HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP! A HUGE HFCS HEALTH DILEMMA…

I can’t write this topic as a “short-cut,” – Hence my longest blog today! It is, after all, my tenth blogging anniversary. I picked high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) because it is 100% on the list of items you will eliminate when asking me to aid your wellbeing!

Let’s revisit sugar history: There was a Japanese Dr. Yoshiyuki Takasaki in 1955 that developed how to extract sugar from corn and found a super cheap way to sweeten anything. His method was equally as sweet as the conventional sugar cane extract, involves very toxic arsenate but is easier to blend with other products. A Dr. Kei Yamanaka in Japan, 1961 developed a more successful catalyst required for mass production.  And then later, between the years of 1965 and 1970, the industrial production process was highly refined by Dr. Yoshiyuki Takasaki and patented in 1971. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is 24% water, and the rest is sugar. Nixon helped to sign a draft agreement – against FDA health recommendation – and that’s how this nasty stuff ended up in 25% of all foods sold in US markets! Today Corn Syrup is in almost everything sweet we consume. To guarantee a long shelf-life of preserved products, you need to take out fiber (so it can be frozen for years) and add HFCS. In most all artificially sweetened drinks, bread, yogurt, honey, ice-creams, sauces and candies. It is used to make fake honey and is added to medicinal drinks served in hospitals and clinics. It is more addictive than heroin!

 

• Corn syrup
• Glucose syrup
• Glucose/fructose syrup
• Maize syrup
• Isoglucose
• Tapioca syrup
• Dahlia syrup
• Fruit fructose
• Crystalline fructose

 

After WWII, the US average sugar consumption was 16 lbs per person, but we have increased this modern addiction to a dramatic 120 lbs per head! (…estimate excludes sugar from natural sources). The US market for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is about 6 billion a year. The same market for obesity drugs/products is worth over $2 billion a year, with some 300 million potential patients in the US alone… The healthcare cost because of obesity is estimated at 3.5 billion a year – do the math of the damage a healthy population could make if we did not need gyms, less food in the markets, and everyone would wear five sizes less material on their inflated corpses… 

Here is the dilemma: modern science knows that high amounts of Fructose suppress an enzyme called ghrelin, also known as the hunger hormone. In your primary digestion, while consuming foods (although often this is a synthetic product), your body signals your brain that either the stomach is filled or digestion is working overtime: Please stop stuffing more products down your pipes!

Fructose enhanced products do not adequately stimulate this natural insulin response, and a chain reaction follows. If insulin levels do not rise, sugar cannot be turned into energy. But when energy is not using sugar as fuel, it is “trapped” in our body… This diabetic reaction causes us to become comatose by too much sugar in the blood (hyperglycemia) or because of diabetic ketoacidosis – not enough sugar converted. It is claimed by modern medicine as incurable, but TCM treatment has proven that statement inaccurate.

(Check out my Keto Blog above)

Insulin is a hormone. Hormones are chemical substances that regulate the cells of the body and are produced by special glands. The hormone insulin is the main regulator of glucose (sugar) levels in the blood.

Insulin is produced in the pancreas. When we eat, glucose levels rise, and insulin is released into the bloodstream. The insulin acts like a key, opening up cells to take in the sugar and use it as an energy source.

Natural sugar is one of the top energy sources for the body. The body gets it in many forms, mainly as carbohydrates (cell building blocks) broken down to glucose during the digestive process. Examples of food rich in carbohydrates are pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, and of course, all sorts of sweet fruits, berries, corn, and roots. (yellow element in TCM)

The cells of a person with diabetes have problems taking up glucose due to either the lack of insulin or insulin resistance. Instead, the sugar remains in the blood, resulting in the rise of blood glucose levels.

People with type 1 diabetes must have injections of insulin every day. Each diabetic patient needs an exact dose of insulin, calculated especially for them. An overdose of insulin lowers the blood sugar concentration. If it becomes too low, it can result in a coma and eventually death. An overdose is treated by giving the patient sugar in a form as pure as possible – for example, orange juice or table sugar. If the patient is in a coma, glucose must be injected directly into the bloodstream.

If a person with diabetes gets too little insulin, they can go into a coma just as when overdosing on insulin. The two types of coma are very hard to distinguish without testing the patient’s blood glucose levels. If the levels are low, the patient suffers from an overdose of insulin. If blood glucose levels are high, the patient doesn’t have enough insulin.

Type 2 diabetes is often hard to discover. An average of seven years passes from the onset of the disease to its diagnosis. This means that a fraction of the patients already suffers damage to their blood vessels, kidneys, eyes, or nerves. You could have this dilemma and not know for years!

The liver is responsible for breaking down fructose and converting it into fat. To understand the dilemma further, I must bore you with my version of a simplified but stunningly complex interior liver-laboratory: For your liver to convert Sucrose (sugar) or Corn syrup into carbohydrates, it needs lots of fiber!

Modern diet will tell you that neither fat nor fiber is good for you, atop nutritionists will convince you to intake high fructose sugar lazed low-fat supplements: drinks, power mixes, sports-bars, etc. Add to it the lack of exercise, and your liver becomes stressed: This organ is burdened with converting massive intakes of various chemical sugars, synthetic substances, food color, and carbohydrates – trying to turn all of this into sugar- and converting half of it into fat reserves. Since we chronically overeat, mix and drink, the liver cannot keep up with the other main duty; to produce High Density and low-density lipoproteins (HDL and LDL) cholesterol. Hence sugar energy and cholesterol in an uncontrolled manner are released into your system. They mix up with high oxygen levels in your blood serum, where serum lipids and proteins now attack it via fructation. The HDL (the good protein) suffers, and the LDL (the bad protein) survives… The liver must produce both variations for various purposes of energy transportation – just not in this horrid amount. I’ll come back to this…

At this point, I must make you aware that either diet, the eat-all-animal fat-Atkins diet, seems equally successful as the only-uncooked-roots and juice-diet… Why is that?

Well, they both reject the intake of human extracted High Fructose Corn Syrup. 

You wonder how diabetic 2 people could be suffering from a cholesterol deficiency: Modern medicine teaches that the human body can synthesize all the cholesterol and fats that it needs, but this is not true when the liver is overburdened; especially during a strenuous diet with additives that contain HFCS and diets promoting low fiber or carbohydrate intake! Or alcohol…

The most powerful side-effect of consuming HFCS is the consequence of this poison to suppress your ghrelin hormone indicator: remember that thing that tells your brain to stop eating. And your liver can store a stunning amount of fat (yes, duckling).

 If you suffer from a lack of insulin response – your hunger hormones are not telling you to stop overeating – you keep eating – your liver will store excess sugar as fat – mostly in the liver, and you become unable to reduce sugar levels in your blood. This conundrum causes a chain-reaction dilemma known as a metabolic syndrome: Systolic blood pressure, Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD), blindness, hypertension disorder, etc.  Your liver grows and grows. Fat is now stored in all corners of your system – hence child obesity, fatty babies (poisoned from the mother plasma…as if they knew how to overeat at this age…), and Type 2 Diabetes (T2DM)! In TCM, we recommend you eat walnuts and almonds. Four nuts of each, every hour – suppresses hunger (scientifically: The glucagon-like peptide levels doubled when chewing them for a long time…)

Normally, the liver releases fat, cholesterol, and antioxidants to all the tissues by converting them into Very Low-density Lipoprotein (VLDL) particles (yes, a variation of the bad cholesterol). The liver would actually clean your system from bad cholesterol via the bile secretion, using the HDL’s. Still, those good cholesterols have been damaged by a high level of glucose, fructose, and oxygen in your blood, and now the bad cholesterol (LDL) seeps through your tissue and “sticks” to your arterial wall. Since you reduced your fat eating intake, rescued VLDL remnants can’t be recycled in your bowl.  Making matters worse: You are probably adding fructose and glucose by stuffing your belly with HFCS-rich fruit and low fiber energy supplements. I love people in an office chair eating such high-sports products…

If you are an active sports participant, runner or bicyclist on a non-fat but high carb diet and you load up your body with fructose and salt enriched Gatorade (I’ll blog about food coloration another time…), your liver will not cope well with the excess sugar consumed and/or produced and will release it into your plasma where your homeostatic mechanism is running amok. Your oxygen-enriched blood serum now collides with the carbohydrates, and an unfavorable chemical process initiates a sugar-burn – wasting energy – resulting in Carbon Monoxide (CO) particles in your plasma – resulting in interior-suffocation of your body. To simplify this: Oxygen can occupy red blood-cells (RBCs) hemoglobin for the duration of a two-minute transport through your vessels, whereas monoxide occupies the same cell for twelve hours, preventing sufficient respiratory gas exchange. Cherry red lips, cramps, dizziness – similar symptoms to heatstroke. Think about it, next time you consume a “powder” drink, within, you choke the blood of needed oxygen – to stay “awake while driving” – while feeling sleepy!

You will never see a sports person seriously gulping down colored Gatorade. Early on, it was a well-designed sports nutrition supplement containing sodium, sugar, potassium and phosphate to replenish carbohydrates and electrolytes. After its acquisition by Pepsi Cola in 2001, High Fructose Corn Syrup was added to cover up the unpleasant taste of salt and potassium. 350ml (12 fluid ounces) of Gatorade contains 21g of sugar, 21g Carbohydrates, 45mg Potassium and 150mg of Sodium (salt). The sugar, however, is HFCS!

Fructose is NOT Glucose!

Let us look at this:

Two slices of white bread are equal to 120g of Glucose. Your body breaks down the carbs and converts them into energy-ready polysaccharides (Glycogene). About 50% is stored as fat in your liver. The other half is dispersed to muscles, brain and into your blood plasma to be immediately ready as energy fuel.

As a sports person, you would ideally store up on carbohydrates by “loading up” on pasta, rice and potatoes. To sustain glucose energy levels during exercise, you should consume carbs at an elevated heart rate during activity. But it would be best if you alternated (ten-minute intervals) between fructose and carb intake. NOT CONSUME THEM TOGETHER!

When you experience signs of muscle fatigue, you should replenish with caffeine and carbohydrates and NOT with fructose enriched liquids. Basically, you should drink lots of water but not only sweetened fruit juice.

A few points to remember: For carbohydrate energy exchange to sufficiently work, you must add Vitamin D (not from milk). You must consume an equal amount of cholesterol as potassium and intake fiber. Bananas are effective as a “starter” and “recovery” food, but “during” high-energy exercise, they interrupt liver function. Reduce intake of HFCS but consume high amounts of natural fruit sugar, or fresh fruit. A perfect diet would consist of eating high-fat, low-grain fiber, skipping the sal, and reducing artificial sugars.

At this point, let me brag: I helped many professional sports participants to super-exceed their training goals by simply “correcting” their natural sugar and carb intake.

Eat your fats! Gently roast fish in butter without browning it. Enjoy Olive oil, cold-pressed fresh oils, and avocados. Try not to mix dairy, fruit and meat.  Quickly blanch high fibrous vegetables (raw broccoli or spinach is not healthy). Start your day with a fiber-rich meal, add fruit and enjoy your crispy bacon!

Half of what you consume (if not on a KETO DIET) should be fruit, berries, legumes or vegetables. Cooked, baked, raw and even blended once in a while. There is no advantage of juicing everything; You MUST eat the fiber for your system to efficiently extract and store the essence of the product you ingest. Nature has wisely packed everything sweet in lots of fiber! If you consume high amounts of sugar, you need fiber to aid your liver in the process of converting it into energy! Listen to your senses. Slow down your eating. Chew better.

Enjoy, TCMchef Raphael