

Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain - tjr
http://www.princeton.edu:80/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

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elblanco
I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type
symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats,
the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can
pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was
HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy.

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.

~~~
illumin8
It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really
don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh
vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about
what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient:
whatever you cooked.

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.

~~~
elblanco
I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS
in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat.

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.

------
tghw
Take a look at <http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/>

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.

~~~
houseabsolute
Reddit had a really great comment from someone who had actually read the study
that seemed to point at some serious flaws.

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superjared
One interesting part is that they used _fewer calories_ of HFCS than sugar in
the trial, yet it still prompted more weight gain.

~~~
zackattack
This would make more sense if I had a better understanding of biochemistry.
It's only a matter of time before an awesome explanation is posted. (Yes....!)

~~~
maxharris
<http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717>

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.

~~~
aik
Thanks for the link. That's a great lecture. Have more on this topic?

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.

------
yanowitz
This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon.

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.

~~~
nas
That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about
the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy
for the body to break.

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?

~~~
gte910h
Table sugar is sucrose.

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)

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msluyter
Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising.
A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot
of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made
fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors
would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the
same category as candy.

~~~
timcederman
Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown
exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the
previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus
resistant).

~~~
maxharris
Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be
replicated from grafts.

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.)

~~~
timcederman
I guess I was surprised by the example, as the modern commonplace banana (in
the western world at least) is very static.

------
axiom
Um, wasn't that kind of the point of corn subsidies?

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.

------
icey
Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food
system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue
to prop up the corn farmers.

~~~
maxharris
What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and
everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended
consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you
don't rob Peter _or_ Paul.)

The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the
philosophy people go by in the future.

~~~
hyperbovine
I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out
of a government-subsidized research program.

Irony.

~~~
maxharris
Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could
give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix?

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.)

~~~
hyperbovine
The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of
the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US
government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of
what you and I call the internet by a decade or more.

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."

~~~
maxharris
You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a
decade.

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.)

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theli0nheart
Who else paid immediate attention to the overly-staged photo?

------
zackattack
Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food
lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up
your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g.,
"I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm
reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of
proteins, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients, and that makes a lot of
sense to me. My primary goal is to improve energy levels.

~~~
maxharris
I've been eating mostly raw food for about a year, and I love it.

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.

~~~
illumin8
Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not
gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning).
As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what
your stomach does anyway.

~~~
maxharris
How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)?

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.)

~~~
wooster
Cattle rancher here. You can get tapeworms by eating uncooked beef. Thankfully
it's usually easily, albeit unpleasantly, cured. However, you need to know you
have them first, which can take some time.

