Per earlier threads on food culture in Korea as compared to the West, I am glad it does not include diet sodas.
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Per earlier threads on food culture in Korea as compared to the West, I am glad it does not include diet sodas.
18 Comments
A big, big caveat about health research studies: correlation does not prove causation. There are good reasons not to consume regular or diet sodas: carcinogic perservative sodium benzene, mineral-robbing phosphoric acid and caffeine, neurotoxic artificial sweeteners, HFCS, which is converted by the liver into harmful triglycerides and in high amounts is damaging to the liver itself. I suspect that the correlation between diet soda consumption and obesity and metabolic syndrome owes mostly to the fact that people who drink diet sodas and other diet foods tend to make up the calories elsewhere. At work, there is a woman at least eighty pounds overweight; every day she brings a Lean Cuisine for lunch. Those frozen entrees are unsatisfying because the tiny portions taste like crap. I’d like to see what else she eats during the day.
“A big, big caveat about health research studies: correlation does not prove causation.”
The study’s authors address that:
Yes, they did in the final sentence of the article, and other studies correlating consumption of diet foods with obesity and weight gain have offered similar suppositions. People often read only headlines or just skim the text, so I wanted to make that clear.
I found the results of this health study interesting:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....Wu2YzVJRIF
According to Dutch health researchers, healthy people spend more on health care than smokers or the obese, owing to high health care costs in the last years of life. The study notes that lung cancer patients tend to die rather quickly and thus don’t cost that much to treat.
. . . meaning a lifetime of unwise habits accumulates sometime in the future.
R.Elgin,
In your brief post, you used the pronoun “it”. Can you clarify what “it” is you are referring to? Also, could you link the earlier threads you referred to.
“it” meaning Korean food culture.
Also search for food culture on the blog for earlier threads.
Is it me, or is mjw targeting R. Eglin, now that mins0306 has stopped posting?
You have to be mentally ill to drink either regular or diet soda.
Providing soda to your children is akin to child abuse.
Any questions ?
Sonagi #4
Many developed countries are going bunkrupt due to ever increasing health care and pension costs. Smoking should be encouraged rather than discouraged if smokers spend less on health care and die rather quickly from the viewpoint of national financial health. Or at least pension premium and health insurance premium should be decreased for those who smoke.
Why does diet soda get the lede? They studied red meat and fried foods as well. The real finding is, “quit putting crap into your body”. Too bad that’s not as sexy of a headline.
#8, no.
But let me ask you this: what would you rather have? A blogger who gives so little thought to his posts as to render them virtually unintelligible? Or thoughtful prose that benefits from the virtue of an edit or two (dare I say sober second thought)?
R.Elgin had something to say and I wanted to know what it was. So I asked and he answered. Also, I think the owner of the blog has set a good standard in terms of linking references to earlier threads. Guys like R.Elgin can follow that with ease if they take but a moment to think about what they have written before hitting the send button.
Perhaps you’d prefer mediocrity for the blogs that you frequent?
#9 My Korean relatives would say that depriving my kids of soft drinks are a form of child abuse.
I was handed a Pocari Sweat after the sauna today and while waiting for my wife (45 minutes late!!!) I was reading the list of ingredients. i assume that as in North America, they are listed in order of percentage (ie, the first items are the main ingredients). The first two ingredients are different kinds of sugars (”white” sugar and glucose, I believe.) the third was something else, and the fourth ingredient, in letters at least three times larger than all the others, was grapefruit juice. I’m betting that there is very little grapefruit juice - probably less than 5%.
I asked my brother-in-law what the main ingredients were, and he told me it was grapefruit juice (although he wasn’t sure what grapefruit was). Wrong–the main ingredients are sugar and glucose!!
Interestingly, Wikipedia does not list grapefruit juice or sugar as ingredients in Pocari Sweat, so perhaps is Pocari marketing a different drink to Koreans?
Isn’t the behavior connection rather obvious in all but the strictest scientific sense? Diet soda. Hmm. . . “I recognize that I need to watch my weight and/or take care of myself, but I won’t consider giving up sickly sweet soda pop.”
I remember (but can’t document) at least a few “shocked” news stories a few years back showing that people who ate diet cakes and chocolates still carried around more excess weight than people who didn’t. No kidding! The diet cake is aimed at, and largely purchased by, people who are looking for a way to eat junk food and desserts and magically improve their health. The story of diet soda (Type I diabetes patients aside) is the same.
Considering how expensive grapefruit juice is, your content estimate of less than 5% juice in a W600 can of Pocari Sweat is probably close to the mark. A favorite trick of US food companies is to label cranberry, blueberry, pomegranate, acai, or some other expensive juice as “100% real juice,” technically accurate as the first ingredient listed is usually apple juice, likely sourced from China, which supplies most of the apple juice concentrate for the US market.
Frankly, mjw, I don’t care. I don’t have all the time in the world to read every post in this blog and pick them apart for issues that are so minor that one wonders why one bothers with them in the first place. However for you, it looks like time is something that you have in abundance.
Also keep in mind that the guest blogger does not get paid for his/her posts, is, unlike Robert, not a trained journalist, is expressing how he/she feels about a certain issue while not thinking about the reaction he/she will get from the commentators in regards to something that he/she is posting. Now is that so wrong? I think not. Besides if one does not like a certain post, one doesn’t have to read and comment on it. Unless of course one has nothing better to do during a holiday evening, but to sit down at the computer and pick apart guest blogger posts.
Get a life, mjw.
Correction:
is expressing -> and expressing
Don’t you just love pseudo science?