School and Pop - A Wellness Battleground

Sometime this summer PEI will announce its Wellness Strategy. What will it say?
If we start at getting our sugar and HFCS consumption down it will be a great start. School is a battleground where there is room to act.
We could ban Pop and all sugary drinks at School. This includes Low fat milk, nearly as much sugar as pop. Juice which has as much and all so called sports drinks. These kind of drinks are the mother-lode of sugar and HFCS delivered to our children. They are the #1 source of calories for boys.
By doing this we put the issue publicly on the table. The rock in that pond will ripple across the Island. This way we will get everyone talking which is surely what we need?
There is precedent in the US where schools are starting to ban Pop. (link to more NYT)
Although schools have been removing sodas and other sugary drinks from vending machines for the last few years, the Faulkton district is one of the first in the country to institute a ban, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which works to reduce childhood obesity.
Cold, bubbly, sweet soda, long the American Champagne, is becoming product non grata in more places these days. Schools are removing sugary soft drinks from vending machines at a faster pace, and local governments from San Antonio to Boston are stepping up efforts to take them out of public facilities as the nation’s concerns about obesity and its costs grow.
Last year, the average American drank slightly under two sodas a day, a drop in per capita consumption of about 16 percent since the peak in 1998, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication.
And its not just health but brain fucntioning itself. You get stupid by consuming a lot of HFCS.  (link)
""Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."
While earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study is the first to uncover how the sweetener influences the brain.
The UCLA team zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We're not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants," explained Gomez-Pinilla, who is also a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and Brain Injury Research Center. "We're concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative."
Then we will all see the wider issue of sugar and HFCS in the health of the Province (link)
How many times do you ask (or get asked), “Why do some cultures eat carbs like rice and not get the same diseases we do?”  A quick glance at China, for example, sheds some light on this.  They may eat rice, but they sure aren’t producing (or eating) much sugar, on average.  Furthermore, the distribution of sugar consumption within the country is wide.  In other words, while the few wealthy people do eat amounts of sugar approaching Western amounts (along with other simple refined grains), the vast majority of non-wealthy inhabitants do not.  So while some have asserted that animal products and fats are the clear culprits explaining the different disease patterns in Asia, they’re missing this important point:  Given the absence of mechanistic and evolutionary reasons why animal products and fats are bad for us, is it more likely that sugar consumption is the single biggest factor differentiating the state of disease across these populations?

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