I'm not perfect, not even close. Every day (o.k., maybe not every day, but sometimes) I make choices to eat carbs that I shouldn't or have sugar instead of Stevia or eat corn in a taco salad or tortilla chips with dip. These things are not good for me at all, and I know this, and yet I eat it anyway. I really don't know why except maybe that it's a habit that I am working to break. (I even eat chocolate, that's my weakness.)
Needless to say, because I said it already, I'm not perfect and although I know all of this health information, and am learning new things every day, I still don't apply it to my life all the time. So, like I mentioned in previous posts, I am not trying to tell you (reader) how to run your life, but rather just let you know exactly what you are putting in your body. After all, your body is your sanctuary, you have to live with it all the time, so you might as well treat is with respect so you don't wake up in the morning with a headache because you drank/ate too much the night before and now your body is in a "food coma." Or, better labeled, a sugar coma.
Allow me to explain my sugar coma idea. I'm going to take you down memory lane for a moment, so come with me. Imagine that you are at Thanksgiving dinner in Texas. That might be hard for some of you since you might not have been to Texas, but no worries, I will describe the wonderful feast you are about to consume. There is Turkey (of course) maybe even venison, which is very tasty deer meat, corn bread, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn stuffing, green bean casserole, corn, and of course pumpkin pie with ice cream and whipped cream. Yum Yum
You eat this wonderful meal, consuming a scoop or piece of everything, because it smells sooo good, then you sleep for three hours and wake up right at the beginning of the Dallas Coyboys playing... well, it really doesn't matter because it's the Dallas Coyboys.
Why do you sleep for three hours after eating that food? Hmmm, people blame it on the turkey, but if you eat three pieces of turkey for a snack from the fridge it certainly doesn't have the same effect on you. So what is it?
I know the answer; I was just asking a question for dramatic effect.
Looking back at the ingredients of the dinner, excluding the meat, green beans and desert items, you are eating carbohydrates and starches. This is very important in that I did not mention corn as a vegetable, and that's because it isn't. Corn is a grain. This is the point where I would direct you to the video I posted on this blog, but I think the video is protected so I'm giving you the link. It's a video from the Discovery Channel on the making of corn. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom and move over the black screen it is a 3 minute video that's incredibly informative. Basically, the video talks about the fact that corn, as we know it today, is all carbohydrates and is a man made plant originated from a grass in Central Mexico. It is grown as any other grain and it can make bread, like any other grain. The yellow pieces of a corn are like the leaves of a barley stalk or a wheat stalk. Just because you take the leaves off of a barley stalk, cook it and call it a vegetable doesn't mean it is a vegetable. That's the same idea with corn.
In 2004 Kim Severson writes in sfgate.com that:
The process of pulling sugar from cornstarch wasn't perfected until the early 1970s, when Japanese researchers developed a reliable way to turn cornstarch into syrup sweet enough to compete with liquid sugar. After some tinkering, they landed on a formula that was 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose -- sweet enough and cheap enough to make most soda companies jump from liquid sugar to high fructose corn syrup by the 1980s.
This basically says that high fructose is directly from corn itself, leaving the idea that the sugar from corn (fructose) has the same affect on the body no matter which way it is consumed. The overall choices to eat a high starch and high carbohydrate diet, including corn, are not good for weight loss or even weight stabilization. The nap and the 7 pounds you gained from that Thanksgiving dinner have nothing to do with the turkey, rather with all of the starch and carbohydrates.
Next week I am excited to talk about this crazy thing called “ceriel rust” that grows on wheat stalks and what researchers are trying to do to prevent the halt of revenue for farmers in the United States.
