I have been holding off on a vitriol-filled posting to make sure I am really filled with vitriol. Until I am sure I have the requisite amount of sulfuric-acid-like substance in me to write about it I am dropping a couple of good, unrelated, quotations. One was a second-hand note in an email and one was from a Dilbert cartoon. I am thinking they are more related than I originally suspected.
“I never met anyone who didn’t speak M-16″
“I no longer worry about life passing too quickly”
As much as the producers of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (mmm … doesn’t the name just make you drool for its sweet goodness–think forbidden doughnut) would be chagrined to see the results, there appears to be a link between high fructose intake and insulin resistance. If you are now nodding off in a fit of boredom by this earth shattering news let me add in a quote from the article in the link above:
“There has been a remarkable increase in consumption of high-fructose corn syrup,” said Gerald Shulman of Yale University School of Medicine. “Fructose is much more readily metabolized to fat in the liver than glucose is and in the process can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease,” he continued. NAFLD in turn leads to hepatic insulin resistance and type II diabetes.
The important part about that quote is the bit where it ends in diabetes.
The article also mentions a treatment for the results of a diet very high in fructose that is showing promise in animals.
Now given that we are eating more and more sweeteners in our diet and the sweetener that is gaining the most as a proportion of our sweetie intake is fructose and given that there might be (as the article above suggests) a connection between the increase in fructose in our diet and getting fat and sick is the most logical response to these little gems of wisdom to “suggest that PGC-1b inhibition may be a therapeutic target for treatment of NAFLD, hypertriglyceridemia, and insulin resistance”?
How about just cutting back on the HFCS and other naughty sweeties in our diet? I know it sounds crazy but why are we looking for a cure for a preventable problem? It has got to be stupid to more people than just me that ingesting a harmful substance and then the antidote is a good idea just because it is cheaper than buying something that is both sweet and non-toxic.
UPDATE: It turns out that according to the Corn Refiners Association I should not be extrapolating any ill effects relating to HFCS as it is perfectly safe. I should not confuse high doses of fructose (which even the Corn Refiners Association admit is bad) with anything that might occur as a result of eating HFCS.
The Corn Refiners Association says that “Fructose consumption at normal human dietary levels and as part of a balanced diet has not been shown to yield such results.”
So, the study I quoted above relates to mice fed a high fructose diet (not to be confused with a high fructose corn syrup diet–really, they are different).
The bottom line here is that TOO MUCH FRUCTOSE IS BAD FOR YOU. If you are getting it from HFCS or regular sugar or are mainlining a private stash you smuggled out of a corn refinery. Don’t look for a drug to fix the problem.
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When my wife was taking some courses in nutrition at UPEI she would often bring home nuggets of wisdom that tended to cause us to eat food closer and closer to alfalfa. Generally, when I heard that she had picked up a tidbit from class I would shudder at the pending switch in foodstuffs. There is one occasion (well, more than one, but I am going to write about one now) when I enjoyed the nugget of wisdom. It went something like this
there is a study that has shown that men who wear black socks are more likely to have heart disease
This would be a good time to point out that I do not know if this study exists and if it does I do not have a reference to it. The point the professor was making is that some types of studies are “epidemiological studies” that attempt to correlate various factors of human populations in order to discover causal relationships between these factors. In other words, get a bunch of people and look at what is the same (or different for that matter) for that bunch of people and see if there is a reason for for the sameness (or difference).
If it turns out that men with black socks are more likely to have heart disease (which might be true) it does not mean that black socks cause a higher incidence of heart disease. There is a correlation but not a causal relationship. Another favourite of mine is the assumption that the crowing of a rooster causes the morning to arrive. The rooster always crows before daybreak and the day always comes. That is a slightly different argument that suggests timing implies a causal relationship (post hoc ergo prompter hoc) but I like it as an example, even if it does not prove anything about heart disease or epidemiological studies.
All of this would mean very little if it were not for the fact that I was catching up on XKCD and came across the above comic a couple of hours after I had a relatively long discussion with my aforementioned wife about High-Fructose Corn Syrup and the correlation (though potentially not causal relationship) with North American obesity. You may be jealous or relieved you do not have such conversations with your partner–I think you should be jealous, but that is just me.
Anyhow, I am still no fan of HFCS and I am not going to wear black socks. You have been warned.
On Sunday I thought I had done the hardest 40 lengths of the pool I had ever done. They were slow and disjoint. At one point I wondered if I was going to swim the pool two lengths at a time (it did get a little better with time and pacing). Today I did the hardest 25 lengths of the pool I have ever done and Sunday looks like a swim with the tide by comparison. Friday beckons.
On a related note and at the risk of making it more crowded at the pool, it is great going swimming in the mornings at the CARI. There are very few people there and those that are there do not mind slow, plodding swimmers.
Now, time to get the muscle relaxants.
It is a funny twist of fate that leaves me with only twenty songs at my fingertips. Fate proves herself to have a cruel sense of humour when sixteen of those songs belong to a relaxation CD filled with new-age-whale-song-is-not music. The remaining four songs are
Because I am home from work and feeling like a well used handkerchief I am not filled with a great deal of energy. In fact, I am sitting with a laptop and a remote control that allows me to select from the aforementioned twenty songs. If I am not careful I end up listening to the rather ironically named relaxation music. I am now coding (when I am not writing this post) in 14:07 minute segments. If I work for longer I risk listening to music that makes me relaxed and nauseous at the same time.
I am now experimenting with variations in order and volume of the four songs to see if any allows me to create better code. Although somewhat befuddled by the September-goin’-back-to-school flu I do believe that this is going to be the best code that has ever been written in the recorded history of mankind. In my estimation, Smothered in Hugs and Boxer the Horse are the two best bands in the word when it comes to music in the background (and sometimes foreground when I get carried away with the volume) when writing software.
AAAAARRRRGG. I took too long to write this. I am listening to a whale bitching about his long swim to the feeding ground this year. Must … find … remote.
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