Cheery News About Bread; About Fructose, Not So Much
If It’s White, Take No Bite; If It’s Brown, Chow It Down
From the world of bread, good news and less good news. The good news is that whole wheat bread has surpassed white processed bread in sales for the first time since they started slicing the product. Thanks to a growing concern among bread-buyers with health, fiber and general nutrition — and labels urgently proclaiming “whole grain!” and “natural!” — wheat bread sales rose 0.6 percent last year to a total of $2.6 billion, while white bread sales fell by 7 percent to $2.5 billion.
The less jolly news is that this triumph of healthy eating is tempered by the fact that whole grain breads are premium-priced, and that the overall physical amount of white bread sold still topped that of the wheat variety, 1.5 billion packages to 1.3 billion. Still, that’s a decrease of 3 percent for the white stuff and a 5 percent rise for the brown. Progress!
On the Bright Side, It Won’t Make Your Face Fall Off
High fructose corn syrup has been on the receiving end of so much bad press and so many negative research findings lately that it has become the veritable al-Qaeda of food additives. About the only thing that could worsen HFCS’s image now would be if it actually fueled the growth of cancer cells.
Oops! Look here: a new report from UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center has found that pancreatic cancer cells use fructose in a special way, differently than they metabolize glucose or other sugar forms. Specifically, tumor cells are energized by fructose, spurred to increase their rate of growth and proliferation.
This isn’t the first study to discern a connection between fructose consumption and pancreatic cancer — a particularly lethal form of the disease — but it’s the first to explain the process by which the former actually contributes to the latter. The study also creates an unpleasant PR problem for the American Beverage Association, which for economic reasons has resolutely defended fructose time and again with a “sugar is just sugar” party line.
Well, no, it isn’t just sugar to a cancer cell, and therefore not just sugar to anyone susceptible to pancreatic cancer, and that’s a lot of us. Possible links between fructose consumption and other forms of cancer have not yet been thoroughly researched, and the sugar, snack and soda industries probably hope intensely that they won’t be.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):
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