A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

The science nazi in me tends to bristle in discussions like these. For example, the claim that you shouldn't eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce. That is a bit of folksy talk, and it is pretending to be "common sense", and we know how common sense can fail in the extreme.For example, I bet I could list 20 chemicals found in naturally growing, organically raised, pesticide free apples that most people would not recognize. Just the TCA cycle by itself includes fumarate and a few other carbohydrates that are foreign to most people. If anything, the processing of food REDUCES the number of complex and hard to pronounce chemicals naturally found in food. On top of that, how many people can even pronounce all of the chemicals found in vitamin pills?What I think has changed most over recent human history is just the availability of food and the increase in sedentary lifestyles. I doubt that a large number of our ancestors had 3 square meals a day just a short car drive away.

I am not aware of any processed food that causes extreme harm. However, I am aware of naturally growing plants that can flat out kill you if you eat them. They are poisonous in the extreme. That's kind of my point. The whole foods get a pass. While this may be for good reason, that reason still needs to be worked out. Are the whole foods in the bar doing as much harm as the additives? Again, the constant assumption is that artificial is bad, natural is good. But is this true?

Studies? So if we took vitamins to make up for the lack of nutritional value would this eliminate the harm caused by processed foods? I personally think that it is the calories that are causing the most harm, regardless of where those calories come from.

Just for the record, I am playing the devil's advocate on this one, so take my posts as food for thought (pun intended). It's not that I think processed foods do no harm. Rather, I think we need to check our assumptions and base our claims on evidence rather than tradition.What you are missing is that the very things you claim are healthy, be it fruits or corn itself, also contain these very same sugars, and yet you are advocating a diet containing fructose and glucose. Your posts have a slight tinge of vitalism, the idea that living matter is somehow different than non-living matter. Fructose and glucose act the same whether they come from an apple or a Mountain Dew.Ironically, what you seem to be arguing is that it is not what is put into processed foods that is the problem. It's what is taken OUT that is harmful. As you say, processed sugar contains no other nutrients other than the simple sugars. It is actually all of those long winded chemicals found in natural food that are beneficial to us, the exact OPPOSITE of what some people gripe about when it comes to processed foods. To tell you the truth, I was much healthier when I was more active, regardless of what my diet was. In my youth I grew up on a ranch where I worked 2 hours or so a day during school, and that was on top of playing two sports. I ate "unhealthy" food all of the time, as well as some homegrown beef and veggies. I was still rail thin, could run a 5 minute mile, and never suffered from health issues. On the list of ways to be healthy I think exercise is by far the most important, well above what you eat, but that is just my opinion.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Apples contain fructose, so does that make apples dangerous to our health?

I am just curious how you people can warn of the dangers of fructose one minute, and then suggest that people eat fruits laden with fructose the next minute.What is it about fructose in fruits that makes it less dangerous?

Just out of curiousity, I did some googling and found these interesting facts.First, a 100g apple will contain about 10g of sugar. Here is the interesting part. Counting the fructose from sucrose, the ratio of fructose to glucose is 2.0. There is twice as much fructose in an apple as compared to glucose. Compare this to the 1.22 ratio of fructose/glucose in HFCS.
Fructose - WikipediaAt the same time, there is 39g of sugar in one can of Coke, so about 4 apples worth of sugar. So, three apples a day is about the equivalent of one can of Coke on a fructose to fructose basis.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Taq, : math error

I wasn't able to find any reliable information on the relative absorption rates of an apple vs. soda pop (aka HCFS). If someone is able to find this info I think it would be very interesting to take a look at.

I was hoping to find actual charts that measured the release of fructose into the bloodstream over time. These may be hard to find, but if anyone runs across them or has time to hunt them down I think it would certainly be interesting.

I have made beer in the past so I have some familiarity with this process. When you put barley in warm water and let it germinate you get the expression of enzymes that change starch into simple sugars that are needed by the developing plant. This process is called malting. For the purposes of brewing beer, the malted barley is put into an oast which removes water from the germinating seeds and freezes barley in this active state. When you are ready to make beer/whiskey you crush crush the barley (grist) and put it into hot water (mash). This puts the enzymes into high gear and turns a lot of the starch into simple sugars which are washed out of the barley grains (sparge) and used in the process of fermentation.The whole process allows you to extract more digestable sugars, and the fermentation is really just spoiling the food so that the end product is edible. Before refrigeration, spoilage was a way of life so people figured out how to use the process of spoilage to their advantage.