Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling (Kindle Single)
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Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling (Kindle Single)
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Locavore U.S.A.: How a local-food economy is changing one community, a chapter from the book Change Comes to Dinner
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Calories make you fat, but sugary calories make you fat and diabetic
Calories make you fat, but sugary calories make you fat and diabetic
Pick your poison.
Drink a can of sugary soda every day, increase your chance of developing diabetes by 1.1 percent.
Drink two cans a day, instead of none, and your risk increases by 2.2 percent.
That was the sobering and very specific conclusion of an exhaustive worldwide study of diets, obesity rates, and Type 2 diabetes: For every 150 calories of sugar that a person wolfs down every day, whether that sugar was squeezed out of sugar cane, beets, or corn, that person becomes 1.1 percent more likely to develop the disease. Type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease caused by lifestyle; type 1 is genetic.
A 12-ounce can of soda typically harbors about 150 sugary calories (which scientists, including the authors of the new study, confusingly call kilocalories). Many candy bars contain more calories than that, though not all from sugar.
The Californian scientists who conducted the 175-nation study, published this week in PLOS ONE, showed that it is not merely the amount of calories in somebody’s diet that affects whether they are likely to develop diabetes. It’s where they get their calories from. New Zealanders, for example, are growing more obese yet fewer of them are developing diabetes. That’s because they’re getting their extra calories from such things as oil, meat, and fiber, not from sugar.
The scientists concluded that those other sources of calories do not increase diabetes rates. Well maybe a tiny bit, but not to an extent regarded as statistically significant. That means that somebody with a big appetite but an aversion to sugar could become obese without becoming a candidate for daily dates with needle-tipped insulin pens. It also means that sugar junkies are putting themselves at risk both of becoming obese, with the myriad health complications that brings, and also of developing diabetes. From the study:
Sugars added to processed food, in particular the monosaccharide fructose, can contribute to obesity, but also appear to have properties that increase diabetes risk independently from obesity.
The study was the icing on the cake for theories that sugar is toxic. As columnist Mark Bittman wrote in The New York Times:
The study demonstrates [that sugar, not obesity, causes diabetes] with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”
Bittman thinks the findings should prompt the federal government to do something about the poison that is sugar:
The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list, because that’s what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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Calories make you fat, but sugary calories make you fat and diabetic
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Pesticides are killing off America’s birds
Pesticides are killing off America’s birds
Flickr:
This adorable burrowing owl could be killed by agricultural pesticides.
Q: How are burrowing owls like honeybees?
A: Both are being inadvertently slaughtered by massive applications of pesticides.
OK, so that wasn’t a funny joke, although it might have been nuanced enough to land me a job at The Onion. And truth be told, it wasn’t actually a joke.
A study published in the online journal PLOS ONE finds that the use of pesticides is the leading cause of a decline in grassland bird species in North America. From the Twin Cities Pioneer Press outdoors blog:
The loss of habitat is real in the corn belt, as are its potential effects on a host of grassland bird species, some hunted, some not.
But a new study concludes that declines of such birds, from the ring-necked pheasant to the horned lark, are more the result of pesticide use than any other factor, including habitat decline.
While the deadly links between pesticide use and bees have been widely reported in recent years, leading some European countries to suspend the use of certain products, less attention has been paid to the devastating effects of the poisons on bird populations. Species of owls, sparrows, and meadowlarks are on the long list of American farm-dwelling birds that are disappearing in part because they’re sucking down any of more than 100 types of pesticides. The pesticides also take a toll by killing the insects that the birds would eat.
The study “reminds us that the poisonings of birds and other wildlife chronicled a half century ago by famed biologist and author Rachel Carson are by no means a thing of the past,” Cynthia Palmer of the American Bird Conservancy said in a statement.
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