sweetners in vitamins, MSG, soy, fat etc are killing us all

Basically this extends from a rant I put on my moms friends fb wall after she posted a link about the "dangerous children vitamins containing sweetners causes cancers". I figured it may be beneficial for some of you to hear.

Have you ever heard something bad about a food and try reading down through any of the linked studies in the article if they didn't bring it out of thin air? Many of these alarmists who like to promote fear mongering don't do it very well. Half of those studies aren't real studies, and the rest don't really prove what they say they prove.

For example, if you replace your diet completely with only artificial sweeteners then yes, something bad is going to happen. You're not getting the rest of the things you need. Something I enjoyed from a friend of mine: " I love the commonly quoted aspartame study where it messed up rats. But per body weight to get the same from Coke Zero I would have to drink 1800 cans a day, I think it was. Sure, I would certainly die, but from the water, not the Aspartame." You would also run into problems if you replaced your diet with broccoli, you're still missing and overdosing on many needed things. Lucky for us our organs try to be an amazing help with this so we don't need to be so smart.

I wish instead of jumping on the fear bandwagon the media would educate people on the importance of a balanced diet and a healthy mind instead. Many people lived long happy lives and have enjoyed cookies too. Orthorexia (obsession with 'good' food) is just as unsafe as to much of one food when you spend your day under eating and stressing out over if you should put something in your body. Food is fuel, and you shouldn't deprive yourself or gorge yourself with it. You can still end up polluting yourself with one thing and avoiding things you need with all fresh unchemically treated food. I'll also add that many people are ignorant over the food the think is clean when it's not as clean as they think, whatever every unique individual defines clean as.

Avoiding certain things isn't the answer. For example, I can't tell you how many times people have told me my occasional deep fried fish is killing me, but is it in specific cases? I hate fish. But I'll eat it deep fried. And most of the iron in my diet comes from deep fried fish. People can obsess over what's 'clean' and tell me to cut out deep fried fish because they think I'll get some kind of unproven cancer or they'll direct me to some far fetched study that doesn't prove squat when everything is taken into account, but essentially they're blindly telling me to cut out an essential nutrient. Don't even get me started on how the twinkie diet guy's health increased with weight loss. But how long would that have lasted if he didn't get vitamins? Same goes for people telling someone who is craving chocolate because they're lacking magnesium to cut chocolate out of their life (for those interested in finding topics potassium magnesium balance is pretty interesting). Is it better to give kids nutrients, even though it contains sugar, or should everyone who reads that article cut off their kids from vitamins like I know some are doing (gluck trying to get them to take adult pills or relying on the parents to feed them a balanced diet). In this case fear could end up with someone malnourished. How many stories have I heard where grown adults blame their parents for their unhealthy habits for not feeding them healthy enough food OR depriving them of food which they want and makes them mentally happy. Educating and reminding someone can be a good thing, but sometimes we need to educate people and let them make their own educated choices. I can't imagine how many people are depriving themselves and others from food because someone thinks it is bad when they could benefit from it physically or mentally.

When it boils down to it, just try to get a balanced diet. Nutrient rich foods, vitamins are great sugar or not you need, fats are important to help absorb them (otherwise it's kind of useless, don't be afraid of fat, you need fat to absorb many nutrients since they're fat soluble), and adequate protein to promote lean body mass etc. Many instil fear in other necessities of life, including sugar, which the brain needs to live. If you don't know what's to low or to high start educating yourself. It's a tricky scale that many do not have figured out and can help prevent so many health problems from having nice skin to nice hair and nails etc. I hate the fat is killing us and making us fat, sugar is killing us and making us fat...fat on our belly is killing us and making us fat...everything except what actually makes someone sick and fat gets blamed for the ills of the world these day. Eat healthy, in adequate amounts (calorie surplus to gain, deficit to lose), and have a healthy lifestyle. Both cardio and resistance training is great for your body. Feel good. You'll find many people can cure health problems taking those simple steps, I've seen it happen with diabetes, I've seen it happen with thyroid problems, even while eating fat and sugar and chemicals along the way *Gasp*. That's why we were blessed with organs, created to deal with detoxifying our bodies and keeping them regulated. No crazy unneeded detox + clean diet needed!

Back to the topic of balance. If you're getting low on something and you're eating a lot of it, you may consider a different option then just eating more of the thing you are deficient in when already eating it in excess. For example, a lot of people have calcium absorption problems and do not realize that some sources are easier to absorb then others (like milk>fortified calcium beverages). Or the problem is because you're not getting enough vitamin D. And if you're vitamin D deficient and taking massive quantities of D it may be beneficial to get more sun without showering right away (Vitamin D can form as a powder on your skin, if you wash it of, you cannot absorb it), or eating more fat (since Vitamin D is fat soluble). There's a big balance. At the same time don't think to hard about it :P Just keep it in mind when you run into problems.


Overdose in something, expect to get ill. Deprive yourself of the essentials, expect to get ill. Stop moving, don't be surprised if you felt better having an active lifestyle. Chemicals? Everything is made of chemicals. Our food is mutated and does not represent the same foods they were years ago. And most of the chemicals that have been proven bad (such as fat, aspartame, sweetners, MSG, soy etc) are because people have them in excessive quantities. Soy is in many of our foods today for example. Add soy milk and tofu daily on top of the rest (there is a paragraph worth of unsuspecting foods I could put here) and yes, problems can happen. Is soy evil? I don't think so, it's chock a block full of nutrients. It really just depends on if they're the ones you're short on. Some of the longest lived people in the world regularly eat it (Okinawan). Don't be blinded by the media lights.

I think we need to stop blaming everything for the woes of the world, particularly if people have grown old doing those things, and every time someone says to do or not to do something step back and find out if you're getting it in some other way to the same extent, and try to find and weigh the benefits and disadvantages.

TL;DR: eat a balanced diet, live a active lifestyle, don't stress the small stuff, be happy inside and out 'cause old people eat nutrients and those hard candy.