Liquid Candy

Wow . . . sort of loosely following the diabetes, High-Fructose Corn-Syrup thread which started with this blog entry and continued here. This article on the Case Against Soda sings to the same choir. The whole thing is definitely worth reading, but here are some quick take aways:

• ...according to a study last year, soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks have become the largest source of calories in the American diet, replacing white bread.
• They tracked the diets of 548 teens for 19 months and found that kids who drank sugar-sweetened beverages regularly were more likely to be overweight than those who didn't. The researchers also found that the odds of becoming obese increased 60% for each can or glass a day of sugar-sweetened soft drinks.
• the type of sugar used in the majority of soft drinks may be making things worse. Although the research is controversial, there's evidence that the man-made high fructose corn syrup used in most sodas fails to suppress the production of ghrelin, a hormone made by the stomach that stimulates appetite.
• scientists now suspect that the sweet stuff may help explain why the number of Americans with type 2 diabetes has tripled from 6.6 million in 1980 to 20.8 million today.
• an ongoing trial tracking the health of more than 51,000 women. None of the participants had diabetes at the onset of the study in 1991. Over the following 8 years, 741 women were diagnosed with the disease. Researchers found that women who drank one or more sugary drinks a day gained more weight and were 83% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who imbibed less than once a month.

I keep finding the whole timetable behind the introduction and wide-spread use of HFCS, the growing "epidemics" of obesity and diabetes which correlate with its saturation in our food products, and the general cluelessness of our "medical establishment" about how food and nutrition works in our mind/bodies part of the same short-sighted trust-us-we're-the-source-of-authoritative knowledge that's wrecking havoc with our environment and international relations.

What happens when little pieces of society/science/government are all in charge of little chunks of the territory and nobody is responsible for putting together the big pictures? I suppose that's when we have to make pictures for ourselves; even though connecting the dots is generally frowned upon as an individual exercise :-)

Here's a little graph I constructed from some USDA data sources. (As an aside, swivel is a pretty cool place to experiment with sifting through data and seeing correlations; when I get time, I'll be trying other experiments there under anamnesis :-)