View Full Version : HFCS: Am I being too simplistic, or am I stating the obvious?
I just saw a piece on the Early Show about how girls are experiencing puberty much, much younger, with a lot of potential negative consequences--girls experiencing puberty at 7 is not as rare as it used to be!
Then the reporter asked, why is this? The interviewee (can't remember who it was) said that they don't know--but they're looking at plastics and obesity as root causes.
I don't know. I've read The Omnivore's Dilemma and seen King Corn etc. and to me there's an obvious correlation:
Fact: Since the corn farm subsidies of the 70s, corn by-products are in everything--in almost literally every processed food in your supermarket
Fact: The stage before slaughter is called "finishing." The reason for "finishing" cows is to fatten them up as fast as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Fact: Corn-eating cows grow faster than grass-eating cows.
SO, if farmers give cows corn to make them fatter faster, and corn is in everything we eat except for fresh produce, doesn't it follow that that's why we're getting fat faster?
And doesn't it also follow that this just might be messing with our hormones? At the very least, aren't the increased hormones they give cattle also possibly to blame?
Am I missing something? Please, those of you who know about farming, tell me what you think? I just don't know why these "experts" aren't making the same possible correlation.
I am not a defender of HFCS (we don't buy anything that contains it), but I think there are multiple factors. Many chemicals are known to affect the endocrine system (BPA, which is in the lining of canned foods; parabens, which are preservatives used in many body care products, for instance). Chemicals go into our bodies, may be removed by our kidneys or liver, but ultimately end up in the environment where we again consume them in our water over and over until they break down.
Body fat also impacts hormones, but corn is not the only food that makes people, or cows, fat. Dairy milk, for instance, is the perfect food for putting calories into baby cows and making them grow very quickly. Yet many people consume it in various forms every day for their entire lives. There are sugars added to most processed foods, and not only in the form of HFCS - which means more added, empty calories. Foods are manufactured - not only the packaged ones in the supermarket, but the ones that restaurants purvey - to be so palatable that they are irresistible, by means of added fat+sugar+salt. School lunches have very tight controls on fat as well as calorie minimum/maximum levels, but I think that this year's changes are the first that limited sugars or sodium.
Here's what Dr. Weil says about early puberty: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/ART00661
People have eaten corn in the Americas for thousands of years. I really don't think its as simple as corn = early puberty.
I'd be more inclined toward exposure to chemicals or pharmaceuticals...
I have to wonder too how many of the prescription drugs we take including lots of hormonal products like birth control pills end up in our water supply. It's not something they ever list on water quality reports but common sense would say that some of these things don't break down easily. I don't think it is just corn. But the corn that is used now is far different than any corn our distant ancestors ate so who really knows.
I always blamed it on the commercial milk industry- 'Hormones in the milk'.
Apparently we didn't quit drinking milk soon enough because my boys wear size 14 and size 15 shoes and have a lot more body hair than I remember boys having when I was in 8th grade, both are shaving!
I wonder if stress has anything to do with it. I always look to nature to understand things. We humans are always trying to separate ourselves from the animals and the rest of nature.
I'm just thinking out loud here. When trees know they are sick, they will do everything possible and use the last amount of their energy to make as many seeds as possible......to keep the race going. I know I'm mixing my metaphors here..........but I just wonder. Our bodies have so many reactions that we don't understand. Sometimes, I just see "us" as a way for a much smarter organism to get food/water/safety. Our brain keeps our organism alive. There's so much we don't understand about why our bodies react the way they do.
I'm sure its quite possible that our way of life in modern civilization has alot of toxins that will interfere with our bodies. But I do wonder about stress.
And I think we live in an extremely stressful environment, even when we don't perceive it as stress..........but our bodies do.
treehugger
4-12-11, 12:57pm
I think (like many others here) that this is a complex issue with lots of intertwined causes (plastics, hormones in meat and milk, pharmaceuticals in water supply, etc.). But I read about another potential cause that also made sense to me. Young girls living with men who are not biologically related to them begin their periods earlier. This situation is fairly common (and has become more so in the past 30 years) with divorce and second marriages.
This was the case for me: my mom and I moved in with my step-dad when I was 7. I started my period at 11, much earlier than all of my friends, none of whom lived with a step-dad or step-brother. I realize this is anecdotal, but that's why the research I read about made sense to me as one more cause in a whole list of potential causes.
Kara
Girls go into puberty when they have enough body fat; I think it's 18-23%. Anything leading to rapid fat deposition will bring on precocious puberty.
Here's an interesting abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12671118
Tellingly, precocious puberty is commonest in girls of non-Caucasian ethnicity, especially girls in the lowest socio-economic ranks, which is a fancy way of saying that girls from the poorest families, which are usually non-white, go into puberty earliest. Some girls have pubic hair before they're out of diapers! This group eats a LOT of cheap simple carbohydrates; heavily sweetened, white flour, white rice based diets. This group is also the most likely to be bottle-fed on the cheapest formula available, which has a lot of soy and scarily high levels of isoflavones, which act like estrogens; formula delivers the equivalent of 3 to 5 birth control pills daily to the baby. Lierre Keith talks about this issue in The Vegetarian Myth, pp 219-223. She asserts that 1% of African-American girl babies are entering early puberty by the age of 3, and 48% of these girls are entering puberty by the age of 8.
The 14.7% of white girls entering puberty precociously are from the poorer groups. So while PCBs in the ubiquitous plastics in our lives, and endocrine disruptors in the chemicals pervading our world, undoubtedly play a role in this, there does seem to be at least a strong suspicion that food is a major factor.
Here's Gary Taubes; it's a long lecture, but very well worth watching. Taubes shows plainly that the fattest people are the poorest, and these obese people are often manual labourers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVvZP2av5Mk&feature=related
Here's a list of the world's youngest mothers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers. Those living outside the United States are unlikely to be guzzling the HFCS, corn, soy diet - but they are likely to be eating a lot of simple carbohydrate. Very poor people tend to place a high value on sugar, and I've seen babies in South African, sucking on bottles filled with Coca-Cola. Of course the parents should know better - but poorly educated people have very poor tools for resisting advertising that is cleverly designed by commercial psychiatrists to hit them in their weakest points! Also, in many places in the less developed world, people have no mains water. They have to buy water, and very often soda is cheaper than water.
Well, I tried to edit my post to add this link, but didn't get it right!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVvZP2av5Mk&feature=related
Gary Taubes lecturing at Berkeley; a long lecture but very well worth watching. Taubes shows conclusively that the poorest people are the fattest, and often these people are manual labourers.
Gingerella72
4-12-11, 1:52pm
People may have eaten corn for thousands of years, but not until the last 50 years was it showing up in EVERYTHING. Same thing with soy. Corn and soy are in things you would never associate them being in, like cola and chocolate bars. Bread. "Pure" vanilla extract. Tomato sauce. It *literally* is everywhere. And why? More people have fallen for the belief that soy is a wonder health food and are eating more soy based foods, but no one ever thinks about how much hidden soy they're consuming.
It's ALL related, there isn't a single cause you can point to to blame for the obesity and early puberty epidemics. The increased dependence on corn for livestock, hormones, antibiotics, BPA in plastics and such, food additives, rising use of genetically modified foods, increased sugar, increased soy, increased pesticides on crops.....they're all to blame, and it's only become within the last 30-40 years that all of these have been multiplying, and it's only been in the last 30-40 years that these "epidemics" have been rising. Correlation? You bet.
Add to that the so-called war on fat. Based on faulty test data saturated fats and cholesterol became villianized. The thing is, our bodies NEED fat and cholesterol to function properly. The hydrogenated fats we were told were healthier are NOT healthier, vegetable oils and margarines are the worst things a person can put into the body but we fell for what the USDA and FDA told us hook, line and sinker. So we've had an increase in all of the things listed above, coupled with a decrease in healthy fats that provide essential vitamins, minerals and enzymes, and look where we are now.
A return to traditional ways of eating is the only way to combat all of the modern health problems. Raw whole milk from grass fed cows. Meat from grass fed animals. Organic produce. A return to healthy saturated fats like coconut oil and butter and cheese from grass fed cows. Less dependence on sugar and refined carbs.
I knew I had this information somewhere!
The single largest source of calories for Americans comes from sugar—specifically high fructose corn syrup. Just take a look at the sugar consumption trends of the past 300 years:[1]
* In 1700, the average person consumed about 4 pounds of sugar per year.
* In 1800, the average person consumed about 18 pounds of sugar per year.
* In 1900, individual consumption had risen to 90 pounds of sugar per year.
* In 2009, more than 50 percent of all Americans consume one-half pound of sugar PER DAY—translating to a whopping 180 pounds of sugar per year!
Sugar is loaded into your soft drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, and hidden in almost all processed foods—from bologna to pretzels to Worcestershire sauce to cheese spread. And now most infant formula has the sugar equivalent of one can of Coca-Cola, so babies are being metabolically poisoned from day one if taking formula.
Taken from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/04/20/sugar-dangers.aspx
ApatheticNoMore
4-12-11, 2:20pm
I tend to think it's mostly people being fatter these days, kids as well. I mean when vast quantities of kids are overweight that seems the most obvious explanation. Why people are fatter these days is of course complex.
Of course the parents should know better - but poorly educated people have very poor tools for resisting advertising that is cleverly designed by commercial psychiatrists to hit them in their weakest points!
There's a certain degree if not having knowledge. But lots and lots of advertising depends on this, and I'm not sure who the target market is, but maybe it is not all poor people. I watched television last night (some documentary about some woman lost in the grand canyon). Yea, watching t.v. .... and Kraft American cheese advertises itself to me as being some great healthy food for the children of America (but isn't American cheese one of the most processed cheeses out there?), cleaning products advertise themselves to me as leading to a wonderful sparkling house (actually those commercial cleaning products, are not a green brand or anything, and are almost certainly toxic). Etc.. So yea ads are aimed at those lacking some particular knowledge (and who doesn't lack knowledge of SOMETHING?), but I don't think it is just the poor.
But even if the poor knew all about healthy lifestyles and were somehow able to make it work with their incomes and time (lots of assumptions here), don't you think being at the bottom of the income distribution in America say, kinda sucks? And having a life that sucks (for whatever reason) just by itself, would motivate people to eat junk, even if they knew better.
Gingerella: As Suzanne said, well said!
And Suzanne, well-said to you, too!
During Lent of 2009 I gave up HFCS for Lent, after reading Omnivore's Dilemma. I am not kidding when I say I had to learn to cook in order to eat. Otherwise I would have starved.
I know from experience that what Gingerella and Suzanne is correct: anything that's in a can or a box in the supermarket has HFCS in it. I think it's absolutely crazy. And then there's restaurants--the good restaurants shower all food with salt, and the fast food restaurants do the same--but adding sugar. We recently had a Papa Johns come into the neighborhood. DH loves it--but man, that sauce tastes--SWEET! Should tomatoes really be THAT sweet?
It totally freaks me out because I do believe that unless we go right back to where food is completely natural we are just killing ourselves. As for Apathetic's comments: unfortunately the working poor seemed doomed to perpetuate the recent cycle of addiction to fast food, just because no one is at home to prepare and cook food the way it is meant to be eaten.
A lot of us who aren't poor and who have more time are victims too--victims to marketing and advertising. Buying water? Really--our dead parents are laughing in their graves. Expensive "natural" "organic" food that's processed and canned? What's wrong with an apple?
Sorry for the rant. It's just troubling to me how far we have (d)evolved from our natural selves. And our bodies are telling us, "hey, what the heck are you doing to us??" and we're just not listening.
I like my cheese to come from grass-fed goats.
Seriously, I do think the issue is obesity resulting from unnatural foods. I agree with Gingerella that if we want our children to be normal we have to feed them "normal" (aka unadulterated) foods. And, frankly, I have to think at the other end of the spectrum: if we want our hormones to act normally as we move through menopause and beyond, then we have to eat normal foods. Confession: I find it hard to be consistent, living in the mid-west, where "normal" foods are not always available. Fish, for instance, is either farmed or $16 a pound.
Yes, jan, the whole hormonal thing is kind of weird... Just tomorrow I'm meeting with a client who has a product indicated for relief of menopausal symptoms. I know that menopause is not a walk in the park, but again, I am not going to be one to cross the line from using estrogen to relieve some discomfort to using it to hold on to our youth.
Meanwhile, as I write this, Jamie Oliver is chattering in the background....
Apathetic, I was being sarcastic, not in any way beating up on the poor! I get really pissed off with the way people whose own grocery carts wouldn't bear inspection start howling about how irresponsible the poor are, and how they're digging their own graves with their teeth, and all the rest of it. It's all part of the welfare queen with the perfect hair and false nails, driving to the store in a Cadillac, using food stamps to buy junk food mindset. I've been poor and yes, it sucks bigtime, especially when you're working 12 to 14 hours a day, including weekends.
I take estradiol alone at 0.5mg/day - not to try hold onto my youth, long fled - but because it really, really helps with chronic migraine.
Treehugger.......that's interesting. See, that's what I mean..........perhaps their bodies are sensing that they need to reproduce now (since its a male that isn't related), and it speeds up. Curious.
Although I lived with my biological father (unfortunately!) and started my period at 10, as did my daughter, who lived with her biological dad. I think sometimes its an inherited thing.
Gardenarian
4-13-11, 7:15pm
I didn't start menstruating till almost 16; my daughter has started at 11 3/4. (which seems early to me, but I guess is within normal limits.) She has eaten very little HFCS (only halloween candy and the like) and we buy mostly organic foods. She is very thin (5'2", 88 lbs.)
I have read that the increased sexualization in the media has had some effects (tho' my particular dd doesn't watch TV either.)
I think poor nutrition/fitness is definitely a factor - I'm not seeing a lot of thin or athletic 7 and 8 year olds who are developing breasts.
Gary Taubes on sugar: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
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