The Love (and HFCS) is in the Soup

It's a heartwarming story about a major corporation fighting to end hunger and obesity. The Campbell Soup company is planning an initiative to reduce malnutrition in the town of it's headquarters, Camden, NJ.

It's a great PR story to be sure, no less at the expense of our press advertising it. But if they choose to follow the dietary guidelines spouted by every other nutrition "expert" they won't get very far. And judging by what they put in their products, I'm sure they'll heed the " experts' " opinion.

"Campbell officials have been particularly struck by problems that revolve around food. The company, long a purveyor of vegetables in its soups and V-8 juices, has made efforts to become — and bill itself as — a prime maker of healthy options. It has reduced sodium in many of its soups and other products and introduced whole-grain Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers, among other health-oriented developments."

What's ironic about this, is that some of the Campbell Soups are some of the unhealthiest things you could eat. Well, maybe white bread with High Fructose Corn Syrup laden jelly would be worse, but maybe not by much. Their tomato soup has HFCS as the second ingredient and most of their other soups have canola oil or partially hydrogenated cottonseed or soybean oil and MSG. Even their "upscale" looking soups have HFCS.

So maybe while they're on their anti-hunger, anti-obesity kick, they could maybe stop putting crap in their soup? Again, that's another one of those things that I'm not holding my breath over.

About the only way to get soup that comes already prepared without a bunch of junk in it is to pony up $4 for a can or box of organic. Poor people can't afford this. But why are some groceries so cheap in the first place? Because they put cheap, crappy ingredients in it. Truly you can make your own soup at home, easily, and you'll know what's in it. It will have ingredients that you can pronounce. I always hate it when I read an ingredient and first of all can't pronounce it, and secondly don't even know what on this green earth it comes from. Does it come from an animal? A plant? Industrial waste? Who knows?

Would you like to know how to make tomato soup? It is so easy, it makes me wonder why anyone would buy it in a can. You boil chopped tomatoes in chicken broth with a bit of salt, until they're very tender. You can even walk away while this is happening. When they're through, you pour them into a food processor and blend them up. It takes a minute of blending. Pour the mixture back into the pot, straining the seeds with a strainer, and add a bit of heavy cream and a packet or two of stevia or splenda and stir until warm. It is very, very good, and very, very easy.

How about carrot soup? I haven't made this in ages, but it's even easier than the tomato soup. You boil chopped carrots in chicken broth until soft. You then use a hand blender to blend them up, in the pot. Voilà! You have carrot soup. You can do this with just about any vegetable. And the stew-like soups, like our chicken soup are even easier in that there's no blending involved.

I see people all the time buying pre-packaged food, and think to myself that they've probably forgotten what real food tastes like. I'm sure that the five year old kid who weighs 125 lbs mentioned in the story, eats primarily processed carbohydrates.

"Kim Fremont Fortunato, who was hired late last year to head up the anti-obesity efforts, said she recently shadowed a doctor who was treating a 5-year-old Camden boy weighing 125 pounds. She said the doctor warned the boy's grandmother that he would be diabetic by age 10 if his obesity wasn't controlled."

I'd like to believe that the doctor treating him will tell his caregivers to lay off the carbohydrates, but that's probably wishful thinking. I'm sure they'll tell them to cut out the fat and the sodium and give the kid whole wheat bread.

Fructose and Fetal Harm

Via a comment on Fat Head:

A commenter on Fat Head left a link to this article, from New Zealand that fructose may affect the development of female children. Sucrose (table sugar) is half fructose, and High Fructose Corn Syrup is more than half fructose, depending on the mixture. And I need not point out that HFCS is in just about everything that's manufactured or processed. They slip it into the most innocuous places. Fructose also occurs in fruit, something that a lot of doctors push people, especially diabetics, to eat (detrimentally to their health I might add).

A lot of pregnant women may think that because they're not overweight, or they don't have gestational diabetes, that it's okay if they consume large quantities of sugar or fruit. They often use the fallacy that because we've been consuming sugar for a long time, it's not a problem. The thing is, we've not been consuming sugar or fruit in the quantities we do for very long. Sugar consumption in the past thirty years has skyrocketed to 150+ lbs per person per year in the States, whereas in the 19th century sugar consumption was only in the 15 to 20 lb range per year before 1850. And even just fifty years ago, most people only ate fruit when it was in season, which in most parts of the world is a limited time frame. I'm sure with the powers-that-be and doctors pushing fruit consumption, that it has also risen.

Is fructose safe?

"In the study, where rats were fed diets high in fructose during pregnancy and lactation, the sugar was found to change key metabolic hormone levels in both foetuses and new born offspring...

The fact that we saw no obvious weight gain implies that women may be unaware that their diet could be compromising the development of their fetus."

They don't say what metabolic hormones are affected specifically, but I'm thinking insulin is probably one of them. Now, I also read a study not too long ago that female rat offspring were also affected by maternal dietary salt restriction. Another thing that the doctors push on us, lower your salt intake they say! Salt restriction in the mother made the female offspring insulin resistant with increased adiposity (fat). The male offspring were not so affected. Does this mean that there would be nothing to worry about with males then?

I doubt it seriously. I read that in indigenous populations, such as the Pima, female hormones somehow protect women from getting diabetes, at least for a while. However, they get very obese instead. Eventually they get diabetes, but not before getting fat. It is theorized that the fat protects them from diabetes as long as their bodies can continue to convert excess sugar in the blood to fat and store it. Now, the men don't necessarily get as fat as the women, but they have an increased incidence in developing diabetes.

I'm glad to see that a news organization actually published something that goes against the party line. I guess they don't grow much corn or sugar in New Zealand. I'm waiting for one of the American news organizations to pick this up, but I won't hold my breath. Asphyxiation is no way to die.

Parrot: "I'm a doctor!"

Are writers incapable of researching stuff before parroting what they're told? Are editors? I hope some are, but it seems like the majority aren't.

For example, this article from US News states that eating too much sodium leads to high blood pressure. Except it doesn't. A dietary reduction in salt can lead to a whopping 1.1 to 5 mmHg at *most*, if you believe meta-analysis. I'm completely underwhelmed. Most high blood pressure is genetic and diet has very little to do with it. If your blood pressure is high you need medication. That's about the only thing you'll hear me say that you need medicine for.

From the article:
"As a family doctor, I've observed that more and more of my practice is devoted to preventing and treating nutrition-related disorders such as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. So I had hoped that the new dietary guidelines would provide me with concrete strategies for helping change my patients' eating habits for the better."

Why don't these doctors do some research instead of relying on Big Brother, er, I mean the government to tell them what to tell their patients? I guess they're too busy to read anything. Or to think for themselves. I find all kinds of interesting information simply searching Science Direct or even google. If they'd recommend to their patients to eat low-carb or paleo, most of their patients' health problems would improve and/or resolve themselves. In fact, I'd bet money on it. I'd even bet a million dollars. I could definitely use a million bucks.

Maybe they're scared? Taubes said in Why we get fat that no doctor was ever sued for recommending a low fat diet. I guess the acceptable killing of patients via the low fat nonsense is preferable to a lawsuit.

Unintended Consequences: Salt Intake, Obesity and Insulin Resistance

When William Banting wrote his Letter on Corpulence in 1863, the medical community attacked him like piranhas in a lake filled with hemophiliac swimmers. Gary Taubes describes this best in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories:

"The medical community of Banting's day didn't quite know what to make of him or his diet. Correspondents to the British Medical Journal seemed occasionally open-minded, albeit suitably skeptical; a formal paper was presented on the efficacy and safety of Banting's diet at the 1864 meeting of the British Medical Association. Others did what members of established societies often do when confronted with a radical new concept: they attacked both the message and the messenger. The editors of The Lancet, which is to the BMJ what Newsweek is to Time, were particularly ruthless. First, they insisted that Banting's diet was old news, which it was, although Banting never claimed otherwise. The medical literature, wrote The Lancet, "is tolerably complete, and supplies abundant evidence that all which Mr. Banting advises has been written over and over again." Banting responded that this might well have been so, but it was news to him and other corpulent individuals." [emphasis mine]

It was news to me as well. No one told me that I should eat that way. But what else was news to me is this, apparently restricting sodium intake can cause and/or aggravate insulin resistance. In a country with what some call a "diabetes epidemic" why are nutritionists still advocating restricting sodium intake? Especially when lower salt intake does little for lowering blood pressure, which is why it's pushed on the general public in the first place. One review found that a reduction in dietary sodium would amount to systolic blood pressure being lowered by a whopping mean of 1.1 mmHg, and diastolic by an even more underwhelming mean of 0.6 mmHg.

I suppose part of it may be because it seems a lot of the studies done were published in a journal called American Journal of Hypertension over the last 20(!) years, and I guess the "experts" and the "nutritionists" don't read it. I mean, don't read period. Because if they did, they'd have read Taubes and the plethora of other studies that would tell them that what they're telling people is flat out wrong and is killing them.

Not only can salt restriction apparently be bad for insulin resistance, but one study showed giving people more salt helps alleviate it and makes them more sensitive to the insulin.

"For the group as a whole, urinary sodium excretion increased on sodium chloride to 267 ± 118 mEq/day versus control (placebo) phase of 135 ± 53 mEq/day, P < .001. Total glycemic response in the oral GTT (area under the glucose curve) was 8.0% lower during sodium supplementation, P < .001. Secondary analysis revealed that the effect of sodium was noteworthy in 1) type 2 diabetic subjects (n = 8), 2) sodium -sensitive subjects (n = 10), and 3) nondiabetic subjects receiving antihypertensive drug treatment (n = 6). The total insulinemic response to oral GTT was also lowered by sodium loading among diabetic subjects. Thus, an abundant sodium intake may improve glucose tolerance and insulin resistance, especially in diabetic, salt-sensitive, and or medicated essential hypertensive subjects." [emphasis mine]

(The effect of sodium supplementation on glucose tolerance and insulin concentrations in patients with hypertension and diabetes mellitus, from the American Journal of Hypertension, Volume 14, Issue 7, July 2001, Pages 653-659)

One of the most recent and largest studies from the journal Metabolism, took data from 152 healthy people who were prescribed a high or low salt diet. It too found that a low salt diet was associated with increased insulin resistance.

People are expensive to do studies on. You have to pay them to participate. Lab rats on the other hand are cheap and you don't have to pay them anything and you get to dissect them when the study is over so you can obtain even more information on what was going on physiologically. One rat study found:

"In the present study, higher body weight, blood glucose, plasma insulin, triacylglycerols (triglycerides) and cholesterol, hematocrit and heart rate were observed in animals on low salt intake compared to the normal-salt group. Blood pressure and glucose uptake were lower on low-than on normal-salt diet." [emphasis mine]

(Insulin resistance due to chronic salt restriction is corrected by α and β blockade and by l-arginine, from Physiology & Behavior, Volume 88, Issues 4-5, 30 July 2006, Pages 364-370)


If you've been paying attention, insulin resistance (and by extension diabetes) is associated with obesity. Apparently one study showed that restricting salt intake in female Wistar rats predisposed their female offspring to obesity.

Most of the studies say that more and larger studies are needed. As mentioned above, studies are expensive. There were some studies in humans that found the opposite or no correlation between salt intake and insulin resistance, but of these I saw, they used a very small number of people, in one only eight and were very short term. That's not enough subjects or time to get meaningful data. We need large studies with lots of people, that way individual variation is controlled for. All of the rat studies I found showed a correlation with low salt intake and insulin resistance, and since rats are cheap, there were more rats involved than people. It may be that some people are not as effected by low sodium intake as others.

So here we have unintended consequences, in that nutritionists are advocating you messing with your diet for what might amount to a slightly lower blood pressure, at the expense of something else completely unforeseen. How do you like being an unwitting participant in one of the biggest health studies ever made? Because that's what you are if you live in any country that follows the dietary guidelines set forth by the USDA. You may think you have no problem eating as you are, but the food manufacturers have made it a point to remove salt and fat from the food they sell you. So unless you are making a concerted effort to add it back in, you may well be deficient and not even know it.

Common sense is indeed not very common. If excess salt intake had anything to do with ill health, the human race in western Europe and elsewhere would not have survived into the modern era. Last I checked, prior to the 20th century, people did not have refrigeration and used, get this, salt and LOTS of it to cure meat. I doubt there's any way to find out exactly how much they consumed, but it was way more than we do now. And since we don't have reports that medieval people were dropping dead from stroke or heart disease (plague is another matter), I dare say the salt wasn't a primary cause of mortality. Of course, absense of evidence is not evidence of absence, and maybe they just didn't live long enough for the salt to kill them.