This sweetener should carry a ‘black box’ warning

Don’t think for one minute that your tax dollars aren’t hard at work!

The National Institutes of Health has opened up your wallet to finance research into how best to create a label warning about the link between drinking soda and packing on the pounds.

The grant money has already been snapped up by academics at the University of California, with the lead researcher there saying that she’s anxious to identify a “spectrum” of “effective interventions.”

Well, I’ve got some ideas on how to do that, and it won’t cost anyone one red cent! My warning wouldn’t just be about gaining weight, either. While that’s clearly an issue, it’s far from the only one.

And when you’re talking about certain sweeteners, what’s at stake here makes obesity look like the least of our problems.

The bigger danger

Last year, San Francisco was duking it out in court with Big Soda and friends over a 2015 law that would have slapped a notice on ads, billboards and bottles saying: “WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.”

No surprise here, Big Soda won.

But whatever this new groups of researchers drags out of the barn in its latest attempt to put a warning label on certain beverages, it will surely be missing out on the real dangers of the sweetener you’re most likely to find in almost all of those so-called “sugary” drinks: high-fructose corn syrup.

And unless that warning said something like “consuming HFCS is known to destroy your liver, promote high triglycerides and cholesterol, disrupt brain function, and cause cancer, diabetes, and obesity,” it wouldn’t be telling the whole story!

Now, those aren’t just some pie-in-the-sky risks. HFCS is in a special, dangerous class all on its own. In fact, you could say that it’s done more to undermine the health of Americans than any other single ingredient that’s been added (or in this case, snuck) into our food supply.

Take your liver, for example. Prior to the introduction of HFCS, fatty liver disease, which is currently at epidemic proportions, was so rare that most doctors never saw a case of it. Now, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH (the deadly second stage of this disease) is a big reason why many shocked patients suddenly find themselves on the transplant list.

When researchers want to give lab animals fatty livers to be able to study drugs for the condition, they simply feed them high amounts of fructose, such as what you’ll find in different forms of HFCS.

And as far as diabetes goes, researchers have found that countries that consume large amounts of HFCS (such as the U.S.), have a 20 percent higher incidence of the disease. That study, led by a medical professor who is an expert in childhood obesity, said that the risk comes from the additional fructose that’s found in HFCS.

While you’ll typically see that laboratory sweetener referred to as “sugar” or “sugars” in the media, they are actually two different things that are metabolized by your body in two different ways.

But that’s not all you have to watch out for. Because whenever “sugars” are in the hot seat, the answer to the problem always seems to be diet drinks.

In San Francisco, thanks to the city’s new soda tax, the local Costco store now serves only artificially sweetened beverages. And at this point, these fakes are well-known for promoting weight gain and being linked to side effects such as cancer, heart attacks, stroke, and dementia.

So, diet drinks are by no means a safe swap!

Perhaps one day, some kind of notice will appear on these syrupy sodas, just as it did on cigarettes.

But for that warning to mean anything, it will have to say “Danger: This product contains HFCS. Don’t touch it with a 10-foot pole!”

“Feds studying adding warning labels to soda” Elizabeth Harrington, April 25, 2018, The Washington Free Beacon, freebeacon.com