Why Do Doctors Ignore 500-Pound Gorillas?

Bette Dowdell

Medical research is beginning to look more and more like an old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie. A problem rears its ugly head, our plucky protagonists put on a show, the amazingly talented cast of friends and neighbors sings and dances its way to the finale'after which everybody lives happily ever after.

Or maybe they rolled the credits before reality set in. That's what's happening in medicine.

Let's talk about a recent example.

Medical poobahs studied the sugary-soda-drinking habits of 61,000 volunteers in Singapore. Researchers followed up on them for fourteen years. Sounds good; large, long study. But don't roll the credits yet.

First, they don't say what 'follow up' means. Second, they don't say how they gathered the information; did they rely on what study participants happened to remember or did they actually see what was going on? And they preened that other dietary and lifestyle habits were included in the study, but neglected to mention what they were.

By now your agenda antenna should be fully extended.

But the sloppiness of the study pales beside its target. Sugary sodas? I don't think so. Nowadays soda is chock-a-block full of high fructose corn syrup'with nary a grain of sugar in sight. Anybody with a hint of a clue about how our bodies handle these two very different substances would never say high fructose corn syrup and sugar were the same.

Anyway, they concluded that drinking more than two sugary sodas a week greatly increased your chances of pancreatic cancer, which, when you read the numbers, meant ten cases a year. This is huge in a study of 61,000 people? Not so much


And they reached their conclusion before discovering the real villain! The 500-pound gorilla that seems to escape their attention!

It's not 'sugary soda,' but high fructose corn syrup that causes disease. Write that on stone. Take it to the bank. HFCS is bad, bad, bad. And it's everywhere, not just in soda. Sugar's certainly not a health food, but HFCS is a disaster!

As the study suggested, in a round-about way, HFCS is hard on the pancreas. As well as other body parts.

Here's the deal: Every cell in our body knows what to do with sugar, but not one of them can figure out how to handle HFCS. The body responds to alien substances by throwing them in its garbage disposal unit, the liver.

Like all garbage disposal units, the liver has load limits'which even one can of HFCS-laden soda exceeds.

That's when the pancreas'and the rest of the endocrine system'takes a hit. Yes, pancreatic cancer can result, but it has to get in line with pancreatitis, Type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, fatigue and obesity. Along with the miscellaneous aches and pains of a whacked out endocrine system.

So don't blame soda alone. Check all labels for HFCS and avoid it. Your health will thank you.

And in case you're wondering, aspartame is even worse. It beats up on the brain as well as the endocrine system.