HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to "Corporate?"

Tom, Tom, Tom

Corporations lie. If they have money at stake, they'll lie until someone takes them to court and makes them quit lying. Period.

As for the rest, this is not about your tables and percentages of fructose in sweeteners; it's about them being there at all. One of the articles I linked states

^An expert in carbohydrate metabolism, he initially focused on sucrose consumption. In laboratory and human tests, he found that sucrose increased blood levels of cholesterol, triglyceride, uric acid, insulin, and cortisol - all associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Sucrose also raised blood pressure and increased the fragility of blood platelet cells, making them more prone to clotting.

As dramatic as those findings were, the real surprise came when Yudkin substituted fructose for sucrose in his experiments. "The effects of eating sucrose in the quantities we eat are magnified with fructose. Fructose is the dangerous part," he said. In contrast, glucose did little more than cause cavities.^

And in the same article:

^"Fructose is part of the sucrose sugar. Sucrose is affirmed as GRAS (generally regarded as safe)," explained Judy Folke, a spokesperson at the FDA's Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Press Office in Washington,D.C. "Fructose is not GRAS, but it was treated under prior sanction because it had been used for so many years."

But the research suggests that, in retrospect, the FDA may have assumed too much.

For example, fructose has been touted for years as a safe sugar for diabetics because it doesn't trigger a rapid rise in blood sugar. That's true, but the cardiovascular consequences may outweigh the benefits for diabetics,who already face a higher than average risk of developing heart disease.

In a recent study, John Bantle, M.D., of the University of Minnesota sequentially placed 18 Type I (insulin-dependent) and Type II (noninsulin-dependent) diabetics on two diets. The only difference between the diets was that one contained carbohydrate as starch, which is digested as glucose, and the other contained carbohydrate as fructose.

When they consumed the fructose, the diabetics had fewer spikes in bloodsugar levels. Three of the Type I diabetics were able to reduce their insulin intake, a positive change. However, according to Bantle's report in the Nov. 1992 Diabetes Care, the diabetics' total cholesterol rose an average 7 percent, and their "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol rose almost 11 percent. The fructose increased their risk of heart disease.

But fructose doesn't play havoc with only the hearts of diabetics. Bantle noted the same effects in a study of 14 healthy volunteers who sequentially ate a high-fructose diet and one almost devoid of the sugar. While on the fructose diet, the subjects' total cholesterol levels increased by 9 percent and the LDL fraction increased by 11 percent.

^

And from my 2nd link:

^Consumption of beverages containing fructose rose 135 percent between 1977 and 2001. Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only cheaper to make, it was also much sweeter (processed fructose is nearly 20 times sweeter than table sugar), a switch that has drastically altered the American diet.

In 1966, sucrose made up 86 percent of sweeteners. Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used are made from corn.^

And:
^Dr Mercola's Comments

In case you forgot, or never knew in the first place, the number one source of calories in the US is high fructose corn syrup. ^

And if that didn't convince you:

^High fructose corn syrup is is not something that should be in your diet at all. But HFCS is the primary caloric sweetener in U.S. soft drinks. Researchers estimate that most Americans eat 132 calories of HFCS per day, while the top 20 percent of sweetener consumers eat over 300. And some, they say, eat as much as 700 calories per day of HFCS.
Sodas, of course, are not the only source of HFCS (though they represent one of the main ones). This dangerous sweetener is also in many processed foods and fruit juices, so to avoid it you need to focus your diet on whole foods and, if you do purchase packaged foods, become an avid label reader.^

It's in so many foods, you cannot avoid it unless you avoid almost ALL processed foods.

I have better things to do than argue with you on this topic. You will not win. I've been involved in medical research for a lot of years. I KNOW what I'm talking about. You don't.

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