I recently read an article in Newsweek about obesity. Sure, there are a lot of articles, books, shows, and documentaries on obesity in America, but this article was different; it was about SUGAR.
I first learned about human nutrition when I took a class in college called the American Epidemic. This class was all about diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. It was a fascinating class taught by a very knowledgeable professor.
He showed us a video from the Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology. It is a whopping 90 minutes, and pretty hard to get through, but after watching it my whole perspective was changed. In the video, Dr. Lustig addresses the way your body metabolizes high fructose corn syrup.
Why am I so against HFCS? The body does not recognize fructose for use of energy, so most of it gets stored as fat. High fructose is 50% fructose and 50% glucose (see the short video at the end of this post for a more in depth explanation).
Think
of it this way: Most Americans eat 75-90 grams of sugar per day, and their body stores a little more than half of that.
And that adds up.
4 grams = 1 teaspoon
113 teaspoons = 1 pound
Check out all these foods that have quite a bit of high fructose corn syrup:
There are thousands of other products that are laden with HFCS, but these are the products that I feel people consume the most. The most disturbing to me was baby formula; some formulas are up to 42% high fructose!!! I just can't fathom an infant getting that much high fructose on a daily basis.
Aaron calls me a sugar Nazi, and maybe I am, but something needs to be done. If you are waiting around for companies to start making food healthier, you will probably die waiting. You need to be responsible for your own food choices; don't take a passive stance on your health, it's too risky.
If you want more information on the obesity epidemic, you can find some short videos here.
There is also this short and wonderfully easy-to-understand article on Life Hacker.
Short version (11 min)
Long version (90 min)
