General Health News

An article on high fructose corn syrup. If you read most of the way through it, you will see a paragraph from a pediatric G.I. who blames too much sugar on the bloating, cramping and diarrhea that he sees in children. It seems that fructose might be the worst kind of sugar. Table sugar is a combination of fructose and glucose, but with slightly less fructose than high fructose corn syrup (50% vs. 55%). If I may make a supposition here, what do IBSers all seem to have problems with? Fruit. What's fruit sugar? Fructose. What if it's the sugar, not the fruit itself that makes us worse? What if we're weird and our intestines can't handle high levels of sugar like normal people? Or maybe we're not weird. Instances of IBS seem to be on the rise. Part of that is certainly due to a better understanding of bowel disorders and diagnosing, but I think part of it is probably due to other environmental factors. Most doctors blame it on lower amounts of fiber, but a lot of people here eat as much fiber as they are supposed to daily and yet have only limited success. What if sugar is the culprit? There have been some small studies that show bad bacteria live on sugar. So maybe if we aren't screwing-up our intestines with sugar, we're making them a breeding ground for bad bacteria. darned either way, it seems.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/18/FDGS24VKMH1.DTL

How high fructose corn syrup is made. Note the addition of bacteria AND a fungus. Wonder how many people are allergic to high fructose corn syrup because of that fungus and don't know it?

http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/cornsyrup.html

Personally I have been trying to cut out a lot of my sugars just because I want to lessen my sweet tooth. The more sugar you consume, the more you want of it. That goes for artifical sweetners too. Now that I'm learning more about the problems sugar can cause, I am even more interested in lessening it. Some doctors think that it's the number one cause behind hyperactivity and ADD in children and adults. While most people can handle some amount of sugar without effect, some people seem to not be able to handle it even in small amounts. Cut out all sugars and previously unruly children suddenly become well-behaved.
I don't have ADD, nor have I ever been hyperactive ("lethargic" is a better term for me!), and my IBS problems aren't so bad I can't control them with medicine, so I'm not a good candidate for an informal study here, but maybe someone else will try it and let us know if cutting out sugars improves their bowel function? Be forewarned that everything contains high fructose corn syrup nowadays. Salad dressing, ketchup, bread, you name it. To go sugar free one pretty much has to go organic. Processed foods are pretty much out--fresh-made everything is in. I've given up a lot of processed foods and am eating more organic things and while food tastes better than ever before and I now look forward to meal times because I look forward to good-tasting food, my grocery bill has doubled. Strange that food that takes extra processing would be more expensive than food that just takes a blending of a few ingredients, but that's the way it is. If you really think about it, food shouldn't be cheap. It ranks right up there with having a roof over your head, but is more important than having a car. 80 years ago or so, food was something like 40%-60% of a family's budget. Now it's 10-20%. We spend more money on clothes, shoes and car payments and less money on decent, un-processed food. But with me being something of a penny-pincher, it has been hard not to be cheap with the groceries. It does take some getting used to. But being able to do a happy dance when I go to eat my lunch does make it worthwhile!

I figure if you can't give something up that's making you sick, it's not making you sick enough. Do I miss drinking cokes? Sometimes. Especially when Stuart brings them home and they sit right there in my refrigerator, staring at me. But I've been off them so long now, that even when I have a caffeine free one, it doesn't taste as good as I think it should. And because I don't like having burning diarrhea all day, I can go without. If it makes you sick enough, you'll quit eating it, and when you do eat it, it will be with planning aforethought--"If I eat this, I'll be sick tomorrow, but I have no where to go, so I can afford to stay home sick." Sometimes you just want something so bad you have to have it, but I have found that once you get off junk foods, sugar and junk fats, they no longer taste very good. At least not as good as you remember. It makes it easier to decline the next time.

It's all a matter of readjusting yourself. If you go cold turkey, you usually wind up failing. Me, I just had some honey-roasted almonds. Yes, they have sugar. But I only had a few and they have regular sugar, not corn syrup on them. Soon I'll be down to just plain nuts. I've already cut a lot of sugar from my breakfast and I've given up my green tea (which I have to have some sugar in) and have gone back to just plain water. By avoiding the pizzas, spaghetti and canned ravoili I used to eat, I have already begun cutting out some sugars. Will I ever end up completely sugar free? No. I'll still want sweets sometimes, but I plan on having them on special occasions and having very little when I do.

Here's an interesting theory I have: The proponets of the French Diet say that obesity levels in America started to sharply climb in the early 80's, which happens to co-incide with the introduction of fat-free products. The French Diet people say (and this is scientifically proven) that fat makes you feel full and that fat free products lead you to eat too much in order to get that same full feeling.

While surfing today, I found that the anti-high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) people say that obesity levels in America started to sharply climb in the early 80's, which happens to co-incide with the introduction of HFCS in the majority of American products, including colas. The anti-HFCS people say (and there is some scientific proof to this) that fructose keeps you from feeling full, unlike glucose (which is in starches), so you tend to consume more food even as you consume those empty calories.

Now, at first glance this would seem to be yet another case of the nutrition world contradicting itself (remember when eggs were evil?). However, I started thinking about it, and the two cases are not mutually exclusive. Low-fat foods have long been criticized by nutritionists as containing too much sugar; see, they replace the fat with sugar in order to keep it tasting good. Are low-fat foods with HFCS in them a double-whammy? Are you not only eating something that doesn't have enough fat to make you full, but it also has empty calories from too much sugar which also keeps you from feeling full? Of course, there are the people who credit the rise in obesity with a rise in fast food consumption. Many of those foods, however, contain HFCS. And they are made with partially hydrogenated crap which doesn't act the same in your system as normal fat.

The reason behind partially hydrogented fats/oils and HFCS? Shelf-life. There's a reason why ho-ho's are laughed at for having a shelf life of years. Butter and oil gets rancid after a time, or at the very least it will seperate out from whatever it was put in. But mix it in with a bubbling hydrogen mixture and it suddenly has the staying power of plastic. Likewise regular sugar can harden, separate or otherwise change its composition and/or go rancid. HFCS, however, does not go bad. Case in point: I buy fresh bread at the grocery store. It lasts a couple of days before it gets hard. A few more days and it's molded. I can get a week out of it if I put it in the fridge, but it still gets a bit hard. Almost certainly has no HFCS in it because that's what keeps bread soft for a longer period of time. Compare that to the Nature's Own high-fiber low calorie bread I bought. It stayed in my pantry for about a month and a half before I finally threw it away. It wasn't moldy and wasn't so hard it wouldn't toast up okay; I just got afraid to eat something that never went bad. That's not natural. And that's part of the reason why food got so much cheaper: it keeps longer. If you're not chalking up losses due to food going bad before it's sold, you can afford to lower your prices.

You mention that people are their own worst enemy. I agree. It's hard to resist temptation when it's staring you right in the face. Like me and the cokes that appear in my fridge. Could I lessen my sugar intake if Stuart was bringing cookies and junk food into the pantry all of the time? When I was bringing that stuff in, he was eating some of it, despite his being diabetic and knowing he shouldn't have it. When I don't bring it home, he doesn't bring it home either (except for those sugar-free things that are full of sugar alcohols which are nearly deadly for me--they make me sick enough that I never touch them). Imagine if in the grocery store the aisle of dessert items dropped away and all that was left was a few pieces of stick candy that you buy individually. What if the boxes and boxes of crackers were replaced with a few brands that contain nothing but bread and regular oil (no sugar, no partially hydrogenated things). Imagine a grocery store of the 40's or 50's. If temptation was removed, would people die from lack of sugar or hydrogenated oils? Even if all of that junk food was moved to a store all its own, would people who recognize that stuff is bad for them and makes them sick go to that sugar store, or will they stick to the regular grocery? Me, I stay out of candy stores because I know better; going in just makes me want some. I think that if junk food was removed to a separate place (like most hard liquors are kept in stores separate from the grocery/ gas station), people would find it much easier to stay away, and at the very least, they wouldn't get it as often. Americans are just too lazy to make multiple stops too terribly often.

I was wondering about Stevia. Someone here at work was telling me about it. Do you happen to know what it breaks down into? It seems fructose is bad, but glucose not so much so. If I'm going to have to have some sugar, I'd rather it be the best kind to have.

Well here's something for you. My 6oz cup of organic yogurt has 24g of sugar. But, it being full-fat milk, how much of that is milk sugar? Does milk sugar count towards your daily consumption? I know this contains real sugar, but luckily not HFCS. And lord knows yogurt is just too tart to eat without something added to it. So what's better for you, not eating the sugar or eating the yogurt? Does the calcium, inulin and multiple bacteria cultures outweigh the added sugar? Either way, I only eat half a cup a day (because I also eat oatmeal for breakfast, which is sweetned with either brown sugar or honey). Still, I stopped adding extra sugar to my oatmeal, so that's a start.

It can be so confusing to know what's good for you and what all you should eat. If it weren't for the religion thing, I'd be tempted to give it all up and go live on an Armish farm. Eat salt pork and potatoes and gravy and just walk it all off. Speaking of which, something that comes up in the Laura Ingalls books is the use of maple sugar as a sweetner. Laura's mother makes several treats from maple sugar because "maple sugar never hurt anybody." However they only have refined sugar on Christmas--both because it was expensive and because it's too sweet for common use. So does anyone know what maple sugar actually tastes like (maple syrup not being the same thing because they add, you guessed it, HFCS) and what it breaks down into (glucose or fructose)? While maple sugar made candy for them, I'm betting it's nowhere near as sweet as the candy and stuff we eat now.

http://www.cspinet.org/nah/4_00/stevia.html

According to this, Stevia is not approved by the FDA for use in food (or in Canada or the EU). It says at "high levels of consumption" it causes cancer and reproductive harm. It doesn't say what high level consumption is, however. Could be like Sweet N' Low; they got it to cause cancer as a result of feeding rats hundreds of times more than a normal human would probably ever consume.

They do have an interesting point in that in Japan there has been no noticable connection with using it and having cancer or reproductive problems, however Americans "can't eat just one." The Japanese do not consume a lot of sweet products, but we do. If it were to replace aspartame in colas, how many people would be consuming it then? If it cooks and bakes well it would suddenly be in all of the sugar-free and diet stuff (I assume it doesn't have any calories). If it were actually cheaper than corn syrup (not likely, but we'll hypothesize), then it would be in EVERYTHING. Probably could get over consumption pretty quickly.

Probably not any different from regular sugar--it's something that needs to be consumed in very low doses. After all, sugar is from a perfectly natural cane plant.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to tolerate probiotics alone--at least not acidophillus. It gives me gas cramps. But I'm the same person who got MORE constipated after taking fiber pills. The next time I tried them--a couple of years later--they gave me diarrhea and cramps and messed me up for several days. So I admit I'm not normal even for someone with IBS, lol.

I've switched to more good fats because I have a runaway appetite. I feel like I'm hungry all of the time. And even when I don't feel hungry, my mouth is hungry. I have heard this is common in people without gall bladders; that the gall bladder and bile regulate appetite and without it you fluctuate between not wanting anything and never getting full. Unfortunately, I tend to stay in the latter category the vast majority of the time. I have read that fats make you fell full, so I'm hoping that the switch may keep me from wanting to eat all of the time. Keeping weight off is a constant struggle for me. It's hard not to eat when you feel hungry, even though you just ate something. I sometimes feel like giving up on the weight thing because I just seem to naturally want to be a size 14. That's the size I hit early in high school and the size I was through a good part of college (I did lose some weight due to being sick) and up until last year. Counting every calorie I ate I managed to go down to a 10-12, but now I'm back up to a full size 12. I'm eating better than I've ever eaten before, so I have to be healthier, despite my weight. And I always carry my weight down on my hips, which is supposed to be a much better place to be overweight than around the waist in terms of heart conditions. I don't know, sometimes it's just depressing not to be the size I want to be and to have to count every calorie I put into my mouth AND be restricted in what I can eat because it might make me sick.

Personally the fertility stuff didn't concern me because I don't want to be fertile anyways, lol.

Don't even get my fiance started on DMSO and the fact that the FDA won't legalize it for humans (but it's perfectly safe to use on animals, including million-dollar race horses). I know they're a bunch of crooks controlled either by big business or politicians, but it did raise an eyebrow that both Canada and the E.U. won't approve it either. But then it's been in use for a long time in other countries with no noticeable effects. You know, the FDA grandfathered in sugar and fructose when it was formed because that was just something people ate and had eaten for a few centuries or more. They never did any tests on it. I wonder if they did tests on Stevia and sugar and fructose side-by-side I wonder if the Stevia would prove any worse? I have a suspicion that it wouldn't.

Of course, it's supposed to be, what, 300 times sweeter than sugar? Seems like a little dab of it would do you. Of course you can't put it past Americans to overdo that little dab, but on a personal level, looks like you could be content with a very tiny amount.

Unfortuntely I was thin as a child, so I know what being thin feels like--know what it's like to no longer be thin anymore. I hit puberty and it all went downhill from there. Of course those 2- and 3-liter bottles of Mountain Dew two or three times a week and pizza everyday in the summer didn't help matters any. Sure would be nice, though, now that I'm off fast food and potato chips and ice cream and candy and most processed foods and most HFCS to actually see some return for all of that healthy living in the way of smaller pants sizes. Though studies have shown that overweight people who eat healthy but remain overweight are not only better off than similar-sized people who don't eat healthy, they are often healthier than people who are not overweight but who eat poorly and/or diet too harshly. Better to eat healthy and be overweight than yo-yo diet.

You know, everyone sets a lot in store by the BMI, but I get aggrevated with it because it doesn't allow for any other factors. It doesn't even ask if you are male or female. Everyone knows muscle weighs more, and a man my height is more likely to be heavier than me because he has more muscle. It doesn't allow for age, when everyone knows younger people routinely have more muscle mass than older people, thus making them heavier. It doesn't allow for any sort of healthy fat, like a woman's boobs. If I had none at all, I'd be a good 3-5 pounds lighter. Does that make me--a size D--less healthy than a women who's a size A? And then there's hair. Not normally a consideration, but my hair is actually below my waist. It accounts for 2 or 3 pounds of extra weight that a woman with shoulder-length hair wouldn't have. And after that there's frame. Me medium frame is naturally heavier than someone with a petite frame. Does extra bone density/size make you unhealthier?

I get pretty disgusted with it all sometimes. Probably because I'm sitting right on the line between overweight and not overweight. And personally I have never really felt that I was overweight. Pudgy, soft, extra hippy--yes--but not actually OVERweight. As in having health or physical problems. Give me a mile, I'll walk it. Give me 5 stories to climb, I'll climb them (I do actually take the stairs every morning from the basement to the 4th floor). I've never been in competitive shape, but I've never been lagging behind everyone else panting and wheezing. I can do whatever I want to do, so I've always figured that was in shape enough for me.

I don't know, fat measures may be like cholesterol--the doctors are just guessing. Before there was good cholesterol and bad cholesterol doctors just said it was too high and they put you on medicine. Then they learned that there are two kinds and if you lower the good stuff too much you can have a stroke. Probably would have been better for a lot of people in the beginning if the doctors and drug companies had just left them alone. Even now I seriously doubt they have it right. Those commercials where they show the people who run, who eat healthy, who meditate... then they show their "deadly" cholesterol number and say they should be on medicine. Hello, if these people are model human beings in terms of exercise, diet and stress levels, then either 1) their cholesterol is supposed to be that number and you'll make their health worse by fooling with it or 2) that's just the way they are and medicine won't help anyways. Look at that figure skater that died when he was in his early 30's of a heart attack. Medicine is no substitute for healthy living and sometimes even the healthy living fails you. Everyone's obssessed with living forever and think that pills will make that happen.

I guess the same thing is true with diets--people are obsessed with being a certain size. Me, I don't have the frame to ever be a size 0. I MIGHT could squeeze into a 6 if I had 0% body fat, but I doubt a size 6 top would ever fit me because you just don't lose weight in the bust unless you lose it through starvation/illness. Am I fat if I'm a size 8? I wouldn't get a job as a model. Even the Mimi Maternity store's mannequins are pregnant size 0's. Every other dummy in every other store is a size 0, except at Lane Bryant, where they are size 14--the smallest size they carry. Lane Bryant won't even advertise a size 20 in the window. The "French Women Don't Get Fat" book is right on in saying that Americans obsess too much about weight and size. While most of us are getting fatter, models and mannequins are getting smaller. It's like we're creating

Now, it's easy to say that and harder to live it. Me, I've gotten bad here lately about seeing myself as being fat. Even after I dropped to a size 10, all I could see was how much more I wanted to lose. To me I noticed my fat much more after I had lost some than I ever noticed it when I was a size 14 and had accepted that I was that size and would just stay that size. I guess in some ways my self-image got worse after I started dieting than before I did. Now that I've gained a little of my weight back, I think I look fatter than I ever thought I looked when I was yet a size bigger than I am now.

Is it any wonder I have IBS when I stress about stuff like this all of the time? I'm surprised I'm not worse.

Personally, I think they should baseline you when you are in your teens or very early 20's. Whatever your cholesterol and blood pressure and weight are then, then that's what you should aim to keep throughout your life (unless you are obese by any standards, then you'll just have to stick with averages until you can get the weight down to something decent). If you have high blood pressure when you're young, then that's not a health problem, that's just how your heart works. Same for cholesterol. You'd have to allow for a bit of change as you get older, but ultimately your blood pressure and cholesterol readings ought to be based off what was normal for you when you were young and healthy. If those change within normal parameters as you get older, well then you're really no worse off than you were as a young person.

Lucky for me the Welchol I take for my bile (a cholesterol med) isn't absorbed by the body. I guess it's kind of like a fiber that way. It's supposed to keep you from absorbing cholesterol in the last stages of intestinal digestion. It doesn't work too well by itself for people with high cholesterol, but it pretty much doesn't interact with any other medicines, so for some people it's all they can take. Though a PCP I saw (I couldn't afford to go to the G.I.) fretted about me losing vitamins while taking it. My G.I. and his N.P. never said anything to me about that and I've tried vitamins on and off while being on the Welchol and never noticed a difference except that the B12 made my pee neon yellow. I figure if I was vitamin deficient, I'd crave certain things all the time (which when I do crave something, I eat it) and/or be lethargic, but I feel fine. And I have heard that excess vitamins make the kidneys work harder because they have more to have to filter out. I'd rather spare my kidneys than take vitamins that I might not need anyways.

Maybe we all should just adopt the Viking philosophy of having a predetermined fate and just live well and meet death head on. And maybe we should raid Europe. Carry off their Nutella, their tasty low-fat Irish beef, the Swiss chocolates, Italian wines and German cars. I wonder if a BMW will fit in a longboat??

The French diet is high in fat, but the southern France diet is more in line with the Mediterranian diet--more fish, less red meat, lots of olive oil. Even in northern France, though, they're not big on a lot of red meat. They tend to stick to chicken and fish and only eat red meat in small amounts. Most of their fat comes from dairy products. Unless I'm mistaken, the Eastern Europen countries eat a lot of pork and beef (like sausages).

However, I doubt diet has anything to do with the onset of Crohn's. Makes it worse, I'm sure, but doesn't cause it. We know Crohn's is genetic, so it makes sense that certain ethnic types would have a larger prevalence of it--anything that stays within a group of people is more likely to get passed on since it can come from both the mother and the father and possibly even both sets of grandparents, etc. For instance, Native Americans (no tribe in particular that I'm aware of) are much more likely to have gall bladder disease than other groups, especially whites. Blacks are more likely than whites to have sickle cell anemia and to be lactose intolerant (in fact, whites are the least intolerant to milk of any racial group--Asians the most intolerant). If I remember my senior thesis on medieval Eastern Europe (unfortunately too well, I think), Eastern Europe--including Hungary--was largely cut off from the rest of the world during most of the middle ages. The Ottoman Turks came in, set up something of an administration, then left them alone. Outsiders ended up in cities (Jewish people migrating from Spain in a lot of cases), the native population ended up in the countryside. And it stayed that way until the 1700's when the Austrian empire (can't think of the exact name at the moment) came in. So, time enough for a genetic disease to come in and be spread around a small population fairly thoroughly.

You know they caution people to check out bank accounts and money habits before getting married; maybe checking out genes should also be considered before deciding on children.

Something interesting about second and third world countries: their instances of intestinal parasites and intestinal diseases (diseases that are contracted, not inhereited) is much higher than in first world countries, but their instances of colon cancer is much, much lower. Scientists theorize that maybe frequent bouts of diarrhea keep the colon clean of toxins that can lead to colon cancer. They still have to do some controlled studies, however, to see if the frequent diarrhea really is a link. So, something to be grateful for, I suppose, when sitting on the pot.