Corn syrup is blamed for the rise in obesity and related diseases
Richard Nixon is remembered for his infamous part in the Watergate scandal, but his lasting legacy may be a burgeoning army of people in the West who are too fat.
In the 1970s, Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, realised that farmers were harvesting more corn than they knew what to do with thanks to more efficient, industrialised methods. His answer was to champion increased production and use of high-fructose corn syrup, which has undergone enzymatic processing to convert some glucose into fructose. The fructose-rich sweetener – now nicknamed “devil’s candy” in the US – was cheaper and sweeter than sugar. By the 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), called glucose-fructose syrup in the UK, was the favourite substitute for sugar worldwide, finds a new BBC series, The Men Who Made Us Fat, starting this week.
A growing body of research suggests that fructose, contained in both glucose-fructose syrup and table sugar, has strong links to obesity, as it suppresses the action of the hormone leptin, which tells the body that the stomach is full. The endocrinologist Robert Lustig told the BBC: “Leptin goes from your fat cells to your brain and tells your brain you’ve had enough.” But when the liver is overloaded with sugar, leptin stops working. “It makes your brain think you’re starving and now what you have is a vicious cycle of consumption, disease and addiction.”
Dr Jean-Marc Schwarz, a food scientist at San Francisco General Hospital, said: “Some sugar will be converted to fat, and fructose is one sugar that can be easily converted to fat. It’s not comparable to lead or mercury: it’s the quantity that makes it toxic.”
“A growing body of research”
There’s that nebulous phrase again! Who could argue with “a growing body of research?”
Chemically, corn syrup is a sugar. Turning sugars into fats requires an oxygen-free environment; what chemists call “reduction conditions.” This cannot happen inside a living, oxygen-breathing being.
Animals would rather metabolize sugars than fats.
Fat comes from oils, oils come from plants, and animals store these oils as fats, but hold them in reserve until sugar supplies have been depleted.
To lose body fat, an animal must first exhaust its supply of sugars (glycogens) with exercise. Once the animal hits the glycogen ‘wall’ the body starts to burn fats.
The answer to the ‘obesity problem’ is to get off our fat asses and exercise until we sweat – and then some – every day until the fat is gone.
Sugar doesn’t cause it, and avoiding sugar won’t sure it.
Nope. No exercise required. We burn about 10 calories a day per pound of body mass by just living.
If you weigh 175 pounds, and eat 1,000 calories a day, you will lose weight.
Adding walking 4 miles a day would burn about another 320 calories a day. So you could eat 1,320 calories a day, and have the same effect as 1000/0.
A pound of body weight equates to about 3,500 calories. Hence, if you weighed 175 pounds, and ate 1,750 calories per day, and started walking 4 miles a day, it would take you nearly two weeks to lose a pound. Hardly a magic bullet.
Exercise can help, but the key is what you eat.
Closing in on half a century since I had the pleasure metabolic pathways in biochem, but I believe animals convert glucose to fatty acids through production of Acetyl CoA. I can gain fat by eating lots of carbohydrates (glucose) and very little oil.
Sugar from cane, sugar beets and other sources is sucrose, which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Corn syrup is predominantly glucose. HFCS is ~50% glucose/50% fructose. So, what makes it so evil?
Yeah, and if I eat more calories than I expend, I will gain weight. The only times I’ve been able to eat all I wanted and lost weight was during times of long, arduous physical labor (farm work, basic training, etc). Still, getting off your butt and doing some form of exercise is much better than the alternative.
“Still, getting off your butt and doing some form of exercise is much better than the alternative.”
That is simply speculation. Chunky people live longer than thin people.
Not speculative evidence, anecdotal evidence based on decades of alternating between no exercise and exercise. YMMV
” Chunky people live longer than thin people ”
Only if thin people have poor nutrition.
You are simply wrong.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20090625/study-overweight-people-live-longer
The study in the link you provided posits possible associations between being underweight and poor nutrition (or poor health, generally):
“Being extremely underweight is considered a marker for poor health and frailty in older adults. Even though the researchers tried to control for this, poor health could explain why study participants who weighed the least had the biggest risk of dying.”
Check this data table from the AMA.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/data/journals/jama/4972/m_joc50018t2.png
Risk of death is greater for people of normal body weight than overweight people.
My suggestion would be for you all to take a look at the documentary Fat Head. It’s available from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. If nothing else, the blog http://www.fathead-movie.com has a lot of related links.
This explanation is more than a bit simplistic, but the gist of it is this:
1 – Blood sugar spikes. Doesn’t matter what the source is, pasta, bread, sugar, HFCS.
2 – Your body responds by producing insulin. So, how does insulin reduce your blood sugar?
3 – Insulin tells your body to start turning all this extra fuel into fat. But nothing in this process is instantaneous. You stop making insulin when your sugar levels get back to normal, but there’s still excess insulin in your system which continues telling your body to make fat until its level drops.
4 – Now you’ve overshot the mark. Your blood sugar is now crashing. Instead of fueling your body’s cells, the sugar in your blood is being diverted to fat. You are starving on a cellular level. At this point you start to feel lethargic, tired, and hungry. This prompts you to eat more, and the cycle repeats.
The way to avoid this is to avoid big spikes in blood sugar. Which means avoiding carbs and sugars as much as possible.
“chunky people”, “thin people” according to who? BMI? I have often read articles in this very forum debunking the use of BMI as a measure of proper weight. Mortality is multifactorial, and happens sooner at both ends of the bell curve of weight distribution. Has the leptin negative feedback control been proven, or just correlated? Too many calories, from whatever source, makes you bigger. I think regular exercise, at least for me, makes me feel better, and I can take my belt in another notch or two. Healthy diets are like pornography, nobody knows what they are, exactly, but you know it when you see it, and it’s a little different for everybody.
In the end, we are all responsible for our own salvation.
Amen, brother.