First posts are boring. I know. You don't have to read this one if you don't want to. I'm not going to give you an overinflated description of how quirky I am, so I'm just going to plunge right in.  My biochemistry professor explained to the class last week how fructose bypasses the regulation points in your metabolism and makes you fatter than regular sugar.  Okay, let's face it. Sugar is sugar.  The first culprit that comes to mind is high fructose corn syrup, but in reality, depending on the percentage of fructose in it, sucrose (table sugar) is nearly as bad with 50% fructose.

Okay, so sugar makes you fat.  We all knew that already....but do you really know how much sugar is in your diet?  Cruising the aisles at Wegmans today I was shocked by the sugar content of seemingly harmless foods.  I had a craving for beets today.  Yeah, I know that's not normal, but I did.  So I headed down the canned food aisle for my beets and grabbed the first one that came to hand.  Aunt Nellie's pickled beets. Boy, do they look good.  And then I flipped the can over and looked at the label.  High fructose corn syrup right after beets and water.  So I opted for the canned beets that had no sugar in them.

I know that's probably not a good example since the average american doesn't head right for the beet aisle, so I'll share another shocking revelation from my morning shopping excursion.  Then next item on the list was salad dressing.  I'm a person of habit and I love my Italian salad dressing.  It's really the only type I usually eat.  I happily headed over to the dressings and grabbed Wegmans brand.  Since I was in the label reading mood I took a peak at the ingredients and became outraged.  High fructose corn syrup in my salad dressing!  What is this Wegmans? You're my go to for quality store brand food.  I turned over every other bottle there and found sugar in each.  I can see why we need sugar in baked goods, but salad dressing?  I finally hit upon the only one on the shelf that didn't contain either high fructose corn syrup or MSG, the Hidden Valley Farm House Original dressing. It still had sugar, but at least it wasn't high fructose...

It was all downhill from there.  I found that all of the gherkins had high fructose corn syrup.  And the ketchup had sugar, the bread had sugar, the tomato sauce had sugar. No wonder America has problem with obesity.  We stick sugar into anything we can lay our hands on.  Everything that doesn't need sugar.