This article is garbage. In fact, it appears to be garbage full of intentional lies. I probably shouldn't have wasted the time to wade through, but I guess if I go all the way here I can show some of you folks how full of crap almost every one of these nutritionist articles on the Internet is.
1. First, there's the problem I mentioned in post 75. In the first paragraph, the guy not only makes correlation into causation, he does so without establishing any correlation in the first place. Heck, the number of tattoos per capita increased dramatically in recent decades...maybe tattoos cause obesity, obesity causes tattoos or high fructose corn syrup causes tattoos.
2. The good doctor identifies the increase in HFCS use over some undefined period of time, but does not identify the decrease in other sweeteners over the same time. Nor does he discuss any of the other factors that have changed in the last few decades that could also lead to obesity, such as increased electronic recreation, less walking and physical activity in daily chores, government propping up poor diets through welfare, etc., though admittedly he does say HFCS is not the only cause.
3. It is improper, indeed, borderline lying, for this guy to say that the ad campaigns he hates are designed to create "doubt and confusion." Even if these folks are lying, they aren't trying to create doubt or confusion, they are trying to identify their product as clearly safe. In other words, honest or scumbaggish, the ads are designed to do the exact opposite of what he says they are designed to do.
4. This analogy...
The goal of the corn industry is to call into question any claim of harm from consuming high fructose corn syrup, and to confuse and deflect by calling their product natural “corn sugar”. That’s like calling tobacco in cigarettes natural herbal medicine.
...doesn't even work if the corn growers are evil. It's an apples and oranges comparison if they're evil, and an apples and Ford F150 comparison if they're not.
5. To think they are tracking this (and me) that closely gives me an Orwellian chill.
So, let's presume innocence and ask this: if an innocent industry making a harmless product is being portrayed as child-killing scumbags, it's "Orwellian" for them to use Google and Lexis-Nexis to identify where false accusations are coming from and respond? Really?
6. Why is the corn industry spending millions on misinformation campaigns to convince consumers and health care professionals of the safety of their product? Could it be that the food industry comprises 17 percent of our economy?
Apparently this guy got an MD without passing statistics. This statement is like saying that Ford makes bad cars, and if Ford disagrees it's because the auto industry is so large. "The food industry" comprises everyone from an organic farmer and a Mexican restaurant to the makers of soft drinks.
7. The ads suggest getting your nutrition advice from your doctor (who, unfortunately, probably knows less about nutrition than most grandmothers)
The modern media "nutritionist" knows even less. See "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre for a full rundown. Also, I'd like to note here that my mother, who has now been a grandmother for 16 years and became a great-grandmother by marriage on Thursday, used to give my brothers and I icebox cookies and Kool-Aid. Fortunately, it was refined cane sugar in the kool aid and icebox cookies; had it been HFCS I would now weigh 1,500 pounds.
8. Last week over lunch with Dr. Bruce Ames, one of the foremost nutritional scientists in the world and Dr. Jeffrey Bland, a nutritional biochemist, a student of Linus Pauling and I reviewed the existing science, and Dr. Ames shared shocking new evidence from his research center on how HFCS can trigger body-wide inflammation and obesity.
The best scientific discoveries never start with "Here's a rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific study," they start with "Three guys had lunch..."
BTW, I can't seem to find any scientists named Bruce Ames that could be described as the foremost anything in the world, except for the one at Berkely who studies cancer, who is indeed one of the foremost living scientists, period. A search of his website finds no mention of the word "fructose." Note that if you search on the web for instances of Ames' name with fructose, you'll only find them mentioned together on health food sites, not in science news or journals, and some of them also link him to MMR-induced autism, which is not only quackery but is outside his area of research, i.e., it's very, very unlikely he was studying it.
As for Dr. Bland...well, he has his own page at Quackwatch. I'm not endorsing Quackwatch (I don't know enough about them to do so) but unless everything on that page is a lie, this guy is a typical nutrition-quack.
Oh, and that stuff about Ames presenting data about inflammation? There are exactly four references to inflammation on Ames' site. None of them are recent and all have to do with sources of inflammation that have nothing to do with HFCS, such as one paper that discusses inflammation in patients who have too much iron.
9. When one 20 ounce HFCS sweetened soda, sports drink or tea has 17 teaspoons of sugar (and the average teenager often consumes two drinks a day) we are conducting a largely uncontrolled experiment on the human species.
First this guys says HFCS isn't sugar, then he calls it sugar. Also, his premise up to now has been that HFCS is a special evil, not something that is harming people because they're eating too much of it. Now he decides it will kill you if you eat too much, just like sugar. Yeah, I can say the same thing about water, so I guess the folks at Culligan are evil, too.
10. High fructose corn syrup is an industrial food product and far from “natural” or a naturally occurring substance. It is extracted from corn stalks through a process so secret that Archer Daniels Midland and Carghill would not allow the investigative journalist, Michael Pollan to observe it for his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The sugars are extracted through a chemical enzymatic process resulting in a chemically and biologically novel compound called HFCS.
Since I haven't read Pollan's book I can't tell if Hyman is lying about Pollan or if it's the one fact in a paragraph that is otherwise a flat-out lie. BTW, if I ran a food processing company I could be making a cereal that cures cancer and I wouldn't let Pollan in my factory, but that's neither here nor there.
Here are the three lies:
HFCS is not extracted from stalks, it's extracted from milled corn.
The process is not secret, it's been around since 1965. There's even a section on how it's done in the Wikipedia article on HFCS.
HFCS is not "biologically novel," it's made of fructose and glucose, both of which occur in nature.
The section that follows in which he uses "basic biochemistry" to explain further evils of "unbound" fructose is pure BS that doesn't even make sense (if it did, honey would be one of the most dangerous food on the planet) and would contradict peer-reviewed studies anyway. Dig this: When you eat sucrose (common table sugar) your body breaks it down to 50% fructose and 50% glucose. When you eat HFCS, your body is receiving 55% fructose and 45% glucose. So, this guy's premise is that this extra 5% fructose is going to kill me? Yes, kill, his word, not mine.
11. But there was one more thing I learned during lunch with Dr. Bruce Ames. Research done by his group at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute found that free fructose from HFCS requires more energy to be absorbed by the gut and soaks up two phosphorous molecules from ATP (our body’s energy source).
This appears to be a claim that the Bruce Ames he had lunch with is the famous cancer researcher, since Ames does research at that facility. So, where is Ames' publication on this issue?
12. An FDA researcher asked corn producers to ship a barrel of high fructose corn syrup in order to test for contaminants. Her repeated requests were refused until she claimed she represented a newly created soft drink company. She was then promptly shipped a big vat of HFCS that was used as part of the study that showed that HFCS often contains toxic levels of mercury because of chlor-alkali products used in its manufacturing.(i) Poisoned sugar is certainly not “natural”.
This passage is an ouright lie. Plus, Hyman either can't do math or is counting on you to miss it.
First, the story of the "new soda company" is an outright lie, as you can see in the summary of the study he cites, there was no problem getting samples of HFCS and there was no "huge vat" but samples from a number of companies. Of course, that's no suprise since the idea of the FDA saying "We want a sample of your food" and being told "you can't have it" is one of the dumbest claims I've ever heard. They're the FDA, man! It would be like me saying, "No officer, you can't see my license and registration."
Fifty-five percent of the samples had no mercury. The remainder had amounts far below international limits. The sample with the most mercury would expose the average American to (wait for it) .00025 grams of mercury per day. Obviously i'm not a big fan of mercury in my diet, but 25/100,00ths of a gram doesn't seem like a major crisis to me.
A lie about a nothingburger...but he says your life is on the line.
13. When citing and quoting Barry Popkin, Hyman doesn't mention that the quote is from 2004 and Popkin has since then determined that there is no difference in effect between sugar and HFCS and that the problem is too much sugar consumption, period. Unless he can't tell the difference between 2004 and 2010, Hyman is the one telling tales.
Bottom line: This article is composed of 100% male bovine fecal matter.
Well done!
You and I said the same things, but you took the time to go deeper into the reasons this “doctor’s” work is crap.
Nicely done.
Good work. That took a lot of digging.
I don't even bother getting into the specifics anymore, this whole thing is obviously another boogeyman hunt. What is most telling, for me, is the fact that sucrose is so similar to HFCS, and all the ills attributed to HFCS can be attributed to sucrose (table sugar), but they don't say a damn thing about it.. AT least the low-carb fanatics are consistent...