Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain
princeton.edu
princeton.edu
About a year ago I figured it out and have systematically gone about trying to eliminate HFCS from almost everything I eat, which is easier said than done. In the U.S. at least, it seems to be in almost everything from Soda to Bread to Ketchup. I also notice that when I travel overseas, I can eat with relative abandon and not suffer any of the typical ill effects I have from HFCS loaded food in the States.
I noticed within a week of doing this that I could actually get hungry again without getting "sick" and go thus go longer between meals. In the last year, I've lost about 15-20 pounds by just eliminating HFCS from my diet but not making any conscious effort to change my diet or exercise habits.
I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously surprised by the amount of people I see at work saying "I can never lose weight" - then I see them in the break room at lunch nuking a pakaged frozen dinner. Just stop, ask yourself "did my grandma eat this?" If the answer is no, then don't eat it. This is actually a great question to ask because it doesn't matter what culture you are from. People two generations ago didn't have access to food made in factories. It was all fresh from a farm, and it was good for us.
I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule.
So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad.
The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi.
However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.
It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.
"First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars -- it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose -- but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized."
I highly recommend watching "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for information on the biochemistry of the metabolism of fructose and glucose.
For what it's worth, I'm in my second semester of biochemistry, and we've studied almost every one of the pathways he talks about in our class, in detail. Dr. Lustig is dead on about the science behind obesity.
Few points he talks about:
- In processed/fast food foods, fiber is often taken out to make shipping easier and cooking faster. This is the only reason fiber isn't seen as an essential nutrient in this country. Without the fiber, the appetite doesn't get quenched as quickly (as the food doesn't go through you as quickly) and so you eat more.
- Stress increases appetite.
- Sugar, fructose, and high fructose corn syrup do not suppress the appetite either. Also, drinking/eating soda/juice/sugary foods with a meal delays the satiety signal. This means you don't feel the fullness as quickly when sweetness is in your food/drink and so you eat more.
- Adding sugar to a salty food (and vice versa) neutralizes the salty/sweetness on your tongue. Companies often make use of this fact. For example, Coke has come out with new formulas where the only change is increased sodium and increased sugar/high fructose corn syrup to counterbalance.
- High Fructose Corn Syrup was created in Japan. HFCS is so widely used because it is so super super cheap compared to other sweeteners. He jokes that Japan sent it to the US as revenge.
Considering the difference in these mechanisms, it isn't surprising that HFCS leads to higher weight gain, because it directly leads to increased synthesis of adipose tissue.
If you get 50 calories of glucose in a set quantity of sucrose, your body expects there to be 50 calories of fructose. If you're getting 47.5 calories of glucose, your body expects you to be getting 47.5 calories of fructose not 52.5, this would mean your body interprets you eating an equal amount of calories as eating less calories.
There's another reason I've read as to why we're naturally susceptible to high-fructose, which is that our direct ancestors are predominantly fruit-eaters. Humans, and many of our ancestors, are unable to produce Vitamin C directly because our food sources were high enough sources that our bodies didn't have to waste energy synthesising it. This means we have the instinct to pig out when we find high-fructose concentrations, our bodies cheaped out on a solution to ensure high Vitamin C intake. It only happens that we've recently began screwing around with our foods to a large enough degree that we're directly suffering from this short cut evolution took.
If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.
Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?
First off to turn sucrose into its component molecules, it must first undergo a reaction with a sucrase enzyme. So there is at least one metabolic step left out there. Studies are being done to test if Sucrase is actively regulated by the body or not. In either case, this metabolic step must occur, and can only occur so fast (limited by the amount of sucrase in your body), no matter how much sucrose you ingest. This means slower absorption of sucrose over HFCS as you get this with the whole load of glucose in HFCS instantly, but only see the sucrose's glucose released over time.
Secondly, fructose has many forms. In sucrose, the fructose is often of the fructose-5 variety. In HFCS, it completely depends on the application, as any heat applied to a fructose-5 molecule upon separation from the glucose turns it into fructose-6.
Fructose-6 is notably less sweet than Sucrose This means when used in heat processed goods, you use quite a bit more HFCS (including all baked goods, etc) then the equivalent amount of sucrose. This means more calories.
Secondly, there are all different kids of HFCS. Notably, there is one with 38% less fructose than sucrose (HFCS 42), one with 22% more fructose than sucrose (HFCS 55) and one with 800% more fructose than table sugar (HFCS 90, often seen in diet foods I might add). They are all used for differing applications, but HFCS is not a single product, and most of the forms are likely metabolically worse in any amount of a single dose than the equivalent sweetness worth of sucrose. It is important you calculate your fractions correctly when realizing the differing amounts of fructose, as they're larger then they appear at first.
One could say a steak and the meal in your small intestines are "about the same thing" but I doubt you'd want to eat it then, and you'd be as accurate as saying table sugar is basically HFCS 55
(all percentages are in terms of "per molecule of glucose", which is what appears to be important as per the evolving science of satiation)
Berries are truly awesome fruits. I eat blueberries almost every day, although it can be pretty expensive, especially during the winter when they have to ship them in from the southern hemisphere.
However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)
It really wasn't that long ago when the biggest problem in the lower class wasn't being too fat, but rather being too thin.
Certainly this is a cause for concern, but keep in mind that there are worse things than having too much fat and too much leisure time.
The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.
Irony.
There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."
Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab!
The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory.
(I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)
Cutting out soda was the easiest, but you'll find corn syrup in everything from bread to lunch meats.
So you have a subsidy on corn, a tariff on sugar, and the double imbalance causes companies to use HFCS.
If we got rid of the tariff on sugar we could import sugar from brazil, and make ethanol out of it. (Which actually works, unlike ethanol from corn.)
It's politically impractical to just leave the corn farmers out to dry, so instead we choose some other food and give them subsidies on that if they agree to switch from corn.
Edit: That probably should have included an irony tag...
My diet so far has consisted of blue-rare steak (all you need to do to be safe is to sear the edges and sides to kill E. coli that has gotten onto the meat during butchering. I learned this in my microbiology class!) [You have to watch out about things like steak sauce - read the labels, and you'll find out that almost all of them have sugar in them. So I never use steak sauce, ketchup, or any of that shit - just salt+pepper.]
Salads are great, as long as you make your own dressing (so that you can keep it low-sugar.) Just a little salt, vinegar, and a nice lettuce mix, and just a little feta cheese...
Berries can be great if you need something sweet; they have enough fiber to keep you from getting an insulin spike if you're on my diet. [Be careful to not do this too much - they're expensive, and you can overdo it by gorging on several boxes every day! Many of your needs for vitamins are met with meat and leafy greens.]
At any rate, what I've described is probably called a paleo diet (maybe?) Meat is such an essential part of my life! I'm pretty healthy, and I've lost a lot of fat eating this way. (I used to be 215 lbs, now I'm at 171; I'm 6'1".)
One more thing - I used to drink sugary soda and fruit juices - these are both terrible things to put into your body. Cut that out alone, and you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.
I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats).
But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste.
The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)
On the other hand, it seems unlikely to me that the hydrochloric acid in your stomach doesn't also denature the hell out of proteins. In fact, your body probably has to denature proteins to get at the amino acids in them so it can build the precise proteins it needs.
At least, so one hopes.
I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages.
Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon, but the low-carb diet, while very much not a raw-food lifestyle, is working well for me.
You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits.
The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.
I ended up quitting because:
1) It gets expensive.
2) It got boring, all the stuff I wanted to eat was not on the diet. I think much of the weight loss was from not wanting to eat another bunless burger.
3) I actually felt gross all the time, like oils were just oozing from my pores.
You can be certain that that HMG-CoA reductase is really, really important in cholesterol biosynthesis because statins work by blocking this enzyme.
HMG-CoA reductase activity is induced by insulin, and reduced by glucagon.
To really control cholesterol, it's more important to cut carbs, not dietary sources of cholesterol (which fall anyway when appetite control is restored as leptin receptors in the hypothalamus regain function.)
I am curious- Where would you buy a meal with Steel cut oats near your office? As nice as it would be to bring things with me everyday to work, I really prefer getting out of the office for a while to clear my head, and re-focus on the tasks left to be done.
I can get a steak anywhere, but I'd have a hard time finding a more balanced lunch.
Beans and other good carbs are also difficult to cook on your own, but you can get canned ones.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html
"There are two really fascinating things about human evolution that we have yet to really fully come to grips with. One is the evolution of cooking. Whenever cooking happened, it must have had absolutely monstrous effects on us, because cooking enormously increases the quality of the food we eat, and it enormously increases the range of food items that we can eat. We all know that food quality and food abundance are key variables in understanding animal ecology. But the amazing thing is that although at the moment there is no conventional wisdom that says when cooking evolved, social anthropology and all sorts of conventional wisdom say that humans are the animals that cook. We distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world because they eat raw stuff and we eat cooked stuff. The best anthropology can do at the moment is to say that maybe sometime around 250 or 300 thousand years ago cooking really got going, because there's archeological evidence of earth ovens.
"This is fine, but long before earth ovens came along we must have learned to cook. And you would think that cooking would be associated with things like evidence in your body of the food being easier to digest, such as smaller teeth, or maybe a reduction in the size of the rib cage as the size of the stomach gets smaller, or maybe the jaw getting smaller. And there's only one time in human evolution that all that happens; that is, 1.9 million years ago with the evolution of the genus Homo. It's there we must look for evidence that cooking was adopted."
All of our ancestors in paleolithic times cooked. Human beings are adapted to eat cooked food.
However, I'd suggest that the book you are reading is probably junk science. A protein is a long chain of amino acids folded into a certain structure. Denaturation is the process of unfolding it, and will be performed by stomach acid if not by heat. A protein is digested by separating it into it's component amino acids. Denaturation is a necessary step in this process.
Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable.
These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked.
The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.