I have read the whole series of these books. supermarket, restaurant, kids, and diet.
Some of the things amaze me, like some meal which had 3 days worth of sodium in it!
It was a learning experience and changed the way I buy groceries.
Did you know Shredded Wheat has only one ingredient? (wheat). And Golden Crisp (the bear mascot) has sugar as its main ingredient?
Did you know… even whole wheat bread has high fructose corn syrup in it?
Not all of it.
Certainly not the wheat bread I bake in my own kitchen… but yeah, HFCS is common ingredient in most commercial bread.
HFCS shows up in the unlikeliest places. While I haven’t read the books in question, my maternal grandfather was a sporadic health nut…he’d read all sorts of nutritional information, he took a dozen different vitamins and minerals, he sent off for the results of drug tests…and he drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney. He seemed to think that one behavior cancelled the other.
Yeah, hfcs sucks alright. If one wants to lose weight, its helpful, like the fact that salsa and hummus are much better condiments than mayo.
Quality photos too.
HFCS has a nearly identical make up as sucrose (table sugar). I would venture to guess that the problem has less to do with HFCS than the dumbing down of the typical product–as in sweeting it up to suit the palate of the typical consumer–rather than any particular sweetener. The problem is the desire for sweetened foods not the vehicle of the sweet taste. It will do you no good to avoid products with HFCS and pick the more expensive product sweetened with “cane juice”.
That’s my problem with the diet instant foods (like Lean Cuisines) - holy sodium, Batman! Reading nutritional labels (and recording all my daily food in an online food diary) has been an eye-opening experience.
HFCS might be nearly identical, but it doesn’t act quite the same way when used as part of a frosting mix, for instance, according to at least one source that I’ve read recently. It also doesn’t taste quite like cane sugar, or even beet sugar.
A big problem is that HFCS is cheap, and a cheap way to add some flavor to mediocre foods. Another problem is that many people see the great big “FAT FREE!!!” banner on a box of cookies, for instance, and don’t notice that the cookies are loaded with sugar or other carbs, as a way to make up for the loss of flavor from not having the traditional amount of fat.
I have noticed that the rate of obesity and diabetes has greatly increased, at or soon after the time that HFCS began being widely used as a sweetener. I’m hesitant to call it cause and effect, though. I suspect that it’s because most processed foods have more sugar in them, and the source of the sugar doesn’t matter, or doesn’t matter very much.
Moved MPSIMS --> Cafe Society.
It’s not HFCS or even “processed sugar” - it’s the fact that sugar is in some foods at all. Bread, for instance - it doesn’t need sugar. Neither do a lot of other foods. But humans are hardwired to like sweet foods, and adding sugar to almost anything makes it more attractive. The problem isn’t the form of the sugar, it’s that it is there, adding calories, at all.
Doesn’t bread need sugar because the yeast needs something to consume?
In addition, I recall reading that a big difference between sugar and HFCS is that with HFCS, your body doesn’t recognize it’s full like when eating sugar.
Actually, a lot of homemade bread recipes call for a little bit of sweetener (sugar, honey, molasses) - like, a Tablespoon or so per loaf - to help with the yeast rising and also to provide a bit of flavor. Yes, you can make bread without a sweetener, but they tend to be rustic style long-rising breads. Your basic American sandwich bread is always going to contain some kind of sugar, though. You just don’t get that style without it.
I just started to do this again. My strategy has been scrupulously record everything without making any changes in my eating habits for a week. Next week I’ll start making adjustments. One day this week I stopped and got breakfast at Dunkin Donuts, and had my typical canned soup lunch. The food diary started blinking “You’ve consumed 4536mg of sodium today!!!” and that was just up 'til lunch. (and yes, I buy low sodium soups whenever possible)
Regarding HFCS, a gentleman who comes into my store says that it causes him to have seizures. My understanding is the he has a condition which actually causes his seizures and that through his own observations he noticed that soda and candy bars triggered them. He says the only commercially produced candy bar he can eat is a Reeses PB Cup.
I knew that! In fact, growing up, my parents would not let us get any cereal that had sugar as the first ingredient. When I was finally old enough to make my own eating decisions, I ate a LOT of Captain Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, and Lucky Charms to make up for it.
Yeast doesn’t need sugar, it’ll do fine on just flour and water - the basic recipe for a sour-dough starter is to mix flour and water and leave it alone for half a day, then add more flour and water & repeat. Adding sugar will make yeast grow faster, but I when make pizza dough or bread it rises fine without any sugar.
Dunno about that; I have read that you don’t get “full” from drinking, which is why sugary soft drinks are “dangerous”.
Not being snarky but is this sarcasm? It doesn’t seem so mindblowing.
HFCS is a migraine trigger for me, and also having experimented with cane sugar, honey, HFCS and standard fructose HFCS will cause a spike in my blood glucose faster than anything except a glucose shot used as a baseline. It has to be how it is metabolized.
I just avoid everything that has it and I prefer to cook from scratch anyways. Better control of ingredient quality. You should taste my homemade bread hot from the oven =)
My husband was severely deprived, or so he felt, of sugary cereals when he was growing up. His mother had 8 kids to feed, and since theirs was a blended family, she had six teenage boys to feed at the same time. She was not just concerned about nutrition, but cost. So he ate oatmeal for breakfast a lot of the time, which is filling and cheap as well as being good for you.
Now that he does his own grocery shopping, he buys the sugary stuff…and eats it, too.