Friday, March 02, 2007

the corn mafia has found me

and it didn't take long.

so i received an interesting comment on yesterday's hfcs post. apparently, someone calling themselves marylandbluecrab has found my humble little blog. nobody reads it except my mom and my aunt and a random canuck or two, so i found it really interesting that someone would leave a comment on my hfcs post, especially one that so resoundingly stated that there's absolutely nothing wrong with hfcs. hmmm... a blank blog with a profile that simply states "female, marketing, washington, dc." could it be any more obvious that my new blog reader is some toady working for a marketing firm paid by a hcfs industry group or perhaps the american beverage association to search the interwebs for bad references to hfcs on a regular basis and post responses that spout their propaganda?

and i beg to differ, marylandbluecrab, that "there's no study out there..." sure, studies that are funded by the american beverage institute and the corn refiners association support your claim. but scientists in the pocket of tobacco companies said smoking is safe for you, too. what about independent studies, such as this one: "Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity," in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 79, No. 4, 537-543, April 2004)? the study's authors state in their abstract:
"The digestion, absorption, and metabolism of fructose differ from those of glucose. Hepatic metabolism of fructose favors de novo lipogenesis. In addition, unlike glucose, fructose does not stimulate insulin secretion or enhance leptin production. Because insulin and leptin act as key afferent signals in the regulation of food intake and body weight, this suggests that dietary fructose may contribute to increased energy intake and weight gain."
simply put, it appears that hfcs doesn't trigger the signals that your body puts out to make you feel full, as opposed to glucose, which does. so, you can drink a lot more hfcs-sweetened coke before you begin to feel full than you would if it were sweetened with sugar. seems like a perfect solution for coke, now doesn't it? yes, americans are chronic, excessive consumers of food (and many other things). but you can't ignore the correlation between the increasing prevalence (i'd almost call it ubiquity) of hfcs in our food and the corresponding rise in obesity and diabetes in this country.

so, welcome, corn mafia. happy reading! i'm glad at least that someone not related to me is reading this blog. ;)

UPDATE: i'm not the only one who has had this experience. check out this guy's article. you can see another corn mafia response in the comments to his article.

7 comments:

barb said...

it's pretty obvious now that you shed more lite on this subject THAT the HFCS industry has a lot more at stake than we think AND way too much $$$ to be able to hire morons to scan the internet on their behalf. How rude ;)

barb said...

FTA = good work little birdie

Deborah Eley De Bono said...

There's also a bit about HFCS and pancreatic cancer. Two people from our circle have been diagnosed with that particular type of cancer. Wonder how much of the stuff they ingested.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you. There was a thing on DrudgeReport today about a new rice crop that will contain human genes. Ick.

Mark said...

Found you from CBB's website.

I ate a Nature Valley granola bar the other day, you know the old-fashioned, crunchy kind, not that namby-pamby chewy granola.

I read the ingredient list, expecting to find nothing but wholesome ingredients. Sugar was listed as the second ingredient. While not particularly heartening, I was glad to see it was just plain sugar.

As I skimmed farther into the list I was shocked to find high fructose corn syrup!

Noooooo! Not my precious dental-work challenging granola bars!

maltese parakeet said...

welcome, mark. any friend of cbb is a friend of mine!

aren't you surprised by how ubiquitous hfcs is in items that are supposed to be healthy? for example, it is the first ingredient in power bars and is in hansen's "natural" sodas.

Steven Noreyko said...

I'm completely on your side against HFCS (I've been trying to maintain a NO HFCS diet for the last 2 years), but your post is not quite right in reference to coke using HFCS or regular sugar.

Regular sugar is Sucrose, not glucose. So your statement that Coke with sugar instead of HFCS having a different effect on the body is not quite correct.

Sucrose breaks down to (roughly) 50% fructose and %50 glucose in the body. The HFCS in soft drinks is 55% Fructose and 45% glucose.

So generally speaking, Sucrose and HFCS are similar and both not so great for you in large quantities.

Now it I could just get the regular sucrose out of my diet. :)