A few months ago I was doing some physical labor and keeping myself cool with some limeade I had purchased (rather than made myself). I started to notice that every time I took a swig, I had to ... defecate ... ten minutes later. I'd been having some minor bathroom trouble around then anyway, but hadn't thought of it as being in correlation to anything.

Since there was very little in the limeade besides lime juice, water, and HFCS, and people had been talking about the possibly deleterious effects of HFCS, I thought I'd try cutting it out of my system. (Certainly water wasn't the culprit and I seriously doubted that the lime juice could be.) Since the vast majority of my HFCS intake was due to Coca-Cola, that meant cutting it out, too.

Shortly after I cut it out, my bowels went completely haywire. I was on the can for days. But once that was done, I felt much better. My minor problems in that area mostly went away. Then I started drinking some cane-sugar sweetened colas (Blue Sky and 365 brands). The problems didn't come back. In addition, I found myself drinking many fewer of them. Initially I thought that might have been subconsciously due to the fiscal premium of those beverages, but the 365 ones, despite being Whole Foods brand, were only barely more expensive than Coca-Cola. For some reason, I just drank fewer of them. Of course, I was largely drinking water at restaurants, seeing as they don't have any HFCS-free soda choices, but even just counting the ones I drink at home, my consumption went down by half, if not more.

Then, over the Thanksgiving holiday, I ran out of HFCS-free sodas. I figured that it would be a good test to see if my HFCS theory was accurate. Sure enough, my bowels went haywire again, actually forcing me to take an additional two sick days beyond the regular vacation.

Anyway, the point of this story is that, at least in my personal case, the stories about HFCS being bad for you are true. I simply feel better after cutting it out of my diet. Of course, it's possible that the reduction in my sugar intake is at least partially responsible for that, but, honestly, these days I largely drink sugar-sweetened sweet tea at restaurants, so any reduction in sugar intake is not a conscious decision. I don't take sugar into consideration, only HFCS. I feel, and this conclusion is even less scientific, that somehow the HFCS made me crave more. All I know is that simply by cutting out HFCS, without making any additional effort, I feel better and I consume fewer sodas.

I would encourage anyone to try it out for a few weeks to see if it has any effect. I'd be very interested in anyone else's conclusions.

Also, after the fact, I was looking up fructose intolerance information and ran across something called "metabolic syndrome". Now, this is one of those ill-defined collections of symptoms rather than a verifiable disease, but I found papers that relate it to fructose intolerance. The symptoms are hyperglycemia, hypertension, central obesity, decreased HDL cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, and elevated uric acid levels. Other than the hyperglycemia, I have every one of those symptoms, to the point of taking medication for all of them except the central obesity. In addition, I was a normal-sized kid and only started gaining weight in the early 80s, which just so happens to be when Coca-Cola started using HFCS. Now, I know that cum hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy, but that data is at least supportive.

I don't really have a point now, but I am curious if HFCS really is affecting me in the way that I think it is, and also if it's affecting other people in the same way.

A friend of mine recently started cutting it out of his diet completely. He says he feels much better having done so.

I've heard nothing but bad things about the stuff myself, although I think I'm a lot less sensitive to it than you are. There was a point a few years ago when I completely gave up all sodas and moved to diet iced teas and water, and I didn't notice those kinds of differences (just decreased heartburn and indigestion).

Overall I think I'm able to stay away from HFCS. It's only because I eat other crap that I'm overweight

It may be important to note that I don't eat or drink "diet" anything. I can't stand any of the artificial sweeteners. I far prefer water to any of those options.

I also don't know if it's the fructose or the corn that's my problem. I haven't tried substituting non-corn-based high-fructose sweeteners (which would include things like honey, invert sugar syrup, and agave nectar) to see what effect they might have.

The only "diet" thing I drink is Peach Iced Tea Snapple. The non-diet is too sweet for me, so I drink the diet. Thanks to Tony for that tip. It's a great drink.

I agree that HFCS is evil. But it's so widely used in the US... I can't imagine how I could ever find any manufactured foods that didn't contain it. Sweet or not.

Keep in mind, I've got someone in my life showing me the advantages of going all natural and all vegetarian right now, so I'm gettng a good understanding of what it takes to simply not eat manufactured foods. It's really fantastic. But as good as this is, I'm completely unable to devote as much time to cooking as she does.

Good be just a generally food allergy you developed. Never heard of anyone being allergic to HCFS specifically but it's a possibility.

It's not just you. I feel better when I'm off it too, I've done it a couple times for long periods of time. I've never managed to stay off it for more than a couple years cause it's so hard not to get bored of the selections at restaurants that don't include it.

Well, there's water (for which I usually add an abundance of lemon), iced tea, which is usually brewed and sweetened in-house (though I do ask if they sweeten with real sugar, and which may be not available places other than the South), and, if there's a bar, there are always a variety of drinks that can be made virgin, although grenadine and other bottled syrups can have HFCS.

My girlfriend and I completely cut HFCS out of our diet about two years ago (as well as most processed foods, honestly) and I'll never touch it again. It's poison, pure and simple. Just a slow one. We also cleanse at each seasonal change, though, so I guess we're pretty serious about health / what we eat / etc. It's amazing how much better you feel when you eat what humans are designed to eat rather than eating what the people selling the product tell you to eat.

Gotta be careful with the iced tea. In Texas, it always comes unsweetened. In other parts of the South, it's generally quite sweet (undrinkably sweet, to my tastes).

My beverage issue turned out to be orange juice. A couple years ago, my wife and I settled into a habit of having breakfast at a cafe that had some nice OJ. I'd have it nearly every day with breakfast. After a while, I realized I was having unpleasant reflux. I experimentally tried cutting out the OJ, and the problem completely went away. Now, I'll only have OJ on occasion, and I'm fine. My guess: the acid in the OJ was slowly eating away at the lining in my throat. Fun stuff. You can get "low acid" OJ in the supermarket, but it doesn't taste quite right and it's only available without pulp. *sigh*

When in doubt, there's always fizzy water (Perrier, San Pellegrino, etc.).

Yeah, Texas isn't really the South; it's its own region, but they lump it in with us.

The sweetness of sweet tea varies tremendously, but seldom is it sweetened with anything other than sugar, unless you see a branded tea dispenser instead of a plain urn/samovar.

At some point last year something made me start noticing how may products have HFCS in them. It's pure insanity. And apparently it's all thanks to subsidizing the corn industry which produces such an overabundance of the stuff that they had to put it somewhere. I read about it a while back but I need to do more looking into the subject. But yeah, go to your average grocery store, and pick up a random item off the shelf... odds are it will have HFCS in it. It's actually difficult to cut it out of your diet completely.

EDIT: The Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and links...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

EDIT 2: And here's a pretty good list of some basic stuff, by no means comprehensive, but LONG.

http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php/2005/06/09/foods_and_products_containing_high_fruct

Things are going to get very interesting for the American consumer and our dependence on corn in the coming years. Now that Ethanol is basically the only Gasoline additive that's legal to use the food industry and the oil industry will be competing for corn meaning prices will go up. So if all our food is based on cheap corn and our gasoline is based on cheap corn then we are going to be in a tight spot. That is unless the politicians get smart and start allowing third world countries to import food without huge tariffs. Hmm what a novel idea that would be..

Not necessarily. Currently, the government pays farmers to produce corn that they don't take delivery of. If there's more demand for it, the government reduces its artificial demand, meaning that everything stays pretty much the same. The only real difference is that more corn will be delivered and, potentially, more farmers who are getting paid for corn actually have to grow it.

I just had a thought...could the alleviation of your issues be the result of cutting your caffeine intake in half, rather than a result of cutting out the hfcs?

I usually drank Caffeine-Free Coke anyway, so probably not. There is still the issue of restaurant beverages, but the tea I usually drink now seems to have about the same amount of caffeine.

It looks like part of the subsidies are paid based on historical yield per acre. Some are based on the actual yield. So, yes, at least partially, the government subsidies can help tide a poor season.

Not sure if this adds anything or not, but I liked this article.

Well, it's written with an obvious anti-protectionism political bias, but the basic facts are correct. Even if the "soda, capable of loosening rusted nails and removing corrosion from car battery terminals" is due to the citric, phosphoric, and carbonic acids in the sodas, which exist in almost all sodas (all soda, including soda water, in the case of carbonic acid, since that's just a result of carbonating water) rather than HFCS.

Oddly, it was a Jones drink that initially made me consider my problem. I'm glad to hear that they switched away from HFCS. I'll have to start buying them again.

Oh, and I've come to be able to recognize the difference between sugar and HFCS almost immediately now. Sugar tastes sweet towards the front of my tongue. HFCS tastes sweet toward my throat. Sugar is more pleasant, too. HFCS now tastes kinda sickly.

I can tell the difference too. Lately I've been getting glass bottled Cokes imported from Mexico instead of the local ones. They taste way better to me with the real sugar.

I've been buying 365-brand (that is, Whole Foods house brand) cola, ginger ale, and raspberry sodas. They use only cane sugar. And, despite what you'd think, they cost only marginally more than Coca-Cola. The cola is not as good as Coke, but it's very drinkable. The ginger ale is great; it's got some heat and bite to it while remaining crisp. And the raspberry is very good, too. It's almost got a creaminess to it while not seemingly having any vanilla flavoring and while also remaining crisp. It takes the place of black cherry soda for me.

This link does help motivate me to switch from the local stuff to Dublin Dr. Pepper.

Hahaha! Dublin Dr Pepper is the BEST! My wife got me a case for my B'day one year, and it was definitely better than the standard stuff. Not too much more expensive, either, until you add the shipping costs (which are quite high). If they sold it here for the same price, $10 a case, in the grocery, there would be no decision to make, even though I can get the regular stuff for ~$6 a case.

I stopped drinking 99% of soda about 7-8 years ago after watching a roomie of mine drink atleast a 12 pack a day.. and my grandfather getting diabetic as he got older.. neither affect me directly (except maybe a minor genetic disposition to diabetes) but between the carbonation and the sugar content I just couldn't drink the stuff anymore. I switched to tea/coffee as a caffeine source, drank way too much coffee for a while, and droped that to 0 for a couple years.. now I can have a nice cup of black tea or coffee in the morning, but no more per day.

All in all, I feel tons better, but I guess cycling to work every day (7 miles round trip) helps too.

HFCS is crap, yet another thing added to foods to make them cheap and have a shelf life measured in decades.

Depends how much alcohol I drink. On a non drinking day I'll maybe have one can of Irn Bru. If I am out for the night I am likely to have 10 or 15 glasses of something with a fizzy mixer - generally different each time, but certainly loads of coke, lemonade, tonic, soda - you name it:-)

I'm at the range of a six pack a day. I'm slowly migrating off of Dr Pepper and more towards milk and just plain water. I'm really trying to kick the caffeine habit, but it's a tough one due to the very real physical withdrawals. I get severe headaches if I don't get enough by say 10 AM. I should have quit during Katrina, as I had no access to caffeine for a few days and I didn't even notice due to the massive amounts of adrenaline running through me. The real problem is that I'm not only addicted, but I LIKE it.

It may be relevant to point out, if it's not already been pointed out, that the Coca-Cola company sells unsweetened cola syrup to its bottlers, who then add sweetener and water themselves. Coca-Cola claims it does not make any rules about what the bottlers use to sweeten it. So we should really be arguing with the bottlers about what they use, not with Coca-Cola itself. Of course, Coca-Cola also tries to prevent people from importing Coca-Cola from countries (mostly Mexico) that use sugar. It might be that part of their contract with distributors includes making sure that other distributors do not infringe on their territory, but they are somewhat overzealous about it.

*cough* *cough*
Dusting off this thread to insert a link to an article I just found.
High Fructose Corn Syrup: A Recipe For Hypertension, Study Finds

...also, in response to all the talk in the thread about drinking/not drinking soda-pop...
About a year ago I was suffering from nasty heartburn and acid reflux in the evenings. I cut out the sodas with my lunch and have been mostly trouble-free while enjoying iced tea instead.
I find that eating on a regular schedule also helps with that issue. None of that is really anything to do with HFCS- it's more of an 'acid management' strategy.

$0.02 delivered

I've done something similar, although probably not as healthy. I take the 24-ounce water bottle from my bike, dump a tray of ice cubes into it, add two healthy "squeezes" from a squeeze bottle of pure lemon juice and two scoops of sugar. The first few swallows are pretty intense, but as the ice melts and dilutes the mixture it becomes mellower. Cheap and thirst quenching.

tanstaafl.

I have the joy of suffering through that as well. My doc told me it was more the caffeine, than soda itself. Apparently caffeine prohibits the valve between your stomach and esophagus from closing as it should. I just did like you and completely cut out soda, and that has also helped me a lot. I do miss Dr. Pepper though...

They make a variety of caffeine-free versions of sodas, including Dr Pepper.

I was drinking root beer every day- no caffeine, just extra fizzy acid.
I miss the root beer, but not the heartburn!

Every soft drink on the planet is completely and utterly vile. And I don't buy for two seconds that Dr Pepper doesn't contain prunes. Or possibly cat feces.

On a related note, you can get Dr Pepper without HFCS in Texas - or over the internet.

Don't hold back, Bruno. Tell us how you really feel! lol
From the flavor I always thought the original recipe would have been (for the most part) carbonated prune juice, but with modern recipes being so 'artificial' they've dropped the whole 'prune' connection.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I like Dr Pepper... but don't drink it these days.

About the only soft drink I'll actually drink is Sprite (zero caffeine, not as much sweetener). Mostly, I'll just get water and be done with it.

(P.S. Is it just me, or are the older messages in this thread showing up with raw HTML tags rather than proper formatting?)

Most are vile simply by taste. But when you start looking at the ingredients... Ugh.



That's exactly what I've been doing and it's served me well. Cavity free after 37 years.

It didn't hurt that I used to hate any type of carbonation at all. Now I don't mind it in some drinks. Namely beer - though I still prefer wine.

Yeah, I'm with you; Lemonade, water, and iced tea all suck! o_O

"Soft Drink" = Soda Pop = Soda Fountain Drink = "Soda" = "Pop" = carbonated mystery drinks.

Not water. Not real lemonade, not real iced tea, not real juice.

A soft drink is a not-hard drink, where "hard" means "containing alcohol".

If you meant to say "soda" or "fizzy drink" or "flavored HFCS-water" or whatever, you should probably say that.

Damn Spaniards, always being imprecise.

A British friend of mine once discombobulated a waiter in a US restaurant by misunderstanding both terms and asking "Have you got any soft drinks other than soda?" -- meaning "Have you got any fizzy drinks other than soda water?", but sounding to the poor American chap more like some sort of Zen koan. "Is there an X which is not an X?"

Peter

LOL

I have never heard the term "soft drink" to describe a drink without alcohol, only a fizzy fountain drink (cola, 7-up, ginger-ale, etc..) I don't think this is a Canadian thing either, like milk in a bag. All other non-alcoholic drinks are usually referred to by their type, such as juice, tea, coffee, milk, etc.

Soft drinks what the term I grew up with in Ireland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_drink
Wiki claims Canada uses the term as well.
All hail Wiki.

I grew up in Atlantic Canada, and we always took the term soft drink to mean the opposite of hard liquor, as in non-alcoholic. More and more nowadays, it seems to be understood by many to mean carbonated non-alcoholic beverage.

Cheers

Around these parts, it's really "soft-drink" as if it were one word, rather than "soft" "drink."

Hey Mark, in your experience and travels, is milk in a bag common elsewhere in Canada? It's an aside, but one of those things friends from the US (and Europe *always* remark on when they're here).

Some supermarkets in the UK tried doing milk in a bag, but it didn't really catch on. I did notice the other day that one of our local supermarkets was trying it again.

I haven't seen those before, but just checked a site and it seems Ocado (Waitrose) sells them. Odd!

edit: Some Sainsbury's stores do, not my (new) local one though.

That bag looks like the same proportions as the ones here in Ontario, but the volume is definitely different.

Here you can only buy 3 bags at a time. They come within a larger bag for a total volume of 4L. Each of the internal bags is either clear, white or translucent blue, with no branding or markings. Only the external bag contains the branding. The translucent blue and white are used by two brands of premium (filtered) milk.

Apart from that you can buy them in a carton in 1 and 2L sizes. You might still find it in 4L plastic jugs somewhere, but I haven't seen those in ages. Single-serve sizes are also available, but I'm talking about buying milk to put in your fridge for family.

Here's an example of a milk fridge in a supermarket:
http://nothingheavy.blogspot.com/2006/04/milk-bag.html

For commercial use, like offices, you can also buy it in Tetra packs as we had them at ATI. These were always from Parmalat. Tetra packed milk is the norm in Portugal (though I'm sure you can buy fresh in glass as well in some places). It doesn't have to be refrigerated until it's opened.

I buy most of my milk (which is not that much, really) from a local dairy in half-gallon returnable glass bottles. I always thought that milk in plastic was creepy; it always left that crust on plastic bottle rims. Paper or glass for me.

Before the local council started offering recycling of plastic bottles, plastic milk bottles were quite a big fraction of my non-recyclable waste. (I get through about a pint a day on average. When I was little our family of four would get through six pints a day.) So switching to bagged milk would have been a big improvement in waste-volume then, but not so much now.

Peter

That website is great!

Definitely so in Quebec & the Maritimes. But to be honest, we haven't gone shopping for bagged milk out west (BC, AB), so I haven't really noticed out there.

Cheers

I haven't seen it in BC (my most recent trip was in July), and a friend in AB hasn't seen milk in bags there.

There is one convenience store chain in Minnesota that sells milk in bags. I never have bought it, it seems weird. They have some special pitcher to put the bags in so you can pour it.

I read, since initially posting, that milk in bags isn't available in BC and AB. In at least one of those places it might even be illegal (so I read). They had bags at one point but due to poor local manufacturing of the bags, they had problems with leaking and milk going bad. So no more bags.

It's supposedly quite common in some South American nations and it's starting to appear in the US and the UK (in multiple supermarket chains).

We get through around 4 to 6 litres of milk a day (3 kids) and to be honest milk in bags would never be a good idea (imagine 3 kids with bags o'milk - the mess!)

Although we get them delivered, I do miss glass bottles - our only option here is plastic. Not ecologically sound at all!

Back to that earlier topic I do love my soft drinks, but only the full fat, full sugar ones... ideally Irn Bru - drink of the gods.

I never drink diet drinks as they make me feel so bad. A half can of diet coke can give me headaches for 3 or 4 days.

Milk in a bag is actually quite mess-free. It's really no more messy than a carton - potentially. The handle on the jug that you place the bag into is easier to grab for a smaller hand, but the whole thing can be a bit heavier since it has about 1.3L of milk when full. But the difficulty is of course relative to whatever size/weight of containers you're now getting.

The drawback is that there's no real way to seal the bag after it's open. So if you were to drop the whole container on the floor, that would be a mess for sure.

Personally, milk quality and recycleability aside, I quite like the Tetra packs I've used in Portugal. I've not actually noticed the milk being inferior in any way, but recycling of the tetra packs may not be available in all areas. Really convenient to be able to have milk on the shelf outside the fridge. Same re-seal issues with this type of container too - drop it and there will be some mess.

I can't imagine bags'o'milk. When growing up, we had pints in glass bottles, left on the doorstep by the milkman. Get 'em before the birds do...

These days, we have 4-pint plastic bottles from the supermarket. Fortunately, Ealing accepts most plastic waste for recycling (though I have no idea what they actually do with it), which accounts for about 60-70% of our domestic rubbish output.



I don't drink diet drinks because (I kid myself) I don't need to lose weight. Also, I can't stand the taste of Aspartame. I pretty much gave up on caffeine 5 years ago. I have maybe one mug of tea per day now; that's it.

Essentially, I drink tap water and Stella Artois.

Honestly one of the few beers I've tried that I simply cannot drink. Strange considering Belgium is my favorite beer producer.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I like most beers, stouts and lagers -- ask anyone who's been to the Amersfoort empeg meets with me, or any of the Cambridge gang. It's just that Stella's my usual tipple. I know that a lot of people don't like it, but I prefer it to the other mass-produced Euro-lagers.

Is the Stella available in the US/North America the same as the Stella in Belgium/Europe? Many mass-produced beers are licensed in foreign markets and brewed locally, with varying degrees of fidelity.

I've never done a taste comparison of different Stellas. That sounds about as exciting as doing a taste comparison of different Budweiser breweries. (And now they're owned by the same company!)

A guy I knew in England called Stella Artois 'Nelson'.

He had to explain Cockney rhyming slang to me.

If anyone likes a nice refermented dark Belgian/Trapist Ale, you have to try Koningshoeven Quadrupel. Made in the only abbey brewery outside of Belgium, in the Netherlands. Bloody fantastic if you like that style.

If you have an opportunity to drink any beer from the Canadian brewer Unibroue (from Quebec), don't pass it up either. Positively the best beer I've ever had from a North American brewer. Most of their good stuff is also on lees, refermented in the bottle. My faves are their Belgian style ales, Trois Pistoles, Maudite and La Fin du Monde. I also quite like their "wit" style, Blanche de Chambly. They all get top ratings at BeerAdvocate so they can't be good only to my palate.

For myself, Stella would have to battle Labatt Blue for the worst tasting beer available in Canada. I really really don't like the taste at all and can't even finish a full glass.

I agree that everything I've had from them is fantastic. There is even a restaurant within 20 minutes of me with some of their beers on tap.


I actually like Stella. It's become common enough here that almost everywhere I go offers it even if the next-most exotic thing on their menu is Sam Adams.

Labatt Blue is Coors Light of the north.

Mandela?

+1 for Unibroue. I don't think they make a bad beer, and most of them are outstanding.

Stella's good mainly because it's finding its way into the spot formerly occupied by Beck's and Heineken at not-very-beer-oriented bars and restaurants. It's quaffable and widely available -- that's a good thing when so many places will have six taps all running yellow fizzy BudMillerCoors crap.

Not sure I understand the Sam Adams hate, though. They make some absolute garbage brews ("Cranberry Nut Crunch Fuckin' Ale"), but also some very solid ones. Boston Lager is nothing special, but I'd take it over Stella any day. Likewise with Octoberfest, Winter Ale, and Double Bock. All solid choices that I'd take over many micros and imports.

Yup

I definitely don't hate Sam Adams. Boston Lager is a solid beer. I also enjoy some of their seasonal beers.

But was it just a ruse to get free beer if the pub displayed a "Free Nelson Mandela" poster?

Peter

I just cracked open one of the bottles from a Maredsous sampler 3-pack I just bought on the weekend. Right now I'm having the Tripel. The pack also contained a Blonde and a Brune. Quite good, but not the best tripel I've had. Though I think I prefer it to the namesake of the branded chalice/goblet I'm drinking it from, Westmalle.

I love that our provincial government owned liquor stores bring in these samplers, I'm just disappointed that there's pretty much no way to get the bottles again locally if you liked what you've tasted.

There's a startup beer web2.0-ish site by the way, that's supposed to recommend beer based on your reviews of other beers:
(in private beta now, but invites seem to be sent out pretty fast)

www.pintley.com

Calon Wen do milk in bags, great milk and butter, great company.