Ice Cream, Don't Do It

Here's a fun factoid: ice cream makes you sick. It's true.

Well, I should say that it made me more sick than I was before.

I had started to come down with something on Monday evening, starting with a sore throat and heaviness in the head. I blasted myself with herbs, and upon waking I was feeling better. By the end of my shift at noon, however, my sinuses were completely congested, and it felt as though it was clogged through to my ears.

I went home and nursed myself, taking a different set of herbs for my congestion. I even stayed home and canceled my shift, not wanting to infect anyone else with my evil qi. By the afternoon, I was feeling so much better that, despite better judgment, I decided to celebrate with some ice cream. Two spoonfuls, to be exact.

Before the ice cream, I had no sore throat, no headache, no congestion, and no runny nose. After the ice cream, within minutes, my nose clogged up and I was back to wiping snot off my face and I had to drink hot tea to combat the coldness I started to feel. It's as if the ice cream canceled out all of the herbs I've taken and the sleep I've gotten in the last two days.

So next time you think of having ice cream, just don't do it... Unless it's Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk, in which case it might be worth it.

More About Sugar

That's a model of the Mormom temple in Salt Lake City, made with sugar cubes.

Most Americans eat too much sugar. We drink too much soda, eat too much ice cream, and ingest a huge amount of sugars from sources we might not suspect, like bread. Many commercially available pre-sliced breads (great for sandwiches!) have high-fructose corn syrup added as a softener and preservative.

The New York Times has a pretty good discussion of some of America's problems with sugar, corn syrup, obesity, soda and so on.

Here are some of the good parts:

Neither ordinary sugar — sucrose — nor high-fructose corn syrup contains any nutrients other than sweet calories, and both are added in prodigious amounts to beverages and many foods that offer few if any nutrients to compensate for their caloric input.

“What consumers need to do is cut down on both,” Dr. Jacobson said. “Sugary foods either add calories or replace other, more nutritious foods.”

The article gives first place to those who claim there's nothing really wrong with high fructose corn syrup, but ends with links to three studies showing the exact opposite:

“It is not surprising that several studies have found changes in circulating lipids when subjects eat high-fructose diets,” he wrote in an editorial in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2007. A study by Elizabeth J. Parks and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, for example, found that triglyceride levels rose when people consumed mixtures containing more fructose than glucose.

Another study, by nephrologists at the University of Florida, found that fructose consumption raised blood levels of uric acid, which can foster “metabolic syndrome,” a condition of insulin resistance and abdominal obesity associated with heart disease and diabetes.

And a study by Chi-Tang Ho, professor of food science at Rutgers University, found “astonishingly high” levels of substances called reactive carbonyls in 11 carbonated soft drinks. These molecules, which form when fructose and glucose are unbound, are believed to cause tissue damage. They are elevated in the blood of people with diabetes and linked to complications of the disease. Dr. Ho estimated that a can of soda has five times the concentration of reactive carbonyls found in the blood of an adult with diabetes.

Condition-Specific Websites, Diabetes, HFCS

This article in the New York Times led me in turn to this website by and for people with diabetes, which in turn led me to this blog post that follows up on the "Sweet Surprise" ad campaign that we let you know about last month. Isn't the web great?

The Times article gives you some good links for online health information, beyond what you might find with a typical Google search.

How Much Sugar Should I Eat?

The short answer is: just a little.

The long answer? Well, you could turn to this misleading website by the Corn Refiner's Association for some incomplete answers on the "benefits" of high fructose corn syrup (thanks to Jason Moskovitz for the link). For instance, in the Q&A section, there's this helpful information...

Why do we crave sweetness?
People have evolved from the hunter-gatherers when sweetness indicated that a food was safe to eat. Sweetness was and still is a key taste marker to survival and good health. Sugars as carbohydrates are an important supply of energy to the body. This energy was essential to our survival in our not-so-distant, hunter-gatherer past. However, over the last 12,000 years our way of life has changed significantly. In contrast to our past, an abundance of calories is not essential, but the craving for sweet things remains.

If you can get past the appalling grammar, you may notice the stunted logic and historical inaccuracies. The one sentence that I agree with states that life has changed significantly over the past 12,000 years. We do still have hunter-gatherer instincts. But if you're hunting the aisles of a typical American supermarket for sustenance, sweetness is not a "key taste marker to survival". In fact, avoiding sweetness in this context will help you avoid many of the major "diseases of affluence" (those caused by too much of something rather than too little) such as diabetes.

This site is obviously designed to put you at ease as you wash down your Lil Debbie snack cakes with Dr. Pepper, but regular sugar is not so great either. I went through a phase where I wouldn't drink sodas made with corn syrup, only those made with real sugar. For some reason I thought I was being healthy - and then I realized that I was drinking way more soda than I usually did.

The corn syrup site also bad mouths supposedly natural sweeteners such as concentrated white grape juice. I have to admit that I was taken in by this sweetener at first, particularly in jam and jelly. I found this brand that was sweetened with fruit juice, and I thought "great! natural!". Again, it's what they leave out that gets you. The fruit juice they use is concentrated to such a degree that it's not much better than regular sugar.

The existence of this site is a testament to the popularity of books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. (The latter book is where I learned about Earl Butz, pictured above. He was Nixon's agriculture secretary and was chiefly responsible for the increase in corn subsidies to ridiculous levels, which in turn ensured the huge surplus of corn that led to the synthesizing of high fructose corn syrup and its subsequent injection into nearly every single packaged item on your supermarket shelf.) Just be aware that the Corn Refiners Association has millions and millions of dollars invested in getting you to eat more crap.

So, where should you get your sugars? Here's an idea: from whole food (which you can get at many places besides the overpriced Whole Foods Market). If you crave something sweet, try eating a piece of fruit. I remember when I was growing up there was always a fruit bowl around. Keep some fruit around all the time and you'll always have sweetness. Another thing you can do is chew your whole-grain rice more completely. Sugars are simple carbohydrates. When you chew your rice or sweet potato or whatever you prefer, salivary amylase breaks down starch into sugar. If you chew incompletely, you don't get the benefit of the full digestive process.

Sweetness is important. In Chinese medicine, the sweet flavor is associated with the earth phase, which in turn relates to the spleen, pancreas, stomach, and the colors yellow and orange. A nice piece of fruit for dessert lifts the digestive energy, or spleen qi.

So don't run from sweetness - run from added sugars both natural and artificial! Most of you have no need of them. By habit many of us are used to eating much more sugar than we need. If you can break the habit, you'll be much healthier!