Courtesy of Linda Bonvie
FoodIdentityTheft Blogger and CFH Contributor
April 30, 2013
Just what are “happy calories”? If you have no idea, Coca-Cola is only to glad to fill you in on the principle of caloric contentment.
The world’s largest beverage company wants you to know that the excess calories you gain from guzzling its flagship product Coke are really your friends, ready to be spent on “extra happy activities” such as dog walking, laughing and dancing.
If that seems kind of bizarre, the fact is that its “I just want to be OK” commercial, which has been airing in prime time, is said to be one of the ways Coke is addressing “obesity head-on.”
By bringing a familiar “calories in, calories out” message to consumers (one Corn Refiners Association President Audrae Erickson has been fond of conveying in her appearances over the last few years), the soft-drink giant has been doing its part to spread the word that that “…all calories count, no matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola.,” but can be easily worked off through all kinds of recreational pastimes.
Of course, there are scores of consumers and health professionals who would call those calories in Coke, which come from high fructose corn syrup, distinctly ‘unhappy’ ones that may ‘count’ in ways we hadn’t counted on.
For example, health guru and integrative medicine pioneer Andrew Weil, M.D. calls HFCS “a direct driver of obesity in kids,” and something he predicts is “going to turn out to be one of the very worst culprits in (our) diet.”
|
|||||
And Dr. Mark Hyman, bestselling author, practicing physician and chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, notes that the consumption of high fructose corn syrup, which went from zero to over 60 pounds per person per year, has coincided with “obesity rates (that) have more than tripled and diabetes incidence (increasing) more than sevenfold” – a correlation he believes “cannot be ignored.”
In fact, if you look at “delivery” data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), it wasn’t until 1968 that HFCS first appeared as a little blip on the data chart, coming in at 0.1 pounds consumed per person annually. By 1978 we were sucking in 10.8 pounds per person per year, and it was all uphill (or downhill) from there, hitting an annual high in 2002 of 62.9 pounds of HFCS consumption per capita.
By contrast, our sugar intake has actually declined over the last 100 years, with folks in 1909 consuming over 73 pounds per person annually, rising to 101 pounds by 1969, only to drop almost 40 pounds per person by 2011 with the corresponding rise in HFCS use.
And if you’ve ever wondered how much actual HFCS might be in that soda, we’ve actually gone to the trouble of measuring out the amount of this test-tube sweetener that can be found in various ‘syrupy’ drinks (which, as we’re pointed out before, are not “sugary drinks” in spite of how many times you see them mistakenly described as such). The results are shown below.
The point is that while sugar may be sugar, it is not high fructose corn syrup (as was made clear last year by the Food and Drug Administration) – and just as a teaspoon of high fructose corn syrup is not the same thing as “a spoonful of sugar” (or a sugar cube), neither can the calories found in these two very different sweeteners be said to affect us the same way, in the opinion of many experts.
So while it may once have been fairly easy to “work (or play) off” the calories in a truly “sugary drink” and “be OK,” it may not be quite so simple with one whose caloric content comes from HFCS.
Perhaps someone ought to tell the folks who market Coke.
I would like to save this article to use on my website in articles. Thank you for it.
I have proof that the FDA is an evil agency. It, therefore, ought to be abolished. Petitions don’t do any good when one has a government as we have in the USA today. That’s why my work incorporated an international boycott of the USA for products and tourism because of all the nonsense that the Congress has perpetuated upon decent people worldwide including the American people who live in the USA. And with the way that Obama is killing American citizens both in the USA and abroad, I won’t sign the petition because then he’d have my name as a signatory.
Peace,
Arlene Johnson
Publisher/Author
http://www.truedemocracy.net
To access my internationally acclaimed e-zine, click on the icon that says Magazine.
I go out of my way to avoid HFCS, they make me fat and our culture is presently saturated with crap from GMO corn syrup, it’s quite ironic that we little taxpayers susidize to the tune of millions of dollars to an industry that neither needs nor deserves our money, especialy when the crap that produce is hurting our health and food supply not to mention higher food prices versus vegtables that get a mere 1% in subsidies, this say’s it all to a congress that is pretty much bought and paid for by the likes of Monsanto, the head of the beast or snake in the grass.
Get rid of HFCS. Stevia and others are natural sweeteners that work well and are economically available.