On food and how processed this is

This morning I went to the market and I learned something cool I'd like to share with you folks.

Remember Karo Syrup? Yep, that is Corn Syrup. Well at one time it was made with a few steps. It was not uber processed.

These days that same corn syrup has over 25 steps.

Perhaps this explains why things are like not so good anymore.

And here is another one. She quit her job with General Mills oh 10 years ago. They did things like the sugar free foods for other companies and it was a SPECIALTY market... these days it no longer is.

But we were talking about it, and how all this amazing processing, added to things like insecticides is leading to a few problems, aka health care problems. This is food for thought.

Oh and this may be just the law of unintended consequences, but I am sure those dots will sooner or later have to be connected.

slide the little rubber ball next to the items you needed to pick up. The categories were simple. Bread, milk, cheese, apples, potatoes, chicken, peas, etc.

Back then, ingredients were something you went shopping for - not something you needed a bachelors in chemistry to read.

but I go to the farmer's market and I shop for ingredients.... and the olive oil is just cold pressed olive oil...

have the worst diet of all the developed nations

seriously I think it's a large part of our health care crisis

and then you look at McDonalds being one of the largest owners of hospitals with McDonalds restaurants inside the hospitals right next to the heart disease and cancer wards.

Karo Syrup is undoubtedly now HFCS, which has led to the obesity and diabetes epidemics.

One thing I've noticed over the years, Americans are woefully ignorant about nutrition. There's no other way they would willingly eat stuff this bad.

Did you just say that McDonald's OWNS hospitals?

The Cleveland Clinic has one of them. They wanted to close it... here is the reason why they did not. The HOSPITAL CAFETERIA was about 50% more expensive. So yes, you could eat healthy but we racked quite a large food bill when dad was in the Clinic in February.

So they kept it open because a lot of their patient's families cannot afford anything else. And they hate it, since it contradicts the wellness message of the hospital and the fact that they have one of the top cardiac units in the country.

And why do I know this? Brother is a doc at the clinic and I asked.

isn't necessarily "health food" either. Like Mcdonald's there are are healthy options like salads but their are also a ton of fried foods, gravy, milkshakes and rich desserts.

The truth is that it was largely the staff that pressed for the continuation of the McDonald's contract at the Cleveland Clinic.

The Ronald McDonald House also does a lot of work with the Cleveland Clinic and Rainbow Babies and Children's and Metro.

Trust me, as a diabetic with a gluten allergy I need to be very careful what I eat.

No use in getting a second one into the ER.

But there is that too. San Diego also has a large RM House, and in a way they are necessary.

So, eh... it's not really a "healthy choice" for a diabetic.

According to the movie, Supersize Me, there are only seven items on the Mickie D's menu that DO NOT contain sugar, and salads weren't on the list.
The only things that do not contain sugar, according to Morgan Spurlock are:
1) hashbrowns
2) french fries
3) sausage
4) chicken mcnuggets (which we now know are fried in butylhydroquinone - petroleum)
5) coffee
6) diet soda
7) Unsweetened ice tea

So, while I applaud the Ronald McDonald House, the idea that McDonald's, Inc. is contributing to childhood cancer with their anti-nutritional food kind of makes the good from their "helping parents live near their sick children's hospital" campaign a moot point, in my opinion.

content of a finished salad. This is not limited to McDonald's salads. Any place offering a prepared salad likely has a salad with a fairly high sugar value.

I was insulin dependent during my pregnancies. During that time i frequently ate at the above mentioned hospitals. It was no more difficult to watch my sugar with a McDonald's dietary info card than it was to navigate the food options of the regular cafeteria. Even the processed meat, often used in all types of cafeterias, contains sugar laden fillers.


The point is that McDonalds, while an easy target, is not the real issue. The real issue is why people choose the bad food instead of the healthy options. I can name, without hesitation, at least four middle class families (it is not always a financial issue) who never serve vegetables because, as they will PROUDLY exclaim to anyone who listens, they hate "rabbit food". Places like the hospital are serving the foods that the people typically want. I assure you that people would simply go elsewhere (cost, time and inconvenience be damned) if those types of food stopped being available.

There needs to be a return of food education. Educating people, especially young people, regarding the basics of food prep, food preservation and nutrition all would go a long way toward helping them become more conscious of the food they put in their mouths.

Because there was such a great price difference between brands,
we began reading the ingredients . . . thinking to find only
kidney beans, water, and salt.


Unbelievable! Every brand but one contained high fructose corn-syrup
. . . and the one without HFCS was so much more expensive, we
decided to buy two cans of the less expensive store-brand (which was on
special), promising ourselves that, the next time anyone in the family
has a taste for chili con carne, unless the non-HFCS beans are on speical,
we'll buy a bag of dry kidney beans and start from scratch.






BTW: Here's what a can of kidney beans without HFCS looked like:

"As it is ill-advised to spew virulent petrochemicals upon our lands and waters in an effort to raise food, so it is equally ill-advised to saturate our bodies with the synthetic chemicals used to grow, to process, and to preserve food. As with smoking cigarettes, it is a slow form of self-destruction. Toxic compounds breed figurative cancers in the land, literal cancers in our bodies.

"That basic point has been obvious for many long years to anyone willing to behold the truth. But the point got hammered home in May when The President’s Cancer Panel released a report stating bluntly, unequivocally, that we face ‘grievous harm’ from chemicals in our food, water, and air. This chemical soup — regularly ingested by the vast majority of human beings in modern, industrial nations — has been generally ignored, and virtually unregulated according to The Washington Post story about the report.

"The report reveals the stunning fact that 41% of all Americans are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes and 21% die of it."

(snip) http://thecalloftheland.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/clean-food-common-sense/

Real food tastes so much better to me, but Mr. Kitteh is prone to whining about just wanting something quick to "get dinner over with."

I think he's just going to have to start getting used to it. (Real food, that is)

Gulp.

Corn syrup was once produced using hydrochloric acid and now it's producing using enzymes and microbial processes. The end result is the same. It's still starch that's been converted to sugar. I don't see how adding steps automatically means it's "not so good anymore".

Processed food is not inherently bad, it's just that people are eating more processed foods which generally means they are eating more high carbohydrate foods and getting less fiber, which is really more of a reflection of personal choices rather than anything the evil cabal of big-agra is doing. The only thing processing does is make those products more efficient to produce which is why someone can buy a box of macaroni and cheese for $0.50 vs spending several times more to buy the equivalent number of servings of fresh green beans.

but we do HAVE a historic increase in obesity rates, as well as metabolic disorders that did not exist even when my brother was going to medical school a generation ago. You may have heard of Chron's... it was mostly unknown when he was a bright eyed young intern. These days... he is the number 3 expert on it in the US. As he told me... given he does a lot of research... increasingly they are starting to look at how we produce food and what we put on it.

It may very well be an unintended consequence of our cheap food policy.

Oh and other things that are at historic high rates:

Diabetes, Celiacs, and other auto immune disorders.

Perhaps it is coincidence... alas I think there is more to this than just coincidence.

There have been a lot of changes in the last few decades. People stay indoors more in climate controlled environments. They walk and bike less. They do less manual labor. The diet has changed and that probably does play a part, but to what extent is not clear based on available evidence.

read insecticides, act in the human body as if they were hormones.

There is plenty of evidence on this one in scientific papers... and why more than a few doctors and research scientists are starting to ask the damn question? Did we cause this ourselves?

Yes all that has a lot to do with it, but so does the way insecticides work in the human body for instance... or how mighty modified and processed food is, which removes some nutrients by the way.

As I said. I am willing to be kind and say it was unintended consequences.

And no, I am not going... go to the other extreme, see raw food movement.

Studies which show correlation most certainly are "evidence", but causation is not necessarily the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

Banning things based on inconclusive evidence also quite often has unintended consequences. DDT was banned because lots of scientists thought it caused eggshell thinning in Bald Eagles and this was causing population decline. 40 years later the eggshells are 10 percent thinner than before the ban, yet the populations have rebounded anyway. Banning DDT made it practically impossible for developing countries to obtain it for malaria control and millions died as a result. If you ban or unnecessarily restrict pesticides, the cost of fresh produce will undoubtedly increase which will put it farther out of reach for the poorest people which leaves them little to no alternative to the more highly processed foods you are vilifying. So if some pesticides are creating health consequences, as you suggest, they most certainly should be considered for further regulation, but we should first have some sort of conclusive "evidence" that shows causation, and as yet we don't.

I happen to believe there is something to this... since yes, they do change the human body at the hormonal level. You don't...

SO be it.

Something straight off the Monsanto website

this same sick sad argument is all over the net, this almost looks like a copy and paste.

If there's no evidence these chemicals are unsafe MajorChode then why don't we fill a 55 gallon drum with DDT and you can take a bath in it to prove your point.

Ad hominem.

Actually people did use to take showers with DDT. People who went to jails, prisons, mental institutions, and members of the military were routinely sprayed with DDT. Not one case of cancer or any other significant health problem was ever reported. In fact, not one case of cancer or any other significant health problem has ever been traced to DDT, unless you count those who have committed suicide by drinking very large quantities of it. Rather than take a bath with it, as you suggest, Dr. J. Gordon Edwards used to eat a teaspoon of DDT once per week to show how benign DDT is to humans and he lived to 84 when he died of a heart attack while hiking up a mountain in Glacier National Park.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Fall02/Mosquitoes.html

I don't believe Monsanto produces pesticides, but clearly you are intent on making your arguments based on ad hominem and irrational emotion rather than anything that approaches good sense or reason. I'm sure big companies who actually do produce pesticides were overjoyed when eco-hysteria managed to get DDT banned with flimsy and non-existent empirical data. DDT is extremely cheap to produce and there is no patent on it. Uninformed people have done more for big companies that produce pesticides than you can ever imagine.

If you don't want to hear it from "Monsanto", how about National Geographic?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/malaria/finkel-text

How about the WWF and Greenpeace?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/opinion/8kristof.html

Cheers!

""If you don't want to hear it from "Monsanto", how about National Geographic?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/malaria/finke...""

"But it was also clear that the campaign was far too ambitious. In much of the deep tropics malaria persisted stubbornly. Financing for the effort eventually withered, and the eradication program was abandoned in 1969....Soon after the program collapsed, mosquito control lost access to its crucial tool, DDT. The problem was overuse—not by malaria fighters but by farmers, especially cotton growers, trying to protect their crops. The spray was so cheap that many times the necessary doses were sometimes applied. The insecticide accumulated in the soil and tainted watercourses. Though nontoxic to humans, DDT harmed peregrine falcons, sea lions, and salmon."

so just like you say about correlation/causation. The fact that DDT was banned is not the primary reason eradication failed, for according to this article it failed before DDT was banned.

So if it didn't harm birds which is debatable what did it do to sea lions and salmon?

""How about the WWF and Greenpeace?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/opinion/8kristof.html""

"DDT doesn't work everywhere. It wasn't nearly as effective in West African savannah as it was in southern Africa, and it's hard to apply in remote villages. And some countries, like Vietnam, have managed to curb malaria without DDT."

"But overall, one of the best ways to protect people is to spray the inside of a hut, about once a year, with DDT. This uses tiny amounts of DDT - 450,000 people can be protected with the same amount that was applied in the 1960's to a single 1,000-acre American cotton farm"

so I may have to admit I'm wrong about DDT, but your post still sounds just like a Monsanto spiel which probably doesn't mean anything really, it's a PR type of appeal. Sorry if I went off, I'm just hypersensitive to crap like Monsanto.

I don't think you're ever going to eradicate disease in the 3rd world until world population comes under control, if it's not Malaria it's going to be some other disease. There's too many humans for the planet to sustain.

""Processed food is not inherently bad""

yes it is

""The only thing processing does is make those products more efficient to produce which is why someone can buy a box of macaroni and cheese for $0.50""

I rest my case, mac and cheese is garbage

""vs spending several times more to buy the equivalent number of servings of fresh green beans.""

you didn't factor in the most expensive health care system in the world cuz mac and cheese eaters are riding the cancer train.

Processed food is inherently bad? OK genius, grinding grains into meal is processing - are you going to tell me that corn meal and flour are inherently bad? Dessication is processing - is the venison jerky on my shelf inherently bad?

You should wipe the bullshit off your shoes before you spread any more of it around.

when I say processing I mean the average packaged foods found in the grocery. By and large they are either neutral or bad. I'm talking all the stuff that is overprocessed and has chemical preservatives/additives. Anything with bleached flour, HFCS, white sugar, food colorings, preservatives, GMO's like corn and soy. Mac and cheese is a PRIME example. It's bad for you. It's pretty easy to shop. Stay in the produce isle, try to find organic produce. Go to a health food store, or a store with a health food section. Stay away from the cereal isle (some health food cereals are okay, but cows milk is bad unless it's raw), the soda pop isle, the chips isle.

When you take food home from the market, what do you typically do with it? You cook it and use it in recipes. In other words, you process it. There is nothing inherently wrong with processed foods. This is NOT the same thing as saying there is nothing wrong with eating large quantities of high calorie, low nutritional value food in lieu of low calorie, high nutritional value food. In fact, that's exactly what I alluded to in my post which you promptly distorted and took out of context in true Breitbart fashion.

Clearly you are far more interested in making your arguments based on hyperbole and emotional BS rather than actually trying to have an adult discussion on the matter. As I don't find you particularly entertaining, I have no interest in pursuing this discussion with you any farther.

Have a nice day.

The only things I "cook" are rice and beans, they can take the heat and retain nutrition, I'm generally on a "live food" diet which means minimal and low heat cooking.

""There is nothing inherently wrong with processed foods.""

maybe we are talking a different definition of "processed". When I say processed I mean bleached flour, white sugar, HFCS, GMO corn/soy, preservatives/additives/food coloring.

I don't mean things like milling rice and grains although technically that is processing.

and I swear they say "contains no high fructose corn syrup". I thought that was the product.

Karo is mostly glucose and has a different taste than table sugar (sucrose). Sucrose is a combination of fructose and glucose. HFCS blends regular corn syrup (glucose) with corn syrup that has been converted to fructose. The result is similar to sucrose and is often used as a substitute because it's cheaper to produce.

Nadinbrzezinski, in case you hadn't seen this one:

Now after reading, we have several now that are pointing in that direction. I also noticed that this was supported by the Feds. Perhaps the Feds are looking at actually regulating this... I HOPE, and to justify this they need the research.

...was this paragraph:

"High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are both compounds that contain the simple sugars fructose and glucose, but there at least two clear differences between them. First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars -- it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose -- but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized."

Sucrose is a disaccharide molecule which contains glucose and fructose. HFCS is simply a mixture of fructose and glucose. So the glycemic effect of the two is considerably different.

and that is the point.

MORE EXPENSIVE sugar from beets et al, might be a better choice for health reasons than... the much cheaper (And subsidized mind you) High Fructose Corn Syrup... but that's just silly me. I mean, what could our cheap food policy have to do with this?

There is no question that HFCS causes more problem for diabetics due to the glycemic differences, but blaming HFCS for the obesity epidemic is a huge leap of faith, especially if you are basing that conclusion on the Princeton study, which creates just as many questions as it answers.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars

like any GOOD SCIENCE.

But whatever...

Me, as a diabetic, I just avoid the crap... PERIOD... even if I have to PAY MORE for product.

There's nothing inherently wrong with correlative evidence, but it should be understood for what it is and what its limitations are. The subject most certainly warrants more study and I would never suggest otherwise.

A considerable percentage of the population drink large quantities of commercial soda on a daily basis. It doesn't take a ph.d to figure out that isn't such a great idea, regardless of whether beet sugar or HFCS is used. Such drinks are essentially liquid candy. I'm not diabetic, but I keep all sugar based drinks in moderation. When I do drink soda, I make my own. If you check the cooking and baking section, I posted a recipe for making homemade root beer with sugar, yeast, and extract. I also have a seltzer bottle that I can use to make other sodas in any combination of reduced sugar, sugar substitutes, or whatever other combinations of sweeteners and flavorings that I like.

Fascinating read.