I dont know about you, but while I may think athiests are wrong, I dont think theyre retarded. One of my closest friend is a rather intelligent athiest; I dont sneer at him every time I meet.
I see the inquisition drug out every time a discussion on religion pops up on any fora. Can anyone explain exactly why they take it at face value that the people running the inquisition were in fact followers of Christ? Or why they suppose one needs religion to do terrible things? Religion happens to be a useful scapegoat for whatever terrible idea someone may have at a particular time, but people have no problem committing atrocities without it (see basically any horrific mass murder of the 20th century, for example).
You might as well claim that democracy causes genocide, because of what happened in Democratic Kampuchea. Oh but wait thats not fair, because they werent really a democracy, right?
The bible clearly states if I prayed with my heart, he should have been healed
The Bible teaches no such thing. In fact I distinctly remember it teaching "In this life, you will have trouble" and "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."
Now that you mention it I seem to recall Jesus praying "that this cup be taken from me", and yet he faced the cross. Im well aware that some people preach "name it and claim it" theology (that is, "if you pray for something you will receive it unless your faith is defective"), but theres a reason thats considered to be a false teaching.
I see posts like this often, and I would appreciate it if some clarification/justification would be provided for this post. Do you mean to claim that anyone with a belief in the supernatural lacks higher cognitive function? Do you claim that noone raised with an athiestic upbringing has ever converted to any sort of belief in the supernatural?
Im not entirely sure what this has to do with the article, or this discussion; do you mean to say that one man's foolishness or claims prove anything? What if I were to walk outside in a rainy day and say "if lightning REALLY exists, it will zap me now"? If I do not get struck, may I then proclaim that lightning doesnt exist?
If you think overnight replacing every gram of HFCS in every food in the US with equal quantity sucrose is going to change a thing with regard to obesity, I have some bad news for you.
No, its been shown that FRUCTOSE is processed different than SUCROSE, which is a different thing altogether-- Fructose affects the liver, where 2 grams of sucrose becomes 1 gram fructose and 1g glucose, so only half of it hits the liver. The point is, HFCS is 55% fructose and 42% glucose, so there isnt much difference THERE.
Again, there may be something to the "corn syrup" part of the equation, but not to the "high fructose" part-- chemically, the sugars in HFCS and sucrose are nearly identical (differing in ratio by 5%).
Correlation, causation, etc. Is it possible the manufacturer using HFCS tends to use lower quality, cheaper ingredients in general? Ive seen NO study which shows any potential for a mix of fructose and glucose to cause hives (though I suppose it could be other ingredients in the corn itself-- do you have corn allergies?).
but what you fail to take into consideration that there is an energy cost associated with the body doing the work vs having both products readily available to your body.
There may be something to that, but Id like to see more than speculation before latching onto that as fact.
The fact that HFCS is usually a 1:1 ratio of glucose and fructose may even exacerbate the issue...
You misunderstand-- it is SUCROSE that is a 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose, when the bond between them is broken. HFCS is 55:42 ratio of fructose to glucose, so your argument kind of falls apart-- their ratios are very very close. That difference MAY be the cause of the uproar, but again, less speculation please.
since HFCS is cheaper (due to subsidies) and has a longer shelf life than sucrose, and sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers looking to make a palatable shelf stable product turn to HFCS
Agreed, but the problem isnt that manufacturers load their food with sugars to make it tasty, the problem is that people think they dont have to watch what they eat, so they eat such foods without wanting to take responsibility for what they are eating. HFCS makes it easy for the manufacturer to put out garbage, agreed-- but consumers are supposed to have SOME degree of diligence against this. They could just as well use sugar; boycotting HFCS will just mean CocaCola just puts out "New with Sugar Coke", and people get fat off of that.
Compare similar products in the store, I will bet you that the products using HFCS have more salt and sugar than a similar product that uses sucrose.
I 100% agree with you, and prefer in general products advertising cane sugar, because they tend to be the manufacturers who will use better ingredients in general. But again, this is that whole "Correlation vs Causation" thing-- if you eat a diet containing HFCS, youll tend to be fatter than those who eat cane sugar-- but its NOT the chemical that is the root cause, rather it is the quantity and quality of the sugars and foods.
but its inclusion into high caloric, shelf stable, cheap, unfilling food leads to consumption of unhealthy amounts.
Youre trying to prevent people from making bad decisions by removing those decisions. That doesnt work. Education may, but telling them the problem is "HFCS" rather than "garbage in your diet" isnt helping matters.
Mountain dew has ridiculous sugar content-- about 40grams per can. For perspective, every 6pack you drink has half a pound of sugar (450g per lb vs 240g per 6pack).
Any chance getting off sugar in general, rather than just HFCS, might be the cause? Take a look at the nutrition facts on the foods you buy-- look at "Sugar: Grams" and not "Ingredients:" and youll see where the problem lies.
Problem 1 in that study: you cant directly compare, calorie for calorie, HFCS to sucrose, as sucrose has more calories (3kcal/gram for HFCS, 4kcal/gram sucrose). If youre using equal calories, youre giving the rats MORE HFCS than sucrose. Yet they claim to use half as much HFCS as sucrose, which means the HFCS rat caloric intake should be far lower. Are they compensating in other areas of the diet? Why did the rats not have identical diets, except for the substitution of HFCS for sucrose? And why is this study being run by Psychology majors and professors?
For that matter, where is the link to the actual study?
Problem 2 is that there STILL hasnt been an adequate explaination for why this would happen, so to say that it has to be HFCS based on one study without any hypothesis as to what is actually causing the weight gain is going to cause me to be skeptical, considering what I know of HFCS and sucrose (though I am admittedly not an expert).
Problem 3 is that 90% of these studies show correlations, not causations, and the uproar over HFCS predates that particular study by quite a bit-- the uproar isnt based in studies, but in superstition.
It may be that there is indeed something about HFCS that is bad, and unique to it (though chemically it doesnt appear that way)-- but thats NOT why people are up in arms, theyre up in arms because they dont want to admit that their diets suck and theyre getting fat because of it.
Right, and my point is that if we had an issue with oil producers, going after Number 14 makes very little sense when #1 is Saudia Arabia, #2 is Russia, and #4 is Iran (rankings are the same for exporting). We have 2 right there in the middle east who produce (or export) several times as much oil as Iraq. Calling Iraq a war over oil is just silly, there were many, far more important reasons for the war, at least for those who made the decision.
Certainly the fact that an unstable Middle East is bad for the oil economy played some role, but an unstable Middle East is bad for many other reasons. To call it an oil subsidy is also silly, and ignorant-- as thats not even what subsidy even means. This isnt money being paid to the oil industry; if anything its money being paid to defense companies and armed forces, so if you wanted you could possibly call it a "military subsidy", I guess.
Its really great when someone starts reading a post, gets to the end of the first sentence, and then decides the rest is irrelevant. Parent answered your objection a mere 2 sentences later:
For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
So assuming he has his sources in order, yes, $37b is quite a bit more than $14b. Of course you claim invading for oil, which is great and all, but doesnt explain why we invaded Iraq, which ranks a whopping number 14 on "world oil producing countries". Thats right-- Iraq ISNT that big of an oil producer.
But sure, lets keep making ridiculous conspiracy claims ungrounded in reality.
The solution to obesity is to stop thinking that you can ingest hundreds of grams of sugar a day through sodas and food, and not get fat.
Some people may be able to claim genetics, but I dont think the average obese person's diet would stand up to much scrutiny-- even if you dont look at what kind of sugar theyre ingesting.
Probably off topic, and feel free to mod as such, but Id like to take issue with part of your post--
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS [cnn.com]),
I see this meme all over the place, and yet I have yet to see a study which actually shows a causation of bad health in any way to HFCS, in a way that sucrose would not also be responsible.
Sucrose has about 4kcal per gram. HFCS has about 3kcal per gram. So if anything is going to cause build up of fat-- which is basically stored excess energy-- sucrose does the job about 33% faster gram for gram, absent some factor that no one has yet explained.
HFCS-55 is about as sweet as sucrose, so similar amounts can be used.
The biggest reason, HFCS is just one of those "popular to hate" things. Doing an actual study with equal amounts of sucrose and HFCS in a human metabolism to show the facts just isnt in vogue right now. Making baseless causal links between obesity and HFCS, uniquely as compared to sucrose, is in vogue. People can run around feeling superior for claiming that they know best, and can feel good for being involved in the anti-HFCS campaign, never mind that ingesting a tenth of a pound of sugar per coke is going to make anyone fat, whether its sucrose or HFCS. Never mind that eating bread with about 10 grams of sugar per slice probably isnt the healthiest thing in the world, no, the real scandal is that its HFCS! (And if you think im kidding, take a look at that honey-wheat bread, or that wonder bread... why do you think its so tasty?)
People need to wake up and stop blaming some bogeyman, and realize that if you eat a diet filled with sugar in all of your foods and drinks, youre going to get fat if you have a normal metabolism.
Because Gmail provides POP3 for people who want to use any one of the zillions of email clients out there? Because Gmail relies on SMTP (port 25) for sending and receiving email? Because SNMP is widely used internally at many businesses for monitoring and administration of network appliances?
Not to mention, I cant imagine why you think schools use POP3 more than anyone else; Northern VA community college outsources gmail, Georgetown U uses a web based client (which actually also has an IMAP client), and I think GMU uses gmail. 3 fairly large schools around here which dont really use POP3 that much, if at all.
Not that people arent permitted the odd mistake, but Im pretty sure explicit instruction about isolating themselves from outside information during the trial is given, for exactly this type of situation.
TO see everyone running around slapping their knees about how bad Fox is, based on an article that is filled with WORSE misinformation (reread my first point, they are criticizing information that they themselves put out there) is awful.
If you want to critize Fox, Im sure there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but honestly the comments on this article should be centered around outrage that this piece of garbage even made it thru the firehose. Ignoring that and going after Fox just makes you look like a biased, ignorant hypocrite.
Im sure they knew this, theyre not dense. It doesnt really help them to say "btw Ubuntu works great on this laptop"; the purpose of demo laptops is to try ChromeOS and find what issues it has, not to rip the OS off and do something completely different.
I mean if Google had just wanted to give you a laptop to dick around with, they wouldnt have given you one with EFI and a boot loader that needs to be tweaked to run ubuntu.
Providing feedback that "btw ive been using ubuntu thru the trial period, thx lol" doesnt really help. Im sure they were aware that you could rip out the google bits and set up an ubuntu rootfs; actually doing so is just lame and cheap. You want to do it with a chrome laptop? Go buy one, dont leech off of the free demo laptop program.
Whats next, a community winning the Google GB fiber rollout, only to restrict it so they could resell it to Verizon?
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I dont know about you, but while I may think athiests are wrong, I dont think theyre retarded. One of my closest friend is a rather intelligent athiest; I dont sneer at him every time I meet.
We call it "civility".
nature or nurture, the part you're crediting God with likely came from them.
The two need not be mutually exclusive.
I see the inquisition drug out every time a discussion on religion pops up on any fora. Can anyone explain exactly why they take it at face value that the people running the inquisition were in fact followers of Christ? Or why they suppose one needs religion to do terrible things? Religion happens to be a useful scapegoat for whatever terrible idea someone may have at a particular time, but people have no problem committing atrocities without it (see basically any horrific mass murder of the 20th century, for example).
You might as well claim that democracy causes genocide, because of what happened in Democratic Kampuchea. Oh but wait thats not fair, because they werent really a democracy, right?
The bible clearly states if I prayed with my heart, he should have been healed
The Bible teaches no such thing. In fact I distinctly remember it teaching "In this life, you will have trouble" and "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."
Now that you mention it I seem to recall Jesus praying "that this cup be taken from me", and yet he faced the cross. Im well aware that some people preach "name it and claim it" theology (that is, "if you pray for something you will receive it unless your faith is defective"), but theres a reason thats considered to be a false teaching.
I see posts like this often, and I would appreciate it if some clarification/justification would be provided for this post. Do you mean to claim that anyone with a belief in the supernatural lacks higher cognitive function? Do you claim that noone raised with an athiestic upbringing has ever converted to any sort of belief in the supernatural?
Im not entirely sure what this has to do with the article, or this discussion; do you mean to say that one man's foolishness or claims prove anything? What if I were to walk outside in a rainy day and say "if lightning REALLY exists, it will zap me now"? If I do not get struck, may I then proclaim that lightning doesnt exist?
So then would you agree that replacing HFCS with equal sucrose to make it sweet wouldnt really help things?
This is exactly my point. Want to educate people? Focus on convenience and sweetness based diets, not the sweetener.
If you think overnight replacing every gram of HFCS in every food in the US with equal quantity sucrose is going to change a thing with regard to obesity, I have some bad news for you.
Sucrose metabolizes into what is basically HFCS, minus the corn components-- glucose and fructose.
Your stomach is acidic too, and im fairly certain gastric acid (ph 1-2) is more acidic than carbonic acid (ph 5+).
No, its been shown that FRUCTOSE is processed different than SUCROSE, which is a different thing altogether-- Fructose affects the liver, where 2 grams of sucrose becomes 1 gram fructose and 1g glucose, so only half of it hits the liver. The point is, HFCS is 55% fructose and 42% glucose, so there isnt much difference THERE.
Again, there may be something to the "corn syrup" part of the equation, but not to the "high fructose" part-- chemically, the sugars in HFCS and sucrose are nearly identical (differing in ratio by 5%).
Correlation, causation, etc. Is it possible the manufacturer using HFCS tends to use lower quality, cheaper ingredients in general? Ive seen NO study which shows any potential for a mix of fructose and glucose to cause hives (though I suppose it could be other ingredients in the corn itself-- do you have corn allergies?).
but what you fail to take into consideration that there is an energy cost associated with the body doing the work vs having both products readily available to your body.
There may be something to that, but Id like to see more than speculation before latching onto that as fact.
The fact that HFCS is usually a 1:1 ratio of glucose and fructose may even exacerbate the issue...
You misunderstand-- it is SUCROSE that is a 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose, when the bond between them is broken. HFCS is 55:42 ratio of fructose to glucose, so your argument kind of falls apart-- their ratios are very very close. That difference MAY be the cause of the uproar, but again, less speculation please.
since HFCS is cheaper (due to subsidies) and has a longer shelf life than sucrose, and sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers looking to make a palatable shelf stable product turn to HFCS
Agreed, but the problem isnt that manufacturers load their food with sugars to make it tasty, the problem is that people think they dont have to watch what they eat, so they eat such foods without wanting to take responsibility for what they are eating. HFCS makes it easy for the manufacturer to put out garbage, agreed-- but consumers are supposed to have SOME degree of diligence against this. They could just as well use sugar; boycotting HFCS will just mean CocaCola just puts out "New with Sugar Coke", and people get fat off of that.
Compare similar products in the store, I will bet you that the products using HFCS have more salt and sugar than a similar product that uses sucrose.
I 100% agree with you, and prefer in general products advertising cane sugar, because they tend to be the manufacturers who will use better ingredients in general. But again, this is that whole "Correlation vs Causation" thing-- if you eat a diet containing HFCS, youll tend to be fatter than those who eat cane sugar-- but its NOT the chemical that is the root cause, rather it is the quantity and quality of the sugars and foods.
but its inclusion into high caloric, shelf stable, cheap, unfilling food leads to consumption of unhealthy amounts.
Youre trying to prevent people from making bad decisions by removing those decisions. That doesnt work. Education may, but telling them the problem is "HFCS" rather than "garbage in your diet" isnt helping matters.
Mountain dew has ridiculous sugar content-- about 40grams per can. For perspective, every 6pack you drink has half a pound of sugar (450g per lb vs 240g per 6pack).
Any chance getting off sugar in general, rather than just HFCS, might be the cause? Take a look at the nutrition facts on the foods you buy-- look at "Sugar: Grams" and not "Ingredients:" and youll see where the problem lies.
Problem 1 in that study: you cant directly compare, calorie for calorie, HFCS to sucrose, as sucrose has more calories (3kcal/gram for HFCS, 4kcal/gram sucrose). If youre using equal calories, youre giving the rats MORE HFCS than sucrose. Yet they claim to use half as much HFCS as sucrose, which means the HFCS rat caloric intake should be far lower. Are they compensating in other areas of the diet? Why did the rats not have identical diets, except for the substitution of HFCS for sucrose? And why is this study being run by Psychology majors and professors?
For that matter, where is the link to the actual study?
Problem 2 is that there STILL hasnt been an adequate explaination for why this would happen, so to say that it has to be HFCS based on one study without any hypothesis as to what is actually causing the weight gain is going to cause me to be skeptical, considering what I know of HFCS and sucrose (though I am admittedly not an expert).
Problem 3 is that 90% of these studies show correlations, not causations, and the uproar over HFCS predates that particular study by quite a bit-- the uproar isnt based in studies, but in superstition.
It may be that there is indeed something about HFCS that is bad, and unique to it (though chemically it doesnt appear that way)-- but thats NOT why people are up in arms, theyre up in arms because they dont want to admit that their diets suck and theyre getting fat because of it.
Right, and my point is that if we had an issue with oil producers, going after Number 14 makes very little sense when #1 is Saudia Arabia, #2 is Russia, and #4 is Iran (rankings are the same for exporting). We have 2 right there in the middle east who produce (or export) several times as much oil as Iraq. Calling Iraq a war over oil is just silly, there were many, far more important reasons for the war, at least for those who made the decision.
Certainly the fact that an unstable Middle East is bad for the oil economy played some role, but an unstable Middle East is bad for many other reasons. To call it an oil subsidy is also silly, and ignorant-- as thats not even what subsidy even means. This isnt money being paid to the oil industry; if anything its money being paid to defense companies and armed forces, so if you wanted you could possibly call it a "military subsidy", I guess.
For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
So assuming he has his sources in order, yes, $37b is quite a bit more than $14b. Of course you claim invading for oil, which is great and all, but doesnt explain why we invaded Iraq, which ranks a whopping number 14 on "world oil producing countries". Thats right-- Iraq ISNT that big of an oil producer.
But sure, lets keep making ridiculous conspiracy claims ungrounded in reality.
The solution to obesity is to stop thinking that you can ingest hundreds of grams of sugar a day through sodas and food, and not get fat.
Some people may be able to claim genetics, but I dont think the average obese person's diet would stand up to much scrutiny-- even if you dont look at what kind of sugar theyre ingesting.
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS [cnn.com]),
I see this meme all over the place, and yet I have yet to see a study which actually shows a causation of bad health in any way to HFCS, in a way that sucrose would not also be responsible.
Heres my theory as to why that wont happen--
The biggest reason, HFCS is just one of those "popular to hate" things. Doing an actual study with equal amounts of sucrose and HFCS in a human metabolism to show the facts just isnt in vogue right now. Making baseless causal links between obesity and HFCS, uniquely as compared to sucrose, is in vogue. People can run around feeling superior for claiming that they know best, and can feel good for being involved in the anti-HFCS campaign, never mind that ingesting a tenth of a pound of sugar per coke is going to make anyone fat, whether its sucrose or HFCS. Never mind that eating bread with about 10 grams of sugar per slice probably isnt the healthiest thing in the world, no, the real scandal is that its HFCS! (And if you think im kidding, take a look at that honey-wheat bread, or that wonder bread... why do you think its so tasty?)
People need to wake up and stop blaming some bogeyman, and realize that if you eat a diet filled with sugar in all of your foods and drinks, youre going to get fat if you have a normal metabolism.
Because Gmail provides POP3 for people who want to use any one of the zillions of email clients out there? Because Gmail relies on SMTP (port 25) for sending and receiving email? Because SNMP is widely used internally at many businesses for monitoring and administration of network appliances?
Not to mention, I cant imagine why you think schools use POP3 more than anyone else; Northern VA community college outsources gmail, Georgetown U uses a web based client (which actually also has an IMAP client), and I think GMU uses gmail. 3 fairly large schools around here which dont really use POP3 that much, if at all.
Honest mistake
Not that people arent permitted the odd mistake, but Im pretty sure explicit instruction about isolating themselves from outside information during the trial is given, for exactly this type of situation.
TO see everyone running around slapping their knees about how bad Fox is, based on an article that is filled with WORSE misinformation (reread my first point, they are criticizing information that they themselves put out there) is awful.
If you want to critize Fox, Im sure there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but honestly the comments on this article should be centered around outrage that this piece of garbage even made it thru the firehose. Ignoring that and going after Fox just makes you look like a biased, ignorant hypocrite.
Im sure they knew this, theyre not dense. It doesnt really help them to say "btw Ubuntu works great on this laptop"; the purpose of demo laptops is to try ChromeOS and find what issues it has, not to rip the OS off and do something completely different.
I mean if Google had just wanted to give you a laptop to dick around with, they wouldnt have given you one with EFI and a boot loader that needs to be tweaked to run ubuntu.
Providing feedback that "btw ive been using ubuntu thru the trial period, thx lol" doesnt really help. Im sure they were aware that you could rip out the google bits and set up an ubuntu rootfs; actually doing so is just lame and cheap. You want to do it with a chrome laptop? Go buy one, dont leech off of the free demo laptop program.
Whats next, a community winning the Google GB fiber rollout, only to restrict it so they could resell it to Verizon?