*this* would explain a lot ...

[Jolie Rouge]

The Common Food Ingredient That's Making You Stupid
Lab studies show high-fructose corn syrup can actually sabotage your smarts in just 6 weeks.
Leah Zerbe, Rodale

Foods that appear to be nutritious could actually be destroying your brainpower. The culprit? A common ingredient slipped into many "healthy" foods, including baby food, applesauce, and oatmeal, a breakfast favorite. Researchers at UCLA found that ingesting foods and drinks containing the ingredient high-fructose corn syrup for just six weeks caused troubling changes in brain function. "Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, PhD, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology at UCLA. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information."

While high-fructose corn syrup is rampant in soda and candy products, it also hides out in some seemingly innocuous items like bread, juices, ketchup, and instant oatmeal. (Previous studies have found high-fructose corn syrup is sometimes contaminated with mercury.) Most often associated with obesity and diabetes, this latest study, appearing in the Journal of Physiology, shows this industrial food ingredient can harm the brain, too.

This could be leading to an all-out American brain drain, given that the average citizen downs 40 pounds of the ingredient every year.

The Experiment To find out how high-fructose corn syrup affects brain function, researchers studied two groups of rats: One group downed high-fructose corn syrup in water for six weeks; another dined on high-fructose corn syrup but also received doses of brain-protecting omega-3 fatty acids.

Before their high-fructose corn syrup diet began, the rats were all trained to navigate a maze. After eating the sweetener for six weeks, researchers put the rats to the maze test again. The animals that didn't receive the omega-3 brain protection were slower and experienced problems with brain signaling, which disrupts critical skills like memory and thinking. Researchers also witnessed signs of insulin resistance in the group without omega-3s; this could hamper normal energy processing, which could impact thoughts, emotions, memory, and learning, according to Gomez-Pinilla. "Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body," he adds. "This is something new."

http://health.msn.com/healthy-living/the-common-food-ingredient-thats-making-you-stupid

3 Rules for Avoiding a High-Fructose Corn Syrup-Derived Brain Drain

#1: Eat organic. If you don't feel like reading fine-print ingredient labels every time you reach for a product in the supermarket, just look for the organic seal. High-fructose corn syrup and many other harmful food additives are banned. And whatever you do, don't ditch real fruit, which contains a natural form of fructose, not the dangerous processed type. "We're not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants," explains Gomez-Pinilla. "We're concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative."

#2: Find safer sweet treats. Gomez-Pinilla, a native of Chile and an exercise enthusiast who practices what he preaches, advises people to keep fructose intake to a minimum and swap sugary desserts for fresh berries and Greek yogurt, which he keeps within arm's reach in a small refrigerator in his office. An occasional bar of dark chocolate that hasn't been processed with a lot of extra sweetener is fine, too, he adds.

#3: Eat for brain protection. : Be sure to eat foods containing naturally robust levels of omega-3 fatty acids, especially if you'll be indulging in food containing high-fructose corn syrup. Omega-3 - rich foods include eggs from pastured hens, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, flaxseed, and walnuts. DHA, the type of omega-3 that comes from omega-3 - rich animal products, helps protect against damage to brain synapses. These synapses are critical to tasks like memory and learning--the very functions that high-fructose corn syrup damages.

[Jolie Rouge]

9 Disturbing Side Effects of Soda
Need a reason to break your soda addiction? We've got 9, and they're not pretty.

If you've been reading health magazines and websites for any length of time, you've read a litany of reasons why soda is bad for you. It's nothing but sugar water. It's devoid of any nutritional value. It leads to obesity and diabetes. But we've dug up nine other disturbing facts about what soda does to your body, besides packing on the pounds, that don't get much attention in broader discussions about soda and its impact on your health.

Weird Fat in Weird Places In the latest bad news for the soda industry, Danish researchers discovered that drinking non-diet soda leads to dramatic increases in fat buildup around your liver and your skeletal muscles, both of which can contribute to insulin resistance and diabetes. The study revealed that people who drank a regular soda every day for six months saw a 132 to 142 percent increase in liver fat, a 117 to 221 percent jump in skeletal fat, and about a 30 percent increase in both triglyceride blood fats and other organ fat. Their consumption also led to an 11 percent increase in cholesterol, compared with the people who drank other beverages such as water or milk.


Diet-Soda Belly It's not surprising that drinking all the sugar in sodas would cause weight gain, but what is surprising is that even diet soda will pack on the pounds: Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center monitored 475 adults for 10 years, and found that those who drank diet soda had a 70 percent increase in waist circumference over the 10-year study, compared with those who didn't drink any soda. Those who drank more than two diet sodas per day saw a 500 percent waist expansion! A separate study the same researchers conducted on mice suggested that it was the aspartame, which raised blood glucose levels, that caused the weight gain; when your liver encounters too much glucose, the excess is converted to body fat.



Caramel Cancer-Causers In 2011, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to ban the artificial caramel coloring used to make Coke, Pepsi, and other colas brown. The reason: Two contaminants in the coloring, 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, have been found to cause cancer in animals, a threat the group says is unnecessary, considering that the coloring is purely cosmetic. According to California's strict Proposition 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer, just 16 micrograms per person per day of 4-methylimidazole is enough to pose a cancer threat, and most popular brown colas, both diet and regular, contain 200 micrograms per 20-ounce bottle.


Accelerated Aging Diet or regular, all colas contain phosphates, or phosphoric acid, a weak acid that gives colas their tangy flavor and improves their shelf life. Although it exists in many whole foods, such as meat, dairy, and nuts, too much phosphoric acid can lead to heart and kidney problems, muscle loss, and osteoporosis, and one study suggests it could trigger accelerated aging. The study, published in a 2010 issue of the FASEB Journal, found that the excessive phosphate levels found in sodas caused lab rats to die a full five weeks earlier than the rats whose diets had more normal phosphate levels—a disturbing trend considering that soda manufacturers have been increasing the levels of phosphoric acid in their products over the past few decades.


Water Pollution The artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas don't break down in our bodies, nor do wastewater-treatment plants catch them before they enter waterways, researchers have found. In 2009, Swiss scientists tested water samples from wastewater-treatment plants, rivers and lakes in Switzerland and detected levels of acesulfame K, sucralose, and saccharin, all of which are, or have been, used in diet sodas. A recent test of 19 municipal water supplies in the U.S. revealed the presence of sucralose in every one. It's not clear yet what these low levels are doing to people, but past research has found that sucralose in rivers and lakes interferes with some organisms' feeding habits.


Mountain Dew Mind Dentists have a name for the condition they see in kids who drink too much Mountain Dew. They wind up with a "Mountain Dew Mouth," full of cavities caused by the drink's excessive sugar levels. "Mountain Dew Mind" may be the next medical condition that gets named after the stuff. An ingredient called brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, added to prevent the flavoring from separating from the drink, is an industrial chemical used as a flame retardant in plastics. Also found in other citrus-based soft drinks and sports drinks, the chemical has been known to cause memory loss and nerve disorders when consumed in large quantities. Researchers also suspect that, like brominated flame retardants used in furniture foam, the chemical builds up in body fat, possibly causing behavioral problems, infertility, and lesions on heart muscles over time.


Whacked-Out Hormones It's not just the soda that's causing all the problems. Nearly all aluminum soda cans are lined with an epoxy resin called bisphenol A (BPA), used to keep the acids in soda from reacting with the metal. BPA is known to interfere with hormones, and has been linked to everything from infertility to obesity and diabetes and some forms of reproductive cancers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pegged soda cans, along with restaurant, school, and fast-food meals, as a major source of exposure to the chemical. And while Pepsi and Coke are currently locked in a battle to see which company can be the first to develop a 100 percent plant-based-plastic bottle—which they're touting as "BPA free"—neither company is willing to switch to BPA-free aluminum cans.


Whacked-Out Hormones It's not just the soda that's causing all the problems. Nearly all aluminum soda cans are lined with an epoxy resin called bisphenol A (BPA), used to keep the acids in soda from reacting with the metal. BPA is known to interfere with hormones, and has been linked to everything from infertility to obesity and diabetes and some forms of reproductive cancers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pegged soda cans, along with restaurant, school, and fast-food meals, as a major source of exposure to the chemical. And while Pepsi and Coke are currently locked in a battle to see which company can be the first to develop a 100 percent plant-based-plastic bottle—which they're touting as "BPA free"—neither company is willing to switch to BPA-free aluminum cans.


Unknown Side Effects of GMOs Take a look at the ingredients list for any soda and chances are most of those ingredients are derived from corn. As much as 88 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified to resist toxic pesticides or engineered to create pesticides within the plant itself. Thanks to lax government safety regulations, and tight corporate control over who gets to test these proprietary seeds, there are no human studies that can prove or disprove whether these crops are safe. Independent scientists have found that, in animals, genetically modified crops, or GMOs, are linked to digestive tract damage, accelerated aging, and even infertility. By drinking soda, you're taking part in the biggest science experiment on the planet.

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