Apologies for not updating sooner. I had planned on writing, but I eneded up hanging out at my friend’s house two nights in a row and they don’t have a working computer. As for an update on what I ate:
Monday and Tuesday(Day 5 and 6) I ate leftovers from easter. I stopped by the co-op for breakfast and grabbed some fruit to eat in the morning (oranges). For dinner on Monday I went to the co-op and got some food from their deli. Freshly made hummus and french bread, and a garden salad. The salad was a bit weird since I didn’t have dressing on it and it had some weird nuts and stuff and I’m not a big fan of nuts. For dinner last night I had some sauteed potatoes with rosemary and tomato bisque made by the co-op. (It was late after work and I was a wee bit too tired to cook. Also, when I go to Kody’s I can’t really cook, so it was easier to just grab some fresh stuff from the deli.)
So far(I know it’s only been six days) eliminating processed/unreal food from my diet hasn’t been very difficult. At most it’s just an inconvenience at times. Like, at Easter I couldn’t eat the candy, or at work I can’t grab a breadstick or a salad at work. To get around this, I’ve been bringing my grapefruit juice and and Tupperware container of leftovers to eat on my breaks. Also, I’ve been eating “trail mix.” The co-op sells some really good bulk trail mixes that are great. (Yeah, I know I said I don’t like nuts, but I’m weird and when they’re mixed together in snack from, I can handle them. I’m weird.)
So, I’ve been doing this project for about a week now and I haven’t really discussed why I’m doing this. I’ve had a few friends refer to it as my “new diet” but I don’t feel that gives this justice. I mean yes, it’s a diet in the sense that it’s the sum of the food consumed by me, but I’m not doing this with the intention to lose weight. I’m doing it because I feel having access to real, healthy, fresh, non-genetically modified food, free of preservatives and derivatives is a basic human right.
Going further, agriculture is the foundation on which a society runs. Without a functional food system, at risk of hyperbole, society cannot really function; and we’ve seen this here in America. In fact, we’ve seen how our current agriculture system affects both countries of the global North and South with the recent earthquake in Haiti. They can’t function or feed themselves because all of their food is imported from America. On the flip side, as Americans the food we grow is exported while the food we eat is imported. The food that we do grow–specifically corn and soy beans–isn’t even for food purposes. In fact, according to the Corn Refiners Association and Soya Tech, the US produced 42% of the world’s corn in 2005. 58% of US corn crops are used for feed(this means it goes to cows, chickens, lambs, fish, basically any animal that’s farmed.), 25% was split between exports and food purposes and 17% went to the production of ethenol. That means that we eat less than 25% of the corn we grow in the US. That’s a pretty startling number.
That 25% of corn used domestically isn’t even sold to us in pure corn form. Corn is taken to places called “wet mills.”
Wet-milling — A process in which feed material is steeped in water, with or without sulphur dioxide, to soften the seed kernel in order to help separate the kernel’s various components. For example, wet-milling plants can separate a 56-pound bushel of corn into more than 31 pounds of starch (which in turn can be converted into corn sweeteners or ethanol), 15 pounds of animal feed, and nearly 2 pounds of corn oil.
–CRS Report for Congress, Agriclture: A Glossary of Terms, Programs and Laws, 2005 Edition
Corn starch, made from a wet mill makes up 90% of the starch Americans use. Corn sweeteners (dextrose, glucose, HFCS, etc…) make up 56% of the market. 56%. It’s on all our sodas, our snack foods, ketchup, it’s in our meat! (Cargill Inc. actually has a wet mill here in Iowa City. I looked on their website, but there’s no information regarding tours, but it’s definiately on my project’s to-do-list. It’d be nice to take a tour and see just where it’s happening and what it looks like. )
If those numbers don’t stir any sort of reaction, American’s consumer 42.2 pounds of high fructose corn syrup a year. That breaks down to 1.8 ounces a day. That’s a lot of corn. Having eliminated processed foods from my diet, I’ve eliminated this 42 pounds of HFCS. That’s already a significant change.
I’m sure many of you have seen the recent commercials for HFCS claiming that it’s got the same nutritional values as pure cane sugar and is simply cheaper. However, according to a Princeston Unversity study has found that HFCS increases obesity(in rats) more than sucrose does. Curious what the real difference between sugar and corn sugar are?
Given that sucrose is a disaccharide, which is metabolized to one fructose and one glucose molecule (Caspary, 1992), it has been argued that there is little difference between fructose and sucrose, since both provide about 50% fructose and 50% glucose in the blood stream; and until recently, there was no evidence that HFCS contributes to long-term weight gain beyond what sucrose contributes (Forshee et al., 2007). However, the present study suggests that HFCS and sucrose can have different effects on body weight and obesigenic measures.
HFCS is different than sucrose in many ways. First, HFCS-55 has proportionately slightly more fructose than sucrose (White, 2008). Second, fructose is absorbed further down the intestine than glucose, with much of the metabolism occurring in the liver, where it is converted to fructose-1-phsophate [sic], a precursor to the backbone of the triglyceride molecule (Havel, 2005). Third, fructose is metabolically broken down before it reaches the rate-limiting enzyme (phosphofructokinase), thereby supplying the body with an unregulated source of three-carbon molecules. These molecules are transformed into glycerol and fatty acids, which are eventually taken up by adipose tissue, leading to additional adiposity (Hallfrisch, 1990). And fourth, HFCS causes aberrant insulin functioning, in that it bypasses the insulin-driven satiety system (Curry, 1989). Whereas circulating glucose increases insulin release from the pancreas,… fructose does this less efficiently, because cells in the pancreas lack the fructose transporter…. Typically, insulin released by dietary sucrose inhibits eating and increases leptin release (Saad et al., 1998), which in turn further inhibits food intake. As previously discussed, meals of HFCS have been shown to reduce circulating insulin and leptin levels (Teff et al., 2004). Thus, fructose intake might not result in the degree of satiety that would normally ensue with a meal of glucose or sucrose, and this could contribute to increased body weight.
–From the Princeston University study
I’m sure many of you are cross-eyed going, “Yeah, okay, but what does this have to do with me?” Well, to begin, the way the body metabolizes HFCS, according to this study, affects the way the body produces insulin. While not stated explicitly, it implies that there is-at the very least-a correlation between HFCS intake and diabetes. While not a common disease, Type II diabetes has risen drastically in the last decade. In fact, according to The Diabetes epidemic in full flight: Forcasting the future, it’s estimated that 333million people will have diabetes by 2025. That’s in increse of 72% worldwide. And it’s only occuring in countries that are adopting the Western Diet of highly processed foods.
So there’s reason number one in a nutshell: Highly processed foods contain mostly soy and corn, have no real nutritional value and can lead to insulin disorders.
Since this was make-up for the last two days, I’ll still be blogging tonight and I’ll include the second reason I’ve decided to do this project. (Haha, if Iowa City doesn’t get destroyed by a tornado…the sirens are going off right now.)
