Sing Along With Sugar

I’ve been writing about sugar and all its variations for the last few weeks now, and today is the last of the series on it.

To close out, I leave you with a video I made set to some bubblegum music – how pertinent to sugar, eh?

So get ready to sing and clap your hands, all in honor of sugar.

Do you love sugar? I hate to break the bad news to you, but sugar doesn’t love you back, no matter what the song may tell you.

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Too Much Soda Drinking Can Damage Your Muscles

For the last two weeks I’ve written articles telling you about the downside of sugar in all its variations – sugar, high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners.

I even told you of the controversy surrounding the natural sweetener stevia.

All of these sweeteners are harmful to your health, and will hinder you in your attempt to experience healthy living and health and wellness.

And as a result, they will also deter your ability to live a Low Density Lifestyle.

I thought I would move on from talking about sugar, but because sugar is consumed in such high quantities – in the U.S. per capita sugar intake is around 175 pounds a year – I’ve decided to spend this week continuing to talk about sugar.

For the next few days, I want to talk about sugary soft drinks. After all, we are inundated with advertising telling us how great our lives can be the more we consume the sugary drinks.

I figured since I don’t have the advertising budget of the soft drink companies that would allow me to run endless ads promoting my point of view, I would just have to tell you some negatives about soft drinks.

For instance, did you know drinking soda can screw up your muscles, leading to anything from mild muscle weakness to severe muscle paralysis?

This was the findings of doctors writing in a medical journal. They said soda does this because it causes blood potassium levels to drop dangerously low.

The author of the research paper said it appeared that hypokalaemia (low blood potassium) can be caused by excessive consumption of three of the most common ingredients in cola drinks – glucose, fructose and caffeine.

The author, Dr Moses Elisaf from the University of Ioannina in Greece wrote, “The individual role of each of these ingredients in the pathophysiology of cola-induced hypokalaemia has not been determined and may vary in different patients.

“However in most of the cases we looked at for our review, caffeine intoxication was thought to play the most important role.

“This has been borne out by case studies that focus on other products that contain high levels of caffeine but no glucose or fructose.”

Despite this, he warned that caffeine free cola products could also cause hypokalaemia because the fructose they contain can cause diarrhea.

“We believe that further studies are needed to establish how much is too much when it comes to the daily consumption of cola drinks.”

Excessive consumption of soda has already been linked with obesity, diabetes and tooth and bone problems.

A spokeswoman from the British Soft Drinks Association said in response to the journal article: “The soft drinks industry is committed to encouraging responsible consumption of all its products. Nutrition labeling is included on the pack so people can make an informed choice about the products they are drinking.”

What? Did you expect them to say something different?

Like, that drinking soft drinks can cause your health to suffer and take you off the path of health and wellness?

Fat chance.

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How Much Sugar Do You Eat?

I’ve been talking about sugar and all its variations for the last two weeks, and pointing out that sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners are not good for health.

I’ve even pointed out that there are questions about stevia, the natural herbal sugar.

So now the question is: how much sugar do you eat?

I’m going to show it in pictures. In the following pictures, each sugar cube shown is 4 grams. The cubes are stacked, and the more sugar, the bigger the stack.

If, for example, the picture shows 10 sugar cubes, that means that eating that food is equal to eating 10 cubes of sugar.

And So Now, Guess Who Is Being Hyped as “The Natural” Choice?

I’ve been writing articles for the last week about sugar, and how detrimental it is to your health.

I started off by telling you about the downside of sugar, and then how toxic high fructose corn syrup is. From there, I discussed artificial sweeteners, telling you about the dangers of all five of the artificial sweeteners that have been approved by the FDA: saccharine, aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K, and neotame.

And so, where does that leave us? Well, believe it or not, the good old sugar industry sees an opening. They realize that if they portray themselves as the natural option, they can convince people that they are the healthy choice.

Why, what a public service they are providing! They are advising people to get away from using the poisonous artificial sweeteners, and instead return back to the fold by sticking with the real thing.

From the tomato sauce on a Pizza Hut pie called “The Natural,” to the just-released soda Pepsi Natural, some of the biggest players in the American food business have started, in the last few months, replacing high-fructose corn syrup with old-fashioned sugar, and promoting the fact that by doing that, they are giving people a healthy choice.

Blamed for hyperactivity in children and studied as an addictive substance, sugar has had its share of image problems. But the widespread criticism of high-fructose corn syrup — the first lady, Michelle Obama, has said she will not give her children products made with it — has made sugar look good by comparison.

Most scientists do not share the perception. Though research is still under way, many nutrition and obesity experts say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess. But, as is often the case with competing food claims, the battle is as much about marketing as it is about science.

But with sugar newly ascendant, the makers of corn syrup are fighting back. Last fall, the Corn Refiners Association mounted a multimillion-dollar defense, making sure that an advertisement linking to the association’s Web site pops up when someone types “sugar” or “high-fructose corn syrup” into some search engines.

In one television advertisement, a mother pours fruit punch into a cup while another scolds her because the punch contains high-fructose corn syrup. When pressed to explain why it is so bad, the complaining mother is portrayed as a speechless fool.

Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association, said consumers were being duped.

“When they discover they are being misled into thinking these new products are healthier, that’s the interesting angle,” Ms. Erickson said in an interview.

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association says that when it comes to obesity, there is no difference between the syrup and sugar.

Dr. Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco Children’s Hospital, said: “The argument about which is better for you, sucrose or HFCS, is garbage. Both are equally bad for your health.”

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A Look at Artificial Sweeteners, Part 1

I told you about how high fructose corn syrup is toxic to your health in yesterday’s article.  But there’s a whole other category of sweeteners besides things like corn syrup.  And that category is the realm of artificial sweeteners.

If sugar in its “natural” state (though it’s hard to think of something like high fructose corn syrup, and many other sugar products, as something in their “natural” state) is detrimental to your health, then artificial sweeteners are even worse.

A diet laden with artifical sweeteners will cause all kinds of health problems, and will definitely not allow you to experience healthy living nor live a balanced life of health and wellness.

And it sure won’t let you live a Low Density Lifestyle.

So let’s take a look at the world of artificial sweeteners, or as they are also called, nonnutritive sweeteners.

Since the 1950s, when nonnutritive sweeteners came into existence, they have been seen as a weight-loss wonder that allowed people to have their sweets without the calories and cavities. Nonnutritive sweeteners are also referred to as intense sweeteners, alternative sweeteners, very low-calorie sweeteners, and artificial sweeteners.

In the 1970’s, the wonder of artificial sweeteners switched to concern when it was discovered that artificial sweeteners had a link to cancer.

The five FDA-approved nonnutritive sweeteners are saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, and neotame. Each of these is regulated as a food additive. In regulating them, the FDA set an Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) for each additive. The ADI is the amount of food additive that can be consumed daily over a lifetime without appreciable health risk to a person on the basis of all the known facts at the time of the evaluation.

Let’s take a look at the first artificial sweetener on the list: Saccharin.

Saccharin has been around for over 100 years and claims to be the best researched sweetener. Saccharin is also known as Sweet and Low, Sweet Twin, Sweet’N Low, and Necta Sweet. It does not contain any calories, does not raise blood sugar levels and is 200 to 700 times sweeter than sucrose (table sugar).

Saccharin is used in tabletop sweeteners, baked goods, jams, chewing gum, canned fruit, candy, dessert toppings, and salad dressings. It also is useful in cosmetic products, vitamins, and pharmaceuticals.

In 1977, research showed bladder tumors in male rats with the ingestion of saccharin. The FDA proposed a ban on saccharin, but Congress intervened and allowed saccharin to remain in the food supply as long as the label carried this warning: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

But in 2000, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the National Institutes of Health concluded that saccharin should be removed from the list of potential carcinogens, and the warning was removed from saccharin-containing products.

But the safety concerns of consuming products with saccharin remain even with the removal of the warning. In response to the National Toxicology Program (NTP) removing saccharin from the list of potential carcinogens, the Center for the Science in Public Interest (CSPI) wrote a report, which said in part:

“It would be highly imprudent for the NTP to delist saccharin. Doing so would give the public a false sense of security, remove any incentive for further testing, and result in greater exposure to this probable carcinogen in tens of millions of people, including children (indeed, fetuses). If saccharin is even a weak carcinogen, this unnecessary additive would pose an intolerable risk to the public.

“Thus, we urge the NTP on the basis of currently available data to conclude that saccharin is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, because there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animals (multiple sites in rats and mice) and limited or sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans (bladder cancer) and not to delist saccharin, at least until a great deal of further research is conducted.”

Another claim made against saccharin is the possibility of allergic reactions. The reaction would be in response to it belonging to a class of compounds known as sulfonamides which can cause allergic reactions in individuals who cannot tolerate sulfa drugs. Reactions can include headaches, breathing difficulties, skin eruptions, and diarrhea. It’s also believed that the saccharin found in some baby formulas can cause irritability and muscle dysfunction.

So consuming saccharin products such as Sweet and Low is something that is not conducive to healthy living and can be very detrimental to your health.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with this discussion on artificial sweeteners, so don’t forget to tune in tomorrow.

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High Fructose Corn Syrup is Toxic to Your Health

In yesterday’s article, I told you how eating sugar in any of its variations is not good for you nor conducive to healthy living or experiencing health and wellness.

In other words, eating sugar does not promote a Low Density Lifestyle, and will contribute to a High Density Lifestyle.

One of the forms of sugar that I discussed in yesterday’s article that is especially bad for  you is high fructose corn syrup.

I discussed how high fructose corn syrup, which is found in so many products, is metabolized in the liver and increases the creation of fats that circulate in the bloodstream, which can then lead to fatty liver disease, cirrhosis of the liver, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The reason the use of high fructose corn syrup has proliferated in nearly all processed foods you find in the grocery store is two fold: because it was thought to be a cheap alternative to sugar, and because it gave farmers something to do with all the corn that was being grown. Instead of corn yields being decreased, the high fructose corn syrup industry lobbied hard to get it into our stomachs.

To compound the health problems that high fructose corn syrup cause, it has been discovered that many foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup contain mercury, left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, a key ingredient in high fructose corn syrup. And worst of all, the FDA and the industry have known about this potential toxin and has continued serving it up since at least 2005.

Where does this mercury go? Once high fructose corn syrup is eaten, the mercury embeds in the tissues of the body.

Before now, the greatest threat for mercury exposure was through fish, followed by mercury amalgam in dentistry and through vaccines, as it is sometimes used as a preservative. But a recent study estimates that exposure via high fructose corn syrup could be up to 50 times that of mercury amalgam exposure in children age 3-19, the age group that is the largest consumers of high fructose corn syrup.

Those with high exposure show signs of sensory impairment, sensation loss and lack of coordination. Just by choosing your food from the boxes and bottles in the center aisles of the grocery store, you could be exposing yourself to high levels of mercury, and in the process, poisoning yourself.

A recent study tested products directly from the supermarket. One in three tested positive for mercury residue. These included products like Smucker’s Strawberry Jelly, Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, Nutra Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars, Pop-Tarts Frosted Blueberry and Coca-Cola Classic – and this list of foods only scratches the surface of all the foods that are toxic due to their mercury residues.

So here’s the story: if you want to experience healthy living and be on the road to health and wellness and living a Low Density Lifestyle, then stay far, far away from high fructose corn syrup.

Read the labels carefully of all packaged foods you buy, and you will discover how many of them contain high fructose corn syrup.

In yesterday’s article I said Americans eat 170 pounds of sugar a year. High fructose corn syrup, being in so many foods, is a good part of the reason for that 170 pounds a year.

And just think how much of that 170 pounds a year might be dumping mercury in your body. It boggles the mind just to conceive of that.

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