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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.
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.
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."
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?
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.