- Pacific
If you know anything about the food supply, you know that honey bees are a crucial part
of the food production chain. In the United States, they pollinate roughly one-third of
all the crops we eat, and without them, we'd be facing a disastrous collapse in viable
food production.
That's why, when honey bees started to disappear a few years ago, scientists scrambled to
find the root cause of the phenomenon, which has since been dubbed "Colony Collapse
Disorder."
The name is a bit of a misnomer, though. It's not really a "disorder." It's more
of a poisoning. Or at least that's what we may be learning from new research that's just
been published in the ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac...).
It's been difficult, of course, trying to determine the cause of colony collapse disorder.
Some of the suggested theories for explaining the phenomenon included chemical
contamination from pesticides,
genetic contamination from genetically modified crops, changes in the Earth's magnetic
field, climate change and air pollution. In an attempt to nail down some scientific
answers, researchers from the USDA
Agricultural Research Service in Tucson, Arizona joined with other researchers in New
Orleans and the University of Wisconsin to check out another possible culprit: High-fructose
corn syrup (HFCS).
HFCS, as you may already know, is a processed, liquid sweetener used in disturbingly large
amounts throughout the global food
supply. You can find it in not just sodas, but pizza sauce, salad dressings and even
whole wheat bread. It's in breakfast cereals, food bars, peanut butter, ketchup and a
thousand other products.
There are two reasons why you find HFCS
in so many food products: 1) It's sweet. 2) It's cheap.
It is for these same two reasons that high-fructose corn syrup
is fed to honey bees. It provides them the sugar calories to stay active without resulting
in a huge cost for the beekeeper. That's why HFCS has been used for decades as a food
source for honey bees.
But this very food source may, in fact, be poisoning the bees.
What these USDA researchers discovered is that when HFCS is heated, it forms hydroxymethylfurfural
(HMF), a chemical that can kill honey bees. The production of HMF during cooking rose in parallel to the
temperatures to which HFCS was exposed.
To put it plainly, when you cook HFCS, it becomes contaminated with HMF. And
according to the research, levels of HMF "jumped dramatically" when temperatures
rose above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (which isn't very hot, by the way).
This is similar to the way in which browning or frying carbohydrates produces acrylamides,
a cancer-causing chemical that's also ubiquitous in the food supply. (http://www.naturalnews.com/acrylami...)
The upshot is that HMF could be part of the reason why honey bees are dying off. Feeding a
chemical contaminant to your bees, after all, doesn't sound like a good way to support
their long-term health. But if HFCS
has been fed to honey bees for decades, why the sudden collapse of bee populations in just
the last few years?
We don't know the answers to that yet, but HMF is likely only part of the picture. It
could be that honey bees are already stressed from pesticides, GM crops and other
environmental sources. With their chemical burdens already maxed out, one additional
dietary stressor might have just pushed them over the edge. There's a limit, of course, to
how much chemical stress any biological organism can tolerate, and honey bees appear to
have been pushed one chemical too far.
Perhaps hydroxymethylfurfural will one day be known as "the chemical that killed the
honey bees."
You can read a bit more about this chemical on Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox...).
Beyond the issue of honey bees, this research on HFCS and HMF raises some potentially
serious questions about the use of the ingredient in the human food supply:
Is HMF toxic to humans?
If it kills honey bees, could it damage the brains of children? Could it disrupt normal
neurological function in the human body? And if so, might this help explain why so much
research links HFCS to diabetes and
obesity?
The researchers from this particular study stated that "...the data from this study
are important for human health as well." They also went on to state two very
important facts you need to be aware of:
Fact #1) HMF has been linked to DNA
damage in humans. (See citation below.)
Fact #2) When HMF breaks down in the human body, it breaks down into substances that may
be even more harmful than the HMF itself. (Similar to the way in which aspartame breaks
down into formaldehyde, formic acid and other potentially harmful chemicals.)
These are bombshell revelations about the potential dangers of high-fructose corn syrup. There's no such thing as
"raw" or "cold-pressed" HFCS. It's all subjected to high temperatures
during processing, meaning that all HFCS may be generating some level of the HMF
contaminant before it's even put into foods.
And then, once it's added to manufactured food items, it's often cooked again! This
second cooking could theoretically generate even more HMF, further contaminating the food
with potentially dangerous chemicals.
Perhaps when you eat HFCS, you're consuming a chemical that "scrambles" health
intracellular communication, causing physiological disruptions that, if allowed to
continue for long enough, are expressed as diseases like "diabetes" or "obesity." We don't know this for
sure, but it's a question that clearly needs to be asked... especially given the
tremendous quantities of HFCS currently consumed in the diets of mainstream consumers.
There are two ways to protect yourself from all this:
#1) Don't eat (or drink) high-fructose corn syrup! This is seemingly the easiest way to
avoid the potential danger here, but it does require a level of vigilance with the reading
of food labels. HFCS is found in many products you would never suspect, so you've got to
watch for it carefully.
#2) Don't eat cooked, processed foods! Work more raw foods into your diet and greatly
reduce your consumption of factory foods.
And finally, don't believe the spin of the HFCS industry. Those lobbying groups will
always insist HFCS is perfectly safe, regardless of what research concludes otherwise.
They act a lot like Big Tobacco, in my opinion, criticizing good research while promoting
a product that can contribute to the decline of health among those who consume it.
The sooner we get HFCS out of the diet of both humans and honey bees, the better off we'll
all be in the long run. In my view, eating raw, dehydrated cane juice crystals is far
better for you than eating cooked, contaminated HFCS. (Natural News,
10.20.2009, ) http://www.naturalnews.com/027286_HFCS_food_honey.html
Sources for this story include:
"Formation of Hydroxymethylfurfural in Domestic High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its
Toxicity to the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)"
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac...
Durling, L. J.; Busk, L.; Hellman, B. E. Evaluation of the DNA damaging effect of the
heat-induced food toxicant 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) in various cell lines with
different activities of sulfotrasnferases Food Chem. Toxicol. 2009, 47 (4) 880–
884
http://www.coldtruth.com/2009/10/14...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...
Eastern