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Coca-Cola To Fund Research That Shifts Blame For Obesity Away From Bad Diets
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports that Coca-Cola is teaming up with influential scientists to support research into fighting obesity through other means than improving diet. They've provided funding to a new nonprofit called the Global Energy Balance Network. Its president said, "Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, 'Oh they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much' — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause." Health experts say it's an attempt by Coca-cola to deflect criticism of the sugary drinks that are the lifeblood of its business. "This clash over the science of obesity comes in a period of rising efforts to tax sugary drinks, remove them from schools and stop companies from marketing them to children. In the last two decades, consumption of full-calorie sodas by the average American has dropped by 25 percent."
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
=Smidge=
It's like clockwork. If I drink one ordinary can of soda, two days later my face id covered in zits, and I wear them for a good two weeks.
I have been told by some that this is impossible, there must be some other cause, etc. It's bullocks.
And it isn't just soda, if I eat a nice big slice of cake, or anything with 40 grams or more of sugar and little-to-no protein, this happens.
When I wanted to lose weight, I reduced the number of calories I was consuming, and I lost weight! Weird, it must be that I changed my "energy balance". Except I didn't change *what* I ate, just how much. I'm not saying it's easy, but if you eat fewer calories than you burn, as a general rule, you'll lose weight.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Not so much propaganda as well known psychological phenomena. Some people switch to diet drinks and decide that since they consume less calories now, they can have an extra piece of ice cream. Often that turns out to more than offset the gains.
Yesterday on a radio I heard a DJ saying that there was a study showing that diet drinks didn't help people loose weight. So the propaganda is already flowing.
They don't. They reduce the amount of calories you consume from drinking soda (diet vs. regular), but they stimulate your appetite so you actually end up eating more food when you do eat.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Had a quick google and evidently 1 pint of Coca Cola has a few more calories than...a pint of Guinness!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Corporations have been doing this for ages.
The same professional deniers that insisted there was nothing unhealthy about smoking cigarettes, are now working the Koch brother's PR firm, and insisting that global warming is a hoax.
These scientists also work for, and support: the nuclear industry, Monsanto, and factory farmers.
You might also want to watch "That Sugar Film"
Patrick Moore, a scientist who help found Greenpeace, now works for several corporations.
Here he is promoting the wholesomeness of GMOs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSten18rI9A
Here he claims that rising levels of CO2 are good for the environment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWEjSDYfxc
Just typical corporate shenanigans.
The main purpose of a diet soda is that it doesn't have any sugar, and therefore, no calories either. What defines "diet" isn't regulated, but every diet soda I've seen indeed has less than or equal to one Calorie.
I suspect that it could very well be true that diet soda doesn't help you lose weight, but if so, it isn't the fault of the diet soda that you aren't losing weight. The more calories you consume, the more "full" you feel, and likewise, simply drinking diet soda isn't going to help you shed pounds if you're consuming something else in lieu of those calories.
Let's say for example that as part of your daily routine, instead of drinking a regular soda (about 150 calories) you decide to drink a diet soda, and have a chocolate chip cookie (typically about 150 calories) with it. In this scenario, you're still retaining the same calorie intake, so you aren't going to shed any pounds that you otherwise wouldn't have.
Having said all of the above, indeed you *can* use diet soda as part of your weight loss plan, but at the end of the day your calorie intake must be less than your Basal Metabolic Rate.
Oh and for anybody who wants to know how to lose weight, it's dead simple, just follow this formula:
Nc = F - (Bmr + E)
Where Nc = Net Calories, F = food calories consumed, Bmr = Basal Metabolic Rate, E = Calories burned during exercise.
So long as Nc is less than zero, you're losing weight. How fast you're losing weight depends on how much deficit. One pound of fat is roughly 3600 calories. As a rule of thumb, your food intake shouldn't be less than around 1800 calories per day for males, 1200 for females, and if you go below these figures, your liver slows down your metabolism (aka starvation mode) and you get tired all the time lose weight slower.
Also one thing to remember about calories: They are a total sum of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and alcohol. How much of each you need is debatable, but I've found that getting calories mostly from protein and fat (aka low-carb) works best for me (not to mention, low carb also got rid of my cholesterol problem.)
What you're saying is wrong.
There is evidence that diet sodas actually cause weight gain. They are not simply water: the artificial sweeteners have physiological effects, and they are not benign.
While we're still figuring out exactly what those effects are, the main ones that we're aware of now are:
1) They stimulate your appetite.
2) They disrupt your intestinal bacteria.
It isn't as simple as eating fewer calories than you expend.
If I'm hungry and eat a handful of almonds - say 100 calories - the fiber and fat content makes me feel satiated for several hours and signals to my body that I'm full. Craves go down and blood sugar remains in a normal range.
Compare that with a handful of skittles. Also say 100 calories. I get a sugar rush, my blood sugar spikes, the skittles breakdown into energy that isn't used and is immediately stored as fat, and my body gets no signal that it's hunger has been satisfied - leaving to more cravings.
Not all calories are equal to one another. On the surface just eating less than you expend works out, but in practice it's a lot harder to do without changes to the actual diet that's supplying the calories.
The Hacker's Diet supports and expands on your points.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Oh and for anybody who wants to know how to lose weight, it's dead simple, just follow this formula:
Nc = F - (Bmr + E)
Where Nc = Net Calories, F = food calories consumed, Bmr = Basal Metabolic Rate, E = Calories burned during exercise.
The idea you're expressing - "Eat less exercise more" - is correct but this formula is deeply incomplete. A fat calorie isn't equal to a sugar calorie isn't equal to a carb calorie because the metabolic pathways are entirely different. Even different kinds of each of a given calorie (e.g. sucrose vs glucose sugars) are metabolized differently.
The human body simply doesn't process calories like an LTI system. It's both hysteretic and complexly dependent on what the composition of a meal is. Drinking a soda or pulpless fruit juice on an empty stomach basically dumps the entire sugar content into your bloodstream the moment it reaches your intestines, which sends your liver and metabolism into panic mode and turns a goodly amount of it into fat, but eating a fruit (which contains asstons of sugar) is harmless because the fiber slows bioavailability. Likewise, if you eat a meal after a long fast (meaning all of 5 hours), your metabolism will be in "ermahgerd starving" mode and process it very differently than if you'd snacked a bit in between.
So it's more like
* eat less in general
* eat less at once, more often
* eat more natural/less processed foodstuffs
* exercise more
This is without getting into things like how science has been used to subvert your body's self regulation systems. Greasy, fatty fast foods - by design! - contain just the mix of salts and fat to prevent you from feeling full and satisfied, so you keep eating until your stomach's "oh god, buffer overload" signal gets through. Well, perhaps this just falls under "eat natural" but still.
Unless you have a causal mechanism and argument, generated through the scientific method...
I love how people say artificial sweeteners are harmless, but whenever I accidentally ingest one I get a headache, become nauseous, a sharpness around my heart, and almost vomit.
What terrible thing did I eat to make me feel so sick? A can of PEACHES. That's right, it had sugar but was also laced Sucralose.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media, I didn't know Sucralose could make me sick until after it happened and I started doing some digging. Tons of people apparently have similar reactions:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com...
For most people artificial sweeteners including aspartame fool the body into thinking you've ingested sugar and responding in kind. In particular spiking insulin levels. This causes the body to reserve body fat, store any sugar in the blood as tissue (mostly fat), and experience low blood sugar levels and therefore mood swings. It also can cause headaches for the same reasons.
Many of these sweeteners also disrupt beneficial digestive bacteria. So no, artificial sweeteners aren't really harmless for most people. They are just even more harmful for a small minority.
It's worth mentioning, there are actually a few artificial sweeteners that don't trigger an insulin reaction such as Stevia and not to astroturf on Coca-Cola's behalf but I will credit them being responsible for forcing the FDA to acknowledge stevia as being safe for human consumption. Before they pushed this issue it was considered safe to eat as a supplement yet somehow not safe to use as a food additive... a strange determination that smells of uncontested U.S. sugar industry lobbying efforts.