Given all the talk lately about drinking fructose water — which was triggered by the New York Times magazine piece by Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — I thought that it would be helpful to those interested readers out there to offer some reading material to folks thinking about embarking upon Seth Robert’s self-created diet.
As I’ve written about twice already on this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog — first here and then here — UC Berkeley professor Seth Roberts conducted some self-experimentation and came up with his own diet, which he credits with helping him to lose and keep off 40 pounds.
What concerns me, as I’ve indicated, is that for his diet, Roberts drank several tablespoonfuls of sugar water (first fructose and then sucrose) to either lose, or keep the weight off. He also took several spoonfuls of canola oil at intervals throughout the day.
So, I urge those of you thinking of adding fructose beverage breaks, to do some exploration first. Here are two recommendations.
First, I’d heartily recommend Greg Critser’s well-reviewed, incisively reported expose, Fat Land, which includes (among other things) a fascinating account of how the abundance of cheap corn led scientists to develop the inexpensive fructose and high fructose corn syrup, which, he claims, contributed to our nation’s obesity epidemic. (I’m re-reading Fat Land this weekend, and I suggest some of you do so too.)
Secondly, I’d suggest reading this article about high fructose corn syrup. It’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, and kudos to Kim Severson of the San Francisco Chronicle for her excellent reporting.
Make sure to see this particular section of Severson’s piece. She’s writing about Critser’s book, Fatland.
Critser writes that despite the food industry’s arguments that sugar is sugar, whether fructose or sucrose, no group "has yet refuted the growing scientific concern that, when all is said and done, fructose … is about the furthest thing from natural that one can imagine, let alone eat."
(By the way, the article seems correct in all its assertions other than its misleading definition of the term, fructose.)
More later.