Over 130,000 cases of diabetes now linked to soda and high fructose corn syrup consumption

Glad my family has been HFCS free for 2 years now.

wow

hmmm... I wonder how much is linked to weed. i wonder what those statistics could possibly be. lol i don't drink that carbonated crap in the first place. tea, juice, water and "other" drinks for me :D

i got non-insulin dependent diabetes from steroid treatments and iv'e had to cut sugar out. there isn't a lot of drink choices in the markets. my doctors have banned diet sweeteners and i don't drink milk. making my own drinks is o.k. but when i'm out and at a 7-11 the only choices are water and coffee. there need be more healthy choices.

my grandpa taught me to make a number of teas from local shrubs but the best is lemon verbenia (vervain). it is delicious, minty, but it does need a little sweetening.

sweetening without sugar can be done by combining cinnamon and orange.

now i understand why my mom banned this stuff from our house

Don't buy any drink or anything for that matter that contains ASPARTAME, drinks which contain ASPARTAME need to be outlawed... Ask you doctor about ASPARTAME! ;-)

but mountain dew is my friend!

It is absolutely not natural because the corn kernels that they use to make the high fructose corn syrup is all genetically modified. 50 years ago people drank soda and the diabetes epidemic was never this bad. It is because the soda had real sugar and people ate real food back then. I don't think it is all related to soda though. Everything has high fructose corn syrup now a days, even bread, so I don't think it is just soda.

not a surprise, but it goes both ways!

the soda and high fructose corn syrup is reaallly bad, but the consumer is very much uneducated and unaware of a lot when it comes to health and the adverse health effects that can come from too much artificial sugar.

also, juice can definitely be bad, but there are plenty of 100% organic and additive-free options that aren't the same as all of the common brands we see with HFCS or added sugar or preservatives.
the argument comes from the fact that sugar and calories are still in juice, right? there is a difference between the added sugar and the naturally occurring sugars in fruit. they each are metabolized differently. pure juice, simply produced and consumed, isn't the same as soda or regular juice drinks.

juice can be consumed in moderation, soda needn't be consumed by anyone, and people need to know about being healthier and make the changes, that's all there is to it.

Leave me and my pepsi alone.

Soda may be partly blame but simply cutting back on mountian dew or even giving it up all togather is not going to solve anything. You can quit drinking soda but youd still get plenty of unneeded sugar and calories from juice drinks and junk food

The soda companies and soda are't the only ones to blame (and they may not even deserve the biggest blame).

One of the main reasons HFCS is used over sugar in the US is because HFCS is cheaper. Why is it cheaper? The price of corn is artificially lowered due to a large amount of government subsidies given to corn growers, and the price of sugar is artificially inflated due to tariffs and quotas on sugar. In other words, you can thank the US government for the large scale switch from sugar to HFCS in the US.

Another issue here is most Americans are tragically uneducated (or miseducated) about nutrition (and fitness, which go together hand in hand). I know this article is about soda and HFCS, but I think most people are aware that soda isn't great for you (even if they're not exactly sure why), so it doesn't make for a good example. JUICE, on the other hand, does.

Many people believe that drinking juice is healthy, the more the better, and that a glass juice is equivalent to a serving of fruit. The reality is most juice is nearly as bad for you as soda, especially in the quantities it is typically drank in (much larger than the 8oz recommended serving that you see on the labels). Juice contains more calories per ounce than soda and contains a high amount of fructose (hello type 2 diabetes and heart disease). Yes, juice does contain some vitamins, minerals, and (if you drink the pulp) some fiber, but this doesn't come close to outweighing the downsides to juice consumption. For comparison, dissolving a vitamin C pill in a can of soda does not make drinking the soda a healthy choice. An actual piece of fruit has more nutrients and less sugar per calorie than juice made from that fruit. Making juice is basically concentrating the least healthy part of the fruit and throwing out the most healthy part.

There is a lot of hate for the soda industry out there, but to me it looks like the juice industry is even more sneaky and deceptive.

The final piece of the puzzle is the consumers themselves. As I mentioned earlier, I think most people are aware that soda is an unhealthy choice, yet many still drink a lot of it anyway because they like the taste and feeling it provides. The same goes for a lot of other unhealthy foods and drinks out there. I'd estimate that well over half of the floor space at a grocery store like Safeway is occupied by unhealthy foods. Why? Because the grocery store is trying to maximize profits and the best way to do this is to provide what their customer's demand. If their point-of-sales data showed large trends toward more healthy options, they'd adjust they're shelve space allocation to reflect the trend. If their revenue started dropping because people were shopping elsewhere to buy more healthy products, they'd have a marketing team on it to figure out what products they were missing and adjust their offerings accordingly.

Similarly, if people stopped buying soda for health reasons, a company like Coca Cola would devote more of their resources to developing healthier products.

Some previous posters in this thread (and the article itself) are placing the blame entirely on "evil" soda companies, but I think it really comes down to the consumer's lack of education on nutrition, the consumer's conscious decision to sacrifice health for taste, or the consumer's lack of self control.

Here's a question for anyone. Would soda be any more healthy if it had sugar (as in sucrose, the way it used to) or is fructose in corn still better?

they're trying to kill us...

And Katie Couric just did a report on CBS stroking the Corn Refiners Association. Just like the oil and tobacco companies, it's all about profit.

in canada we use sugar instead of HFCS in sodas

"High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is totally natural and completely harmless."

Ah, the "natural" argument. If one really stops and thinks about it, saying that something is natural adds absolutely nothing to an argument and tells one nothing about the safety of a compound. Curare and botulism toxin are "natural" -- they must be safe right? I'm so sick of people making stupid arguments, and even more sick of people accepting them as valid. There are numerous papers that reveal the dangers of HFCS.

Consuming sugar in itself DOES NOT cause diabetes. However, having said that, obesity does cause diabetes. So, if you consume process foods and foods high in sugar and do not exercise you can become obese (fat) and that may lead to diabetes.

With the health care debate raging, and diabetes being an expensive cost to the system I can see why people are trying to alter our diets. We truly are becoming an obese society.

Just visit Europe for a few weeks and then travel back to the U.S. and you will be shocked at how obese we truly are.

Sons of bitches, there is a place in someones hell for these company's.

Only 130,000 cases, I'm sure if they really checked it would be in the millions.

*gasp* No way!

Yes, great rule to employ in making a profit while making people sick.

HMM, corn syrup made from BT corn?

Correlation is not causation. First rule we learned in stats class.