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IMO, noone who wants a healthy diet should ever drink soda or anything containing high-fructose corn syrup or indeed, any other processed junk.

+1

I was at the gym last night and two girls working for Red Bull were handing out free samples of their product. I did my best to educate them.

I mentioned high fructose corn syrup to them but they had no idea what I was talking about (and Red Bull over here just uses sugar). I have since learned that there's a very low production quota of HFCS here in the EU (but it not low for health reasons).

The one girl asked me what I do if my sugar level is a little low and I start getting light headed, no doubt asked as a way to give sugar drinks a more positive light.

I just said I eat an apple. Yea, well apples have sugar. Yea, but they also have fiber which helps to keep the sugar level in my blood from spiking. ... and so on

I went out for a date with a guy who I thought had "class",

Everyone is predisposed to gaining weight - if they are surrounded by plenty, which we are now. 20 years ago, there were hardly any obese people in China: go to Beijing and see what it's like now. Not quite as bad as in USA and UK, but they're catching up very quickly. The same for the big rich cities in otherwise poor countries (including all African countries). The genes haven't changed - it' the environment that has. But homo sapiens haven't adapted: it now requires an effort (controlling the amount we eat) to stay slim.

piano joy, I'm not a health nut but it does seem odd that only humans continue to drink milk beyond childhood ... and the milk isn't even from our own species. I never gave that any thought until I started reading about nutrition.

I have little time for the anti-refined-sugar crowd. So little of it has any real basis in science.

It's not really convenient for other species to do that, is it?

Apart from the milk indistry, I wonder why we do it.

Over 60% of the world's population are lactose intolerant, i.e. they've lost the capacity to digest milk sugar soon after they're weaned. In other words, for most of the world, cow/goat/sheep/anyone else's milk isn't a normal part of the human diet, just as milk from another species isn't a normal part of any other animal species' diet. Evolution over millenia, after farming of cattle etc became prevalent, allowed humans of European ancestry (and a few other parts of the world) to retain the capacity to digest lactose into adulthood.

But milk contains a high percentage of saturated fat, which leads to high cholesterol and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. Humans still haven't evolved to cope with this problem......

I don't think the rise in obesity means that people are predisposed to gaining weight - it just means that if the environment and culture changes in certain ways, the general population will gain weight. But that is not a predisposition to gain weight, genetically speaking.

Said differently - if eating a lot of junk makes a person fat, it may be because they are eating junk, rather than because they have some predisposition towards weight gain.

I saw an interesting documentary once where they recreated a historical (and controversial) experiment in which a group of people increased their daily calorie intake from normal to more than triple for several weeks, including all sorts of junk food they wouldn't normally eat. In both experiments, the results were that a few people gained a lot of weight, a few people put on an inch or two around the waist, and a few saw no changes to their body whatsoever.

I saw that programme too. It was not a proper controlled experiment - the subjects were free to get on with their normal lives, which made all the difference between how much weight they put on, and how they put it on.

If subjects were made to eat all their meals in front of the experimenters and their exercise routines monitored, and they stayed under surveillance throughout the experimental period, the results would be much more valid.

Unfortunately, many so-called 'studies' are flawed in this way, which is why the food industry can 'justify' themselves so easily. And, not to put too fine a point on it, why so many people can claim that their weight problem is due to 'low metabolism' or something similar (rather than eating too much).....