Artificially Sweeteners or Natural Sugar Replacements?

IMG originally published on Be Food Smart

The number of sweeteners available today is staggering. We see high fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, dextrose, xylitol, and sugar in our packaged foods along with white, blue, pink, brown and now green packets to spruce up that iced tea in restaurants. If you are keeping up with the trends, agave nectar and stevia are all the rage. But have you ever stopped to wonder what all the sweeteners really are? Regardless of where you ended up on the flowchart or what you think of your choice, understanding what the sweetener is and where it comes from is the first step.

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The Worst Nutrition Advices

Originally posted by Kris Gunnars on Eat Local Grown found on Hungry For Change

Nutrition history is riddled with nonsense. People have been advised to do all sorts of strange things that challenge common sense. Some of these things are not only useless, but potentially harmful. The worst part… a lot of this misguided advice is still being pushed. Here are the top 5 contenders for the worst diet advice in history.

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5 Food Ingredients to Avoid

5 Food Ingredients to Avoid | ecogreenlove

Snacking healthier is easier said than done. After all, how do you know what’s actually good for you? NatureBox believes in the 80/20 rule – 80 percent of the time, we eat totally clean with lots of vegetables, fresh fruit and lean protein. Twenty percent of the time, we let ourselves indulge; maybe it’s a sweet treat for dessert or at a birthday party.

In this 80/20 lifestyle there’s lots of room for both healthy and indulgent snack options. But whether we’re avoiding anything and everything processed, or allowing ourselves to enjoy a decadent goodie, one thing is for sure: We all should avoid certain ingredients.

Here are the five food ingredients to avoid at all costs and why:
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FRUCTOSE – the new public enemy! and @sophieuliano

BY JOHN DOUILLARD

I am sure you have noticed food manufacturers reverting back to using good old-fashioned cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in sweetened foods.

While this is a good thing, few of us realize that cane sugar is actually sucrose, which is made of 50% fructose and 50% glucose. High fructose corn syrups average about 55% fructose, so cane sugar has only 5% less fructose than the HFCS that we all know is so bad.

We forget that cane sugar is a highly processed product too!

Remember the golden rule: if it is processed, beware!!! 

Whenever these sugars are processed, they enter into the blood stream and liver much quicker and in a more concentrated form than when you, say, munch on an apple!

Some examples of processed or purified fructose:

o   High fructose corn syrup
o   Pasteurized fruit juices
o   Cane sugar
o   Any product with added sugar or HFCS

Fructose has a unique way of being processed by the body. It likes to turn into fat, which is why most of the really sweet fruits are harvested in the fall, when the body is working on storing some winter fat.

Fructose is seven times more harmful than sugar!

When fructose or sugar levels rise too high in the blood, bad things happen! Proteins like collagen andelastin attach to the excess fructose or sucrose in the blood. This pulls these proteins out of circulation, accelerating the aging and wrinkling of the skin, arteries, heart, gut and more! This process of proteins and sugars sticking together is called glycation, and is the leading cause of free radical damage in the body.

Fructoseglycates seven times faster than sugar!

Excess fructose in the blood has been linked to:

o   Insulin Resistance (32 studies)*
o   Fatty Liver (22 studies)*
o   Obesity (13 studies)*
o   Metabolic Syndrome (19 studies)*
o   Hypertension (10 studies)*
o   Elevated Uric Acid (9 studies)*
o   Elevated Triglycerides (14 studies)*
o   Belly Fat (2 studies)*
o   Cardiovascular Diseases (4 studies)*
o   Liver Stress (6 studies)*
o   Pancreatic Cancer (2 studies)*
o   Leptin Resistance (2 studies)*

The Solution

Make sweets a treat, like they were in the old days. Sugary snacks and desserts were a delicacy—something to get excited about! Today, those treats are an everyday event. Most desserts use highly processed sugars, which is why this constant glycemic impact on the blood sugar is much more devastating today than it ever was in the past.

Source

* These studies can be found Greenmedinfo

Found on Gorgeously Green