Original Story Link http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/4/895.full

George A Bray from Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana State University wrote an article located at nutrition.org (Link above) about how bad fructose is on the human body.  He starts off the article reminding the reader that the intake of soft drinks with high-fructose corn syrup as risen in parallel with the obesity rate and points out this suggests a relation. Lastly he hints on the risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Fructose consumption in the United States has increased a lot between 1970 and 2000. And further more between 2000 and now but this article seems to only look at up to 2000.  In the article an individual’s intake of sugar in 1994 to 1996 was in the daily range of 79 g. The top consumers of sugar was as high as 178 g a day.  He further points out that 500 years ago before the development of the sugar industry the only fructose the human diet was exposed to was that of honey, dates, raisins, molasses and figs and a lot less in fruits. Milk has no fructose neither does most vegetables and meats. So most humans had very limited exposure to fructose.

In America most exposure from fructose comes from refined products and not fresh fruit. Soft drinks being a very large contributor of it.  He continues on to go through the details of fructose in the body and how it’s metabolised. Also goes into detail of some of the effects from fructose such as the production of uric acid which causes increased blood pressure, the formation of LDL. The conclusion of the article basically sates the relation of bad health and fructose cannot be ignored and that more evaluation is needed.

Tomatoes and Skin Protection

In 2007 the BBC released a documentary series called the Truth about Food. In this series the mission was to put to test many of the claims about certain foods and the ability to affect people. The series covered a wide scope of different foods and I will be blogging about a few of them over the coming weeks. Unlike most claims, the BBC actually hired scientist to conduct experiments to prove the claims. And for today’s blog we I will be discussing the Tomatoes and Skin Protection.

The test setup is pretty simple. They took people who burn easy and did a UV test on them. When the skin is exposed to UV light it will tan to reduce UV exposure. Some people react quicker to UV light then others. For the simple test they exposed people to different durations and different levels of UV light and recorded how long it took to react and how much of a reaction occurred. Basically they burned the test subjects but only mildly. These results are the baseline.

The next 12 weeks the test subjects ate Tomato paste which according to the BBC website contains the most lycopene, the compound responsible for the protection from UV light in the skin. After the 12 weeks was completed eating 55g of tomato paste every day the same subjects where given the same test. The 12 weeks of eating tomato paste resulted in an amazing 30% increase in skin protection. The subjects took longer to burn and the burn level was milder for the same duration of exposure.

So when it comes to the claim that Tomatoes are very good for your skin it would appear the science easily backs this up. It offers extra protection from UV light naturally.

BBC Source http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/young/tomatoes.shtml

Welcome to the new safecooking.net website. We are just starting out and are not really live yet. So please read the disclaimer first as we add more content to the site and go live.