Is the Can Worse Than the Soda?

DevotedSkeptic sends this excerpt about research that found a correlation between the use of a common food-packaging chemical and obesity rates. "Since the 1960s, manufacturers have widely used the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in plastics and food packaging. Only recently, though, have scientists begun thoroughly looking into how the compound might affect human health—and what they've found has been a cause for concern. Starting in 2006, a series of studies, mostly in mice, indicated that the chemical might act as an endocrine disruptor (by mimicking the hormone estrogen), cause problems during development and potentially affect the reproductive system, reducing fertility. After a 2010 Food and Drug Administration report warned that the compound could pose an especially hazardous risk for fetuses, infants and young children, BPA-free water bottles and food containers started flying off the shelves. In July, the FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups, but the chemical is still present in aluminum cans, containers of baby formula and other packaging materials. Now comes another piece of data on a potential risk from BPA but in an area of health in which it has largely been overlooked: obesity. A study by researchers from New York University, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a sample of nearly 3,000 children and teens across the country and found a 'significant' link between the amount of BPA in their urine and the prevalence of obesity."

Comments

Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

BPA or not, there is probably a significant link between teens who drink a lot of soda and those that don't. Maybe this obvious correlation is not causation issue is covered in the full publication (I only read the excerpt)... but if not, this is pretty damn stupid.

There is probably a significant link between the number of fast food wrappers scattered around someones home and obesity, but that doesn't mean the ink in the paper is to blame.

At the absolute minimum, "worse than the soda" is pretty unlikely. Soda is definitely bad for you, whereas BPA _might_ be bad young children and infants.

And in general, I think while environmental factors do probably contribute in a small way to obesity, it seems silly to worry about these things when the real causes are pretty damn obvious: eating wrong and getting no exercise. That bit o` BPA you drank probably made no difference, but your lifestyle of sitting in a chair all day at the office, then going home and sitting on a different chair until bed while eating a whopper probably made a huge difference.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's assume BPA is bad. The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Really, though, there's no reason we need to keep doing this. Just switch everything back to glass. The occasional shattering bottle is probably less of a danger to society than the constant poisoning through food and drinks.

Re:Silly

[AuralityKev]

I'd also like to see the stats on HFCS/sugar ratio in sodas from the 1960's to now graphed right alongside the BPA situation. Have the sodas themselves changed over time? I'd think that would have much more of an impact, along with sitting in a chair all day and eating whoppers.

Re:Silly

[MrEricSir]

The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Or, you know, we could be lining our canned food items with something that's safe.

Re:Silly

[Anrego]

Even if they started using cane sugar rather than HFCS, it might make a difference.

I blame the prevelance of really shitty food and the difficulty of finding decent food more than the packaging it comes in.

Re:Silly

[Brian Feldman]

Beeswax.

Re:Silly

[CanHasDIY]

Let's assume BPA is bad. The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Really, though, there's no reason we need to keep doing this. Just switch everything back to glass. The occasional shattering bottle is probably less of a danger to society than the constant poisoning through food and drinks.

Not to mention, things just plain taste better when coming from a glass container.

Yes, I know that's entirely anecdotal, but instead of having your normal, knee-jerk reaction of pointing out the obvious, I implore the /. audience to go get a can of your favorite soda, and a glass bottle of the same, and do your own taste test.

Re:Silly

[Endo13]

Quote from TFA:

The finding is only a correlation between the amount of BPA in the body and obesity, rather than evidence that one causes the other.

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

Beer tastes better from a can, by a lot. The seal of the metal cap on a glass bottle is inferior to the metal-on-metal seal of a can. So, in addition to less UV radiation (fluorescent lights, Sun) reaching the isomerized hop alpha acids through the glass of a bottle, a metal can just plain ol' keeps more oxygen out. And that helps keep your beer fresh. Don't just take my word for it, though!.. Try a blind can-vs-bottle test, of the exact same beers, for yourself. It's really interesting.

Re:Silly

[Brian Feldman]

What "beer" can you get in both a bottle or a can?

Re:Silly

[Nadaka]

glass

Re:Silly

[Nadaka]

Sorry, but no. Canned beer is worse than bottled beer is worse than tap beer.

Re:Silly

[dgatwood]

At the absolute minimum, "worse than the soda" is pretty unlikely.

"Worse than the soda" actually isn't unlikely. Hormonal imbalances are a major cause of weight gain. If your hormones are significantly out of balance, you aren't going to achieve a healthy weight even if you practically starve yourself.

Also, soda is arguably one of the least significant sources of BPA in people's diet. Most people don't drink from cans all that often; they drink soda from 2-liter bottles (which do not contain BPA), from soda fountain tanks (which AFAIK are not lined with BPA), etc.

The average person is exposed to BPA from many, many other sources—canned foods, plastic tupperware dishes (particularly while reheating food in them), dental fillings and sealants, reusable plastic water bottles of all types, the ink used on newspapers and many cash register receipts, and so on.

Besides, it is straightforward to compensate for any bias in the data caused by the tiny portion of BPA that comes from people's soda drinking habits.

Re:Silly

[tnk1]

Soda in general is absolutely horrible. I've never really been very much overweight, but at one point I got up there enough to decide that I wanted to lose some weight. The first thing I did was cut my soda intake from whenever I felt like it down to "merely" twice a day. I lost ten pounds in just two or three weeks and the weight stayed off. I also cut down on other things afterward, but the weight never came off as fast as it did after first regulating my soda intake.

Having managed to successfully lose weight when I wanted to without resorting to salads or some special food, the secret to pure weight loss is simply not eating more calories than you need for the day. That's it. As long as you actually do it, as opposed to thinking that eating a gallon of "low fat" ice cream is going to make you lose weight, you always lose weight. There are days it spikes up and down, but if you maintain it day after day, you make steady progress.

Things like BPA or certain types of food are really only going to be corner cases. Your body cannot store fat from nowhere. If your body uses up all the calories ingested for that day for energy and then some, you will either lose fat or at the very least, you won't have much to make fat from. Endocrine problems are going to be an issue, but even if your body stores extra fat, it gets used up with normal daily exertion, and even more with exercise. You may never be thin, but you're not going to be obese.

Now, the major problem with things like soda isn't that it is soda, it's that it is a high calorie beverage that gives you zero nutritional value. That means to get proteins and nutrients, you have to eat other things which also have calories and you will become hungry for those things because your body won't allow you to fall over dead without letting you know something is missing. You get fat from soda because you have to eat other things with it. That goes even for diet soda (to a lesser extent). It also goes for anything that is high density fat/carbs, but lacks nutrition you need.

So, if BPA has made an epidemic of anything, I'd say it was more like an epidemic of being "slightly chubby", but not one of obesity.

Re:Silly

[tsotha]

The problem is aluminum has an unpleasant taste, so even if what you say is true, it only matters if you pour your beer into a glass before you drink it.

Re:Silly

[locopuyo]

They make BPA free plastic.

Re:Silly

[s2jcpete]

Modelo Especial

Re:Silly

[dinfinity]

BPA or not, there is probably a significant link between teens who drink a lot of soda and those that don't. Maybe this obvious correlation is not causation issue is covered in the full publication (I only read the excerpt)... but if not, this is pretty damn stupid.

Yep. From the abstract: "Controlling for race/ethnicity, age, caregiver education, poverty to income ratio, sex, serum cotinine level, caloric intake, television watching, and urinary creatinine level, children in the lowest urinary BPA quartile had a lower estimated prevalence of obesity".

So apparently they haven't controlled for the soda (or sugar) intake. On the other hand, I'd expect that to be correlated to a number of the factors they did control for.

Re:Silly

[anagama]

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale:

This isn't a Bud:
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/sierra-nevada-pale-ale-bottle-can/365/

And recently, it's being sold in bottles and cans -- I've seen it my local supermarkets:
http://www.craftcans.com/sierra-nevada-pale-alesierra-nevada-brewing-company

Re:Silly

[jenningsthecat]

...you're a tool if you think solid beer isn't available in can form.

It's only solid if it's frozen. I prefer my beer in a liquid state, thanks.

Re:Silly

[rednip]

Plenty, but you might have to look a little as few retailers even have the space to sell both for anything but some domestics. Often the good beers are only sold in cans in places or near them, that prohibit glass containers but allow alcohol.

It's true that light and air are among the worst enemies of liquid bread and that canned is considered 'better' by a certain crowd. However, one could argue that a bottled beer is kept in the dark both in it's package and in the fridge. Also the cap isn't really that bad, there is a vacuum seal, that you even hear released, just like you do in a can. If drinking a beer I'd typically order a bottle if given a chance, however, BPA does worry me some, so I think I'd be sticking more closely to bottles the rare times that I drink beer.

You'd think that for something like infant formula bottles and such they'd use 'tried and tested' materials, if only for liability issues.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until the late 1970s cans had a corrosion-resistant liner made from wax. This was replaced by bpa-based lacquers - I worked for a coatings vendor at this time who watched their business disappear due to this shift. Wax coatings were sprayed in just before the product, the BPA finish went on at the coil plant or can maker. To some extent it just pushed the liability upstream. The coatings we made we resistant to pretty much everything outside of aromatic solvents and heat. Depressing to see that what replaced them leeched chemicals into the food. Guess this is our version of the roman lead cooking pots.

Re:Silly

[Translation Error]

Let's assume BPA is bad. The question is, is it worse than no BPA?

Well, gee, maybe someone should do some research on the subject.

Re:Silly

[timeOday]

And in general, I think while environmental factors do probably contribute in a small way to obesity, it seems silly to worry about these things when the real causes are pretty damn obvious: eating wrong and getting no exercise.

Oh boy, thanks for sharing your tremendously valuable Common Sense with us.

In fact this study is shocking and here is why (in bold):

The researchers pulled data from the 2003 to 2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, and after controlling for differences in ethnicity, age, caregiver education, income level, sex, caloric intake, television viewing habits and other factors, they found that children and adolescents with the highest levels of BPA in their urine had a 2.6 times greater chance of being obese than those with the lowest levels. Overall, 22.3 percent of those in the quartile with the highest levels of BPA were obese, compared with just 10.3 percent of those in the quartile with the lowest levels of BPA.

So here is what I pull from the emphasized bits:

• No, it is not explained by caloric intake. Nor by physical activity (or at least a proxy for it).
• The effect size is enormous. A 160% increase in risk of obesity!
• The sample size is large: 10.3% and 22.3% are both relatively large proportions of subjects in the study. So this is almost certainly not a spurious correlation between rare events.

The idea of significantly impacting the obesity epidemic simply by replacing BPA with something else is hard to believe. But occasionally a technical breakthrough on what was previously considered an issue of character and morality does does occur, and can be revolutionary: consider birth control.

Re:Silly

[shiftless]

....which is amazing in glass. Never seen it in a can though.

Re:Silly

[rednip]

When I was a kid, the McDonald's large was the size of their smallest adult cup today, and the largest sandwich you could buy was a single quarter pound of meat.

Re:Silly

[BetterSense]

Shiner Bock
Heineken

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Caldera, Hopworks, New Belgium, Hop Valley, Paulaner, Sierra Nevada, Pabst...

Re:Silly

[zippthorne]

Guinness.

But if you must get guinness that isn't on tap, the bottle does a better job because of the rocket widget....

Re:Silly

[ottothecow]

Not true at all.

The key is that the canned beer has to be poured into a glass (the can taste is all because your bare lip is touching freshly sheared aluminum). What do you think a keg is if it isn't a big can? You can get many great beers in cans and I find I prefer them...recently I have had several beers from Surly, an IPA from Two Brothers, and many cans of 312 from Goose Island. The latter is the only one I can do a comparison on (the other two are fantastic, but unavailable in bottles) and I think a can of 312 poured into a glass tastes noticeably fresher than a bottle of 312 poured into a glass. Maybe not if they were both just bottled/canned today--but you take something that has sat around at a store for a while and the cans win.

Re:Silly

[zippthorne]

Hipster is such a hipster word.

Re:Silly

[sjames]

Do they use BPA laden can liners in Estonia and Afghanistan?

Re:Silly

[zippthorne]

Ever try to drink a plain seltzer water? Sugar helps get the enormous amounts of dry nastiness down your throat.

Analogously, I doubt that either Lye or Muriatic acid would taste very good on their own, but together they make an excellent seasoning for a variety of dishes.

Peanut butter and Chocolate on the other hand are the exception to this rule.

Re:Silly

[sjames]

The counter to that is that I went from 2 liters a day to none at all (I don't even like the taste now) and.....nothing changed.

Re:Silly

[foniksonik]

What if the BPA leads to sitting at home, eating more, less exercise, etc etc. Could be a feedback loop.

Re:Silly

[Sinryc]

Many diffrent kinds. New Belgium Fat Tire, Sierra Nevada Torpedo, Abita Amber or Purple Haze, Long Trail Ale, Harpoon IPA, Paulaner Hefeweizen... and that i just to name a few.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

BPA-free plastic has other chemicals that replace the functionality of BPA. We know less about those chemicals than we do about BPA. Pick your poison.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

And that original iconic Coca-Cola bottle was 8 ounces.

Re:Silly

[Urza9814]

Oh sweet jesus, are you crazy? I've done the test -- I'd just flown in for a job interview, I'd already gotten lost trying to find the hotel, it was late, and I was from a state that didn't usually allow beer sales in gas stations...so while I was picking up my gas station dinner, I figured 'fuck it I'll get a bigass can of beer!'...got a Yuengling Lager, which is far from my favorite beer but certainly drinkable in a bottle...in the can it was quite possibly the worst beer I've ever had.

There's a reason REAL beer isn't sold in cans....mostly just the American pisswater brews.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

It's hard to control for caloric intake. You're relying on people self-reporting.

Also, contrary to popular myth, all calories are not the same. Your body absorbs much more energy from 100 calories of sugar, for example, than it does from 100 calories of raw vegetables. This is because calorie content is based on laboratory measurements and does not factor in calories lost when food is harder to digest, or when food is not fully digested (in which case the energy is instead absorbed/used by bacteria in the colon).

Re:Silly

[Crypto Gnome]

If your hormones are significantly out of balance, you aren't going to achieve a healthy weight even if you practically starve yourself.

PLUS ONE for this.

Anyone who has a medical condition treated by large (relative to normal levels) steroid doses on an ongoing basis will tell you this.

Re:Silly

[Urza9814]

Ever try to drink a plain seltzer water? Sugar helps get the enormous amounts of dry nastiness down your throat.

...I'm confused...I'm sitting here drinking from a two liter bottle of straight seltzer as I type this...why is sugar necessary?

and my father...my god, the man goes through three liters of the stuff EVERY DAY. It's all he drinks!

It's even better if you toss in some lime and gin...or maybe vodka...or some lime, gin, and quinine... ;)

Seriously though, anyone who wants to cut down on sugary, HFCS-loaded soda...try buying a bottle of flavored seltzer. Soo much more refreshing. Or buy plain seltzer and toss in a tiny amount of juice. Less sugar, still fizzy, still sweet, and no the sticky syrupy residue.

Re:Silly

[Brian Feldman]

I never said that -- for example, Dale's Pale Ale comes in a can and is one of the best IPAs that I have ever had. My point was only that very few good beers come in both. Some that are have no comparison -- Guinness in a bottle is Extra Stout, not the same stuff that gets canned.

Re:Silly

[Macgrrl]

Mostly the number of fast food wrappers around our house is a function of being about 2 blocks from a McDonalds and getting them blown into our yard. I get really tired of picking them up every other day.

Re:Silly

[Lumpy]

"there is a vacuum seal, that you even hear released, just like you do in a can."

of your beer has a vacuum seal, buy better beer. All of my beers are under pressure, a LOT of pressure, from 12-18psi of pressure in them... the CO2 carbonation in it does that.

If you have a vacuum seal you are drinking FLAT beer or something that is not beer.

Re:Silly

[Arterion]

From all I can tell, HFCS is almost identical to sucrose metabolically. Okay, there is a very, very small amount of extra energy used when metabolizing the sucrose: the bond between the fructose and glucose molecules has to be broken. With HFCS, you have molecules of fructose and molecules of glucose. Interestingly, the ratios of fructose:glucose are almost the same. Sucrose is 50:50 while HFCS is usally 55:45, about the same as honey.

It's also worth pointing out that fructose tastes sweeter than glucose, and is significantly lower on the glycemic index. It also has to be be metabolized into glucose, consume some of the energy provided by it. So really, fructose has advantages: you can use less, because it's sweeter, and therefore have fewer grams of sugars products, and fewer calories for the same level of sweetness. Second, the impact on you body is much less because fructose is metabolized more slowly, especially important for a diabetic. Third, some of the energy contained in the fructose is consumed by the body having to metabolize it into glucose. This is not a negligible difference, and if you think I'm bullshitting you, read the wikipedia article on the Thermic Effect of Food and read this paper specifically comparing fructose and glucose:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermic_effect_of_food

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8213608

In short, we would all probably be a lot better off if all sweeteners were switch to 100% fructose, whether the source is corn or something else.

Re:Silly

[Lumpy]

You are 100% inaccurate.

I make my own soda. mix it with tap water, tastes great. mix it with carbonated water, tastes the same but fizzy. if the pop has a different flavor between flat and fizzy, then your pop is complete crap.

Re:Silly

[Mike Buddha]

...or buy your pop in Big Gulp cup. Sorry NYC.

Re:Silly

[Sique]

Most beers I drink come in both versions. Budvar, Pilsner Urquell, Radeberger, Köstritzer... :)

(Fun fact: The beer Charlie Harper drank in the Two and a Half Men movies is Radeberger.)

Re:Silly

[Brian Feldman]

Err... the bacteria in the intestines are where "full digestion" occurs. Those bacteria break food down further into constituents and therefore cause you to get MORE energy from it. We would be in a sad state if the intestinal microherd were parasitic rather than symbiotic.

Re:Silly

[NeoMorphy]

I never said that -- for example, Dale's Pale Ale comes in a can and is one of the best IPAs that I have ever had. My point was only that very few good beers come in both. Some that are have no comparison -- Guinness in a bottle is Extra Stout, not the same stuff that gets canned.

The Guinness in a bottle with the rocket widget is not the Extra Stout.

Re:Silly

[Mike Buddha]

You have no idea what you're talking about. Lots of great beers are distributed in cans and you'd be a fool to buy a bottle over a can for any beer worth drinking.

I'm not talking about Schludwiller crap here, I'm talking about American craft brewed beer.

Re:Silly

[Eponymous Hero]

what? come on. kids drink lots of soda, kids get fat, it's obviously the bpa lining the can. after all, we never did obesity studies during the time before we added bpa to the can, sooo ... wait a second ... i know what makes kids fat! it's the obesity studies! like quantum mechanics, just stop observing the kids get fat and they'll stop being fat. i'm going to start ignoring the obese for a healthier world in which we all can live (in a van, down by the river).

Re:Silly

[NeoMorphy]

When I was a kid, the McDonald's large was the size of their smallest adult cup today, and the largest sandwich you could buy was a single quarter pound of meat.

At least as far back as 1982 you could get a double quarter pounder with cheese, you just had to ask for it and they would make it for you. You would be surprised at how flexable they can be.

Re:Silly

[C0R1D4N]

Ten years ago at age 18 I switched to a diet of almost entirely fast food and canned soda. I was 6' 135lbs at the time. I am now...140. My job has me sitting on my ass 9 hours a day and my predominant hobby is D&D making me rather sedentary. Anecdotal evidence obviously, but just as relevant scientifically as this study.

Re:Silly

[Mashiki]

I've got some coke bottles from the 1950's and 60's that are still sealed with the coke inside, sadly they don't list the amount of sugar in them. Chances of them being "rich in sugar" is pretty high though. Though this was back in the day when they actually had sugar or cane sugar, not glucose/fructose, or HFCS.

Let's be realistic though, sitting on your ass is the main difference especially today. Back in highschool(in the 90's) at least for me, we had all the soda drinks we could get our hands on. The difference between the lard asses an those of us who weren't was the amount of physical activity. I drank as much soda as the guy who was weighing in at 350lbs(our highschool of around 500 only had a few of these), but I was a wrestler, I competed in local, county and provincial matches, I hit the school weight room every day. I was active, I took gym class from gr9 through gr13(OAC--last class standing). But the people didn't, you could tell by the end of those 4 or 5 years. And today, the people who kept that lifestyle, well they probably are eating for four people.

Re:Silly

[dgatwood]

Actual "hormone imbalances" are rare.

Define rare. Between thyroid and parathyroid disorders, somewhere around 6% of adults have actual hormone imbalances. That rises to a whopping 23% of women 65 and older. And after pregnancy, another roughly 8% of women develop temporary thyroid hormone imbalances that go away after a few months.

Natural hormonal problems certainly don't explain all of the obesity in the U.S., but they probably explain a sizable chunk of it.

Re:Silly

[rgbrenner]

this debate, eh? I've already tried it. You can probably just keep your facts to yourself. It won't convince them that HFCS isn't bad.

They are looking for an easy scapegoat for their obesity problem.

That's my theory anyway.

In a can of soda with 39g of sugar.. HFCS would have 2g more fructose. Imagine someone with 40+ lbs of extra fat and thinking the soda with 39g of sugar is OK.. but that 2g of fructose is terrible.

Amazing.

Re:Silly

[tibit]

Kudos. It's the same conclusion that I got to. At least two people out there who are not scared of media BS on HFCS.

Re:Silly

[NeoMorphy]

Looks like you were modded down for telling the truth. Makes you wonder how many "fat asses" are on /.

Maybe sending BPA supplements to places suffering from famine would help?

Does a "Hormonal Imbalance" allow one to defy the first law of thermodynamics?

Re:Silly

[tibit]

They are used worldwide.

Re:Silly

[camperdave]

I make my own soda.

Interesting. Would you be kind enough to explain further: links to products, etc.?

Re:Silly

[tibit]

Dude, those bacteria must be some pretty vile creatures then. They are converting all this "absorbed/used" energy into what? Heat? Energy of chemical bonds in something that is dumped out? What? Where does that energy magically disappear, and will you sell me some of those bacteria, because I have a whole bunch of uses for them!

Re:Silly

[tibit]

I sympathize. I find McDonalds food, at least in the U.S., to be so bad as to be inedible. Somehow the stuff I get in Europe, especially east of Berlin, is better.

Re:Silly

[Urza9814]

I mean, my favorite beers are Shiner Bock, Guiness, and Spaten. In...well, not that order, but the reverse order. I've never seen any of those in a can, although I've heard of all but Spaten being sold in them. Maybe it works for some beers (or some people) but I always find canned beer to have a bit of a metallic taste to it...though I suppose that could also just be the canned American pisswater that I occasionally get stuck with...

Re:Silly

[tibit]

Hey, maybe you have a helpful tapeworm companion.

Re:Silly

[adolf]

The last 12-pack of Guinness bottles I bought had no rocket widget, but instead some fancy verbiage on the package about how they decided that it wasn't necessary.

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

I think that we should paint the inside of houses with something besides lead paint. I think we should use something safer. Now, some of you will look to me for the answer, since I have no doubt that you believe that I just claimed to be an expert on the matter. I would like to point out that I can, in fact, want to use something safer without claiming to be an expert. It is an odd concept, I know, but really ... I assure you ... it is true.

Also, I - like many Americans - would like the government to do a better job. Again, you probably think I just claimed that I am a political genus. I once again feel the need to point out that I am not making such a claim. As it turns out I really can suggest we do something better even if I don't know exactly what that "something better" might be. I leave that to the experts, not because they have a solid track record, but because I am not, in fact, one of the experts.

It would be a sad(der?) world indeed if the barrier to wanting a better approach was expertise in the matter.

Re:Silly

[governorx]

Exactly. +5 Insightful.

How is it even funny?

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

Well Google says:

Your search - BEERHIPSTERGRUBEN HOPPENDOUCHEZEL - did not match any documents.

... so pardon me if I don't believe you.

Re:Silly

[shibashaba]

My understanding is that light degrades the taste of beer. Glass, though is a much better insulator. I'm assuming that's why European beers come in cans, since many people over their prefer it at room temperature. Us Americans expect our beer ice cold, which is probably why we usually go for glass bottles.

Re:Silly

[lurker1997]

Part of the problem with fructose is that because it has a low glycemic index, your body is not signaled to stop consuming it as quickly. It is metabolised in the liver and excess amounts are converted to triglicerides in the blood which are a factor in heart disease. There are other problems too. Please see this, admittedly not the most scientific reference but I think it makes a good case.

Normal amounts of fructose are not a problem, and it is one of the main sugars in many fruits. The problem is downing movie theatre size pops with 200+ grams of the stuff. What I would be most interested to see is people would consume the same volume of glucose or sucrose flavored drinks, or would they naturally limit the amount they drank?

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

I'm sorry. But I just ran objective tests on various beers using my Mass Beer Spectacle-ometer and it clearly indicated that bottled beer, while better than tap beer, is actually not as good as canned beer. It also indicated that Hillary Clinton is hot.

Re:Silly

[timeOday]

It's hard to control for caloric intake. You're relying on people self-reporting.

Nope! If your theory is that caloric intake is the real cause, what you must now explain is why misreporting of caloric intake (not caloric intake itself!) would be so strongly correlated with BPA in the bloodstream.

Some interesting cases to look at would be those with low BPA and high self-reported caloric intake (for example people eating pies or drinking sugared fountain drinks instead of drinking soda from cans), or people with high BPA and low caloric intake (such as people who drink lots of diet soda from cans).

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Natural hormonal problems certainly don't explain all of the obesity in the U.S., but they probably explain a sizable chunk of it.

By mass

Re:Silly

[Silentknyght]

Sorry, but no. Canned beer is worse than bottled beer is worse than tap beer.

Modded "informative"? As a homebrewer and craft beer connoisseur, this is totally false. Let's not judge a book by its cover, eh? Canned beer--and really most other canned food--used to be taste awfully worse than its non-canned counterparts, at least before the advent of plastic lined cans... Now-a-days, you can buy some really fantastic craft beer in cans. Moreover, it has fewer detrimental effects due to light spoilage (aluminum being opaque and all), and you can also take it to places you can't take bottles.

Re:Silly

[NeoMorphy]

Now, the major problem with things like soda isn't that it is soda, it's that it is a high calorie beverage that gives you zero nutritional value. That means to get proteins and nutrients, you have to eat other things which also have calories and you will become hungry for those things because your body won't allow you to fall over dead without letting you know something is missing. You get fat from soda because you have to eat other things with it. That goes even for diet soda (to a lesser extent). It also goes for anything that is high density fat/carbs, but lacks nutrition you need.

So, if BPA has made an epidemic of anything, I'd say it was more like an epidemic of being "slightly chubby", but not one of obesity.

I agree that non-diet soda is very bad for you. But the real problem is that sugar drinks allow you to induce ridiculous amounts of sugar into your system at a very fast rate and unless you have an urgent need for it, it's probably going to fat, not to mention the insulin issues afterwards. Non-sugar soda doesn't have this problem.

Fruit juice is bad for the same reason. If you ate the fruit instead of extracting the sweet juice directly from it and drinking it, your body would process it over a longer period of time instead of giving you a quick sugar rush.

Re:Silly

[breeze95]

Beer tastes better from a can, by a lot. The seal of the metal cap on a glass bottle is inferior to the metal-on-metal seal of a can. So, in addition to less UV radiation (fluorescent lights, Sun) reaching the isomerized hop alpha acids through the glass of a bottle, a metal can just plain ol' keeps more oxygen out. And that helps keep your beer fresh. Don't just take my word for it, though!.. Try a blind can-vs-bottle test, of the exact same beers, for yourself. It's really interesting.

Actually, my experience is the opposite. I stopped drinking canned beer in favor of bottle beer because I find can beer has a metallic taste. UV radiation doesn't penetrate brown bottles so if you beer is in a brown bottle there shouldn't be a problem. Now. beer in clear or green bottles may be affected by light.

Re:Silly

[ottothecow]

Did you really drink as much soda though? There are plenty of 350lb people who drink pepsi by the 1 or 2-liter bottle.

I enjoyed a good can of mountain dew in high school/early college...for a while being at 2 cans on a normal day. I had access too as much as I wanted but, unless I was staying up late to finish a paper or something, I never could stomach drinking more than 2. Then it became just one...and then it became none.

Consuming 2 liters of pop a day is pretty hard to defeat with just exercise.

Re:Silly

[breeze95]

Sorry, but no. Canned beer is worse than bottled beer is worse than tap beer.

I absolutely agree with you.

Re:Silly

[Fastolfe]

I have no idea if the OP's statements are accurate or not, but just because you consume something that has "100 calories" does not mean your body will metabolize 100 calories of energy. If the food is incompletely digested (perhaps because the food is hard to break down), you will excrete undigested food energy. The method used to determine caloric energy does not resemble the human digestive system, and it is indeed possible for only a portion of the measured food energy to actually be absorbed by the organism consuming it.

Re:Silly

[Beorytis]

At the absolute minimum, "worse than the soda" is pretty unlikely.

Don't you know the rule of questions in headlines? The answer is always NO.

Re:Silly

[Velex]

Oddly, though, higher levels of testosterone are associated with easier weight loss. Just my $0.02, not that I'd want any more than 50 ng/ml in my body. ymmv.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not clear to me that bpa is a corner case. What you have assumed is that your calorie burn is independent of BPA. That's not been shown. I have a form of muscular dystrophy and the meds mess with my glucose metabolism so what was a quiescent calorie intake and burn before MD is not the same. Physical activity is the same (the meds work and the case is mild) but if I eat what I ate before being on the meds I'd be adding about a pound a week. Since the overal activity is the same, the only place I see the difference has to be in the way my basal metabolism is running. My point is, chemistry can change your basal metabolism and that would need to be ruled out before claiming "it's just the soda". For example, what if you looked at three groups: no soda, diet soda and sugar soda; naively you would expect to peel out the bpa from the sugar effects. BUT diet soda introduces other non-naturally occurring compounds that our bodies are not optimized to handle (that's why we don't digest them to get energy) .

Re:Silly

[DuckDodgers]

RTFA. Controlling for age, exercise level, calorie intake, caregiver education level, and average amount of time watching television, kids in the study within the top quartile of for levels BPA in their body were more than twice as likely to be obese as kids in the study within the bottom quartile.

BPA is in some packaging for junk foods and soda cans, but it's also in some packaging for bottled water, baby bottles, containers of baby formula, children's sippy cups, and lots of packaging for other foods.

Re:Silly

[TechyImmigrant]

Indeed. But it goes further. There is substantial evidence that bulk fructose, in it's role as 50% of sucrose is the underlying cause of the modern rise of obesity.

The story goes like this..

The POMC neurons in the brain (the VMH - Ventromedial Hypothalamus to be precise) regulates energy expenditure are hunger based on levels of glucose, non esterified fatty acids and various hormones, principally insulin and leptin.

Bulk fructose damages those cells, so the regulation goes out of whack. Then the carb-insulin mechanism of obesity kicks in and you're sensitive to carbs. Now regardless of the leptin signaling and the copious NEFAs, the brain isn't telling the rest of the body that you're in an energy rich environment and so it resist burning fat in favor of storing it and you're hungry all the time.

The evidence is pretty good and getting stronger as new studies dig in. E.G. There are many ways to break the VMH in rats. Do it and they get fat. Starve them and they stay fat, but rob their own muscles and organs in order to survive, while leaving the fat cells intact. MSG will do it, Fructose will do it. An ice pick will do it. Section the brains of freshly dead fat people and they have exactly the same lesions in their VMH.

We never had bulk fructose until recent centuries and we never had it in the quantities we have it now. People fart around arguing about micro-nutrients and trace elements looking for reasons, but the macro-nutrients are where the first order effects can be explained.

Re:Silly

[DigiShaman]

Bock in a bottle only. The can is sacrilege.

Re:Silly

[Bremic]

For hundreds of years food and drink was regularly contained in a substance called "glass". Some of these glass containers have survived more than a century of regular use are are still considered safe and functional.

After drinking soda that had been stored from the factory in a glass bottle, I was surprised how the same soda out of a can tasted very different, and I rarely drink out of cans.
Plastics then became common (in the 80s) and the flavor was again very different. The rare times I drink soda now I still try to get it in glass.

I understand this isn't a solution, but if (as a society) we have put convenience ahead of health and safety, then we shouldn't be ridiculing those who suggest we should have chosen a different path. It has been very obvious since soda was put in cans that the cans affected the contents, simply through taste.

Re:Silly

[manu0601]

the secret to pure weight loss is simply not eating more calories than you need for the day

You would probably benefit from improving your model. For instance 100 mL of soda gives you about 50 kcal. 100g of nuts gives you around 600 kcal. Are you sure it is better for your diet to lower calories intake by replacing nuts by soda?

Re:Silly

[tibit]

That's obvious, but the magic undigested-energy-disintegrating colon bacteria are just that, magic.

Re:Silly

[cstacy]

I don't always drink BPA, but when I do....

Re:Silly

[Mashiki]

Did you really drink as much soda though? There are plenty of 350lb people who drink pepsi by the 1 or 2-liter bottle.

Yeah, I was going through a 24 case of coke every two days.

Re:Silly

[mjwx]

It also indicated that Hillary Clinton is hot.

So she found that radioactive rod that was lost in Texas last week?

Didn't anyone tell her not to open it?

Re:Silly

[potpie]

Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Your statements are 100% correct. However, it's a little like saying, "I'd like to not die." It's sort of a pointless statement because pretty much everyone /wants/ that. It's in the (ahem) execution of it that goal where we have difficulties.

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

Vacuum, pressure, same difference, different perspective. So the cap is pressure-sealed against an internal pressure of +1 atmosphere - or alternately it's vacuum-sealed against the external vacuum of only 1/2 beermosphere.

Yeah, yeah, the phrase vacuum-sealed typically has other implications, but they have nothing to do with the actual *seal*

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

... right, now canned food only tastes much worse than the real thing, not awfully worse like it used to. Not that a few things don't actually taste good, but if I'll take traditional "canned" (i.e. widemouth-bottled) food over actual cans any day.

Not that I don't drink canned beer, some of them even good, but I can't say I've ever had a canned beer that was better than a comparable-quality bottled version. As for photo-degradation I have two words - dark glass. Or you know just keep the bottles within an opaque cardboard sleeve, possibly even bundling a convenient number of bottles with an integrated handle. Admittedly though it's not 100% effective unless you actually completely enclose the bottles within some sort of boxlike structure, but that's not entirely uncommon either.

Re:Silly

[Zenin]

The verbiage is complete crap. Guinness from the new widget-less bottles uses pure carbon dioxide and tastes like bitter ass and has a head like soda.

They did it because it's cheaper to not add the widgets, pure and simple.

Screw Guinness, they already WAY over charge AND use smaller bottles and cans, AND the stuff they sell stateside is crap. Murphy's is FAR better, cheaper, and you get a full 16oz in a can, WITH the widget and the right gas mix for stout.

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

Yea, but why would you try to choke down that foul stuff? Plain ordinary clean water is actually pretty delicious if you can get it, and some of the bottled stuff is halfway decent, though it typically tastes strongly of plastic and other chemicals. Having lived in a city for a while now though I can at least understand why people drink it, the swill you call tapwater is truly disgusting before being properly filtered.

For tongue-tingling goodness I've found a blend of of seltzer water and unsweetened cranberry juice can be quite good, and is a semi-passable alternative to have around if you find yourself getting a little too fond of alcohol as well.

Re:Silly

[Andtalath]

Poop.

Re:Silly

[Evtim]

The bosses of Amstel, Heineken and Grolsh are meeting in a cafe (probably for price-fixing). The waiter comes and the Heineken boss orders Heineken beer. The Amstel boss orders Amstel and the Grolsh boss orders one Amstel and one Heineken!! Noticing the incredulous stares of the others he says "Oh, it is too early for a beer".

Seriously though, why does it take at least a decade before something that is well known to scientist finds its place in the public domain, especially when the data is vitally important for the public? Is the use of a tinfoil hat warranted in this case? I think yes...

I know about this issue for more than a decade from my biochemistry-educated friends. In fact one of them after his kid was born visited me in Western Europe and the first thing he said after the greetings was "Can we find anywhere in this country a glass baby bottle?!" Turned out he had investigated thoroughly the full range of plastic baby bottles available on the market (including ultra expensive brands) and found they all release ungodly amounts of dangerous stuff (including the BPA). I had to disappoint him, but we still found a solution. One chain of supermarkets often uses fruits that are about to expire to make juice without any additives, that needs to be consumed within 24 hours. They use glass bottles with a tread. The tread could be used to attache the silicon sleeve for the baby to suck on. Case closed. Conclusion:

The nerds will inherit the Earth (our children will be healthier)!!

Re:Silly

[Yetihehe]

Bottles can also be reused (not only recycled). The problem with glass is that it requires more energy to make than a can AND more energy and water to wash a bottle before reuse than to make a can.

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

Absolutely. Provided of course you replace 100kcal of soda with 100kcal or less of nuts. Your example suggests replacing a half-cup of soda with a quarter-pound of nuts. While the volumes are (roughly) similar one of those is mostly water and will slake your thirst while quickly making you hungry*, while the other is almost pure fat and protein and will take the edge of hunger (fat is good at that) but do nothing to slake your thirst. Holding them up as alternatives is disingenuous.

* sugar rush -> insulin surge -> most sugars being "scrubbed" from your bloodstream (the only place they're stored after digestion) and stored as fat -> you feel hungry because your body can't actually operate well on just fat and demands carbs to restore the balance. Transitioning to a purely fat-powered metabolism is what is known among athletes as "hitting the wall", and it's not a terribly pleasant experience - basically it's an emergency survival response to preserve the last carbs in your system for your brain, which it can't burn fat at all.

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

Not that I entirely disagree, but one of the things that this study controlled for was caloric intake - so even among people with the same caloric intake increased BPA levels still correlated with an increased chance of obesity, and that does suggest that further research is warranted.

Re:Silly

[subreality]

BPA may not affect your intake : weight ratio, but it may have a significant effect on your appetite.

It was eye opening for me when I went on a medication that gave me completely insatiable food cravings. I would literally eat until I was uncomfortable for hours afterward, even when consciously knowing that it would make me feel awful and put on weight. Willpower is overrated - when your brain gets the chemical signal that you're starving and need to eat more you will.

I don't know if BPA specifically does that, but it was plainly apparent from my experience with prescription meds that it's plausible.

Re:Silly

[kraut]

Bottles can also be reused (not only recycled).

Indeed. That's the whole point.

The problem with glass is that it requires more energy to make than a can

Not sure about that. Aluminium is very energy intensive to produce, and of course the cost of the glass bottle is amortized over tens (or hundreds) of uses.

AND more energy and water to wash a bottle before reuse than to make a can.

I think anyone who has ever washed dishes would disagree with that.

The big problem with glass bottles is that they are heavy. That increases transport costs, reduces stock density, and reduces sales. People can pick up a two litre plastic bottle quite comfortably - a two litre glass bottle would be a lot heavier.

Re:Silly

[makomk]

The first law of thermodynamics says nothing about whether the levels of calorie intake required to lose weight are going to be healthy. (It doesn't even require them to be non-fatal!) From what I've heard, at least some people with hormonal imbalances actually found that when they tried to lose weight by cutting down on food it made them actually unable to function and work normally.

Re:Silly

[LourensV]

I can't tell where the factor of 2.6 comes from, it's not in the abstract and the article doesn't explain. I can't access the full article, but the abstract at least does not say how big the effect of BPA is relative to the factors that they controlled for. It may well be that the effect of say caloric intake is much larger still than that of BPA. And as the abstract states at the end, it may be that the obese children have a different mix of foods, something that wasn't controlled for. Perhaps the obese children are obese because their parents are more lazy and set them a bad example for getting some exercise, and the lazy parents also serve them more canned and packaged foods because they're too lazy to cook, so they have a higher BPA level.

It's also interesting to note that there is no significant difference between the second, third and fourth quartiles of urinary BPA, i.e. what they found was that (a bunch of things like ethnicity, sex, income, caloric intake, etc. being equal), if you're in the 25% of people with the lowest urinary BPA, you have about a 10% chance of being obese, while if you're in the 75% of people with highest urinary BPA then you have about a 20% chance of being obese. So perhaps a better way of summarising that result is to say that people with a low level of urinary BPA have, most other things being equal, only half the chance of being obese compared to people with an average or high level of urinary BPA. Perhaps the BPA acts as a kind of enabler, i.e. getting a certain minimum amount of it will change something in your biochemistry, but once you cross that threshold getting more of it doesn't make any more difference? Or perhaps it points to some statistical fluke?

Re:Silly

[Inda]

All of them.

Honestly, in the UK they come in both. 250ml to 500ml sizes. Cans are cheaper. Bottles don't go flat as fast. Cans are better for the fridge. Take your pick.

Re:Silly

[Arterion]

I wasn't aware of this, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to have to do some reading on research -- it's new to me. It seems pretty advanced brain science that makes more conventional thinking (such as I mentioned before) inapplicable. Still, as you said, HFCS vs. Sucrose isn't going to be much different, and people who think going back to using cane sugar as a sweetener are still wrong.

Personally, I avoid any sugary drinks -- whether sucrose or fructose. They just seem sticky and syrupy to me. It's really a preference rather than for any benefit. I almost exclusively drink artificially sweetened beverages, which is an whole other can of worms. There may be some dangers, but I don't know that they're any worse than shoving unusually large amounts of sugar (from the an evolutionary perspective) down the hatch.

Re:Silly

[gravyface]

I'm in Canada and I can't think of a brand of beer, domestic, premium, or imported that doesn't come in can as well as bottles. It might not be stocked at every Beer Store or LCBO (Liquor Store), however.

Re:Silly

[gravyface]

You know bock is just a type of beer, like a lager, ale, or stout right? And yes, there are cans.

Re:Silly

[tbird81]

but your lifestyle of sitting in a chair all day at the office, then going home and sitting on a different chair until bed while eating a whopper probably made a huge difference.

That's it. I'm turning off Google Latitude. I'm sick of you stalking me!

Re:Silly

[tbird81]

Obviously the bacteria turn the energy into heat and chemical bonds.

Bacteria need to live and reproduce. That reproduction (and mere living) uses energy. Where do you think they get this energy from? Magic?

Re:Silly

[tbird81]

Actually, I once heard about 50% of faecal mass is actually of bacteria.

Bacteria break down the contents in our guts and reproduce. The make cell walls, membranes, DNA, organelles etc. with the energy taken from food inside our gut. They generate heat (obviously) and create new molecules. Many of these bacteria will end up being flushed down the toilet with undigested food, breakdown products of haemoglobin, fibre, etc.

Re:Silly

[tbird81]

It might just be snobbery.

Re:Silly

[King_of_Prussia]

That's made even more ridiculous by the old speckled's clear bottle assuring that it will be properly skunked by the time it's drunk.

vic park new world? or have other nz supermarkets become better since i left?

Re:Silly

[lxs]

At least some people who cut down their heroin intake have a similar reaction. That doesn't mean that they should continue indulging an unhealthy and expensive habit.

Re:Silly

[lxs]

Ever try to drink a plain seltzer water?

If it's anything like heavily carbonated mineral water then yes. Bottles and bottles of the stuff. It's the best drink in the world.

Re:Silly

[bloodhawk]

I completely disagree, beer definitely tastes better from a bottle, I find the can seems to do something nasty to the taste, similar to soda cans. beer is also best drunk while relatively freshly bottled and you should never store it in the light anyway.

Re:Silly

[bloodhawk]

because obese people are far more likely to lie about how much they eat. It can be embaressing.

Re:Silly

[OnePumpChump]

Also, if you want to coat a bottle in plastic, you could put it on the outside of a glass bottle, so when it shatters it doesn't go all over.

Re:Silly

[hey!]

Actually, it depends on storage. Beer reacts with light to form off-flavor sulfur molecules -- particularly green light if I recall correctly. So that beer that's been sitting in a green bottle illuminated by the store's fluorescent lights (which have a greenish tint) is slowly changing into skunk spray. It probably doesn't matter if the beer just came off the delivery truck, but if brewers all used brown or opaque glass their product would be more consistent.

Re:Silly

[zer0sig]

Milk (the organic variety as well as the door-to-door delivery of old) is often in 2L/QT glass bottle. It's much heavier empty, but the difference is not so bad when you're talking about up to ~4 lbs of milk in them.

Re:Silly

[DerekLyons]

Or, to look at it another way... your coatings were thought to be safe, but were replaced by another coating that was thought to be safe. Now that the replacement coating has been found (decades later) to be unsafe, you're implying your coatings are safe even though they haven't actually been subject to modern scrutiny.

Re:Silly

[jellomizer]

My parents sill lament on how they say that leaded gasoline smells so much better then the unleaded.

Re:Silly

[crtreece]

Plenty of micro-brews around here. Avery brewing, Ska Brewing, New Belgium Brewing.

I really should know better than to feed the trolls. :-(

Re:Silly

[zer0sig]

I wish Abita would put out the Belgian Ale, S.O.S. and Andygator in cans. All 3 are awesome. Makes me miss living closer (in the Memphis area it's pretty easy to get the big beers - i occasionally find them here in NC but I haven't tried the Amber or Purple Haze partially because I'm fond of good hi-grav beers when possible).

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

So then you support banning high fructose corn syrup since that is the major cause of obesity do in part because it is addictive....or are you one of those head in the sand crowd....

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

Like you I guess...

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

What insane planet are you from? Beer does not taste better in a can. Any beer drinking person will tell you that bottle is better.

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

What the fuck do you mean by solid beer? You mean mass produced swill, like Bud, yeah it's in a can. But lots of beer that is readily available in you local supermarket is not available in can.

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

The one that doesn't have the widget is Extra Stout.

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

" HFCS is almost identical to sucrose metabolically."

No it is not. HFCS is not metabolized by the body the same way sugar is. HFCS is addictive, people eat more of it to get satiated. People eat less if the sweetner is sugar. The other kicker is HFCS is a food source for some cancers.

Seriously we would be a lot better off switching back to sugar. Decades of data have shown why HFCS is worse than sugar.

Re:Silly

[oh_my_080980980]

You mean the media bullshit that says HFCS is safe.

Re:Silly

[Ahnteis]

So no tomatoes, fruit, anything slightly acidic?

Re:Silly

[timeOday]

No. That would explain why obese people are more likely to misreport caloric intake. But if it were just under-reporting of calories by obese people, there would be no correlation with BPA in the bloodstream after adjusting for reported caloric intake unless obese people with high BPA tended to under-reported their calories MORE than people of the SAME WEIGHT with low BPA.

Now, what's harder to rule out is some underlying cause of both high BPA and weight gain for a given caloric intake. In other words, like Cholesterol, how much BPA is in your blood might NOT be a simple function of how much you eat. For example (and I am totally making this up) maybe there are differences in metabolism that cause some people to clear things from their blood more quickly - including both sugar and BPA.

Re:Silly

[balbus000]

political genus

Just curious - what species are in that genus? The only one I'm familiar with is politicus douche-maximus.

Re:Silly

[pureevilmatt]

Parent's parents are gas huffers.

Re:Silly

[BetterSense]

Other than the BPA thing, cans are superior to bottles for packaging beer, because they keep out light, which degrades the beer.

Shiner's other beers are packaged in screw-top bottles that I can't even reuse for homebrew, so I might as well buy the cans.

Re:Silly

[SleazyRidr]

I was just about to reply expressing my disdain for your suggesting that tap beer is the worst of the bunch. Then I read the part about Hilary Clinton and got confused, so very confused. I'll come back again after this coffee.

Re:Silly

[Pope]

And back in the day the biggest bottles were 750ml. Maybe if we went back to smaller sizes, people would realizes they don't need to drink so much of it.

Re:Silly

[jedidiah]

What they were using before might be a good start.

Although there are some things that don't do well in metal period. There are other things that need to be removed from the can as soon as the can is opened.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth HBO even aired shows that addressed this sort of thing.

Re:Silly

[Quirkz]

There were also times where wine was heated in lead pots, because it added a sweetness to the drink.

Re:Silly

[Quirkz]

Newcastle, several new Belgium beers, Stella Artois - there's a lot of them now. At least out west beer in cans has become a popular thing, in part because it's easier to go camping with light, crushable aluminum containers rather than glass bottles.

Re:Silly

[jedidiah]

Yet if you actually do any of your own canning, you will end up with your stuff in glass jars. It was the original can and still serves DIY types well. No BPA required.

Re:Silly

[jedidiah]

It's not the can. It's the mindset that led to the can. That mindset is likely a corner cutting mindset. The corner they cut with the container likely applies to the product.

Not universal but pretty pervasive.

Re:Silly

[Quirkz]

So no goat-kebab for you then?

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

Because it is a Mass Beer Spectacle -ometer, of course.

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

The only thing I can say for sure about them is it that they have blood Type-O

Re:Silly

[Quirkz]

Forget the conspiracy, the actual story of New Coke and Coke Classic is interesting enough. New Coke was inspired by panic created by the Pepsi challenge - in small sips, the sweeter Pepsi was clobbering Coke in taste tests. What was realized later was the taste test skewed things; over the course of a full beverage, the less-sweet Coke left consumers just as satisfied or more satisfied. But first Coke panicked and created a newer, sweeter mix to compete with Pepsi in the challenge. Only later when customers became dissatisfied in droves (because that little sip of sweeter drink tested well, but the full bottle of sweet wasn't as satisfying) did Coke panic again and revert the recipe.

Re:Silly

[pepty]

The problem with glass is that it requires more energy to make than a can

Not sure about that. Aluminium is very energy intensive to produce, and of course the cost of the glass bottle is amortized over tens (or hundreds) of uses.

The last time I was on a brewery tour they said the average bottle was unusable after being recycled twice, but that's just beer bottles. Recycling glass takes about 50% of the energy of making new glass. Most of the energy used in making an aluminum can is the f*ckton of electricity required to reduce bauxite ore to aluminum. Recycling a can takes 5% of the energy necessary to make a new can.

Re:Silly

[jedidiah]

HFCS is no worse than any other refined sugar.

However that's not really saying much.

Re:Silly

[jedidiah]

I treat HFCS the same as I treat MSG: an indication of severe corner cutting that likely has a strong negative impact on the quality of the product as well as the ingredients put into the product. It's a cheap crutch used a shortcut for having a decent recipe.

That or it's just junk food that should be consumed sparingly or not at all.

Re:Silly

[evilviper]

Your body absorbs much more energy from 100 calories of sugar, for example, than it does from 100 calories of raw vegetables.

This is TECHNICALLY true in some cases, but there are fleetingly few people who get a significant percentage of their daily food intake from, say: completely RAW, UNCOOKED broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, corn, peas, beans, etc, etc.

People cook these foods precisely because uncooked food is hard to digest. And it's not likely people are going to be ignorant of this fact... eating raw vegetables is tantamount to drinking a mega-dose of Metamucil. It'll be PAINFULLY obvious if you're not digesting your food.

While there are exceptions, like foods very, very high in fiber... I don't know of any all-bean diets, so for the average person, all calories are pretty damn close to being the same, for all practical purposes.

Re:Silly

[TechyImmigrant]

Here are some good starting points for the lay reader:

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/01/used-brain-for-sale-one-careful-owner.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/09/protons-linoleic-acid-in-hypothalamus.html
http://www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year3/psy337EatingNeuralFactors/PSY337EatingNeuralFactors.htm#evidenceforceontrolcentresforfeeding

Re:Silly

[Matheus]

Guiness brah!

Re:Silly

[epiccollision]

here yeah go http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/79/4/537/F1.expansion.html

Re:Silly

[evilviper]

Things like BPA or certain types of food are really only going to be corner cases.

That seems very unlikely. It was suspected for a long time that BPA signaling your system to keep creating fat was causing some real problems.

Your body cannot store fat from nowhere.

That's technically true... It will always be possible to diet and lose weight. But if BPA is acting as described, then you will have to carefully watch your diet, forever, because your body will ALWAYS continue to signal hunger, and always try to store fat. And it's a tricky balance. It's easy to diet too much, and end up getting dizzy and even fainting from too few calories.

So, if BPA has made an epidemic of anything, I'd say it was more like an epidemic of being "slightly chubby", but not one of obesity.

Maybe you don't know what "obese" means... If you really mean MORBIDLY obese, then I'll agree with you. When weight becomes crippling, a little self-control is necessary, and it's easy to judge by eye when you're gaining hundreds of pounds, versus losing it (too quickly, perhaps).

But obesity is really just a few pounds of extra weight. Someone doesn't even have to appear out of shape (when clothed) to be obese. A few pounds of belly fat, and you might be obese, and at high risk of a number of health problems.

Re:Silly

[epiccollision]

the glycemic index is not very helpful to measuring the impact of fructose as its absorption and processing in the liver does not have the same effect on insulin levels due to the extra steps fructose has to go through to get from the monosaccharide to be used as glycogen...then there is the significant amount of fructose that is converted and stored as fat compared to glucose through "Synthesis of triglyceride from DHAP and glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate" "Triglycerides are incorporated into very low density lipoproteins (VLDL), which are released from the liver destined toward peripheral tissues for storage in both fat and muscle cells." so glucose spikes insulin and fructose spikes VLDL plasma levels and gets stored as fat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Synthesis_of_triglyceride_from_DHAP_and_glyceraldehyde_3_phosphate

Re:Silly

[Pigeon451]

I'll bite. What shall we line it with? Companies are replacing BPA with other plasticizers with unknown effects. Plastics are porous and chemicals can be emitted from them. ANY plastic is likely to be an issue.

How about no coating? Well that won't quite work either, as the can will corrode or be damaged (which is why the coating is there in the first place).

So what shall we do oh wise one?

Re:Silly

[kevkingofthesea]

Okay, there is a very, very small amount of extra energy used when metabolizing the sucrose: the bond between the fructose and glucose molecules has to be broken.

...some of the energy contained in the fructose is consumed by the body having to metabolize it into glucose. This is not a negligible difference, and if you think I'm bullshitting you, read the wikipedia article on the Thermic Effect of Food and read this paper specifically comparing fructose and glucose:

Self-contradiction aside, you realize that sucrose has to be metabolized into fructose and glucose, and that fructose then has to be further metabolized, right? Posting an article that compares the thermic effects of fructose and glucose is not relevant when you're comparing sucrose to HFCS. I don't know of anyone who uses pure glucose for anything, except for diabetics with low blood sugar.

Re:Silly

[bkr1_2k]

Except that "sweeter" means your body has a higher propensity for "addiction" to it, apparently. I'll see if I can dig up the source...

It's not really the HFCS is bad for you, it's that it tastes "sweeter" and your body automatically craves "sweet". Sweeter is better from your body's perspective so you're going to want to drink more soda with HFCS than you would with cane sugar or other source of sweetening.

Re:Silly

[cos(0)]

Your grandparent was talking about a specific bock: Shiner Bock. That one is made only in bottles.

Re:Silly

[gewalker]

I remember otherwise, 6.5 ounces -- just checked the source too.

Re:Silly

[cayenne8]

So what shall we do oh wise one?

How about the old fashioned way...in GLASS? You can can stuff in glass that keeps a LOOOONG time.

I'd imagine some thing could be canned without coatings...

I prefer most things to be in glass if I can...I only buy beer in glass bottles, with the only exception being when at the pool or on a boat generally....but I prefer how things taste out of glass containers. It is worth the extra few cents that bottle beer costs over canned.

Re:Silly

[g1zmo]

He was saying that it comes in cans too.

Re:Silly

[dgatwood]

If you starve yourself, you lose weight.

Correction: If you starve yourself and force yourself to maintain a high activity level in spite of the extreme lethargy, you lose weight. When most people starve themselves, they maintain roughly the same weight or lose only a very small amount of weight. Then, when they go back to eating again, they gain weight because their metabolism is slower, but they are consuming calories sufficient for a faster metabolism.

What makes weight loss hard is that IIRC, your metabolism typically slows down faster than it speeds up. So reducing caloric intake doesn't make you lose as much as you gain when you remove the reduction.

Re:Silly

[cayenne8]

The problem with glass is that it requires more energy to make than a can AND more energy and water to wash a bottle before reuse than to make a can.

I'd rather pay a few extra pennies to have a safe container that won't poison me....

Hell, I only buy beer in bottles....can't stand the stuff in cans, and it doesn't really hit my budget in any significant way.

The few times I drink coke...I hunt down the MX ones...in bottles made with real cane sugar. Again, worth the few extra cents here and there for me...and that is just for flavor, not even considering the BPA crap.....

Re:Silly

[Mike Buddha]

Spaten is sold in a can. Guiness is sold in a can.

I've never had any issues with aluminum taste in good beers. Think of the can as a small keg that you can crush against your head.

Re:Silly

[Yetihehe]

I too prefer beer in bottles, but I just don't drink much beer and almost no sodas. If I drink sodas, they are with sugar, not artifical sweeteners. I'm still fat, but it's just because I'm lazy and don't move enough.

Re:Silly

[adolf]

Agreed.

Except the last time (and I do mean the last time) I tried Murphys, it left a mouth feel like that of the sweat from a grilled hot dog. Less than fun, that.

Re:Silly

[Arterion]

Maybe, but the general idea is that you can use less of it to achieve the same level of sweetness, thus fewer empty calories.

Re:Silly

[Obfuscant]

It would be a sad(der?) world indeed if the barrier to wanting a better approach was expertise in the matter.

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

Everyone wants something better. The sad part is that we often try to get there without having any expertise in the matter. Or what expertise we have has the same flaw humanity has as a whole: it isn't perfect. If a bad outcome is a 1:100000 chance, then even if you test 100000 times you might miss it. And then you find that 1:100000 and have to weigh that outcome against the 99999 beneficial outcomes.

How many people would have died from botulism or other food-born disease, compared to a tendency to be overweight, and is the benefit of them not dying worth the cost of the latter?

Re:Silly

[CannonballHead]

"In short, we would all probably be a lot better off if all sweeteners were switch to 100% fructose, whether the source is corn or something else."

Except that fructose is harder on your intestines, and it's not recommended that you have a whole lot of fructose. On paper, it can look better, and can even be recommended for diabetics ... but just because it looks better based on a couple of considerations doesn't mean it actually is better. There are a lot of people that actually have problems with excess fructose that are totally fine with sucrose - fructose absorption.

Basically, we can look at some stats on foods... but how exactly our intestines deal with the food is still somewhat mysterious. Ever heard of "IBS?" A lot of people get diagnosed with that. Nobody really knows what causes it. We still don't even really know why people develop intestinal issues with certain foods (including fructose). Pretending that we know more than we do is generally not good, especially with we start shifting the variety of foods towards one spectrum (e.g., very high fructose). It's bad enough that we eat as much sugar as we do, but shifting all that sugar to *one* type of sugar...

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

Sorry, but no. Canned beer is worse than bottled beer is worse than tap beer.

1. Be willing to admit that you might be wrong; 2. Post the results of a blind taste test, between the same beer in a can and a bottle; 3. Wonder why your post was mod'ed "Insightful".

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

I completely disagree, beer definitely tastes better from a bottle, I find the can seems to do something nasty to the taste, similar to soda cans. beer is also best drunk while relatively freshly bottled and you should never store it in the light anyway.

Have you done a blind taste test to confirm this?

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

The problem is BPA might be toxic, so even if...

FTFY

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

Isomerized alpha acids, found in beer brewed (boiled, energy applied) using most forms of humulus lupulus (common hop) as an ingredient, can be split by the energy of visible light, or especially-eagerly-split by UV radiation. One of those resulting pieces, from the split, becomes 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol. This is the thiol by which "skunked" beer earns its infamy. Brown (dark amber) glass is decent at protecting beer; opaque containers are the best. Additionally, and separately, a better oxygen seal for the lid of said container will guard the beer from oxidation. Oxidation of beer results in 2,3-pentanedione, trans-2-nonenal, and others. Some oxygen gets into cans; more gets into bottles. Of course, keeping your beer stored in a cool place will reduce oxidation, in either case.

Re:Silly

[rgbrenner]

I agree with you.. but there are people who think it is far worse. There's an entire movement behind a move to sugar instead HFCS. It's those people I was addressing in my post.

Re:Silly

[TechyImmigrant]

HFCS is 45% glucose and 55% fructose unbound.
Sucrose is 50% glucose bound to 50% fructose.

By the time the sucrose hits the stomach, it has been cleaved by enzymes into an unbound 50:50 mix.

So the difference is just the 45:55 vs 50:50 thing

Can you point to research that supports your assertions. I haven't read anything along those lines.

Re:Silly

[TechyImmigrant]

Don't fall into the 'Food Reward' trap that Guyenet fell into and hasn't escaped from yet. It isn't relevant to cell metabolism.

Re:Silly

[tibit]

OK, perhaps "starve yourself" is taking it too far. Eating less. That's all. Whatever you feel like, eat half of it. Portions served in most U.S., um, eating establishments, are humongous. Split it in half for dinner and breakfast or lunch the next day. Easy. No lethargy involved, you're still living your normal life.

Re:Silly

[monkeykoder]

I've re-used beer bottles at least 10+ times each with no concern. The problem they might be having is that the commercially used beer bottles are typically made of a thinner glass than the ones sold for home brewing. That being the case most of the bottles I used for home brewing had big raised letters on the side saying "New Belgium" (makers of Fat Tire).

Re:Silly

[manu0601]

Absolutely. Provided of course you replace 100kcal of soda with 100kcal or less of nuts. Your example suggests replacing a half-cup of soda with a quarter-pound of nuts. While the volumes are (roughly) similar one of those is mostly water and will slake your thirst while quickly making you hungry*, while the other is almost pure fat and protein and will take the edge of hunger (fat is good at that) but do nothing to slake your thirst. Holding them up as alternatives is disingenuous.

Ok, that was a weak example. Consider 250 kcal cookie vs 600 kcal nuts and you get a better example

Re:Silly

[Immerman]

Okay, that is a better example, though it's still a calorie-balancing trick - calorie-for-calorie nuts are far healthier than the same calories in cookies. Your example is rather unbalanced though, 250kcal is maybe 5 cookies, whereas 600kcal of nuts is about 1/4 pound (assuming they're not peanuts, cashews, or some other really high-calorie variety), so no, stuffing your face with nuts is probably not going to be healthier than a moderate snack of cookies.

Really though I wouldn't suggest nuts as a "snacking food" anymore than I would cookies - they're both far too calorie rich to eat on a regular basis unless you actually need the energy (I say while sitting here snacking on a shot glass of roasted almonds) . On the other hand fats tend to be more filling, and since they don't cause a sugar/insulin spike like glucose does they at least stick with you a lot longer. Fruit or vegetables are preferable though - a little fructose for flavor and a moderately quick energy surge, along with lots of more complex carbohydrates and fiber for slow-burn energy and stomach-filling roughage.

Re:Silly

[Stuarticus]

You don't think the surface area/volume ratio of cans and kegs are slightly different?

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

My bad... but the truth is even worse. ;-)

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

I said "colon" not "intestines". Only water, salts and some vitamins are absorbed from the colon (i.e. large intestines). Not all calories are absorbed by the end of the small intestines, especially for hard to digest material. Whatever is left over allows the bacteria to continue to multiply in your large intestine.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

They convert all of that absorbed/used energy into multiplying themselves, before finally being expelled in your feces. Entropy argues that some of that energy must end up as heat, also, I guess.

BTW, you can get as much of that bacteria as you want... you don't need to get it from me.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

You should quit while you're behind. Are you really arguing that bacteria do not utilize energy?

Re:Silly

[Arterion]

We can all make lots of assumptions and see what it looks like on paper. But all that is just supposition, or at best hypothetical, until we can collect some empirical data. It wouldn't be that hard of an experiment to do. But of course, it's easier for the sugar industry to invest in marketing to convince people that corn-based sweeteners are bad than it is for them to experiment. Honestly, I don't think they don't care. They just want to make more money. If putting out bad publicity about HFCS makes the sugar industry more money, then that's what they'll do.

I suspect IBS has something to do with abnormalities with gut flora. It seems strange to me that we are, by quantity of cells, more bacteria than we are human, but I haven't seen a single gastroenterologist observing the health of bacteria colonies in the gut. But that's a random, unrelated topics.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

I'm not the one who has to explain anything. That's the beauty of science. It's their responsibility to show how self-reported caloric intake may not be misleading, given that self-reporting is known to be problematic.

But just to play "counter example": BPA content is correlated with certain types of particularly-bad-for-you foods -- soda, fast food, packaged foods. The one study I've seen that tried to get at measuring calorie misreporting showed indications that it is correlated with certain types of particularly-bad-for-you foods -- soda, fast food, packaged foods. (I oversimplified the parallelism for effect, but I think you get the point I was trying to make.)

The kind of person that eats too much home-made pie may be the kind of person that honestly reports about eating too much home-made pie. The kind of person that pigs out at McDonald's may be the kind of person that misremembers how much they pig out at McDonald's.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

Again, it's possible that the types of food that tend to have BPA are the types of food that, for whatever reason, people tend to misreport. It would make sense, because foods with BPA tend to be the kinds of foods we are told are particularly bad for us -- soda, fast food, packaged foods.

A fat person who eats too much organic, home cooked food is less likely to be embarrassed to admit (even to himself) how much he really eats. A fat person who eats too much packaged food is more like to be embarrassed to admit (especially to himself) how much he really eats.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

While you are correct about how limited raw foods are in diets, you are incorrect in the concept that only raw foods exhibit this difference in absorption. You will absorb more calories from a well-done steak than from a rare steak, for example. You will absorb more calories from well-cooked, slightly mushy broccoli than you will from crunchy, slightly steamed broccoli. The differences can be meaningful.

But, also, how cooked something is is only one example of "all calories are not the same". Different foods are easier or harder to digest than others, even controlling for cooked vs raw. Meat is harder to digest than starch, for instance. Your body absorbs more calories from a 100-calorie potato serving than from a 100-calorie meat serving. Again, this is because the laboratory measurements used to determine calories do not mimic the digestive tract. They merely measure the total energy content of the food, regardless of how easily humans could digest/absorb that energy.

Re:Silly

[evilviper]

There are differences, but they absolutely are NOT significantly affecting calorie absorbtion. There will be a little variability from the type of food, but other effects will be more significant. If you count your calories, you will be eating about the right amount, and maintaining a healthy weight.

Study after study, Atkins diets never out-perform conventional starchy diets.

Re:Silly

[tibit]

They do, and to get an idea for how much energy they do generate (assuming most of it goes to heat), see how much hotter your intestines are compared to, say, your liver :) Energy doesn't magically disappear, and it usually ends up in the form of heat. Those bacteria sure do utilize energy, but it's a minuscule amount and has no real effect on your calorie budget.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

LOL

Why do you think the only possible result of energy metabolism is heat?

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

Wrong.

Just look at how much weight loss is experienced by people on raw-only diets. They simply have a hard time getting enough calories, almost regardless of how much they eat.

Re:Silly

[bloodhawk]

Actually yes I have. Not intentionally, some of my friends buy whatever is cheapest (beer or bottles) and several times I have asked why the beer tastes funky an every time it has been because it was poured from a can.

Re:Silly

[evilviper]

I already addressed this in my first reply to you, which you didn't bother to dispute at the time. Go re-read it, or go away.

Re:Silly

[timeOday]

I would be surprised if that were a big enough factor to account for such a strong correlation, but I can't fault your logic.

Hopefully the next step is a controlled experiment - give half the subjects BPA pills and placebos to the others and see if there is an effect. It doesn't seem overly risky given that BPA is already widely used.

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

Sorry for the miscommunication--- when I said blind I meant "have someone else serve you a poured beer from a bottle and can, at the same time, without you knowing which is which. Pick your favorite, then."

We already know soda drinkers are fat

[mewsenews]

Everyone on /. already knows correlation != causation. People that drink 2L bottles of soda on a regular basis are going to high higher BPA and higher obesity.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Bob-taro]

Everyone on /. already knows correlation != causation. People that drink 2L bottles of soda on a regular basis are going to high higher BPA and higher obesity.

Actually, that might be a good test - is there a stronger correlation between obesity and cans than 2L bottles?

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Antony T Curtis]

Actually, what they are implying is that people who drink 2L of soda from cans daily will be in a worse state than those who drink 2L of the same soda daily from plastic BPA-free bottles.

Some individuals would probably be just fine drinking 2L of sugar soda from plastic bottles if they're active enough to burn off the extra calories.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[reverseengineer]

Well, they shouldn't, if they're drinking out of 2L bottles, most of which are polyethylene terephthalate and generally do not contain BPA, which is why the focus here is on the epoxy liners of many aluminum cans. They did try to control for caloric intake in the study:

Controlling for race/ethnicity, age, caregiver education, poverty to income ratio, sex, serum cotinine level, caloric intake, television watching, and urinary creatinine level, children in the lowest urinary BPA quartile had a lower estimated prevalence of obesity (10.3% [95% CI, 7.5%-13.1%]) than those in quartiles 2 (20.1% [95% CI, 14.5%-25.6%]), 3 (19.0% [95% CI, 13.7%-24.2%]), and 4 (22.3% [95% CI, 16.6%-27.9%]).

However, they also admit in the conclusions, "Explanations of the association cannot rule out the possibility that obese children ingest food with higher BPA content or have greater adipose stores of BPA."

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Anonymous Coward]

At what point in time do you actually stop and think instead of regurgitating the same old, tired like "correlation != causation".

CO2 => Global Warning correlation != causation!!

Lower work ethic => Lower wages correlation != causation!!

chemicals => cancer correlation != causation!!

Posting mindless correlation != causation on slashdot => stupid !!!

Do some research once in a while.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesogen

Everyone knows calories in - calories out > 0 tends to build up fat. But Obesogens fuck up with the metabolic system such that the body will build NEW fat cells much more readily. And no, higher BPA amount != more fat. It has been shown that the relationship is NOT linear. Smaller dosages result in more fat subjects than with high BPA levels.

So you can have exact clones, raised in same environment, fed the same food. If you give one group a little bit of obesogens, they can get very obese while the group without obesogens would not be fat. Heck, a group with tons of obesogens would not get fat too because of negative feedback loop that does not happen at low levels. That's how research is done. No one goes around like a retard with a "correlation implies causation" mindset. They actually test it in the lab if it is causation.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[leppi]

Well, "be just fine" is relative I think. That is a ton of sugar, like 7-8 times the US recommended limit. Horrible for your teeth, contains no nutritional value, other than hydration, robs you of opportunities to eat foods that are actually good for you. So you consume 800 calories of pure sugar a day, that would either make you fat, or eliminate 800 other calories from your diet. which is a lot!!! like as much as a big steak.

Depending on your gender it is around half of your recommended healthy intake (even for active individuals).

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Nittle]

This should be fairly easy if you start looking at diet soda drinkers. There are few calories in diet soda.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[epyT-R]

well if that was true, then why are so many studies (or the articles posted about them anyway) LOADED with broken correlation? The only answer that makes sense is that many of the authors are ideologically/politically obsessed about some action (seems like soda is a current target considering the stupidity in NY), so they sprinkle it with some badly manipulated stats and serve it up as 'research.' Even under the rare instances the actual studies are sound, the articles themselves often are not. The frequency of this rubbish is why people knee jerk with 'correlation is not causation.' Most of the time it's right on target.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[zippthorne]

zero grams of salt is a pretty small amount..

Perhaps you are thinking of sports drinks.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Mask]

I can think of dozen other things they did not account for. They are simply measuring the wrong thing.

Did they consider the timing of soda drinking? During lunch at school (more likely cans), or
while watching TV (more likely bottles). There are studies that correlate drinking at lunchtime
with weight issues.

How about 2L bottles being used by other member of the family and visitors, making it difficult to estimate the caloric intake of soda for any family member. Caloric intake is very easy to get wrong unless you perform complicated
measurements. Counting calories according to what you think you ate is only slightly better than guessing.

Some people forget to add up the calories of the huge amount of calorie-loaded sauce they add to the salad,
or the obscene amounts of oil and butter in almost everything they eat.
So maybe the lack of BPA is correlated with overestimation of caloric intake for the drinkers of L2 bottles?

Also, obese people like to drink soda during lunch (canned). If they somewhat care for their body they hope that
drinking sugar free soda will save them. So they are more likely to get a lot of BPA without additional calories than
people with a healthy weight. So, maybe they are obese because all those artificial sweeteners? Did they check
the urine for that?

If I really wanted to "prove" that artificial sweeteners are the cause for obesity, I would probably would find a way which
would look as convincing as this study. I would also be able to "prove" that people who eat a lot of quinoa are more likely to get smallpox, despite vaccination.
[hint: the link is vegetarians/new-age/vaccination level of friends]

I don't say that they did it, they almost certainly did not, but cooking-up wanted results is significantly easier than
detecting it in a review. Similarly, if the distance between the alleged cause and effect is too big, as in this case,
it is almost impossible to rule-out causation!=correlation errors.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Xylantiel]

This is a great correlation is (possibly) not causation. They are saying that it is possible that the same metabolic differences that lead to obesity might also cause people to have more bpa in their urine. So the causality might be the other way entirely. Somehow that seems like a more reasonable explanation to me since it might even have a reasonable mechanism in terms of the individual's uptake of both sugar and an additive of sugared beverages.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[Immerman]

or the articles posted about them anyway

I think the answer is in the question. Most "journalists" are both scientifically clueless and far more interested in flashy headlines and provocative articles than in anything so pointless as truth or accuracy. I mean come on, who cares about such ridiculous things? They have no direct impact on advertising dollars, and very few readers are cognizant enough to care that they're being trampled on. Add in that the original scientific articles are probably a bit slanted to begin with (everybody loves their own pet theory after all) and it's a recipe for ridiculousness.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[subreality]

Yes, causation/correlation, but JAMA is a quality journal. If you RTFA, they didn't miss this:

"Results: Median urinary BPA concentration was 2.8 ng/mL (interquartile range, 1.5-5.6). Of the participants, 1047 (34.1% [SE, 1.5%]) were overweight and 590 (17.8% [SE, 1.3%]) were obese. Controlling for race/ethnicity, age, caregiver education, poverty to income ratio, sex, serum cotinine level, caloric intake, television watching, and urinary creatinine level, ..."

That doesn't mean BPA is causative, but they DID control many obvious factors.

Amount in urine

[Anonymous Coward]

The studies that look at the mount of BPA in urine drive me crazy. They take a group of people, give them some food or liquid with BPA, then freak out when it's in their urine.

I'll let you in on a little secret here: humans have the ability to excrete BPA. Mice do not. All those studies that show health issues in mice from BPA ingestion are testing on creatures that cannot rid their bodies of the compound.

Re:Amount in urine

[kEnder242]

I googled something and found something that disputes your claim that

humans have the ability to excrete BPA. Mice do not.

http://healthandenvironmentonline.com/issue-archive/bpa-science-safety-1/

Slashdot: A mix between a peer review journal and "bum fights"

Re:Amount in urine

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'll let you in on a little secret here: women excrete oral contraceptives and yet they appear to function just fine between the time they're taken and the time they're pissed out.

If you've ever lived with a woman who's taken BC, you would know that your preceding statement is flatly false. A woman will end up trying several different types of BC, finding one that doesn't cause weight gain / lack of desire / batshit insanity / skin breakouts / dry skin / hair falling out / BEARDO TAKE OUT THE FUCKING GARBAGE syndrome / etc

Just remember, 40 years ago we started loading up little boys with female hormones. Now they're marrying each other.

Homosexuals have been around forever, and will be around forever. Hormones in the drink containers didn't give the Victorians / Romans / Greeks / Neanderthals / etc the idea. It's just a different way of wiring up your preferences.

Re:Amount in urine

[sjames]

If you've ever lived with a woman who's taken BC, you would know that your preceding statement is flatly false. A woman will end up trying several different types of BC, finding one that doesn't cause weight gain / lack of desire / batshit insanity / skin breakouts / dry skin / hair falling out / BEARDO TAKE OUT THE FUCKING GARBAGE syndrome / etc

Exactly. That's true i spite of women excreting the contraceptives. So excreting a substance isn't the same as being unaffected by it.

Re:Amount in urine

[the eric conspiracy]

Dr Julia Taylor, the author of this work, is a co-worker of Prof Frederick S. vom Saal. von Saal is the primary BPA critic and is under a lot of criticism because much of his work has been found to be not reproducable in large multigeneration studies done in national labs both in the United States and Europe.

Lack of reproducability in small volume academic exploratory studies is a big problem in the endocrine literature. It's very worth being aware of when evaluating these papers.

http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articles/PMC3135059//reload=0;jsessionid=SXzQiL3qssivuEwafSgl.24

Re:Amount in urine

[PiMuNu]

Slashdot: A mix between a peer review journal and "bum fights"

Peer review journal: a mix between science and "bum fights"

Re:Amount in urine

[bkr1_2k]

Just out of curiosity, wouldn't this imply that the kids getting rid of the BPA are the ones having problems? Couldn't it be argued that retention of the BPAs is what is keeping kids skinny?

I'm mostly joking here but it seems to me they're drawing some big conclusions from some fairly inconclusive information.

Correllation? Causation?

[skine]

Did they control for soft drink intake, or did they just compare BPA levels to obesity?

I mean, it seems like drinking more soda would increase both BPA and obesity, while switching to glass containers isn't going to stop someone from being obese if they drink enough.

Re:Correllation? Causation?

[sjames]

Drinking soda would only boost BPA if it's from the can. The far more common plastic soda bottles have no BPA.

Blame the can!

[Sooner Boomer]

And the fork/spoon! They're what made me fat!

Let's find an easy scapegoat for obesity . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . it's not overeating and lack of exercise. Let's blame the soda can!

It's sure enough easier than convincing people to eat healthy and get more exercise . . .

"It's not my fault that I'm fat . . . I was given too much BPA as a child!"

Re:Let's find an easy scapegoat for obesity . . .

[AK Marc]

I had a teacher. She gained 50 lbs. She was diagnosed with a thyroid condition. She was given medicine. With no adjustments to her diet, she lost the 50 lbs (And a little more). There are millions of such stories out there. You are factually incorrect. There are plenty of documented cases where the "fault" for fat isn't on the person who became fat, even if it was possible for them to have reversed the trend through disproportionately large effort.

Re:Let's find an easy scapegoat for obesity . . .

[quantaman]

Having run a few marathons and covering 2000+ km per year I'd dispute the effects of cardiovascular exercise on weight loss (there's a lot of other great reasons to run, weight loss just isn't one of them). High intensity training has some effect (I don't think it's significant though), but a lot of endurance exercise doesn't really affect weight loss.

Diet however, can make a huge impact, there's a lot of other factors that also make a huge impact (genetics, maybe gut flora, etc), but diet is the only one we can really manipulate.

Re:Let's find an easy scapegoat for obesity . . .

[evilviper]

First off, it's been solidly proven that BPA will shrink your genitals, just as if you've been taking estrogen pills. That's something which might be a reasonable trade-off in powerful medications, but that should never be something that comes into contact with our FOOD, which by definition, should not have such medical side-effects.

And back to your claim, exercise has very little effect on obesity. You have to run a marathon to burn off a pizza. It's massively impractical to lose weight with exercise.

So we're back to over-eating. But is this generation really forcing themselves to over-eat? It's really not like every family out there drinks nothing but sodas, and eats nothing but junk food. The fact that obesity has become an epidemic, and this generation is estimated to have a shorter life-span than the previous, indicates that something has change for the worse.

BPA is a reasonable guess. The other likely option that scientists are researching is children being treated with antibiotics, which kills off beneficial bacteria.

Re:Let's find an easy scapegoat for obesity . . .

[epiccollision]

there are Millions of these stories because there are Billions of people...the number of people who have an actual biological imbalance that causes undue weight retention would be in the 10-30% range to account for American trends...as it stands 0.06% of the worlds population has some sort of biological imbalance that can account for their obesity as a rough estimate 0.06% of 7 billion is 4.2 million that would only account for 4.6% of the obesity in america, and if all those people happened to live in the US, but sadly only 180k of the 4.2mil are american

I'm a fat bastard..

[Adult film producer]

and I know who to blame: myself. I just eat too much and don't get enough exercise.

I think this short 30 second youtube video is appropriate for the discussion, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ihOi56J17Hw

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[Beardo the Bearded]

and I know who to blame: myself. I just eat too much and don't get enough exercise.
   

It's never too late to fix that. I started biking to work 16 years ago. I've dropped from 250# to 160#, and now I even teach spin classes.

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[Adult film producer]

It's probably time for me to change my habits. I'm 270 right now when my optimal genetic weight is probably about 195/200 (as my father and brothers are.) Frankly, sometimes the weight hurts my ankles... I spend way too much time in front of the computer editing video and drinking coffee. Its kind of pathetic.

Maybe I should take this moment to reflect and do something about it, I know I would be a lot happier if I did.

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[phantomfive]

Do it! You'll be great!!

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[jollyreaper]

It's probably time for me to change my habits. I'm 270 right now when my optimal genetic weight is probably about 195/200 (as my father and brothers are.) Frankly, sometimes the weight hurts my ankles... I spend way too much time in front of the computer editing video and drinking coffee. Its kind of pathetic.

Maybe I should take this moment to reflect and do something about it, I know I would be a lot happier if I did.

Do it. I'm taking the slow and steady route to improvement. Was at 6'1", 336lbs, down to 260 right now. I was at "turn and stare" weight and in a fatass country like 'Murrica, that's saying something. Dropped a lot of fat, put on a lot of muscle. Still got a belly to finish working off but arms and legs are toned and muscly, no longer got a roll of fat hanging off my back, got my goddamn face back. I had a goddamn Rush Limbaugh bullfrog throat with pig jowls. It was disgusting.

You'll need to do a couple of things:
1) Figure out where you're getting your excess calories, start cutting
2) Get more exercise, mix of cardio and weights

My biggest problem is portion control. I can easily eat four times what I actually need in a meal. If I have the kind of breakfast I want to, I can go the rest of the day without eating. Not good. Smaller portions, I'm actually feeling hungry by the next meal.

The thing you may hate is you're going to have to learn how to cook and do it proper. It takes time. That's usually why people are willing to pay more to avoid the work. And honestly, it's more than a bit fucked. If I were a lazy bastard who didn't want to cook, I could live on dollar menu burgers and water. $3 a day. You can't get veg and salad for that. Of course, you won't be living for long on that kind of diet, either. Cheap, shit food is too easy, the good stuff costs more in time and money.

If you're going to make changes, start small. If you're short on time, eating less and more of the right things is the easiest. You're already making the time for meals anyway. Then set aside at least a half hour for a walk around the block. It'll probably kick your ass. I was getting shin splints when I started, utterly pathetic. Work your way up from there.

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[CommieLib]

I was right where you are about five months ago - I'm now down forty pounds, and training (gulp) for a triathlon sometime next year. It's Weight Watchers man....I don't want to be spam for them, but join WW and go to the meetings. BTW, I turned forty this year as well.

Good luck.

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[BlueGMan]

Yeah, me too.. The wifey and I are going on a 50th Birthday Celebration Cruise (my 50th not hers), and of course we need to "look good". A recent visit from a mid-western (Ohio) friend and his wife who has lost 300lbs using Advocare... Of course the wifey says, IT WORKS! So we dive in... Now, I am not here to extol the virtues of "Programs" as it is an MLM with very little upside and a TON of proprietary (and expensive) supplements that "have not been evaluated by the FDA".. Being the supportive husband, I have embarked on the "Lifestyle Change" with her. I have lost 8lbs in 9 days, she has lost 4... Being a lowcarber for the last 10 years (lost 85lbs), that has ALWAYS worked for me and my doctor approved it... (and from reading some of the comments), I am carb sensitive.. A thorough evaluation of this program has yielded a couple of interesting facts.. 1. Food intake is strictly regulated - meaning PORTION CONTROL. 1/2 cup of this, etc... 2. The program removes all intake of white sugar, white flour, soda, coffee) - effectively low carb or at least low glycemic.. 3. No liquids other than water or their "spark drink"....(the sugar free spark drink is essentially a derivative of any energy drink with a whopping 120mgs of caffeine), While the supplements and drinks are pure sales and marketing, the one realization is this.. while we have been low carbing, we weren't loosing weight (although we weren't gaining either).. however, when you actually see 4oz of meat on a plate with 1/2c of veggies, it is minuscule in comparison to what we WERE eating.. So we are back to: intake vs usage... A hard pill to swallow, but in reality, we just eat TOO MUCH. Period. And I am sure many of us would raise the roof in a restaurant if we were served accurate portion sizes based upon our body size. SO that leaves us with one obvious choice - Paleo - the all natural, fresh food, clean eating, low carb approach to eating.. Of course, who knows what ailment we will end up with next considering all of the chemicals used to GROW food..

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[Beardo the Bearded]

If you're going to make changes, start small. If you're short on time, eating less and more of the right things is the easiest. You're already making the time for meals anyway. Then set aside at least a half hour for a walk around the block. It'll probably kick your ass. I was getting shin splints when I started, utterly pathetic. Work your way up from there.

GP posting.

That's totally true. The first time I went on my bike ride to school, I couldn't make it to the end of the block. A 2km ride took a half-dozen stops to catch my breath. (I told myself "I can rest when I want, but I won't walk my bike.") Now I can do a twice-daily 5 miles barely breaking a sweat, and I can go 35+ miles hauling camping gear without too much trouble.

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[RyoShin]

A little late, but I wanted to throw my hat in with support.

I'm 230ish (haven't actually weighed myself in a while, but my body size hasn't changed much). Three weeks ago I moved from a location almost a half hour away from work to a location a quarter mile away, and in a super-bike-friendly city. I now bike to work every day, and in addition I bike home for lunch (and a short-ish nap) as well. In the three weeks since I started, doing only 20 minutes of light biking per day, I've found myself with a huge burst in energy[1]. I go to bed at the same time but I wake up earlier (which is helpful in getting the time for the nap). In addition, since it takes more energy to go get fast food for lunch/dinner, either I save money and just don't get any, or I bike there and burn at least some of the extra calories I will take in doing that. Once I get my leg muscles up to speed I will be biking around town for the majority of my errands, as well. I'm sure that after a few months of this (assuming the winter doesn't completely destroy my ability to bike) I will have lost at least some weight without changing my other habits (I made soda a rarity months ago, at most I'll have one 20oz per week).

Not everyone can move that close to work like I did, but the point is that if you can increase the amount of energy you expend each day you will find that it will help you feel better and thus become even more motivated to work out more. After just two weeks I up and decided to just bike for a while when I left work. In the end I biked a mile or so--no great amount at all, even if I had been running, but that one bike ride was still more exercise than I had in the entire month of August (or between May and August, for that matter).

Try parking further away from work. If you have a bike and a bike rack on your car, drive most of the way and bike the rest (this will be handy if you have a crowded lot, little/expensive parking, or just want to save on gas). If you don't but have the money, seriously consider getting such a setup. Even doing errands, park as far away from the doors as you can (taking into account whatever you might buy). Use a hand basket instead of a cart when doing grocery shopping to both give your upper body a little extra work out and to force you to be more choosey in what you buy (since it's far harder to overload a basket than a cart.) On that note, make a list before you go shopping and buy only what's on that list--this is something else I did a while back and found myself doing a lot less junk food and impulse purchases (also make sure not to go grocery shopping while hungry).

There are a lot of little things like what I listed that can be done to make up to a larger goal (if you're a coder, think of it like taking a large function and breaking it into multiple, smaller functions that each do a simpler task.) If you go into weight loss thinking that you'll do a gym membership with daily lifting or jumping into P90X, you'll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and give up. You can do it! Just start by looking at the every day and asking how a task could be modified to help you with weight loss.

[1] Full disclosure, I've taken a huge downturn this week in energy and sleep pattern; however, I believe I am (successfully) fighting off either a cold or a severe seasonal allergy attack, so I don't consider it a failure of the changes I've made.

Xenoestrogen

[areusche]

From what i've read in my adventures to bulk up and build muscles BPA is one of those really prevalent xenoestrogens. There are a ton of chemicals in our environment that mimic estrogen, and its effects have been crazy if you look at the effects on sperm counts and not to mention its emasculating effects of men. Soy is in the same class, so if you're a vegetarian watch out. I've also noticed a lot of testosterone creams hitting the market lately, probably to help those old men whose test counts are really low. Interesting times we live in these days....

Re:Xenoestrogen

[epiccollision]

Vegetarians/Vegans who use Soy based protein as a basis of their diet are doing it wrong, not only are they avoiding eating the many other Vegetables that should be making up the bulk of their diet, but Soy protein isolate is mostly extracted using a hexane solvent that is not too healthy as well. Just because its vegetable based does not mean its can't also be junk food. Where did this idea come from that plants in general are deficient in protein?!?

Beer Drinkers?

[Memophage]

Similarly, is there any statistically significant weight difference between people who drink beer from cans vs. glass bottles?

Correlation w/o causation.

[ezakimak]

People who chew gum are more likely to contract throat and lung cancer.
Correlated? Yes.
Cause: people who *smoke* are more likely to chew gum to freshen their breath afterwards.

BPA--in containers of crappy processed foods and beverages.
Grain-laced soda -> fat.

As "smart" as some of these researchers seem to be, they often come up with the *dumbest* conclusions.

Re:Correlation w/o causation.

[Nadaka]

Yea... they didn't actually come to those conclusions.

They tested it by lacing mice food with bpa and observing their health in a controlled experiment.

As "smart" as some of these slashdot posters think they are, they often come up with the *dumbest* conclusions.

Re:Correlation w/o causation.

[ezakimak]

From the post:

A study by researchers from New York University, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a sample of nearly 3,000 children and teens across the country and found a 'significant' link between the amount of BPA in their urine and the prevalence of obesity.

Children and teens != mice.
The above statement sure sounds like a "conclusion" of sorts...

Re:Correlation w/o causation.

[coyote_oww]

The articles cited state that researchers looked at BPA levels in people's urine, and found a correlation with obesity. No mice where harmed. You must be be thinking of a different study.

I don't get it

[Mask]

Many, if not all canned drinks contain bisphenol-A.
Don't people who, instead of water, drink substantial amounts of canned and sweet beverages become obese?
Hence, if you get a lot of BPA in your system you are have good chances to be obese.

So what's the news?

(There is a small problem with this logic, which can easily be fixed ; I was lazy)

Re:I don't get it

[viperidaenz]

Is your logic problem correlation != causation? If I eat a bunch of canned green beans I'll get a high about of BPA but probably won't get fat.

Re:I don't get it

[Mask]

No, the logic problem is with sugar free cans. Many obese people drink sugar free sodas, hence no calorie intake
and my argument fails. However, in the case of sugar-free drinks the correlation != causation is reversed:

Who drinks sugar-free sodas? Obese people probably more than others. So if you are obese, my guess is, you have
a greater chance to drink soda with or without sugar. The paper talks about calorie intake, but with sugar-free
sodas you practically have no calorie intake. And yet, you get BPA for free.

2L soda = 800 calories

[jeko]

Two liters of soda carries in the neighborhood of 800 calories. The usual number quoted is that running burns about 100-120 calories per mile. Roughly speaking, you're gonna pay for that two-liter soda with a seven mile run.

Need to gain weight fast? One pound of fat = 3500 extra calories. Roughly, eight or nine liters or four six-packs (22 cans) of soda equal one pound. Drink a six-pack a day and you'll be a pound, pound and a half heavier by the end of the week. You'll be four or five pounds overweight by the end of the month. You can be grossly clinically obese by the end of the year, simply from drinking soda alone.

Now, yeah, I get personal freedom and, no, we shouldn't ban bacon and candy, but I have a lot of sympathy for the noise coming out of New York about banning soda. I was raised to think soda was basically "Water Plus," and the Coca Cola Company spent billions programming me to think "Coke Is It." I mean, good grief, we literally get our picture of Santa Claus from a Coca Cola ad, so deep is soda ingrained in American culture.

It took a ridiculous amount of effort as an adult to look at a can of soda and link that to feeling bad from poor health. It was ridiculous how hard it was to teach myself that I should look at a can of Coke and a cigarette the same way, since both would have roughly comparable deleterious effects on my health.

Some individuals would probably be just fine drinking 2L of sugar soda from plastic bottles if they're active enough to burn off the extra calories.

No one, nobody, is going to stay fine if they're drinking two liters of soda a day.

strange end result

[Tumbleweed]

World saved by Mexican Coke! (Coca-Cola, that is).

Re:strange end result

[tbird81]

True. I wonder what the obesity levels are like in Mexico.

Re:strange end result

[balbus000]

Are Cokes in Mexico still sugar instead of hfcs? That would doubly good!

BPA also linked to increased breast cancer risk

[felixrising]

There was a recent confirmation of endocrine-disruptors such as BPA causing breast cancer in the female gene line which is passed on to not just the daughter, but the granddaughter and great grandaughter too... http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n9/full/ncomms2058.html

Fat kids eat more

[Culture20]

Ergo, they will have more BPA in their systems. Maybe fat stores BPA better too. Doesn't mean boa makes you fat (which is the angle tv news is taking).

Is the Can Worse Than the Soda?

[NoKaOi]

No.

It's simple to explain the correlation

[Johnny Loves Linux]

The correlation is simple: BPA correlates to cans of soda consumed which correlates to high fructose corn syrup ingested which correlates to obesity. It's not that BPA causes obesity, it's that it's in the same delivery system as the cause of obesity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Re:It's simple to explain the correlation

[viperidaenz]

If I cook food, does it magically increase the number of calories? Not that I'm aware of. However, the same intake of cooked food will make you fatter than raw food. Your body uses less energy to digest it. The same amount of calories in a different form has a different effect. Calories from fat and simple sugars are very easily metabolised.

Re:It's simple to explain the correlation

[Johnny Loves Linux]

It doesn't matter whether or not they "controlled for caloric intake". The biochemical process by which fructose is processed by the liver converts the fructose directly into fat. A person who consumes 2000 calories daily of protein/fiber/low carbohydrates (with no sugars) is not going to have the same problems as a person who consumes 2000 calories daily of primarily sugar/fructose as the latter goes straight to fat and depresses the metabolism of the individual while the former does not. Please take some time to watch Dr. Lustig's presentation or the 10 minutes abbreviated version to understand what the metabolic issues are with fructose. Not all calories are the same.

WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[Taco Cowboy]

One thing about this article submit is that it only tells part of the story.

BPA lining is not only present in the soda can.

BPA lining is also present in CANNED FOOD - yes, inside the cans that are used for CANNED FOOD

http://www.thedailygreen.com/going-green/tips/bpa-in-canned-foods

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[fragMasterFlash]

How many of the canned foods you eat are as acidic as soda? Also food cans are vacuum sealed whereas carbonated soda cans are pressurized. At a guess I would suspect the lining in the soda can is more likely to break down over time. Perhaps there is something to those freshness dates that have been stamped on the cans for the past few years after all?

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[Taco Cowboy]

How many of the canned foods you eat are as acidic as soda?

You forgot one thing - People do not heat up their can of soda, but many people do place their canned food over fire to heat it up

Heating up canned food while it's still in the can will mean one thing - the PLASTIC LINING will melt into the food.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[Anonymous Coward]

And you do realize that most of the food (like fish) is cooked in the cans at the canary before being sealed to kill off bacteria? Right?

They could just use stainless steel in cans and no more problems with plastic crap leeching.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[smooth wombat]

If people are too lazy to extract the contents of a can into a pan, there are other issues to consider than just what lines a can.

But as I keep getting modded down when I talk about personal responsibility in healthcare, I guess that goes out the window as well when talking about safely handling food.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[TemporalBeing]

If people are too lazy to extract the contents of a can into a pan, there are other issues to consider than just what lines a can.

But as I keep getting modded down when I talk about personal responsibility in healthcare, I guess that goes out the window as well when talking about safely handling food.

Is that pan a non-stick pan? Or one without any kinds of non-stick coating?

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[epiccollision]

While a ph of 2.5 in Coke Classic is a little on the high(or low if you are so inclined) side for most canned foods, Cola is not cooked and processed inside of the cans and at most gets heated to only environmental temps during shipping...that being said most canned vegetables, sauces and fruits are usually at a ph of 4.6 or less and then pressure cooked with at least 1 bar(15 psi) which raises the temp to a little over 250 F from anywhere between 5-90 mins depending on the contents....BPA leaches better at low ph and high heat...

The problem is two fold 1] the BPA lining until about 2 years ago was the only lining approved to be used for human consumption by the FDA and the new BPA free liners were only used in very few products( Muir Glen, Eden Foods, and small seafood operations)...withe addition of Cambell's and a large portion of Conagra foods making the switch the industry is making strides to improve the situation. 2] the FDA still says that BPA is generally recognized as safe (GRAS) But until the FDA stops talking out of both sides of its mouth then they can get down to make the industry fix this idiocy. As it stands the FDA's official position as stated by its regulations the BPA containing polymers and the leeching into the food supply is still GRAS

here is the FDA in April saying BPA is bad m'kay http://www.fda.gov/newsevents/publichealthfocus/ucm064437.htm

here just a month earlier BPA is A OK http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodIngredientsPackaging/ucm166145.htm

and now in July https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/07/17/2012-17366/indirect-food-additives-polymers BAN it!!!(but only for babies and toddlers)

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[jedidiah]

The can is cooked as part of the canning process.

This is what you get from a nation of people that don't cook and just get their food out of cans and shinny boxes. They don't understand anything about food or how it's prepared.

They don't even have enough of a clue to recognize food when they see it (or don't).

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[epiccollision]

the PFOA's are not that much of a concern in PTFE coatings for cookware, that's not to say your bag of microwave popcorn is not out to get you with cancer and Alzheimer's or that the buildup in the environment is not worrisome, just use your pans safely and learn to eat popcorn without the bag and organ eating seasoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Food_contact_surfaces

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[TemporalBeing]

the PFOA's are not that much of a concern in PTFE coatings for cookware, that's not to say your bag of microwave popcorn is not out to get you with cancer and Alzheimer's or that the buildup in the environment is not worrisome, just use your pans safely and learn to eat popcorn without the bag and organ eating seasoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Food_contact_surfaces

I much prefer having pans that do not have any non-stick coatings on them simply because teflon and other non-stick coatings greatly reduce the lifespan of the cookware, as well as what you can use on it to clean it. For example, we're still using my grandmothers pans and my mom's pans; yet the non-stick pans my sister had in the late 1990s have to all be replaced due to the non-stick materials flaking off - especially prevalent in mashed potatoes.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[cayenne8]

You forgot one thing - People do not heat up their can of soda, but many people do place their canned food over fire to heat it up

Many?..???

I can imagine a few people do it...when camping, but surely this is a rare thing in most home life...? I'd assume most people today, open a can, empty into a dish and throw in the microwave...or at least do it the old fashioned (and my preferred way) put it into a pan/pot and heat it up in that over the stove.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[cayenne8]

I much prefer having pans that do not have any non-stick coatings on them simply because teflon and other non-stick coatings greatly reduce the lifespan of the cookware, as well as what you can use on it to clean it. For example, we're still using my grandmothers pans and my mom's pans; yet the non-stick pans my sister had in the late 1990s have to all be replaced due to the non-stick materials flaking off - especially prevalent in mashed potatoes.

I'm largely the same way. I have most of my collection as All-Clad Stainless Steel. However, I do have 2x of them...SS but with non-stick on the inside, a 14" and a 12" fry pan. I got these pretty much exclusively for eggs...omlettes, etc. It is just so easy for doing eggs, or even crepes.

But aside from that.....I don't use non-stick (doesn't create the malliard sp?) reaction....and I also have a few choice cast iron pans, grill grates, and a hibachi (Lodge stuff rules)......for everything else.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[SuperQ]

Yea, my favorite pans are my cast iron. I also like my stainless lined aluminum core pans.

However some of the modern non-stick materials are much harder than classic '90s teflon and are much more durable. I have very nice non-stick stovetop wok that is anodized aluminum and a very tough non-stick surface. I've used it in apartments for many years where I don't have a nice big wok burner that I use with my much larger carbon steel wok. The non-stick has held up for 8+ years with no problems. It probably won't out-last my carbon steel pan, but it does a good job.

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[SuperQ]

I just made hashbrowns and omlets for breakfast this morning in my cast iron. I have a 80 year old cast iron skillet and a more modern lodge round griddle skillet. The trick I found for making hasbrowns in the cast iron is to make a couple strips of bacon in the pan first, then toss the potatoes into the bacon fat. Yummy, and no sticking.

Is BPA really bad?

[viperidaenz]

If it has anything to do with the fact women have bigger breasts now than previous generations, I'm willing to accept the risks.

Re:Is BPA really bad?

[hyades1]

Yeah, but the downside is that you wind up with bigger breasts, too. Hairy ones.

Re:Is BPA really bad?

[viperidaenz]

Not if I wax.

Re:Is BPA really bad?

[hyades1]

LMFAO! Excellent point. And it opens whole new doors in closeup photography.

Other sources of BPA might be worse

[TimTucker]

There's also the finding that many types of thermal paper contain much larger amounts of BPA than food packaging:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/28/study-finds-bpa-in-store-receipts-health-effects-as-yet-unclear/

Would be interesting if the link between obesity and eating fast food was only partly due to the food itself and partly due to handling the receipts.

Re:Other sources of BPA might be worse

[evilviper]

That seems extremely unlikely. Obesity in children is the major story, and they aren't particularly likely to be handling receipts for the groceries that their parents bought. Besides, it seems obvious that direct ingestion is far more significant.

BPA is everywhere

[Taco Cowboy]

http://website.lineone.net/~mwarhurst/bisphenol.html

Click the above link and see for yourself where the BPA-compound (resins, epoxy) has been used

And one of those is "WATER PIPE"

Yes, the water pipe that you got your tap water from

You do not need to drink can soda

You do not need to eat canned food

All you need is to turn on the tap and there you go, you get BPA.

Re:BPA is everywhere

[timeOday]

There is not an infinite supply of BPA in any given bottle or water pipe. The thing with a pop can is it's single use, so you're always getting a fresh dose.

Documentary on this

[_prime]

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/programmed-to-be-fat.html

Should be viewable free online.

No more rocket widget :(

[Zenin]

Guinness took out the rocket widgets from bottles about a year or so ago, while at the same time replacing the nitrogen heavy gas mix with pure carbon dioxide.

The result is that Guinness from a bottle now tastes like complete ass and if you poor it out you'll notice the head looks much more like Coke-Cola then anything you might call stout.

The cans still have the widget and the right gas and still taste great. Or just drink Murphy's, it's a much better stout then Guinness anyway.

I agree

[aepervius]

I am not sure why , it is so, but I have tried many time and there is a perceived effect. Maybe it is just enough to feel the presence of the glass hard and cold agaisnt the lip, maybe it is jsut because the glass bulk maintain the temperature lower longer, but it feels tastier and better.

Not really

[aepervius]

Simply return to the can lining whicvh was used before it was BPA. If the other poster is right, it was a wax based lining, and clearly that has been studied and known longer than BPA.

Re:Not really

[Chuckstar]

Even though the discussion has been more about cans, in my mind I was thinking about bottles when I wrote that.

Soda destroys your teeth

[gay358]

And even if soda would be otherwise safe, it still destroys your teeth because it is so acidic. At least I prefer to keep my teeth healthy and I recommend it to others as well.

lead was used as a sweetener

[DABANSHEE]

BTW, It seems some out there claim sucrose & fructose are poisonous sweeteners too.

But the mnaths doesn't work.

[DABANSHEE]

Fact is that fructose is nearly twice as sweet as sucrose, meaning a drink sweetened with fructose has not much more than half the total amount of sugar than a drink sweetened with sucrose (to the same level of sweetness), which breaks down to 50:50 glucose:fructose. Surely a volume of drink with 55 grams of fructose is healthier than a similar volume of drink with 100 grams of sucrose instead (everything else is equal), especially when that sucrose breaks down to being 50 grams of glucose & 50 grams of fructose, nearly the same amount of fructose plus nearly the same amount of another sugar too.

Re:But the mnaths doesn't work.

[oh_my_080980980]

Not if you drink more. That's the problem. As research has pointed out, you are not satiated with HFCS, you are with sugar. People drink alot less soda if it uses sugar as a sweetener.

The other problem is HFCS is EVERYWHERE. It's in salad dressing for christs sake.

Re:But the mnaths doesn't work.

[TechyImmigrant]

Everything I've read suggests that HFCS and sucrose are metabolically equivalent.

Re:But the mnaths doesn't work.

[Arterion]

I honestly don't believe that people are drinking sodas because their body is signaling them hunger cravings. People drink soda because they're thirsty and want something that tastes good.

Re:But the mnaths doesn't work.

[Arterion]

What about me? I drink diet sodas. When I switched to diet, which I now greatly prefer, I didn't start drinking more sodas. Your hypothesis that people drink sodas to fulfill some physiological need for sugar seems, at least by my own anecdotal experiences, incorrect.

I have a brother who drank copious amounts of Mountain Dew, and ten years later, he's got bad Type 2 Diabetes. The quickly metabolized glucose didn't satiate him -- he kept on drinking. Maybe 4 liters a day. Now, I wonder if if drink had been sweetened with 100% fructose, would he have still developed diabetes? Or at least delayed it? It's quite possible. Also, drinking diet soda might have helped, too.

I really don't think he diet was particularly awful. He liked a lot of meat (usually lean and grilled), not too many starchy carbs, not too many sweets. I pretty much blame drinking excessive amounts of Mountain Dew.

Re:MSG destroying VMH..

[3.5 stripes]

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223725981_Components_of_hypothalamic_obesity_bipiperidyl-mustard_lesions_add_hyperphagia_to_monosodium_glutamate-induced_hyperinsulinemia

To get the full effect, you need to add BPM damage to the AH (arcuate hypothalamic nucleus)..

So, herbicides plus extracts of seaweed make you oh so fat... sweet.

Re:This is really easy to figure out...

[EmagGeek]

I did read somewhere a while back that diet soda can lead to obesity, because it triggers the "Oh cool! I just got some SUGAR!" response in the brain, but when there is no actual blood sugar forthcoming, it triggers the "WTF? Where's my SUGAR? Damn, EAT SOMETHING, FOOL!" response in the brain that increases appetite and results in higher caloric intake.

I did a little experiment of my own in logging how I felt in the hours after drinking a diet soda. I actually did find a trend of feeling hungrier in the hour or two after consuming one. So then what I did was make sure to eat one of those little peppermint hard candies after drinking a soda, and that dramatically reduced my appetite after drinking a diet soda, because my brain did see a corresponding (albeit small) increase in blood sugar after getting the "sweet" response from my pie hole.

Recycling

[ThatsNotPudding]

We have a recycling center in my tiny burg now. They only accept glass inside (when they're open) as people refused to 'place' glass bottles and jars in the bin, but dropped them in (mainly for the thrill of the shattering sound I bet), causing danger for the workers and even themselves. Now I find myself far more hesitant to buy something in glass as I now have to hang on to them for weeks before having time to take them in. Yes, yes; first world problems... still a real issue.

Re:Recycling

[_Sharp'r_]

Or you could just buy glass containers and throw them away afterwards.

It's not like we're going to be running out of sand any time soon, is it? And biodegrading glass isn't exactly an environmental pollutant.

Recycling consumer glass bottles takes way more total resources than just throwing them away and making new glass bottles from sand.

Or is this about something other than logic and the actual physical environment? If so, carry on...

Re:Recycling

[pepty]

Recycling consumer glass bottles takes way more total resources than just throwing them away and making new glass bottles from sand.

Cite? The figure I keep seeing is that it takes 50% less energy to recycle glass than to produce new glass.

Re:Recycling

[Nadaka]

And it takes even less energy to disinfect unbroken glass and reuse it. Used to do this all the time by returning coke/barq's bottles to the bottling plant.

Re:Recycling

[_Sharp'r_]

Your figure doesn't include the energy, time and other resources spent to collect, transport and hand sort the used glass.

Consider this... if used glass cost less resources than producing new glass, wouldn't someone pay people for their used glass? When's the last time you had an offer to buy your used glass that didn't involve the government charging you per bottle ahead of time and then using the money to help pay for processing it on the back-end?

If you really want to recycle something that make sense, buy a used house, or a used car, or go to a pawn shop. You'll notice that the people who sell that stuff all pay for what they're recycling to you, because it's clearly less cost to buy used ones than to make a new one. Plenty of reuse, there.

Why do you think NY city canceled their recycling program? It was costing them twice as much to recycle stuff than to throw it away. To the tune of $57 million/year. That's a lot of wasted resources being used. Doesn't sound like the stuff they were recycling was in huge demand from manufacturers because they'd save by using it in place of raw materials, does it?

But don't let basic economics intrude on feeling good about saving sand from extinction by driving trucks all over to collect worthless used glass from people's homes and then paying people to sort it into different colors. :)

Tarantino

[ThatsNotPudding]

Would be interesting if the link between obesity and eating fast food was only partly due to the food itself and partly due to handling the receipts.

"Would you like your receipt?" [clack-clack] "DROP IT, OR I'LL DROP YOU!"

Can you separate BPA from sugar

[OnePumpChump]

If much of the BPA in humans is coming from soft drink bottles, and soft drinks account for the excess sugar and most of the HFCS specifically, is it even possible to be sure which of those is the problem, even if you establish for certain that soft drinks are the problem?

Ask Dr. Moron.

[phrackwulf]

BPA in Botsylvania writes.. Dear Dr. Moron.. "BPA is scary and bad because there is more of it in obese people and aluminum cans and somebody says its bad, uh, why?"

Dear BPA, as you might know if you weren't America and a scientific moron, fat is where any chemical stored in the human body ends up if it is passing through the environment. This includes nutrients as well as dangerous chemicals. The more fat you have in your body, the more of every chemical and nutrient you are likely to have. So saying that larger people with larger fat deposits have more BPA in them is a little like saying the sun will rise every day for the next 365 days. It is stupid. Just like you. Until next time..

Dr. Moron.

Re:Ask Dr. Moron.

[phrackwulf]

Sorry, that should be "many chemicals" not any. Fat soluble chemicals.

laws of physics, people

[slashmydots]

BPA unfortunately cannot violate the laws of physics/thermodynamics. If you don't take in more chemical energy than you use in a day, you will not gain weight. Your car can't run on magic, neither can your body.

Re:Must be the BPA...

[P-niiice]

I'm pretty sure that scientists generally, during the years of study they devote to subjects like this, are pretty likely to cover any study-foiling scenarios you or I can drum in within the 42 seconds we spend reading and responding to posts on the internet.

Re:MSG destroying VMH..

[TechyImmigrant]

>So, herbicides plus extracts of seaweed make you oh so fat... sweet.

And fruits and vegetables give you cancer

I had bacon eggs and sausage for breakfast. Can you blame me?

Like apple... orange:

[poofmeisterp]

Can... Bottle.

HFCS is the culprit

[YaddaMinski]

HFCS is the culprit. See http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22152650 Of course the corn lobby threatens researchers funding who pursue this research!

-5 Way off topic

[Zero__Kelvin]

"If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."

If you are going to try to sound insightful, please at least pick a quote that is remotely related to my post. (Hint: A wish and a want are two completely different things.)

Your unintelligible ramblings on probability, botulism, and weight issues are equally unrelated to my post.

This is actually beneficial

[Dreth]

In a time when kids are born with dozens of conditions, our numbers multiply at a staggering rate worldwide, and that scenario where we must ration our resources VERY carefully (like we should have done since the beginning) is not THAT ridiculously far away, this is actually positive in my eyes.

Do we really need to procreate in such a hurry? I'm not the biggest fan of sodas out there, but if they're gonna help reduce the output of the baby-factory generation out there, I'm all for even buying other people a soda or two.