A Natural Bias

I was watching Isabel de Los Rios' video blog about high fructose corn syrup. She's the creator of the popular Diet Solution Program. She's passionate about her product, and about good nutrition. I like her articles and her blogs but I have to take exception to her latest rant against chemicals.



Her first countercharge is that HFCS is not the same as natural sugar, or sucrose. She admits that HFCS is somewhat natural because it's derived from corn, but it goes through so much processing that it becomes a chemical. Thus, when we eat HFCS, we are ingesting chemicals (along with the thousands of other chemicals that are floating around in our body.) She calls HFCS a "toxin", a claim she doesn't back up.



She says HFCS and table sugar (a disaccharide) are not the same. In fact, they contain very similar amounts of glucose and fructose (monosaccharides). I'll tell you something: the effects of eating too much of either are the same. As I've said before, ingesting a lot of sugar, as natural as it is, will lead to rapid fat gain. De Los Rios admits, "even if they were the same, sugar is horrible for you too."

Here's the best part. She refutes the charge that HFCS and honey are the same. She says honey is "natural" and made by bees, while HFCS is made by evil chemists.


Her second and third charges completely contradict each other. She says we should avoid sugar on one hand, but then she says honey is a wonderful natural product. What is honey? Honey is straight sugar! One tablespoon has 15 carbohydrates. It's also very high on the glycemic load index (a measure that takes into account the volume of food as well as the rise in blood sugar). As natural as it is, it's still sugar, and humans were never designed to consume large amounts of honey. Our ancestors were rarely able to obtain it. There were no teddy-bear-shaped containers of honey back then.


De Los Rios is not really attacaking HFCS at all. In fact, she's part of a wider campaign to discredit anything that is not considered natural or organic. Anything man-made is bad, while everything from nature is good. Honey and sugar are good because they're natural, while Splenda, HFCS, and all the millions of other chemicals are bad


Is natural necessarily better? No. Honey is a concentrated source of sugar that should only be used in small quantities. The bees that produce honey can injure or kill people. Swine Flu is natural too. So is the common cold. Nature can be a brutal, nasty place. Humans used to die after 30 or 40 years. But in our "toxic" and man-made environment, we're living twice as long.

And what about medicine? If we aren't supposed to ingest chemicals, then I suppose we should never take man-made medicine. Instead, we should only use herbs and natural remedies from Andrew Weil's books to solve our medical problems.


Just 40-50 years ago everyone believed in "better living through chemistry." Man could perfect the world through the wonders of technology. At some point, chemistry and man-made chemicals become synonomous with evil. It was seen as tampering with nature. Natural now means good and benign.


Life is never so simple. We cannot create such simple distinctions. It's like saying some foods are "bad" and some are "good." In fact, some foods are only good until a certain point, and some are only bad beyond a certain point. We need to discard black-and-white thinking.


I think the natural movement is a testament to how spoiled we are. We have so many conveniences, comforts, and features these days that we forget how much they have actually improved our lives. The people who attack "man-made" chemicals or products fail to realize how much they benefit from the marvels of the modern world. Almost all of them use You Tube and laptops, drive cars, have iPods, expensive TVs, cell phones, and use the internet on a consistent basis. None of them actually live "naturally."

If they want to live naturally, they can. They just shouldn't expect to live as long or send text messages.

Kevin