The Misconception of Natural Sweeteners

Lots of things are natural, meaning they occur in nature. Arsenic, cyanide, uranium, deadly nightshade. That doesn't mean you'd want to eat them, or even come into contact with some of them. I don't know how many articles I have read decrying the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and yet saying that regular sugar is fine. Now, I'm not saying that HFCS is the same as sugar, it's not, by a long shot, however, neither of them are good for your health. Other naturally occurring sugars are no better, like honey. Sugar is sugar, and the glucose spikes your blood sugar while the fructose portion damages your liver and raises your triglyceride levels. That includes the fructose in fruit.

We have articles in newspapers like this one, since it's Valentine's day:

"But let's not make fructose the only bad guy here. The real problem is our consumption of all added sugar. Naturally occurring sugars like fructose, found in fruit, and lactose, found in milk, are valuable nutrients."

Overall, this article is better than most, but still has some problems. It fails in that it differentiates the fructose in fruit from the fructose in HFCS. There's not one iota of a difference, with perhaps the exception that if you ate a piece of fruit you might get less than if you ate something laden with HFCS. The problem is, our modern fruit has been bred to be bigger and sweeter. The sweeter it is, the more fructose is in it. Also, the fructose found in sucrose (table sugar) is also the same to your cells.

The problem is, they can't let go of the notion, that "everybody knows it's common knowledge" notion, that fruit is good for you. Five hundred years ago everyone knew the earth was flat too, and the center of the universe to boot. We all know what happened to Galileo when he dared to suggest otherwise.

"Does this research mean that eating fruit will increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes? Absolutely not."

That statement may be blatantly false, considering the study out of New Zealand that I wrote about last week, that I might add no American media picked up (good thing I didn't hold my breath).

Another newspaper article, also acts like natural sweeteners aren't a problem:

"While the massive amount of high-fructose corn syrup consumed by many people isn't a great choice, a more moderate amount of natural sweeteners can be a wonderful complement to a healthy diet."

What exactly is their idea of "moderation"? Eating 100 lbs of sugar a year versus the current 150+? Taubes wrote about this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it seems from some reports by doctors who were in Africa and other colonial places a hundred years ago that a sugar intake of approximately 60 lbs was the cut off point of "too much". After consumption rose above that level, and after a time frame of about 20 years consuming such levels, they saw diabetes and metabolic syndrome begin to develop, along with all the other western diseases that go along with them. And really, it might be that a lower consumption just means it takes longer to develop metabolic problems in some people, or maybe even in most people. I doubt seriously the authors of these news articles imagine that we really might need to restrict our sugar intake to a minuscule amount to avoid developing disease.

The first article I cited did have a great line in it:

"If we really looked like what we eat, most Americans would look like kernels of corn."

There's the truth if I ever read it.

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.

There's No Fat in Sugar

We have an obesity epidemic in this country because our government, dietitians and doctors continue to give people the wrong information. Take for example an article on the Pima Indians from the NIH.

"Thirty years of research show that exercising and eating lower fat, fiber-rich foods can at least delay diabetes. "If you delay it long enough," adds Dr. Knowler, "It's almost as good as preventing it...

[NIH doctors] also discovered that high levels of insulin in the blood, or hyper-insulinemia, is another strong risk factor.

Studying this clue, researchers working with patients found that high levels of insulin were linked to insulin resistance. Normally, the pancreas releases insulin to regulate the amount of sugar or glucose in the blood. People who have non-insulin-dependent or Type II diabetes (hereafter referred to simply as "diabetes") produce insulin, but their bodies don't respond to it effectively. NIH researchers have made it clear that people with insulin resistance are those most likely to get diabetes...

The second strategy is to encourage those who are at high risk to change behaviors that can lead to diabetes, such as eating a high fat diet, being physically inactive, and being overweight.

The NIH has begun a major nation-wide program to prevent diabetes in people who increase exercise and eat lower fat foods." [emphasis mine]

Now let me explain something to you that even a five year old should be able to understand. We have three basic nutrients, fat, carbohydrates and protein. Carbohydrates break down in the blood into sugar. This causes you to secrete insulin, sometimes it makes people insulin resistant, some think quite possibly because of exposure to sugar and/or refined carbohydrates.

Once you are insulin resistant, simply cutting out the sugar and simple carbohydrates doesn't stop you from being insulin resistant. If you continue to eat carbohydrates, depending on genetics, you may become type 2 diabetic. If you don't eat carbohydrates, and restrict them severely, you will not. It's not possible (to my knowledge) to become diabetic if you are not eating carbs, because you don't have an increase in blood sugar if you're not consuming carbohydrates and therefore very little insulin is secreted. Some people can eat more carbs than others and be okay. Some have to cut out all carbohydrates, as in the case Taubes mentions in his book about the du Pont executive who couldn't even eat an apple. Some have said their insulin resistance improves after months of being on a low carb diet, and they can then have some carbs without having problems.

So you tell me why in the hell they are advocating that people who are already insulin resistant eat more carbohydrates? Because that's what they're doing. By lowering fat you raise carbohydrate consumption. Protein intake cannot increase very much, you can't tolerate too much of it (unless you're body building and breaking down muscle).

Why do they blame fat? I think it's because of the mistaken notion that since the Pima were agriculturalists that meant they didn't eat meat and that they only ate carbs. There isn't a single documented case of a native society being completely vegetarian, that I know of anyway. They usually tend to eat whatever they can get their hands on.

"A dietary change common to all these cases [of Native American cultures] has been the increased consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates ... Since the key diagnostic feature of diabetes is high blood sugar, often accompanied by sugar in the urine, diabetes is frequently spoken of as "sugar diabetes" and "I've got sugar" or "I've got high sugar"... All carbohydrates cause a rise in blood glucose, and the glycemic index, a meaure of the impact of food or a meal on the rise in blood glucose, has a significant but transitory effect on both insulin production and glucose homeostasis." --from the Encyclopedia of medical anthropology by Carol R Ember, p 342

Since the Pima didn't grow sugar or refine grain to within an inch of it's life, I'm going to go with door number 1. And that is, the Pima are overweight or obese and diabetic because they consume carbohydrates typically found in the western diet. They may have consumed carbohydrates before contact with Europeans, but they were not the same kind of carbohydrates. Also, because they live in a rather inhospitable place, they may have not gotten enough calories, and this functions in much the same way as carbohydrate restriction if Ancel Key's studies on starvation are worth anything.

It's sad that all of the Native Americans' ancestors were screwed over by the Europeans. But what's even sadder, is that they are continuing to be screwed over even today, just like every other overweight or obese person in this country who has been told that they're fat because they eat too much. They will continue to get type 2 diabetes, will continue to have legs amputated and will continue to die prematurely as long as the lie that fat is the problem is perpetuated.

In the beginning...

In the beginning God created journalists. And they were real journalists, in that they rooted out the truth and gave it to the general public. But then somehow things changed, as they usually do, and journalists became beholden to corporate interests. And they stopped telling you (the public) the truth and began telling you what they thought was the truth. Or rather, what they thought ought to be the truth. It may not have been entirely their fault. They were lied to. But instead of investigating whether what they were told was a lie or not, they accepted it at face value. Perhaps the scent of money to be had made them shut their eyes and their ears and accept the lies. I suppose the glint of silver does that to a person.

We know it's a lie. Gary Taubes has shown us all that. The man deserves a nobel prize.

What pisses me off, is that I was lied to. Isn't that how it usually is? Humans are very self-centered creatures for the most part. I was told all my life that I ate too much, and that was why I was fat. In my case though, I now know that's not true and I can do something about it. I've lost about forty pounds since I read Taubes' book last May.

The same can't be said for the millions of dead. That's not hyperbole either. Almost everyone who has died of complications from diabetes in the last thirty years might have been saved if they'd only been told the truth, instead of to "eat more fruit." That includes my mother's best friend, who lost her leg before she lost her life some years ago now.

The lies go on almost every day in the press and on the daily news or morning show, and people continue to believe them. And until the lie is stopped, we'll have more dead best friends, more dead mothers, more dead sisters, etc... It doesn't have to be this way.