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No, wait. I will add a comment. My supermarket started offering a cane-sugar line of soft drinks a couple of months ago, and I switched to that. I drink about 4 cans a week (70 liters a year). In that time, I have lost about 5 pounds, and as far as I can tell, I've made no other changes in my diet or lifestyle. (My BMI is 23.)
To much of any sugar (and not much is too much) is clearly demonstrated to be bad. Why mess around with man-made sugars which are not well understood like HFCS? Oh, well. Corn is in everything. The best way to avoid it is to only eat food without labels (i.e. apples are not corn) and meat and dairy products that are expressly from animals that were fed grass-based diets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jtur88
[regarding whether bees feel pain] Of course they can. Pain is a survival strategy locked by natural selection into every species that survives, because it "tells" them to stop doing things that are destructive to the organism and militate against its survival. Pain is why children do not keep putting their hand on the hot stove over and over again, so they live to reproduce. Bees live to reproduce, through the same mechanism of cause-and-effect recognition and damage control. Why do you think the worm tries so much harder to escape when you put the hook through it?
Pain is a nerve message. While most kinds of organisms feel pain, the quality of pain, that is to say, the nature of the response to pain messages differs. In higher organisms, pain causes 'suffering', in lower organisms, pain acts to change behavior. That is why a human being can 'work through the pain' or 'manage pain' while a different being will merely change their behavior (move away from the environmental factor associated with the pain message to mitigate the pain response.
At least that is what I gathered from a study on pain in fish.
No, wait. I will add a comment. My supermarket started offering a cane-sugar line of soft drinks a couple of months ago, and I switched to that. I drink about 4 cans a week (70 liters a year). In that time, I have lost about 5 pounds, and as far as I can tell, I've made no other changes in my diet or lifestyle. (My BMI is 23.)
So everybody that switches to cane-sugar will lose weight? I drink beer for lunch and have lost weight, so should everyone, young and old?
About the bee's on your other post, I just found the site interesting and posted it. How deep do you want to go about the suffering of organisims? You better not fight the flu. I do get your point of the bees, but at what point do we say it's ok to hurt another organism? Could get down to even plants, they react the same, they will do their best to produce off spring(seed) when in adverse conditions.
Interesting info on the soft drinks, Jtur, Thanks.
Sugars are sugars...the trend to now tout "real" (i.e. cane) sugar as somehow incredibly healthful is ridiculous.
For those who are in the know, the trend is to tout food items made with natural ingredients and with less sugar per serving - which is not hard to do, since the food industry dumps obscene amounts into their synthetic food-like products.
Pain is a nerve message. While most kinds of organisms feel pain, the quality of pain, that is to say, the nature of the response to pain messages differs. In higher organisms, pain causes 'suffering', in lower organisms, pain acts to change behavior. That is why a human being can 'work through the pain' or 'manage pain' while a different being will merely change their behavior (move away from the environmental factor associated with the pain message to mitigate the pain response.
However, if pain is not perceived by the organism as suffering, it would not act to change behavior. So pain is the "unpleasant nerve message" that organisms all experience, and either flee from or die.
Human beings have evolved a nervous system that enables them to make a rational choice, to either flee from pain or manage it. But that does not change the nature of pain itself, which is universal among all organisms that have survived as a species only because they are equipped with the capacity to feel it as a warning system against danger. It is true that some organisms have evolved alternative defenses against damage, such as the ability to regenerate tissue to replace that which is lost. The ability to feel pain in such tissue then becomes of less survival value, and may be selected out, having evolved an alternative strategy for coping with bodily attacks. That's why we don't feel pain when we clip our toenails.
Anybody remember how we got on this, and what point we're trying to make? Oh, right, bees. I bet even plants "feel pain". Daisies turn toward the sun, because it hurts not to. Tomatoes hate it when you put them in the fridge, and go to sleep rather than endure the suffering.
The bigger question here is why wouldn't you believe the completely fair and balanced side presented by the genetically modified corn lobby and Monsanto, who only have millions of dollars to lose?
They said there's NO DIFFERENCE. I for one, believe them completely, because the actress walking through a corn field telling me about how she researched it looks like a trustworthy mom type.
Fabulous! Thanks for the laugh! and a point to you, too ...
My experience - cut out HFCS, cut out constant cravings/hunger.
Whenever I consumed anything with HFCS, I would constantly feel like snacking between meals - if someone brought treats in to work, I felt compelled to sample/nibble back when I still ate HFCS.
Since I stopped buying products with HFCS, I am now down to three squares a day, no snacking between meals, and no cravings/hungry beast inside feelings. And definitely, no afternoon doldrums/lethargy that plagued me when I did consume HFCS.
The poster who mentioned that fructose goes straight to the liver to be converted to fat had it right. It has a negative and acute impact on the liver/gallbladder.
If you think about it, the US's problem with mushrooming obesity rates started around the same time HFCS started to be meshed into our collective diets. One thing I can say about the human diet that I am sure most will agree - foods that are still in their natural state i.e. a tomato, whole grains, a steak from a pastured cow - can't be all that harmful. Things that need to be created by people like trans fats, HFCS, and the like were never part of the human diet until very recently. The Japanese were offered GMO seed and they stated that they would wait and see how those of us in the US would serve as the "guinea pigs" before they committed to anything. The EU adopted law that if anything has GMO it has to be clearly labeled accordingly. The GMO industry has fought down any similar effort in this country, because virtually all corn and soy produced here is GMO. And something like 90% of process foods here contain either corn, soy, or both.
A bigger question than whether or not HFCS and cane sugar are equally good (or evil) - would you buy a product if it indicated that the corn or soy used to make it was derived from genetically modified seed?
Here's somethig I didn't know. Lots of products contain both sugar and HFCS, and they're listed separately on the label, but apparently, they don't have to be. Often, if the products contains more sweetener than anything else, they can be deviously and deceptively listed separately as the number 2 and 3 ingredients. But I found a product in my cupboard with an ingredient label stating "sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup", so the FDA doesn't even require that the label specify whether whether it is sugar or HFCS,
My experience - cut out HFCS, cut out constant cravings/hunger.
Whenever I consumed anything with HFCS, I would constantly feel like snacking between meals - if someone brought treats in to work, I felt compelled to sample/nibble back when I still ate HFCS.
Since I stopped buying products with HFCS, I am now down to three squares a day, no snacking between meals, and no cravings/hungry beast inside feelings. And definitely, no afternoon doldrums/lethargy that plagued me when I did consume HFCS.
The poster who mentioned that fructose goes straight to the liver to be converted to fat had it right. It has a negative and acute impact on the liver/gallbladder.
If you think about it, the US's problem with mushrooming obesity rates started around the same time HFCS started to be meshed into our collective diets. One thing I can say about the human diet that I am sure most will agree - foods that are still in their natural state i.e. a tomato, whole grains, a steak from a pastured cow - can't be all that harmful. Things that need to be created by people like trans fats, HFCS, and the like were never part of the human diet until very recently.
I found the same thing, that when I had HFCS in my diet, I didn't feel full.
It is curious that obesity has boomed as artificial sweeteners and HFCS are every where now. People might argue there is no link, but something isn't adding up. It's amazing how many people I see the size of cows that are slurping down "diet" drinks. I rarely see a slim person drinking "diet" drinks.
I remember 20 years ago as a teenager and while there were some fat people around or some moderately overweight people, now almost everyone is a balloon. And i'm not just talking about someone who can pinch an extra inch or two, but huge 350-400 pound people everywhere.
I found the same thing, that when I had HFCS in my diet, I didn't feel full.
It is curious that obesity has boomed as artificial sweeteners and HFCS are every where now. People might argue there is no link, but something isn't adding up. It's amazing how many people I see the size of cows that are slurping down "diet" drinks. I rarely see a slim person drinking "diet" drinks.
I remember 20 years ago as a teenager and while there were some fat people around or some moderately overweight people, now almost everyone is a balloon. And i'm not just talking about someone who can pinch an extra inch or two, but huge 350-400 pound people everywhere.
Amen to that - there was like maybe one chubby kid per classroom back in the 80s. Now we see people who are 300-400 lbs, and I feel compassion for them, not the hatred and disgust they widely receive from a majority of the regular sized world. People mistakenly assume that those folks are just obscenely enamored of eating and are too stupid and lazy to exercise. The problem is they are being hustled by several powers - Agribusiness, Pharma, the weight loss industry*...and many doctors are for the most part clueless on how to cure their obese clientele.
* Global market for weight loss industry is estimated to be $586.3 billion by the year 2014.
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I drink beer for lunch and have lost weight, so should everyone, young and old? 
I do get your point of the bees, but at what point do we say it's ok to hurt another organism? Could get down to even plants, they react the same, they will do their best to produce off spring(seed) when in adverse conditions. 
