Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Almighty Buck

Journal tomhudson's Journal: Nobody sets out to be fat. 10

Journal by tomhudson

Seriously, nobody except a sumo wrestler has as one of their goals in life "I want to get fat, have high blood pressure, trouble finding clothes, type two diabetes, etc." And yet there's a food additive that, the more you eat it, the hungrier you feel.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup, aka HFCS. You can read more about it in this paper from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Basically, HFCS is a replacement for cane or beet sugar. It's cheaper, and switching to HFCS from sugar cane also helped depress Cuba's economy.

The problem is that HFCS depresses the production of the hormone that says "I'm full." In other words, the more HFCS you eat, the hungrier you feel. It hasn't escaped the soda pop manufacturers. They load their drinks with HFCS, and people guzzle them like there's no tomorrow.

In fact, Pepsi ran a test where they put vending machines in peoples' homes, dispensing free Pepsi. The result - there appears to be no limit to how much HFCS-laden pop people will drink. They couldn't keep the machines stocked.

This isn't normal. It reminds me of the story about wiring mice (or was it monkeys ...) so that every time they pressed a lever, their pleasure center was stimulated. They would spend all the time pressing the lever, not even eating. Sort of like gamblers who keep feeding the one-armed bandits and wear Depends so they don't "lose their machine", or who take an extra coin cup and pee in it so they don't have to go to the bathroom.

I have friends and relatives who are overweight. I have friends and relatives who are obese. Maybe they're more susceptible to the side-effects of HFCS? It's not like they can avoid it all that easily, because our food supply is thoroughly contaminated with HFCS. In the pop we drink. Marinating everything from canned peaches to pork-n-beans. Even our daily bread.

Why? Profit and politics.

Is it really worth shortening the lives of hundreds of millions of people just so we can make an extra 2 cents a drink, and go "nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah" to Cuba? I used to laugh at the idea of regulating junk foods. I still think it's not te way to go, but we really should look into eliminating HFCS as a food additive - it's not like there aren't alternatives.

HFCS - not your grandparents' sweetener. Maybe that's why so many people from "back then" looked skinnier.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Nobody sets out to be fat. More

Nobody sets out to be fat.

Comments Filter:
  • some say it's okay, but I notice a difference in how I feel if i drink or eat something that uses HFCS.
    we actively scan the packages to see if this is an ingredient.

    For the summer i'm going to see if i can cut back to one soda a day again.
    I mostly drink diet Mt. Dew. not because i care about the calories though.
    I actually like how it tastes.

  • I feel worse when I consume HFCS. I stopped drinking carbonated beverages three years ago (except beer), and I've since trimmed almost all HFCS from my diet. It's fairly obvious when I get some accidentally - I can tell how it makes me feel. I do not much care for diet sodas, though I suppose that I could develop a taste for them if I really wanted to. Which I don't.

    It helps not to have a craving for sweet things. I like cookies, for instance, but I'd just as soon have a pretzel or a potato chip or som

  • I'm not sure, but I don't think it's used all that much in Europe. At least, I didn't notice. Our sugar is normally made from sugar beet [wikipedia.org] (A well known sugar producer is in Tienen, Belgium [wikipedia.org]). If you can produce it here, why can't it be produces in the US? I'm just wondering....

    Anyway, I was surprised by something else in your last journal (or was it second last)... You have HFCS in your bread?!? WTF? There is no place for sugar in bread. Final point... Bread is wheat, yeast, water and salt (and tha

    • There's an amazing difference between the home-made bread I bake on occasion and the manufactured (there's no better term for it) bread I buy at the store. You can leave that stuff (store-bought) out for a couple of weeks and it won't go moldy. Home-made? It never lasts long enough to find out, because there's nothing quite like the taste of fresh-baked bread right from the oven.

      The HFCS is used to feed the yeast, resulting in quicker rising times, and larger CO2 bubbles. That's why store-bought bread is

      • The HFCS is used to feed the yeast, resulting in quicker rising times

        Once again, proving that "slow food" is better than "fast food" ;-)

        • Once again, proving that "slow food" is better than "fast food" ;-)

          I *heart* my slow cooker :-)

  • At where I work I have a free and unlimited supply of Coke, Pepsi and just about everything else.

    I have one in the morning and that is it. If they made HFCS free (aka real sugar), caffeine free (with artificial caffeine flavoring) Coke I would be all over that.

    • You mean like this [drsoda.com]?

      It's available at the local supermarket, so I don't see why they can't stock it. Maybe they don't because "everyone knows coders run on caffeine"? Why not stick a request for it on a post-it on the vending machine and see what happens?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Talinom ( 243100 ) *
        I've tried the regular caffeine free coke and found it lacking. There is a flavor in caffeine that just "makes" it. And Diet Coke uses the wrong formula. Diet Coke without caffeine just sucks.

        I'd have to say that the best diet cola I have had so far is Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.
  • Fructose and Sucrose mean "sugar" to me.

    Glucose? Strange thing to have in your sweetner.

Slashdot Top Deals

The best things in life are for a fee.

Close