I couldn't believe my eyes and ears the other night as I was monitoring coverage of Hurricane Ike on CNN. The scene: young couple in the park on a blanket under a big tree--the quintessential idyllic picnic setting. She offers him a Popsicle, which he initially refuses because "It's filled with corn syrup sweeteners." She smiles lovingly at his silly ideas and says "But why is that bad? Corn is natural and corn syrup is no different that sugar--it's fine in reasonable amounts." After which he sees the error of his foolishly misinformed ways and accepts the yummy treat. A voice-over says "know the facts."
Good idea. What it doesn't say is that often times high fructose corn syrup is the dominant ingredient in soft drinks and snack food. I don't think anyone would consider eating 16 teaspoons of sugar at a sitting, while they think nothing of downing several sodas a day, each one with the corn syrup equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar. But the FACT is that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is much worse than sugar in the way it interacts with our body chemistry.
Our bodies function through a series of chemical interactions that act as traffic signals and everything we ingest has an effect. When operating properly, our systems generate one chemical to signal our brain that we are hungry--ghrelin, and another to signal that we are full --leptin. HFCS plays havoc with these two important message systems. First, it inhibits the secretion of leptin, so your brain never gets a full message. To make matters worse, it never shuts off ghrelin, so even with a full tummy, your brain keeps getting a hungry message.
Knowing the facts is an excellent idea.
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