Why totally avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup….
Today's Post, Friday, 5-22-2009
This post is partly a repeat of our many previous posts saying to totally avoid high fructose corn syrup to the maximum of your ability to do so.
But it adds some new information.
And, one of the reasons to totally avoid high fructose corn syrup is so important, doing so certainly is worth repeating for any of you reading this who have somehow missed it before here or elsewhere.:
Mercury is a toxin to nerves and brain cells. Getting too much of it both makes you feel sick with no clear reason why if you are unaware that you have ingested too much mercury –AND – it produces neurologic damage which can impair brain functions and mimic Alzheimer’s disease.
Mercury is now in 30 to 45 % of all foods that contain high fructose corn syrup including well known name brands.
So, it’s important if you want to be healthy and stay mentally able to never eat or drink foods that contain high fructose corn syrup.
This may change. But for right now, avoiding high fructose corn syrup is as important as NOT eating produce that still has dangerous amounts of pesticide on it because of this mercury contamination.
Worse, since children are developing their brains and nervous systems and are so much smaller than adults, avoiding mercury from high fructose corn syrup is really important for children.
The new information is that pregnant women should be even more careful to avoid high fructose corn syrup for this reason. Why set up your baby to be less able or defective due to the mercury in high fructose corn syrup when it is totally avoidable?
In addition, high fructose corn syrup is bad for you for all the reasons eating or drinking excess sugar is.
It may be worse for you than sugar though the people who make it have argued that it is more the same or very slightly worse than dramatically worse because the most used versions of it have only a bit more fructose than sugar. Fructose in quantity has been shown to cause heart disease and to help trigger type 2 diabetes and obesity more than regular sugar. So even a bit more fructose is not desirable. But their point may be valid otherwise.
Even if that’s so, by eating and drinking sweet things a few times a week or month instead of several times a day will improve your health. Since high fructose corn syrup is cheaper and easier to put in things than sugar, if you buy and eat those things that contain it, you will find more of them at lower prices which make it easy to eat more than five times too much for good health.
I work to avoid most sweet foods; but on a few occasions I’ve been tempted by something. By looking at the label first, I find that I indulge far less because most of them turn out to contain high fructose corn syrup. So avoiding high fructose corn syrup does help to avoid getting too much or too many sugary foods.
So if you fail to avoid foods and drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup you will likely ingest enough to be fat and sick. In fact this is now the case for millions of people in the United States who have ingested far too much high fructose corn syrup and sugar both.
That will remain true even if the food manufacturers manage to make all high fructose corn syrup used in foods and drinks to be mercury free.
So we believe the prudent solution is to read all labels and simply avoid buying or ingesting anything that contains high fructose corn syrup.
Here at my work today, I saw a loaf of bread that on its label advertised a cookbook with what recipes it said were recipes good for your heart. The recipes may be as advertised. But the bread was NOT at all good for your heart to eat. Its main ingredient was white flour, a refined grain, AND it contained high fructose corn syrup. That means that is was very high on glycemic index and has little fiber. So it does a bad job of making you less hungry and tends to cause blood sugar surges. Those kinds of foods help cause type 2 diabetes & obesity AND they increase your triglycerides which helps directly cause heart disease. Ouch !!
Note that you could easily avoid all that by simply declining to buy it as soon as you saw it contained high fructose corn syrup.
What triggered my doing this post today?
Here’s this morning’s Early to Rise health article which has some background AND makes it truly scary to think of having pregnant women ingest high fructose corn syrup.:
This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.
"Just Say No to Sweet Poison
By Melanie Segala
As bad as too much sugar is for you, its cousin is even worse. I'm speaking, of course, about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the sugary goo that's been added to soft drinks, salad dressings, cakes, cookies, and cereals for over 30 years. The darling of food manufacturers everywhere, HFCS made its debut as the ideal solution for extending the shelf life and reducing the cost of producing commercially sweetened foods.
While it might have been a magic bullet for manufacturers and retailers, it's been a bullet of a very different kind for consumers. According to nutrition expert Jonny Bowden, writing in Total Health Breakthroughs, HFCS comes with a veritable laundry list of associated health risks, including raising triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, reducing insulin sensitivity, and causing dangerous intra-abdominal fat (the kind that's a precursor to heart disease).
Not enough to make you think twice? Here's another frightening twist: mercury contamination!
Mercury can damage the heart, kidneys, nervous system, and immune system. In pregnant women, mercury can cross the placenta and affect the neurological development of the fetus. (Is it any wonder we're seeing so many cases of autism and ADHD?)
The latest news regarding the dangers of HFCS came to light in late January when several news outlets published the results of two eye-opening studies. In the first study, it was reported that, in 2005, an FDA scientist tested 20 commercial products containing HFCS and found that nine were positive for mercury. If that wasn't bad enough, the FDA, asleep on the job as usual, did not release these dangerous findings to the public until recently.
In the second study, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a non-profit watchdog group, analyzed 55 commercial products containing HFCS that were purchased in the fall of 2008. They found that nearly 1 in 3 of the foods and beverages it tested contained mercury.
At this point you might be wondering what a toxic heavy metal has to do with high-fructose corn syrup. Was it an accident or shoddy manufacturing practices that caused mercury to be found in these foods? No. In creating the corn syrup, a mercury reagent is typically used with a caustic soda to separate corn starch from the kernel. In the process, the mercury cells can contaminate the caustic soda, which is then transferred to the corn syrup.
A spokesperson for the Corn Refiners Association claims that the industry has not used mercury reagents in the manufacturing of HFCS for several years and the study is therefore outdated. But can that really be true if the products tested in the second study were purchased off the shelf by IATP in 2008?
And even so, that feeble excuse cannot reverse the damage done to countless Americans who unknowingly ingested mercury-contaminated food for 30 or more years, clogged their arteries, and possibly affected the neurological development of their unborn children.
What's the takeaway advice here? It's obvious. Get high-fructose corn syrup out of your diet. The health dangers are just too alarming to ignore. Don't wait for the FDA or food manufacturers to do the right thing. If their track record is any indication, the wait will be a long one.
[Ed. Note: Melanie Segala is the Managing Editor of ETR's free health newsletter, Total Health Breakthroughs. You can learn more about food safety and natural health solutions from today's leading experts by subscribing now.]" For a complimentary subscription, visit
http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com .
X*X*X*X*X*X*
Autism and ADHD certainly each have other causes. But additional neurologic damage from mercury certainly doesn’t do unborn babies any good. So in addition to avoiding high fructose corn syrup yourself, get this information to any women who you know who are pregnant.
Today's Post, Friday, 5-22-2009
This post is partly a repeat of our many previous posts saying to totally avoid high fructose corn syrup to the maximum of your ability to do so.
But it adds some new information.
And, one of the reasons to totally avoid high fructose corn syrup is so important, doing so certainly is worth repeating for any of you reading this who have somehow missed it before here or elsewhere.:
Mercury is a toxin to nerves and brain cells. Getting too much of it both makes you feel sick with no clear reason why if you are unaware that you have ingested too much mercury –AND – it produces neurologic damage which can impair brain functions and mimic Alzheimer’s disease.
Mercury is now in 30 to 45 % of all foods that contain high fructose corn syrup including well known name brands.
So, it’s important if you want to be healthy and stay mentally able to never eat or drink foods that contain high fructose corn syrup.
This may change. But for right now, avoiding high fructose corn syrup is as important as NOT eating produce that still has dangerous amounts of pesticide on it because of this mercury contamination.
Worse, since children are developing their brains and nervous systems and are so much smaller than adults, avoiding mercury from high fructose corn syrup is really important for children.
The new information is that pregnant women should be even more careful to avoid high fructose corn syrup for this reason. Why set up your baby to be less able or defective due to the mercury in high fructose corn syrup when it is totally avoidable?
In addition, high fructose corn syrup is bad for you for all the reasons eating or drinking excess sugar is.
It may be worse for you than sugar though the people who make it have argued that it is more the same or very slightly worse than dramatically worse because the most used versions of it have only a bit more fructose than sugar. Fructose in quantity has been shown to cause heart disease and to help trigger type 2 diabetes and obesity more than regular sugar. So even a bit more fructose is not desirable. But their point may be valid otherwise.
Even if that’s so, by eating and drinking sweet things a few times a week or month instead of several times a day will improve your health. Since high fructose corn syrup is cheaper and easier to put in things than sugar, if you buy and eat those things that contain it, you will find more of them at lower prices which make it easy to eat more than five times too much for good health.
I work to avoid most sweet foods; but on a few occasions I’ve been tempted by something. By looking at the label first, I find that I indulge far less because most of them turn out to contain high fructose corn syrup. So avoiding high fructose corn syrup does help to avoid getting too much or too many sugary foods.
So if you fail to avoid foods and drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup you will likely ingest enough to be fat and sick. In fact this is now the case for millions of people in the United States who have ingested far too much high fructose corn syrup and sugar both.
That will remain true even if the food manufacturers manage to make all high fructose corn syrup used in foods and drinks to be mercury free.
So we believe the prudent solution is to read all labels and simply avoid buying or ingesting anything that contains high fructose corn syrup.
Here at my work today, I saw a loaf of bread that on its label advertised a cookbook with what recipes it said were recipes good for your heart. The recipes may be as advertised. But the bread was NOT at all good for your heart to eat. Its main ingredient was white flour, a refined grain, AND it contained high fructose corn syrup. That means that is was very high on glycemic index and has little fiber. So it does a bad job of making you less hungry and tends to cause blood sugar surges. Those kinds of foods help cause type 2 diabetes & obesity AND they increase your triglycerides which helps directly cause heart disease. Ouch !!
Note that you could easily avoid all that by simply declining to buy it as soon as you saw it contained high fructose corn syrup.
What triggered my doing this post today?
Here’s this morning’s Early to Rise health article which has some background AND makes it truly scary to think of having pregnant women ingest high fructose corn syrup.:
This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.
"Just Say No to Sweet Poison
By Melanie Segala
As bad as too much sugar is for you, its cousin is even worse. I'm speaking, of course, about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the sugary goo that's been added to soft drinks, salad dressings, cakes, cookies, and cereals for over 30 years. The darling of food manufacturers everywhere, HFCS made its debut as the ideal solution for extending the shelf life and reducing the cost of producing commercially sweetened foods.
While it might have been a magic bullet for manufacturers and retailers, it's been a bullet of a very different kind for consumers. According to nutrition expert Jonny Bowden, writing in Total Health Breakthroughs, HFCS comes with a veritable laundry list of associated health risks, including raising triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, reducing insulin sensitivity, and causing dangerous intra-abdominal fat (the kind that's a precursor to heart disease).
Not enough to make you think twice? Here's another frightening twist: mercury contamination!
Mercury can damage the heart, kidneys, nervous system, and immune system. In pregnant women, mercury can cross the placenta and affect the neurological development of the fetus. (Is it any wonder we're seeing so many cases of autism and ADHD?)
The latest news regarding the dangers of HFCS came to light in late January when several news outlets published the results of two eye-opening studies. In the first study, it was reported that, in 2005, an FDA scientist tested 20 commercial products containing HFCS and found that nine were positive for mercury. If that wasn't bad enough, the FDA, asleep on the job as usual, did not release these dangerous findings to the public until recently.
In the second study, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a non-profit watchdog group, analyzed 55 commercial products containing HFCS that were purchased in the fall of 2008. They found that nearly 1 in 3 of the foods and beverages it tested contained mercury.
At this point you might be wondering what a toxic heavy metal has to do with high-fructose corn syrup. Was it an accident or shoddy manufacturing practices that caused mercury to be found in these foods? No. In creating the corn syrup, a mercury reagent is typically used with a caustic soda to separate corn starch from the kernel. In the process, the mercury cells can contaminate the caustic soda, which is then transferred to the corn syrup.
A spokesperson for the Corn Refiners Association claims that the industry has not used mercury reagents in the manufacturing of HFCS for several years and the study is therefore outdated. But can that really be true if the products tested in the second study were purchased off the shelf by IATP in 2008?
And even so, that feeble excuse cannot reverse the damage done to countless Americans who unknowingly ingested mercury-contaminated food for 30 or more years, clogged their arteries, and possibly affected the neurological development of their unborn children.
What's the takeaway advice here? It's obvious. Get high-fructose corn syrup out of your diet. The health dangers are just too alarming to ignore. Don't wait for the FDA or food manufacturers to do the right thing. If their track record is any indication, the wait will be a long one.
[Ed. Note: Melanie Segala is the Managing Editor of ETR's free health newsletter, Total Health Breakthroughs. You can learn more about food safety and natural health solutions from today's leading experts by subscribing now.]" For a complimentary subscription, visit
http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com .
X*X*X*X*X*X*
Autism and ADHD certainly each have other causes. But additional neurologic damage from mercury certainly doesn’t do unborn babies any good. So in addition to avoiding high fructose corn syrup yourself, get this information to any women who you know who are pregnant.
Labels: autism prevention, hfcs, high fructose corn syrup, how to avoid ingesting mercury, mercury in food, mercury in high fructose corn syrup, mercury in soft drinks
posted by David at 12:58 PM
1 Comments:
Not long ago, I posted an opinion post saying we should tax high fructose corn syrup in part so fewer people would get fat from ingesting it.
Today I got a health information & opinion email on this topic.
I find it well done & agree with its main point.:
"Dr. Robert Jay Rowen's SECOND OPINION Health Alert
May 27, 2009
The problem with a soft-drink tax
You know, when you get starved for oxygen, your brain can do wild things. And when the government gets starved for their energy source (i.e., money), it can go wild, too.
You may have heard that the U.S. is thinking about charging a luxury or "sin" tax on soft drinks. Most of the plans I've seen target sugar-laden soft drinks. Yes, those drinking sugar-containing soft drinks will have to pay an additional 18% in taxes for this sin or "luxury."
Allegedly, these plans will help fight the obesity epidemic. Actually, it will to some degree. It will lighten the weight in your wallet. But it won't help you lose weight. In fact, it could make your situation far worse. Here's why:
If we simply tax sugar-filled soft drinks, most people will buy the cheaper diet drinks instead. Published research overwhelmingly has shown that so-called "diet" drinks do nothing to foster weight loss. In fact, the evidence clearly shows that they increase weight.
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Read on:
How might that happen? When you drink something that tastes sweet, your pancreas responds by making insulin in preparation for a natural load of sugar. No sugar comes. So your blood sugar drops and you get hungry. You eat more and gain weight.
Furthermore, "diet drinks" are loaded with aspartame. Aspartame is 10% methanol, a horrible neurotoxin. Aspartame causes a large number of neurological abnormalities. I consulted with my own dentist today for his take on it. He would prefer his patients to drink sodas containing sugar rather than the poison. At least your body recognizes sugar, even if not good for you. Aspartame and other sweetening chemicals are foreign to your body.
A tax to encourage the consumption of terribly toxic chemicals is just plain nuts. It would be far better to tax all of the soft drinks. Hopefully that would encourage people to drink God-made water (the safest of all drinks). Whether this tax passes or not, please avoid all soft drinks, other sugar-laden drinks, and all diet drinks.
Robert Jay Rowen, MD"
So, since sugar and high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and soft drinks all tend to fatten and sicken people, I think the best solution is to tax each of them.
So every soft drink would get taxed twice, once as a soft drink & once for its sweetening agent.
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