Henry Rollins on why fast food is evil and France’s annual “Kick-In-A-McDonald’s-Day” tradition.
(via secondnaturefitness)
Epidemiologists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio reported data showing that diet soft drink consumption is associated with increased waist circumference in humans, and a second study that found aspartame raised fasting glucose (blood sugar) in diabetes-prone mice.
“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised,” said Helen P. Hazuda, Ph.D., professor and chief of the Division of Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine. “They may be free of calories but not of consequences.”
Diet soft drink users, as a group, experienced 70 percent greater increases in waist circumference compared with non-users. Frequent users, who said they consumed two or more diet sodas a day, experienced waist circumference increases that were 500 percent greater than those of non-users.
Click to read more.
If you’re still drinking aspartame-laced diet soda, I’d recommend watching the documentary Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World about the history of Aspartame. It’s about the corporate fraud (led by Donald Rumsfeld) that went into getting Aspartame approved for human consumption. And the biological consequences of putting those corporate petrochemicals into your body like they were some kind of food as opposed to toxic crap that makes you fat and ruins your health.
Both glasses are 16 oz (2 cup) glasses. The glass on the left is 100 calories of regular Coca-Cola, and the glass on the right is the sugar that the 100 calories of soda contains.
The reason I don’t drink soda….
yup, ditto
And the fun part is, your body would throw it all up if you were to eat that much straight sugar. So what does the soda company do? Add chemicals that suppress the need to throw it all up after you’ve had it.
(via fuckyeahstrength)
What is often in shredded cheese besides cheese?
Powdered cellulose: minuscule pieces of wood pulp or other plant fibers that coat the cheese and keep it from clumping by blocking out moisture.
One of an array of factory-made additives, cellulose is increasingly used by the processed-food industry, producers say. Food-product makers use it to thicken or stabilize foods, replace fat and boost fiber content, and cut the need for ingredients like oil or flour, which are getting more expensive.
Cellulose products, gums and fibers allow food manufactures to offer white bread with high dietary fiber content, low-fat ice cream that still feels creamy on the tongue, and allow cooks to sprinkle cheese over their dinner without taking time to shred.
Ugh! And don’t think that eating organic food is enough to avoid it:
powdered cellulose in its least manipulated form can be used in foods labeled “organic” or “made with organic” ingredients by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
McDonald’s serves up a nice big bowl of wrong
From Mark Bittman’s blog.
There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “bowl full of wholesome” — also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates…
in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).
A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”
CSPI asks FDA to ban caramel coloring in sodas, food
As reported on Consumerist.
Yesterday, the folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest sent a petition to the Food & Drug Administration, demanding that the “caramel coloring” commonly used in sodas like Coke and Pepsi be banned because they claim it contains a pair of carcinogenic chemicals.
To be more precise, CSPI is asking the government to ban two specific forms of caramel coloring: Caramel III, used in some beers, soy sauce and other foods; and Caramel IV, used in dark soft drinks.
Writes CSPI:
“In contrast to the caramel one might make at home by melting sugar in a saucepan, the artificial brown coloring in colas and some other products is made by reacting sugars with ammonia and sulfites under high pressure and temperatures. Chemical reactions result in the formation of 2-methylimidazole [2-MI] and 4 methylimidazole [4-MI], which in government-conducted studies caused lung, liver, or thyroid cancer or leukemia in laboratory mice or rats.The National Toxicology Program, the division of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that conducted the animal studies, said that there is “clear evidence” that both 2-MI and 4-MI are animal carcinogens. Chemicals that cause cancer in animals are considered to pose cancer threats to humans. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found significant levels of 4-MI in five brands of cola.
”“Carcinogenic colorings have no place in the food supply, especially considering that their only function is a cosmetic one,” said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. “The FDA should act quickly to revoke its approval of caramel colorings made with ammonia.”
Also at issue for CSPI is the phrase “caramel coloring” itself, which the group says is “misleading when used to describe colorings made with ammonia or sulfite.”
“Most people would interpret ‘caramel coloring’ to mean ‘colored with caramel,’ but this particular ingredient has little in common with ordinary caramel or caramel candy,” Jacobson said. “It’s a concentrated dark brown mixture of chemicals that simply does not occur in nature. Regular caramel isn’t healthful, but at least it is not tainted with carcinogens.”
They suggest using “ammonia process caramel” or “ammonia sulfite process caramel” instead.
CSPI does admit that “the ten teaspoons of obesity-causing sugars in a non-diet can of soda presents a greater health risk than the ammonia sulfite process caramel,” but believes the levels of 4-MI found in colas could be causing thousands of cases of cancer.
FDA Urged to Prohibit Carcinogenic “Caramel Coloring” [CSPI]
Love heals.
It’s colored sugar drinks that kill slowly.
