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Soda Pop Damages Your Cells' Telomeres
BarbaraHudson writes Those free soft drinks at your last start-up may come with a huge hidden price tag. The Toronto Sun reports that researchers at the University of California — San Francisco found study participants who drank pop daily had shorter telomeres — the protective units of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes in cells — in white blood cells. Short telomeres have been associated with chronic aging diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The researchers calculated daily consumption of a 20-ounce pop is associated with 4.6 years of additional biological aging. The effect on telomere length is comparable to that of smoking, they said. "This finding held regardless of age, race, income and education level," researcher Elissa Epel said in a press release.
I spent a few years drinking 128oz of Mountain Dew every workday. I'm down to 24oz now of Throwback, but I'd like to know more about what I've done to myself...
I had to quit. I was starting to have heart palpitations.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
When they get shorter you get irregular errors in DNA duplication, cancer, eventually death. Telomere shortening is a large % of what 'causes' 'aging' on a cell level.
So it's not just obesity related health risks, this is a fucking big deal. I wonder when we'll find out if it's the carbonation or the sugar or something else unexpected.
Sodium benzoate
My money is on the sugar/syrup itself, acting through the insulin-like growth factor system. There is substantial evidence that decreased IGF activity lengthens lifespan and reduces cancer risk, while increased activity drives increased cell-division activity and apoptosis.
My Great aunt, who donated her body to Science (Also in an Open Source way(1)) never drank any Cola, yet they were still way down when she died at the age of 115.
A search on van andel telomeres will give more detail. I have the study somewhere around here, but am not able to find it just now.
(1) Not only did she donated her body to science, she wanted the science to be used for people to learn AND have her name linked to it. To be honest, she thought she would end up on a shelf somewhere after they cut her up. She never thought it would result in so much results in research.
Also because of her, they now have proof that alzheimers is not a given with old age thus a solution is at least possible. There were no traces of Alzheimers found anywhere.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Juiced fruit doesn't have the fiber. The complaint about 100% fruit juice is that you're probably drinking way more juice than you'd eat (I know people who juice 5 apples at a time. When was the last time you ate 5 apples in the span of 10 minutes?) and that it hits your system all at once instead of slowly being released as your body breaks down the fruit fiber.
Fruit juice contains a lot of sugars as well and consumption of fruit juice was associated with longer telomeres.
I think the problem is that 2 different anti-HFCS campaigns reached the public conscience at about the same time.
One was the Passover Coke crowd, they were complaining that sucrose tastes better than HFCS in Coca-Cola. They were calling for sucrose to replace HFCS for taste (and nostalgia) reasons.
The second was the HFCS is causing obesity crowd, who were against HFCS because it was being added to everything, even stuff you wouldn't expect to be sugary. They were really calling for an end to adding sugar to everything, HFCS just happened to be the type of sugar that was being added. Their point was not that HFCS was somehow worse than sucrose, but rather that HFCS was AS BAD as sucrose (which you should only be eating as an occasional treat). They wanted the HFCS (and any other added sugars) removed from food and not replaced with anything.
These 2 movements collided in the public consciousness and led to people thinking "HFCS makes you fat, and it should be replaced by sucrose."
It's not just that honey possible has more "flavor", it's that processed foods in general are playing multiple flavors against
each other to neutralize flavor. The FDA has recently outlawed caffinated alcohol because the caffeine and the alcohol
counteract each other's effects. Well, soda has been doing this for years. The salt and the sugar are designed to
counteract each other. Even the fizz is used to that effect. Ever notice how sweet "flat" soda is? If they took the salt
out of soda, noone could stand to drink it as it would be way too sweet.
Consuming CO2 rapidly, as happens when drinking carbonated beverages, leads to stomach expansion. The stomach is capable of increasing in size to accommodate a large meal but if the practice is habitual the stomach will actually grow in size permanently. There is a nerve where the esophagus meets the stomach that triggers when the stomach is full. When triggered it tells the brain to stop eating (you are no longer hungry). Studies have linked an enlarged stomach to overeating and thus obesity. So while it may not have a direct link to obesity there is evidence it may be indirectly linked.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
HFCS is bad because it's associated, causally, with the over-sweetening of processed foods in general.
Take Yoplait, for instance. The top-selling yoghurt brand in the US. In the US version, according to its own label, the product is 16% sugar. The same product sold in the UK is 11% sugar.
Wonder Bread? 6% sugar. Warburtons (top selling UK sliced loaf)? 2-3%.
What you should really be asking yourself is "Why has the (particularly lower-class) American palate been educated, over decades, to crave oversweetened crap?" And the answer to that would involve a solid guest appearance by farmers' lobbies pushing a market for HFCS.
The 40 to 55% of HFCS that isn't Fructose is Glucose, which triggers insulin production immediately when it reaches the small intestine and is transported into the bloodstream before the insulin reaches it - Insulin is then needed to transport the glucose out of the bolldstream and into muscles and other tissues. Sucrose has to be cleaved first into glucose and only starts triggering insulin production after cleavage by other enzymes. This means, qat the very least, that Sucrose gets farther into the intestine before triggering insulin production, and that the rate of production is limited by the rate at which the sucrose is split and not the much faster rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream. I really don't see how you can call those two processes identical. Note I'm not saying that its been proved the differences in how high and low insulin levels and blood sugar levels get necessarily means there's a difference in health consequences, but its certainly not impossible just because of the fact both forms of sugar get to the same organ before digestion. And what about the part that is Fructose? That's certainly dealt with separately.
Who is John Cabal?
http://www.princeton.edu/main/...
I have puzzled about this myself for a long time. I have come up with two possibilities for why there might be a difference. First, speed matters when forming addictive behaviors. It doesn't matter that cocaine and crack cocaine are the same chemical. It matters that crack goes into your system much faster because it is smoked. I learned in my first year psychology course in college that people taking cocaine reported feeling the highest not when they had the most cocaine in their system, but when the level in their bloodstream was rising the fastest. THAT is when they feel high, and that is the feeling they crave. Rate of change into the blood stream is addictive. So, even though the metabolism may first break down sucrose into fructose and glucose, that speed difference might be akin to the speed difference between cocaine going in your nose or in your lungs. It might be just enough of a difference to make you more obese than sugar, over a long period.
Second, I have heard that HFCS is not merely fructose and glucose. It also has impurities from the process of making it, specifically enzymes that convert starches in corn to fructose. You are eating those enzymes with HFCS. Might it not affect your metabolism? Don't rush too quickly to ideological conclusions based on assumptions. Real world testing does matter.
Anyway, I gave up sugar and HFCS in May. I began to think of them as the addictive equivalent of cigarettes (which I quit ten years ago). Cutting back doesn't work, and never worked for me. Cold turkey is the only way to deal with nicotine, and now sugar. Since May, I no longer have heart burn, I have more energy, better concentration, I don't get the blues very often, and I have lost 20 pounds. From the way my body feels today, I *know* I'm going to live longer.
Join the IParty!
In Germany, EVERYBODY drinks carbonated water all the time, so this would spell doom on almost the whole population, hence i am a bit sceptical?
Notice that Germany lies well down the list of life exectancy by country.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's far more likely it's the caffeine, but they aren't being specific enough. If it was just sugar, then pretty much everything would be doing it and I wouldn't see how they could possibly have a control group.
Not so likely, given caffeine is widely available in other beverages that don't have the same affect.
Most likely is the phosphoric/carbolic acid content.
The most popular cola available is highly acidic with a pH of about 2.5 (which is why it needs so much sugar to taste good). Healthy digestive systems can buffer the acid so that blood acidosis doesn't occur, but they mobilize calcium phosphate from bones and teeth to do so. Several studies have already shown links between telomere shortening and blood calcium levels, so while there's no smoking gun, there's a known mechanism for the result.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Your body needs quick energy cause your GLUCOSE levels are down
The craving/satiety mechanism is much more complicated than that. The other day I bought a glucose meter and spend a few days testing my blood sugar levels, and found very little relationship to feelings of craving and blood glucose levels. Even at times when I felt really really hungry, glucose was still exactly the same as a few hours earlier. Besides glucose, hunger is also controlled by ghrelin/leptin and stomach/intestine fullness. In the case of HFCS sweetened beverages, the amount you drink is also influenced by carbonation, salt and other flavorings. Try comparing completely flat coke and fresh coke. Most people wouldn't want to drink a bunch of the flat stuff, because the taste just isn't appealing.
Your calculation is a bit off. The 55% fructose content of HFCS is by weight, not by moles. Density of fructose is 1.67, while density of glucose is 1.54, so the HFCS-55 actually contains 50.7% fructose and 49.3% glucose by moles. This is almost the same as sucrose.
The mechanism is well understood - it's twice as bad for the liver as sucrose and the same as fructose from apples etc. As for the pancreas, it's not so clear but the liver situation is bad enough.
Beyond a certain level you are absolutely right and there are plenty of people with a vast amount of sucrose or fructose in their diets. However below that obvious level of overconsumption it appears that HFCS is causing liver damage in children. That's not a "think of the children" plea, it just hits kids harder since their livers are smaller so that's where it's being noticed.
It's a pretty nasty unintended consequence of protecting cane farmers from the free market - previously more expensive HFCS became the cheap sweetener of choice and you need a lot more of it to get the same sweet taste as cane sugar.
It's a myth that Sugar causes diabetes. I'm so tired of that FUD being spread around.
There is no direct link between sugar and diabetes. Sugar causes weight gain and obesity, which can lead to diabetes.
I have a sister who has never been overweight. She has type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance (type 2) is caused by the body being repeatedly forced to produce high levels of insulin - such as her 2 liters a day Pepsi habit - over a lifetime. Those May Wests and chocolate bars didn't help. So, her tissues developed resistance to her body's insulin, and now she has to take pills to help her tissues utilize the insulin she produces.
Same story with one of my nephews, who was always a bit skinny, but guzzled soft drinks all his life.
Ask any endocrinologist. Type two diabetics come in all shapes and sizes.
Given that type 2 diabetes represents more than 90% of all diabetes, we really need to cut the crap (including soft drinks). There was a time when soft drinks weren't a regular part of lunch or supper meals. Now people are drinking them at breakfast.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
In short...
The 55% fructose content of HFCS is by weight, not by moles.
Yup.
Density of fructose is 1.67, while density of glucose is 1.54, so the HFCS-55 actually contains 50.7% fructose and 49.3% glucose by moles. This is almost the same as sucrose.
Nope.
You're taking a shortcut, imagining that both HFCS and sucrose are just piles of glucose and fructose, measured by volume.
Hint - molar mass of BOTH fructose and glucose is 180.16 g/mol - i.e. THAT is the molar mass of HFCS.
It's density is 0.88 g/cm3 for dry mass.
http://www.adm.com/_layouts/Pr...
For sucrose molar mass is 342.30 g/mol. With density of 1.587 g/cm3.
See where this is going? How it is NOT "almost the same"?
In long... and sorry if I'm repeating myself.
I explicitly stated "some 100 units of glucose".
So, if you are taking grams of glucose mixed inside HFCS - you compare it to grams of glucose trapped in sucrose. Same for fructose in the mix.
If you are taking cubic centimeters of glucose from HFCS - you compare it to cubic centimeters OF glucose FROM sucrose, along with attached fructose.
If you are taking glucose from lengths of strips of paper dipped into 50% HFCS solution... etc.
You are weighing, measuring, counting, drinking, biting... HFCS and sucrose - NOT glucose OR fructose.
It's about COMPARISON of same quantities of glucose-fructose compounds/mixes and the satiety THOSE COMPOUNDS/MIXES produce.
Except only one part of the mix does that.
Think drinking coffee or tea and sweetening it.
You are not measuring spoons of glucose and fructose. You can't take one or the other from the mix.
You are taking spoons of sucrose or HFCS - until it is sweet enough.
That's the 100% you're looking for. 100% sweet enough.
From the one or the other mix or compound of BOTH glucose and fructose together.
Now substitute "sweet enough" with "energizing enough" - i.e. enough of glucose, with fructose coming along for the ride.
Whether it is 55-42 or 50-50.
BTW... you are confusing density, molar mass, and how fructose and glucose are measured in HFCS
I.e. Mass per volume of substance - kilograms and meters, 1.694 g/cm3 and 1.54 g/cm3.
And mass DIVIDED by amount of actual substance in atoms - grams of substance times number of atoms in molecule of substance times atomic mass of the element, 180.16 g/mol AND 180.16 g/mol.
Molar mass for fructose AND glucose is EXACTLY THE SAME - 180.16 g/mol.
Just like their chemical formulas are the same - C6H12O6.
Meanwhile... HFCS 55-42 and 42-53 are measured by DRY MASS.
Nobody cares about moles or volume when making that mix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Now, OUT OF THAT MIX get the same level of blood sugar as you would get from sucrose.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens