Re: Comparing hot dogs to vegetables and natural fruit sugar to HFCS?

Are you actually trying to suggest that eating a hot dog is healthier than eating lettuce or other vegetables?  If so, that is patently absurd!

First of all, the problem with hot dogs and other processed meats is mostly nitrites, not nitrates.  When meat is cooked, nitrites combine with other compounds to form carcinogenic nitrosamines.  Unlike meat, vegetables contain valuable items and compounds (such as Vitamin C) which prevent the formation of nitrosamines.  That is why study after study has found that cooked meat and meat products lead to increased cancer risks while increased vegetable consumption does not (and does in fact often lead to decreased cancer risks).

You obviously didn't read the link which took your comparison of nitrates to nitrites into account - and still makes your comments rather illogical.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/does-banning-hotdogs-and-bacon-ma...

Comparing the natural occuring sugars that occur in fruits to industrially prepared and refined high fructose corn syrup is equally misleading.  Man has been living with and nourished by fruits for eons.  Not so with commercially prepared high fructose corn syrup, which also happens to come from genetically modified corn 85% of the time (most often "Roundup ready GMO corn").

I'll be the first one to agree with you regarding refined high fructose corn syrup, but the statement in the research did not differentiate between the two.  You have failed to read what it said at the link regarding fructose:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFN0210830520100802

Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

"These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation," Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.

"They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth."

Americans take in large amounts of fructose, mainly in high fructose corn syrup, a mix of fructose and glucose that is used in soft drinks, bread and a range of other foods.

The link goes on to state:

The industry has also argued that sugar is sugar.

Heaney said his team found otherwise. They grew pancreatic cancer cells in lab dishes and fed them both glucose and fructose.

Tumor cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. "Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different," Heaney's team wrote.

I'll be the first one to get in line to help stamp out high fructose corn syrup.  However, that said, when you extract anything from its normal form and use it as a concentrated ingredient in food in a completely different manner than nature prepared it, you have problems.

You will notice that there is no difference between fructose from either fruit or high fructose corn syrup relative to pancreatic cancer cells - they (cancer cells) use fructose (no qualifier found) to proliferate.  There is no difference between the two in this research and it has implications far beyond pancreatic cancer and even cancer itself.  Note also that the cancer also thrived on sugar which is what things like bread and potatoes become in your belly.

You are in significant error when you state that "Man has been living with and nourished by fruits for eons" - that is what my ancestors would call blarney.  To begin with, fruits are a seasonal vegetation and they have only been available year round with the availability of refrigeration and rapid transportation. Prior to that, canning began only after the Civil War when they first began to can meats.  So man could not have been living with fruits for eons, not even 150 years - except perhaps in the tropics.  Add to that that the fruit produced today is nothing but hybridized relatives of fruit found in nature (as in natural) and bears little resemblance to it.  The hybridized things you find on your grocery shelves today have significantly more fructose in them that the race varieties and are far from "natural."  Other than berries, go find me some wild fruit in North America today.

I have lived in Korea and I have traveled extensively in China.  In Korea in the early 1950s when I was there, fruit was a rarity and all I ever saw was a peach at harvest time.  No other time did I ever see fruit and the one time I saw the peach in their market was the only time I saw fruit in Korea.  In China, by about November in the days that I was there the only vegetation they had was bok choy.  Bok choy is the only vegetation of any kind the Chinese had that would keep over the winter time and I would see piles of it on the street outside of a home, on carts, on peoples porches/decks, on sampans, in markets - it was everywhere.  By November there was no fruit to be found anywhere!  Not until the next Fall harvest.  That represents all of Asia prior to the middle of the last century.  Recognize that even by 1980 neither Korea nor China had refrigeration of any kind and a canning industry was non existent. You can carry that on into Mongolia, Tibet, Nepal, Siberia even India and whit is now Pakistan and many other parts of the world.  DO NOT try and peddle me the BS that man has lived on fruits for eons because I know better and have personally seen that they have not.  Asians have lived on rice, bok choy, (other veggies when available) with very little to no meat for thousands of years.  With the modernization of Asia that has all changed and so has their acquisition of Type II diabetes - particularly in India where it has exploded even in their teenage population and where they don't even eat meat products.

Fructose causes cancer cells to proliferate, it's that simple and the study reinforced that position.