Be Wise-Health Wise

Wow, it’s great to hear from so many of you.

And have we had some interesting feedback about insomnia problems.

This may be the most interesting feedback of all in regard to sleep disturbance:

“This is a hard to believe remedy for sleeping but it works.

I was amazed that taping a kidney bean to your wrist could do this.

My sister tried it and it worked for her so I tried it.

The real test was the full moon phase when I often don’t sleep well. I usually have to move my head to the foot of the bed so I can’t see the window in order to sleep half way decent. I slept through the whole full moon phase without sleeping at the foot of the bed. I have been doing this for approximately 1 month and have slept well every night.”

Well that e-mail stirred up my curiosity. I thought that taping a kidney bean to the wrist might activate an acupressure point. Sure enough, a Google search confirmed it.

Find this acupressure point on the inner side of your wrist three finger widths from the wrist crease. Place the kidney bean between the tendons at that point, securing it with tape or a soft elastic band. But avoid pressure that cuts off circulation. Then see how well you snooze.

I suspect any kind of bean about the size of a kidney bean will work. Does anyone want to experiment with beans and let us know?

Turns out you can buy a commercial band that just slips on your wrist if you want something more sophisticated. Search the web for “acupressure wrist band for sleep” to order a set.

A couple of other alternative remedies that some people find helpful for insomnia:

Taking magnesium just before bed time helps some folks sleep. But be careful with your dose because magnesium can cause increased bowel movements, even diarrhea. Actually it’s a good remedy for constipation too. Dr. Mercola thinks that taking calcium and magnesium at the same time at bed times works the best.

The scent of lavender or jasmine soothes some folks into a deep sleep for those of you who tolerate the scented stuff.

Then of course some herbal teas have that sleep inducing effect. (But drinking them before bed time increases the likelihood that my bladder will scream at me in the night to get up, so they don’t work so well for me, but they might for you.)

Chamomile and valerian are probably the most well known herbal sleep aids. You can read about other herbal sleep aids at:

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/excessive-sleepiness-10/sleep-supplements-herbs

http://altmedicine.about.com/cs/conditionsitoq/a/Insomnia.htm

What better way to be wished off to sleep than by your little girl who said every night at bed time, “Sweet dreams, good night, I love you, I’ll see you in the morning.”  That little girl of ours is now grown with two children of her own. I’m sure she’s saying that to them now.

So,

Sweet dreams, good night, I love you, I’ll see you in the morning,

Dr. Jo

Filed under: Insomnia on November 22nd, 2011 | No Comments »

If you tried taking Chlorella before bed time and during the night to counteract sleep disturbance and you are still not sleeping well your sleep disturbance may spring from other causes. Here are some other things to try for insomnia. I suggest trying them one at a time so you will know which one helps you.

Try taking calcium at night just before bedtime (if you need to take calcium supplementation) since it can have a calming effect on your system.

Make sure your sleeping room is totally dark. Any light at all can disrupt the pineal gland and melatonin rhythm. Melatonin levels rise at night to induce sleep. Light activates the pineal to decrease melatonin production, a good thing if it’s morning and you’re ready to get up, but if it’s the middle of the night, not such a good thing.

So remove or turn off all of the electronic devices with led lights in your bedroom. Turn off night lights and televisions. I don’t even turn on the lights to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Instead I use a small flashlight that produces a small amount of light if I need it. Use light block out drapes in your bedroom.

Besides led lights electrical appliances create an electromagnetic field that can be stressful to the electromagnetics of your body. If your body has to work hard to deal with those foreign electromagnetic frequencies, you may not sleep well nor regenerate your tissues well. Therefore, keep all electronics far away from your bed including clock radios, alarm clocks, electric phones and anything else electric that’s plugged in. That list includes electric blankets. If you must, turn the electric blanket on to warm the bed, then turn it off and unplug it.

Avoid exercising within a few hour of bedtime. Exercising late in the evening may keep you too stimulated to go to sleep. On the other hand, definitely exercise daily earlier in the day. Something about regular, good exercise promotes good sleep and counteract insomnia.

Read something soothing or inspiring once you get in bed. Good thoughts may wash away the stresses of the day and let your brain relax. If that doesn’t work, then read something boring. A technical, dry medical journal can put me to sleep right away. But best of all, read your Bible and pray. Give God the cares of the day and relax in His loving arms.

Let me know what works for you.

Food allergies, inhalant allergies and hormonal disruption can also cause sleep disturbance. Each of those topics need some in depth explanation, so we will be addressing those issues in future Be Wise articles.

In the mean time, rest well.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo

Filed under: Insomnia on November 14th, 2011 | No Comments »

Here’s a recent request from one of my beloved Be Wise Health Wise newsletter readers:

“Do you think you might include an article on the latest info. on nighttime leg cramping? All my friends suffer from this and nobody seems to know what to do about it. Some of the remedies would crack you up! I guess it’s just the “aging generation” – we boomers want to do what’s right for our bodies and now everybody wants to sell us stuff. More junk out there than you can shake a stick at!”

That’s a great question! Of course the answer can be different for different people. Let’s start from the most serious condition and then go from there.

Hardening of the arteries can certainly cause leg cramps because of a lack of oxygenation to the muscles. If a person develops leg cramps while walking then certainly a physician should evaluate the condition of their circulatory system.

Of course these circulation problems may manifest as night leg cramps also. So be sure you’ve ruled out circulation problems and then consider these more common causes of night leg cramps.

First let’s take a look at the macro mineral balance in the body. The macro minerals include calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium.

According to Dr. Carolyn Dean and many other holistic practitioners, magnesium deficiency at the tissue level is one of the most common deficiencies in the United States. Unfortunately, most physicians do not recognize the cell deficiency of magnesium because blood magnesium levels tend to stay normal even when the cells are starving for magnesium.

For you see the body gives great priority to the blood levels of nutrients to protect the vital organs. Therefore the body metabolic processes will rob magnesium or other nutrients from the tissues to keep the blood levels normal. Therefore low blood levels of magnesium appear only when the tissues have become severely depleted of magnesium.

A company called Spectracell tests for the level of magnesium and other minerals inside the cells. It’s a very simple test. Just use the kit that Spectracell provides to scrape the inside of the cheek, spread it on a slide and send it to Spectracell. Then they do the analysis.

http://www.spectracell.com/

http://www.spectracell.com/find-a-clinician/

If you do not have access to this type of testing then consider taking a trial of extra magnesium as a supplement. The dose needed to correct a magnesium deficiency varies from person to person. So start with one or two magnesium tablets or capsules a day and then gradually increase them.

Your gastrointestinal tract limits the amount of magnesium you can take per day. When you hit that limit you start having diarrhea so you have to cut back on your magnesium dose.

You can overcome the diarrhea problem by selecting a different form of magnesium as indicated in the chart below:

Forms of magnesium

• Magnesium salts – oxide, sulfate, chloride, pidolate
•      Poorly absorbed in ileum and colon
•      Can cause diarrhea  as dose increases
• Magnesium organic acid chelates – citrate, gluconate
•       Good absorption in ileum and colon
•      Can cause diarrhea  as dose increases
• Magnesium amino acid chelates – glycinate, lysinate
•      Good absorption in ileum and colon
•      Well tolerated
•      Can push to over 500 mg/day without causing diarrhea

For a wealth of information on magnesium review Dr. Carolyn Dean’s web site.

Magnesium is a good place to start when considering leg cramps but there’s a whole list of other nutrients that may be important in calming that grip that wakes you out of a dead sleep. We’ll cover those nutrients in part two of Night Time Leg Cramps.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo

Filed under: Leg Cramps on November 12th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

If you consider the number of prescriptions written for sleeping pills, you begin to realize that sleep disruption has become a major problem. But sleeping pills only put a band-aid on the problem. The cause of the sleep problem goes undetected. Like any other malfunction in the body, we look for the underlying upset in body chemistry, deal with it and the malfunction goes away.

Having difficulty sleeping is a lot like any bodily disorder. It has a lot of causes. So for now I will cover some causes that may be relatively unknown in medical articles. First of all consider toxicity in your tissues.

You may wake up in the middle of the night because your body is detoxifying.

Toxic substances accumulate in our bodies from environmental pollution and poor tissue detox pathways because of our poor food choices, lack of exercise and other unhealthy lifestyle practices.

When you embrace a lifestyle of healing, your body starts dumping those toxins out. That dumping occurs more vigorously at night as the body works to cleanse and repair your tissues.

Some toxins stimulate your system on their way out, causing you frustrating nights of wakefulness.

Try this simple remedy.

Take Chlorella just before going to sleep. Also, set some Chlorella by your bed and take it in the middle of the night if you wake up. Chlorella absorbs toxins and takes them out through the bowel. Getting the toxins out of your system faster will help you sleep.

Taking Chlorella just before you go to sleep may act as a preventive to sleep disturbance since the Chlorella binds the toxins before they can over stimulate you.

What is Chlorella?

It’s simply a green food, a little algae. In the processing of Chlorella, the cell wall is broken, releasing the good nutrients to replenish your cells. The broken cell walls act like a sponge to soak up the toxins. So you get two great benefits, nourishment and detoxification.

A small percentage of people experience diarrhea when taking Chlorella, so start with a small amount and build up gradually. Take one or two per dose initially. Then build up to whatever amount you need to counteract the sleep disturbance without developing diarrhea. I have taken as many as 18 at once. Currently I find that taking 6-7 at bed time and another 6-7 in the night if I wake up works well for me.

Taking Chlorella is a simple solution for sleep disturbance. If that works for you – great! If not we’ll be discussing other remedies for sleep disturbance in future issues of Be Wise-Health Wise.

Sweet dreams,

Dr. Jo

Filed under: Insomnia on November 7th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

By now we know that:

• The production and consumption of high fructose corn syrup has sky rocketed because it’s a cheap sweetener
• That unlike sucrose, it’s metabolized totally in the liver where it turns to fat
• That it does not turn off your appetite, so you keep eating and get fat

High Fructose Corn Syrup can damage the liver:

Not only does it turn to fat, but it turns to fat much more rapidly than any other sugar. On top of that much more of it gets stored as fat. If you eat 90 calories of fructose, 30 calories get stored as fat whereas only about 1 calorie of glucose gets stored as fat. Your cells burn the glucose as a fuel out in the tissues, but they don’t directly burn fructose, so fructose fat builds up.

Besides building up in obvious places on the body, fructose fat also silently builds up in the liver.

The body handles fructose metabolism a lot like it handles alcohol, producing similar toxic by-products and similar damage to the liver. What starts out as fatty liver (most doctors don’t even recognize the cause of it) can lead to scarring of the liver and cirrhosis similar to alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver with the same deadly consequences.

Even children as young as 3 have been diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Diagnosis is only by biopsy of the liver, but elevation of the liver enzyme ALT may be seen in the blood as an indicator to test further. Children (and adults) with NALFD have a much higher incidence of the disease progressing to scarring and even death.

What’s the remedy? Stop consuming high fructose corn syrup and other sources of fructose including fruit juices. Keep whole fruit consumption minimal. Lose weight and exercise.

We must stop this obesity epidemic that’s killing the children and the adults by inducing degenerative diseases at a very early age.

For more details see Dr. Mercola’s eye opening article:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2099/12/31/why-do-millions-of-kids-in-the-us-have-liver-disease.aspx?e_cid=20110809_DNL_artTest_A2

Dr. Mercola strongly recommends limiting fructose consumption to no more than 25 grams per day. Look at the chart at the bottom of his article that gives the amount of fructose in common foods.

Pancreatic Cancer

Dr. Anthony Heaney, Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, recently published an article in Cancer Research, linking high fructose consumption to the development of pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Heaney discovered pancreatic cancer cells metabolize fructose and glucose differently by using fructose to generate nucleic acids needed to build RNA and DNA. With plenty of RNA and DNA cancer cells divide and flourish.

Dr. Heaney concludes that his findings “have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption.”

Dr. Heaney’s research adds to the already known findings that cancer cells thrive on sugars.

We don’t have to be victims of cancer. We can make choices that help prevent it. Keep sugar intake low and avoid high fructose corn syrup and eat your veggies!

Kidney stones

High fructose corn syrup may induce elevated blood uric acid levels. If the uric acid crystals precipitate in the kidneys, painful stones can develop. If they precipitate in the joints the very painful condition of gout develops.

If you drink your HFCS in sodas you may get a double whammy of stones forming in your body. The high acidity of sodas upsets the calcium balance in your body, leaving “free” calcium that can collect as stones anywhere in the body (like kidney stones, gall bladder stones) or calcify your blood vessels or other tissues.

We could go on and on about the adverse and even pathologic effects of high fructose corn syrup on the body. Hopefully we’ve given you enough knowledge to make wise choices. Wisdom is knowledge applied with good judgment and I know you have good judgment and want to make wise choices for yourself and your children. So…

SOS – SOC

(Translation Save Our Selves – Save Our Children)

Many blessings to you and yours,

Dr. Jo

If you missed the preceding articles on High Fructose Corn Syrup, you can find them at:

HFCS part 1

HFCS part 2

HFCS part 3

Filed under: Sweeteners on November 7th, 2011 | No Comments »

Let’s continue to explore the effects of high fructose corn syrup on the body by gaining an understanding of how the body metabolizes it and compare fructose metabolism with sucrose (table sugar) metabolism.

From a chemical standpoint high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are remarkably the same, each containing approximately 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

However there is a difference. To metabolize sucrose our bodies have to secrete an enzyme called sucrase that breaks the bond between the glucose and fructose before these individual molecules can be metabolized.

In high fructose corn syrup the glucose and fructose are already separated, thus they may enter the bloodstream more quickly than the monosaccharides from sucrose.

After that the digestion, absorption and metabolism of fructose differs significantly from that of glucose. Absorption of fructose occurs farther down in the small intestine while glucose absorption occurs higher in the small intestine.

They both then enter the large vein that carries them to the liver or they pass into the general circulation. In the liver fructose can be converted into glucose.

Glucose stimulates insulin release from the pancreas but fructose does not stimulate insulin release. That’s why fructose may look like a good substitute sugar for diabetics because it causes a lesser rise in blood glucose levels and less stimulation of insulin release.

However there is a caveat. After drinking a high fructose corn syrup sweetened soft drink, fructose floods into the liver. The liver converts that fructose into fat that not only gets stored on the body as extra weight but also can be stored in the liver. We’ll cover the disastrous effects that may occur as more and more fat accumulates in the liver in the next article.

And another problem with fructose as opposed to glucose ingestion:

Glucose stimulates insulin release which in turn triggers the release of a hormone called leptin. Now that’s your friendly hormone that acts in a feedback mechanism to suppress appetite.

So what happens with eating food that has high levels of fructose in it? By deduction fructose induces less insulin which in turn induces less leptin. Therefore you stay hungry when you have had plenty of calories. So you pile on the fat. See how fructose is tricking you?

Also, insulin transports glucose into the brain cells. The brain cells then realize that they’ve been well fed which acts to tell you that you’ve had enough to eat. Once again you feel satisfied.

Fructose cannot enter the brain cells because insulin will not carry it across. That leaves the brain cells feeling starved. Brain cells cannot survive very long without their fuel source, glucose. Therefore the brain sends strong signals “eat more”.

So you grab something else sweet and if it’s another high fructose corn syrup sweetened food you enter right back into the vicious cycle. You eat, but you’re not satisfied, so you eat more. No wonder the weight piles on and your liver starts to suffer.

In summary:

1. Fructose easily turns to fat.

2. Fructose sets up a vicious cycle that keeps you eating and drinking calories that you don’t need because fructose does not satisfy your appetite.

Americans consume the greatest percentage of high fructose corn syrup in the form of soft drinks and fruit type drinks or juices. Simply eliminating that source of high fructose corn syrup in the diet would go a long ways to decreasing obesity and other health problems.

If you like reading the scientific research on fructose here’s the link:

http://www.ajcn.org/content/79/4/537.full

Watch for the next article discussing the research that implicates fructose as a cause of some major debilitating and death inducing disease processes.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo

If you missed the preceding articles on High Fructose Corn Syrup, you can find them at:

HFCS Part 1

HFCS Part 2

And for the next article:

HFCS Part 4

Filed under: Sweeteners on October 31st, 2011 | No Comments »

If we’re going to talk about sleep disturbance, we better start with the basics before you waste your money on a lot of sleep aids.

Of course, when you’re around me, we always start with diet and toxicity – both big culprits in a lot of things that ail us.

Eating sweets can rob your sleep too.

Consumption of concentrated sweets, (we’ll just call them sugar for short) over-stimulates our glands. When the adrenals kick into action, they pour out adrenaline among other hormones.

Eating sweets induces uneven blood sugar levels. When blood glucose levels fall, the adrenals secrete adrenaline to bring those sugar levels back to normal.

You know that adrenaline revs us up.  There goes your sleep.

Conversely, once our glands wear down from the constant stress of sweets in our diets, you may get very drowsy after eating sweets. But don’t eat sweets at bed time to induce that effect, because of the rebound effect from the adrenals as described above.

So get rid of soft drinks, fruit juice drinks (yes, even fresh fruit juice – it’s a concentrated sweet), candies, pastries, baked goods, doughnuts, pies, cakes, cookies and any other concentrated sweet. That includes “natural sweeteners” like honey, molasses, agave syrup, rice syrup, date sugar, etc. They all affect your metabolism similarly causing blood sugar swings that rob your health and possibly your sleep.

If you aren’t convinced yet about getting rid of sugar, that’s lots more info at:

http://www.dr-jo-md.com/nutrition/sugar.html

Eliminate Caffeine

Do I have to mention caffeine? Most everyone knows the profound effect that caffeine can have on sleep, causing insomnia and restlessness. Besides coffee remember to avoid the stimulants contained in tea, and soft drinks, chocolate, cough and cold medicine, and other over-the-counter medications.

Coffee addiction can be tough to break, especially if you get caffeine withdrawal headaches and feel dazed in the day time after you stop. Try gradually weaning yourself off of coffee and other caffeinated products by decreasing the amount you ingest by 1-2 cups per day. Especially avoid caffeine drinks or food after 3-4 pm.

Many folks find relief from the caffeine withdrawal headaches by taking buffered vitamin C, 1,000 milligrams about 3 times per day between meals. Be sure that it’s the buffered C, buffered with calcium, magnesium and potassium so it will neutralize the acidity released by the caffeine withdrawal. (By the way, it’s very good to get rid of that acidity.)

Take the buffered vitamin C between meals if at all possible so it doesn’t neutralize your stomach acid when you eat. You don’t want to interfere with proper digestion by neutralizing stomach acid.

Include Foods that Help You Sleep

The amino acid tryptophan metabolizes to serotonin, which is then converted to melatonin.  So eating tryptophan containing food helps with sleep.  Eating a complex carbohydrate snack at bed time can preferentially boost the tryptophan into the blood and brain to switch on that metabolic pathway to the production of melatonin. You could choose to eat a little brown rice, whole grain cracker, ½ of a potato or small amount of sweet potato for that snack. But be sure to avoid concentrated sweets.

Turkey contains rich quantities of tryptophan. Maybe the reason we all crash on the couch after that big turkey dinner comes from eating all those carbohydrate rich foods along with the tryptophan-containing turkey.

Other rich sources of tryptophan include:

Since calcium helps the brain turn tryptophan into melatonin, eating dairy products can be a good choice close to bed time. Maybe that’s why warm milk has been a traditional recommendation for insomnia. Milk contains the tryptophan, carbohydrates and calcium.

If you don’t tolerate dairy food, animal proteins, eggs and seafood all contain good amounts of tryptophan.

Here’s a link to a list of foods highest in tryptophan:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000079000000000000000.html

Eat Magnesium Rich Foods to Help Sleep and Lots of Other Potential Problems

As a sedative and relaxant, magnesium leads the list of minerals that aid sleep. Most Americans eat so little of the magnesium rich foods that their cells are starved for magnesium. No wonder we have so much difficulty sleeping, constipation, muscle tremors or cramps, anxiety, irritability, pain and even restless leg syndrome. Most of the list interferes even more with sleep.

Foods rich in magnesium include:

•  legumes and seeds
• dark leafy green vegetables
• wheat bran
• almonds
• cashews
•  brewer’s yeast
•  whole grains
• pumpkin and squash seeds
• pine nuts
• black walnuts

More information on magnesium rich foods and how they favor health:

http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/magnesium-000313.htm

http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/minerals/magnesium/

http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/magnesium

Enjoy!

Dr. Jo

Filed under: Insomnia on October 31st, 2011 | No Comments »

By Guest Author Jeff Schuman

Menopause is a dreaded word for many women because they know that at some time in their life they will have to go through this change. That is why it is important for every woman to understand some menopause facts that will make it easier for you to deal with it.

The following are the most essential facts for you to know about.

One: Every woman is different – The first fact that you need to know is that every woman is different. Not all women will experience the same symptoms or go through menopause at the same age.

Most women won’t go through menopause until their 40s or 50s, but there are some women that will go through it in their 30s. You have to realize that you are an individual, so menopause will affect you different than others.

Two: Ages vary – As stated above; every woman is different in the age that they experience the change. The average age for women to experience this change is 51, but women can go through this between the ages of 45 to 55.

Three: Perimenopause – This is when a woman experiences menopause at an early age. It can start with some women as early as 35 and can last for a few months or a few years. There is no way to determine how long it will last for each woman.

Four: Menopausal – When a woman has gone for 12 months without your period, you are considered to be menopausal.

Once you stop having your period, your body will start going through the change and you will have to find ways to deal with the symptoms you are experiencing.

Five: Signs of menopause – Many women get lucky and never experience any signs. Other women will find that they are dealing with a combination of symptoms. Some of the different symptoms you can experience include:

- Hot flashes

- Night sweats

- Insomnia or sleeping problems

- Vaginal changes

- Mood swings

- Urinary problems

- Problems concentrating or memory

- Losing interest in having intercourse

- Weight gain

-  Hair loss or thinning of hair

These are just a few of the symptoms that you could experience. You have to be sure that you know all of the symptoms so that when it starts happening to you, you will have a much easier time recognizing what your body is going through.

Now that you know these menopause facts, you will be more prepared to deal with going through this change when your time comes. You have to remember that all women will experience it differently, but it will eventually end so you do have something to look forward to.

—————————————————-

You are invited to visit our menopause symptoms website today if you liked this article by Jeff Schuman. You will be given useful menopause facts and other information along with tips that will make it easier for you to deal with. http://www.everythingmenopause.com

Dr. Jo’s comments:

Lots of good information on http://www.everythingmenopause.com.

Take a look at the article on bioidentical hormones. I am very sold on using bioidentical hormones.

Filed under: Menopause on October 25th, 2011 | No Comments »

To better understand the effects of high fructose corn syrup on our bodies let’s take a look at how a whole food like corn becomes corn syrup.

Manufacturers developed the process for making corn syrup back in the 1960s. Basically soaking the corn kernels in warm water with sulfur dioxide softens them facilitating the process of separating the starch, hull, protein and oil. After removing the oil the resultant cornstarch is washed.

Cornstarch contains amylose which is simply a long chain of glucose molecules. By adding an enzyme called amylase these long chains are broken into glucose molecules. This process results in regular corn syrup which contains only glucose molecules.

But regular corn syrup is not as sweet as sucrose commonly known as table sugar. So invertase, another enzyme is added to the mixture to convert about half of the glucose into fructose. This step results in high fructose corn syrup which is sweeter than sucrose (table sugar). This syrup then undergoes evaporation to create the consistency that makes it easier to ship.

Manufacturers developed HFCS-42 which contains 42% fructose in 1967 and HFCS-55 containing 55% fructose in 1977. The food companies jumped on the bandwagon with this new substance sweeter than table sugar. It became the sweetener of choice.

Of all the caloric sweeteners available in 1970 HFCS represented only 1% of the market. But in the 1980s HFCS rapidly replaced other caloric sweeteners. By the year 2000 it claimed 42% of the caloric sweetener market.

So you will find HFCS everywhere in processed foods. Read the labels of all the processed food that you buy. You will find HFCS in carbonated beverages, fruit drinks, baked goods, many cereals, canned fruits, jams and jellies, yogurt and dairy desserts.

About two thirds of the HFCS produced in the United States goes into the production of sweet drinks such as carbonated soft drinks and fruit drinks.

Now to return to our question from part one of this high fructose corn syrup series of articles:

Remember that the corn industry got a lot of flak for calling high fructose corn syrup “natural”. Therefore, the industry wanted to change the name of high fructose corn syrup to “corn sugar”.

Why? According to the CRA’s Audrain Erickson, “Consumers need to know what is in their foods and where their foods come from and we want to be clear with them.”

After reviewing the process of converting corn to high fructose corn syrup, what do you think now? Is “corn sugar” a legitimate description of high fructose corn syrup?

From a chemical standpoint high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are remarkably the same, each containing approximately 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

So from that standpoint “corn sugar” could be a legitimate description of high fructose corn syrup.

In part three of high fructose corn syrup we will take a look at the differences between HF CS and sucrose (table sugar) and how they are metabolized differently in the body.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo

If you missed the first article on HFCS, you can find it here:

HFCS Part 1

And find the following articles about HFCS here:

HFCS Part 3

HFCS Part 4

Filed under: Sweeteners on October 22nd, 2011 | No Comments »

You probably don’t even realize that you’re eating high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) because it’s in so many processed and packaged foods. On the other hand if you choose natural whole foods, you probably rarely eat high fructose corn syrup.

Either way it’s wise to know what’s going on with this form of sweetener in our food supply because eating it can have disastrous, irreversible results in the long run.

On average an American ingests 41.5 pounds or more of HFCS per year without even realizing it.

How did High Fructose Corn Syrup become so common in our food?

Way back in 1977 the USDA initiated a different system of sugar tariffs and quotas that increased the price of table sugar (sucrose). At the same time the government kept the price of corn low with subsidy programs.

Obviously manufacturers scrambled to switch the sweetener in their products to the cheaper corn sugars, saving them billions of dollars.

Suddenly HFCS flooded the market place increasing its consumption 1,000% from the 1970’s to 1990.

Unknowingly another processed food entered the food chain that silently but relentlessly adds to health problems like obesity, fatty liver that may proceed to deadly liver failure, and even contribute to the development of pancreatic cancer. We will get back to more about those problems later in this series.

Big Corn calls High Fructose Corn Syrup “natural”

Audrain Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) says, “HFCS, like table sugar and honey, is natural. It is made from corn, a natural grain product.”

But hold on one minute here – is something “natural” after a synthetic mixing agent has been added to it?

The FDA says it’s still natural if that synthetic mixing agent does not touch the corn starch and so it let the CRA manufacturers call products HFCS “natural”.

Kind of boggles your mind doesn’t it? To me anything that’s been extracted from a whole food has lost the definition of “natural”.

When Big Corn received that favorable decision from the FDA, other companies jumped on that band wagon. Cadbury Schweppes called 7Up “all natural”. Give me a break – that’s basically diluted killer syrup. Kraft joined this deception calling their Capri Sun products “all natural”.

That deceptive labeling was aborted quickly because of the law suits filed against these companies. To avoid the hassles of dealing with the law suits they changed their labels right away.

Also, the FDA’s decision was called to task by the press, the deception was unraveling.

So Big Corn had to do something to save their image. They applied to change the name of HFCS to “corn sugar” in September of 2010.

Why? According to the CRA’s Audrain Erickson, “Consumers need to know what is in their foods and where their foods come from and we want to be clear with them.”

H-mm, do you buy into that explanation?

In the next HFCS article, part 2, let’s review the process of converting corn to HFCS and then decide.

Blessings to you,

Dr. Jo

Find more of the High Fructose Corn Syrup articles here:

HFCS Part 2
HFCS Part 3

HFCS Part 4

Filed under: Sweeteners on October 14th, 2011 | 4 Comments »