Consumers Union Urges USDA To Allow Private Testing For Mad Cow Disease

This summer, on June 12, the Consumers Union wrote a letter to Congress. The Consumers Union (CU) is an independent, nonprofit organization that receives the bulk of its funding from the sale of the magazine Consumer Reports.

The letter was addressed to the Secretary of Agriculture, USDA, Edward Schafer. Its writing was motivated by months of street protests in South Korea that began when the new president decided to resume US beef imports. The CU maintains that allowing exporters to test their beef for BSE would resolve the difficulty.

Currently, the USDA does not allow a private business to voluntarily test its beef for mad cow disease, also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).

Excepts:

"Although USDA has prohibited private use of the rapid BSE tests so far, it lost on this issue in March 2007 in a court case brought against it by Creekstone Farms."

The USDA continues to block private testing while they appeal that ruling. (Update : The USDA just won their appeal: Court Bars Meatpacker Tests For Mad Cow.)

The USDA's own Deputy Secretary has said:

"We have said it's not our business to interfere with ... private importers in Korea developing their own standards. And if US suppliers want to supply that product by those specifications, that's a private commercial transaction that we don't intend to interfere with and have no opposition to."
- Chuck Connors, USDA Deputy Secretary

Yet, they continue to make an exception for beef testing.

The CU goes on to make a strong argument for BSE testing:

"We strongly disagree with the USDA's assessment that the rapid test kits are "worthless" when used for a food safety purpose because their use could result in a false negative. While we agree the rapid test kits can miss a case of BSE in the very early stages of incubation, such test kits can catch the disease in later stages, before the animals show symptoms. The European Union, using these rapid BSE test kits in government-mandated testing of seemingly healthy cattle approved for slaughter turned up some 1,117 cases of BSE between 2001 and 2006 and prevented meat from these infected animals from reaching European supermarkets."

"We also believe that companies that use the rapid tests should be allowed to label their meat as having been "tested for BSE," and sell it to US consumers who would like this extra level of protection."

"Consumers Union believes that, ideally, the USDA, like Japan, should require testing of every cow over the age of 20 months at slaughter. At this time, the USDA is testing only a tenth of a percent of dead or slaughtered cattle."

Those 1,117 cases were found in the UK after they introduced controls in 1989. In fact, there have been 183,823 cases of BSE discovered in the UK in total, 1,353 cases in Ireland, 900 in France, 875 in Portugal, and hundreds more throughout Europe. ¹

Take a guess how many cases of BSE the Unites States says they discovered, in total. ² Recall that we test a mere one tenth of one percent.

Grass-fed, organically-raised cattle have a lower risk of contracting BSE, but they are not immune. As we saw in a previous post, the infecting agent, a prion, can contaminate pastureland through irrigation and runoff. Prion-infected wildlife can also infect a herd, and its pasture. And right now, no cattle-raiser or meatpacker is allowed to voluntarily test for BSE.

There's little doubt in my mind ... mad cow disease has infected the US beef supply. Somewhere in this big, beautiful coutry, someone is eating contaminated meat. Let's test.
________ ¹ Wikipedia: BSE
² Three

Mad Cow: "Don't Look, Don't Find" *

* Jean Halloran, Director of the Consumer Policy Institute at Consumer's Union, in her description of the USDA's mad cow policy.

Mike from comments shared these two YouTubes that I think lay bare the goings on in this country regarding mad cow disease.

The first mad cow found in the US, in 2003, wasn't a downer cow. So says the gentleman who received it, Dave Louthan. You can watch him tell his story below. There are some gruesome parts in the beginning. If you'd rather not watch, here's his story (CounterPunch), or here (New York Times).

Curiously, the USDA responded to the discovery of a standing mad cow by restricting downer cows. I'm sure there's logic in there somewhere.

Here's the YouTube of Colm Kelleher, the author of the book Brain Trust, which describes how mad cow disease can jump species, infect humans in the form of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD), and possibly be at the root of the unusual spike in the number of Alzheimer's patients in this country since 1979.


"According to research by New York biologist Michael Hansen, it takes less than a milligram of infected material [for a cow] to contract the disease."
- Mad Cow: Are We Still Unprepared?, Time Magazine, 2006

• Japan tests nearly 100% of its slaughtered cattle.
  
• The European Union tests about 30%.
  
• The US tests one tenth of 1%.

________

Human Form Of Mad Cow Disease May Be More Prevalent Than Thought

This line of thought is unsettling. If there's any truth to it, it certainly supports a cease-and-desist order regarding the feeding of animal scraps to livestock that would not normally eat those scraps, especially if those scraps come from diseased or downer animals.

Currently we recycle (render) those scraps and feed them back to livestock and pets as a cheap source of protein. (Let's stop using dried cattle blood in calves weaning formulas.)

It also supports an effective testing schedule that would keep the infectious animal agent out of the food supply.

The article has an alarmist quality to it, but it makes some credible points:

Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?

The new thinking is that since some types of fatal dementia, notably Alzheimer's Disease (AD), have the same symptoms as the form of mad cow disease that occurs in humans (called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: vCJD), the prevalence of the latter may be much higher than initially thought.

Unfortunately, you can only conclusively tell the two apart via a post-mortem brain biopsy.

In this study, when tissue of 54 people diagnosed with AD were autopsied, 5.5% were instead found to have had vCJD, and to have died from it. In a study at Yale, 13% of presumed AD patients were also found to have had vCJD.

Yet, the CDC reports that only one human case of vCJD has occurred in the US from 1995 to 2004. (The incidence of non-variant CJD, also known as spontaneous CJD, is reported as 1 in 1 million worldwide.) ("spontaneous"?)

On the other hand, the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease has been increasing exponentially. There are currently more than 5 million people in the US diagnosed with AD.

Both mad cow disease and vCJD in humans are caused by a prion, an infectious bit of non-living protein that cannot be deactivated via heat, ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation, normal sterilization processes, or use of disinfectants that normally inactivate viruses and bacteria. (I'm not making that up.) Prions "reproduce" in the host by bumping up against another protein, causing it to adopt a shape similar to its own.

Vegetarians Aren't Immune To Prion Infection

Prions "can survive wastewater decontamination and wind up in fertilizer, potentially contaminating fruit and vegetables." ^{1, 2} Wastewater becomes contaminated via slaughterhouse and other meat processing facility drains and runoff.

The human form of mad cow disease, vCJD, is transmissible between humans via blood. It has an incubation period of 10 to 20 years. It is incurable, untreatable, and fatal.

I don't see why, given this scenario, the USDA doesn't require more cattle be tested for mad cow disease. (The USDA currently tests about 1% of slaughtered cattle.)

Not only is the USDA not requiring much testing, it, in fact, after pressure from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), sued a small meatpacker, Creekstone Farms, to prevent them from voluntarily testing their cattle for mad cow disease. The president of the NCBA told the Washington Post, "If testing is allowed at Creekstone, we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too."

So far, the USDA is winning, if that's what you want to call it. They've appealed a lower court's ruling in Creekstone's favor, and have refused to sell Creekstone it's requested mad-cow test kits.

Bill Marler, when you become Food Safety Administration Secretary, I hope you support increased testing for mad cow disease and other spongiform encephalopathies.

Related: The Organic Consumer's Association does a nice job of keeping up-to-date on all things related to mad cow disease: Organic Consumer's Association: Mad Cow Disease
________¹ Persistence of Pathogenic Prion Protein during Simulated Wastewater Treatment Processes, American Chemical Society, 2008.
²Even Vegetarians May Not Be Safe From 'Mad Cow' Prions, New Scientist, June 2008

When Is It Not A Good Idea To Take Fish Oil?

When it could hasten progession of cancer.

Not that this study proves anything, and it's certainly a fish out of water where fish oil studies are concerned. But ... what in blazes is going on here?

Dietary Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids Promote Colon Carcinoma Metastasis In Rat Liver, Cancer Research, 1998.

Rats were fed either a:

• Low-fat diet
  
• Fish oil diet (source of omega-3 fatty acids)
  
• Safflower oil diet (source of omega-6 fatty acids)

... for 3 weeks. Diets were isocaloric. Colon cancer cells were then injected.

Findings: (The figure at right shows livers of rats on the low-fat diet (A - Top), the safflower oil diet (B - Middle), and the fish oil diet (C - Bottom). The arrows show tumors. Click for larger.)

"At 1 week after transplantation, the fish-oil diet had induced 7-fold more metastases (in terms of number and size) than had the low-fat diet, whereas the safflower oil diet had not affected the number and total volume of metastases."

"At 3 weeks after tumor transplantation, the fish oil diet and the safflower oil diet had induced, respectively, 10- and 4-fold more metastases (number) and over 1000- and 500-fold more metastases (size) than were found in the livers of rats on the low-fat diet."

"The effects of omega-3 PUFAs on the proliferation of colon cancer cells and on the growth of metastases in the liver are stronger than the effects of omega-6 PUFAs."

Both the omega-3 diet and the omega-6 diet (both polyunsaturated fats) promoted the growth of liver tumors when compared to the low-fat diet -- with the omega-3 (fish-oil diet) more than twice as risk-promoting as the omega-6 (safflower oil) diet, in terms of both number of tumors formed, and size.

Omega-3 fatty acids can suppress the immune system. That's one supposed mechanism for their anti-inflammatory effect. A suppressed immune system could hinder natural cancer-fighting pathways. However, these researchers' analysis "revealed that the immune system in the liver (Kupffer cells, pit cells, T cells, newly recruited macrophages, and the activation state of macrophages) did not play a significant role in this diet-dependent outgrowth of tumors," causing them to conclude that "the enormous effect of omega-3 PUFA on colon cancer metastasis in the liver is not mediated via alterations of the immune system."

There goes that theory.

Another study I saw, "Does Dietary Alpha-Linolenic Acid Promote Liver Metastases In Pancreatic Carcinoma Initiated By BOP In Syrian Hamster?" from Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, 1999, found something similar. Omega-3 fat (alpha-linolenic acid: ALA, the type of omega-3 found in flax seeds) increased liver metastases, this time from pancreatic cancer, and did so dose-dependently, meaning the more omega-3 they gave the hamsters, the more liver cancer they got.

Maybe omega-3 helps in cancer prevention, but once you have cancer, these studies show ingesting omega-3 can hasten its progression.
________

The Relaxation Response (RR)

There are non-drug therapies that have been documented to be at least as effective as drugs in the treatment of mental disorders, as well as physical disorders. One is the relaxation response (RR).

Studies have shown that employment of the RR on a regular basis can alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. The RR has been shown to reduce blood pressure and heart rate, reduce insomnia, alter metabolic processes (how much oxygen we consume, the movement of molecules into and out of cells, the rate of mitochondrial respiration, formulation of the energy-storing molecule ATP, etc.) reduce inflammation (by reducing oxidative stress, for one) (omega-3/omega-6 ratio isn't the only way to reduce inflammation), increase immunity (by increasing levels of cytokines and related molecules, for one), reduce pain ... so much more.

Even if it IS genes that are the primary determinant of our mental and physical health, the RR may be able to change what our body does with those genes, that is, change how those genes get expressed.

________
In a study published last month, researchers from Harvard provided some of the best evidence of that to date. ¹

They compared gene expression in 19 long-term practitioners of daily RR practice to 19 people who had never engaged in such practices.

They found that employment of the relaxation response changed the expression of over 2200 genes in the RR group compared to the control group (P<0.05. Statistically, the difference in gene expression was not due to chance.) - upregulating some, downregulating others.

In case there was something about the RR group that was different enough from the control group to obscure results, the researchers gave all participants in the control group 8 weeks of RR training - then measured their gene expression. Even in these short-term practitioners, 1561 genes were expressed differently after engaging in an RR practice than before, with significant overlap to genes that were expressed differently in the long-term practitioners.

The genes in question (which were targeted more often than would be expected by random distribution) are known to be involved in:

• Inflammatory processes
  
• Metabolism (oxidative phosphorylation, the production and neutralization of free radicals)
  
• Programmed cell death (also known as apoptosis - cancer growth is naturally limited by apoptosis or cell death)
  
• Immunity (antigen processing, autoimmune disorders)
  
• Stress response - both within a cell and among cells

The growing body of evidence that practices such as meditation, biofeedback, progressive muscle relaxation, etc., can profoundly impact physiology puts into question (at least in my mind) findings of previous studies, primarily epidemiological studies, that sought to account for confounders via statistical adjustment. It's easier to adjust for variables such as age, body mass index (BMI), smoking, even exercise, which can be measured. It's more difficult to adjust for a confounder such as body changes elicited by an RR.

For example:

• Was it intake of omega-3 fatty acids that resulted in reduced inflammation? Or was it regular employment of the RR?
  
  
• Was it the intake of an SSRI that ameliorated depression? Or was it initiation of a meditation practice? A move to a less stressful job or location? The resolution of an interpersonal conflict?
  
  
• In Dr. Dean Ornish's studies, was it consumption of a low-fat, vegetarian diet that reversed heart disease (a disease of inflammation)? Or was it the incorporation of his required, integrated, daily stress-management techniques?

How To Generate The Relaxation Response

I've been exposed to a number of approaches over the years that can elicit the relaxation response. How effective one method is over another depends on the person - it's a very individual match-up.

They include (but are not limited to):

• Breathing exercises*
  
• Progressive muscle relaxation (e.g. body scan)
  
• Various forms of meditation*
  
• Repetitive prayer*
  
• Mantra*
  
• Mindfulness*
  
• Various forms of yoga*
  
• Tai chi
  
• Qi Gong
  
• Guided imagery
  
• Biofeedback

* Noted as used by the long-term practitioners in this study.

The 8-week training in this study involved:

• Information about reducing daily stress
  
• Educational overview of the stress response (SR), and the relaxation response (RR)
  
• Instruction on how to elicit the RR
  
• Individual RR-training sessions from an experienced clinician*
  
• Listening to a 20-minute RR-eliciting CD daily
  
• Weekly meetings with clinician to review progress, assess daily RR practice, fine-tune RR

* The session included: "diaphragmatic breathing, body scan, as well as mantra and mindfulness meditation, while subjects passively ignored intrusive thoughts."
________¹ Genomic Counter-Stress Changes Induced by the Relaxation Response, Public Library Of Science, July 2008

How Safe Are Psychiatric Drugs?

In my last post, The Geography Of Mental Illness, I wondered whether genes play as strong a role in mental illness as pharmaceutical companies would have us believe. I mean, how did so many mental illness genes end up in Utah?

I wouldn't argue against the idea that a "chemical imbalance" is at the root of conditions that drugs are being prescribed to treat, conditions such as depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, phobias, social anxiety disorder. I don't know. However, I would argue against the idea that drugs are the most effective treatment for most people. They certainly aren't the only treatment. Unfortunately, they're the first-line treatment in this country.

We don't even understand fully how these drugs work, or how safe they are, yet millions of Americans are taking them, billions of dollars are being pocketed by the sale of them.

Take one class of antidepressants, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs):

"While serotonin has something to do with depression, the relationship is not a simple nor a well-understood one. ... While the SSRIs do indeed act on serotonin regulation in the brain, allowing the neurotransmitter to linger a little longer in the synapses, the changes that the drug ultimately exerts on the brain are entirely unclear. As an indicator of how little we know, it is striking that one of the more popular antidepressants in Europe, tianeptine, is a serotonin reuptake enhancer - it has the opposite effect of the SSRIs, allowing less serotonin to flow between the synapses."
- Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation

In an earlier post, I noted that the dependence and withdrawal problems associated with SSRIs are only now coming into mainstream discussion; that their addictive qualities may in fact, as David Healy put it, be greater than "any psychotropic drug ever."

Update: See my next post for an alternative (or adjunct) to psychiatric drugs.
________

The Geography Of Mental Illness

In the last few decades, mental illness has increasingly been portrayed as the manifestation of a "chemical imbalance", and that in turn strongly affected by genes. That portrayal lends itself to drug-based therapies, to the delight of drug-makers.

Interestingly, in this country, psychological distress seems to occur more as a result of geography than genes.

Below is a map showing the hot spots for serious psychological distress (SPD), based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health for 2005 and 2006.

Serious Psychological Distress In Past Year Among Persons Aged 18 Or Older


Click for larger.
The Department of Health and Human Services reports that SPD is most common in Utah (14.4%). ¹ Other states with high rates of distress include Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The one exception to the geographical trend is Rhode Island. Generally, the Northeast and West Coast have much lower rates. The least-stressed state? Hawaii (8.8%).

Is there something else these states have in common?
________¹ Via SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)

Carrots For The Colon

Three groups of rats were fed: ¹

• Carrots with their normal diet.
  
• A component of carrots (an amount equal to that present in the carrot group) with their normal diet.
  
• Normal diet, less carrots.

Findings:

"Dietary treatments with carrot and [carrot component] delayed or retarded the development of tumors" of the colon by a third compared to the carrotless group.

The carrot component thought to be responsible for this is falcarinol. Here's the neat thing ...

"Falcarinol is a natural pesticide found in carrots and red ginseng (Panax ginseng), which protects them from fungal diseases, such as liquorice rot that causes black spots on the roots during storage." ²

This is one reason why organic produce can be more nutritious. Plants are stressed by organisms. Herbicides and pesticides kill off these organisms in conventional crops. Organically raised plants will manufacture more of their own defensive chemicals ... in this case the natural pesticide falcarinol.

The authors used freeze-dried carrots, ordinary orange ones, which they say would be equivalent to raw carrots. They don't know if cooked carrots or carrot juice would produce the same effect. One of the researchers, Dr. Kirsten Brandt, extrapolated these findings in the recommendation: "consumers should eat one small carrot every day."
________¹ Inhibitory Effects of Feeding with Carrots or (-)-Falcarinol on Development of Azoxymethane-Induced Preneoplastic Lesions in the Rat Colon, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2005
² Wikipedia: Falcarinol

You Can't Both Know From Where Your Meat Is Coming, And Not Know

I've purchased meat from Whole Foods. And eggs. And dairy food. I'm willing to pay their higher prices for what I believe to be higher-quality products.

Now I learn that Whole Foods accepted for sale from its biggest meat supplier, Coleman Natural Beef, product that was processed by Nebraska Beef - the same Nebraska Beef which processes factory-farmed animals, which is at the center of an E. coli outbreak, and which was compelled to recall several million pounds of their product - resulting in Whole Foods recalling all of their ground beef in over half the country (27 states plus DC) for most of the summer (June 2- August 6). (I wonder how much of that was consumed.)

Whole Foods isn't claiming responsibility for this incident. (Edmund LaMacchia, Global VP of Procurement: "this event did not occur because we were negligent or slow to react.") They say their reputation for monitoring and conducting onsite inspections at production facilities is intact. LaMacchia: "We stand behind our products."

If Whole Foods was not negligent, and if they stand by their stated practice of "inspection of each producer's operation", how did this happen? Did someone at Whole Foods knowingly sign-off on the use of the Nebraska Beef plant? Something doesn't make sense here.

Either they truly follow the path of their meat from farm to store shelf as they state, in which case they knew that their largest beef supplier was sold ... to whom ... and what that could mean regarding processing. (Even though LaMacchia said they were "surprised" to learn that the new owners of Coleman were using Nebraska Beef for processing.) Or they did not know from where their meat was coming, in which case their claim of selling quality meats from quality operations, that they inspect on-site, is not true. You can't both know from where your meat is coming, and not know.

If I choose to accept that they are not at fault, then I have to conclude their practices are inadequate to assess from where their meat is coming. From where their eggs are coming. Their dairy foods.

I don't mean to pick on Whole Foods exclusively. This has been a lesson for me. Unless I harvest it myself, I take a risk.

________

Eating Large

Can you guess whose diet this is?

Breakfast:

• 3 fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise
  
• 2 cups of coffee
  
• A 5-egg omelet
  
• A bowl of grits
  
• 3 slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar
  
• 3 chocolate-chip pancakes

Lunch:

• A pound of pasta
  
• 2 large ham-and-cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread
  
• 1000 calories worth of beverages

Dinner:

• A pound of pasta
  
• An entire pizza
  
• 1000 calories worth of beverages

Grand total: 12,000 calories for one day.

What I could do with 12,000 calories.
________Answer: It's this person's diet.

Whole Foods Recalls All Ground Beef In 27 States And DC

Last Friday, the natural food chain Whole Foods recalled all fresh ground beef sold in its stores in select states (including my own - PA) between June 2 and August 6, 2008, "because of a concern that it may be contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria":

Press Release, August 8:
Whole Foods Market® Voluntarily Recalls Fresh Ground Beef

That's two months of burger sales, during the height of the summer season - prime burger time. That's not good. Not for a business that bases its reputation on delivering the safest, freshest, and most nutritious food products, and charges for those choice products proportionately.

Whole Foods had been selling meat that was processed by Nebraska Beef - a slaughterhouse the USDA says is the source of the latest E. coli outbreak, an outbreak that has resulted in almost 80 (reported) illnesses to date, and the recall of 6,500,000 pounds of meat.

The New York Times said in an article on Monday, Recall Leads Whole Foods to a Change, that Nebraska Beef "had received multiple citations and had fought a long-running battle with the Agriculture Department." That's the company Whole Foods chose to deal with? A company that deals primarily with factory-farmed animals?

Edmund LaMacchia, the Global Vice President of Procurement for Whole Foods, says on his blog post, The Safety of Meat at Whole Foods Market, "We have worked for the last 28 years to establish second-to-none quality and safety standards."

I read that to mean that if I want the highest quality and the safest meat in the US, I should feel comfortable turning to Whole Foods.

I don't. For whatever reason, and I can't believe that reason isn't tied up in profit, Whole Foods has let its standards slip. I don't trust that their meat isn't being raised and processed in a manner not unlike the goings-on at factory farms or Concentrated/Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), regardless of their in-store signage to the contrary.

I don't know what it will take for me to buy their meats again. The least they could do is apologize, instead of offering excuses.

________

Gravatars

That little icon of an apple that accompanies my comments is called a Gravatar, a globally recognized avatar. It's an image that follows you wherever you comment on the web (that enables Gravatars). It's linked to your email address. It's free and easy to set up:

Gravatar.com

________

High-Fructose Corn Syrup VS. Table Sugar

I was reading this study for work and it reminded me that I think we blame high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) too much:
Dietary Sugars Stimulate Fatty Acid Synthesis In Adults, Journal of Nutrition, 2008

If you're skipping HFCS because you don't want the fructose, you may as well skip sugar, cane syrup, honey, maple syrup, and fruit syrups ... because they all deliver the same if not more of a fructose punch. (HFCS is derived from modified corn starch.)

The study above was very small - 4 men and 2 women. It found that beverages containing more fructose than glucose resulted in more fat production - both after the beverage was consumed (even though no fat was consumed), and again after a meal 4 hours later. That is, the liver manufactured more triglycerides when higher-fructose beverages were consumed, than when higher-glucose beverages were consumed, and there was a carry-over effect to subsequent meals. (However, higher-glucose beverages raised post-meal blood glucose and insulin more than higher-fructose beverages.)

There's something that stands out in this study for me - the amount of fructose in those beverages, and the implication that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is to blame.

There were three beverages tested. All contained 85 grams of sugar, as:

• 100% glucose
  
• 50% glucose and 50% fructose
  
• 25% glucose and 75% fructose

Which works out to:

• 85g glucose and 0g fructose
  
• 42.5g glucose and 42.5g fructose
  
• 21g glucose and 64g fructose

That 40 or 50 grams of fructose is a lot for a few gulps, especially when you consider a beverage usually accompanies other possibly fructose-containing foods. It's not something you'd find easily in nature:

• One cup chopped carrot contains 1g fructose (plus 2g wrapped up in sucrose)
  
• One cup cherry tomatoes contains 2g fructose
  
• One medium banana contains 6g fructose (plus 1.5g wrapped up in sucrose)
  
• One cup of blueberries contains 7g fructose
  
• One medium apple contains 9g fructose (plus 1g wrapped up in sucrose)
  
• One cup grapes contains 12g fructose

Those test beverages add up to a lot of bananas, as regards fructose at least.

But are HFCS-sweetened foods much higher in fructose than foods sweetened with cane sugar?

By "wrapped up in sucrose" in the list above, I mean that common table sugar, also known as sucrose, is a disaccharide; it consists of two single sugars (monosaccharides) bound together, in this case, a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose. So -- table sugar contains fructose, in an amount not much different from high-fructose corn syrup, while honey and maple syrup provide even more fructose:

• One teaspoon of table sugar (sucrose: 50% glucose and 50% fructose) contains 4g sugar, about 2g glucose and 2g fructose.
  
• One tablespoon high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS: 45% glucose and 55% fructose) contains 5g sugar, about 2g glucose and 3g fructose.
  
• One tablespoon pure corn syrup (100% glucose) contains 5g sugar, hardly any fructose.
  
• One tablespoon honey contains 17g sugar, about 8g glucose and 9g fructose.
  
• One tablespoon maple syrup contains 12g sugar, about 6g fructose tied up in sucrose.

If you sweetened a cup of coffee or tea with a teaspoon of sugar, or two teaspoons of high-fructose corn syrup, you'd be consuming roughly the same amount of sugar, the same amount of fructose, and not such an unnatural amount of either, considering the above examples. There is the need to disengage fructose from its partner glucose when you eat table sugar, a step not necessary when you eat HFCS (or when you eat fruit), but our body is very efficient at digesting (breaking apart) sucrose.

In my mind, it becomes unnatural when one consumes 40, 50, 60, or more grams of fructose in a few fell swoops, whether it be as sucrose, or as HFCS. Unfortunately, the amount of fructose tested in this study (42.5g and 64g) may be unnatural, but it is not uncommon:

• One medium (21 ounce) cola beverage, if it was sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, might contain about 26g glucose and 32g fructose (58g total sugars - about 15 teaspoons of sugar)
  
• One medium (21 ounce) cola beverage, if it was sweetened with table sugar, might contain about 29g glucose and 29g fructose (58g total sugars - about 12 tablespoons of HFCS).

There may be other reasons not to recommend HFCS, but for its fructose content, or its calories, it's not that much different from plain sugar. It's the amount of these sweeteners being added to foods that's causing problems.

Below is a nice graphic from the New York Times of the making of HFCS. Above is a photo of the final product.


Click for larger.________

Stephen Hawking: "We Think We Have Solved The Mystery Of Creation"

I've been watching videos on TED. (Check my sidebar for recent ones.) Here's one by the British physicist Stephen Hawking:

Stephen Hawking - Asking Big Questions About The Universe

It's short, 10 minutes, and to my mind at least, very listenable, even though I know nothing about quantum theory. About 2 minutes in, he describes how "time behaves like another dimension of space." And then:

"This removes the distinction between time and space and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state."

At 2:52 minutes in, he says, or at least I think I hear him say:

"The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing."

And later:

"We think we have solved the mystery of creation."

Huh.
(There's plenty of conversation about his talk on the site.)
________

Drug Makers Drool Over China's Nutritional Shift

There are 1.3 billion people in China today. The US has less than a quarter of that population, about 300 million. China has quite a market if you have something to sell.

According to Barry Popkin's latest research ¹, those 1.3 billion are experiencing an acute nutritional shift. Increased prosperity has led to increased consumption of meat, dairy food, and added fats. Popkin says that nutritional shift is contributing to China's increasing incidence of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and obesity -- obesity doubled among China's women and tripled among its men in the 11 short years between 1989 and 2000.

An analyst with the healthcare consulting firm IMS Health, Ray Hill, says pharmaceutical companies view this as a boon. "[China] has the highest growth rate for pharmaceutical sales than anywhere in the world.", he says.

If what Popkins says is true, that the diets of people in China, which have shifted to include "more energy-dense foods, which have higher saturated fats and calories than vegetables and carbohydrates", are responsible for the downturn in their health, why not encourage a nutritional shift towards one that mirrors their pre-1989 consumption? (Why not do that here?)

________¹ Barry Popkin PhD is a professor of nutrition and economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of the recently published: Will China’s Nutrition Transition Overwhelm Its Health Care System And Slow Economic Growth?, Health Affairs, July 2008

The photo is from The Keropok - Singapore Daily Photo. Not quite China, but according to Wikipedia, the majority who live there are Chinese. This caption accompanied the photo:

"Chinese food is usually communal and not individually served. So, there needs to be two pairs of chopsticks. Which pair to use? Well, the steel pair is for your personal use, ie put food into your mouth. The black pair it to take food from the main plates to your own plate or bowl."

How about that.