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Is there such a thing as good sugar? Agave nectar (syrup) is called “Good Sugar”.
What is agave nectar? It is sugar from the Mexican agave plant. It is particularly rich in fructose, the very sweet substance that separates sugar from starch. The very substance that in larger amounts taxes the liver and gives sugar it’s special ability to cause adverse health effects.
If anything, agave nectar is extra dangerous sugar. Continue Reading →
Did you think drinking sugar all day was bad for your weight? Silly you. The obesity epidemic is caused by chairs. Yes, really. At least that’s what Coca Cola wants you to believe.
Of course, chairs have been around for a long time. People even used chairs before the 1980′s – when the modern obesity epidemic began. But The Coca-Cola Company assumes that you don’t know that. They assume that you are stupid.
What do you think about their ad campaign?
As an added irony they even sell Coca-Cola chairs (as pointed out by Yoni Freedhoff).
Do you want to know the darkest secrets of the food industry? Read the great new book Salt Sugar Fat, like I’m doing right now.
The author, Pulitzer prize-winner Michael Moss, was just on the Daily Show. Watch it above.
A short comment on the book: While it’s mostly great it’s also partly stuck in the failed dogma of yesterday. Natural saturated fat is still a villain. The main solution? FRUITANDVEGETABLES. Yawn. But if you ignore that the book is absolutely fascinating. Mostly for the insights we get into the minds of the people running the processed food industry.
Highly recommended: Salt Sugar Fat – How the Food Giants Hooked Us.
Today giant cups of soda would have become illegal in New York. But at the last minute the ban was stopped by a judge. It’s not very far-fetched to believe that the soda industry had something to do with it. They have burned millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying against the proposal. They have also hired some of the highest-paid lawyers in the US to try to stop it.
Why the panic? The soda industry makes most of their profits from “heavy users”, people drinking enormous amounts of soda every day (ruining their health). People who are addicted are profitable. And the soda industry wants no obstacles to get more people addicted.
NYT: Judge Blocks New York City’s Limits on Big Sugary Drinks
Now this latest decision will be appealed and the battle goes on. We know how it will end. We’ve seen this movie before, with the tobacco industry in a lead role.
Once people smoked on the streets and in the restaurants of New York, but no more. Getting rid of insane soda cups is likely to do even more for people’s health. The question is just how long it will take.
What do you think?
PS: I know libertarians are allergic to any regulation. Fair enough. Unfortunately this time they are Big Sugar’s little helpers.
Do you remember the new study showing that more available sugar in countries is closely followed by more cases of diabetes?
As I wrote this kind of observational correlation does not really prove causation. But the story is slightly more complicated. Dr Lustig emailed me yesterday: Continue Reading →
Can sugar cause diabetes? Has the increase in sugar consumption caused the worldwide epidemic of type 2 diabetes? Ask the sugar industry and the answer is a definite NO. Ask a random scientist in the field and the answer is likely to be “probably”, “possibly”, or “maybe”.
Ask dr Robert Lustig and the answer is emphatically yes. And I think he’s absolutely right.
A new study adds more support. Looking at the available sugar during the last decade in 175 countries the relationship is clear: The more sugar available, the more diabetes. Less sugar, less diabetes.
One extra can of soda per day corresponds to an extra 1.1 percent prevalence of diabetes. If correct this would mean a single extra can of soda per day would cause 3,500,000 more people to suffer from diabetes – just in the US. A relationship that rivals the disease-causing effects of smoking.
This relationship is clear even when correcting for other possible causes like obesity. In other words: Here’s more support for the theory that excess sugar does not just make you fat. Sugar can probably make you sick even before you get fat.
To be fair, this study is just about statistical correlations: it does not prove causality. But it’s another smoking gun for the sugar industry to try to explain away.
The evidence of harmful effects of extra sugar in our diets is piling up. And there’s no need to consume it, there’s nothing nutritionally necessary about pure sugar in excessive amounts. Let’s just get rid of our sugar addiction and stop this disaster.
Drinking soda might be the #1 unhealthy habit in the world. But just how bad is it? And why is it so popular?
Here’s a nice new infographic: Soda: Is The Fizz Killing Us? – Facts & Infographic
Here’s a great new article on how junk food is engineered to be addictive:
NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
It’s perhaps nothing really new and the journalist is still stuck in old-fashioned failed ideas (sugar, salt and fat are equally bad). But the article gives great insights into the minds of the men running the junk food industry. Like this quote:
People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
You see the problem? Any junk food company trying to focus on healthy food (instead of focusing on making the junk food ever more addictive) risks being quickly eliminated. Any executive trying to do what’s right (and make less money) will likely be fired.
So what happens if the industry is left unregulated? It turns into a rapid evolution towards ever more addictive and ever less healthy junk food. It’s what’s been happening for a long time.
Here’s how a former Coca Cola executive was secretly thinking about expanding his market and making more money:
Dunn said. “How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”
I imagine that’s not too different from how any drug dealer thinks.
How do you get kids to eat more vegetables? Reports show that kids tend not to enjoy eating veggies at school lunches, often discarding them uneaten.
This is not a joke: At the recent meeting of the American Society for the Advancement of Science a radical new method was discussed. Researchers have found that putting sugar on top of the veggies makes kids like them more:
In the community, 2 of 3 preschoolers preferred vegetables lightly misted with small amounts of sweetener to plain vegetables. Serving lightly sweetened vegetables weekly across 4 weeks was associated with increases in vegetable intake compared with little change for preschoolers served plain vegetables.
Great. So now that kids are already addicted to sweet junk food we’re going to give up and put sugar in everything they eat?
Crazy times.
There’s another, better, solution. My 17 months-old daughter loves veggies like broccoli and carrots, she can’t get enough of them. Why? Her veggies are fried in butter. A healthy choice: Butter is better.
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