Day 34 – Are We Poisoning Ourselves?

“In the Middle Ages, they had guillotines, stretch racks, whips and chains.  Nowadays, we have a much more effective torture device called the bathroom scale. “

~Stephen Phillip

207.6 lbs.

I set a few milestones for myself when I undertook this project, and I was hoping to be down 40 lbs by the halfway mark at Day 51. So far I’m on track with 16 days to drop 7.6 lbs.

Remember, I’m doing this to show how harmful starving yourself is, and I’m in no way encouraging this as a method of weight loss. I’ve been told to expect it to take as much as 2 years to return my body to normal processing of food after just 100 days of this abuse.

Speaking of self abuse (no, not that kind, Hairy Palms) chances are you’ve been poisoning yourself without even knowing it.

A little history: in 1957 an enterprizing Japanese chap came up with a new form of sweetener, glucose isomerase that rearranged the composition of glucose in corn syrup, making it into fructose. By the 1970s it was being produced industrially as high fructose corn syrup. HFCS (as it’s called in the US; aka glucose-fructose syrup in the UK or glucose/fructose in Canada) is hailed as “cost-efficient for many sweetener applications”. In other words it costs a lot less than table sugar which usually comes from sugar cane. Are you with me so far? Because we’re about to go down the rabbit hole…

A cheaper ingredient that offers the sweetness of sugar is a good thing – for manufacturers. Because it’s so much sweeter, not only can they save money by using it instead of sugar but they can put a lot less of it in the drink and food they sweeten, right?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

The thing is, around the same time Coke, Pepsi, et. al. started using HFCS in place of sugar they also decided to add another ingredient: salt. Because salt is bitter, they add more HFCS to mask that bitterness. The sodium is in both regular and diet drinks, so one wonders how much aspartame they need to mask the salt. Diet drinks have more sodium in them than regular, high calorie ones: 160mg (Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi) to 640mg (Canada Dry Diet Ginger Ale) per 2 litre bottle, based on a glance at labels I performed recently.

An aside: it’s urban legend that we taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter on separate parts of our tongues. This simply isn’t true. Our tastebuds can detect any of these on any part of the tongue.

Okay, back to the salty soda pop. Why do they put sodium in drinks? The same reason bars used to offer complimentary salty peanuts and pretzels in open bowls.  Because it makes you thirsty. You down a cool, refreshing can of pop… and crave more. you reach for a second and cha-ching! They’ve just doubled their sales.

But as bad as it is to have yet another source of hidden sodium pop up, the HFCS is far more insidious.  Manufacturers don’t just like it for it’s sweetening ability; it acts as a “browning agent” as well. So HFCS goes into bacon and other meat products, as well as barbecue sauce and a host of other things. But why it browns so well when you cook it is due to protein glycation and cross-linking. It works on your steak on the grille, and on your arteries the same way.

Then there’s how it gets processed by your body. HFCS is processed in your liver, not your stomach, and is converted into glycogen but creating a lot of uric acid. Uric acid is the culprit behind gout & hypertension, and the increased uric acid actually raises your blood pressure.

And when you eat natural glucose sugars like those in fruit, your body sends signals that tells you when you’re getting full. HFCS doesn’t send these signals. Fructose doesn’t stimulate insulin production, so your appetite regulation has no idea you’ve been consuming those calories, even as your body starts storing all that energy away. So you still feel hungry even as your fat cells swell.

It’d be all to easy to say something simple like “ditch the pop and you’ll be better off”. The problem is that HFCS is now in more than half the processed foods we eat, including loaves of bread, mustard, and other places you wouldn’t suspect.In fact we eat about 142 lbs. of the stuff per year.

Buy made-in-store breads where possible, or bake your own if you have the knack. Avoid processed foods, read condiment labels carefully, and cut down on those where you can too. Taking away the enemy’s ammo can go a long way towards winning the battle of the bulge.