Why Are We Fat and Ill? The Answer's in the Coca-Cola

Well, I must say, we've really managed to screw ourselves over in this country food-wise. Left and right there's tainted meat and salmonella-laced lettuce, BPA-lined cans and chemically enhanced food-like products that will give you "anal oil leakage."

Now there's evidence that the reason for our obesity epidemic is that something we consume a lot of — at least 60 pounds a year — is actively damaging our ability to stay healthy. Yes, my friends, apparently high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) alters our body chemistry, causing it to grow more fat cells around vital organs and to spark early stages of diabetes and heart disease.

The problem isn't just that we consume too much of the corny sweetener — though surely we do — it's that HFCS actually damages human metabolisms in ways that promote the specific problems we've got.

In a UC Davis study, sixteen volunteers ate a diet with high levels of fructose for 10 weeks, during which time new fat cells sprung up around their hearts, livers and other digestive organs and their bodies developed symptoms of impaired food-processing associated with diabetes and heart disease. The control group, on the same diet, but consuming glucose sugar in place of fructose, showed no signs of these abnormalities.

I thought the market was supposed to respond to consumers' demand, but since when did we all demand to be poisoned in eighteen different ways? I, for one, plan to think twice next time I feel like an ice-cold Coke.

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng