The ever-present, disgusting ingredient

I'm busy packing, rather than blogging. I'm moving in the next few weeks, so it's time. Oy, the dust and the boxes and the cans of garbage! And surely the most oppressive thing is that you're still expected to tend to your normal life. That seems so unfair. Surely someone should do my chores for me as I pack. Surely.

Anyway, I had to stop packing to visit the grocery store yesterday. That's another in a list of moving travesties: it seems I'm expected to eat and cook as I do all this work! What can you do? Those are the rules.

I bought three loaves of "potato bread" while there, because I couldn't find my usual bread. And then last night, I happened to eat a plain slice of the bread...and it was sickeningly sweet! Yuck. When I read the ingredients, I found that it was suffused with high fructose corn syrup. In bread! I threw all three loaves in the garbage this morning, and then figured I might as well check the other loaves in my freezer. Yup, they had high fructose corn syrup in them. And we're talking about whole wheat bread. Isn't this supposed to be a healthy choice? I was utterly disgusted. So I cleared out all the bread in my freezer today and tossed it in the garbage, which is where anything that contains HFCS should go.

High fructose corn syrup is in everything. Americans are growing fatter and fatter and stupider and stupider -- and everything at the supermarket has this unhealthy, extremely fattening and heart-unhealthy ingredient in it. (I also believe it makes people stupid. Just looking around tells the tale. They added it to our food supply and the entire country got fat and stupid. There is a causative relationship here.)

From now on, I'm reading the ingredients on every food item before I purchase it. My only fear, going into this regimen, is that every item at the food store has HFCS in it. What has gone wrong with our food supply? Yuck again.

Uh, what about high fructose corn syrup?

It's nice that trans fats are being removed from the American diet. We've only known of the dangers of trans fats for, oh, about 30 or 35 years now. So it's just about time for Americans to notice; we're right on schedule. (I've always said it takes 30 years for anything to work its way into the American mind. We're a tad slow here, but still in the mental ballpark.) So, good. We're finally tackling that one.

But what about high fructose corn syrup? We added it to our diets and almost immediately, we became morbidly obese and very, very stupid. It was one big, double-barreled wave of change, powered by fructose. So...has it been about 30 years since we began to walk down this idiotic path? Well, it's getting close. But apparently we don't care. It remains in just about every food product on our market shelves. We still haven't noticed that this "food innovation" is ruining the country's health.

But maybe this will wake a few people up: (bolding is mine)

A new paper by Krek and his team member Peter Mirtschink describes a further, more troubling side effect of fructose. The researchers have discovered a previously unknown molecular mechanism that points to fructose as a key driver of uncontrolled growth of the heart muscle, a condition that can lead to fatal heart failure. Their study was recently published in Nature.

When a person has high blood pressure, the heart has to grow as it is harder to pump the blood through the circulatory system. These growing heart muscle cells require a considerable amount of oxygen. However, since not enough oxygen is available to adequately supply the increased growth, the cells switch to an alternative energy supply. Instead of drawing energy from fatty acids, they rely more on an anaerobic process called glycolysis—literally, the 'splitting of sugars'. If the heart muscle cells can access fructose in addition to glucose, this can set off a fatal chain reaction. 

So, are you ready to ditch all foods that have high fructose corn syrup in them? Might be a good idea, huh? Mind you, this science story doesn't even hint at the fat-and-stupid thing. But if we fear high fructose corn syrup because of heart disease, and wipe it from our supermarkets, that will take care of not only heart attacks but, yup, fat and stupid. I'd love to see the country regain its brain power. Slimming down wouldn't hurt either. I'm just saying.

Don't eat this stuff, kids. Seriously.

Why bees are dying

When this story was published on April 30, 2013, I thought the news media would plaster it everywhere. Didn't happen. It's been 25 days since this story surfaced, and yet you probably haven't heard a thing about it. Here's the scoop:

Commercial honeybee enterprises began feeding bees high-fructose corn syrup back in the 70's after research was conducted that indicated that doing so was safe. Since that time, new pesticides have been developed and put into use and over time it appears the bees' immunity response to such compounds may have become compromised.

The researchers aren't suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins, such as those found in pesticides.

So let's see, we took honey away from bees...and gave them high fructose corn syrup as a replacement for their natural food. You remember high fructose corn syrup, don't you? If you're eating a processed food right now, chances are it's got HFCS in the list of ingredients. It's in almost everything we eat these days. As far as I'm concerned, HFCS is the reason why Americans are obese. (I also think it's made the public stupid, but let's not go there right now.)

Anyway, apparently some nitwits decided to feed it to the bees. After all, what could go wrong? It's not like we need bees to produce food for us, or anything. I mean, they're just bees. (Note: that was sarcasm. We really, really need the bees.)

But this story wasn't picked up by the media. You'd think they'd have some interest in the actual, real-life reason why bees are dying. Nope. The only reason I can think of for the media blackout is that Big Syrup commanded that this be so. You're not allowed to tell the American public anything negative about this disgusting product. Or, I guess, you'll end up with your feet in concrete, at the bottom of a river.

Why else would this story be buried? There are tons of stories about why the bee decline is occurring. Tons. But they're not interested in running this one. Hmmmm.

Anyway, now you know why the bees are dying. I suggest you tell someone. Apparently that's the only way the news will get out.

Image of beekeeping in the 14th Century: Wikipedia Commons