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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."
So anything that shifts the attention away from that will only help their business of selling detritus. I would say it's an addictive drink, almost as bad as cigarettes.
Isn't the classification of "diet drink" completely unregulated? I would be very surprised if "diet drinks" helped people lose weight at all.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
diet drinks actually cause your pancreas to go throwing a lot of insulin into your blood stream contributing to insulin resistance (think eventual type 2 diabetes) and condition your body over time to want more calories by appreciating food less.
the mantra of calories in vs energy out is also a fun bit of spin by these processed food manufacturers. food is not made equally. refined sugars = straight to pancreas = straight to insulin = straight to sugars .... high glycemic index, high fat conversion. might as well as be feeding our kids vodka instead of oreos, at least then they wouldn't need all the meds to be still in the public school setting.
#realfoodmatters.
source: credentialed, licensed, cowardly.
Aspertame and MSG, introduced by food manufacturers to try to replace the taste lost by removing anything resembling fats from our foods, both seriously screw with Leptin, which regulates how hungry you think you are.
It's not propaganda, it's science.
Sugar, the body recognizes, and can adjust appropriately-- but many artificial sweeteners which trick the brain into thinking you just had something sweet, are also tricking your endocrine system into thinking you just had something very sweet, and reacting as if you'd had a ton of sugar. Good way to kickstart insulin resistance.
None of this is news to the science community, it's just not known by the general population.
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn,
Wrong. You metabolize more calories than you burn, while your body is in a state in which it will store the unused food as fat. But all of this is controlled to a very large extent by factors other than what you eat right now; some of it is controlled by what you've been eating, there appears to be a genetic influence, and there's also the current condition of your gut biota which is also affected by the other two major factors. Remember, poop transplants can make people fatter or skinnier. Once you realize that, it's all a bunch of shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is evidence diet sodas may further insulin resistance, http://care.diabetesjournals.o....
I switched to diet soda about 12 years ago and over the course of a year I effortlessly lost about 15 pounds with no conscious change to my eating habits (aside from the switch to diet). Then over the next two years, still with with no conscious change to my eating habits, I gained all of the lost fat back. So who knows.
400?! Amateur. When I switched, I averaged 5 Cokes per day for about 700 calories. The switch to diet 6-odd years ago made an immediate difference with no other marked change in diet. Even 6 years on I'm still about 25 pounds under my pre-diet-Code days.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Frankly, being 'naturally' fairly slim, but having been on medication that first made me gain more than 40 pounds, and then on other medication that made me lose those 40 pounds again and had me basically stuffing as much sugar and fat into myself as I could stand and still losing weight, I have gained some respect for the idea that it might not actually be that easy for an individual to control.
At the very least it's certainly possible for medications to move around the body's perception of hunger from anything between having to basically force things down to not ever being full. For someone stuck at either end it must be a complete horror, and anyone managing to override such an urge through sheer willpower has certainly earned my respect.
Nope, its actually worse than that which is why Coke is trying to get ahead of the media by funding these "studies" that I put about as much faith in as RJ Reynolds studies of ecigs.
You see the diet colas kill the good bacteria while helping bad bacteria to flourish in your gut which means that if you put two otherwise healthy people side by side, have one only drink regular and the other diet? Then the one drinking diet will gain more weight and be more unhealthy overall. So you can understand why they want to get ahead of the media, I've seen more and more stories trickling out about this and I'm sure their PR dept has been keeping an eye on it and seeing its starting to catch the public eye.
So in this case the company really has no more cards to play, regular cokes are empty calories and diet cokes make you fatter, so what else can they do but spin like a top? After all the flavored water biz is already saturated and they will never make a tenth what they have selling cokes, and now that its coming out that diet is even worse? if I worked for their PR I'd do the same move, they really don't have any other moves to play.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The general idea is still sound. The problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values are based on a very average and idealized man
No, the problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values were derived by setting food on fire . Seriously, I am not making this up. Since mitochondria are not little coalmen shoveling food into furnaces, the whole idea of deriving caloric benefit values by setting food on fire is basically insane. But as the link above explains, today, we don't even do that. We just look up each ingredient in a table, a table which was derived by setting food on fire, and then decide what its caloric content is. So not only does the back of the package not tell you what percentage of the food you're going to metabolize (it can't, since we're all different and we don't actually know that much about it) it also doesn't actually tell you what the caloric content of the food is! (There are numerous other problems with the system; some of them are described in the second link.)
Setting food on fire can be fun, but it's not a very good substitute for actual knowledge of how it will behave in the body.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More importantly, Big Gulps have only been around since 1980.
Ever seen a vintage Coke bottle from 100 years ago? They're tiny!
How do I get a poop transplant to deal with obesity and type II? Presumably this will clear my stress hormones too.
Since it's a pretty new thing, I imagine you'd either have to join a trial, or find a back-alley donor.
You probably don't want to know that freeze-drying poop and putting it into capsules and then taking it orally has been shown to also work...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, right. I guess that's my point. The energy content of the food when set on fire is an interesting data point, but it doesn't tell you how it's going to behave in the body, let alone your body.
Yes, that's true. It's still not useless though. You know that certain kinds of food are going to behave pretty similarly (e.g. processed meat pastries like saysage rolls, meat pies etc will have broadly the same types of ingrediends), so the calorie value across different ones will be somewhat consistent for you.
And in some cases, especially for things high in fat and simple sugars, it's going to be a pretty accurate number, because on the whole those get metabolised and absorbed pretty well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And in some cases, especially for things high in fat and simple sugars, it's going to be a pretty accurate number, because on the whole those get metabolised and absorbed pretty well.
Oh no, not at all! The percentage of fat in particular that you eat that is metabolized varies widely based on a whole bunch of factors, including how much you eat at once! And metabolism is also significantly affected by how thoroughly you chew! It's an interesting number, but it really is all but useless. Out of context, it means nothing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
[Sugar - The bitter truth by Dr Robert H. Lustig, University of California Television (UCTV)] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [Warning: 90 minutes]
This is the best math I've seen about sugar, coca-cola, energy drinks and obesity.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
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 part you left out is Bmr = f(F, Ft, E) where f is a non-linear function that we don't fully understand and Ft = type of Food and is a catchall for the impact of different types of food on your metabolism. A naive reading of your original equation might lead people to assume that Bmr is a number rather than a function of the other variables. A more accurate formula would be:
Nc = F - (f(F, Ft, E) + E)
Also worth noting that F = g(F, Ft, E) where g is a function describing your body's hunger and fullness sensing mechanisms as well the decision making neural pathways in your brain. The ability to solve a differential equation or write an elegant piece of software or make a correct decision under psychologically challenging conditions is very much influenced by F and Ft. So I think your simple equation would be more accurately written as:
Nc = g(F, Ft, E) - f(F, Ft, E) - E
I distributed the subtraction to remove an extraneous pair of parentheses.
Since g and f are non-algebraic functions it's understandable that solving this equation is a bit more complicated than the simplistic arithmetic that your original equation implies.
Good points. People might have had a couple of those bottles a week as a treat, now they have a couple of big gulps every day. A big gulp size coke has over FORTY teaspoons of sugar in it (a single can has around 12). There's also the switch to high-fructose corn syrup, as well - many people think that plays a huge role. I still don't believe the government should be able to tell people they can't abuse themselves, but I do believe in educating people.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
I'm sorry you have a bad reaction to an artificial sweetener, but you should realize that the term "harmless" doesn't mean "nobody can ever have anything bad happen", it means that for normal people it does no harm.
For most people, peanuts are harmless. For most people, a bee sting is an annoyance. For most people, shellfish are a yummy treat.
For most people, aspartame is a harmless sweetener. For people who have phenylketonuria (PKU) it can kill them. They lack an enzyme that processes phenylalanine, an amino acid (building block of proteins) that is part of aspartame, and is also found in higher concentrations in turkey. Should the media report on a regular basis this fact?
For most people, most medications intended to treat some symptom or disease do just that and nothing more. But read the contraindications or side-effect lists and see that some people don't have the same reaction that everyone else does. Does that mean the drug or whatever should be banned? Of course not.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media,
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
You ought to read this website:
ihatecilantro.com
Cilantro is an increasingly popular herb for many dishes, and shows up more and more as more chefs discover it. It's actually pretty healthy too. But some people have a gene that causes cilantro to taste like soap, and these people have banded together to fight its widespread use. They call it "The most offensive food known to man."
Anyways I guess you can say that, like artificial sweeteners, it's starting to get added to everything, much to the dismay of its detractors.