Yes, that’s right.  Me and Patsy Cline^W…  We must be crazy.  At least that’s what a good chunk of people I’ve talked to seem to think.  I’m a nut job, there’s no way the food we eat can be bad for you.  Well, let’s break it own down Patsy Cline style:

Crazy, I’m crazy for feeling so lonely… I would be crazy to feel alone.  I’m not alone, there are millions and millions of people in this world that understand the importance of not only watching what you eat but what’s IN what you eat.  Movies have been made about it, media talks about it each time someone dies from tainted meat.  It’s all around us, just look.

I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue…  And why shouldn’t I feel blue?  Or FD&C Yellow 5^W or FD&C Red 40^W?  These artificial food colorings have been banned in many countries because of they are KNOWN to cause hyperactivity and KNOWN to cause cancer but we stupid Americans want our fake cheese to be yellow, dammit.

I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted, and then someday you’d leave me for somebody new…  This is what has happened to our food industry, our FDA^W, our USDA^W.  They used to love us, then they found someone new, MONEY.  Anyone who thinks the USDA and FDA has the consumers best interests in mind is clinically insane.  If there is a tainted meat outbreak, a court has ruled that the USDA^W has NO AUTHORITY to force the producer to recall it.  The producer has a choice to recall or not, the USDA^W is powerless.  The entire system is a joke.  It’s a faux layer of protection to make you feel warm and fuzzy about what you have on your plate.

Worry, why do I let myself worry? Because this is the fuel that we all need to physically survive on this planet.  It’s the fuel that makes my children grow to be healthy (or not) adults and it is their quality of life and their children’s quality of life that is more important than any amount of money.  There is no price tag on my children, there shouldn’t be one on your either.  These processed foods are KILLING US.  You don’t have to take my word for it, the information is there, go look for yourselves.  I’m just one voice among many.  No child deserves to die, accidents happen and sometimes they die, but death by beef is NOT an acceptable loss.  Death by spinach, or chicken or obesity IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!

Wond’ring what in the world did I do? What did I do?  How did I survive on this crap food all of my life?  I have battled with my weight since I was a teenager.  Why didn’t I ever see it before?  Sure, I always knew that sweets weren’t good for me but it’s not just the sweets, it’s how those sweets were made and as companies shifted to using more and more lab created, artificial ingredients, my weight ballooned with that shift.  It’s like I was caught in that wave of shifting from quality ingredients to shit ones.

Crazy for thinking that my love could hold you…  I was crazy for putting my faith in our government.  I was crazy for thinking that my tax dollar would go to protect our most basic necessity on this earth.  I was crazy to think that food producers cared more about their customers than their bottom line.

I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying…  Maybe I am.  Maybe I’m fighting a battle I can never win.  Maybe I’m crazy for posting this blog and trying to teach people how important it is to read and understand labels and what’s in the food they eat and the food they feed their children.  There certainly are some that think I’m full of shit, smoking crack, have no basis for many of my statements…  Maybe I am crazy…

And I’m crazy for loving you…  Could be.  Could be that I’m crazy for caring about people who are poisoning themselves.  Crazy because I love my children and my family more than anything in this world and want to see nothing but the best for them for as long as they live.

To those that doubt anything, I’m not alone in this world.  There are more and more of us.  Like I’ve stated in the About section of this website, we’re not greenies, or tree huggers.  We are just a typical family that flipped over a bottle of ketchup one day and said to ourselves, “WTF?”  This isn’t a quest against HFCS alone, it’s a quest against everything that we just shouldn’t be eating.  It’s a quest to find out not only if something is bad for you but why, and not only why is it bad for you but why is that ingredient even in something we eat.  This is a quest to learn, discover and teach whatever we can to anyone that will listen.

Echo told me recently that she had someone on her mother’s side of the family (I’m divorced from her mother) that said they were in a profession that would have been notified if there was any truth to what I’m saying and since they never heard it, it must not be true.  THAT is crazy.  I’m in the Information Technology field and I’m one of only 248 people in the entire world that can do what I do and there’s things in this industry I still know very little about and for someone to claim to be an expert on all things is just absurdly impossible and close minded that it makes me sick to my stomach knowing that this person has an influence in my daughter’s life.

The argument centered around fructose and ethanol and how they are metabolized in the human body nearly the same way.  I emailed Echo my findings already but I thought I’d post them up here just in case there was anyone who doubted that FACT.

The information below was written by Dr. Mercola who got a good chunk of his data from a report by Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco

Dr.’s Lustig and Mercola sort of know what they are talking about…

Fructose:

When you consume fructose, one hundred percent of it goes directly to your liver to be metabolized. This is why it is a hepatotoxin — it overloads the liver. Fructose metabolism creates the following adverse effects:

• Fructose is immediately converted to fructose-1-phosphate (F1P), depleting your liver cells of phosphates.
• The above process produces waste products in the form of uric acid. Uric acid blocks an enzyme that makes nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is your body’s natural blood pressure regulator, so when it is blocked, your blood pressure rises — leading to hypertension. Elevated uric acid levels can also cause gout.
• Almost all of the F1P is turned into pyruvate, ending up as citrate, which results in de novo lipogenesis, the end products of which are FFAs, VLDLs, and triglycerides. The result — hyperlipidemia.
• Fructose stimulates g-3-p (activated glycerol), which you will recall is the crucial molecule for turning FFAs into triglycerides within the fat cells. Remember, the rate of deposition of fat into fat cells is dependent on the presence of g-3-p. The more g-3-p that is available, the more fat is deposited. Fructose is the carbohydrate most efficiently converted into g-3-p11. In other words, fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate.
• FFAs are exported from the liver and taken up in skeletal muscle, causing skeletal muscle insulin resistance.
• Some of the FFAs stay in the liver, leading to fat droplet accumulation, hepatic insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)[ii][iii].
• Insulin resistance stresses the pancreas, which pumps out more insulin in response to rising blood sugar as your cells are unable to get the sugar out of your bloodstream, and this can progress to type II diabetes.
• As with a bolus dose of ethanol, a 120-calorie bolus of fructose results in a large fraction (again, about 40 calories) that directly contributes to disease.

Do these symptoms sound a bit familiar to you? Hypertension, lipogenesis and dyslipidemia, obesity, inflammation, insulin resistance, and central nervous system leptin resistance?

If you are thinking it sounds a lot like classic metabolic syndrome, you are dead on!

The point to take away is: consuming fructose is consuming fat. Fructose is not really a carbohydrate — a high fructose diet is a HIGH FAT diet. A high fat diet that creates a vicious cycle of consumption that won’t turn itself off.

You can see by comparing the metabolism of fructose with the metabolism of ethanol that they are very similar. In fact, when you compare the metabolism of 150 calories of soda with 150 calories of beer (a 12 ounce can of each), about 90 calories reach the liver in either case. Fructose causes most of the same toxic effects as ethanol because both come from sugar fermentation.

Both ethanol metabolism and fructose metabolism lead to visceral adiposity (belly fat), insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Studies are accumulating that bear this out.

For example, high-fructose diets were shown to cause dyslipidemia in healthy people with and without a family history of type II diabetes, a recent study showed[iv].

Two other studies were done using medical students, both looking at biological responses to fructose loading. In the first, the med students were given either a large glucose load or a large fructose load. In the students given fructose, almost 30 percent of the calories ended up as fat. In the students given glucose, almost none ended up as fat.

In the second study, medical students were given a high fructose diet for 6 days. In just that short time, their insulin resistance and triglycerides doubled!

Ethanol:

Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, is the favorite carbohydrate of many. But it is also a carbohydrate that undergoes a very different metabolic process, leaving in its wake a trail of toxins a mile long.

Ethanol is an acute central nervous system toxin and a chronic hepatotoxin due to the fact that it must be metabolized almost completely in the liver.

After consuming an alcoholic beverage, 10 percent of the ethanol gets broken down by the stomach and intestine as a “first pass” effect, and another 10 percent is metabolized by the brain and other organs. The fact that ethanol is partially metabolized in your brain is the reason you experience that familiar “buzz.”

The remaining 80 percent hits the liver, where it must be broken down. This is four times the load on the liver as the same number of calories from glucose.

But the metabolic process in the liver is quite different from that of glucose.

This metabolic cascade can be summarized as follows:

• The liver converts ethanol to aldehydes, which produce free radicals that damage proteins in the liver.
• Some of these aldehydes are converted to glucose, but a large amount of excess citrate is formed in the process, stimulating “junk chemicals” that result in free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL and triglycerides. As compared to the 1 calorie from glucose that was converted to VLDL (see previous section), the same caloric intake from ethanol produces 30 calories of VLDL that are transported to your fat cells and contribute to your obesity, or participate in plaque formation. This is what leads to the dyslipidemia of alcoholism.
• The resulting lipids, together with the ethanol, lead to an enzyme that begins an inflammation cascade, which in turn causes hepatic insulin resistance, liver inflammation and cirrhosis.
• Fat globules accumulate in the liver as well, which can lead to fatty liver disease.
• Free fatty acids (FFAs) leave the liver and cause your skeletal muscles to become insulin resistant. This is a worse form of insulin resistance than hepatic insulin resistance and can lead to type II diabetes.
• After a 120-calorie bolus of ethanol, a large fraction (about 40 calories) can contribute to disease.

Why am I including a discussion of ethanol metabolism in a report about fructose?

Because, in nearly every way, fructose is metabolized the same way as ethanol, creating the same toxins in your body.

In conclusion to all of this I guess my only feeling is that if the worst someone can do is label me as crazy, well, I can live with that.  So can my children and we’ll live a very healthy, long life…