What Are We Eating?

Another fun infographic:

Click image to embiggen

In one year, the average American consumes, among other things:

• 192.3 pounds of flour and cereal products
• 141.6 pounds of caloric sweeteners -- 42 pounds of which is corn syrup

Oh, and this stuff, too:

But it's the 62.4 pounds of beef (1.2 pounds per week!) that's killing us, right?

[Source]

The World's First Huffable Soft Drink

Are you bored with your HFCS-infused carbonated beverage? Is sucking a straw too physically strenuous for you? Have you found yourself snorting a can of Cheez Whiz for dinner on a Saturday night, wishing you could power-wash it down with a pressurized stream of sugary soda?

Well, if you're in the U.K., your dreams are about to come true.

Introducing Turbo Tango, the huffable soft drink in an aerosol-pressurized spray can!

With a retail price of £1.60 for 375ml, the product is aimed at teenage consumers.  

Britvic collaborated with a team of more than 40 developers to create what is claimed to be the world’s first plastic aerosol drink.

Simon Stewart, marketing director at Britvic said: "Teen consumers told us they found the category 'samey' and were ready for something genuinely new and different. The reaction to Turbo Tango has been amazing from consumers and customers -- we’ve certainly never had teens trying to buy a pack from us in research before."

Labelling on the cannister advise users to "Hold upright and squirt in your mouth (and nowhere else)."

What excellent advice!

My favorite quote from Mr. Stewart: "With Turbo Tango, we’ve gone one step further and come up with a world first that really is ‘soft drink meets squirty cream.'"

Yum?

[Source]

Irony is Best Served in a Half-Gallon Jug

Isn't it awesome that KFC is supporting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation by donating proceeds from its HALF-GALLON "Mega Jugs" of sugar HFCS water?

I knew it all along: SODA PREVENTS DIABEETUS!

[Source]

PepsiCo's Drinkifying Your Snack

It may surprise you to learn that PepsiCo, the largest food-and-beverage company in the U.S., doesn’t just make cola. Eighteen of its brands, including Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses. And collectively, these brands are responsible for many of the ultra-processed, insanely-sugary snack foods that are killing us. Plainly put, PepsiCo is making people fat and sick.

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But according to this week's New Yorker, PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, wants the company to help battle the obesity epidemic, and to “lead the fight in the public health realm.” How? By selling "healthy," “scientifically advantaged” snacks that are “good for you."

“It’s not a question of selling less,” Nooyi has said. “It’s a question of selling the right stuff.”

Wow! Does this mean PepsiCo’s going to stop selling, say, PEPSI? Or TOSTITOS? Or AUNT JEMIMA SYRUP (which lists corn syrup AND high fructose corn syrup as its two primary ingredients)?

More after the jump...

Life Lessons from the New York Times Magazine

Planning to do some reading? This weekend's New York Times Magazine is jam-packed with healthy goodness.

The cover article by Gary Taubes (you know -- the author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat") is about the eeeevils of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, which we discussed a couple of days ago.

But wait -- there’s much, much more crammed into this little issue! For example:

Mark Bittman shows you how to make lamb -- and how to carve it in three cuts!

James Vlahos spells out exactly why you need to ditch your office chair!

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” 

Maggie Jones examines why we need to get more sleep!

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. [psychomotor vigilance task] results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day...

Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

And Gretchen Reynolds surveys a bunch of talking heads in order to find the BEST EXERCISE EVER.

Other than Taubes' piece, this article was the one that piqued my interest. According to the exercise physiologists interviewed, three movements -- all of which are familiar to any CrossFit enthusiast -- stand head and shoulders above the rest:

Burpees (a.k.a., the King of all Exercises):

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Squats:

“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.”

...The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition... Most physiologists believe that only endurance-exercise training can raise someone’s VO2max. But in small experiments, he said, weight training, by itself, effectively increased cardiovascular fitness.

“I used to run marathons,” he said. Now he mostly weight-trains, “and I’m in better shape.”

Intervals:

High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours...

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all.

(What's your poison? Burpees, squats or intervals? Something else entirely?)

So what have we learned from just one issue of the New York Times Magazine?

• Meat is tasty, but skip dessert. 
• Sleep a lot. 
• But when you’re up, don’t sit: Do burpees instead.

Sounds like a plan.

Sweet Poison

The New York Times Magazine just published a lengthy write-up by Gary Taubes about the long-term toxicity of eating sugar and high fructose corn syrup. (And as a special treat for all you Robert Lustig groupies, he's prominently featured in the article.)

Taubes argues that sugar doesn't just make you fat, insulin resistant and diabetic -- it may also promote cancer growth:

As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do...

“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” [The director of Harvard Medical School's cancer center, Lewis] Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

Me, too.

[Source]

[Update 4/15/11: Who's been keeping the lid on the evils of sugar? The lobbyists, of course.]

HFCS Makes You Fat(ter)

I'm sure you've seen the Corn Refiners Association's television ads in support of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), arguing that it's a "natural" product (albeit super-processed) that comes from corn (duh) and no worse for you than table sugar (which is like saying a piano dropped on your head is no worse for you than being hit by a car):



Surprisingly, when these ads started airing a year or two ago, many experts voiced agreement with the central premise of these commercials -- though they decried the overconsumption of both HFCS and regular old refined sugar. As noted nutritionist and author Marion Nestle put it:

"Lots of people think high-fructose corn syrup is the new trans fat. It isn't. ... Biochemically, it is about the same as table sugar (both have about the same amount of fructose and calories) but it is in everything and Americans eat a lot of it — nearly 60 lbs. per capita in 2006, just a bit less than pounds of table sugar. High-fructose corn syrup is not a poison, but eating less of any kind of sugar is a good idea these days and anything that promotes eating more is not."

The question of whether HFCS has been unfairly vilified has been around for years. But now, Princeton researchers have found that HFCS isn't as innocuous as Big Corn's commercials would have us think:

[In one study,] 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.

And that's not all:

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

"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."

But regardless of whether this study settles the debate, our best bet is to avoid both refined sugar and HFCS.