Foods NOT to eat -- part 1

Welcome to our health & self help blog.

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.

Today's post: Wednesday, 6-28-2006

Foods NOT to eat -- part 1

(The foods to virtually never eat & why.)

High Fructose Corn Syrup.

It’s totally understandable to almost inevitable that literally tons of this stuff got into much of our food.

The bad news is that it’s absolutely dreadful for your health. Even worse, it’s still in a huge percentage of foods in a typical Supermarket or grocery store.

This is so much the case that high fructose corn syrup is actually the largest source of calories in the diet of many people in the United States.

Here’s how High Fructose Corn Syrup got in our food.

I’ve heard it’s cheaper to buy in bulk than sugar.

And, it tastes sweeter, so adding it to a food will allow a food company to either use less than they would using sugar; or the food will taste sweeter & the customers will like it more; or both if you get the amount just right.

In addition, it’s in a liquid form. So it’s easier & cheaper to add it to food than granulated sugar which has to be dissolved or mixed more.

Given these things, the food companies switched from sugar to High Fructose Corn Syrup in droves.

So, it’s now in almost all non-diet soft drinks, most canned juices; most jams, & even in ketchup !!

Here’s why it’s absolutely dreadful for your health.

In addition to foods or drinks with high fructose corn syrup tasting good enough to be a bit addicting & high fructose corn syrup appearing in many foods with no or very little fiber content, recent studies found that calories from high fructose corn syrup do NOT register as food or calories by the human appetite regulatory system when you consume them.

This means that if you eat a lot of it, or drink a lot of it in soft drinks, you are virtually certain to be fat.

(If you’d like to be less fat & consume a lot of high fructose corn syrup now, you can lose several pounds of fat with almost NO effort by eliminating high fructose corn syrup from your foods & drinks.)

And, I’ve read that even more than eating a comparable amount of sugar, people who eat a lot of high fructose corn syrup tend to develop type II diabetes.

Apparently, our bodies simply didn’t evolve to process high fructose corn syrup in large quantities.

And, many of the people who consume the most high fructose corn syrup get virtually no exercise.

Add to this the fact that our bodies DID evolve to process sugar well when getting lots of exercise, primarily from walking.

The results have been in the recent news.

People in the United States who consume too much high fructose corn syrup now are so large a percentage of the population that the average American is fatter & sicker than people in comparable developed countries – including England & Canada.

Do you want to be well & healthy & lean & trim?

If you consume foods or drinks with high fructose corn syrup now, you can get perhaps as much as 60 percent of the way there, by slamming the door on foods or drinks with high fructose corn syrup; locking the door; & melting down the key.

Definitely stop drinking regular soft drinks totally.

(If only soft drinks are available, substitute diet soft drinks. But studies show that people who drink lots of diet soft drinks don’t do well keeping fat off.

So, substitute water, green tea, tea, coffee, decaf coffee, or even real fruit juice mixed half & half with plain carbonated water if you possibly can.)

Refuse to buy or eat jams or canned juice or ketchup with high fructose corn syrup.

The good news is that if enough people learn why to do these things & do them, the food & drink companies will give us more health OK choices.

Right now the foods that have NO high fructose corn syrup are either a tiny minority or are only available in stores like Whole Foods Markets.

And, even in such stores, be SURE to read the labels.

At a local health food store, I got my wife a canned juice drink from a company I thought was health oriented; & we found to our shock that it was sweetened with high fructose corn syrup when she read the label.

So, always read the label FIRST – before you buy.