I have been told that God doesn't want me to eat until my stomach growls. I have been told to avoid foods that cost $6.66 at the store. Some say medicine is entirely ungodly and any form of pharmacy must be avoided if I am to live as a Christian.
This isn't in the Bible - it simply isn't there. The rhetoric used by these people almost always follows the same pattern: "God didn't intend for you to eat ________ - he wants you to eat _____"
Really? I've read the Bible and never run into that one. It doesn't come up in the works of the church fathers or the Christian mystics, either.
The latest is HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). The best article I have read about this subject came from Brian Dunning at Skeptoid.com. I don't always agree with him but he is very intelligent and, in particular, his knowledge of chemistry is very strong.
Regular table sugar is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, which means that the two monosaccharides are chemically bound into a larger, more complex disaccharide molecule called sucrose. That's sugar. HFCS consists of the same two monosaccharides, only they're just mixed in together, the molecules are not bound...
...When you consume regular sugar, sucrose, the first thing your digestive system does is break the chemical bond and separate it into glucose and fructose. So once saccharides are in your body, it makes very little difference whether they came in as table sugar or as HFCS.
...When you consume regular sugar, sucrose, the first thing your digestive system does is break the chemical bond and separate it into glucose and fructose. So once saccharides are in your body, it makes very little difference whether they came in as table sugar or as HFCS.
You've probably heard that you will not feel "full" after eating something with HFCS - but you will not find a scientific study that verifies this. Look. I dare you. This effect is caused by fructose which is in table sugar in the same amounts. HFCS and normal sugar contain the same ingredients.
"OK, the eleventh commandment says 'Thou shalt not eat HFCS' wait, does anyone know what that is? No? Ok, we'll just put that one aside for now."If you want to lose weight it doesn't require mysticism - simply count calories and exercise, just don't blame it on the Devil or some conspiracy theory. There is nothing sinful about eating corn syrup.
Of course, HFCS is still sugar so it causes any problems you would normally associate with sugar; cutting sugar out of your diet might be a good thing for your health (consult your doctor) but that does not mean that drinking soda is living in sin.
(And if you've heard about mercury being found in HFCS, read be sure to check this out.)
4 comments:
I burst out laughing at people when they denigrate some sort of common edible. I'm always amused to find out what is killing us.
"Everything in moderation." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...
There are a few reasons you shouldn't eat HFCS, the least of which is religion. First, HFCS is a highly processed food, meaning it's not going to be in the foods we should be filling most of our diets with, i.e. whole fruits and vegetables, grains, etc. Second, one of the problems with HFCS (and to a lesser extent table sugar) is not that it's made up of simple sugars, but that it's basically unadulterated sugar. The problem with this is that it removes any sort of fiber or protein that would normally slow the absorption of these saccharides, so while HFCS may have the same simple chemical compounds as a piece of fruit, it has none of the other components that help the body metabolize it, meaning that when you drink a soda or eat something with HFCS in it, your body is being flooded with high amounts of unadulterated fructose and glucose, which can lead to it being stored as fat if the body can't use it fast enough, and in the long term can lead to diabetes if the body is constantly flooded with more sugars than it can effectively handle. So while HFCS probably isn't the worst thing in the world you can eat, it's probably not a bad idea to avoid it as a general rule.
"God doesn't want you to drink Coke, He wants you to drink Dr. Pepper."
I agree with James on this one.
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