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At Christmas dinner this year, you may find yourself stuffed to capacity, unable to eat another bite…until you see a scrumptious dessert. Now, scientists know why. It’s because your stomach gets bigger when you eat sugar:
The sugar in sweet foods stimulates a reflex that expands your stomach, writes senior researcher Arnold Berstad and assistant doctor Jørgen Valeur from Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital in the latest issue of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.
“If you eat dessert after you’re actually feeling stuffed you’re tricking your normal sensation of being full,” they argue. [...]
Glucose – or sugar if you will – stimulates this relaxation reflex.
“In this way it can decrease the pressure on the stomach and reduce the sensation of being full. A sweet dessert allows the stomach to make room for more food,” the researchers write in the medical journal.
Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Flickr user whitneyinchicago
To commemorate Prince William and Kate Middleton’s upcoming nuptials, Executive Pastry Chef Laurent Branlard of the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort created Kate’s famous engagement ring out of sugar. He also created one of Princess Diana’s famous tiaras. It took him 30 hours to do both.
If you won’t be in England to see any of the gems in person this weekend, maybe you can make it to Florida – the sugary creations are on display in the lobby of the Dolphin hotel through the wedding events of this weekend. Link-via Cakewrecks
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Illustration: Kenji Aoki / The New York Times; Prop Stylist: Nell Tivnan.
Source: UI.S.D.A. 2009 Estimates
How much do we love sugar? The amount may surprise you - the average American eat about 3,550 pounds of sugar and 313 gallons of high fructose corn syrup in a lifetime. And according to Dr. Robert Lustig, UCSF expert on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood obesity, it's killing us:
Lustig’s argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.
The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.” This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.
See also Lustig's fascinating lecture, Sugar: The Bitter Truth, about how bad the sweet stuff is for us:
What was your favorite sugar-coated cereal when you were a kid? Does it exist anymore? It may be featured in this roundup at Urlesque. You can recall when ice cream cones, donuts, milkshakes, candy, and of course, pop culture characters were honored in breakfast cereal. And you won’t need an insulin shot just for looking! Link -Thanks, Hillary!
(Image credit: Urkel For President by Flickr user JasonLiebig)
Russian artist Danil Zdorov has a great idea — Tetris Sugar! These little sugar cubes could bring an 80s flavor to the tea making experience.
Attention hypochondriacs! Thanks to Japan (who else?), you can soon forgo frequent visits to the doctors for health check ups. Instead, simply pee into the "Intelligent Toilet" :
Toto’s engineers developed a receptacle inside the basin to collect the urine for sugar content and temperature checks, and an armband to monitor blood pressure. The readout is displayed on a wall-mounted computer screen.
"With the current model, your data is sent automatically to your personal computer, and then you can email it to your doctor," said Suzuki.
"In the next generation model, the data will be sent automatically to family members or doctors via the Internet," she told AFP.The electronic marvel, called the "Intelligence Toilet", is capable of storing the data of up to five different people and retails for 350,000 to 500,000 yen (about 4,100 to 5,850 dollars) in Japan, she said.
Link | Nerve has a few more pics: Link – Thanks Ben!
A food fight is brewing in the school cafeteria, and this time, it’s promises to be much nastier than the one that got those kids jailed:
The milk industry clearly doesn’t want chocolate milk to go the way of the soda can in schools. Sure, a serving of chocolate milk has 60 more calories, but kids love it, so they’ll drink more milk if it’s an option instead of other sugary drinks, the campaign contends. The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processor Education Program are spending between $500,000 to $1 million to get the message across.
But no amount of money will convince people like Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, that chocolate milk needs to be in schools. She told the AP that kids get needed calcium elsewhere and do not need yet another source of sugar additives that contribute to obesity. Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services at the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, notes in the same story that kids "happily drink white milk" when it’s the only milk available at school. The "renegade lunch lady," as she calls herself, also said that the extra 40 to 60 calories on top of the 110 calories in a typical 8-ounce serving of white milk "could add up to 5 pounds of weight gain over the 180-day school year." Her district does not offer chocolate milk.
So, should schools ban chocolate milk? Will kids revolt if they did? Link
Hard to imagine eating 10 sugar cubes, but when you guzzle down a can of soda, that’s what you’re putting in your body. See just how much sugar you’re destroying yourself with …
From the Upcoming 
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Archie McPhee is known for its weird stuff, but this is really weird. I’m sure Freud himself would have something to say about it. But hey, if fruity Austrian psychoanalysts on a stick aren’t for you, there’s always cherry-flavored Marie Antoinette severed heads, orange-flavored Abe Lincoln heads, blueberry-flavored Will Shakespeares and cola-flavored Vladimir Lenins. I love Archie McPhee.
