For the longest time, I had an idea that I should be eating more natural foods and fewer processed foods, but I didn't know why exactly. Sure, there were additives in food, but "they need to be there to make them shelf stable, right?" Certainly, they'd do research to ensure ingredients were safe for human consumption before putting it into our food!
This isn't always the case. In fact, often times, ingredients are very bad for humans. Here are a couple ingredients to avoid at all costs.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
A study linked high fructose corn syrup (hfcs) to diabetes. There are quite a few countries that have little to no hfcs in their food supply while other countries have a lot of it. This study demonstrated that countries with hfcs had a 20% higher rate of diabetes.
There's a big difference between correlation and causation. Couldn't the diabetes be happening for other reasons?
The researchers said:
There were no overall differences in total sugars or total calories between countries that did and didn’t use high-fructose corn syrup, suggesting that there’s an independent relationship between high-fructose corn syrup and diabetes.
Michael Goran, PhD says:
There are lots of other aspects of the way fructose is handled by the body which are different than glucose that make it metabolically dangerous for the body,
It's a bit more complicated than that, though, Goran states. There's fructose in fruit, but the body handles that fructose just fine. Perhaps because its absorption is slowed by the fiber in the fruit whereas, when refined into a syrup there is no fiber.
Aspartame
There was a study performed in which 200 rats were followed from 8 weeks old until they died of natural causes. The rats were exposed to various levels of aspartame which were measured to be similar to human exposure. They were then autopsied immediately following their death.
The results were that the rats who were exposed to more aspartame had higher levels of a wide array of cancers.
There are people who dispute this study and claim that aspartame has been proven safe many times. My personal opinion is that it takes a lot more evidence to prove that something is safe than to prove it's dangerous.
I don't want to take the chance, so I'll use other sources for my sweeteners, like honey.