Dangers Of High Fructose Corn Syrup

FoodPolitik: Hysterical Huffington hype

Rick Berman is the President of Berman and Company, a Washington, D.C.–based public affairs firm specializing in research, communications, and creative advertising. Berman has founded several leading non-profit organizations which are known for their fact-based research and their aggressive communications campaigns. A long-time consumer advocate, Rick Berman champions individual responsibility and common sense policy. He believes that democracies require an informed public from all sides. Berman and Company has received dozens of national awards for its creativity and cutting edge work. In the past two years alone Berman and Company has earned over 30 awards for its work in television, print, and radio advertisements and crisis communications. Rick Berman has appeared on all major television networks and has organized national coalitions on a variety of issues.

You don’t need  a Media Research Center report to know that The Huffington Post hosts a wide variety of crazed and rabid political opinions. (Maybe that’s why AOL’s stock is near a 52-week low.) It should come as no surprise, then, that HuffPo isn’t exactly a credible or unbiased source of nutrition advice either.

You’ll find all kinds of special cases there, from anti-meat animal rights activists like Wayne Pacelle and Bruce Friedrich to someone who runs a site called “Eating Liberally.”

If you thought “progressive” politics were bad, just wait ’til you read “progressive” food manifestos. (For some background, see my previous column about Mark Bittman .) Today’s for-your-own-good lefty food vanguard bashes practically everything containing calories, but one of their most idiotic blind spots is reserved for high fructose corn syrup, a sugar made from corn.

One recent HuffPo essay is actually titled “5 Reasons High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill You.”  It’s signed by an MD, so it ought to be pretty solid, right?

It’s not. The author largely bases his conclusion on a 2004 study which speculated that HFCS might be a unique cause of obesity. But the study’s own authors have since recanted that idea. One of them even said: “A number of recent studies … have convinced me that HFCS does not affect weight gain.”

Another HuffPo piece about the “dangers” of high fructose corn syrup comes from a self-identified “psychotherapist and mom.

The Dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup | Utica Phoenix

Some days ago I was sent an e-mail with a link to a video with the title listed above. The video is on YouTube, if any of you wish to look at it yourselves, and lasts about 90 minutes. For those of you not inclined to do this, I will try to give you a summary of it. I believe the information it contains can actually save lives. Failing that, it will explain how many lives are being ruined by the industrialization of our diet.

“In Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” by Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist from the University of California in San Francisco gives a lecture on the effects of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in our nation’s diet.

As you might expect, the news is very, very bad. Consumption of HFCS is rising every year, along with regular sugar consumption, and we now each take in around 140 pounds per person of sugar in its many forms.  In fact, we are all eating more than we did twenty years ago. Adolescent males are consuming 275 more calories per day, adult males, 175, and women are consuming 335 more calories per day.  We are all getting fatter and fatter. Why?

Leptin Resistance

In 1994, researchers in Japan working with genetically changed mice which would consistently become obese, discovered a new hormone, which they named leptin.

Leptin is something most of us have heard little about since then, but over 8,000 scientific articles have appeared in the years since its discovery. Leptin has been found to be THE most important hormone in the human body.

What does it do? It regulates many bodily functions, but for our purposes, we will focus on its prime nutritional function: It tells us when we have eaten enough.

If our bodies are working correctly, leptin is the shut-off switch for appetite. When leptin is high, we experience satiety, which means our brain decided we have taken in enough fuel for our body’s needs, and we stop eating.

Leptin and insulin work in tandem to keep our bodies fueled and running at maximum efficiency.

Most of you know that when someone becomes diabetic, production of insulin to move sugar around is compromised, and they become increasingly sicker.

You may have heard that Type II, or adult onset diabetes is on the rise, and is now claiming victims even among teenagers. In the past, it was always a disease of the older generations. Why is this happening?