Also, about sugar:

[garote]

So, you're an American agribusiness conglomerate. You discover that your star product has had an unfortunate side-effect on the populace: Over the long haul, it physiologically degrades their insulin response and contributes significantly to obesity and other health problems.

So what do you do?

You mount an ad campaign to distract people from legitimate evidence, with a handful of cherry-picked studies and inane "facts" about your product.

I don't know what irritates me more: The audacious disregard for public welfare demonstrated by the "Corn Refiners' Association", or the misanthropy of the individual people who collected a paycheck while assembling this shitstain of a PR exercise. (Rest assured that some graphic designer somewhere took home several thousand dollars for layout out this garbage.)

Here, read this.

Comments

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I saw those commercials, it made me want to scream, "Rat poison is okay in moderation as well. That doesn't mean I want to eat it."

[thegoodreverend.livejournal.com]

But why is it worse than sugar?

People are fat because they eat more calories than they expend. People eat more of all kinds of foods and don't move around enough - there's no single thing causing obesity.

[garote]

TFA says that basically, it's worse for two reasons:
1. It's hightened fructose content
2. It's ubiquity

You note that people are fat because they eat more calories than they expend, which is the basic truth of it...

But our bodies have a genetic predisposition to seek an equilibrium in the calories we absorb versus the calories we expend. We do not, in general, have a natural tendency to become obese, we have a tendency to avoid becoming so.

To make this happen, we contain a series of Rube-Golberg-style physiological mechanisms that make measurements of the caloric content of what we've eaten, and the caloric deficit we currently have. So, what if you start regularly eating an ingredient that your particular genetically constructed Rube-Golberg measuring stick does not accurately measure? What if it chronically under-measures the caloric content of the ingredient? Maybe not by a lot, but by just a small amount, every day, for ten years?

This is what happens with fructose. Basically, our mechanisms (with some genetic variance among populations/individuals) assume that, if the sugary foods we eat will contain fructose, they also contain a balance of fructose versus glucose, and if we take an accurate measure of the calories absorbed as glucose, we can infer the amount absorbed as fructose. For the majority of the fruits we've evolved to eat, that shorthand measurement has worked just fine, in conjunction with all the other measurements our bodies take to judge when we should get hungry, and when we can stop eating. It's complicated, of course. But this is one of the mechanisms in play.

Even people who exercise get fat, on a diet their bodies do not measure correctly. And by that I mean, they're pudgy, so they decide to exercise, but they don't bother to measure calories with points or a calculator, so they gain muscle ... and they get fatter. Because exercise makes them hungrier, so they eat more to counterbalance the energy use, and the unmeasured imbalance in their standard American diet is magnified!

Why would you assume that there is something inherently lazy about Americans, and something inherently "active" about the people dwelling in France? Doesn't it make more sense for there to be an aspect of what they eat, that causes otherwise unremarkable people to gain weight _despite_ themselves?

Of course there is no one thing causing obesity. People overeat for all kinds of reasons. Aaaaalll kinds of reasons. But I don't need to prove that high fructose corn syrup is THE SINGLE cause of obesity to prove that it is contributing factor, or even a SIGNIFICANT factor. (And how can it not be, taking into account the absolutely amazing transformation that virtually every single product on our supermarket shelves has undergone in the last 30 years, simply to accommodate an artificially stimulated excess of cheap corn-derived sweetener?)

There are also mechanisms in the body for measuring the calories absorbed from dairy products, and genetic variations in those mechanisms actually break down along the same lines as traced by our goat-herding vs. non-goat-herding ancestors. In other words, if your great great great great great great great great grandmother drank goat milk to survive, you're more likely to be able to accurately measure your caloric intake of dairy. Not everyone in America is descended from goat-herders, but EVERYONE in America is exposed to dairy products. There's another contributing factor. And of course, it's even more complicated beyond that ... the fat versus carbohydrate balance of individual meals can affect how our bodies deal with the influx of calories. And the speed with which we eat. And what we do afterwards. Et cetera.

There is an incredible mountain of things to learn about this process, and eventually it becomes overwhelming... But the pathways of cause and effect do exist. "People don't move around enough" is kind of an unfortunate statement to make, because it tends to distracts us from asking _why_ our current (widely varied) exercise levels are not "enough". ... As if we are expected to measure what "enough" is by hand, instead of simply eating when we're hungry, and stopping when we're full.