Hi Wharf Rat; Re: "My friends and neighbors don't feed corn to their cattle.";
So I showed you that America's lab rats have been fed a diet which has GMO corn as its largest ingredient for 40 generations and *you* want to talk about your friends and neighbors's cattle's eating habits? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Sure, why don't you bring us signed affidavits from your friends and neighbors showing us exactly what they *do* feed their cattle. Or better, let's take a quick look at the ethanol industry. About half the US corn crop is made into ethanol. (This reminds me, another item you have to take off your diet in avoiding GMOs, bourbon and various other alcoholic beverages.) And the ethanol industry uses GMO corn, as opposed to the varieties of corn eaten as corn-on-the-cob. And the main byproduct of ethanol production from corn is "distiller's grains"; about 1/3 the dry weight of corn used by an ethanol plant is converted into dried distiller's grains (another 1/3 becomes ethanol and the last 1/3 becomes CO2 which is sometimes captured, sometimes not). And what is done with dried distiller's grains? Look at wikipedia:
There are two main sources of these grains. The traditional sources were from brewers. More recently, ethanol plants are a growing source. It is created in distilleries by drying mash, and is subsequently sold for a variety of purposes, usually as fodder for livestock (especially ruminants). Corn based distillers grains from the ethanol industry are commonly sold as a high protein livestock feed that increases efficiency and lowers the risk of subacute acidosis in beef cattle. [1]
en.wikipedia.org
Okay, so maybe your friends and neighbors don't feed their cattle GMO corn. Somebody is, LOL.
Re: "So, is HFCS bad ...";
Very complicated question.
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is chemically almost identical to sugar, at least after it hits your stomach and sugar is split into fructose and glucose. In small quantities, sugar and HFCS are not poisonous. In large quantities either of them will kill you and for the same reasons. Honey is a high fructose syrup (but it's not made from corn) and its health effects are similar to sugar and HFCS.
Regular corn syrup is almost pure glucose. Glucose is also not poisonous, it's the stuff they put into your IV when you've done something so stupid that you can't even be fed hospital food. In the US, the glucose they put into you is made from corn. So if you happen to be allergic to corn, and you do something really stupid, and you happen to be in the US, you need to tell the hospital to not give you a glucose drip. Here read more about these facts at the corn allergy website:
Be aware of pitfalls in a hospital setting - Intravenous fluids containing glucose and dextrose are problematic for corn allergic/intolerant individuals.
cornfreelifestyle.wordpress.com
Note that dextrose is converted to glucose when it hits your stomach. Basically, dextrose is a combination of two molecules of glucose while sucrose (table sugar) is a combination of two molecules, one of fructose the other of glucose. By the way, the above applies to hospital patients in the US. In other countries they may use other grains for their glucose source. I'm told that in Japan, a glucose drip will be rice syrup while in Australia they use wheat syrup. All these are similar to corn syrup, they are made by cracking the starch into glucose using the enzyme amylase (see wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org ). This enzyme is present in your saliva for the same reason; to help you digest starch, so the reaction is entirely natural. By the way, instead of harvesting human saliva, they use bacteria to get industrial quantities of amylase. Anyway, if you're allergic to any high starch grain (and huge numbers of Americans are wrongly convinced that they're allergic to wheat these days), you might want to look up the details before you travel overseas and do something stupid.
Now the reason glucose is used in an IV drip is because glucose is the "sugar" that they're talking about when they say you have "low blood sugar", which is what eventually happens to you if you aren't able to eat. They don't add fructose (or HFCS or table sugar or honey) to your IV drip because these contain fructose (in addition to impurities). And fructose is a special type of sugar. It is a whole lot sweeter than glucose, and most of the cells in your body cannot process it. Instead, most of the fructose you consume ends up converted to fat by your liver (and some gets eaten by bacteria, especially if you are fructose intolerant, google that phrase for more info).
Fructose is also the form of sugar that is predominant in fruits.
And what happens if you eat too much fructose? The first thing that happens is that you tend to get fat. A high fructose diet is biochemically equivalent to an extremely high fat diet, after the fructose is converted by your liver. And if you eat enough of the stuff you overwhelm your liver. This appears to cause a rather common disease:
Is Fructose Bad For You?
Harvard Health Publications, Harvard Medical School
Patrick J. Skerett, April 2011
One of many controversies mixing up the field of nutrition is whether the use of high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks and other foods is causing the paired epidemics of obesity and diabetes that are sweeping the United States and the world. I’ve ignored this debate because it never made sense to me—high-fructose corn syrup is virtually identical to the refined sugar it replaces. A presentation I heard yesterday warns that the real villain may be fructose—a form of sugar found in fruits, vegetables, and honey. It may not matter whether it’s in high-fructose corn syrup, refined sugar, or any other sweetener.
...
Experts still have a long way to go to connect the dots between fructose and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Higher intakes of fructose are associated with these conditions, but clinical trials have yet to show that it causes them. There are plenty of reasons to avoid sugary drinks and foods with added sugar, like empty calories, weight gain, and blood sugar swings.
...
www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-fructose-bad-for-you-201104262425
Re: "... and, if so, is it bad because it is fructose, or because it is GMO derived?";
It's the fructose. If you ate as much honey as people eat HFCS (mostly in sweetened soft drinks) it would make you just as fat. The GMOs have nothing to do with it, except that they allow the crap to be factory farmed more cheaply.
-- Carl
By the way, some of my stupid lefty friends think that wheat is GMO. It's part of their irrational explanation for why they think they're allergic to wheat or are gluten intolerant, LOL. Commercial wheat seed is not GMO, at least not yet. The reason has to do with the market size for the seed. Field corn (as opposed to other varieties like popcorn or the sweet corn used in corn-on-the-cob) is primarily grown in a rather small part of the US and the same sort of corn is more or less suitable for the whole area. Wheat is grown from all the way Sasketchawa to Georgia. The different climates require different varieties. Some varieties stay alive during the winter (naturally called "winter wheat") while others do not. And different varieties of wheat are suitable for different baking needs. So wheat seed is a highly fragmented market and any single GMO wheat seed variety would have far lower sales than a GMO corn seed variety. Basically, the American midwest is so perfect for growing corn that (until recent high corn prices) they drive other producers out of the market and into other crops. The latest news on gluten intolerance is that the researchers who started the fad did a follow-up which suggests it's not really a problem:
In 2011, Jessica Biesiekierski and colleagues at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, confirmed what is now known as non-celiac gluten intolerance in patients with IBS. In a study of 34 patients published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, the authors showed that gluten, added to a previously gluten-free diet, caused gastrointestinal distress and fatigue in 68 percent of patients with irritable bowel syndrome.
But now, in results published May 6 in Gastroenterology, the same group of researchers shows that gluten had no effect in IBS patients who claimed they had non-celiac gluten sensitivity. The results seem to contradict the group’s earlier work. But the science may simply be a bit more complex than previously thought: People with irritable bowel syndrome may indeed feel better on a gluten-free diet — but gluten might not have been the culprit.
sciencenews.org |
