High fructose corn syrup and obesity

Discussion in 'Science and Nature' started by SlowMo, Apr 23, 2015.

  1. The following linked lecture by Dr Robert Lutzig, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, is a must see for anyone wondering about how and why America - and increasingly, the rest of the world whose diets have been influenced by it - are experiencing a statistical avalanche in terms of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
     
    Warning - there is a portion in the middle of the lecture that delves specifically into some of the pertinent biochemical metabolic reactions and pathways that non-biology peeps may find boring or even incomprehensible. Nevertheless, this should be an eye opener for many of us who wonder what the hell is really going on with our food and bodies over the last couple decades.
     
    [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM[/media] 

     
  2. I higly doubt corn syrup is any worse than sugar.

    Being as I'm allergic to corn I avoid it anyway.

    But the reality is that in America, we see a trend over time for producing cheaper food.

    Corn syrup was am even cheaper alternative to sugar, and as a result, became easily accessible to everyone.

    Its no surprise everyone is fat when they can get sugar for cheaper than water

    -yuri
     
  3. One aspect that makes HFCS worse is that it doesnt trigger ghrelin (if i recall correctly from 7years ago). Essentially its calories that doesnt trigger your body to think it got calories... i think.
     
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  4. Yep.
     
    Not only does it increase ghrelin (appetite)signaling, it also interrupts the leptin (the "satiety hormone") feedback loop and thus prevents the brain from having the relevant energy storage information that's required to regulate our feelings of having eaten enough. Double whammy! 
     
    It also influences biochemical feedback systems in the parasympathetic nervous system, causing one to feel tired (conserve energy) and in need of an energy boost.. Triple whammy!
     
    As far as obesity is concerned, among many other things, it overwhelms the mitochondria's abilities to handle the quantities of acetyl-CoA  being fed to the Citric Acid Cycle, forcing them to produce <sup>1</sup>comparatively large quantities of citrate as a product to be exported for further processing into fat. Citrate is transported out of the mitochondria and converted by a series of enzymatic reactions known collectively as lipogenesis (lit. fat creation) to VLDLs - very low density lipoproteins. And these aren't "the good kind" of lipoproteins, either.
     
    Plus, there are such a large number of spin-off reactions from the body's handling of fructose that produce such long-term harmful effects  
     
    One thing I learned for sure - one calorie of glucose is way different than 1 calorie of fructose in terms of energy vs fat production. But fat production and the consequences of obesity are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to its negative effects on health. 
     
    1. compared to the normal levels resulting from the breakdown of other complex carbohydrates in combination with fiber (slows the carb absorption rate and evens out energy production)  and converted to pyruvate by glycolysis.
     
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  5. Good info! Hey you reminded me, last night i was enjoying some citric acid and was wondering, what are the benefits and side effects? Ive looked online a few different times and cant find much info. PM is fine as to not derail your thread. :)
     
  6. Shit. No wonder corn syrup is literally in everything, even foods that aren't sweet like fucking sausage.

    -yuri
     
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  7. I shouldn't have picked on high fructose corn syrup exclusively. It and sugar are for all intents and purposes, the same thing. HFCS usually contains around 45% to 55% fructose. Table sugar (= sucrose) is molecularly 50% glucose and 50% fructose - a molecule of glucose bound to a molecule of fructose - and gets broken apart into the two constituent sugars in the small intestine.
     
    And I should add that even though there is mounting evidence pointing to fructose as a major player in the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics, there are some dissenters to this "fructose hypothesis". And even though that's a no-no in PC based politics, it's a beautiful thing in science.
     
    Challenging the Fructose Hypothesis: New Perspectives on Fructose Consumption and Metabolism - John S White - Adv Nutr. 2013 Mar; 4(2): 246–256
     
  8. Don't know anything about citric acid as a food. 
     
    The so-called "citric acid cycle" that I was referring to is a circular series of chemical reactions that takes the result of glycolysis (the breaking down of glucose) and uses it to make some end products that are fed on down the metabolic line and used to manufacture ATP - the energy currency of the cell. Most chemical reactions in the cell are mediated by enzymes and powered by ATP. 
     
  9. Well darn! Thanks anyway haha. I recall the cycle from A&P class but i only recall the term, no details whatsoever. So it has nothing to do with citric acid at all ehh?
     
  10. Everything in moderation. The problem is just not that is Americans shove food into there mouth like its a vaccum cleaner. A can of Coke has what 110 calories so you get your 32 ounce drink you get your value meal at McDonalds or another fast food joint. Your up to what 1400-1500 calories just for a lunch.
     
    Then you throw into your suck sodas all day, a bag of chips. Dinner times come and you act like you just got out of a Concentration camp so you put in your pie hole another 1000-1500 calories.
     
    On top of that the very act of doing any form of exercise is horrific. So we sit here and wonder why your ass is so fat it evelopes the toliet when you go to squirt it all out. 
     
    Easy solution...your mouth is not a blackhole with gravity that forces you to eat everything in site as though its your last day on Earth. The other easy solution is to take your titanic obese fat ass and go walk, run, workout. Can't do that now can we?
     
    Then you wonder why your heart is failing, your joints hurt, you have diabetes. So instead of doing something you pump your body full of medications to counter your miserable self induced lifestyle.
     
  11. Naw. I'f you read it you'd know iits not that simple.

    Hfcs stimulates appetite. And is snuck into almost every single food on the market.

    You should watch "secrets of sugar"

    The industry literally sneaks it in so that people become addicted and essentially compelled to buy more food

    They are legal drug dealers

    -yuri
     
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  12. #12 SlowMo, Apr 24, 2015
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 24, 2015
    Exactly! 
     
    And in spite of the old dogma, 100 calories of HFCS or sugar has a helluva big difference in metabolic consequences as compared to a 100 calorie potato. It's been shown that if adolescents drink a 16 oz soda before eating a meal, they will on average consume MORE food (and calories) in the subsequent meal than if they hadn't consumed the sweetened soft drink.
     
    Sugar and HFCS cause us, through Ghrelin and Leptin signaling interference among other things, to feel the need and desire to consume more food to feel satisfied. This is one of its more insidious effects. It's estimated that the calories from soft drinks and sugar laden foods (e.g. yogurt, ketchup, and other supposedly "normal" foods) account for around 30% of total caloric intake.
     
    The average American, through consumption of the various forms of sugar and HFCS, must process the equivalent of 141 lbs of sugar annually. [​IMG]
     
    And then we wonder why 2/3 of the nation are overweight and it's people are experiencing an alarming trend in the rise of obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and the other pathologies collectively labeled, "Metabolic Syndrome"..
     
    Childhood obesity: behavioral aberration or biochemical drive? Reinterpreting the First Law of Thermodynamics
     
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  13.  
    Yes the human is a mindless zombie who must feed the suck endless mountains of food to his/her ever increasing girth. He had absolutely nothing to do with his current state. The endless cows I see at the mall or store had zero say on there current weight.
     
    Yea I believe that. Always easier to blame someone for ones lot in life. It could never possibly be and in this case the person who shoves food in his/her mouth like tomorrow there will be no food.
     
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  14.  
    In some cases, it's used to improve mouthfeel.   As a smoothing agent, it can replace fat, but now we know that fat is less harmful than hfcs.
     
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  15. here is what i know about high fructose corn sugar. 
     
    i changed my diet so that i eat little to no high fructose corn syrup / sugar. as of yesterday i weighed 171 and a year and a 2 months ago i weighed 235. at first i thought i was sick again {cancer survivor} so i had every test imaginable done, no matter how painful or embarrassing and i came back clean. not only a clean bill of health but my cholesterol went down to normal levels, i dropped almost 70 pounds and the sickness, dizziness etc, etc, has gone almost completely. 
     
    now i will go on to say that i did clean my eating habits up, but just a little. i still eat big macs and pizza on occasion. but i am not exercising or any other thing that might account for my health getting better aside from my slight diet change and the drastic measure of cutting out corn sugars. as a matter of fact i got sicker at first. something to do with the toxins that store up in the fat our bodies collect when they are put into that mode of operation. 
     
    so as far as following some sort of scientific procedure that would help me get the definitive "yes or no" about corn syrup, no i didn't do any such thing. i used common sense and just cut it out of my diet. i mean corn syrup is kind of like bologna in the way that you don't see wild bolognas or jugs of corn syrup roaming the plains.
     
    just be smart. eat less processed foods and more fresh foods. crazy thing i found out is that the healthier i eat, the less food i need. ever see a guy eat a big mac and fries worth of healthy food? ya me either lol!!! [​IMG]
     
  16. I might be an exception.. cause I love me my soda and sugary drinks. Typically drink Mountain Dew during the day and green tea at night. When I was a baby, my crazy ass mom would give me iced tea (store bought with HFCS) in my bottle and ended up hitting a point where I'd reject milk. I try to eat food that wasn't processed so much, but I eat/ate a lot of junk food too.. and I've never been overweight. I actually have a really hard time keeping weight on and don't feel hungrier when I consume HFCS.. but I also rarely get the munchies when high.

    Not trying to say HFCS is good for you.. but how definitive are these studies? Cause one thing I noticed.. is we are so varied and everything effects everyone differently, so you can almost correlate any cause and effect if you look hard enough.
     
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  17. shit man. Sugar caffeine babies ftw

    -yuri
     
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  18.  
     
    [​IMG]
     
  19. I actually agree with you. Consumer responsibility is important

    However, so is honesty

    Often times consumers are unaware of the sugar contents of their food .

    Is it not wrong to exploit people and proffit off their weakness?
    -yuri
     
  20. I don't think the main reason for obesity is due to high fructose corn syrup. I think it's due to a lack of stress coping mechanisms and people seeking an immediate gratification using sugar to boost their mood, instead of looking at the root of the problem and breaking free of the cycle of food as a fixer of emotional/psychological ailments. A monkey will orgasm himself to death if he is hooked up to a machine to propagate it and given the button. People need to look beyond the sensational and look at the mysterious nature of the psyche. I don't believe in the western way of looking at the parts of a system and saying this part is not working, I believe it a lot more holistic. High fructose corn syrup is bad but I believe our modern standard of living places a lot of stress on the mind and people who lack the understanding delve into addictions to subside these stressors. Robot dicks.
     

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