, so just avoid breathing on chicks for awhile while on your diet
if these negatives scare you, think about the diabetes and heart disease you are giving yourself with your carb addiction: far more dangerous than a temporary diet which will make you a healthy weight
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While it's not totally new, this is one of the first long term studies comparing consumption of different forms of sugar.
I believe the very first such experiment was where we split the world between Americans, who were given high fructose corn syrup, and everyone else, who continued to use sucrose. The results were pretty conclusive.
One thing seems for certain, Laboratory Rats are a miserable lot. They seem to be susceptible to cancer and just about everything else you can imagine. Why not test something really hardy instead? Why not politicians?
Rats are much better human analogs then politicians.
Personally I'm in the "don't substitute water intake with soft drink intake". It doesn't take a genius to figure out that guzzling soda doesn't seem like a great idea, HFCS or not, and is completely unnecessary and basically just self-indulgence. Yeah, fine as an occasional treat, but not as a regular part of the diet. Obviously tea/coffee has a drawback wrt caffeine, though there is decaf. I can recommend Rooibos (red bush "tea") as a drink seemingly without drawbacks (unless you find the taste repugnant) and it works with milk or even soya.
As regards caloric intake - I'd say rather than counting calories, start eating good food instead of junk (for the most part, when your base diet is good then you don't have to worry about the occasional indulgent meal) and rather than go over-the-top, just take slightly smaller portions or don't finish all the food on your plate. It doesn't take long when you start this to become more familiar with the point where you are comfortably satiated and you'll soon enough be better able to judge what serving size you need given your hunger.
So as regards dietary management - make definitive changes that you're going to stick to pretty much forever (i.e. do make sensible changes you won't have to reverse rather than monkey around with stupid over-the-top ideas).
which is the hormone responsible for stopping the body's lipolysis, telling it to store fat instead of burning it, in order to collect and burn the sugar in the blood. Let's repeat that: more insulin = more fat gain.
Anyone had the Pepsi and Mountain Dew "'Throwback" editions? It was made with beet and cane sugar, and people online said it reminded them of the old days. It got a little flatter quicker, but it may not have had the same carbonation levels. I know this much, it tasted better and not near as syrupy (eeewww). It was last year for a limited time and from Dec.-Feb. this year. I found some earlier this month for the first time at store near me off of an exit of the interstate that didn't have much else around it. More expensive, but I think it was well worth it!
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
The data in the actual paper doesn't support the conclusion in the title of the Slashdot story.
Obviously tea/coffee has a drawback wrt caffeine, though there is decaf.
The problem I have with tea is that it seems to make me have to urinate a whole lot. This even happens with herbal (caffeine-free) teas. So I drink it only occasionally.
Personally, my libertarian streak is OK with just not consuming so damn much corn.
As, yes, if you can make the subsidies go away, please do. Thank you.
I stopped drinking high fructose corn syrup a long time ago. And when I buy groceries, I generally check the ingredients, at least down to the minor quantities. People who don't would probably be surprised what they would find. Lower in fat versions generally add sweeteners. Tomato sauces with added herbs generally add sweetener. Etc....
Generally speaking soft drinks are acidic. The thing is acids catalyze the conversion of succrose into a fructose/glucose mixture.(Basically turning it into the same thing as HFCS.) So the first question to ask is by the time you drink that soft drink sweetened with sugar did reaction of sucrose + H2O->fructose + glucose already reach equilibrium. (Because if it did then there is no difference between drink a soda sweetened either way since in both cases you're drinking a glucose fructose mixture.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Yeah, generally they used that one to advertise feminine hygiene products, but it could be repurposed for HFCS just as well.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
That's great, and avoiding HFCS helps toward that goal (apparently) - HFCS blocks you from feeling full, so you eat more. If that's true and is really a big effect, then all that would be required to get caloric intakes to a reasonable level would be removing HFCS.
That's no longer micromanagement, but a single large change that could (partially) solve the overlying issue, which is consuming too many calories as you say.
Obesity is a bigger problem in the US than in most other places, and the US is also the place where it's basically impossible to avoid HFCS. Americans as a whole eat too much... correlation is not causation, but if it's shown that HFCS makes you feel less full so you eat more, then that *is* causation and is way beyond "micromanagement".
It has the same number of calories as Sugar. It breaks-down in the body the same way (fructose and glucose). There's no real difference.
With carbohydrates, it's all in the timing--the slower they are delivered, the better. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, which can be absorbed directly, so anything you consume goes directly into the bloodstream. Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate.
***If you had the article, you'd know that this isn't true.***
And if you had done some research, you would know that it actually is true. Despite the name, the High Fructose Corn Syrup used in soft drinks is a mixture of glucose and fructose that is only slightly more fructose heavy than table sugar (sucrose) after digestion. HCFS-55 is purportedly quite similar to honey in it's basic sugar mixture. Here's the Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
There's something clearly wrong here. Bad study? (Wouldn't be the first) Maybe we know a lot less about sugar metabolism than we think? Something else? Who knows?
I'm not defending fructose. In fact, it's metabolic path is thought to be decidedly different than glucose and it may well be bad news. Personally, I've suspected as much for quite a while. But this study just doesn't seem to fit with anything "we" thought we knew about sugar metabolism.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The researchers did not run a poll asking people how much they weight and how much HFCS they consumed. If they had, that would simply be a correlation as they had no control over what the subjects consumed.
In this study the researchers controlled the experiment. They randomly selected which group each rat would participate in. Then they controlled which foods the rats ate. This study did not simply find a correlation. It found cause and effect in two of the four experimental groups. The effect from the other two experimental groups were not large enough to draw a conclusion.
No, the study was not perfect. No study is. Even though the results were statistically significant they could still be a random fluke. The results need to be replicated.
They spread disease, like the plague. And now they are eating our HFCS.
I don't buy it because it is more expensive, but I don't buy regular HFCS Coke either - I drink Coke Zero instead because I don't want to gain more weight than I already have and I consume too many calories as it is :)
One day my brother was drinking a Coke Zero while studying (medical school stuff). His stomach rumbled, and produced shooting pains. He heard my voice in his head, "you shouldn't drink that stuff, it causes problems." Coke zero was the only contents of his stomach. He felt betrayed, and doesn't drink it anymore.
Here's the symptoms, in his own words: "GI symptoms, pain in stomach, bloating and loose stools"
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Now, I don't know one way or the other about the validity or otherwise of this study. I'd just like to point out that Australians are now very close to your levels of obesity, and we use cane sugar.
"Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate."
This is generally true of everything we eat. Not just refined sugars. A simple rule, if we want to lose weight, is to include more minimally pre-processed foods in our diet...in other words, chew our own food. A hamburger from any of the drive-thru restaurants is basically chewed for us before we put it in our mouths. And this goes for cooking too. Eat raw foods and we burn more energy digesting, digesting slower and netting fewer calories. So a pound of carrots isn't always a pound of carrots. Not when you think about what happens inside your GI-tract.
P.S. I love BBQ. I am not advocating a completely raw food diet. However, maybe 30-50% raw, unprocessed foods combined with moderation in intake and making sure we get a wide variety of mostly plants will certainly improve the health of the normal North American (including me).
Spend an hour doing research. Yes, it ends up the same, but sugar requires the body to WORK to get those calories (net calories is lower).
This sig is the express property of someone.
This is generally true of everything we eat. Not just refined sugars.
Yes. But what does that have to do with what we're discussing here?
Eat raw foods and we burn more energy digesting, digesting slower and netting fewer calories.
But that's not the cause of this effect. The difference between HFCS and sucrose is a specific and quite unexpected effect.
In Australia, its practically impossible to find a product containing HFCS. Sugar is so cheap here that George Bush insisted it be specifically excluded it from the so called "Free Trade Agreement" we signed with America a few years ago (seems US Republicans believe "free trade" means trade highly regulated through excessive taxation).
Obesity rates in Australia are higher than in US, following a similar trend over the past 30 years. This is about as close as you can get to definitive proof that correlation does not imply causation with respect to HFCS consumption and obesity. It is increasing consumption of products containing either sugar (Australian version) or HFCS (US version) that is increasing obesity rates. Substituting sugar for HFCS appears to, if anything, make you a tiny bit fatter.
Even though sugar doesn't help people stay thin, the obese are still at a big advantage here thanks to universal "socialist" health care. Coincidentally we also have a functioning capitalist economy which now consistently yields higher average wages than those in the US. If the quality of this study and most of the comments on here are anything to go by, America really is a country in decline. Maybe you should try some of our "socialist" university education.
Now that you know what the real demon is, can we get our trans fats back?
well in that case, why treat the rats in such an inhumane way? I vote the politicians :)
Tipped me off that something was amiss.
I believe the very first such experiment was where we split the world between Americans, who were given high fructose corn syrup, and everyone else, who continued to use sucrose. The results were pretty conclusive.
A meta-analysis of all past obesity and HFC intake studies is in order.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Beet sugar and cane sugar is just as cheap. It is just US subsidies (cost the US taxpayer money) and import duties (cost the consumer because they can't buy cheaper foreign stuff) make it more expensive.
And of course, the US could grow regular sugar itself.
But hey, the market will sort this out! That is what the liberaterians and republicans claim.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because when you give high fructose corn syrup to a politician, he raises taxes...
The main disadvantage with using rats (instead of politicians or laywers) is that sometimes the scientists start to feel attached to them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The faster the energy is released into the blood stream, the more of it is simply too much for the cells to use in those minutes, before it has to be quickly removed from the blood or it will destroy the vessels. So it gets moved into the fat.
And HFCS is the king of speed, when it comes to this. So the rest is completely and utterly obvious.
And on top of that, to do all this, the process needs B-vitamins. Which is included with wholemeal. Which until the 20th century was the prime source of those vitamins for humans. But it’s not included in those pure-sugar products. So the process depletes your body’s reserves. ;))
Unfortunately, that’s also needed for your brain to think! So essentially it also makes you stupid as fuck to eat such pure carbohydrates.
And you wondered where all those fat idiots came from...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Heh...
There's been a few other long-term studies that were done that were claimed "inconclusive" prior to this one. Most of them showed there was a serious problem with HFCS, but this one goes further to show that it's worse than many thought of the stuff.
If you're counting calories- it's identical. That's what the producers of HFCS would have you believe is all that matters.
The problem is that it isn't identical. Not even close.
The fructose is in an immediately available fashion to your body, which means it's absorbed on the spot, unlike sucrose which has to be cracked apart first. From there it lies in your blood stream until your liver can utilize it. Your liver absorbs and converts some of this fructose into it's roughly one day's store of glycogen. Once it has a day's worth of reserve, it starts converting the rest as it gets to it into triglycerides and fatty tissue within the liver (Look up "fatty liver disease" via Google...). While it's waiting to be converted the pancreas sees the sugar levels rise and tries to pull the sugar OUT of the blood stream by increasing insulin levels. Unfortunately, only glucose responds directly to the insulin part of your hormone system- fructose is largely processed by your liver and only your liver. This has the predictable effect of yanking the glucose out of your blood stream. At some threshold, the body detects problems caused by the sugars being ripped out of your system by that and starts producing glucagon which orders the liver to start converting the glycogen in it's store back into glucose. Over time, this swinging, the triglycerides, and the other stuff going on combine to provide leptin resistance and insulin resistance- which are the hallmark signs of Type 2 Diabetes, something we're supposedly having an "epidemic" of in the "Western" world.
And this doesn't even get into the traces of mercury and other chemicals you're exposed to when you eat HFCS as part of your diet.
In the end, while you do need Fructose, you don't need the quantities that the Western populace seem to consume, nor do you need or want it in the form that we're exposed to it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why should it be an unexpected effect? It's a mix of monosaccarides, absorbed directly into your system as opposed to sucrose, which is a polysaccaride needing to be broken apart. Once in your system the glucose causes it's own immediate issues and the fructose causes rather insidious ones when you're presented with the blood serum levels you get from even a single can of soda.
Your insulin system doesn't distinguish between the sugars, but your body doesn't respond to the Fructose save through the liver's metabolic pathway. When it sees the "sugar" in the system, it jams out insulin to drive the serum levels back into line with what they should be for proper health, etc. This drives the glucose out of your blood (part of where that "crash" comes from...) to the point you lose energy supply. While all of this is happening, your liver is slowly processing the fructose either into a 1 to 2 day supply of glycogen that is held in your liver as an emergency glucose boost store- or into fat to be put into longer term storage. Eventually, it catches up with the fructose levels in your blood stream and if you've not depleted your glucose levels, everything's just fine. If you've depleted your glucose levels, your body detects the low sugar problem (as bad as the high one you just caused...) it jams out glucagon to order the liver to peel part of the glycogen back apart into glucose.
Now, to be sure, sucrose will cause many of the same issues, but it takes quite a bit more to do it because the effect of all of this is slowed down because you have to break it apart first. With HFCS, it's already in a fully bioavailable form out of the gate.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I thought the US was food rich? So using corn doesn't enable food security.
come from this part : "Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same (my emphasis).
While the study was not designed to test that hypothesis, it provides evidence that weight change is affected by factors other than caloric intake, at least in rats. This study is thus a serious blow to the "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" paradigm of obesity research.
Seems like Gary Taubes was right all along.
But HFCS is subsidised by taxes so...
OMG!
See this is what happens when uneducated morons (read: the government) come up with "consensus" that something is bad for you and they have the solution. Sugar BAD! You MUST use HFCS instead. Oops, our bad. Saturated fat BAD! Use transfat instead. Ooops, our bad. How long will it be before we discover that Sea Salt (or whatever they plan to replace regular salt with) is bad for you?
I heard Alton Brown say that the reason hot sauce is so popular is that as we age our taste buds sort of wear out. But people have been aging since the year one so that theory is bunk, IMHO. If you have parents in their 80s, ask them what food was like 30, 40, 50 years ago and they'll tell you things like "Pork used to be really delicious." Now it's like chewing on a mouse pad because everyone decided that fat pigs were bad for you. Technically, you might argue that "Fat Pig" is no longer an insult.
four other points you should know:
1. DON'T EXERCISE. it just makes you really, really hungry and prone to vampire fiend cravings carb addiction relapse. but DO exercise on the weekend (if that is when you are eating carbs if you are carb cycling for relief from the ketosis diet's monotony). of course, when you finally reach the weight you want, go ahead and exercise: you should exercise no matter what as part of normal health maintenance. just don't exercise while you are losing weight on ketosis during the week, your body is stressed enough as it is when it is losing weight. i mean, you should be walking a lot anyways, as a simple part of life, always do that, but that's very low impact exercise
2. SLEEP ALOT. i don't know why, but when i weigh myself in the morning after a really long sleep, i seem to weigh a lot less. i heard this connection between sleep and weight loss was debunked though. however, i do know the liver does a lot of sleep-specific metabolic things, such as refilling your glycogen reserves from fat (if you have no carbs in your diet). so there has to be some connection to burning fat in sleep (if you have no carbs in your diet). however, i usually take a giant piss after waking up, and you dehydrate over the night time hours too, so maybe when you weigh yourself in the morning you are just seeing a lot of water loss
3. speaking of pee in the morning, get ready for bizarre poop. when i was a carb addict, i used to crap giant logs all day, and also a lot of runny stuff. occasionally it was urgent too. but while on ketosis, you only do these tiny hard little nuggets in the morning, and nothing is ever urgent. your poop becomes the same size as a cat's! which makes sense, in a weird way, considering the caveman diet is a carnivore's diet, like a cat. also weird: i notice the odor of your crap changes... it smell's like cat poop rather than human poop, again probably due to the fact you are basically turning yourself into a cat, diet-wise, and biochemically, this changes the ratios of certain odoriferous compounds in your crap to resemble that of a committed carnivore's. i wonder what you are doing to your gut flora ecosystem while on ketosis? thank god the appendix is there to keep a healthy reserve of carb loving gut bacteria. while in ketosis, you really could go a whole day without crapping, no urgency whatsoever. its almost like you don't need anything but a cat litter box. which again, to me, speaks volumes about us still being, biochemically, cavemen, living as we are in this alien world known as the agricultural revolution
4. this is a way, without hunger, to achieve that life extension via calorie constriction you hear about now and then, i think. the diet gets monotonous, yes, and you feel like a heroin addict or a crack fiend at just the thought of pancakes and ice cream, but you are NEVER HUNGRY. you can eat all you want. its really amazing. however, you are missing out on wonderful extremely healthy carbs like blueberries, and all those vitamin rich veggies. i also think teenagers and children should avoid this diet (it would stunt their growth, they need their carbs). but if you are a fat adult, perhaps a permanent lifestyle of carb cycling (monklike fat and protein only asceticism during the week, pig outs on waffles and berries on the weekend) isn't terrible for the body long term at all. i wonder what you are doing to your circulatory system though, long term: is your cholesterol through the roof? should you be on statins? or does cholesterol paradoxically go down (cholesterol's precursors being burned for fuel in the liver while in ketosis? or being shunted to the bile ducts for lots of fat and protein digestion work?: all wild ass conjecture). i noticed my blood pressure did drop, but only slightly, but mine was always low in the first place. but maybe for someone with high blood pressure, this diet could be a wonderfully healthy alternative (again: WILD ASS CONJECTURE on my part). but recall: dr. atkins died slipping on ice in manhattan. maybe that's a cover
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that high carb diets were a part of certain ancient human lifestyles... and that no carb diets were as well, and every fraction in between. consider the lifestyle of the inuit and their seal blubber. i'm certain there were differences in average carb quantities in diets all over, but that this fraction of diet was stable according to local geographical constraints on food sources, over time spans of thousands of years, if human populations and food cultures were mostly isolated and cut off
for example, amongst native americans in the southwest, dangerous diabetes is beyond epidemic, its almost ubiquity. this is directly traceable to a biochemistry that thousands of years honed to perfection for living in desert environments. and when europeans came, they disrupted this lifestyle, put them all on "indian" reservations, and shipped them high carb food stuff to live off of. southwestern usa native americans are basically killing themselves/ being killed off, with high carb diets that europeans are more adapted to
i'm not saying this is what is happening in modern society to all of us, but something LIKE it, more low grade, is happening to us due to our sudden affluence and highly secure food supply as compared to even just our grandparents' generation
i am certian some people can tolerate carbs really well, if they come from a high carb ancestry, and can subsist on a diet, for example, of all rice, and still have six pack abs. and i bet there exists some people, if they went on a no carb diet, that they wouldn't lose any weight at all. in other words, everyone's carb metabolizing biochemistry is unique
however, i can still say, with some certainty, that the MAJORITY of us, in the developed west at least, when it comes to our obesity epidemic, that its simply a side effect of having bodies honed by hundreds of thousands of years of little or no carbs, suddenly being exposed to a carbohydrate explosion in our suddenly stable and affluent diets
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.
i do the same job as you (programming) and for me, it is true, as you say: when in sugar rush, your brain seems more high powered. however, this is rapidly followed, for me, in an hour or so, by the insulin blanket of lethargy and sleepiness, even midday. you just can't keep amping up all day, there's payback eventually
so i just snack on cheese and nuts, all day, and lose weight, and have a nice slow burn with no peaks of megalomania and valleys of sluggish grogginess. also: i only get headaches when i'm dehydrated. so i guzzle 2 or 3 1.5 liter coke zeros all workday. i pee gallons and i have a permanent callous on my pointer finger from heaving 1.5 liter bottles, but no headaches. seriously: headaches are more dehydration than low carbs, for me. and my sleep schedule is much better when not eating carbs: no sleeplessness at bed time, and no sleepiness when waking up (as long as i remember: no caffeine after 6 pm)
but i will grant you this: everyone's carb biochemistry is different, and i can only speak for what works for me, and it really may have no lessons for you whatsoever. i guess the value of my words depends on whether or not the average fat geek programmer has biochemistry more like me, or more like you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This again from the same wikipedia article...I know, its very much in biology terms, but the last few lines make it worth the read!
:)
Fructose metabolism
All three dietary monosaccharides are transported into the liver by the GLUT 2 transporter [30]. Fructose and galactose are phosphorylated in the liver by fructokinase (Km= 0.5 mM) and galactokinase (Km = 0.8 mM). By contrast, glucose tends to pass through the liver (Km of hepatic glucokinase = 10 mM) and can be metabolised anywhere in the body. Uptake of fructose by the liver is not regulated by insulin.
Fructolysis
Fructolysis occurs in two steps. First, the two trioses dihydroxyacetone (DHAP) and glyceraldehyde are synthesized. Second, the trioses are metabolized either in the gluconeogenic pathway for glycogen replenishment and/or complete metabolism in the fructolytic pathway to pyruvate, which after conversion to acetyl-CoA enters the Krebs cycle, and is converted to citrate and subsequently directed toward ''de novo'' synthesis of the free fatty acid palmitate [31].
Metabolism of fructose to DHAP and glyceraldehyde
The first step in the metabolism of fructose is the phosphorylation of fructose to fructose 1-phosphate by fructokinase, thus trapping fructose for metabolism in the liver. Fructose 1-phosphate then undergoes hydrolysis by aldolase B to form DHAP and glyceraldehydes; DHAP can either be isomerized to glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate by triosephosphate isomerase or undergo reduction to glycerol 3-phosphate by glycerol 3-phosphate dehydrogenase. The glyceraldehyde produced may also be converted to glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate by glyceraldehyde kinase or converted to glycerol 3-phosphate by glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase. The metabolism of fructose at this point yields intermediates in the gluconeogenic and fructolytic pathways leading to glycogen synthesis as well as fatty acid and triglyceride synthesis.
Synthesis of glycogen from DHAP and glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate
The resultant glyceraldehyde formed by aldolase B then undergoes phosphorylation to glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate. Increased concentrations of DHAP and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate in the liver drive the gluconeogenic pathway toward glucose and subsequent glycogen synthesis. It appears that fructose is a better substrate for glycogen synthesis than glucose and that glycogen replenishment takes precedence over triglyceride formation [32]. Once liver glycogen is replenished, the intermediates of fructose metabolism are primarily directed toward triglyceride synthesis.
Ok, now read "as well as fatty acid and triglyceride synthesis." and "Once liver glycogen is replenished, the intermediates of fructose metabolism are primarily directed toward triglyceride synthesis." again and again, and decide if you think high amounts of fructose are healthy?
I had always thought fructose was metabolised into glucose somehow, and could be used by every cell in the body. This is CLEARLY STATED not to be the case. Glycogen is said to be for the liver only, and after that it goes to fatty acids. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triglyceride for an explanation of triglycerides...yeah.
Now again, tell me that HFCS is the same as sugar?
I cut out non-diet soda a long time ago, and have been working to find a good replacement to carbonated beverages, which have flavor, no carbonation, and no sugars of any kind, are easy to find bottled, or don't stain plastic...and a preference to no sweetener, but for now I'll take my chemical substitutes to make things taste good. Right now, the leading candidate....water....It meets all requirements except flavor
Yup, I get Mexican Coke at CostCo. :) It is in the nice green glass bottles (12 oz.) and just tastes oh so much better. I understand you can also find it at some WalMarts, but they don't carry it at my local WalMart. After having the Mexican Coke, I am spoiled forever and don't want to go near the HFCS variety again.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
I got the joke too. Those ads are so obnoxious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbRxTOyGf0
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Now again, tell me that HFCS is the same as sugar?
Table Sugar is sucrose, which breaks down immediately (any slightly acidic environment) into glucose and fructose. Whether you get the fructose from HFCF or from table sugar, you're still getting the fructose, and as such all of its metabolites. That's the argument that they're they same. Table Sugar is not glucose.
I wish I had my source handy for that.)
Citation, please!
,,
No pinoqachole was imbibed or inhaled, possibly hurting these electrons.
i now weigh 212 lbs
that's 17 pounds in 26 days
no exercise... except i run on weekends when i grant myself some carb indulgence of popcorn and blueberries to break the monotony
i eat all i want. i chow on nuts and cheese all day long. i eat chicken and fish for dinner, i eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. i guzzle coke zero and black coffee by the gallon
i'm never hungry, and i lost 17 pounds in almost 26 days (so far)!
fraud? superstition? its my honest genuine personal fucking experience
i'm not selling you anything, i'm not asking anything from you. i'm merely representing my personal experience: this is the only thing that has ever worked for me, and it works fantastically, beyond my wildest expectations
do you know how hard i've tried to lose weight before this? i exercised like crazy... then i'm absolutely famished, i break down and eat. i exercise some more... and i weigh more! so i try starving myself, eating 1/4 what i usually eat. but its pure torture, i can't do it, i'm pure misery, snapping at everyone, i'd rather weigh 300 pounds, and i break down
and now, all i do is eat all i want except carbs, i'm never hungry, and the pounds disappear!
when you eat carbs, the body stores fat. when you don't eat carbs, the body burns fat: that's the reality for my body. you go ahead and you go and cite 100 pure science sources otherwise, i don't fucking care. for me, all calories are NOT the same. the body treats fat and protein calories different than carbohydrate calories, i honestly believe that now
put it this way: before trying to do this ketosis diet, i would not have believed results could be this fantastic, fast, and effortless. i would have agreed with you 100% that there are no cheats: more exercise and less food is all you can do
but all i know now is my own personal experience, and i am honestly representing it to you: this really works
i feel like i am in some alternative universe with some sort of crazy secret. i don't know why this diet isn't standard procedure. i can't figure out why i had to stumble on it by myself. i mean yeah, hundreds of people have thought up this diet on their own for centuries, and evangelicized about it even. but for some reason, it hasn't gained wide acceptance and become the status quo for dieting i would have expected it to. perhaps everyone's biochemistry really is that different and i'm a biochemical weirdo? but i can't see such basic food dynamics being THAT variable
dude: all i know is what i've experienced, and i'm being honest with you. i'm not trying to sell you anything, i'm just shocked at how fantastic this has worked
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low-carbohydrate_diets
the solid factual research, that you supposedly cite when in truth you are woefully out of touch, colors my experience as quite common. sure, this diet is not for everyone and there may be difficulties (although the inuit seem to be doing fine for centuries), but it is quite obvious that the way you represent current understanding of low carb diets is patently false
apologize and then shut up
my "anecdotes" are closer to the truth than whatever the hell is going on in your mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it