Pooks read my entry about the brownies I made and noticed that I added the following note about the caramel sauce I used:
I used a brand I found at Lunardi’s that was made with sugar and cream. Read the labels! No corn syrup, ever!
She asked me what I meant by that.
You know how you always hear that you need to learn to read labels and find the “sugar” words? You know, anything ending in -ose. The biggest one you need to look for is high fructose corn syrup. It’s in everything. It’s cheaper than sugar (which is kept artificially expensive to please a few well-connected families) and has led to the explosion of high-calorie, extremely sweet snacks we have. It’s in everything. It’s horribly sweet, much more so than sugar (I have convinced myself I can taste the difference).
One thing about HFCS, though: it doesn’t work the same as sugar. It actually leads to an increase in fat storage in the body. So if you’re eating the same calories of HFCS as you would with sugar, you end up fatter.
If you’re gonna eat sugar, eat sugar. The trick is to find products actually made with sugar. Even when shopping at Whole Foods—which I believe has a mandate not to stock products made with hydrogenated oils?—finding stuff made with sugar and not HFCS is a trick. At Whole Foods, the label often reads “organic corn syrup.” Pass on by.
Greg Critser wrote an excellent book named Fat Land. Do yourself a favor and read this book immediately. We all know Americans are fatter than ever, consuming ever-larger amounts of fat and sugar than we did 30 years ago. Critser investigates the question of why that is, and in doing so takes through the birth of the corn glut, the development of high fructose corn syrup, what is palm oil anyhow? and what exactly is behind the “supersizing” of American meals.
You don’t have to change your choices of what to eat, but you owe it to yourself to learn a lot more about what’s in there and why.
Even for those who aren’t Jewish, all the Kosher for Passover foods are made with sugar instead of HFCS.
Yup. Lots o’ people stock up on Coca-Cola at Passover for that very reason.
Yup.
And if you ever want to watch some “fun”, read ba.food right around that time. Someone will say “Hey, Mollie Stone’s has Kosher for Passover Coke!” and then someone else will say “Hey, if you aren’t Jewish, don’t go buy all of our Coke” and then someone else will say “Don’t you tell me what to do”.
And boy, the good times just don’t end after that.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Thank you for reminding me why I don’t read Usenet anymore. 🙂
It is worse than that, the liver is too busy with that to handle the fats, so your blood fat goes to hell (triglicerieds and cholesterols), and you start down the road to type 2 diabieties. It is called Syndrome X, big article in the New Scientist a few years ago.