Post by timPost by FrankPost by High Miles*Sugar isn’t any better for you than high-fructose corn syrup*
True. Your body basically can’t tell the difference so it processes both
sweeteners the same way, says Leslie Bonci, M.P.H., R.D., director of
sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and
author of “Walk Your Butt Off
<http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1609618831>.” The problem is that high
fructose corn syrup is so ubiquitous that you may be eating and drinking
it all the time without even noticing. “It’s used in a lot of foods
because it is cheap and blends well,” Bonci says, so it’s easy to ingest
vast quantities of it from sodas, fruit drinks, candies and other
processed foods. Your best bet is to read the package label: If you see
high fructose corn syrup high up on the ingredients list, put the item
back on the shelf.
For all intents and purposes, sucrose, high fructose corn syrup and
honey are the same thing. Sucrose, the disaccharide, inverts in
the high acid environment of a soda or in your stomach to a mix of
glucose and fructose which are what high fructose corn syrup or
honey consist of.
Study: Sugar even at moderate levels toxic to mice health, reproduction
Washington Post
By Meeri Kim, Published: August 13 E-mail the writer
Sugar, even at moderate levels, could be toxic to your health — or
at least to your sex life, a new study says.
Scientists at the University of Utah looked at how sugar affected
mice and found that the mouse equivalent of just three sugary sodas
a day had significant negative effects on life span and competition
for mates.
“That’s three sodas if the rest of your diet is pristine and
sugar-free,” said lead author and biologist James S. Ruff. “And
those are 12-ounce sodas, not double Big Gulps.”
Sugar-fed females died twice as quickly as control mice, which were
fed the same total number of calories. While the sugar-fed males did
not die more quickly, they had trouble competing against the control
males for mates and were less likely to hold territory and reproduce.
The study was published online Tuesday by the journal Nature
Communications.
For the rodents on the sweetened diet, sugar accounted for
25?percent of their total calorie intake. Up to a quarter of
Americans consume that proportion of sugar as part of their diets.
Previous studies that found harmful effects of sugar consumption
tended to use unusually high amounts.
“[Our findings] set a new standard for caution even at low doses of
added sugar,” senior author and biologist Wayne K. Potts said.
About 80?percent of substances that are toxic in mice are toxic for
people as well, said Potts, so it is likely that the effects of
extra sugar could be similar in humans.
The researchers first fed 156 animals either sweetened or normal
diets for 26 weeks. They then used a novel lab setup: room-sized
mouse barns where the animals could roam free instead of being
confined in cages. The goal was to mimic the natural environment.
The scientists used this method because they thought it would be
sensitive to the sociological and Darwinian effects of sugar — the
mice must struggle for resources and need to be at their fittest to
successfully compete. Once in the barns, both groups of mice were
placed on the same normal diet. Scientists monitored the mice
interactions for 32 weeks.
Overall, Potts and his colleagues found that the sugar-fed rodents,
which didn’t look more obese or less healthy than the control
animals, were nevertheless “physiologically worse at doing things
they need to do on a daily basis.”
Sugar-fed females — but not males — died off sooner than their
healthier counterparts, possibly from being too worn out to handle
the burdens of reproduction. Many of the mice were nursing one
litter while pregnant with another.
For the sugar-fed males, meanwhile, reproductive efforts were
hindered by their inability to hold down territory.
A male mouse will typically control a designated area, defending it
fiercely from short, intrusive forays by other males. A weakened
male mouse will lose territory, along with female attention.
“Females won’t mate with any males that don’t own a territory,”
Potts said. The sugar-fed mice held a quarter less area than their
counterparts and as a result had an average of five to 10 fewer
offspring, as determined by genetic analysis of the litters.
Potts and his colleagues chose a combination of sugars that mimicked
high fructose corn syrup, a 50-50 ratio of fructose and glucose. The
increase in sugar in the typical American diet in recent decades is
largely attributed to higher consumption of high fructose corn syrup
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and lots of salt. ;-)