Remember this ad for high fructose corn syrup?
Not so much, as it turns out:
A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction.
Lengthier smoking habits—but not more intense ones—seem to reduce the odds of developing Parkinson’s disease, according to a study in Neurology…. Researchers compared the smoking histories of 305,468 elderly subjects, 1,662 of whom had been diagnosed with the disease in the previous decade. Compared to the nonsmokers, subjects who had smoked at least a pack a day for one to nine years were only 4% less likely to develop Parkinson’s. But subjects who smoked as many cigarettes a day for more than 30 years had 41% shorter odds of developing the disease.
So it’s cane sugar and smokes from now on.
Been there for years now…
Did they correct for the presumably significant number of folks who didn’t get Parkinson’s because they were dead of lung cancer?
I always thought it was a well-known fact that high fructose corn syrup is, well, shitty for you. I’ve been checking ingredients for it and partially hydrogenated oils for years.
We’ve come full circle in a little over 50 years.
Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet!
It’s toasted!
They still make Lucky Strikes, don’t they?
Wasn’t high fructose syrup approved during the Reagan administration over the objections of the FDA as it wasn’t safe and frankly no one knew what the hell the shit would do to us? Or was that something else they approved for human consumption?
I read the actual paper, not the press release for the HFCS case and the conclusions they make are VERY hard and sketchy to draw from their results. They try to compare things which are not the same and the methods are lacking. From my interpretation of the results, I would say that HFCS behaves the sames as sucrose. The only time HFCS was different than control or sucrose is when they had extended access to it compared to sucrose.
Others also have issues with it
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010…
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs…
It was a poorly designed study on a very topical subject which makes for flashy press releases
Is there a link to the HFCS article? I’m interested to see the researchers thoughts about why HFCS causes more weight gain.
Whoa! That’s Buffy’s roommate from her first few weeks in college. Watch out! She’ll write her name on the eggs, she’s a soul sucking demon, and (worst of all) has a strange Cher fetish!
From reading the headline, I thought maybe you were talking about bourbon here. Bummer.
@6 Well, Americans DO have extended access to it. Damn near everything in grocery stores contains it. It’s very hard to find non-fresh food that DOESN’T contain HFCS.
Another repercussion of the Cuba Embargo. One of the few reasons we ever cared about Cuba in the first half of the 20th century was the cheap & plentiful sugar supply. When the Cold War changed our national priorities to “communism=evil”, Cuban sugar became far less important than ideological interests. Into that void stepped the BigAgra and their promise that they could replace all that Cuban sugar with good ol’ USA corn! Farm subsidies weren’t just about business, it was national security!
Now, corn subsidies are so deeply entrenched and protected by Midwest senators who could care less about public health, that we can’t get rid of them even in the face of overwhelming evidence that HFCS is killing us.
Fnarf, reading hoe the results were presented (“41% shorter odds”) indicates that they did a case-control study. In a case-control study you go find a bunch of sick people, this time parkinsons patients (the “cases”), and match them with similar non-parkinsons patients (the “controls”). You then determine the ratio of the odds of being a 30yr+ smoker for the cases vs odds of being a 30yr+ smoker for the controls. Thus all dead smokers have been weeded out from both the parkinson and non-parkinson groups. Then, due to a mathematical equivalency, you can flip around the interpretation to state the odds ratio to say “30yr+ smokers had 41% shorter odds of developing disease” as if you did a prospective study.
As part of my culinary arts degree, I had a 30 hour course in nutrition. A recent grad of Bastyr taught the class and the most useful thing she did was to draw molecular diagrams of butter vs margarine and sugar vs corn syrup and then show how the body could break these into all kinds of building blocks for health and which parts would be left over as free radicals and the like.
I don’t know if t
he school does classes for the general public but it would certainly be worthwhile for anyone interested in the science behind nutrition/weight management to attend.
Dan’s mentioned a few times on Slog that he makes cookies at home as opposed to buying them at the store and has gotten a little grief for it. Well, yes, calories are calories but I expect Dan’s using real butter, cane sugar etc which his family is digesting and utilizing a whole lot better than they would a box of preservative-laden, artificially augmented this and that.
No one has yet to explain why the Japanese smoke like fish and live to be 114.
I only drink Cane Cola. For some reason they stopped selling Jones mix in the stores, so I get Blue Sky which is good tasting but doesn’t seem to have the caffeine that one expects from a can of Coke.
@14 – Load up on Coke that’s kosher for Passover. It’s in stores now!
This is a good juxtaposition. The HFCS industry would have us believe that it’s really all in our control. Sure fructose is bad for you, but there’s fructose in table sugar too, and taken in moderation, what’s the big deal. Well the big deal is that it’s hard to take HFCS in moderation, which is what the study basically shows. Fructose doesn’t sate. It’s hard not to have too much of it. It’s like the ciagarette industry shrugging off evidence of cancer by claiming that used in moderation, what’s the problem. In both cases you’ve got an addictive product that’s bad for you, and an industry trying to supress the degree to which it’s addictive.
HFCS would be a terrible idea even if they proved it was marginally good for you. Corn is destroying America, not from a health persective but an ecological, fiscal, and political one.
@6: npage148, I heart you.
Yeah, a great protection against Parkinsons, that is if you aren’t one of the 1 in 15 smokers who die of lung cancer.
@blip, your comment is made of win 🙂
For the facts – go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIpAyHJ2…
I think I’ll risk getting Parkinson’s disease over the many other disgusting things that cigarettes can and will do.
I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.youtube.com/v/bJ-w8a75EJQ&sta…
Also, lol@Polaroid line.
Stave off smoking’s deadly side effects AND Parkinson’s? Good genes are good genes, I guess.
As for corn syrup… this study will hopefully be encouraging to some to moderate what they take in or buy for their families, but—while it’s not necessarily the case here—it gets really tiring to listen to people looking for that magic bullet that’s making America fatter. Some days it’s fast food or junk food, some days corn syrup, some days it’s carbs… Jesus America, it’s not that complicated.
Mouse studies aren’t necessarily that helpful, though. As a friend of mine who’s getting her PhD in human genetics pointed out, the mice used for these clinical studies are genetically inbred, and tend to be much more sensitive to environmental conditions than humans. The short version? HFCS might be worse for you than cane sugar, but probably not by as much as this study would suggest.
Point is, though, that there is a LOT of HFCS in junk food. Avoiding/limiting junk food and sodas is a good way to go, even if they are made with cane sugar.
Also, compared to cane sugar, HFCS tastes like ass. And not in the good way.
@25–I have to agree. I mostly drink diet soda, but on occasion I’ll treat myself to an orange pop. One time I got a brand that was sweetened with cane sugar instead of the usual HFCS, and was amazed at the difference. The cane sugar is much less cloyingly, sickeningly sweet than the other kind.
For baked goods, there’s still nothing that can hold a candle to dark honey, though.
@26: I swore off cranberry juice b/c of the HFCS. Now they’re largely HCFS-free and you can really taste the difference.
Here’s an awesome Jackie Beat parody of the corn syrup commercial – check it out, you won’t be dissappointed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIpAyHJ2…
I have had my suspicions about HFCS for years and have tried to convince people it’s bad, unnatural and unhealthy. Finally studies are showing up to prove this. The stuff is overused and in everything-even pickle relish.
As for evidence look at Europeans who consume large amounts of fat and sugar (chocolate) and don’t have obesity problems like we do.
@30, your thesis is undermined by the large number of Europeans who are just as fat as we are — the Greeks, the Brits, the Portuguese — the obesity epidemic is global. It is true that there is such a thing as the “French paradox”, but “French” is not the same as “European”, and the French paradox is probably about red wine and moderation. Most French people do not, in fact, consume anything like the quantities of fats or sugar that we do; and the ones that do….are obese. France is suffering from an obesity crisis. Even the French are catching up.