I think it’s another example of American all-or-nothing thinking.

I want to think that that doesn’t therefore tie into the evangelical sin-redemption model; sadly, I’m sure for a lot of people it does.

Three years is a long ass time to wait before coming forth with the info. During that time she could’ve cut back on the pedal to the metal recipes and she could’ve gradually weaned her fans off of the high sugar, high fat, high sodium recipes.

I think it’s interesting how she and we all assume that the natural rhythm of these things is to make the switch to healthier eating after you’ve already started to suffer problems, often incurable ones like diabetes.

“Incurable” is maybe too strong a statement here.  If you have type II you can have it pretty mild, and if you have weight you can lose, often losing that weight and maintaining an exercise schedule will help you maintain for quite some time.  You may never have to rely on insulin and can delay the need for meds of any kind.

I see the same thing with people taking a pass on dessert or eating something healthy; if you don’t frame it as an attempt to lose weight, you often get aggressive questions.

A vegetarian friend of mine gets grilled on being vegetarian all the time, much more than I do because (a) I’m actually pescetarian and (b) he’s a guy, and one who’s known for his full-on take on life, so why would he not be eating crap all day every day?  Instead of eating actual good food that actually tastes good?  He’ll be raising hell while the other guys are sitting in recliners watching TV, that’s why.

he’s a guy, and one who’s known for his full-on take on life, so why would he not be eating crap all day every day?  Instead of eating actual good food that actually tastes good?

But that rabbity crap can’t taste good. Only burgers and takeout wings and pizza and watery beer can taste good. Everyone knows that except the hippies who think they’re so much better than everyone else because they do things women would do.

I think another problem is the endless amount of weight loss information we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.  While the process for controlling diabetes is pretty well established the best practice for losing weight definitely is not (note it’s almost never “controlling” weight.)  When you mentioned drinking diet Coke my first unbidden thought was hearing someone, maybe on NPR? mention that aspartame increases perceived hunger, or slows your metabolism, or something like that.  One of my coworkers seemed downright relieved when she was diagnosed with diabetes, because it gave her a set of hard and fast rules to follow, rather than a slew of competing claims.

Diabetes is a great disease.  It makes people so much money.  Drugs to properly maintain insulin levels and prepackaged diet plans sold at a premium and all sorts of advice counseling and books to sell make diabetes a forever booming business model.  If I was Paula Dean and I knew I was in on that gravy train, I’d want everyone and her kid brother suffering from something I was peddling the cure for.

There’s not as much money in prevention, after all.  And you don’t have the same kind of dedicated consumer base.  I mean, what makes a product fly off the shelves like “If you don’t consume me, you’ll go into a catatonic shock”?

From a capitalist perspective, what’s not to love?

The trajectory of many American women is a vicious cycle of calorie restriction followed by unrestrained eating accompanied by weight fluctuations or a steady weight gain and a buttload of guilt and shame.

Agreed, Rick. I don’t want to put this post into the universe of people who make food a moral issue. I think there’s nothing immoral with eating sugary or fatty food—-I love to do it! I don’t get the moralizing about it. Questions of health and morality need to be firmly separated, when it comes to sex or when it comes to diet. (As in, we all have a diet, not “going on” a diet.)

I’m amazed at how little awareness there is on diabetes, given how dangerous it is, how costly it is, and how unpleasant it is.  There’s a lot of low-level grassroots things: nurses and doctors talk about it, health educators talk about it.  But nobody’s wearing stop diabetes ribbons, nor are there PSAs with any of the many celebrity sufferers.

The best we had was an episode of 30 Rock.

I don’t blame Deen for not coming out about this sooner. It’s not like it has been particularly pleasant, and chances are she wanted some time to digest her new diagnosis without everyone telling her it was her own fault because she’s so fat and eats so much.

Also, it’s hard to say what her actual diet is.  Yeah her cooking on her show is fatty and ridiculous, but that’s television.  So I"m not about to make comments about her lifestyle choices while knowing actually nothing about her actual lifestyle.

I think it is really the dieting mentality that leads to this whole issue of sudden dietary changes.  The idea that I “SHOULD” have a diet coke even though I’d rather have a regular one doesn’t really lead me to making food choices based on what is healthy for me.  It leads to food choices based on guilt and fear of future restriction.

I’m amazed at how little awareness there is on diabetes, given how dangerous it is, how costly it is, and how unpleasant it is.

Not surprising at all. 1) as mentioned at 6, it’s a massive moneymaker. 2) Unlike breast cancer or lung cancer, it can take decades to kill you, so there’s no sense of urgency. 3) Acknowledging it would require confronting and rethinking much of our food culture, which would impact (1).

I don’t know who Mary Elizabeth Williams is to admonish Deen for not disclosing personal medical information sooner or for looking out for herself financially but her article has provided a great forum in the comments section for misogynistic fat-bashing of Deen.  Which, of course, is motivated by the utmost compassion and concern for her “health”.

@Smikey
They changed the diagnosis criteria for diabetes in 1997 to make nearly a quarter of adults (based ona normal bell curve) diabetic.  Prediabetes is now set at a fbs of 100, which is just above average.  Yes, serious and uncontrolled diabetes is harmful and dangerous and should be treated.  But a lot of people just have high blood sugar, and are being told they are going to go blind and lose limbs.  http://www.obesitymyths.com/myth8.2.htm

Also true, Donna.

The proposed relationship between food and religion is nothing new. The equating food with morality has been around for a while—I remember reading up on this about how in the 1920’s—during a period where Americans were generally becoming more urban and less religious (the blossoming of the “modern era”), the first diet ads were coming out equating morality with thinness, and “testimonial” style declarations of how much better a woman feels having conquered her weight and trimmed down that could have just as easily been a rejection of sin and a return to Jesus as it was about dropping 20 lbs. Prior to this, being a fat lady might not have been the idealized look, but it was at least appreciated as a symbol of wealth and prosperity (which was pretty attractive in and of itself)*. With a further push to make food cheaper and more readily available, having enough food to feed yourself could no longer be the marker of wealth and luxury, and so having the time and money to keep a thin waistline was more important. 

My feeling is that there are people out there who have rejected religion but still feel a very deep need to deprive themselves of pleasure for the sake of “morality” and food makes a very convenient means to transfer that need to self-aggrandize one’s morality or indicate one’s superior wealth and standing or both. It’s not enough to be a vegetarian or a vegan, they constantly look for new diet plans that will further restrict what they eat: based on politics, based on “health,” based on some bizarre evolutionary junk science.

Food is an important way that people socialize, and so it is a natural place to insert morality. Frankly, I see as much of a health and moral argument to be made about how we ... erm… get rid of our food after we’re done with it—using perfectly drinkable water to flush our waste, and having toilets that are basically designed to give us painful hemorrhoids, etc. But we don’t have fashionable niche pooping lifestyles, because we poop in private and there’s nothing there we can beat other people over the head with about how one person is a superior, more moral pooper than the other.

Long story short: Paula Deen has made a nice buck being a hedonist, and she’s having her Come To Jesus now.

* A popular theory is that the thin, waifish look was considered unattractive during the 19th century because it was a sign of tuberculosis, which I don’t think is a factor. In the 1980s, we still had thin, waifish models and a thin ideal of beauty, and there was another deadly wasting disease at the time. It’s the money, not the “health.”

Uh, could we please put away the ridiculous conspiracy theories about how all of this is about making money for Big Pharma, who obviously have their finger on the cultural pulse of America? Heart disease is also a huge moneymaker that can take years to kill a person, but awareness of that disease is pretty high. I’m not sold on this idea that the pharmaceuticals are influencing the way Americans think about diet and nutrition. There is a huge number of moving pieces here. Sure, they benefit, but do people seriously believe that pharmaceutical companies rely on the revenue stream from diabetes treatment to stay profitable? Disease isn’t going away.

An honest-to-god comment on a Deen recipe called Paula’s Fried Butter Balls:

These are great, Paula! You rock! I just love to see the comments from do-gooders. They think they will live longer because they eat a salad - that’s goat food!

This. On a recipe for deep-fried butter.

I’m sure a lot of people think a healthy diet is just a treatment for serious illness, but I think a substantial portion just think any meal that doesn’t meet the mainstream fat-sugar-salt baseline isn’t really people food at all. Literally: I don’t think leafy plants of any variety register as food.

Also, a point that we should be emphasizing here is that the latter half of one’s life is a terrible time to attempt to form entirely new eating habits.

One of my undergrad clinical psychology courses dedicated nearly two weeks to a discussion on motivation and diabetes treatment - the horrifying conclusion being that many people will lose a foot before they’ll implement major changes to their diet, even with the support of a therapist or group.

Yeah, in so many of the comments are people using diabetes and “health” as an excuse to pillory a fat woman.  Like how dare a non-skinny and non-conventionally attractive woman be on TV?? Fat: Still a feminist issue.

There’s also the fact that a lot of what gets pushed as healthy food just sucks. Sure, salads are good when they’re good, but when they’re bad they leave you feeling you’ve wasted a lot of time and energy. So when you have billions of dollars spent on making unhealthy food attractive and yummy, and thousands or millions spent on doing the same for healthful food…

paul—you mean my bleu-cheese-and-avocado salad with the fried chicken fingers on top isn’t healthy?! But I told them to put the ranch dressing on the side!!!

Literally: I don’t think leafy plants of any variety register as food.

I think the problem is the leafy variety is a) damn bland and b) not exactly filling.

And I say this as a person who was a vegan and who still has no problem pulling out a bag of baby spinach to snack on.

Most people’s experience with ‘salad’ is iceberg lettuce, if they’re lucky there might be a little shredded cabbage and carrot. NO ONE wants to subsist on that; the only way to enjoy it is to drown it in dressing.

And that’s the problem, if they think “healthy eating” equals bland salads, I can understand why they think healthy food sucks. The problem is there are very few people teaching about tasty and healthy food.

It also show up the complete falisy of markets always coming up with the most efficient solution. There is no profit to be made from preventative medicine, in fact there is a large amount of profit to be lost. On the other hand Goverenments that run public health care have very strong incentives to run programs that prevent much more costly health care later on.

One of my coworkers seemed downright relieved when she was diagnosed with diabetes, because it gave her a set of hard and fast rules to follow, rather than a slew of competing claims.

Amanda is right, some people give you a really hard time if you don’t have a good reason for not indulging. I have considered faking being diabetic so that I would have an easy escape from the “just one cookie won’t hurt” type of social pressure that surrounds food in workplace and many social settings. I am not diabetic as of my last check up, but my blood glucose is a bit on the high side and my family tree is chock full of diabetics. I could easily wind up diabetic if I’m not careful, but in many situations people try to make you feel bad for trying to maintain a healthy diet.

I was just volunteering (at a fan convention) and I ate alot of my meals provided by the convention.  “Why do you eat like a rabbit?”  “I don’t eat like a rabbit.  I eat like a horse.  I eat everything and lots of it.  That includes salads.”  Besides, I find when I’m traveling I have trouble getting enough soluble fiber…

I’m big on the eat-a-few-bites and be happy train.  If that means you don’t finish your soda or dessert or popcorn, so be it; it’s not like those things are big wastes.  I drink a huge soda at the movies - but I make a conscious effort to drink other things at meals and don’t otherwise drink soda.  Sure, I eat dessert, and I love it, but I balance that with eating more plain salad or dried fruit or smaller main dish or carbohydrate portion when I can.  When I can’t, it probably means I’m burning those calories, but that’s not going to work for everyone.

Also, I abhor diet soda.  But I can stand (and like) things with less sweetener.  If I could get soda or treats with half as much artificial sweetener, I’d like them more.  But generally, that’s not an option.

There is also a lot of societal shaming around medical conditions like diabetes.  You only get diabetes if you “eat poorly” (shame on you!) or the like.  It is weight-shaming taken to the next level.

Add to that, the real world difficulties with insurance (and if the GOP guts ACA, expect that problem to be worse) and other issues, and you can understand why someone would be reluctant to be open about acknowledging that diagnosis.

We’re learning a lot about this in my family; in three days my father will become an insulin-dependent diabetic as a result of having his pancreas removed.  It was quite a surprise to learn the types of foods one must be careful eating.  He’d never thought of rice or pasta as being bad for diabetics, he’d always thought of it as being sucrose.  (The carbohydrates become sugars in the digestive process.  Add bread and potatoes to the no-no list!)  He’s an 80-year-old who’s reasonably healthy and has eaten a lot of carbs in his life without becoming overweight, so it will be a major life adjustment.

There’s also the fact that a lot of what gets pushed as healthy food just sucks. Sure, salads are good when they’re good, but when they’re bad they leave you feeling you’ve wasted a lot of time and energy. So when you have billions of dollars spent on making unhealthy food attractive and yummy, and thousands or millions spent on doing the same for healthful food…
Comment #20: paul on 01/18 at 02:00 PM

A lot of people don’t cook from scratch; they eat frozen dinners or share frozen entrees instead.  If you look at what’s available in those categories you can kind of understand why they think healthy food tastes like crap, because a lot of it does.

A huge number of “low-fat” foods are just full of sugar and some slick crap that’s apparently supposed to mimic the fat mouth-feel but just coats the tongue. 

And a lot of the other “healthy” stuff has so little taste!  I suspect the anorexic contingent for this, the people who want to get away from eating altogether so they want super-“pure” whiter than white food, like plain boiled boneless chicken breast.

Most people’s experience with ‘salad’ is iceberg lettuce, if they’re lucky there might be a little shredded cabbage and carrot.

That’s one reason. I think another is that many veggie-heavy meals incorporate multiple vegetables, which means there’s a high chance of there being one that you a) are unfamiliar with and reluctant to try and/or b) just plain don’t like. Some are so ubiquitous that if you don’t like them (ie. tomatoes) they can be hard to avoid even if you’re not vegetarian.

I’ve also run into the issue when trying to veggie-shop with my husband that we seem to prefer different plants. It makes it difficult to incorporate more vegetables into our diet because what I like, he doesn’t and vice versa.

It’s not just the type of food, but the amount. Anyone who was raised in the South, as I was, most likely had an overbearing relative who would relentlessly push them to eat more food at any meal. For me it was my grandmother and my great aunt. Anytime they cooked a meal, they would pester me to eat more, as if I was going to die of starvation. And then, if you refuse to eat anymore, they get offended, as if you had just said that the food they prepared was the worst in the world.

We live in a culture that has taught us to not consider prevention because we can simply go to our physician and be prescribed a pill that will alleviate any issues we might be experiencing. Don’t worry about lifestyle changes - just take pop a pill and all will be better. It’s amazing to me how we come up with excuses about how hard it is to make the smallest changes in our lives that will have a tremendous impact on our quality of life. I speak from experience because I know I have been guilty of this more than once and while I have made major diet changes in the last year I still haven’t managed to work exercising into my life at all.

I work in healthcare and not a week goes by when at least one of my older patients says to me “Don’t get old” or an equivalent to that phrase and it always breaks my heart. Not all of the time, but frequently their quality of life could have been different if they had been better educated or maybe followed their doctor’s advice more closely.

Diabetes is often followed with multiple health issues because it is such a devastating disease. Why wouldn’t we, as a society, want to focus more on preventing it not just for the costs that impact all of us but so that our golden years actually live up to the title?

Crissa @ 25 - which convention? (if you don’t mind answering)

The trajectory is to overeat without thinking about for years, until it catches up with you and then, as a corrective, your doctor puts you on a strict diet where you can’t eat any of your favorite foods at all. There’s no room for the “take two bites and leave it” mentality that allows you to have the food you like without putting yourself in a position where you’re forbidden from ever touching it again.

I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with type 2, I was actually kind of shocked how not restrictive the diet is. Or at least, surprised at how much junk actually still gets through.

The funny thing about diabetes is that while being overweight can lead to insulin resistance, foods that are high in fat are better digested by the insulin resistant digestive system because fat slows down the entire process.

If a diabetic were choosing a snack between a chocolate bar, a serving of potato chips, a serving of ice cream or some watermelon. The worst choice in that list is actually watermelon because it will cause a much higher blood sugar spike.

So chocolate is an occasional food but watermelon is a never.
You can have potato chips more often than a baked potato - unless you smother it with sour cream or butter.
Most types of rice are worse than a can of coke.

Diabetic friendly and healthy don’t necessarily coincide.

The most hilarious thing is that the same people who mock you for trying to eat healthy will turn around and shame you for being fat under the guise of caring about your health. It’s like the voices in these people’s heads don’t talk to each other.

Two years ago I made one simple diet change: I slowed down while eating and I stopped eating when I was full. It didn’t matter if I was out at a restaurant or at home. Full stop.

Every time I was out with friends and we’d be ordering appetizers and sharing food, I’d eat my entree and stop once I felt full. I let the waiter take the dish away and told them I didn’t need to put it in a doggy bag (especially if the food was junky, didn’t want to be eating it for days on end). A lot of my friends where shocked and called me wasteful, both in money and food. I told them my feelings were that I was paying to get full and once that was accomplished my money was well spent. As for the food waste, they’d try to make me feel guilty but I’d often ask for half portions (willing to pay the full price) and sometimes I would get them and other times not. In those cases I pointed out to my friends it was more on the restaurant and not me.

After a couple of months of this I noticed that I’d get fuller faster, and I figured my body had adjusted to the new eating pattern (and that I’d been over eating quite a lot). One of the best decisions I’ve made about my health.

One of the other things is that whenever we go out to bars I’d normally stop at two or three drinks and take my time with those. You can’t imagine how many “Why are you drinking so slow?” comments I get and even people taking my drinks and drinking them for me to try and get me to drink faster. It surprised me how “concerned” my friends seemed to be about what I choose to do with my eating habits and how accustomed to gorging we’ve become.

One of the other things is that whenever we go out to bars I’d normally stop at two or three drinks and take my time with those. You can’t imagine how many “Why are you drinking so slow?” comments I get and even people taking my drinks and drinking them for me to try and get me to drink faster.

Isn’t that bizarre? I get it a lot—I have a low tolerance these days so I no longer even attempt to match people drink for drink. I used to wonder whether they thought I was trying to get out of paying for rounds…

Now I think it’s just that they don’t want a quasi-sober witness to how ridiculous they are being.

I don’t want to pick on UltraMagnus (I think your system is perfect), it just drives me nuts when people in a restaurant send away a plate half-eaten without a doggy bag.  Restaurants serve too-large portions, but my cheap soul is pained to see leftovers not taken home (unless it’s junky like you say).
I totally agree about bars.  I don’t drink often, and I decided in college it was a co-dependent activity, but it never occurred to me food could be as well.

I’ve also run into the issue when trying to veggie-shop with my husband that we seem to prefer different plants. It makes it difficult to incorporate more vegetables into our diet because what I like, he doesn’t and vice versa.

My partner and I made up the rule that whoever does the cooking for that meal, picks the ingredients of that said meal. Now it’s not to the point of cruelty, for example I won’t feed him anything with artichokes in it when they actively make him gag. But the stuff he just doesn’t prefer? Nope, the mushrooms and the zucchini are going in, he can pick them out if he needs to but that rarely happens anymore.

So he’ll eat the zucchini as long as it’s in small enough pieces and I’ll hold my nose while I eat the brussel sprouts that he wants to have boiled. Ah, love.

In most cases it is totally worth trying vegetables in different ways, with different cooking methods and in different dishes. If you can find a veg that you previously disliked but can cook it in a way you can tolerate and your partner really enjoys it really can be quite rewarding.

hypatia, I LOVE that rule! The only thing that would cause me to hesitate to institute it between me and my partner is that I’m extremely unpicky about food in general, and she is a bit pickier about which vegetables she prefers. So if there is asymmetry like that, such a rule could end up being a bit of a punishment for the pickier person. Of course, the other side of it is that I end up not being able to eat things that I like, so I’m not sure what the solution is.

The problem is there are very few people teaching about tasty and healthy food.

I love showing up to potlucks with this quinoa salad and having everyone rave about how awesome it is and wondering what on earth I put in it… and it’s completely vegan. I’ve handed out that recipe to at least ten people who didn’t even know how to pronounce “quinoa”.

UltraMagnus - this is why I drink good whiskey, neat. No one is going to tell you to slam your Johnnie Walker (and if they do, then tell them they’re buying you the next one - and then get a blue label).

my first unbidden thought was hearing someone, maybe on NPR? mention that aspartame increases perceived hunger, or slows your metabolism, or something like that.

I’m convinced!

What other word starts with qui and is pronounced like key?

@ganews: I’ll take home food that I really enjoyed and am sure to eat again, but I won’t take food home that I was meh about or if I’m not sure I’ll get to it before it goes rotten. Then too—consider that a lot of folks eat out before going to movies or other events. If they aren’t going to be near a fridge, it’s asking for food poisoning to cart their leftovers around.

I love Magnus’s plan—it works for me and my husband. At favourite restaurants, where we know we’ll love the food we’ll get a pre-emptive doggie bag, and box half our entree. Otherwise, we too just leave the leftovers, since the chances we’ll get to it before it goes bad are low. (Occasionally I’ve taken leftovers along to give to the local homeless who ask for leftovers, but I’ve been told that leaves me open to the city ticketing me or to a lawsuit if anything is wrong with the food.)

Re: Comment #30: Der Herr der Finsternis on 01/18 at 02:46 PM

A trait may not be unique and yet be defining to a definition.  All-or-nothing-ism is certainly a defining American trait, but I have no idea if it is unique.

I was questioned by someone recently on why I ate cherry (or grape) tomatoes, plain, just like that out of the container.

Because they’re delicious and extremely portable to work!

Hadn’t he ever eaten cherry tomatoes? Sure, he said, in a salad (drenched in dressing, I’ll bet.)

Carrot chips, also, yum and portable. And great for dips, better than chips.

I have two friends who developed adult onset diabetes in their late ‘50s—both carbohydrate fiends.

A diet of unrefined carbohydrates is also yummy, but since I went into a dizzy spell the last time I drank a milkshake, well, that’s it for me.

However, when the one friend asked her doctor for a nutrition list after he diagnosed, and she began treatment, for diabetes and he couldn’t be bothered to supply it. Just urged her to keep up the insulin.

The other friend will eschew fruit (carbohydrates!) for white toast and hash-browned potatoes with breakfast. So I wonder about his doctor, as well.

And a lot of the other “healthy” stuff has so little taste!

While it doesn’t have to, if you just straight reduce the sugar salt, or fat content of a food you will reduce its apparent flavor.  Sugars and fats bind flavors to your receptors.  It’s like the contrast is turned down on your TV - but with flavor - when you remove the base sugar of fat.  Coke wouldn’t taste spicy at all if it didn’t have sugar, as an example.

So when they make things which have no fat or no sugar, the ability to taste the flavors in it becomes dulled.  And the flavors cost money!  Flavor is the expensive part, per pound, of any meal.  Just a drop more of sugar salt, or fat would go a long way in making something have more taste.  Flavor is also one of the things which ages out of foods the fastest, making it hard to retain those flavors when dried or boxed or frozen.

It certainly is a difficulty that is not trivial to overcome.

@43 - quiche (I’m such an effette librul)

I wish cherry tomatoes tasted good to me, judy.  But they usually seem to have the flavors of tomato I don’t like ^-^;  Gimme a big brandywine or pineapple tomato instead.  And I keep ‘em on the counter, never refrigerated, because that just kills their flavor!  Gotta keep ‘em above 50F or thereabouts.  But then again, I can snack on cabbage and as long as its cold and crispy, be happy.

Thank Jimmy.  I knew there was at least one. because it’s a close sound.

Re: Comment #32: helen w. h.  on 01/18 at 02:54 PM
http://www.furtherconfusion.org/fc2012/

Comment #38: hypatia on 01/18 at 03:31 PM
Sounds like our unwritten rule, too.  But we exempt certain foods, like burgers sandwiches and salads, from it specifically.

I’ve had my manhood questioned many times at work from not overeating (plus the fact that I was eating some kind of weird unacceptable foreign food). When we ordered Chinese (an acceptable foreign food) at lunch the last time, I was asked whether I was a vegetarian in a dismissive tone, because of the pile of brocolli on my plate next to the chicken. Chicken is a vegetable now, you know.

Hobbes - thanks, I bought some quinoa recently and was wondering what easy way to cook it.  This should fit the bill.

Chicken is a vegetable now, you know.

You may joke about that, but when traveling behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980’s, I visited a restaurant that had chicken on their vegetarian menu.

Crissa - Cool! 
We had a couple of people who might have fit in at the convention I attended this last weekend - http://2012.arisia.org/ .  The spouse and I are just easing back to the SciFi public events after a long dry spell (last previous con had been in ID in Fall ‘94).  They seem a lot tamer.  I’m not sure if they are tamer in general, we are more jaded, or it is a regional difference.

@53: Lots of cultures have the same colloquial words for ‘meat’ and ‘beef’, so vegetarians visiting those countries might need to be more specific. I’d imagine vegetarians native to those countries would already know such things and would be useful in this context.

Getting a little bit big picture/philosophical.

IIRC Micheal Polan’s book says that it used to take three or four years to fatten a heifer up for slaughter, now thanks to antibiotics (prescribed largely because they have a side affect of making the animals grow larger) and super high calorie diet, now they fatten up in 8 months.

They say you are what you eat - and in the American AG system, we are pumping our meat full of calories and drugs - then we pump OURSELVES full of empty calories and drugs.

Much in the same way our police state has began to adopt torture - since many of the Natl Guard torturers were cops in regular life - so too the American obesity machine has fattened us up and filled us full of drugs because that’s what we’re doing to our cattle and chickens.

And the result? Shock of shocks, we have an average lifespan nearly ten years shorter than N. Europe - and drug industry raking in the dough for all the health problems caused by the food industry.

When you see the way the American system treats food animals, you are essentially seeing the way the American Corporate System views its own people - as raw material resources to be converted into dollars.

The depth to which Americans refuse to talk about food as nourishment for human bodies approaches outright psychosis.  I don’t know why this is so, but the act of saying, “Food is how human bodies get nutrients” is outside the American mainstream.

If you believe Paula Deen’s recipes are “irresponsible” and that she “deserves” type II diabetes, then you ought agree with those Christians who argue that free access to contraception promotes promiscuity and its consequences.

After all, chlamydia, a highly infectious agent, often goes undiagnosed in women and, when untreated, is responsible for at least 30% of all cases of infertility. HPV causes 99% of cervical cancer lesions, 85% of anal cancer lesions, 70% of vaginal cancer lesions, and 60% of neoplasms detected in the mouth and throat.

And HIV. Well, we all know about that, don’t we? And abortion? Ditto!

We wouldn’t be having all these awful problems if liberals weren’t working day and night to advance “sexual freedom” and “women’s rights” and “gay rights.”

Which is to say…

Inchoate notions of morality aren’t very useful when we start thinking about disease, its incidence, and prevention.

This is often difficult for laypeople to appreciate because, on a certain level, it just makes “sense” that diseases and disorders are punishments for “bad” behavior,” and that health and longevity are the rewards for “good” behavior.”

But in the real world of what’s directly observable and measurable, diseases and disorders are too complex and too subtle to lend themselves as protagonists in moral lessons or morality plays.

And, anyway, purse-lipped censoriousness has never been empirically shown to be an effective means of promoting healthy, or at least lower-risk, behaviors.

KingElvis, how are livestock raised in Europe? Is it different than here? How does the Northern European diet compare to the American diet? How much should we wait differences in access to health care in N. Europe and the USA vs. any differences that may exist in diet and means of raising livestock? What about those pharmaceutical companies that are based outside the United States, and what proportion of their revenue comes from Europe?

My questions are meant seriously. There are obviously differences, and they come from somewhere. But again - there are a lot of moving parts! And I would be surprised (but educated) if American agriculture and raising of livestock differed in ways that somehow explained large amounts of the differences in life expectancy and population heath.

I think American exceptionalism that runs in the opposite direction of normal - e.g. the American corporate world is more callous and less human than it is elsewhere, where everyone loves everyone and there isn’t a corporate system that sees the population as individual money vending machines - is still a deeply flawed way of thinking. I guess I find these hypotheses that ascribe differences between the United States and other places to large-scale conscious moral failure kind of boring and lacking in explanatory power. If governments in Europe are making regulatory decisions that have positive effects on public health, I’d like to know. I couldn’t give too shits about whose Corporate System is eviler than the other’s.

Gah. TWOshits, TWO. Not “too.”

Hugo, I don’t disagree with your larger point, but your analogy doesn’t work at all.

Dichotomized (all or nothing) thinking is a hallmark of perfectionism, which companies use all the time to sell products. Perfectionism is not about setting high standards, but unreasonable or unachievable standards and then punishing yourself harshly when you inevitably fail to meet them. “If my house doesn’t look like Martha Stewart’s, then I’m a huge failure. Oh wait, I can spend thousands on her products to emulate the look.”

Large sections of the media are fundamentally perfectionist.

Hillary
(Author of a book on perfectionism!)

Arisa sounded awesome.  Like GDC for writers.

...Hugo, I’m totally lost at how access to contraception increases diseases by increasing promiscuity is comparable to the argument that unhealthy menus promote disease by increasing unhealthy eating.  Because unhealthy menus also directly aggravate disease, and contraception also can mitigates disease.  So I think your point got lost there somewhere.

My questions are meant seriously. There are obviously differences, and they come from somewhere. But again - there are a lot of moving parts! And I would be surprised (but educated) if American agriculture and raising of livestock differed in ways that somehow explained large amounts of the differences in life expectancy and population heath.comment #59: grolby

Read one of the Micheal Polan books. Our AG system was changed profoundly by Nixon’s AG secy Earl Butz in 1972. It went from a system of price supports to farmer subsidies which tended to take power away from Farmers and give it to ‘big food’ like conagra and Kraft.

Life expectancy is probably also influenced by Americans’ high rate of auto and firearm deaths.

But the larger point is simply that we are what we eat. We are treating people literally like animals, and we’re treating animals more and more like machines.

It’s a little ‘right brain’ but you have to be open and honest to it.

King Elvis - I think your viewpoint makes total sense. Of course, the way agribusiness treats us is just a subset of the way most corporations seek to treat us: as less than human, mere passive consumers.

Mother Jones had a hilarious collection of comments about Paula Deen - and not a one was fat-shaming:
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/01/paula-deen-promotes-dubious-diabetes-drug

Chicken is a vegetable now, you know.

I once saw a dish described as semi-vegetarian.  It only had bacon in it.

I once had a Southern friend look me in the eye and say without a trace of humor, “If it’s not fried, it’s not food.” He pointed to his grandmother who smoked, drank, ate no vegetables, and lived to be 100 as proof that what you eat doesn’t matter.  He didn’t buy my rebuttal that she was just a freak of nature, not an example of how to live.

Crissa, that’s great that MoJo commenters were so restrained.  Take a gander at this:  http://eater.com/archives/2012/01/18/schrambling-on-paula-deen.php  Far more typical of the commentary about Deen.

Big pharma is a threat to our health in many ways, but as far as diabetes and heart disease (same causes mostly) they are peripheral. The major culprits are the food industry, government, and the medical profession. The food industry creates freakishly unhealthy products and markets them aggressively, they also lobby the government into pushing their products and way too many medical professionals have either been co-opted or are some combination of ignorant, incompetent, and ineffective. For example, the diet recommended by the USDA food guide pyramid and the American Heart Association diet recommendations will both cause heart disease.

I blogged it: http://offseasontv.blogspot.com/2012/01/schadenfreude-yall.html

Long story short, although Deen should have come clean long ago, this is a tempest in a deepfryer because you would have to be out of your goddamned mind to take her too seriously. I doubt she eats like that every day, and I doubt she expects anyone to eat that way every day either. The etiology of her diabetes is between her and her doctor, so this is just straight-up fat shaming.

@ Crissa & Katie Joy

The logic works like this…

Sex is risky. By providing free access to contraception, one is necessarily providing people with more opportunities to expose themselves to risk. Paula Deen, with her “irresponsible” recipes, is inviting people to expose themselves to risk.

I obviously don’t agree with this reasoning, but it’s one apparently shared across the political spectrum.

(And we needn’t indulge the irony revealed by the fact that those American states which express the greatest antipathy toward “sexual freedom” also happen to be those with highest incidence of morbid obesity and its sequelae.)

What I find particularly distasteful about the public outrage concerning Deen’s seeming refusal to “come out” in proximity to her diagnosis is that the outrage assumes an intimate understanding of Deen’s medical history. (Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three entirely valid reasons why someone wouldn’t immediately “come out” about a type II diabetes diagnosis.)

Also, and in closing, this mean-spirited uproar about Deen’s not announcing her diagnosis…

When we think about public health and all that it implies, does Deen’s high-profile castigation make it more or less attractive for people to have themselves screened for type II diabetes?

This is what’s truly shameful.

Given what’s happened to Deen, how many people are not going to have themselves screened for type II diabetes because they fear they’ll be scorned, and mocked, and blamed for their illness?

I can definitely see the relation between “she enjoys food too much” and “she enjoys sex too much.”  This blog writes frequently about people who think women should be punished who step outside their sexual norms, by getting pregnant or std’s or scorned or whatever, and here’s a woman people think deserves diabetes for not eating what they think is “right”.
Paula Deen had a rough life.  Her husband left her with two kids and no means of support, and she was agorophobic.  She pulled herself up, started a little catering business, was successful, started a restaurant, which is also successful, and found love late in life.  Her kids work with her and think she’s fabulous.  She found the joy in life and tries to share it with others. 
I’ve watched her show a lot, and never cooked anything from it.  It’s entertainment.  I ate at her restaurant when I was vacationing there, and it was fun.  It’s not everyday food, it’s a treat.

You know Amanda, I’m feeling pretty uneasy about this post and it’s difficult to pinpoint why in a single quote, especially since I completely agree with your points about prevention rather than waiting till more damage is done to adjust one’s diet (which, in an ideal USA would be neither treatment nor prevention, but simply “ordinary food”).

But I got the impression that you didn’t really address how Deen, a fat woman who is outspoken in her field, is being personally attacked by media and commenters for the details of her personal life and her body, how being a woman and fat plays a role in people saying she’s responsible for other people’s ills and that her body is public property in that her medical records should be public.

The post opened with a casual mention of her “coming clean” about having diabetes, which suggests to me a crime more than a disease. And:

Mary Elizabeth Williams is understandably angry that it took Deen three years and a drug company endorsement deal before she started down this path [...]

I’m really just not comfortable with one person’s health issues (about which we know little off-camera) representing the logical outcome of a wrong way of thinking. I’m fine with you bringing up the all-or-nothing thinking but without some serious distance from Deen herself and disclaimers about how she is being treated it reads as shame & blame of a prominent woman, and I don’t think you went far *enough* with that distancing.

As Rick Massimo and DonnaDiva have pointed out there’s some gross moralizing, fat shaming and other nonsense at play and you’ve seemed down with those ideas in the comments so my hackles aren’t up or anything, but I was still surprised to find the original post up on a feminist site.

Why is everybody so sure that overeating, or eating “the wrong kind” of foods, causes diabetes?  Maybe it’s been proved but I haven’t seen any evidence.  The closest to proof that I know of is some correlation between insulin resistance (a possible precursor to diabetes) and high BMI in an individual.  But that correlation, which by the way many fat people don’t manifest, is a far cry from causation.

Until I hear about a controlled study where one group was given nutrition advice and told to curb its weight, or whatever it is the scolders demand, while the other was left to itself, and then years later it turned out that second group had developed significantly more Type 2 diabetes, I’ll hold off on judging Paula Deen for not doing what she should have done to fend off her condition. 

We don’t like to believe it in the USA, but much of our ill health falls upon us through no fault of our own, while many of us are healthy with no virtue to speak of.

One more thing.  Paula’s kids aren’t fat, so whatever she fed them growing up must have been at least somewhat reasonable.  And she does cook vegetables, and doesn’t deep fry everything.  I think the “fried butter balls” must have been more of a joke than anything.  Her food is typical Southern cooking, dating back to the days when the farmhands worked hard and needed to be fed.  Cornbread, fried chicken, beans and rice, chocolate cake, that sort of thing.  Not the sort of food that sedentary city folks should eat every day, but good for the occassional treat.

That’s stupid, Hugo, gretchen.  She’s a cook, makes cook-books and TV shows.  These have negative effects upon people’s health.  You can’t say the same for sex and health.  Or contraception and health.

I don’t care if Deen is fat.  I don’t watch her shows, I do get to see her shameful ads promoting terrible foods and now terrible drugs.  She is not immune from criticism because she was a single mother and is now fat.  I don’t care, don’t know about those things.

And I didn’t even mention comment(ers) at Mother Jones, I linked to an article.

If you’re upset that she’s drawing criticism for her actions, perhaps you should examine what actions she has taken.  ‘Don’t take her seriously’?  What is that about?  Am I not supposed to complain about someone because somewhere, never to be published, they weren’t serious?

Re:  Comment #71: BrianX on 01/18 at 11:25 PM

How is it fat-shaming to point out that she is taking money to promote a drug that has no proven positive health effect?

Re: Comment #73: gretchen on 01/19 at 01:30 AM

How is it related to her being a single mother that her cookbooks a full of food and advice which do not prepare a healthy menu?

Grr.

Nobody was mad at Bob Hope for not coming clean with his erectile dysfunction before he started hawking Viagra.

On another note, the obesity numbers in this country started rising at the same time as the government started subsidizing corn, which led to food companies putting HFCS in absolutely everything.

Also if you are ever in a country that is not America, do try the regular Coke.  It’s made with real sugar, not HFCS, and it tastes WONDERFUL.

For anyone interested—Stephan Guyenet, who professionally studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation, and blogs over at Whole Health Source is doing a multipart series on Insulin Resistance, a major contributor to diabetes and heart disease. The series began on January 6, 2012.

One of the other things is that whenever we go out to bars I’d normally stop at two or three drinks and take my time with those. You can’t imagine how many “Why are you drinking so slow?” comments I get and even people taking my drinks and drinking them for me to try and get me to drink faster.

Well, that’s what binge-drinkers do. Also if you were bar-hopping (this usually happens whenever I go out) they probably wanted you to finish your drink so they could move on to the next place. Not to mention hammered drunks always see anyone who isn’t as fucked up as them as “sitting there looking miserable”, and it bothers them.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone out with binge-drinkers, but I’ve done this myself in the past, and it’s out of a sense that you can’t be enjoying yourself unless you’re plastered. I hate being sober during these occasions (for two reasons: a) being sober around a bunch of drunk people acting stupid is boring, and b) we only go to shitty clubs with shitty music, and you need to be drunk in order to enjoy yourself), so I assume it’s the same for everyone else. To be honest, among the crowd of friends I’m referring to, it probably is- drinking slowly and responsiblyis an unusual thing for everyone in the group. But of course, trying to force that kind of drinking on anyone who doesn’t want to do it is akin to trying to force fried butterballs onto someone who eats responsibly because “you can’t actually be happy with that rabbit food”.

Now, when I’m with a different crowd of friends, in a nice pub with a relaxing atmosphere, a couple of drinks consumed slowly is the order of the day.

Why is everybody so sure that overeating, or eating “the wrong kind” of foods, causes diabetes?

Perhaps because of the research done in this field:

Mark N. Feinglos, M.D., C.M., and Susan E. Totten, R.D. (Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C) write in an accompanying editorial that: “The relationship between food and the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus has been debated for many years.”

“So, what do we now know about the impact of diet on the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus, and what remains unknown?” ask the authors. “We know that, as a population, we eat too much for our level of activity, and we are growing fatter as a result. In association with this increasing weight, we are in the midst of a dramatic increase in the number of cases of type 2 diabetes mellitus, not only in the United States, but in countries like India and China, where the caloric intake has also increased.”

They add: “We do not know whether specific macronutrients put genetically predisposed people at increased risk of developing diabetes mellitus, or whether adding lots of fat or refined carbohydrate to the diet just makes it easier to take in excess calories.”

“Studies to isolate these effects will be difficult to perform, but, until we have more information, we have to assume that calories trump everything else, and that our number one goal for the reduction of new cases of type 2 diabetes mellitus should be to reduce the intake of high-energy, low-benefit foods, particularly in young members of the most vulnerable populations,” conclude the authors.

Diabetes
There are over 20 million adults in the USA today who have been diagnosed with diabetes, i.e. 8.7% of all adults. In 1996, the figure was 4.4%. Studies have indicated that within the next four decades between 1 in every 3 to 5 adults will have been diagnosed with diabetes. The authors say this means there are millions of people today who are either at risk of developing diabetes, or already have it but do not know (have not yet been diagnosed).

By the end of this decade, about 10% of all health care spending will be channeled towards treating diabetes and prediabetes - an annual total of nearly $500 billion (compared to $208 billion today).

And of course, correlation doesn’t mean there is a 100% causative factor between overweight and diabetes, but if someone has another hypothesis to explain why the rate of diabetes in the population has risen at the same time that obesity has, I’m all ears and eyes.

KingElvis - Traditionally, and even typically today, one does not fatten a heifer for slaughter.  You may fatten a calf for slaughter, but a majority of them will be bull calves.  Even when a rancher isn’t saving many heifers for breeding purposes, they would typically be saving or selling many more heifers for that purpose than bull calves.  That is just considering the beef industry.  Many animals raised specifically for fattening and eating are the bull calves from dairy operations where most/almost all heifers are kept for a few years of milking prior to being sold for meat.

Hugo @58 totally ignores that sexually transmitted deseases, even ones that kill you, are not by any means a new thing, nor are they more widely spread now then they were prior to the general availability of contraception.  Anyone who knows anything about medical history knows that.  See syphilis (or Great Pox): Europe, 1490s; Asia early 1500s.

Crissa - the bigger SciFi cons tend to have something for everyone, but usually have both a writer and an artis GoH.  At Arisia, they combined those by having 3 GoH this year, all graphic novel writers/artists.  There is also gaming; costume workshops, display with performance and contest; science and scientistic panels (like both science truthiness and speculative stuff); writing workshops; readings; a poetry slam at this one; a punning contest.  They even had a limited daycare and kid specific activities (a huge improvement from any cons I went to in the 80-90s for fans with kids).  Boston also has a specific con for readers/writers, manga and comics and at least one film festival.  The NE fetish flea is in Providence RI next month for the costume inclined (that is a good place for decent leather & metal goods even for those not into a fetish).
I’ve decided, upon reflection, that the con seemed tamer at least in part because the mundane world in far less mundane these days.  I was also at a concert Friday where the bands and many in the audience wore costumes.  The most elaborate was a demon costume including moving articulated wings, though street garb and a simple mask were more common.

I’ve never understood the “need salt” thing to make things taste good.  Maybe my family is unusual, but my mother rarely salted anything she made.  She felt that food didn’t need salt - spices, sure, but not salt, and that there was no reason to add salt to anything processed as it already contained enough salt that you didn’t need to add any.  To this day, I never add a lot of salt to anything and I warn people about it.  For me, if I want to make something taste better, I add herb blends - Greek or Italian seasoning does wonders for really bland food - or pepper.

We don’t like to believe it in the USA, but much of our ill health falls upon us through no fault of our own, while many of us are healthy with no virtue to speak of.

While I wouldn’t say that’s particularly so for diabetes, I do think that that statement is generally true.  There’s plenty of people who have horrible moral superiority issues over food and weight, which makes having a sensible discussion in the US about food nonexistent.  There’s a not-zero portion of the population who thinks that their doctor is a quack because they eat very, very healthy and exercise, so they couldn’t possibly have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, even though it’s high every time the doctor checks it.  I also think it’s tied in with health care - if I eat the magic foods, I don’t need to ever go to the doctor, not even for a physical, because I’m doing the all the healthy things I need to do, so I’ll never be sick/get a medical condition that needs to be treated, and all of those fat people don’t care enough about themselves/are too lazy to do what I do and they’re probably at the doctor every month because they’re fat.  What these people don’t seem to realize is there’s a ton of medical conditions that are invisible and not necessarily tied to weight.

Crissa:

Is there something wrong with writing a cookbook that doesn’t promote a balanced diet? In fact, I don’t think most cookbooks or chefs promote any sort of diet at all, per se. Paula Deen represents one style of cooking, and it’s up to the viewer/reader to decide how much of that to indulge in. The recipe writer shouldn’t and can’t take any responsibility for how their recipes are used. If a recipe writer wants to do what you propose, fine, there are plenty who do, and some of them are even honest. But blaming the chef for the way her fans eat is pointless when the problem stems from issues elsewhere in our culture.

@Crissa

That’s stupid, Hugo, gretchen. ...

Your tone would indicate that your interest in this subject extends rather beyond the empirical.

Buy you’re not alone.

For many people, Paula Deen’s illness is a welcome occasion for discharging strong pent-up emotions unrelated to Paula Deen, or type II diabetes, or “health,” at least not insofar as “health” might be scientifically construed or understood.

As I said above, what’s unfortunate is that the angry, sneering, mocking self-righteousness that’s greeted news of Deen’s diagnosis will almost certainly discourage people from having themselves screened for type II diabetes.

Not a few people would prefer to die but once of type II diabetes than endure the thousand deaths of shame and humiliation.

Chet:

I don’t know what’s in “Greek seasoning”, but Italian seasoning almost never has salt in it—it’s mostly basil, oregano, thyme, and possibly rosemary. “Mexican seasoning” (i.e. adobo) usually does have a fair bit of salt in it, but even that’s available salt-free.

@82 DAGCM, I know about what you quoted, but there’s still a lot unexplained.  Americans are getting fatter (in part because the official BMI cutoffs for being fat have been lowered) and diabetes is up, you’re right.  So I’ll agree that fatness precedes diabetes for most Type 2 diabetics. 

But how do we know that getting fatter was preventable through the kind of lifestyle improvements that the scolders preach?  Maybe before manifesting diabetes, the body gains bulk—so that fat is an effect rather than a cause.

I don’t object to pointing out correlations; I just object to blaming people for their poor health without evidence that they could have done something different to be healthier.  It’s inconsistent because, for example, we know that dieting in early adolescence correlates with fatness in adult life.  If we were consistent about correlations being enough, we’d urge parents NOT to encourage dieting by 11-12 year old girls.

There’s zero likelihood that you can even tell the difference. The evidence for this is that you almost certainly didn’t notice the different two years ago, when Mexican bottlers started using HFCS but continued to label the bottles as containing sugar

Then why is Pepsi marketing Throwback sodas without HFCS?

There’s just no evidence for an HFCS-specific connection to obesity beyond an increase in carbohydrate calories in general as consumed by Americans.

Purpose of review: The purpose of the review is to suggest that fructose, a component of both sucrose (common sugar) and high fructose corn syrup, should be of concern to both healthcare providers and the public.

Recent findings: Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has increased steadily over the past century and with this increase has come more and more reports associating their use with the risk of overweight, diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. In a meta-analysis of the relationship between soft drink consumption and cardiometabolic risk, there was a 24% overall increased risk comparing the top and bottom quantiles of consumption. Several factors might account for this increased risk, including increased carbohydrate load and increased amounts of dietary fructose. Fructose acutely increases thermogenesis, triglycerides and lipogenesis as well as blood pressure, but has a smaller effect on leptin and insulin release than comparable amounts of glucose. In controlled feeding studies, changes in body weight, fat storage and triglycerides are observed as well as an increase in inflammatory markers.

Summary: The present review concludes on the basis of the data assembled here that in the amounts currently consumed, fructose is hazardous to the cardiometabolic health of many children, adolescents and adults.

Current opinion in Lipidology

@Crissa:  way to have a reasonable discussion: just tell the people you disagree with that their arguments are stupid.  Then it saves you the trouble of coming up with any sensible arguments yourself.
I mentioned Paula Deen’s history, because if you’re going to condemn someone, it’s a good thing to know a little something about them.  It’s harder to be judgmental about a person than a charicature. 
A cookbook is not a diet plan.  It’s something you make something out of once in awhile.  I love southern-fried chicken.  I eat it about once a year, and I’m not going to give it up because people like you consider it a mortal sin.  Grr yourself.
The point that Hugo and I were trying to make, is that sex and food are both pleasurable, that both can be misused and be harmful under some circumstances, and the puritans among us want to shame those who enjoy these things too much, in ways that they disapprove of.  Whether it’s Rick Santorum saying gays shouldn’t be able to get married because gay sex is icky, or whether it’s people who go ballistic about a cooking show with fried stuff, and feel the hostess had it coming when she gets diabetes.

But how do we know that getting fatter was preventable through the kind of lifestyle improvements that the scolders preach?  Maybe before manifesting diabetes, the body gains bulk—so that fat is an effect rather than a cause.

As the fat cells increase in size, which is what happens in obesity, the insulin receptors on their cellular membranes decrease in their sensitivity to insulin, in what is called negative cooperativity, which means that the same amount of insulin becomes less effective as the cells grow bigger.

We also see examples with ethnic groups like the Pima of the American Southwest, which would tend to suggest that increased caloric intake by itself can be detrimental with or without increased physical activity if the genes roll the wrong way:

As was previously mentioned during the discussion of the diversion of the Gila River, the Akimel O’odham and the Onk Akimel O’odham have various environmentally based health issues that can be traced directly back to that point in time when the traditional economy was devastated. They have the highest prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the world, much more than is observed in other U.S. populations. While they do not have a greater risk than other tribes, the Pima people have been the subject of intensive study of diabetes, in part because they form a homogeneous group.[5] The general increased diabetes prevalence among Native Americans has been hypothesized as the result of the interaction of genetic predisposition (the thrifty phenotype or thrifty genotype as suggested by anthropologist Robert Ferrell in 1984[5]) and a sudden shift in diet from traditional agricultural goods towards processed foods in the past century. For comparison, genetically similar O’odham in Mexico have only a slighter higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes than non-O’odham Mexicans[6]

You see the same thing in Micronesia, where high-caloric processed foods have replaced traditional sources, and not just obesity and diabetes, but all sorts of diseases increase as well.

There’s also Metabolic Syndrome, which is definitely linked to diabetes:

Etiology

The exact mechanisms of the complex pathways of metabolic syndrome are not yet completely known. The pathophysiology is extremely complex and has been only partially elucidated. Most patients are older, obese, sedentary, and have a degree of insulin resistance. Stress can also be a contributing factor. The most important factors are:

  weight
  genetics[18][19][20][21]
  endocrine disorders, such as polycystic ovary syndrome in women of reproductive age.
  aging
  sedentary lifestyle, i.e., low physical activity and excess caloric intake.[22]

There is debate regarding whether obesity or insulin resistance is the cause of the metabolic syndrome or if they are consequences of a more far-reaching metabolic derangement. A number of markers of systemic inflammation, including C-reactive protein, are often increased, as are fibrinogen, interleukin 6 (IL–6), Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFα), and others. Some have pointed to a variety of causes including increased uric acid levels caused by dietary fructose.[23][24][25]

The point that Hugo and I were trying to make, is that sex and food are both pleasurable, that both can be misused and be harmful under some circumstances, and the puritans among us want to shame those who enjoy these things too much, in ways that they disapprove of.  Whether it’s Rick Santorum saying gays shouldn’t be able to get married because gay sex is icky, or whether it’s people who go ballistic about a cooking show with fried stuff, and feel the hostess had it coming when she gets diabetes

Great point! It seems like miserable people are always looking for ways to make the non miserable among us feel bad and one of the easiest ways is to criticize any kind of pleasurable behaviors, and suggest that they are bad, in a way it’s the Karl Rove strategy of turning someone’s strength into a weakness, the miserable person takes what makes you happy and try’s to make you ashamed of it.

Just because there exists misogynist/fotphobic/etc commenters on other boards criticizing Deen does not mean that she should be immune to criticism without the bigotry.

Or can’t you make your argument without relying on straw comments?

It may be that the resistance to insulin makes it more likely that some calories are stored rather than burned, hence, obesity is a symptom of diabetes, not a source.

Either way, it doesn’t absolve people from hawking drugs that seem to have no positive outcomes, and merely change a test result.  It could be then instead masking the test result instead of actually making a better outcome… Or it could be the body load - the ability to metabolize and then excrete the compound - is higher or equal to the benefit it gives by lowering the test result.

Crissa says:

“Or can’t you make your argument without relying on straw comments?”

Straw comments?

Does this have something to do with the Galloping Gourmet?

Or is it related to your unbridled need to demonize Paula Deen?

Why should someone’s background absolve them of criticism from their public speaking?  ‘Oh, she’s fat, you can’t criticize her published menu!  It’s delicious even if it’s unhealthy!’  ‘Oh, she’s a single mother, you can’t criticize that she’s publicizing an unethical and unhealthy food supplier!’  ‘Oh, she has diabetes - she didn’t need to tell anyone - you can’t criticize her for making commercials hawking a drug that might be dangerous!’  ‘Oh, you can’t criticize her, someone else called her fat!’  ‘Oh, you can’t criticize her, someone else said she deserved it, that’s wrong!’  ‘People who make menus aren’t responsible if they’re not healthy but delicious!’  ‘People ho hawk dangerous medicine aren’t responsible if they’re promoting unhealthy choices!’

What kind of arguments are these, exactly?

It may be that the resistance to insulin makes it more likely that some calories are stored rather than burned, hence, obesity is a symptom of diabetes, not a source.

I would say that it’s a leading indicator that there may be a problem later on, and that inactivity doesn’t help matters any, even if one isn’t obese but is eating highly processed, high-glycemic foods.

Crissa, what is your argument exactly?  She hasn’t published a food plan she expects people to follow.  She owns a restaurant, which people visit on special occasions.  She published a cookbook which people make an occassional meal from.  She has a tv show which people watch for entertainment.  She hasn’t dictated a lifestyle she expects people to follow.
What are your criticisms of the medication she takes, and why is it a problem?  She takes it, she believes it helps her, her doctor believes it helps her.  Do you have some hard data to indicate it’s a scam, or are you just going with the “drug companies, evil” plan?
What are your arguments, exactly, right back atya.  You haven’t really made any.

She advertises for Smithfield, a company known for operating hog farms with high antibiotic use and no waste processing.

Why can’t I criticize her for that?

She makes menus which are unhealthy, and goes on TV promoting unhealthy foods.

Why can’t I criticize her for that?

She now is advertising a drug without better outcomes and more side effects than current treatments.

Why can’t I criticize that?

I didn’t bring up her weight.  I don’t care about her weight.  I didn’t bring up her family.  I don’t care about her family.  I didn’t bring up her disease.  I don’t think it is relevant.

But you, apparently, think it is fat-shaming to point out that fatty foods should be enjoyed in moderation, and to point out she does not publicize moderation.

PPS, yes, it is a straw comment to say I demonize her when I am merely attacking her published position.  That’s not demonizing.

I honestly feel mixed about Deen and her diabetes diagnosis because I do hate her and her family from watching her TV shows where the “all or nothing” attitude is a part of their cooking. I’m a strong believer in using fat and sugar for flavor but Deen’s recipes frequently use just excessive amounts, to the point there’s little flavor beyond the fat and sugar. And when Deen has been criticized in the past she’s responded with a “Y’all are just been elites!” kind of response.

It’s not that she’s fat for me, it’s that she plays on the edges of excessive fat and sugar use as part of the culture war. She doesn’t flat out play that game, but she knows how to use the right dogwhistles to rile the kind of people who are convinced Michelle Obama is working on reeducation camps where people learn to eat like rabbits.

If you believe Paula Deen’s recipes are “irresponsible” and that she “deserves” type II diabetes, then you ought agree with those Christians who argue that free access to contraception promotes promiscuity and its consequences.

I understand the comparison of shaming over sexual pleasure and shaming over culinary pleasure but if I were compare Deen’s cooking to sexuality, she’s much closer to the kind of person who thinks they’re being rebelious by participating in bareback sex.

IMO, someone like Rachel Ray (who sometimes gets overly cutesy for me), Martha Stewart, or Jamie Oliver make a fitting comparison to using contraception. They’re about enjoying food, enjoying flavor, thinking about nutrition but not letting it rule your cooking (Oliver’s recipes can get pretty fatty).

Pepperlad says:

“I do hate her and her family from watching her TV shows where the ‘all or nothing’ attitude is a part of their cooking. ...[I]t’s that she plays on the edges of excessive fat and sugar use as part of the culture war. She doesn’t flat out play that game, but she knows how to use the right dogwhistles to rile the kind of people who are convinced Michelle Obama is working on reeducation camps where people learn to eat like rabbits.”

You perceive in Deen’s recipes a political code inteligible to the most extreme factions of the American far right?

This is fascinating.

Have we, then, sufficient cause to question the sincerity of liberals, progressives, and radicals who use “excessive” amounts of fat and sugar?

I suppose Michael Moore could have, theoretically, attained his girth by eating a zero-fat 100% vegan diet, but that somehow seems unlikely. (What is he hiding from us???)

Yes, Hugo, language you and public figures use is not in isolation from politics.

Also, might note, only Hugo once again mentioned someone by their waistline, not their published works.

You perceive in Deen’s recipes a political code inteligible to the most extreme factions of the American far right?

That’s not what I said at all:

And when Deen has been criticized in the past she’s responded with a “Y’all are just being elites!” kind of response

When her cooking has been criticised in the past she’s used those political dogwhistles about New York fancy eating and organically-raised meat.

I’m thrilled, by the way, when you quoted me you edited out the part that actually showed what I was talking about so you could pretend I said something completely different.

Didn’t we cover this once before? HFCS isn’t fructose, so your cite is irrelevant.

From the Wiki:

According to the USDA, HFCS consists of 24% water, and the rest sugars. The most widely used varieties of high-fructose corn syrup are: HFCS 55 (mostly used in soft drinks), approximately 55% fructose and 42% glucose; and HFCS 42 (used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods), approximately 42% fructose and 53% glucose.[5][6] HFCS-90, approximately 90% fructose and 10% glucose, is used in small quantities for specialty applications, but primarily is used to blend with HFCS 42 to make HFCS 55.[7]

That means HFCS is 76% fructose and 24% glucose, Chet, but you’re going to tell us that we should believe you instead of the lying research.

Demonstrate some facts and research to demonstrate I’m wrong instead of mere assertion, Chet.

Sorry, misread glucose for sucrose.

Now, pay attention to the following, Chet, and please cite something substantial as a counter-example to the first sentence if you don’t want to lose whatever shreds of credibility you have around here.

Fructose intake and the prevalence of obesity have both increased over the past two to three decades.Compared with glucose, the hepatic metabolism of fructose favors lipogenesis, which may contribute to hyperlipidemia and obesity. Fructose does not increase insulin and leptin or suppress ghrelin, which suggests an endocrine mechanism by which it induces a positive energy balance. This review examines the available data on the effects of dietary fructose on energy homeostasis and lipid/carbohydrate metabolism. Recent publications, studies in human subjects, and areas in which additional research is needed are emphasized.

Link

But the rise in fructose intake has nothing to do with obesity, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

If you want to say there’s no definite scientific link, that would reflect on our present state of knowledge in this area.

And it might be noted the fructose in corn syrup is in isolation from the fibers and alcohols that it normally is found with.  So yes, fructose syrup on its own might be a bad thing to sweeten things with.  We learn new things all the time.

Yes, Chet, they’re talking about HFCS ‘high fructose’ corn syrup and yes, tht might mean something even if it’s only half of it.

In fact, you need to have an ID stating you’re over twenty-one to buy drinks with an alcohol content over 1%.  And they refer to these drinks as alcohol.  And yes, they’re only a tiny bit alcohol!

Weird, huh?

And you’re demanding we forget that HFCS is only half fructose syrup?

I have to hand it to Deen. She’s certainly landed on her feet (pancreas?).

Although I wonder if the Novo Nordisk people are going to have second thoughts now that there’s a big backlash underway.

Again, you’re conflating HFCS and fructose. You seem to have lost all sight of my point, which is that HFCS is no more responsible than any other carbohydrate for American obesity.

The general increases in consumption of calories, and specifically of refined carbohydrates and fructose, is clear and correlates positively with an alarming increases in metabolic syndrome. Can these seemingly harmless nutrients actually be directly associated with metabolic syndrome? Recent studies appear to support this link. In a 2004 study, Gross et al examined nutrient consumption in the United States between 1909 and 1997, and discovered there was a significant correlation in the prevalence of diabetes with fat, carbohydrate, corn syrup, and total energy intakes. Most striking was the fact that when total energy intake was accounted for, corn syrup was positively associated with type 2 diabetes, while protein and fat were not [32]. High fructose corn syrups (HFCS) are quite commonly found in soft drinks and juice beverages, and are incorporated into many convenient pre-packaged foods, such as breakfast cereals and baked goods. Fructose consumption has thus largely increased over the past few decades most likely as a result of this increased use of HFCS, which contains between 55–90% fructose. The use of HFCS has increased an alarming 1000% between 1970 and 1990 [33]. In 1970, individual consumption of fructose was only 0.5 lb/year. However, in 1997, this figure rose to an alarming 62.4 lb/year [34]. The type of common, general use sweeteners represent as large an impact as the dramatic increase in the use of these caloric sweeteners. Between 1909 and 1997, sweetener use increased by 86%; and specifically, corn syrup sweeteners now represent over 20% of total daily carbohydrate intake, at an increase of 2100% [32].

Bitter Scribe says,

“I have to hand it to Deen. She’s certainly landed on her feet (pancreas?).
Although I wonder if the Novo Nordisk people are going to have second thoughts now that there’s a big backlash underway.”

Why do you feel this way?

Do you also feel that “promiscuous” women deserve cervical cancer?

Why do you feel that Paula Deen is so especially deserving of your contempt?

And I’m also asking you to remember that because free fructose is sweeter than sucrose, it takes less HFCS to bring a food product to the same level of perceived sweetness than sucrose.

Which explains why the amount of HFCS that Americans have consumed has gone up on the average from half-a-pound in 1970 to 62 lbs a year, because it’s so much cheaper than sucrose.

I’m asking you to remember that sucrose is also half fructose.

And I’m asking you to remember that we went through this before, the sucrose molecule needs active transport and cleaving by an enzyme before the two sugars can be used, fructose OTOH, needs neither process and doesn’t need insulin to be utilized by any cells of the body, unlike 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.

Link

Not to mention the number of studies which demonstrate that fructose affects the body differently in normal amounts given to subjects in animal studies.  You can find them if you’re as intelligent as you think you are, Chet, I’m not going to hold your hand with citations as I did last time.

That dog, again, won’t hunt

But these studies that claim to show harmful effects of fructose use fructose dosages that are equivalent to the consumption of 20 cans of soda per day. Dose matters. Do you know anyone who drinks 20 cans of non-diet soda?

Again, we’ve been through this already, Chet, and the Princeton study definitely didn’t expose the rats in the study to enormous amounts of fructose:

“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese—every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”
...................................................................................
The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

Unless you have some peer-reviewed research that you can link to to support your arguments Chet, I won’t engage you on this issue again, because flailing your hands isn’t the same as participating in a discussion with good faith

I’m thinking this is maybe the dumbest argument I’ve seen, certainly the most ridiculous subject of an argument, between two people who generally agree with each other on the big picture, this case being that refined sugars are bad for one’s health.

I’ve read a lot about health over the years. The best book as far as I can tell is “Eat to Live” by Joel Fuhrman. It’s strengths are the combination of its numerous references to scientific studies and its consistency with common sense as well. The basic conclusion is that nutrient rich foods protect us from a myriad of health problems and eating enough of them ensures optimal weight, so it’s best to make sure that a very high percentage of what we eat are nutrient rich foods. Kinda goes in this order: Greens, green vegetables ->other vegetables->fruit->beans->seeds and nuts->whole grains, then downhill fast from there. He notes that the USDA recommendations represent an average and that the average American develops heart disease. It also contains a lot of information about the politics and business lobbying behind the various recommendations such as the food pyramid. For those interested in the food/wellness issues, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Gawd…Food Shamers are almost as irritating as Fat Shamers. Especially since it comes off like obnoxious elites looking down at regular people. It must be nice to have time and money to buy and prepare artisanal veggie meals that are actually edible.

You guys act like people who eat “unhealthy food” would eat the healthy stuff if we were just exposed to it. Most of us were exposed to it by our mothers throughout our childhood, and have rejected it. The only way to eat most of that stuff is to cover it with unhealthy stuff.

Comment #120: Hugo de Toronja on 01/20 at 12:52 AM

Wait, anyone mentioning that she’s taking money to advertise an expensive, patented treatment for a disease her menus aggravated is not okay?

She’s immune to criticism for promoting an expensive treatment now because she has the disease?

Is there anything you can criticize a woman for, if you can’t criticize them for their published works, Hugo? 

Re: Comment #140: A Tale of Two Cities on 01/20 at 01:19 PM

You’re an idiot.  And yes.  And the studies have to be ridiculous so as to find the trend in a short term.  Also, didn’t you admit to being a troll in a later thread?

Re: Comment #126: Bruce from Missouri on 01/20 at 01:36 PM

...So you’re saying that the tons more effort to promote unhealthy menus and the tons of money spent making unhealthy food cheaper and that most people don’t even know what is healthy vs unhealthy has no impact?  It’s all a matter of moms being pushy?

Damn what an idiot.

Use of all sweeteners has increased, even the use of honey; Americans consume not just more HFCS

So your saying that the increase in fructose consumption, not just fructose from HFCS-sources, like from honey, table sugar, etc, is responsible for the increase?

Which is actually completely irrelevant to that. Use of all sweeteners has increased, even the use of honey; Americans consume not just more HFCS but more carbohydrates of all types. Approximately an extra 200 calories a day in carbohydrates since the nation’s nutritional “experts” started telling us to avoid fats in our diet and increase carb consumption.

200 calories a day of fructose, not sucrose or glucose, unless you want to challenge the figure I cited for the rise in fructose consumption.

And I’m asking you to remember how even you agreed that it didn’t matter (and wasn’t true - sucrose doesn’t arrive in the intestine intact, the human intestine has almost no sucrose-specific transporters) because your body produces sucrases regardless of whether or not your diet includes sucrose or fructose.

And I’m asking you to remember that the glucose portion of the sucrose molecule, freed from its’ glucose partner, needs to be actively transported through the intestinal wall into the blood stream, which isn’t necessary for it’s fructose counterpart. 

Again:

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.

Again, what we’ve been through is that you have a problem being able to read your own citations. Concentration isn’t the same as amount; in the Princeton study, rats in the fructose group consumed enormous amounts of fructose that have no relevance to the human diet.

Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

Then why was there a difference when the caloric intake was the same, Chet?

Further - sugar processing is different in the livers of rats and humans. Rat models don’t prove nearly as much as you think they do.

You’re getting to be ignorant bordering on the pathetic, did you know that?

Women, but not men, show an association between fructose consumption and an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes mellitus. As rats are considered a model for human fructose metabolism, we sought to determine whether such a gender-related difference is present in Sprague-Dawley rats and to analyze the molecular mechanism behind. Male and female Sprague-Dawley rats had free access to water or to a 10% w/v fructose solution for 14 days. Plasma analytes, liver triglycerides and enzyme activities and the expression of enzymes and transcription factors related to fatty acid metabolism, insulin signaling and glucose tolerance were determined. Fructose-fed rats had hypertriglyceridemia, steatosis and reduced fatty acid oxidation activity, although the metabolic pattern of fructose-fed female rats was different to that observed for male rats. Fructose-fed female, but not male rats, showed no change in plasma leptin; they had hyperinsulinemia, an altered glucose tolerance test and less liver insulin receptor substrate-2. Further, only fructose-fed female rats had increased adenosine 5’-monophosphate (AMP)-activated protein kinase activity, resulting in a decreased expression of hepatic nuclear factor 4 and sterol response element binding protein 1. These differences were related to the fact that liver expression of the enzyme fructokinase, controlling fructose metabolism, was markedly induced by fructose ingestion in female, but not in male rats, resulting in a significant increase in the AMP/adenosine 5’-triphosphate (ATP) ratio and, thus, AMP-activated protein kinase activation, in female rats only. The difference in fructokinase induction could explain the higher metabolic burden produced by fructose ingestion in the livers of female Sprague-Dawley rats.

J’ai toujours fait une prière à Dieu, qui est fort courte. La voici: Mon Dieu, rendez nos ennemis bien ridicules! Dieu m’a exaucé.

Bon jour!

Again, Crissa, dismissing your critics as stupid or idiots doesn’t add to the discussion.  It just makes you a troll.
As for the studied, they “have to be ridiculous”?  You don’t need to look at them, or know what they found, or what percentage of people this drug improved versus other competing drugs?  They just “have to” be ridiculous?  A little less emo, a little more fact would be helpful.

Those are usually half salt by weight.

You don’t need a bunch of salt to make things taste good, but the most common mistake beginning cooks make is that they forget to add any salt to anything, and then they wonder why their food tastes so flat and dull. Well, it’s because they’ve been incorrectly taught that “salt is bad for you” and so salt is forbidden in their kitchen. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Salt doesn’t just add flavor, it does some important Stupid Chemistry Tricks, like drawing water out of vegetables (“sweating”), koshering beef, brining chicken and pork (which maintain juiciness), and so on. Salt has an important place in the kitchen.

Obviously you’ve never cooked with either seasoning, if you think it’s half salt.  Neither one of these seasonings generally has salt in it.

And you don’t need salt to sweat veggies if you’re cooking them.  I’ve never had problem sweating veggies without salt.  And salt was never forbidden, it’s just that there’s many, many spices that make something taste good and it doesn’t involve salt.  As for brining meat, that does not apply to a simple saute or even grilling.  I’ve had zero problems maintaining juiciness in meat without using salt.  Salt is great in some recipes, sure, but I think its use is totally overrated.  It has a place, just not as the first thing a person should grab.

If I use anything processed, I’m sure as hell ain’t going to be adding any more salt - most stuff has a ton in it anyway that all salting it does is add more salt.  A little here and there isn’t bad, but seriously, there’s a ton of salt in anything processed.

<blockquote>The only way to eat most of that stuff is to cover it with unhealthy stuff.<blockquote>

Yeah, but the unhealthy stuff is made so that it’s not just unhealthy, it’s dangerously unhealthy.  Personally, I don’t see why this should be so.

Um, no, I’m saying that carbohydrate consumption of all sources - sugars, starches - has increased in the United States. In fact I think I’ve said that three times now. Is there some reason that reading statements in English is so hard for you?

You’ve yet to link to a reliable source to document your claim, Chet.  You don’t think I’m the only one around here to notice that, are you?

Now, this is from 2004:

In a multivariate nutrient-density model, in which total energy intake was accounted for, corn syrup was positively associated with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes (ß = 0.0132, P = 0.038). Fiber (ß = –13.86, P < 0.01) was negatively associated with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes. In contrast, protein (P = 0.084) and fat (P = 0.79) were not associated with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes when total energy was controlled for.

Conclusions: Increasing intakes of refined carbohydrate (corn syrup) concomitant with decreasing intakes of fiber paralleled the upward trend in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes observed in the United States during the 20th century.

Why are all these studies drawing the opposite conclusion, Chet?

Why can’t you find a single reliable link that documents any assertion you’ve made here today.

Who knows! Not even the authors of the study propose a mechanism for how rats can somehow violate the law of conservation of mass by gaining additional mass without consuming additional mass.

You’re so cute when you’re angry:

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.</strong>

I called it more bang for the buck, as it should be clear to one of even your limited mentality that the extra metabolic step needed for any other sugar other than fructose would account for that difference.

You’re a liar and a fool:

If you wanted to argue that the rat liver isn’t a good model for the interaction of fructose and ethanol and the relationship to diabetes in H. sapiens, you win the argument hands down,
but that

But, again, Princeton’s rats provide you no evidence that HFCS is the cause of obesity because Princeton’s rats were not fed HFCS.

while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

Completely wrong. Fructose and sucrose and glucose and maltose and all other carbohydrates.

<blockquote>In 1970, individual consumption of fructose was only 0.5 lb/year. However, in 1997, this figure rose to an alarming 62.4 lb/year [34].

And its a major weakness of the Princeton paper that they don’t seem to know about biohemistry that was performed in 1972.

As rats are considered a model for human fructose metabolism

That’s from the study I linked to that was published in 2010, apparently Princeton wasn’t the only one who was ignorant as well.

Who said anything about pushy moms, Crissa?  It would seem like you are the idiot… and an asshole.

I’m still trying to figure out what brand Italian seasoning you’re even buying, Chet. If yours has salt in it, it definitely isn’t any Italian seasoning I’ve ever heard of.

But there is no extra metabolic step. Sucrase has no energy-containing co-factor, and its a constitutional enzyme - present in the stomach whether the diet contains sucrose or not. It doesn’t change the energy calculations because sucrase requires no energetic cofactor to function. Degrading sucrose happens “for free” because sucrases are always present in the stomach</b>

<i> A throwaway line that rats “are considered the model for fructose metabolism”<i> (considered by who, exactly?) doesn’t prove that the authors have any good reason to use rats to answer questions about human fructose metabolism. The fact that glucose is actively co-transported with sodium in the intestine doesn’t prove that fructose is not subject to active transport of its own (as an isomer of glucose, identical in constitution and similar in size and shape it would be surprising indeed if it were not.)

The authors, and presumably the people who peer-reviewed the paper, Chet, have you forgotten how science works these days? 

Glucose is a structural isomer of fructose, and a look at the molecules demonstrates that they aren’t similar in shape, so that dog won’t hunt.

From the second link:

The mechanism of fructose absorption in the small intestine is not completely understood. Some evidence suggests active transport, because fructose uptake has been shown to occur against a concentration gradient.[23] However, the majority of research supports the claim that fructose absorption occurs on the mucosal membrane via facilitated transport involving GLUT5 transport proteins. Since the concentration of fructose is higher in the lumen, fructose is able to flow down a concentration gradient into the enterocytes, assisted by transport proteins. Fructose may be transported out of the enterocyte across the basolateral membrane by either GLUT2 or GLUT5, although the GLUT2 transporter has a greater capacity for transporting fructose, and, therefore, the majority of fructose is transported out of the enterocyte through GLUT2.

From the glucose link:

Glucose is then transported across the apical membrane of the enterocytes by SLC5A1, and later across their basal membrane by SLC2A2.[15]

“Extra metabolic step” is inaccurate, which anyone who knows even the slightest biochemistry understands. But you, as usual, understand nothing.

So, a study at Princeton has all the inaccuracies(like not using HFCS in the Princeton study) and it got published anyway, or you’re just another Internet fool mistaking bravado, beard-muttering and arm-waving for logic, facts, and dialog.

Oh, and BTW, here on the West Coast, I’ve only seen Italian seasonings as an herbal mixture that is salt-free, I don’t know of any such blend unless it’s meant for a salad dressing.

I have, DAGCM, but whether a store carries salt-based blends or not seems to be more about the store than the type of blend.  For instance, at Costco, only the ones on the meat (and the name brand) ones have salt; at Safeway or Kroger-minions nearly all have salt unless they’re ‘diet’ but the ones at the organic stores have very few that contain salt, and the independent market only has a few name-brands with salt the majority also do not.

Salt works as a preservative for packed spices as well, so that probably encourages its use at the big-chain retailers.

Re: Comment #129: gretchen on 01/20 at 02:16 PM

The reason I call you an idiot is because you don’t bother with simple reading comprehension.  Such as the comment I plainly referred to by time, name, and number was talking about sugars, not drugs.  Calling you names doesn’t make one a troll, alas.

To prove a possibility of danger, you take a test to its extreme.  Does this rope break?  Try to break it!  Where does it break?  Then you go into small increments.  The same is true with biological tests.  To see if there’s a possibility of danger, you try a ridiculous dose on rats first to see if there’s any reaction in the short term.  Then if there is, you dial it down to various doses over longer periods.  If you didn’t get a result at a high dose, why would you infer any reason to do the later studies?

Re: Comment #133: Bruce from Missouri on 01/20 at 03:50 PM

Comment #126: Bruce from Missouri on 01/20 at 01:36 PM
... Most of us were exposed to it by our mothers throughout our childhood, and have rejected it. ...

Wow, denying what you wrote?

Anyhow.

Chet,  do you know what a ‘facilitated transporter’ is?

Fructose is a hexose sugar that is being increasingly consumed in its monosaccharide form. Patients who exhibit fructose malabsorption can present with gastrointestinal symptoms that include chronic diarrhea and abdominal pain. However, with no clearly established gastrointestinal mechanism for fructose malabsorption, patient analysis by the proxy of a breath hydrogen test (BHT) is controversial. The major transporter for fructose in intestinal epithelial cells is thought to be the facilitative transporter GLUT5. Consistent with a facilitative transport system, we show here by analysis of past studies on healthy adults that there is a significant relationship between fructose malabsorption and fructose dose (r = 0.86, P < 0.001). Thus there is a dose-dependent and limited absorption capacity even in healthy individuals. Changes in fructose malabsorption with age have been observed in human infants, and this may parallel the developmental regulation of GLUT5 expression. Moreover, a GLUT5 knockout mouse has displayed the hallmarks associated with profound fructose malabsorption. Fructose malabsorption appears to be partially modulated by the amount of glucose ingested. Although solvent drag and passive diffusion have been proposed to explain the effect of glucose on fructose malabsorption, this could possibly be a result of the facilitative transporter GLUT2. GLUT5 and GLUT2 mRNA have been shown to be rapidly upregulated by the presence of fructose and GLUT2 mRNA is also upregulated by glucose, but in humans the distribution and role of GLUT2 in the brush border membrane are yet to be definitively decided. Understanding the relative roles of these transporters in humans will be crucial for establishing a mechanistic basis for fructose malabsorption in gastrointestinal patients.

Facilitated diffusion (also known as facilitated transport or passive-mediated transport) is a process of passive transport, facilitated by integral proteins. Facilitated diffusion is the spontaneous passage of molecules or ions across a biological membrane passing through specific transmembrane integral proteins. The facilitated diffusion may occur either across biological membranes or through aqueous compartments of an organism.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_diffusion

They’re talking about GLUT5. Seriously, stick rule. If you can’t even read your own citations you’re too dumb to post here.

The fact that glucose is actively co-transported with sodium in the intestine doesn’t prove that fructose is not subject to active transport of its own (as an isomer of glucose, identical in constitution and similar in size and shape it would be surprising indeed if it were not.)

Look at the molecules of the two substances and tell me they are similar in shape.

Yeah, they get published anyway. I know it’s hard for you to believe because you don’t work in the sciences, but the number of papers that are eventually retracted is increasing yearly so it’s not surprising that a few stinkers get out. Princeton’s rats aren’t the smoking gun you seem to think they are.

Of course not, they weren’t fed HFCS(except that they were)  they were fed HFCS in enormous doses(except they weren’t, the caloric content of the sucrose solution gave them the same amount of calories), a paper that was so poorly peer-reviewed that it reported violating one of the Laws of Thermodynamics and it didn’t get caugh , and, and,

You could only find a 33 year old paper dealing with fructose and ethanol metabolism to back up any of your silly claims here.

Thanks for demonstrating what stupidity on two legs looks like, Chet.

I have seen Italian and Greek Seasoning Salt and I have seen Italian and Greek Seasoning.  The first has it’s main ingredient as salt; the second is an herb mix, generally but not always without salt.  Of those, the ones that are cheaper or use ground herbs are more likely to contain salt.  There is nothing wrong with small amounts of salt, for most people; but if you eat any processed food in the US, you are likely alreay getting much more than you need to be healthy.

Helen, here on the West Coast, Italian Seasoning in bottles of glass or plastic comes as an herbal mixture without any salt whatsoever, even in places that sell cheap, like the 99cent store chain.

Fructose doesn’t diffuse into the lumen, it’s transported.

Since the concentration of fructose is higher in the lumen, fructose is able to flow down a concentration gradient into the enterocytes, assisted by transport proteins.

That the calories were identical does not prove that the doses were not enormous. The dosage per weight was the sugar equivalent of consuming 23 sodas. You keep referencing irrelevancies because you don’t understand anything that you read.

Weight-matched, male rats (300–375 g, n=10/group) were fed either (1) ad libitum chow, (2) 24-h HFCS and chow, (3) 12-h HFCS and ad libitum chow, or (4) 12-h sucrose with ad libitum chow for 8 weeks (2 months). We selected these schedules to allow comparison
of intermittent and continuous access, as our previous publications show limited (12 h) access to sucrose precipitates binge-eating behavior (Avena et al., 2006). The 12-h groups had access to sugar
(HFCS or sucrose) starting 4 h into the dark phase each day. These sugars were selected because they are the primary sweeteners in many soft-drinks. HFCS was an 8% solution (Nature’s Flavors®,
Formula 55, v/v dissolved in tap water, 0.24 kcal/mL), and sucrose was given as a 10% solution (Domino® Granulated Pure Cane Sugar, w/v, dissolved in tap water, 0.4 kcal/mL). Standard rodent chow was provided to all groups (LabDiet #5001, PMI, St. Louis, MO, 3.02 kcal/g).
All animals had water available ad libitum (see Table 1 for complete list of diets).
HFCS, sucrose, and chow intakes were measured daily, and body weight was measured weekly. After 8 weeks on the diets, the rats were sacrificed via rapid decapitation and trunk blood was collected
and assayed for blood glucose levels using the Analox GM7 Fast Enzymatic Metabolizer.

They weren’t dosed, Chet, they were given access to water with sucrose and the other group was given access to water with HFCS.

Did you even read the paper before starting to tear it apart?

They’re constitutional isomers (not, as you stupidly asserted, “structural” isomers)

Wiki wiki, come to my help!

Fructose is a 6-carbon polyhydroxyketone. It is an isomer of glucose; i.e., both have the same molecular formula (C6H12O6) but they differ structurally.

If anyone here wants to have some fun, suggest to a biochemistry professor that the same transport protein can handle both a furanose and a pyranose.

You have no idea how many legs I have, asshole.

Whether you have 1, 3, 2 or zero, this is still true.