Ants Invade Park?

Aren't you treading in someone else's jurisdiction, Mo? huummMMM?

I realize you're roughly 70,000 votes behind the antster on the Big Boy Board but this makes you look, hungry.

You know I respect you and hold you as a mentor and powerhouse sifter. I could never hope to get close enough to even smell your farts; but stepping on ants to get to the top of the hill...?

Yes, I know you told me you were a rule breaker but..., still.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make some sweetened milk for my little buddy.

I think it's fair for the dairy industry to lobby for this. It's an argument of definition.

You make almond milk basically by taking almonds and blending them up with water then straining.


They could call it "milk-substitute" perhaps. Point being, it's not the same thing as milk from a cow.

Peanut butter went through a similar episode in history when Jif added a bunch of crap that wasn't peanuts to its mix.

"Jif, in an effort to overtake Skippy and Peter Pan, added sweeteners and reduced their actual peanut content to improve the flavor and increase the profit margin. According to a lab study (granted, by a lab run by Skippy’s parent company, Best Foods), Jif peanut butter contained 25 percent hydrogenated oil and only 75 percent actual peanuts. This greatly concerned the FDA and other consumer groups."

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/12/food-labels-peanut-butter-hearings/

Today, you can't call a product "peanut butter" unless it's made of at least 90 percent ground up peanuts. Otherwise it has to be labeled "peanut-spread."

See also: Pringles are not "chips" they are "potato-crisps" http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/the-inventor-of-the-pringles-can-was-buried-in-one/

Chicken and cheese are two very salty foods.

Depending on the cheese it's 25-50% RDI of salt.

Chicken is often injected with saline solution to plump it up, and also as a cheap way to make it weigh more. When you cook it the water is boiled out, but the salt remains.

It's worth getting used to unsalted peanut butter too (the 100% peanuts is the one to go for). You can sweeten it to your liking later with jam or maple syrup.

If you can keep your salt intake down to 1500mg your blood pressure returns to that of a child! (you also have to eat plenty of greens to create nictric oxide which prevents things sticking to the arterial walls.)

Blood pressing increasing as you age doesn't need to happen at all.

Eat more whole foods, and less processed foods essentially, and you need never have hypertension or erectile dysfunction.

Your video, Why This “Zero Calorie Sweetener” Isn’t Zero Calories, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Wow, I thought it was going to be less than 1, and rounded down, that's just inexcusable that they're allowed to round 4 down to 0.

Though, in practice a drink sweetened with splenda will have fewer calories than one sweetened with sugar, because you need less of it to achieve the same perceived sweetness. A single sugar packet is around 20 calories.

For the same reasons they do it with meat, fruit, vegetables and other foods: control, consistency, easier to mix with other ingredients like sweeteners, stabilizers and preservatives.
Most food companies don't treat food the way households do, but as raw material for creating a product.

Unfortunately...

http://www.joslin.org/info/correcting_internet_myths_about_aspartame.html

The whole "sweet taste tricks your body in to releasing insulin" is complete bunk. A simple glucose tolerance test would show if pancreatic hormone secretion was elevated due to aspartame ingestion...

Oh look!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3522147

A nutritive sweetener, aspartame (L-aspartyl-L-phenylalanine methylester) was administered orally to normal controls and diabetic patients in order to evaluate effects on blood glucose, lipids and pancreatic hormone secretion. An oral glucose tolerance test was also performed in the same subjects as a control study of aspartame administration. In 7 normal controls and 22 untreated diabetics, a single dose of 500 mg aspartame, equivalent to 100 g glucose in sweetness, induced no increase in blood glucose concentration. Rather, a small but significant decrease in blood glucose was noticed 2 or 3 h after administration. The decrease in blood glucose was found to be smallest in the control and became greater as the diabetes increased in severity. No significant change in blood insulin or glucagon concentration during a 3-h period was observed in either the controls or the diabetics. The second study was designed to determine the effects of 2 weeks' continuous administration of 125 mg aspartame, equal in sweetness to the mean daily consumption of sugar (20-30 g) in Japan, to 9 hospitalized diabetics with steady-state glycemic control. The glucose tolerance showed no significant change after 2 weeks' administration. Fasting, 1 h and 2 h postprandial blood glucose, blood cholesterol, triglyceride and HDL-cholesterol were also unaffected. From these and other published results, aspartame would seem to be a useful alternative nutrient sweetener for patients with diabetes mellitus.

Yes, phosphoric acid isn't great for your teeth, and yes, it's better to drink water, but the majority of the blurb against diet type low calorie sweeteners start with conspiracy theorists and nuts who believe you can cure cancer with herbal teas.

Sorry poster, no upvote for blatant misinformation.

Stevia is too new to make any real determinations on. Currently, there is a lot of uncertainty. Just because something comes from a plant doesn't make it safer. Almonds used to be loaded with cyanide before we eliminated the trees that had those kinds of almonds. There have been recent studies questioning the safety of stevia, and this will likely be dealt with over the next decade. Unfortunately, certain countries have gotten around the necessary procedures for sufficient scientific inquiry because they are marketing it not as a food additive or sweetener but as a dietary supplement, which makes it easier to avoid such scrutiny. Unlike xylitol, which is perfectly fine for human consumption and has been shown to inhibit growth of oral bacteria that leads to caries and plaque, stevia is simply an unknown at this point.

However, stevia has also been around for a while. It has been a product since the 90s and has been banned and un-banned in numerous countries. European reports have shown that it is safe, but it is also still banned in many countries there.

For those of you think that it is "natural" and thus safer, I urge you to look up the naturalistic fallacy on wikipedia before going any further here. It has also been used as a sweetener by certain tribal peoples for centuries, so that means absolutely nothing as far as science goes, but it will still sway many people over, just like traditional herbal Chinese medicines like tiger penis powder and rhinoceros horn powder.

However, it is not a "natural" substance whatsoever, even though that word means nothing in nutrition anyways. Basically they take a small amount of Rebaudioside A from the stevia plant and use a bunch of alcohols and other chemicals to extract out the active sweetening ingredient and then crystallize it. This is then renamed steviol. It is significantly less sweet than most of the other sweeteners, except maybe saccarin, at only about 150x the sweetness of sugar.

Basically, Stevia is probably not bad for you, although the verdict is definitely not in on this one. It is no more "natural" than any of the other sweeteners. You need more of it to reach the same level of sweetness as your other sweeteners so dosage could be an issue. But you have to understand that each of the companies that makes these sweeteners has to find a way to sell their product. So, what do they do? They claim that their sweetener is "natural" and "safe" which implies that all of the other sweeteners that came before it aren't, and as evidence by my previous tirades, this is simply not the case. But they profit from our unwillingness to look at the data for ourselves and play on our natural tendencies to trust them.

In short, we are not certain about stevia yet, but we are certain that sugar is bad and aspartame is fine. However, you probably shouldn't eat any processed food, but we already know that in our bones. We all know that cooking up a delicious meal from simple ingredients is the best way to eat healthy but we don't do it because we are lazy. I am just as guilty of this as the next person. We can only dream of a future similar to "The Invention of Lying" where marketers aren't allowed to lie to us and can simply say that their food is bad for you but you drink it because it tastes good and because you have been for years. A world where they can't market to our children so we don't all grow up addicted to halloween candy or cereals that are more sugar than grains. The best way to do this is to cut your cable from the television and live on the internet with AdBlock installed. Then those fuckers can't get at you as easily.

korsair_13,

You are truly educating us here! I really appreciate it.

What are your thoughts on Stevia? Seeing that it's derived from a plant species, is it any more or less safe than sugar? And how does it compare to the other sweeteners like aspartame and splenda?

Sure lucky760, I'll do Splenda, since some varieties of Coke Zero have Splenda in them.

First off it is important to note that the majority of the anti-sweetener "science" has been done by one man: Dr. Joseph Mercola. Now, watch out here, because his name is deceptive. You see, Mercola is an osteopathic physician. Osteopathy is a form of pseudoscience that believes that all pathology can be solved by manipulation of the bones and muscles. There is little science to back up these claims because they are clearly insane and worthy of ridicule. So, much like his doctorate, the claims he makes against sweeteners are pseudoscientific. A number of his beliefs are: that AIDS is not cause by HIV but by psychological stress; that immunizations and prescription drugs shouldn't be prescribed but people should instead buy his dietary supplements; that vaccinations are bad for you and your children (a belief which is the cause of recent outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and mumps); and that microwaves are dangerous machines that irradiate their products (they do, but not with the kind of radiation he is thinking of). Since he made a movie called Sweet Mistery: A Poisoned World, he has been at the forefront of anti-sweetener rhetoric. If you watch the movie, note how hilariously bad it is at actual science; the majority of the "evidence" is people claiming side effects after having ingested something with a sweetener in it (anecdotes are worth nothing in science except perhaps as a reason for researching further). So, you have a movement against something seen as "artificial" by a man who is not a doctor, not a scientist and is clearly lacking in the basics of logic.

Now, Splenda. Created by Johnson and Johnson and a British company in the seventies, it's primary sweetener ingredient is sucralose. The rest of it is dextrose, which as I have said above, is really just d-glucose and is safe for consumption in even very large quantities. So really, we are asking about sucralose. Sucralose is vastly sweeter than sucrose (usually around ~650 times) and thus only a very small amount is needed in whatever it is you are trying to sweeten. The current amount that is considered unsafe for intake (the starting point where adverse effects are felt) is around 1.5g/kg of body weight. So for the average male of 180lbs, they would need to ingest 130g of sucralose to feel any adverse effects. This is compared to the mg of sucralose that you will actually be getting every day. The estimated daily intake of someone who actually consumes sucralose is around 1.1mg/kg, which leaves a massive gap. Similarly to aspartame, if you tried to ingest that much sucralose, you would be incapable due to the overwhelming sweetness of the stuff.

There is some evidence that sucralose may affect people in high doses, but once again, this is similar to the issues with aspartame, where the likelihood of you getting those doses is extremely unlikely.

The chemistry of sucralose is actually way too complicated to go into, but suffice it to say that unlike aspartame, sucralose is not broken down in the body at all and is simply excreted through the kidney just like any other non-reactive agent. The reason that it tastes sweet is because it has the same shape as sucrose except that some of the hydroxy groups are replaced with chlorine atoms. This allows it to fit in the neurotransmitters in the tongue and mouth that send you the sensation of sweetness without also giving you all of those calories. Once it passes into the bloodstream it is dumped out by the kidneys without passing through the liver at all.

In sum, if sweeteners were bad for you, they wouldn't be allowed in your food. Science is not against you, it is the only thing working for everyone at the same time. The reason sugar has gotten around this is because we have always had it. If you want to be healthier, don't drink pop, drink water or milk (unless you are lactose intolerant, then just drink water). Don't drink coconut milk, or gatorade, or vitamin water. Assume that when a company comes out with something like "fat free" it really reads "now loaded with sugar so it doesn't taste like fucking cardboard." Assume that when a company says something is "natural" it is no more natural than the oils you put in your car. IF you want to live and eat healthy, stay on the outside of the supermarket, avoiding the aisles. All of the processed food is in the aisles, not on the outsides and the companies know that you don't want to miss anything. Make your food, don't let someone else do it. And never, ever buy popped popcorn, anywhere, the mark-up on that shit is insane.

Sugar is sucrose. Sucrose is glucose and fructose combined and it is immediately separated in the body by the saliva in your mouth. Glucose is fine for your body, it is the energy storage system that metabolizes into glycogen in the liver. Fructose, on the other hand, is a toxin that is metabolized in the body similarly to alcohol, as ChaosEngine said. Essentially it is treated as a toxin and turned into numerous by-products which do things like: delay your leptin response (you feel full later, thus making you eat more), increase your high-density lipo-protein (increasing your cholesterol and storing fat in your liver), and decreasing your sensitivity to insulin (leading to type-2 diabetes).

As to what artician said, high-fructose corn syrup and sugar are treated exactly the same in the human body. In fact, here is a list of all of the things that companies call sugar to hide it when it is the exact same thing: brown sugar, caster sugar, fruit sugar, organic sugar (in fact sometimes they just put organic in front of any of these things to make it seem better for you but trust me, it isn't), evaporated cane juice, evaporated cane syrup, high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, glucose-fructose, brown sugar, honey, molasses, golden syrup, high glucose corn syrup, agave/agave nectar, corn sweetener, fruit juice solids, cane syrup solids, fruit juice concentrate, invert sugar, maltodextrin and even fruit juice.

All of the studies done in the last 15 years have shown that sugar is sugar and calories are not calories. All of the kinds of sugar that have quantities of fructose are bad for you, except when they have fiber. This is why fruit is still good for you while fruit juice is the same thing as soda.

The only things that you do not have to avoid as a sugar are these: brown rice syrup, dextrose and glucose. All of these things are completely glucose, no fructose whatsoever. Therefore, they are largely safe. However, large quantities of glucose can give you a large liver because of the stored glycogen.

Some links if you don't believe me:

Comparison: http://www.foods4betterhealth.com/what-evaporated-cane-juice-sugar-vs-evaporated-cane-juice-8645

Aspartame: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4127 ; http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-artificial-sweeteners-safe/

HFCS vs Sugar: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4157

Dangers of Fructose: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-fructose-corn-syrup/

Same here I used to get headaches from diet soda as a child. I still refuse to drink anything with aspartame in it. Wish someone would sell pop with less sweeteners. I find them all too sweet to drink.

Sugar is good in small amounts. The amount in pop is very unhealthy. Even drinking too much water can cause seizures.

We will agree to disagree because I'm at work and don't have the time for citations

I'll leave this here though:
http://www.medicaldaily.com/coca-cola-spreads-lies-about-aspartame-and-dangers-artificial-sweetener-311300

Oh, and this:
http://www.rense.com/general33/legal.htm

Damm, I need to get back to work...

The taste is subjective, but the sweeteners are in no way "far worse than sugar".

Coke Zero uses aspartame, and in and of itself, there's nothing wrong with aspartame. There are a bunch of bullshit conspiracy theories around it, but none of them have any solid science behind them.

That said, I don't drink any kind of soft drink anymore. If I'm thirsty, I drink water.

Soft drinks are just empty calories and frankly, if I want a tasty drink, I'll have beer, whiskey or wine. More enjoyable and at least that way I know what I'm drinking is bad for me

Yes, but Coke Zero tastes disgusting and what they use for sweeteners is far worse for you than sugar!