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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,
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.'"
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!
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.'"
[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)
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.