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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 Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, recently analyzed historical documents regarding a rat study called Project 259 that was launched in 1968.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.
Read some of crusader Gary Taube's books to find out how institutions like Harvard and many more succumbed to industry research money that makes sugary foods an integral part of today's diet and yes, the ubiquitous Food Pyramid. Bought.And.Paid.For.
Sugar's an addictive drug, like opoids, nicotine, even social media and gaming. This is one of the US's favorite business models: addiction-- Profit!!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
Started out as a kid, before I knew it was hooked on Cap'n Crunch. Within a few years it was harder stuff - twinkies, mars bars, ju jubes. There's no end. Before it hit me, I was buying up chocolate bunnies after easter and binging on them for days and was looking forward to Christmas only for the delicious Turtles. And they say it's not a drug. They're crazy.
"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.
Have you ever looked at ingredients for stuff? Sugar is in EVERYTHING. Even stuff you wouldn't expect - like milk, or most peanut butter.
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.
Eat only bread and fish. Drink only water and wine. I call it the Jesus diet. Have you ever seen a Jesus statue that wasn't lean with 6 pack abs? Of course, longevity only ensured for 30-35 years, YMMV.
A couple of sodas a day is moderation? lolwut? Just one 12 oz. Coca-Cola has over 40 g of sugar. Even only 2 cans a day is over 80 g of sugar and that’s not even remotely a “moderate amount.”
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.
Like corn that contains gluten.
Bullcrap. Corn, whether GMO or not, does not contain gluten.
(easy to google - GMO corn taco bell).
I googled it, and came up with ... nothing. There was not a single reference to GMO corn containing gluten.
I imagine anything with nut genes or shellfish genes inserted would also be pretty bad
You can imagine anything you want, but unless you can cite an example of a real (non-imaginary) GMO product available to the public that actually contains those genes, then your imagination is irrelevant.
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.
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.
Actually, its position varies over time--sometimes it's inside the Sun, and sometimes it isn't.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
The acid is consumed by the process and must be replenished, which takes energy, hence why there's more than a little difference in practice between eating HFCS and sucrose.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
We know how this ends, it costs you an arm and a leg.
Well, at least an arm.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What scientists (and athletes) have known for some time now is that a calorie is not just a calorie, and a carbohydrate is not just a carbohydrate. The nature of the nutritional source matters, even if the end product of its metabolism is the same caloric energy equivalent. And the reason, quite simply, is because different nutrients are converted to energy through different metabolic pathways in the body. In the past, the importance of this fact was not well-appreciated; even though some researchers had sought to point this out, they were largely regarded as being on the fringe of mainstream nutritional science. Much has changed, however, with the elucidation of these specific pathways and the more recent revelation of the relationship between the human gastrointestinal system and the microbiome that it contains.
To address your specific points, the energy content of a "complex" carbohydrate (e.g., what we commonly think of as starches or long-chain polysaccharides) is extracted more slowly than a simple carbohydrate (e.g., what we think of as "sugars" which are generally mono- or disaccharides). Comparatively, insulin levels do not rise as quickly in the digestion of the former; there is more "processing" to be done by the body to break those long chains down and ultimately get to the glucose that cells then directly utilize to create ATP. So the first lesson is that anything that slows the rate of gastric emptying, or the rate at which blood glucose elevates after a meal, is going to have a beneficial effect on insulin regulation. The second thing to understand is that fructose is a pentose sugar that is exclusively metabolized via the liver, unlike glucose. Sucrose (table sugar) is composed of one glucose and one fructose molecule. High fructose corn syrup is essentially sucrose with a higher proportion of fructose, making it sweeter (as fructose is sweeter than glucose). Complex carbohydrates are not high in fructose. But we now have ample evidence that the consequence of long-term, excessive fructose consumption in a low-fiber diet causes liver damage in the form of hepatic steatosis and inflammation. The liver and pancreas work overtime and can't keep up. In fact, this is precisely what foie gras is: overfeeding geese with corn mash until their livers turn to fat, except in humans, this result is self-induced due to the neurochemical effects of sugar consumption.
Regarding endurance athletes, I would not say that they are necessarily healthier: they have optimized their bodies for physical exertion (higher VO2max, lower resting HR, greater muscular efficiency, higher lean muscle to fat ratio, etc), but this does not exactly translate to better overall health as measured by factors like total longevity and disability-free lifetime. In fact, we know that many of these athletes suffer from long-term health complications as a result of their training and competition, such as arthritic disease. In any case, if we are talking about how they are able to consume vast quantities of food yet remain lean, this is simply a matter of energy consumed versus energy expended. Yet the quality of the diet remains important even if there are no obvious signs of metabolic damage--sure, they might not get a fatty liver because gluconeogenesis kicks in, but even they know that they can't just drink 10 liters of soda to carb load.
The main driver of obesity in the United States is gross overconsumption of food relative to the energy needs of the average sedentary American. This is the imbalance in the basic caloric equation (energy in > energy out). And I say it is "gross" not in the "yuck" sense, but in the "it's REALLY WAY over the top" sense, because we're seeing people eat upwards of 3500-4000 calories per day when their expenditures are in the 2000 range. The secondary driver, which is what we might think of as "kicking the liver while it's down," is the extreme preponderance of calories from refined sugars, which do not trigger the satiety response as quickly as the equivalent energy co
Barring some freak side effect like a potato taking up a heavy metal from the soil the ability for a GMO to pose any health risk is non-existent. GMOs don't suddenly gain the ability to produce some crazy chemical structure.
1) Roundup-ready GMOs on average get sprayed with more Roundup than non-resistant plants would, leading to a higher load of pesticides (which get absorbed into the plant), not because the GMO produces them, but because the GMO allows them.
1.a) This overuse leading to Roundup resistance in weeds, then needing even more pesticides, has also been published for a number of years.
2) "BT" GMOs contain genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, expressing an insecticide. B. thur. is used in organic farming (spores and Cry proteins sprayed on crops) because it is deemed mostly safe to the environment, but it seems research of effects on human health is "insufficient". I would think there is a bit of a difference between a topical application that can be washed off, and a systemic production of the insecticide.
Culinary tip: A bowl of salad becomes much more nutritious and tasty if, just before serving, you replace it with a steak.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just stop. Your basic facts about HFCS makeup and metabolism are wrong and therefore I assume the rest of what you are saying is shilling.
Unlike what you said, HFCS has four common versions with different quantities of fructose: HFCS-42 has 42% fructose. There is also, HFCS-55, HFCS-65, and HFCS-90, containing 90% fructose. Soft drinks typically use HFCS-55 or HFCS-65, but of course there's nothing on the labels to indicate which version of HFCS is being used.
Also, unlike what you said, fructose is not metabolized identically. Unlike glucose, fructose is metabolized nearly entirely in the liver, which is where the triglycerides are coming from (re: the article).
Disappointed that whoever modded you up didn't at least check Wikipedia first.