[Archive November 13, 2005]
This is my first “diet/nutritional post”. We’ll see how it goes. Please enjoy…
The current popular diets include The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston, M.D., The Sugar Busters, Dr. Phil McGraw’s The Ultimate Weight Solution, The Zone Diet by Dr. Barry Sears, The Atkins Diet and, of course Weight Watchers. The Abs Diet (©2004 Rodale Inc.) by David Zinczenko is a new-comer. It caught my attention in part because of its bright orange cover and in part because well-defined abdominals for men are all the rage and, most especially, because it is pretty slim (under 300 pages). I am not looking to loose weight or to have super-defined abdominals, but to be fit. I was looking for a concise source of good nutritional information and think that I have succeeded in this regard. “Calorie counting” is certainly not my cup of tea.
The Abs Diet presents mostly common-sense nutritional facts. It also promotes building muscle to burn more calories and recommends six meals per day. The actual “abdominal aspects” are treated as a somewhat secondary matter. (Basically, if a man has between 8-12 percent body fat his abdominal muscles will show.) This book is also well-written because it is focused and to the point.
Since reading The Abs Diet section on high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) this past summer, I have cut-out regular soda in favor of diet selections and noticed a “difference.” I was really unaware of the “nutritional evilness” of HFCS until then. HFCS is everywhere, even in Wheat Thins™ and various nutritional bars! The southern hemisphere sugar producers are certainly not happy with the ubiquities of HFCS from what I understand.
Play word association with high-fructose corn syrup, and if you’re like me, you say, “Froot Loops.” But when nutritionists play the same game, they spit out another word: obesity. HFCS is a man-made sweetener that’s cheaper and sweeter than sugar. Food manufacturers love it because it enhances their profits, so they add it into an unbelievable number of foods. Cereal. Ketchup. Soda. Pasta sauce. Cookies. Even some meal replacement bars, which are supposed to be good for you, list HFCS way up on the ingredients list.
We’re talking about a processed sweetener that didn’t even exist in the food chain until the 1970s. And HFCS is really, really, really bad for you. That’s because it’s packed with calories, but your body doesn’t recognize these calories. In fact, HFCS shuts off you body’s natural appetite control switches, so you can eat and eat and eat far beyond what your body would normally be able to handle. You probably know guys who can down a 2-liter bottle of Coke in a single sitting. Well, guess what? Before HFCS was invented, humans couldn’t do that. Our natural appetite control switches would kick in, detect the sugar we were consuming, and say ”!No más!” But by shutting off the switches that control appetite, HFCS —a true junk food— is making America fat. In 1970, Americans ate about half a pound of HFCS per person per year. By the late 1990s, every person was consuming about 62 pounds every year. That’s 228 additional calories per person per day.
The problem with HFCS is not the corn syrup; it’s the fructose —a sugar that occurs naturally in fruit and honey. Corn syrup is primarily made of glucose, which can be burned as a source of immediate energy, stored in your liver or muscles for later use, or, as a last resort, turned to fat. But corn syrup isn’t as sweet as other sugars, which is why HFCS became so popular. It’s cheap and doubly sweet.
Unlike glucose, you body doesn’t use fructose as an immediate source of energy; it metabolizes it into fat. While the small amount of fructose you get naturally through fruit and honey won’t make you fat, eating HFCS is sort of like setting up an IV that pumps fat directly to your gut. One of the worst offenders is soft drinks: Soda consumption has doubled from 25 to 50 gallons per person per year in the last few decades. So the amount of HFCS we’re getting is unprecedented —and many researchers think that there’s a direct link between the huge amount of HFCS we’re consuming and the huge numbers we’re seeing on the scale.
…
Even if you aren’t a soda drinker, HFCS can still sneak up on you. Here’s where nutritional labels come in handy. If a label says “sugar” or “cane sugar,” the product contains sucrose, which is a 50/50 blend of glucose and fructose. That doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. If HFCS is listed first or second, look at the chart on the nutrition label to see how much sugar the food contains. If it’s just a gram or two, don’t sweat it. But if you see a food that has 8 or more grams of sugar and HFCS is prominent on the list of ingredients, do what you do when you get turned down for a date: Move along to something else. The body can deal with a little of anything, but when your HFCS numbers start looking like Michael Jordan’s career statistics, that’s when you’re headed for trouble.
(From The Abs Diet by David Zinczenko (©2004 Rodale Inc.) p128-131)
HFCS seems to be an example of science not always improving our lives. Maybe some evolutional theory will give us hope that the human body will better process HFCS at a future date?
If you are interested, The Abs Diet’s homepage can be found here.
