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How the Sugar Industry Tried To Hide Health Effects of Its Product 50 Years Ago (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: About 50 years ago, the sugar industry stopped funding research that began to show something they wanted to hide: that eating lots of sugar is linked to heart disease. A new study exposes the sugar industry's decades-old effort to stifle that critical research. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, recently analyzed historical documents regarding a rat study called Project 259 that was launched in 1968. The study was funded by a sugar industry trade group called the International Sugar Research Foundation, or ISRF, and conducted by W. F. R. Pover at the University of Birmingham. When the preliminary findings from that study began to show that eating lots of sugar might be associated with heart disease, and even bladder cancer, the ISRF pulled the plug on the research. Without additional funding, the study was terminated and the results were never published, according to a study published today in PLOS Biology. The study in question investigated the relationship between sugars and certain blood fats called triglycerides, which increase the risk of heart disease. The preliminary results from the research, called Project 259, suggested that rats on a high-sugar diet, instead of a starch diet, had higher levels of triglycerides. The rats that ate lots of sugar also had higher levels of an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase in their urine, which at the time was thought to be potentially linked to bladder cancer, says study co-author Cristin Kearns, an assistant professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry.
If you think you "know" anything, you have no clue about how science works.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"GMOs are safe" is a nonsensically overgeneralized statement. It's entirely dependent on the *specific* GMO being discussed. The whole point of a GMO bioweapon for example is to NOT be safe.
If you're specifically talking about GMO foods, then the answer is a definite "it depends". Golden Rice, etc seem quite safe, as do many survival- and yield-boosting enhancements. But the GMO food market is dominated by things like Monsanto's poison-resistant crops, which might be fine on their own, but exist for the specific purpose of allowing the plants to be saturated with chemicals that are both known to be toxic to humans, and to be absorbed into the "food" part of the plant.
And then there's the very definite secondary risks of monoculture that inevitably accompany enhancing yield, etc. of a comparative few crop strains, which makes them far more vulnerable to disease and other blights. You know that weird cloyingly sweet candy flavor that's called "banana" despite not tasting remotely right? That's actually what bananas used to taste like, before the commercial banana monoculture was hit by a plague that rapidly drove our preferred species to extinction. Too dense a population with too little genetic variation is *extremely* vulnerable to plagues.
Not to mention the very real risks of allowing Monsanto and friends to have a legal stranglehold on the food supply, which they have already shown themselves to be eager to abuse at every opportunity.
And of course if you want to go full "Frankenfood", there's no reason you couldn't engineer corn, or anything else, to produce any of a wide range of highly toxic substances that would make them as lethally poisonous as the most deadly of mushrooms. And there are in fact already GMO crops (not deployed...I think) designed to produce their own pesticides internally - not immediately fatal to humans, but most pesticides can do nasty things to us if consumed in large enough quantities. And no amount of scrubbing will wash off a pesticide that's produced within the fruit itself.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Whatever works for you dude. Eating fats upon fats upon protein works great for me. Salt + butter + not-carbs, and I am great. Add carbs into any of that, your "processing" doesn't even begin to factor into it, and all get it is fat, sick (constant allergy/flu-like symptoms) and depressed probably from the first two.
My first venture onto a keto/atkins diet, I had my blood pressure drop from medium high to "wow you're doing just fine", my triglycerides went from 390 to 95, weight from 235lbs to 190lbs, and I got completely off all diabetes-related medication - all within the span of 10 weeks. Apparently that's simply the way my body was designed to eat. Might not be the way your body was designed to eat, that's all fine and dandy, good luck with figuring that out. But they're going to have to pry the salt and saturated fats from my cold dead hands.
The only thing I know for sure is that when it comes to food, I really can't trust studies. Take any stance you want, and somebody has a study to "prove" it. Such useless BS. Dr Atkins nailed it when it comes to the uselessness of nutritional science in America in the mid-to-late 1900s, and I sure am glad as hell he spoke up.
The sugar industry and the AHA and FDA have already been responsible for so many thousands upon thousands of man-years lost to diseases like type II diabetes, do you really want to keep shoveling that shit for them? Haven't people figured out why health care costs are so bloody much higher than the rest of the world? Hint: it's what you put in your mouth, and it ain't butter.
I know for a fact that the Sun is the center of our solar system
You are wrong. The barycenter of the solar system is outside the sun.
Please tell me how knowing this means I have no clue how science works.
Science is not about "knowing" things, it is about evidence. The preponderance of the evidence says that climate change is real, and that GMOs are safe. But we don't "know" these things.
Actually, some GMO's are really unsafe.
Time for fun - I'll get you the tin foil.
Like corn that contains gluten.
Corn (even GMO corn) does not contain gluten. Some people refer to the storage proteins in maize 'glutens', but that's not the same thing.
That's a particularly nasty one that already happened (easy to google - GMO corn taco bell).
StarLink - the event that, even after extensive testing, didn't have any demonstrable health effects at all?
I imagine anything with nut genes or shellfish genes inserted would also be pretty bad (potentially fatal).
Only if you insert particular genes, and that's why nobody is dumb enough to do that.
If GMO is so great - LABEL IT.
When it's useful information, it is. Buy any bag of seed and you'll be able to find out exactly what traits are in it.
When it comes to consumer products, there's no point - almost every corn or product in the US contains a mix of GM and conventional crops - the whole point is that they're interchangeable after they're harvested.
within 10 years most people would be eating it at full price and not care any more.
They already are - surprise!
And people who were sensitive to gluten wouldn't be hospitalized after eating a corn taco shell.
Then they'll be free to complain that the new cell tower that hasn't been turned on yet is aggravating their 'WiFi sensitivity'.
You've made a compelling argument for why GMOs should not be protected by intellectual property laws.
We can agree on that.
You are what you eat. You can have all of my potato chips, friend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But the fructose and glucose in table sugar are chemically bonded together, and the body must first digest sugar to break these bonds
The bonds get broken when the sucrose gets into contact with an acid, so basically as soon as it hits your stomach. That's why there's little difference in practice between eating HFCS or sucrose.
Uh, No! No! No! GMO's are engineered to produce insecticides in the plant itself.
GMO's are not engineered to be healthier / more vitamins / whatever; they are
engineered to get to market; to ensure that the money invested in their seed carries
all of the way through to the consumer. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- but what's
bad is the insecticide hasn't had enough time to be thoroughly tested as to its effects
on humans (or pets, farm animals, etc.).
CAP === 'lessen'
I know for a fact that the Sun is the center of our solar system
You are wrong. The barycenter of the solar system is outside the sun.
I think that's rather the point. Science continues to refine knowledge, and past a certain point it gives approximations that are close enough that most people don't have to care that they're wrong. Assuming that the sun and moon go around the Earth is close enough that you can predict seasons, tides, and so on with a reasonable amount of accuracy. Knowing that it is the other way around gives you more accurate understanding of seasons, but is basically only important to meteorologists and people running space ships. Knowing that the complex N-body system of the solar system revolves around a point that is sometimes in the is closer to the truth, but is well past the point of utility for most people.
Similarly, we still teach Newton's laws of motion even though quantum mechanics and relativity mean that we know that they're wrong, it's just that they're wrong by an amount that is far less than the errors from measurement for anything that most people will ever deal with.
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