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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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
If the rats had free access, how did they control for the amount consumed?
Your criticisms may be apt but I would like to point out that after listening the evil shroud surrounding HFCS I decided to do an experiment with myself to see if eliminating HFCS from my diet while eating the same as I always have would cause me to lose or gain weight.
And I had to make sure only to buy things at Trader Joes since my local grocery store carried but one loaf of bread with no HFCS in it and it was hilariously marked up as some organic bullshit.
The problems didn't stop there. HFCS is quite literally everywhere. It's a preservative, a sweetener, everything. It got to be really ridiculous. After about a month of the whole charade my weight was about the same but I had been having wild cravings of ketchup (no, I wasn't pregnant). After satisfying this with some baked potatoes and french fries here and there loaded with ketchup, it dawned on me to inspect the label of my Heinz ketchup bottle. Fucking HFCS. Seriously? Upon returning to the store the "organic" ketchup is ridiculously expensive.
Due to government subsidies and advanced food science, you cannot control your intake of HFCS. It's bloody impossible in today's America. I don't know how to fix this but you can be damned sure the Corn lobby likes it this way. I'm not saying it's as evil as trans fats or bad cholesterol but holy hell is it pervasive and uncapitalistically inexpensive!
My work here is dung.
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.
It's just the corn industry. The restrictions on sugar imports drive up the price so that sugar can't win (it can compete, but companies will take HFCS at 5% less or whatever). Then, because sugar beets would be barely cheaper and sugar cane could be grown in some areas, they get price subsidies on the corn. So importing the cheap sugar cane sugar is expensive, and growing it here results in reduced yields that can't compete with the subsidized corn.
It's the same reason that marijuana is illegal. The cotton lobby made it illegal because they feared hemp. Then it became a moral issue (that oddly, no one had about tobacco and we had just swung the other way on with alcohol) and we exported our morals to the rest of the world. But at least the rest of the world tastes our HFCS and doesn't use it...
Learn to love Alaska
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
I beg to differ about not being able to control HFCS intake. Basically, I eat far lower down the food processing chain than ever. Diabetes runs in my family. I don't have diabetes and I don't want it, and over doing any sweetener is bad and HFCS is much worse than any of the others. I read labels carefully. I get most of my sweets from fruits and more complex sugars. No soda, unsweetened ice tea. More cooking from scratch and salads. Making your own salad dressing is *easy*. Just get a bottle and put in oil, vinegar and spice. And far cheaper.
Also, I first became aware of this when a friend of mine turned out to have horrible reactions to HFCS. That's when I realized most of the supermarket was off-limits to her. I then started reading labels and began to understand how bad the situation is.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I would like to endorse the sentiment expressed by Ars and expand upon it. Since I have access to most scientific journals, a couple days ago when this study was first published, but before any secondary analysis appeared on the web, I printed it out and took it home to read. I read scientific papers all the time (usually physics and chemistry), probably hundreds of papers per year, so I like to think that I'm pretty familiar with how good science is done and what constitutes a well designed, rigorously conducted investigation.
The impression I got while reading this paper, is that it is a total piece of crap. It is confusingly written to begin with, but there are serious problems with methodology, controls, conclusions, assumptions about caloric intake and claimed statistical significance. It's a joke. Which, I guess is why it's published in an obscure journal with a pathetic 2.7 impact factor. Two sites explaining the problems in more detail are the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forums at: http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,26925.15.html and this blog post by Marion Nestle (a New York University professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health with a Ph.D. in molecular biology): http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/
None of this told me how Princeton, of all places, could publish such a shit study though.....until I noticed this at the top of the paper that all the authors are from the Uni's PSYCHOLOGY department. Oh, I guess that's how.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Has anyone done one of those "Fahrenheit 9/11" or "sicko" style documentaries exposing American agribusiness and all the stuff they dont want you to know?
Queue[sic] Corn Lobby response in 3 . . . 2. . . . 1 . . . .
You think you're being funny, but in the past month or two, the corn-syrup folks have already started running commercials that claim their product is just as good as regular old sugar when used in processed foods.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 1
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 2
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 3
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
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.
Yeast requires sugar in order to produce the carbon dioxide that creates the tiny bubbles in the final product. Not all of the sugar gets eaten, so there will be some left over for the human... but some bread companies are probably adding even more sugar in order to make their bread sell better.
I did an experiment at home and discovered that commercial yeast can eat splenda (sucralose) just as well as sugar (sucrose), but cannot eat aspartame (nutrasweet). No doubt the splenda molecule is so close to sucrose that the yeast don't notice... IIRC splenda is sugar with one carbon swapped out for a chlorine.
You can try it yourself, just mix 120-degree-F water with a packet of yeast and a teaspoon of something you want the yeast to eat.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
In general, cooking your own food has become the only way to reliably avoid HFCS. Brands I have known and loved for years have sold out recently, probably due to the sagging economy, and products I've been consuming since I was a kid have suddenly sprouted HFCS, MSG, or both. Even bulk ingredients aren't guaranteed to be free of nastiness, but luckily it's easy enough to find hormone-free dairy, and organic flour is still cheap. Hey, it's flour, right? I think there's plenty of food additives that are probably harmless or even helpful to the human body, but in general most of that crap is just that, and you're best off producing a product which doesn't have any of that nonsense in it.
About the only thing I refuse to make on a regular basis is bread, because it's actual work to do it as well as some of the stuff you can buy in the store. When I have access to quality fresh bread, I buy that, but most fresh bread available in typical grocery stores is made from blobs of frozen dough anyway, slacked the night before according to schedule.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"