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Lets talk about sugars (Read 1011 times)


#artbydmcbride

     ....In the end food is just matter there is not some ineffable magical quality of healthy to something that grows which then vanishes when it enters a manufacturing plant. 

     

    ....

     Well it isn't "magic"  but I do know that lots of nutrients, vitamins, etc are lost when things are cooked, rinsed, or processed.  Lots of good stuff is stripped away when they make things last longer on shelfs or without refrigeration also.

    It doesn't exactly 'magically vanish" but it does get boiled away in the steam, or washed down the drains.  Big grin

     

    Runners run

      Also, a banana (or two) is more satisfying and keeps the hunger away longer than a candy bar.  A candy bar has its place though as a mid run snack. 

       

      MTF spelling - WTH is huger?


      A Saucy Wench

        ...or processed with bleach or chlorine or other fun stuff.  Assuming it started from something that grew in the first place. 

         

        Did I say a candy bar was bad?   I just said that it really wasnt that much different from sugar yogurt. 

         

        Not riled. 

         

        MTA: dammit happyfeet now my .... as an add on to ilenes post makes no sense.  And actually for me, no, a banana makes me hungry just as fast as a candy bar.  Actually faster as there is no fat to slow down the absorption of the sugar.  But I am insulin resistant.

         

        MTA2 and yes I realize bleach is chlorine.  I'm canning today and my brain is slightly steamed.

        I have become Death, the destroyer of electronic gadgets

         

        "When I got too tired to run anymore I just pretended I wasnt tired and kept running anyway" - dd, age 7

        xor


            WTH is huger?

           

          A question asked during measuring contests.

           

          ok then

           

            DG, if you have 90 minutes to spare, and want some very technical details on the dangers of sugar,

            watch this lecture titled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"

             

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

             

            The part I don't understand though is how he basically says that fruit juice, from a sugar stand point, isn't much different than soda. He'd rather you eat the orange than the glass of orange juice, or the handful of grapes instead of the grape juice.  I have a real hard time convincing my wife of that one. 


            Feeling the growl again

              Read the article Jeff linked.  Better yet, read the book from which it was abstracted.  All your answers are there.

               

              And as you read it, remember that it is only one person's point of view.  Then read others, which will disagree on points and share other opinions.   As science has not solved everything definitively yet, somewhere along the way you will need to form your own opinion from the parsity of real fact.

              "If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does.  There's your pep talk for today.  Go Run." -- Slo_Hand

               

              I am spaniel - Crusher of Treadmills

               

              dennrunner


                The problem with all the various information sources is determining what is a fact from that which the source believes is a fact but, in fact, may not be a fact. (At least that's my problem.)

                 

                MTA: Was typing this while Spaniel posted. Wasn't trying to reword anything he said.


                Why is it sideways?

                  I didn't mean to insinuate that the final answers were there. But the reasoning behind the anti-nutritionist point of view is there in its basic form. Sorry I was unclear. 

                   

                  (Just realized that was Trent's post above. Smile )


                  A Saucy Wench

                    But in other news...the McRib is back.  Yay.

                    I have become Death, the destroyer of electronic gadgets

                     

                    "When I got too tired to run anymore I just pretended I wasnt tired and kept running anyway" - dd, age 7


                    Feeling the growl again

                      But in other news...the McRib is back.  Yay.

                       

                      Had to try one...my elk burgers are better...complete with an onion and tomato from the garden...of course the BBQ sauce I used probably had HFCS in it so I will likely be dead by morning...

                      "If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does.  There's your pep talk for today.  Go Run." -- Slo_Hand

                       

                      I am spaniel - Crusher of Treadmills

                       

                        And as you read it, remember that it is only one person's point of view.  Then read others, which will disagree on points and share other opinions.   As science has not solved everything definitively yet, somewhere along the way you will need to form your own opinion from the parsity of real fact.

                         

                        Yep. I don't especially like Michael Pollan, but I'm on his side, mostly. I might like him better if he had credited Margaret Visser's decade-earlier "Much Depends on Dinner" in his "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

                         

                        But...in a nutshell: HFCS is bad becomes it comes from corn by the means of a whole bunch of processing. Much refined sugar, even cane sugar, is fairly heavily processed also.

                         

                        So. Sometimes processing can be relatively easy: take a bunch of sap from a sugar maple, and boil it down until it gets really sweet. Easy and relatively unbad.

                         

                        But getting a cob of corn into a bottle of cola is a 'nuther balla wax, and results in a product that may taste good, but doesn't necessarily react well with your body's metabolism.

                         

                        Those who advocate eating a whole orange rather than drinking it's juice (assuming here that they mean a pasteurized juice and not something fresh-squeezed) probably know, or are of the opinion that, heat pasteurization kills (many of) the naturally-occurring vitamins that a fresh orange contains. Many of those lost nutrients are then added back to make Anita Bryant* be able to trumpet the health benefits of OJ.

                         

                        There's a two-fold thing with HFCS: not only is it not good for you (that's my opinion), but it's in freakin' EVERYTHING....breads, meatballs, pasta sauces, candy, drinks. And then there's the whole "corn itself is everywhere in the food chain" thing, which, at least to me, shouldn't be discounted.

                         

                        So: most people agree that a "balanced diet" is a good thing, but that's a little hard to do when just about everything on your plate contains some vestige of processed corn in it: the beef, the bread, the beverage: if you put cheese on your broccoli, there's some DNA strand of corn there, too.

                         

                        HERE'S MY SOLUTION:

                         

                        -Eat like your grandparents. If not born on a farm, they were probably only a generation or two away from people who were. My grandparents were used to gardening and completely utilizing the bounty: they canned, they pickled, they smoked, they froze. They also kneaded and chopped and sliced and rolled.....basically, they cooked from scratch for most meals. They ate pomegranates because they had a pomegranate bush (maybe it was a tree but it looked like a bush).

                         

                        Now, here's the kicker: most of the stuff they cooked was densely fatty, by today's standards: fried chicken in lard. Chicken-fried steak, in lard. Green beans cooked 'til fork tender, in a big pot with a real hamhock in it. Greens, and dried beans, cooked they same way. Potatoes mashed with butter and whole milk.

                         

                        But, they lived into their 90's, which is good enough for me. It's harder these days to do what they did (the whole two-income family, or single-parent thing), but it's not impossible.

                         

                        My point? Their fats were honest fats. They weren't consuming HFCS every time they ate a hotdog and bun with ketchup or a plate of spaghetti. Coke also came in an 8-ounce bottle, too, which is about half the size of most sold nowadays I think.

                         

                        So I know you want info. on sugars but you also hinted at larger dietary issues, which you sorta hafta address these days when you talk about sweeteners, since they are so prevalent in most of what we eat.

                         

                        Criminy I'm hungry now.

                         

                        *Really, really dating myself here.

                        AmoresPerros


                        Options,Account, Forums

                          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

                           

                           

                          HFCS isn't metabolically bad, it's economically bad. Smile

                           

                          And I enjoyed the part where he explained that it's Nixon's fault that the Harlem toddlers are fat.

                           

                          He's certainly entertaining.

                          It's a 5k. It hurt like hell...then I tried to pick it up. The end.

                          Trent


                          Good Bad & The Monkey

                            Those who advocate eating a whole orange rather than drinking it's juice (assuming here that they mean a pasteurized juice and not something fresh-squeezed) probably know, or are of the opinion that, heat pasteurization kills (many of) the naturally-occurring vitamins that a fresh orange contains. Many of those lost nutrients are then added back to make Anita Bryant* be able to trumpet the health benefits of OJ.

                             

                            OJ does not have to be cooked.

                             

                            The other major major problem with juice versus whole foods is that juices remove all the fiber.  The fiber is both filling and slows down the sugar's absorption from the gut.

                              Reading stuff like this (http://docakilah.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/the-6-most-horrifying-lies-the-food-industry-is-feeding-you/) also really makes the idea of eating real, identifiable, unprocessed food really appealing.  Don't know how true/common this stuff is (Snopes says mostly true), but how can you not be disgusted by "zombie orange juice"  or "blueberry crunchettes"?


                              Feeling the growl again

                                But...in a nutshell: HFCS is bad becomes it comes from corn by the means of a whole bunch of processing. Much refined sugar, even cane sugar, is fairly heavily processed also.

                                 

                                So. Sometimes processing can be relatively easy: take a bunch of sap from a sugar maple, and boil it down until it gets really sweet. Easy and relatively unbad.

                                 

                                But getting a cob of corn into a bottle of cola is a 'nuther balla wax, and results in a product that may taste good, but doesn't necessarily react well with your body's metabolism.

                                 

                                -Eat like your grandparents. If not born on a farm, they were probably only a generation or two away from people who were. My grandparents were used to gardening and completely utilizing the bounty: they canned, they pickled, they smoked, they froze. They also kneaded and chopped and sliced and rolled.....basically, they cooked from scratch for most meals. 

                                 

                                But, they lived into their 90's, which is good enough for me.

                                 

                                So preface by saying I'm being a little facetious here, but...

                                 

                                So explain to me why "processing" inherently makes a food worse?  Be specific.  So if I "process" a food to turn it into pure glucose, how is ingesting that glucose worse than ingesting glucose purified direct from food?  It is the same exact chemical structure.  This is an extreme example not necessarily representative of what all processing does, but it makes a point.  The "processing is bad" is drawing an extraordinarily broad generality not necissarily based in any facts.

                                 

                                Now, the whole "eating like your grandparents" thing.  Well, the people from that generation THAT YOU REMEMBER may have been 90, but the fact is that the average life expectancy for that generation was much shorter than for the current generation.  The current youth, however, may be the first generation with a life expectancy short than that of their parents (in the US anyways).  IMHO it is an over-simplification of the situation to say that what prior generations ate was better, and what we eat now is worse.  For example my great-grandfather ate a crapload of fat in his diet, and had his first heart attack before he was 50.  He lived into his 80s, but does that mean his diet was better?  Judging from his young heart attack, not necessarily.  Pickling...well, the Asian countries do a ton of that and they have an unusually high rate of gastric cancer directly linked to that.  So think twice before you think pickling is healthy for you.

                                 

                                That said, I agree with much of what you said.  I garden as much as I can, even if the failure rate the past few years has made me question the value.....the "fresh" food we buy these days is picked green and shipped hundreds of miles.  Don't fool yourself into thinking much of the veggies you buy at the store are really all that nutritious for you.  I hunt 90% of the meat we use, not because I think farmers put weird stuff in store-bought meat (I know for a fact this is over-blown having grown up farming), but because it is much leaner meat.  I can everything from my garden I can't eat fresh--- 1 year of canning green beans constantly (80+ jars) and we're eating like kings for 5 years.

                                 

                                Sugar, I've been trying to cut down as much simple sugar as possible...regardless of the source.  IMHO the differentiation between simple sugars is overblown, you really need to be cutting down on all of them in favor of more complex carbs.

                                "If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does.  There's your pep talk for today.  Go Run." -- Slo_Hand

                                 

                                I am spaniel - Crusher of Treadmills

                                 

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