Can a Orange-Peach Smoothie Kill?

It is amazing how many supposedly "healthy" things really aren't all that good for you once you know what is in them.

thats why my smoothie place uses turbino (raw, unprocessed, unbleached granular sugar) rather than straight up processed cornstarch

This is an excellent point. The addition of calorie rich thickeners and sweeteners is considered to be one of the driving forces between the national (nay, worldwide) obesity epidemic, especially in childhood. Time watching television is another major factor in pediatric obesity; however, many commentators suggest that exposure to advertisement for calorically dense snacks is the root cause of this association.

The key here, like everything dietary, is moderation. Portion sizes are, and will always be, the most important controllable element to any diet. Unfortunately, at least in the US, portion sizes have spiraled out of control. As Dr Fierce put it, the "addition of calorie rich thickeners and sweeteners" to those large portions only exacerbates the issue. Some of the other driving forces seem to be in socialized beliefs such as eating 3 meals per day and finishing what is on your plate. I am one of the lucky few with a highly active metabolism so I do not have to worry about obesity, but heart disease can be blind to my lankiness. Organic foods, as mentioned by freonchill, are a great alternative, but can be substantially more expensive and a large proportion of the US cannot afford to buy them.

Thank you for writing this article - and seeding links to where people can find out more about HFCS. Let me add that when you assume something is "safe" - you might be slightly off. Take prescription medications approved by the FDA. When the FDA approves something for prescription use, they are not saying that it is safe, they are actually saying that it "probably won't kill you". Keep that in mind.

But, just so you know that I'm not trying to feed the paranoia machine - I believe that with a minimal amount of education, you can avoid the most dangerous of the chemicals and other nasties that are available to put in our bodies - and that you can write off a lot of the other "warnings" as simple scare mongering.

More "Food for thought..."
Americans in general are more unhealthy than Europeans who eat the same basic diet. European diets have FAR LESS HFCS in them, it is more of an American food additive.

Possible correlation to the differences???

It's true... a lot of foods have gotten more sugar in them. One example: what we know today as "muffins" - used to be known as cupcakes, and were strictly a dessert, not a breakfast.

I really personally don't believe that sugar makes a person fat, because I've never seen this occur in my own body. I eat a lot of sugar, a lot of saturated fat, and I am always lithe.

Honestly I think that research which has said that sugar causes obesity has been conducted by organizations who wish to create a market for saccharin, aspartame, and other such alternative sweeteners.

In fact, there was a big problem with fainting and such lightheaded illnesses in the early 1900s, and since we have gotten a sugar habit in the 1950s, those illnesses are no longer common. Why? Because sugar or other kinds of solutes are centrally important in helping the human body absorb water. I learned this in first year biology class in college. There is a mechanism by which cells absorb or excrete liquid... it has to do with how concentrated the solute is. We used sugar in the petri dish to illustrate this.

I moved to a very dry area of the continent, a few years ago, and I had to learn how to drink more water... because we have a 15 or 20% humidity - and the water is just sucked out of your body, without even turning into sweat. Sugar, I found to be centrally important. If you don't eat enough sugar, and you try to drink a lot of water, you end up with a lot of head rushes, and feeling lethargic.

Of course, sugar is a very active chemical. It can cause stomach acidity and gas... so one has to be wise about how one eats it.

I think that if a person wants to lose weight, he should diligently study the differences in diet between his own choice of foods, and that of a person who has a lithe build. A love of sugar and saturated fat is a common demoninator between people of all different kinds of body builds. The difference that I see, is that people who are skinny enjoy more fruit, and more chlorophyll in their diet.

Now changing your diet around is a very touchy thing. You're mixing chemicals in your stomach, so that they will absorb properly. A person who wants to eat more fruit, shouldn't start with a glass of orange juice every morning... that's just far too acidic, when you're just having cereal with it. He should rather start with a hunk of watermelon every day as part of his lunch.

Leafy greens, in the volume a mammal really ought to eat them, are hard to store in the refrigerator - they take up too much space. And most frozen food aisles only have one authentically chlorophyll filled vegetable - spinach. My grocery store also carries frozen mustard greens and collard greens.

I would say that you are in error where you say that "salt ions" are responsible for maintaining water balance in the cell - it's any dissolved solute. And sugar is a much more gentle solute than salt is.

What maintains water balance is the osmotic balance across a cell membrane. And sugar is a more osmole relative to salt-- as a hydrophobic molecule it can cross cell membranes much more easily. This is a well known fact that is directly applicable to the management of patients with various derangements of fluid and electrolytes. If someone faints or is dehydrated, they receive an IV bolus of normal saline-- salt water with a NaCl concentration comparable to that of the body. Giving a concentrated sugar solution does not fix this situation and can be detrimental.

There is so much padding in the writings of people who do medical research. They always want to impress with words, and very often they have nothing substantive to say.

Ah, too true. And I have no doubt that much research is influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. The roots of the increasing trend of obesity are still not entirely clear-- but the increase in consumption of calorie rich foods with decreasing levels of activity have been well documented. Additionally, I am not aware of research in the field of obesity being funded by multinational food companies (and obesity is my field of research.) If the creators of Nutrasweet were funding a study saying "sugar is bad" I would share you reservations. If anything, the increasing prevalence of high fructose corn syrup to foods has been driven by large companies who produce corn and process it for mass consumption-- they have created a lucrative productive which slipped into many foods which we unknowningly eat-- this is where I place my suspicion.

I think we both agree that most people would benefit from an increase in intake of natural foods-- fruits and vegetables, lean meats, complex carbohydrates, etc, instead of processed, sugary foods or artificially sweetened snacks which are full of chemicals.