The Unmistakable Cone of Ignorance

I’ve mostly been a hold out against most mixed drinks. But I’m becoming curious about them as of late. So what’s your favorite mixed drink? Also Karl sent me this link.  ExtraTasty.Com

Today I made my first Martini.  8oz of grey goose. 2 splashes of extra dry vermouth and 2 olives.  Shaken cause I don’t have any sort of special spoon.  I’m liking it I have to say.  I blame Karl for this.  He keeps suggesting things that almost always turn out to be tasty.   Fried Eggs on Boca burgers are also tasty as hell.  Damn you Karl! Damn you !!!

Over the course of the last year or so I have been steadily decreasing the amount of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that I consume in various foods. For the most part this has been an issue of taste. Most of the foods which contain HFCS taste syrupy and leave a cloying aftertaste in my mouth. A few items that I still make general exceptions for are either things which I am unaware contain it or which would be an utter pain to get rid of (ketchup for one I admit my weaknesses) but in general I am trying to reduce the amount of HFCS I consume. For the most part, I think I’m doing a pretty decent job. Diet pop(which has it’s own problem) if I drink pop, energy drinks from Trader Joe’s which don’t contain HFCS(and taste better than other energy drinks for half the price), Stoneyfield yogurt is HFCS free as well. Honestly food tastes better without it and after some reading it would appear that HFCS may very well be the poison making America fat and bloated. Not to slander the item here is a general summary of what I’ve read, but you can do a google search and find all this in a manner of minutes.

1) HFCS comes in a variety of combinations anything from 80% fructose/20% glucose to something around 30% Fructose/70% glucose. In general, it seems the majority of HFCS comes in a 55% fructose/45% glucose form. This form is just about the equivalent of what sucrose(sugar) becomes in the body which is very close to a 50/50 split.

2) HFCS is far more complicated to produce than sugar but due to massive government corn subsidiaries as well as high sugar tariffs it is cheaper to use in food production. HFCS is in just about everything. It’s used almost as a filler ingredient and even supposedly healthy things such as yogurt cups with fruit can contain a startling high amount of HFCS. The average American is also consuming more HFCS and normal sugar than ever before, but it’s about 2 servings of HFCS for every 1 serving of sugar or so. That may be a bit off but is close to what I remember reading a few days ago.

3) In laboratory studies, it was shown that high fructose diets combined with generally poor overall nutrition were bad on the level of causing the rats hearts to explode and their livers to scar from fatty tissue as if they were consuming massive quantities of alcohol. Also it seems a lack of copper in the diet combined with fructose caused some nasty effects as well. Now these were extreme experiments in rats which combined fructose as the only sweetener in the diet with piss poor nutrition but they still illustrate a point when set next to a study that showed the same diet with all glucose sweetener did not lead to the nasty end result of exploding hearts. It seems part of the problem is that the liver is the only place in the body where fructose can be processed. Also high fructose diets do not result in the proper hormone production to regulate hunger and over eating.

4) Sure HFCS is not toxic and won’t kill you outright as evidenced by the almost 16 billion+ some odd pounds of the stuff Americans eat every year, but when combined with the fact that most American diets are not that healthy and that we consume MASSIVE quantities of sugar(meaning large quantities of fructose in effect) is it any surprise that our society is suffering from extensive and rising obesity levels. Now I’m not a nutrition scientist, I didn’t perform any of the studies in question and I don’t claim to be any of these things, but between the possible risks and the fact that HFCS just tastes bad I’d say maybe, just maybe it’d do everyone some good to STOP EATING THE DAMN STUFF! Seek alternative products that don’t contain the stuff, look at labels and I’m sure you’d be surprised how much sugar and HFCS is in stuff you eat everyday. You’ll probably feel better and when you do eat candy and sweets you may not feel as guilty about it or just won’t feel as bad since your body won’t have so much damn sugar in it to start with.

Yesterday was a day of good news. Amanda got a huge raise at work so we decided to go out to dinner rather than cook or just grabbing something easy and fast out. Not that we don’t eat out all the time but we usually keep it under 40$.  We decided to hit up the veggie restaurant out on 108 who’s name I’m completely blanking on now. God I need to sleep more. Anyways, the food was as always good though the service becomes slower every time we go. I think they’re having staffing issues or something. My only complaint was they put shredded carrots on top of my carrot cake. I mean the cake is full of carrots but carrots do not make a good desert garnish… ever. Either way the cake was really good after I scraped them off.

The important part of all that was the part about Amanda getting a raise. We’ve been feeling cramped in our current apartment and since the company that owns our apartment seems to let you transfer between properties on your lease we’re considering trying to rent a townhouse from them outside the city. The downside would be that we’d be much farther from school and work, but Amanda could take the metro into work and I work such strange hours I never see rush hour. We’d be getting 2 times the space with a personal garage that’d be big enough for both our cars and a small workshop as well as 2 stories of living space. We pretty much drive everywhere we want to go already and don’t really take advantage of city living so outside of proximity to school and work our current apartment doesn’t offer many other advantages.

Other news, I will be home the last week of April and I will be heading to Germany on the 25th of May.

Breakfast time.

Continuing my trend of blogging about things I’ve done in the last week, last Friday, Amanda and I went to the restaurant Rocket to Venus in Hampden. We got there just in time to avoid up to an hour and a half wait for a table of two and ended up only having to wait 10 or 15 minutes to be seated. The atmosphere was dim with most of the lights partially blacked out and if you weren’t in a booth the tables were pretty tightly packed together. The majority of the space is actually occupied by the central bar. They had an OK selection of vegetarian choices and the food was really quite good. I had deep fried red pepper, onion and potato pierogis and vegetarian “wimpy’s” (2 oz veggie burgers) and Amanda got a swiss and tomato grilled cheese with potato salad. All in all, I’ll definitely go back there and if you’re ever in Baltimore make me take you there for dinner. Then again why you’d want to visit Baltimore is beyond me… but that concludes a nice banal restaurant review of a place people in my lab have been wondering about and I finally tried.

OK, I’m done I’m going to sleep for a few hours cause I can’t get this code working.