Who here reads packaged food/drink ingredients list regularly?

If you disagree with a post, it might be helpful to state why. Anyway I'm out of this conversation.

How can I state why I disagreed when I only disagreed for the sake of disagreeing and looking cool?

Like I said, I made an uneducated statement about HFCS and was made aware of my baseless bias by someone with more knowledge on the topic.

What the hell do you want me to say? He won, he convinced me. I have never had any concrete reasons for disliking HFCS... I even went to Wikipedia to find some sources to back up my claim that HFCS is bad for you, but I saw the relevant section of the article is marked as biased. So I came back here and admitted I was wrong and uninformed.

Me saying HFCS is bad because it doesn't occur in nature is just as stupid and ridiculous an argument as when I was arguing that the Japanese whalers should quit their day job because whales were "majestic" creatures. :lol: Clearly I'm an idiot! This isn't sarcasm my friend... this asshole has finally woken up and realized he should just stick to threads which don't require fact checking or debating skills.
 
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OK, maybe it's just me, but I can't tell if you're being serious. I can't tell if your previous posts are serious. You say everything in a completely sarcastic way, then you deny sarcasm, so I guess I'll take your words at face value and leave it at that. I apologize if I overreacted.
 
So ... since I am German, I once dug up the nutrition information from the McDonalds website and made one huge chart which compares all the McD products. Turns out you can change the total amout of garbage you consume there by altering a couple of things. Let's see what this is about and then make two examples (this is based on the German McDonalds, the products and their sizes may vary for your country).

It boils down to this: the main burgers all are pretty much identical in total calorie count, sugar and fat. Sure there are better ones and worse ones, but they all circle around 500 kcal, so you can pretty much choose what you want. There are exceptions such as the 20 pcs. ChickenMcNuggets (855 kcal), but you can simply choose a smaller size and are good to go. Now, the side dishes are a problem: french fries are bad. The large fries have as many kcal as the burgers and an assload of fat and even sugar (whereever that comes from). The beverages are obvious: all the lemonades are heavy on sugar Water, apple spritzer and coke light are okay. If you need to have a sauce, take the ketchup. It contains some sugar, but less than any of the other sauces. For desert, either take the fruit bag, the fruit&yogurt or the McSundae. The latter obviously has sugar, but the serving is so small that it's better than all the other things. And if you must have breakfast at the golden arches, take one of the scrambled egg variants - not good, but better than all the breakfast burger crap.

So, let's crunch some numbers. Let's assume I go to McDonalds and order...

1. A large McMenu BigMac with french fries, extra mayonnaise, a 0.5l coke and a McFlurry Smarties for dessert
When I'm done, I have comsumed 1,730 kcal, 77g of fat and 216g of sugar.

2. A large McMenu BigMac with the Garden Salad (Balsamico Dressing), a 0.5l coke light and a McSundae for dessert
When I'm done, I have comsumed 650 kcal, 31g of fat and 63g of sugar.

Now, according to the GDA, a man should consume around 2,500 kcal, 80g of fat and 110g of sugar per day. With #1, I have - with this one meal - consumed 70% of my recommended daily calorie input, have almost done 100% fat and exceeded my sugar input by almost twice of what I should do. With #2, I am well within specs and can still have breakfast and dinner without too much hassle.

Of course, going to McD never is healthy to begin with. But with changes such as the above, you can make the best of it. It may not be as tasty overall, but it makes one hell of a difference.
 
At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, which it isn't meant to be, virtually everything we eat is cooked from scratch using fresh (or at least singular eg tinned chopped tomatoes) ingredients.

I'm the same way myself, I rarely eat anything out of a package. I do end up eating very simply because of this however, because the effort (and cost, i.e. to spend $5 on a type of spice that I'll use once and forget it exists) in making a complex dish from scratch is usually not something I'm willing to do. I almost never eat out. When I do, I'm not very daring when I pick from the menu.
 
Full disclosure, I do work for Coke, but I much prefer the taste of Mexican Coke, Fanta, or the Throwbacks.

The hard part is there is a lot of bullshit out there. It's hard to sift through all the studies and use what is caustically proven and what is linked to this and that. I think the real problem with HFCS is the cost (and subsidies), it is dirt cheap and you can pump a lot into food without people caring. When I go to the grocery store there is the Produce, Meat, and Dairy departments and then about 10 aisles packed with nothing but simple carbs. It's not a chemical problem, but simply a problem of over-consumption. Not to say there aren't bad things in food, but most specific problems stem from immoderation with a particular food, ie. hormones, Splenda, mercury in fish.

As a society we can't pigeon hole a single trigger for obesity because there are a million choices. The diet industry is more about fancy marketing than any sound nutrition advice, and that makes it all the worse. Accessibility to sugar laden foods is at a all time high, and most of that is HFCS because of the cost-effectiveness. More sugar just tastes better.
 
That's probably why I'm able to stay as thin as I am, I really don't like eating anything that tastes sweet except for fresh fruit. I like most of my food to taste light and refreshing, so I eat a lot of salads and fresh fruit, I think about the heaviest snack I eat regularly is celery sticks with peanut butter.
 
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