THE GREATEST MEDICINE OF ALL… IS TEACHING PEOPLE HOW NOT TO NEED IT
Is Your Diet Drink Killing You?
Drinks firms insist they're safe, but now a major study says just two glasses a day can lead to an early death
• Products saying 'sugar-free' or reduced sugar will contain artificial sweeteners• Study involving 450,000 said consuming these higher your risk of dying young
• They can 'over-stimulate our sugar receptors' and warp our palates
• So we no longer enjoy eating foods that aren’t so sweet and have cravings
They are in thousands of products we slip into our grocery baskets each week — everything from ‘diet’ colas, soft drinks and yoghurts to chewing gum and toothpaste to slimming ready meals, cakes, ice creams and desserts.
You’ll find them in sachets to sweeten your tea and coffee. If you pick up any product labelled ‘sugar-free’, ‘reduced sugar’, or ‘low calorie’, it’s almost certain to contain them.
Yet this week the World Health Organization delivered a bitter verdict on artificial sweeteners, with a study showing that just two glasses of diet drink a day increases the risk of early death.
Coca-Cola says that, ‘with over 200 studies to support its safety, aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested ingredients in the world. Its safety has been validated time and time again, including by the European Food Safety Authority in 2013’
The research, involving more than 450,000 adults in ten countries, revealed that the daily consumption of all soft drinks was linked to a higher risk of dying young. But an early death was significantly more likely with diet drinks — the ones that qualify for a green ‘traffic light’ label from the Government, meaning they are supposedly healthy because of their low sugar content.
So who should we believe? The World Health Organization or the Government, which advises us that artificial sweeteners are good for us. To answer the question, we have to look at exactly what these sweeteners are.
Most are chemically synthesized food additives known as high-intensity sweeteners. They are compounds designed to elicit the same response from receptors on the tongue as the ‘sweet’ flavor we get from sugar. And they are hundreds of times more powerful.
These hyper-intense synthetic sweeteners found in fizzy drinks might warp our palates, to the point that we no longer enjoy eating foods that aren’t so sweet.
The trouble is that concerns over their safety simply will not go away — even though food and drink manufacturers and national regulatory bodies such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) insist they are safe.
For instance, the U.S. grocery chain Whole Foods Market refuses to stock products containing any synthetic sweetener. As it says on its website, listing the sweeteners it scorns: ‘No saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, neotame or acesulfame-k. We don’t allow it! All of these are synthetic compounds produced through complex chemical processes... not so appetizing, huh’.
And that’s before some scientific studies have suggested that artificial sweeteners can cause brain damage, liver and lung cancer, brain lesions, and neurological and hormone disorders.
In 2017, a U.S. study of 2,888 people found that consumption of soft drinks containing artificial sweeteners was associated with a higher risk of dementia and stroke. It found no such increased risk from sugar-sweetened drinks. Other research suggest that artificial sweeteners could be worse for health than sugar. In 2013, a study of more than 66,000 women over 14 years found that those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks had a higher incidence of Type 2 diabetes than those drinking sugar-sweetened ones.
One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners — found in Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Sprite Zero, among other drinks — is aspartame.
Weight-for-weight it contains the same number of calories as sugar — four calories per gram — but it has been chemically engineered to be 200 times sweeter which means you only need a touch for any foodstuff or drink to taste sweet. Little wonder its use is so widespread. It is said to be one of the most rigorously tested food additives ever, and after what appeared to be a stringent assessment of its safety, aspartame was given a clean bill of health in 1994 when European regulators lifted restrictions on its use in the EU.
Sprite and Fanta are two fizzy drinks popular with children and studies have found accumulating evidence to suggest that people who consume these sugar substitutes regularly are also more likely to gain excessive weight
In 2013, the EFSA again reviewed the science on aspartame, and once more concluded that the sweetener was safe for the general population, including infants, children and pregnant women, specifically ruling out any association between aspartame consumption and brain damage or cancer.
On its website, Coca-Cola says that, ‘with over 200 studies to support its safety, aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested ingredients in the world. Its safety has been validated time and time again, including by the European Food Safety Authority in 2013’.
Yet warning bells have sounded over its safety ever since it was first approved for use in foodstuffs and carbonated drinks in the U.S. in the early 1980s.
And now, after carrying out a painstaking new analysis looking at how aspartame’s safety status was assessed, University of Sussex researchers are calling for its use to be suspended. Worryingly, Professor Erik Millstone and Dr Elisabeth Dawson have detailed what they describe as ‘serious flaws’ in the approvals procedure.
They say that the European Food Safety Authority panel discounted ‘every single one’ of 73 studies that suggested aspartame could be harmful to health. In contrast, the panel accepted 84 per cent of the studies that found no obvious evidence of harm as unproblematic and reliable.
Prof Millstone and Dr Dawson believe that scientists sitting on the panel, which meets behind closed doors, may have been biased by commercial conflicts of interest.
They warn that the safety of aspartame for human consumption has not been ‘adequately proven’, and want it taken off the market in Europe while a thorough, independent and open examination of the science on the sweetener takes place.
The International Sweeteners Association — which represents the chemical companies that manufacture sweeteners — meanwhile, insists that an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has ‘consistently confirmed that aspartame is safe’.
But there is, perhaps, another persuasive argument for cutting out (or back) your consumption of products containing aspartame and other artificial sweeteners — one that might surprise you.
They may not do what they claim to do: help control weight.
Contrary to what you might expect, several large-scale studies have found a positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and weight gain.
One animal study, for example, found that rats consuming artificial sweeteners gained weight faster than those eating sugar.
Might artificial sweeteners, then, actually be more fattening than sugar?
In 2013, a wide-ranging review of studies on humans looking at the impact of artificial sweeteners on weight and other health outcomes found accumulating evidence to suggest that people who consume these sugar substitutes regularly are also more likely to gain excessive weight.
The puzzle is, if artificial sweeteners contain no, or low calories, how could they make you fat?
One emerging possibility is that an extremely sweet taste, unaccompanied by the calories that would accompany it in natural food and drink, encourages us to overeat by seeking out the ‘missing’ calories from other sources. ‘I’m drinking diet cola, so I’ll eat the doughnut’-type thinking.
Another theory is that artificial sweeteners disturb the hormones that regulate our appetite and which signal to our bodies that we have had enough to eat.
This leaves us feeling unsatisfied, which makes us more likely to overeat.
A further possible explanation is that because they over-stimulate our sugar receptors, these hyper-intense synthetic sweeteners might warp our palates, to the point that we no longer enjoy eating foods that aren’t so sweet.
Bear in mind just how sweet these high-tech chemicals are.
Aspartame — which along with acesulfame-k is 200 times sweeter than sugar — is a relative lightweight compared to saccharin, sucralose, neotame or advantame, which are respectively 300, 600, 8,000 and a mind-boggling 37,000 times sweeter than standard white sugar.
Personally, I avoid all products that contain artificial sweeteners. It seems to me that their off-the-wall sweetness aids and abets the root problem: a self-destructive craving for sweetness.
At least with standard sugar, if you decide to gradually reduce the amount you consume, you can surprisingly quickly reset and re-educate your taste buds.
Quite soon you’ll begin to find that less and less sugar is quite sweet enough for you, and start finding very sweet foods that you used to enjoy much too cloying.
It’s clear that we haven’t got to the bottom of how artificial sweeteners could be affecting our eating habits, or our health.
So, for the time being, I think it might be wise to err on the safe side and assume that a taste for larger-than-life chemical sweetness isn’t a habit that’s likely to keep us slim and healthy.
Note: Author Joanna Blythman is an investigative food journalist and the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer of the Year 2018.
These 3 Foods Are the Worst for Your Metabolism
According to Jillian Michaels, trainer on The Biggest Loser
When you take a look the ingredients that rev up your metabolism, a few stand out. Namely, fiber (particularly from "real" foods like fruits and veggies) and iodine-rich options like seaweed. For every metabolic superhero, though, there's an alternative eat out there that works the opposite way, sabotaging your body's calorie-burning prowess.
"The two things that are predominantly in control of your metabolism are your endocrine system and your hormone balance," says Jillian Michaels, creator of the My Fitness app and former trainer on The Biggest Loser. Thus, when you chow down on something that disturbs these things, your metabolism gets thrown for a loop, too.
1. Sugar
Not-so-shockingly, Michaels names sugar as one of the greatest culprits of a sluggish metabolism. Why? After savoring a dessert, she explains, your blood sugar spikes. This causes your cortisol and insulin hormone levels to increase, in an effort to level things out—and it can eventually lead to metabolic disruption if left unchecked long-term. "Hormones work in a symphony, and there are tons of them," explains Michaels. "So ultimately, when we’re looking at metabolism, we want to make sure that we have the right hormones working for us, instead of against us."
According to Chicago-based dietician Amanda Lemein, MS, RD, LDN, the lack of fiber in sugary snacks is yet another factor that makes them a total no-go for a solid metabolism. "Things that we think of as sugar—like cookies, cake, pancakes, whatever—are broken down by our bodies really, really quickly," she says. Fiber-rich foods, however, are digested slowly—your body fights hard to break them down, kick starting your metabolism in the process.
2. Processed grains
Next on Michaels' hit list: refined grains like white rice, highly processed breads, and white pasta. These have a similar affect on your body as sugar, breaking down quickly and causing insulin to skyrocket. And that's not all, says Josh Axe, DNM, CNS, DC. "When consumed in excess, refined grains can provide you with high levels of certain compounds that may hurt your metabolism, including gluten, lots of starch, and phytic acid," explains Axe, founder of Ancient Nutrition and DrAxe.com. "Many packaged grain products also contain lots of added sugar, salt, synthetic preservatives, and are 'fortified' with synthetic vitamins and minerals that can be hard to metabolize properly." Moral of the story: Stick with whole, unprocessed grains when you get a carb craving.
3. Processed Soy
Hold the vegan chicken tenders? "Soy is very toxic [to your thyroid]," Michaels claims. To be clear, scientists haven't come to a consensus on this, but some studies do indicate that excessive soy consumption may negatively impact your thyroid—the gland in your neck responsible for regulating your body's metabolic operations. (Especially if your iodine levels are low or you've already got some form of thyroid dysfunction.) And to make matters worse, conventionally grown soy is also often treated with pesticides, which are also linked to thyroid issues. "The only time you should do soy is if it’s organic and fermented," says Michaels.
My Comment:
There has been a lot of information and data published in recent years showing the negative health effects of soy especially on our hormones. Soy is used extensively in processed foods because it is cheap and the manufacturers can tout its higher protein content. There are much better ways to get your protein. My advise, is to avoid soy as much as possible, unless it is fermented.
Why You Should Ditch Sugar In Favor of Honey
Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder, GreenMedInfo LLC, 2019
While honey and sugar share similar degrees of sweetness, the differences in the way our bodies respond to them are profound.
Technically, honey and sugar (sucrose) both exist because they are food for their respective species.
In the case of sugarcane, a member of the grass family (Poaceae) which includes wheat, maize and rice, sucrose provides energy for its leaves and is an easily transportable source of energy for other parts of the plant, such as the root, that do not produce their own energy.
Honey, of course, is produced by bees from the nectar of flowers solely for the purpose of food. Beyond this obvious similarity, the differences between honey and sugar, however, are much more profound.
First, honey is a whole food and sucrose is not. In other words, sucrose is an isolate – technically only one chemical compound – lifted from a background of hundreds of other components within the whole plant, whereas honey is composed of an equally complex array of compounds, many of which are well-known (including macronutrients and micronutrients, enzymes, probiotics and prebiotics, etc.), others whose role is still completely a mystery.
Even the "sugar" in honey, which we might mistakenly equate (due to caloric and nutrient classification equivalencies) to the "sugar" from sugarcane, is a complex mixture of the monosacharrides (one-sugars) glucose and fructose, and at least 25 different oligosaccharides (which are sugars composed of between two to ten monosaccharides linked together), including small amounts of the disacchardide sucrose, as well as trisaccharides (three-sugars) like melezitose and erlose.
Interestingly, if you were to isolate out the fructose from honey, and consume it in isolation in American-size doses (over two ounces a day), it would likely contribute to over 70 fructose-induced adverse health effects; primarily insulin resistance, fatty liver, obesity, hypertension and elevated blood sugar. But place that fructose back into the complex nestled background of nutrient chemistries we call honey, and the fructose loses its monochemical malignancy to our health. Food is the ultimate delivery system for nutrition. Reduce whole foods to parts, and then concentrate and consume them excessively, and you have the recipe for a health disaster that we can see all around us today in the simultaneously overnourished/malnourished masses who still think a 'calorie is a calorie,' and a 'carb is a carb,' without realizing that the qualitative differences are so profound that one literally heals, while the other literally kills.
But the differences between honey and sugar are not simply based on their respective chemical and nutritional compositions, but also the length of time we humans have had to adapt to them as a source of energy and nourishment.
Honey was the primary concentrated sweetener consumed by humans until after the 1800's when industrial production of sugarcane-derived sugar was initiated. While the first written reference to honey is found on a 4,000 year old Sumerian tablet, and depictions of humans seeking honey have been found in cave paintings at in Spain that are at least 8,000 years old, we can assume that our love affair with the sweet stuff graciously provided by the bee goes back much further, perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.
Regardless of the exact date of its introduction into our diet, from the perspective of evolutionary biology and nutrition, it is clear that our body has had infinitely more time to adapt to honey than sugar. It is instructive, as well, that sugarcane is in the same grass family whose seeds in the form of "cereal grains" we now consume in such plenty that, arguably, we are now slowly digging our graves with our teeth (particularly, our grain-grinding molars). After all, we have only been consuming them for 10-20,000 years, and in some cases less than 10 generations - a nanosecond in biological time, even if from the lived perspective of a single human lifespan, or even cultural time as a whole, it may seem like "forever."
For those skeptics who consider this reflection on the differences between honey and sugar mere theory, there is now plenty of clinical research confirming their significant differences.
A double-blind, randomized clinical study titled, "Effect of honey versus sucrose on appetite, appetite-regulating hormones, and postmeal thermogenesis," published in 2010 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, compared the effects of honey or sugar on appetite hormones (ghrelin, peptide YY) and glycemic and thermic effects after a meal, in 14 healthy, nonobese women.
The researchers found that the group given 450 calorie (kcal) honey in their breakfasts had "A blunted glycemic response may be beneficial for reducing glucose intolerance," and saw positive modulation of appetite hormones, i.e. delayed the postprandial ghrelin response and enhanced total peptide YY levels.
Another study published in Journal of Medical Food in 2004, which compared honey to dextrose and sucrose, found that natural honey was capable of lowering plasma glucose, C-reactive protein, homocysteine in healthy, diabetic and hyperlipidemic subjects.
Animal research also confirms that, when compared to sucrose, honey is more effective at promoting lower weight gain, adiposity (fat accumulation), and triglycerides.
Why Consuming Honey Raw Is So Important
Raw honey contains enzymes and probiotics which are destroyed when heated or used in cooking applications. These compounds are of no small significance and contribute directly or indirectly to honey's many well-known health benefits. Take the active starch-digesting enzyme amylase, for instance, found only in the raw form of honey in a form known as diastase, which is believed to contribute to clearing antigen-antibody immune complexes associated with allergies to pollens, while also reducing mast cell degranulation associated with histamine, and related inflammatory hormone, release linked to allergic symptoms.
Also, if it is local honey, it will pick up small amount of local pollen which may help to "immunize," or desensitize an overly active immune response to these environmental triggers. There is also the enzyme in raw honey known as glucose oxidase, which produces hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid from glucose. The hydrogen peroxide formed as a result of this enzyme is associated with honey's well-known wound sterilizing and healing properties.
Honey is also rich in prebiotics, as attributed to some of the oligosaccharides already mentioned (e.g. FOS), and probiotics that contribute to supporting the healthy flora in our gut as well.
Recently, in fact, an abundant, diverse and ancient set of beneficial lactic acid bacteria were discovered within the honeybee gut. Researchers found a collection of 50 novel species from the genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium from a single insect. Further investigation of these strains indicated that the association between these bees and the bacteria are at least 80 million years old.
Consuming raw honey, therefore, likely significantly impacts the microbiota within our own gut, and is one way to reconnect to ancient symbiotic relationships with flora that in our modern, sterilized, pasteurized, irradiated, poisoned, cooked, and bleached world, are all but eradicated from our environment, soil, food, and therefore bodies.
Honey's ability to support the growth of beneficial bacteria was recently demonstrated in a study published in Letters in Applied Microbiology in 2000, where researchers compared the stimulatory effect of honey with sucrose on the multiplication of lactic acid bacteria in in vitro conditions and found "The number of Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus plantarum counts increased 10-100 fold in the presence of honey compared with sucrose." Animal feeding of honey to rats also resulted in significant increase in counts of lactic acid bacteria.
The probiotic-boosting properties of honey may provide an explanation for why it is such an effective anti-infective agent and has been proven to heal many gastrointestinal disorders.
There's also the fascinating medical fact that honey + coffee has been clinically proven to be more effective than steroids for cough.
A Final Word on The Bee
A full appreciation of honey inevitably leads to a full appreciation of the bee, as well as an awareness of the precarious relationship presently existing between our species. While shallow, the bee's role in pollination has been estimated to have over several billion dollars of economic value annually. The reality is that we are far more dependent on this insect than it is on us, which is why when we use "pesticides" and various agrichemicals to radically transform the bee's natural habitat and microbiota, or use antibiotics, feed them high fructose corn syrup, and add other various amendments in its hive, the resulting collapse of immune function, and secondary infections that emerge, we pretend are a novel new disorder whose origins are unknown, i.e. bee colony collapse disorder, much in the same way that we blanket over our own self-poisoning with various idiopathic syndromes that are actually iatrogenic or environmental in origin.
Bee products, including venom, wax, propolis, royal jelly, etc., have been found to provide potential medicinal solutions for over 170 different health conditions (see Bee Products), expressing over 40 distinct beneficial pharmacological actions. This growing body of research should awaken in us greater respect for this sacred insect -- even if only for selfish reasons.
Until next time, stay healthy and happy
JD Roma
The information on this blog is provided for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical care, and medical advice and services are not being offered. If you have, or suspect you have, a health problem you should consult your physician (preferably a Naturopath).
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