That thud you heard yesterday ... was me falling off of the HFCS wagon

Twice. Yes, sometimes you need a Coca-Cola -- like when nothing else will sit in your stomach.

I have been fighting a strange bug for the last couple of days that's got my stomach churning and my head swimming. I feel very sorry for my online students yesterday afternoon. They must have been sitting at their desks saying, "What did she just say?" as I rambled along. I'm a little scared to send out my post-class evaluation ....

Can I still have a cheeseburger if I leave off the ketchup?

I recently decided to try to lose a little weight and get in better shape. For the first time in many years, we actually have a beach vacation planned months in advance. Usually we decide on a Thursday to go to Rehoboth Beach, which is about 3 hours away, but this time we've already rented a place in Provincetown for a week in May. And I am not too proud to say that getting in shape now is motivated totally and completely by vanity.

Now I'm not talking about being any "biggest loser." I'm in relatively good shape already. In fact when I've said to friends and colleagues that I want to lose a little weight, their response is usually "oh, you don't need to lose any weight!" My doctor disagrees. I went for a physical recently, and all was good, except when she asked if I was exercising much. I said yes, and that I was hoping to lose about 20 pounds. She smiled a little and said "Yeah, well 15 would be really good."

Now, I love good food. I love butter and all things dairy. I enjoy a good steak, and almost more enjoy a really good cheeseburger. With a cold pint of ale. Sigh. So in addition to spending a lot of time with my new best friend, the elliptical trainer, I'm trying to change my eating habits. And one thing I'm trying to do is cut down ny intake of processed foods, and cut out foods that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Although HFCS has been a boon to food manufacturers, the effects on the human body are still somewhat murky. As one writer says:

But there's another reason to avoid HFCS. Consumers may think that because it contains fructose--which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food--that it is healthier than sugar.

A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered that this just ain't so.

Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy--that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.

And to put it in a more practical way:

"One of the issues is the ease with which you can consume this stuff," says Carol Porter, director of nutrition and food services at UC San Francisco. "It's not that fructose itself is so bad, but they put it in so much food that you consume so much of it without knowing it."

A single 12-ounce can of soda has as much as 13 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup. And because the amount of soda we drink has more than doubled since 1970 to about 56 gallons per person a year, so has the amount of high fructose corn syrup we take in. In 2001, we consumed almost 63 pounds of it, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA suggests most of us limit our intake of added sugar -- that's everything from the high fructose corn syrup hidden in your breakfast cereal to the sugar cube you drop into your after-dinner espresso -- to about 10 to 12 teaspoons a day. But we're not doing so well. In 2000, we ate an average of 31 teaspoons a day, which was more than 15 percent of our caloric intake. And much of that was in sweetened drinks.

In other words, it's everywhere! It's in my Snapple -- it's even in my ketchup! So I'll let you know from time to time how this is all going. Meanwhile, you know that person that's always in your way at the grocery store because they're reading every word on every label? Yeah, sorry, that'd be me ....

And then the Dalai Lama appeared

Although I don't attend church regularly, I do think of myself as a very spiritual person. I know that there is some force in the universe that looks out for me, that sends me small blessings. I'm so grateful that I am aware enough to recognize them in the many forms in which they may appear.

This morning, for example. I had a physical last week, and this morning I finally got around to going for the bloodwork tests that my doctor recommended. I had to fast overnight, so I planned to go when the clinic up the road from my house opened at 7:30 am. I didn't have an appointment, but I thought that at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, it shouldn't be too too busy, and hopefully the wait for walk-ins wouldn't be bad.

Ha! Although the clinic's doors opened at 7:30, the technicians didn't start showing up until 7:50. That meant they were behind before they even began! By the time the techs started calling names from the sign-in sheet, people with appointments started showing up. They, understandably, got seen first. But it was extremely frustrating to sit and wait for an hour when there was hardly anyone there when I first arrived.

On top of the wait time, of course, was the fact that I had fasted. So low blood sugar, and -- this cannot be overemphasized -- no coffee, was putting me in a pretty sour mood. The t.v. was blaring some health program with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (the one who reported falsely about Michael Moore's film "Sicko"), with some inane story about seeing a dermatologist to treat your split ends. Then the tech called my name and I went to the window, only to have her say "Oh. Sorry. Actually there's someone before you."

Too weak from lack of food and tired from lack of caffeine to argue, my shoulders simply dropped and I turned and went back to my seat.

But suddenly on the television there appeared the Dali Lama in all his serenity. The story was about dealing with stress, and his words were manna from heaven for my tired soul. He said, there is stress that is caused by physical problems with the body, but there is stress that is caused by a problem in the "thinking process." There is no cause for the stress other than me, which means that I can control the stress. And remembering that I have the power to do that was in itself a "stress reliever."

With some deep breaths, and a promise to buy myself a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich when this was all done, I made it through until my name was called -- for real this time. And man, was that the best cup of coffee I've had in a long, long, time. I really thought about that coffee, and it was good.

Senator Dole's twisted compassion

The U.S. Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved legislation that would raise tobacco taxes to pay for expanding a children's health program, shrugging off a veto threat from President George W. Bush who wants a more limited plan.

Senator Elizabeth Dole denounced the bill, saying “Of the 20 percent of the adult population that smokes, around half are in families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In other words, many of the families SCHIP is meant to help will be disproportionately hit by the Senate’s proposed tax hike.”

Aww, she's standing up for the poor people. What a wonderful person.

But wait — Dole's home state of North Carolina is also a major producer of tobacco. Uh, could her compassion really be more about money in North Carolina and getting re-elected?

Senator Dole's concern notwithstanding, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation by 68-31. The House also approved a similar bill. The two bills will now need to be reconciled.

President Bush has vowed to veto this bill, but the votes in both the House and the Senate are more than enough to override a presidential veto.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. President!

House defies veto threat from President Bush, adds 6 million children to insurance program

From today's Washington Post:

House Democrats pushed through legislation Wednesday to add 6 million lower-income children to a popular health insurance program while making deep cuts in federal payments to Medicare HMOs, defying a veto threat from President Bush.

On a 225-204, mostly party-line vote, the House passed the legislation, which would add $50 billion to the decade-old State Children's Health Insurance Program and roll back years of Republican-driven changes to Medicare.

Bush vows to veto healthcare for children

He's pathetic. Just when you think he's slithered as low as he can go, President Bush says some asinine comment that shows how (a) out of touch, and (b) heartless he is.

On July 10th, Bush vowed to veto a bill with bipartisan support that would add $35 billion to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next five years by increasing federal taxes on cigarettes.

His reasoning? He thinks it means putting more power in the hands of the government by expanding federal health care programs and empowering bureaucrats to make medical decisions. (Ronald Reagan and his '80s neo cons tried that same tired line about too much government expansion, and you know what? They named the biggest new federal building in Washington DC after him! Hypocrites!)

How out of touch is Bush? At a town hall in Cleveland this month, he said “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” Spoken like the man he is: someone who has never wanted for anything. Papa Bush and Mama Bush always took good care of their boy, I am sure. And even when he drove his oil company into the ground (and then walked away with a profit) and gouged the city of Arlington when he was an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, he never had to worry about how the bills would get paid.

That's right, Georgie. Just go to an emergency room. It's not like they'll send you a bill later, or anything.

The Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that S-CHIP will need about $14 billion in new money over five years just to keep covering the same number of children, in part because of rising health-care costs.

From Common Dreams:

Republican Sen. Gordon Smith originally introduced the SCHIP budget resolution in the Senate. Unlike Bush, who is not up for re-election, Smith is defending his vulnerable Senate seat in 2008, in the blue state of Oregon. He, like other Republicans who are breaking with Bush on the war in Iraq, is sensitive to Bush’s domestic policies. Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families just released a poll that says 91 percent of Americans support the expansion of SCHIP to cover more kids.

Repeat after me: January 20, 2009.

About those polyps

Well. President Bush is getting all the attention, but it's a little known fact that his polyps held a press conference recently. You can watch it below, if you are so inclined.

I'm sorry. This will be the last mention of George Bush's colon on this blog. But it's kinda funny.