JohnSmith2007

Welcom back John. I see you've recovered from your board suicide.

Right.... Just passing time until my account is deactivated. It has been requested.

This has been an interesting exercise in the dynamics of VJ. I really don't care one way or another about HFCS, I only posted it as a reaction to a friend of mines statement here at the office. You may have noticed I haven't posted a topic in quite a while. My office mate was looking over my shoulder as I was trolling the forums the other day and asked about VJ. I told him about the site and mentioned to him that I haven't posted in a while. He asked why. I said that any discussion can spin out of control for any reason and it gets tiresome. He said show me. So I picked a story to post, one that is just a doctor stating his opinion on a subject that really means very little. I knew that I needed to stay away from GW, religion or gun control because those subjects insured an argument. I wanted one that would show my friend that even the most trivial subject gets spun out of all semblance of normal adult discussion.

Now, I admit that once things got going I participated in kind. When someone posted a reasonable comment I responded in a reasonable way. When faced with a hysterical comment I reacted in kind. I must say that you all didn't disappoint! I got reactions that were worthy of discussions about abortions or the death penalty. All over sugar. Really, its only sugar.

Well, my friend now sees why I don't post topics here anymore. There are some people here that only want to argue. Its a game for them. The subject does not matter, only that they make the discussion spin out of control in the shortest amount of time. Its a shame really, this place could be a lot of fun when you consider the wide range of nationalities and viewpoints here. But the usual suspects have taken over and reminded me once again why I stopped trying to bring up topics.

So, I am going to leave now. I am sure there will be several pages of poison aimed at me. There will be the "you were just as bad as everyone else" posts. I am cool with that. I will not respond nor will I even care what is said. I will ask that this thread be closed because it has served its purpose.

Thank you all for participating in my little experiment.

excess fruit can be bad for you..

Ah, now fruit is bad for you. I see.....

but let's play another comparison. HFCS made from "corn syrup" --- Look at the calorie content/nutritional value of corn. You'll understand very quickly how people get fat eating the garbage.

Yeah, corn is a really bad thing. Good thing we don't grow much of it in America.

Honey too! Big, bad, evil honey.

Yeah, some people will never really understand. But demagoguery trumps truth every time.

Yes, all 'sugar' in excess is bad for you. But cane sugar (sucrose) is NOT the same thing chemically as HFCS! Fructose is far worse for the body than glucose. Fructose is metabolized by the body to preferentially go to fat and visceral fat in particular. You need to do more reading!

So that means we shouldn't be eating this?

The sugar in fruit is fructose! You need to understand what you are talking about!

How would you go about that I wonder... As I see it that's the tip of a very large iceberg... When major food processors command multi-billion marketing budgets and own, for example, highly lucrative contracts to provide (processed) school dinners to kids and what goes into vending machines.

You might be right that HFCS doesn't deserve the stigma it has gotten (but there needs to be more conclusive evidence than the word of this guy), but as an additive it is still surely a big part of the problem of excessive food processing in the food chain. HFCS is added to make low quality, nutritionally barren food taste better. Surely if sugar is bad, so is HFCS - why use any of it?

You might be surprised to see that I agree with you. It is going to be very hard to change the way we eat. I guess it comes down to proper parenting for our children, holding the school lunch program accountable and personal responsibility for adults. I find government regulations in regard to commercial products to be a very poor way of solving the problem. The way to change things is to only buy foods that have been minimally processed and demand more choices from manufactures. If a product doesn't make a company money then they will change it until they do make a profit. I for one deplore junk food (with the occasional exception of an once in a while burger) and eat mostly home cooked. I am lucky that both my wife and I are good cooks and we try to stay away from anything that is pre-packaged. I am overweight but not because I am a junk food junky, I just like my own cooking.

I guess my reason for this thread is not to champion HFCS but because I instinctively recoil at the PC mentality that has surrounded the whole subject. As with many other so called "scientific" reasons for the crusades for or against certain things most people just listen to the hype and jump on the bandwagon. We as a society no longer think for ourselves but listen to the popular media and follow along with no regard to the scientific, or lack of, reasons behind the latest popular fad. Today it is HFCS, yesterday it was salt and tomorrow who knows?

Yep. People that make moonshine - if they're not careful, they'll end up with methanol and can die.

To the OP: consume all the sugar (fructose, HFCS, glucose) you want, but if you're over 45 and have a lot of belly fat, you're at very high risk for developing diabetes. In fact, you may already have it, but haven't been diagnosed. I'd recommend you go get a periodic checkup because uncontrolled diabetes can put you in a world of hurt.

To your first statement, you cannot get methanol from corn. You get methanol from wood fiber. Different thing altogether.

To your second statement. Yes, we agree 100%. To much sugar of any type is bad and is especially bad to older overweight people. This is why I don't drink soda and only use Stevia in my tea and coffee. The point here is this, there is no reason to demonize HFCS. It is bad, equally as bad as cane sugar. The problem isn't HFCS, it is the overuse of sugar in general. To much of either will cause bad physical consequences. The problem is that our pre-packaged oriented food supply is using HFCS in almost everything. If HFCS were banned and the industry used cane sugar in equal amounts in the very same products we as a nation would be no healthier. We would still be obese. The minor extra weight caused by the excess fructose that HFCS has isn't the problem, the problem is the abundance of sugar laden foods that we have become addicted to. We need to get back to home cooked meals rather than junk food and McDonalds. That is the problem.

Gas? Additives? Talk about being difficult. But let's do this: Why is the mixture different in the winter vs. the summer? If it's all the same and if ratios don't matter and have no effect, then why bother changing the mix?

May I remind you as to what you said:

Sucrose is sugar (50% fructose and 50% glucose), HFCS is not. Hence, it should not be called sugar.

HFCS and Cane sugar are both sugars. If you still deny that then you are being deliberately ignorant. You managed to deflect enough to get away from your original erroneous statement. I am reminding you of your incorrect statement.

You mean the ratio of fructose and glucose. And if the ratio differs, then they are chemically not the same.

You are deliberately being difficult. HFCS and cane sugar are the same thing only in different ratios. For example, The gas you buy in the winter has a different blend that what you buy in the summer. The ratios of gas and additives are different but it is still gas. I think I have proved my point. If you want to continue to be obtuse then go right ahead. I am going home for the night.

Several posts by different individuals have been removed for TOS violations. You can disagree with the post but you are not allowed to insult the poster. Any further such posts will lead to thread bans

I stand behind my posts. They were not in violation of the TOS. They just struck to close to home for some people. I respectfully disagree with your removing them.

A point often made in my area of expertise is 'A little bit of knowledge is dangerous!' I know a great deal more than you might expect! I deal with this daily. You need to stop listening to corporate mouthpieces who use that little bit of knowledge and twist it or spin it into dangerous 'factoids'. No wonder someone wondered if you were getting all this from Fox 'news'! They are masters at this type of BS!

You should take your own advice. You are listening to people with an ax to grind against HFCS. All sugar in excess is bad for you. Cane sugar and HFCS are just the same thing derived from different sources. The ratio of fructose to sucrose differs a bit but chemically they are the same.

And there you go with the Fox News bit. Whats up with that? Is it supposed to be some sort of an insult? I get my news from dozens of different places, some left and some right.

You seem to only want to insult and not discuss. Why is that? Do you find your ability to debate so limited?

I haven't agreed with you. The "sugar" I introduced there is the kind that you shouldn't ingest if you still want to drive. It's against the law. The point being that the composition of the corbon, hydrogen and oxygen makes all the difference. You see, ethanol and methanol are very similar. One only gets you drunk, the other makes you blind.

Where did methanol and ethanol come into the discussion? So sugar and alcohol are both carbon based? Big deal. You said HFCS isn't sugar. It is. That is a fact. Try less deflecting. If you don't like HFCS then don't use it. That is your right but the demonize it makes no sense. They are both sugar, so closely related to make the difference moot.

Why do the people that don't like HFCS feel the need to make it out as some sort of poison? To much of any sugar is bad for you. That is why I don't use traditional sugar at all. I use Stevia. It has no carbs, no glycemic index and no calories. Since using it in my tea and coffee I have lost 10% of my body weight.

It has already been provided. Maybe if you actually listened to people instead of spouting abusive garbage, you might learn something.

Next you're going to say you don't know who ADM is.

It hasn't. The author belongs to the Hoover institute. One of the contributors is ADM. That means nothing. Are you saying there is a direct link to this doctors opinion and ADM? Prove it. Where did he profit from his connection?

Oh, and I do know who ADM is. I can see one of their plants from my office window.

Really? Archer Daniels Midland isn't funding the Hoover Institute?

So if there is any link at all that disqualifies anything the guy has to say? I will remember that on the next discussion about GW. You still haven't shown any link between the author and the corn industry. Show me the money that he got.

I see. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen = carbohydrate = sugar. Got it.

How about this here sugar?

Your point? You said HFCS isn't sugar. Clearly it is. Thanks for agreeing with me.

You will say anything won't you? Even absolute factually false garbage!

No it isn't. Calm down or you will blow a gasket. The hype about DDT is way overblown. The usefulness of DDT greatly outweighs any slight harm it causes. Tell me, do you like millions of dead people in the third world? I guess they don't count huh?

Sucrose is sugar (50% fructose and 50% glucose), HFCS is not. Hence, it should not be called sugar.

Sugar is the generalised name for a class of sweet-flavored substances used as food. They are carbohydrates and as this name implies, are composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. There are various types of sugar derived from different sources. Simple sugars are called monosaccharides and include glucose, fructose and galactose. The table or granulated sugar most customarily used as food is sucrose, a disaccharide. Other disaccharides include maltose and lactose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar

A basic chemistry class would be in order for you if you don't think HFCS isn't sugar.

Drink tea! It's much better for you.

http://www.empowered...up-and-diabetes

I drink nothing but tea with Stevia sweetener. No soda for me, always been that way. If you want to avoid the problems with fructose you need to give up all fruits, honey and cane sugars. The hype about HFCS is just that, hype.

UCLA study finds high fructose corn syrup hurts memory, learning ability

News flash! Cane sugar, fruits and honey all have fructose in them. As Big Dog pointed out HFCS is 55% fructose and cane sugar is 50% fructose.

You have another straw man?

You quoted an ancient document from 1998. Here are some recent articles...

DDT and Breast Cancer in Young Women: New Data on the Significance of Age at Exposure

DDT Compound Speeds Breast Cancer Growth

Chlorinated Hydrocarbons (Organochlorines) - DDT

There are so many more links.

I just posted documents from the government. Stop watching fox news.

So your willing to trade the small increase in the possible weak link between DDT and breast cancer for the millions of Africans that die of malaria?

Mighty nice of you.

BTW, Fox news has nothing to do with any of this. Why do you keep bringing it up? How do you know I even watch Fox? It seems you are fixated on Fox. You might want to see a Dr about that.

The corn industry gets fat subsidies - billions of dollars a year - from the taxpayer. They can afford to pay anyone to say anything.

This guy has no links to the corn industry. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good hysterical episode though.

If you read fox news, sure.

No, just the American Council on Science and Health is all. But if you want to blame the Fox boogy man go right ahead.

Facts versus fears: DDT

Extract from the American Council on Science and Health publication "Facts Versus Fears" - Edition 3, June 1998. © American Council on Science and Health - all rights reserved.

.....

Conclusion

The ban on DDT was considered the first major victory for the environmentalist movement in the U.S. The effect of the ban in other nations was less salutary, however. In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying was stopped in 1964, malaria cases began to rise again and reached 2.5 million in 1969.33 The same pattern was repeated in many other tropical— and usually impoverished—regions of the world. In Zanzibar the prevalence of malaria among the populace dropped from 70 percent in 1958 to 5 percent in 1964. By 1984 it was back up to between 50 and 60 percent. The chief malaria expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that malaria would have been 98 percent eradicated had DDT continued to be used.34

In addition, from 1960 to 1974 WHO screened about 2,000 compounds for use as antimalarial insecticides. Only 30 were judged promising enough to warrant field trials. WHO found that none of those compounds had the persistence of DDT or was as safe as DDT. (Insecticides such as malathion and carbaryl, which are much more toxic than DDT, were used instead.) And—a very important factor for malaria control in less developed countries—all of the substitutes were considerably more expensive than DDT.35

[insertion: See the human toll of not using DDT here. Ends.]

And what of the charges leveled against DDT? A 1978 National Cancer Institute report concluded—after two years of testing on several different strains of cancer-prone mice and rats—that DDT was not carcino-genic.36 As for the DDT-caused eggshell thinning, it is unclear whether it did, in fact, occur and, if it did, whether the thinning was caused by DDT, by mercury, by PCBs, or by the effects of human encroachment.16,37 And as recently as 1998 researchers reported that thrush eggshells in Great Britain had been thinning at a steady rate 47 years before DDT hit the market; the researchers placed the blame on the early consequences of industrialization.38

Regardless of whether DDT, exclusive of other chemicals, presented a threat to bird populations, it remains in the news. DDT has a long half-life, and residues sometimes persist for years in certain environments. Also, DDT is an organochlorine. Some organochlorines have been shown to have weak estrogenic activity, but the amounts of naturally occurring estrogens in the environment dwarf the amounts of synthetic estrogens.39 A recent article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives suggested that the ratio of natural to synthetic estrogens may be as much as 40,000,000 to 1.40

In addition, Dr. Robert Golden of Environmental Risk Studies in Washington, DC, reviewed the research of numerous scientists and concluded that DDT and DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) have no significant estrogenic activity.41

The 1996 book Our Stolen Future speculated on a link between DDT and breast cancer, noting that DDE has been found in some breast tumors.42 Recently, charges have been made associating DDT and DDE with breast cancer—specifically, the finding that women with breast cancer had higher levels of DDE in their blood than did women without breast cancer.43 However, elevated blood DDE could quite plausibly be a result of the mobilization of fat from storage depots in the body due to weight loss associated with breast cancer. Breast cancer thus may be a risk factor for elevated DDE, rather than DDE’s being a risk factor for breast cancer.44

In a 1994 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers concluded that their data did not support an association between DDT and breast cancer.45 The researchers did note that breast cancer rates are higher than the national average in many places in the northeastern United States; but the data also indicated that the higher levels could be accounted for by nonenvironmental factors among women living in these regions—factors such as higher socioeconomic status and deferral or avoidance of pregnancy, both of which increase the risks of breast cancer by up to twofold.45,46

In October 1997 the New England Journal of Medicine published a large, well-designed study that found no evidence that exposure to DDT and DDE increases the risk of breast cancer.47 In the accompanying editorial Dr. Steven Safe, a toxicologist at Texas A&M University, stated, “weakly estrogenic organochlorine compounds such as PCBs, DDT, and DDE are not a cause of breast cancer.”48 Dr. Sheila Zahm, deputy chief of the occupational epidemiology branch at the National Cancer Institute, agrees that the body of evidence that DDT can cause breast cancer “is not very compelling.”

http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C06/C06Links/www.altgreen.com.au/Chemicals/ddt.html

Wildlife and the cancer victims are irrelevant, right?

There has been no link to cancer and DDT.

The links to wildlife harm and DDT have also never been proven.

Well, the good doctor that authored the piece also wants to bring back DDT. There are tons of other doctors out there that will disagree with him. There are studies out there that disagree with him. The simple fact that the chemical composition of sugar and HFCS is not the same leads me to believe that the body would process them differently. Be all that as it may, as a consumer I want to have the ability to chose products made with sugar over those made with HFCS. When HFCS is called sugar - which it isn' - that choice would no longer be so easy to make.

Well, it is sugar. Fructose and sucrose are both sugars, just different kinds. It just isn't cane sugar. I agree that people should have the right to choose what they eat. I haven't a problem with that, just don't demonize something that doesn't deserve it.

Oh, BTW. I think the responsible use of DDT should be allowed. The banning of DDT killed millions of people due to the sharp rise in malaria after its use was banned. That is another example of junk science taking over realistic safety.

http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsid.442/healthissue_detail.asp

The author is full of #######.

I'd love to see who paid this guy for his study because there's no way someone in the corn industry didn't pay him off.

There's a reason many nations have outright BANNED HFCS. It's not healthy at all. It's not good for you, at all.

I know several people who cut HFCS out of their diet (including myself) and lost weight while still eating the exact same products/keeping the same relative diet using pure cane sugar products instead of HFCS.

That stuff it garbage.

Need evidence of that? Stop drinking HFCS laced sodas for awhile and then try and drink one after a couple of months. It will practically make you sick from how thick/gunky it is.

It wasn't a study, just an article he wrote. I have tried to find out if he is connected to the corn lobby and so far I haven't found anything. Here is what I did find though:

Henry I. Miller

robert wesson fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy

Expertise: Biotechnology; genetic engineering; bioterrorism; government regulation of science and technology, especially pharmaceutical development and biotechnology; regulatory reform

Henry I. Miller, MS, MD, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. His research focuses on public policy toward science and technology, encompassing a number of areas, including pharmaceutical development, genetic engineering in agriculture, models for regulatory reform, and the emergence of new viral diseases.

Miller served for fifteen years at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a number of posts. He was the medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugs to be evaluated by the FDA and thus instrumental in the rapid licensing of human insulin and human growth hormone. Thereafter, he was a special assistant to the FDA commissioner and the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology. During his government service, Miller participated frequently on various expert and policy panels as a representative of the FDA or the US government. As a government official, Miller received numerous awards and citations.

Since coming to the Hoover Institution, Miller has become well known not only for his contributions to scholarly journals but also for his articles and books that make science, medicine, and technology accessible. His work has been widely published in many languages. Monographs include Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View; To America's Health: A Model for Reform of the Food and Drug Administration; and The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution. Barron's selected The Frankenfood Myth as one of the 25 Best Books of 2004. In addition, Miller has published extensively in a wide spectrum of scholarly journals and popular publications worldwide, including The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Science, the Nature family of journals, Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, National Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Guardian, Defining Ideas, and theFinancial Times. He is a regulator contributor to Forbes.com and frequently appears on the nationally syndicated radio programs of John Batchelor and Lars Larson.

Miller was selected by the editors of Nature Biotechnology as one of the people who had made the "most significant contributions" to biotechnology during the previous decade. He serves on numerous editorial boards.

http://www.hoover.org/fellows/10000

I suspect you lost weight because food manufactures tend to use to much HFCS to make their products taste sweeter. When you switched to products with cane sugar you just used less of it because it is more expensive of an ingredient.