Great article in last week’s New York Times that interviewed, Jeff Ritterman, cardiologist, a member of the Richmond, California, City Council and a leader in the proposal to institute a penny-per-ounce soda tax in Richmond, a measure that’s being voted on by the Richmond electorate.
Here is an interesting quote from the article on how sugary beverages effect the body,
‘So you get a kid who drinks a Big Gulp, who’s got this huge hit of fructose in the liver, the liver is converting it to triglycerides, which get deposited everywhere. But not only in the abdomen and in the subcutaneous tissue, where you see it, but also in the liver and the muscles and the heart. So our organs get fatty, and the fatty liver gets insulin resistant. That’s one of the dysfunctions which comes with fatty liver, and that insulin resistance continues to drive the system, because the pancreas responds to the liver as if the liver was hard of hearing—it can’t hear the signal from insulin. So the pancreas starts shouting, metaphorically, it puts out higher and higher levels of insulin. And therein comes the problem with the pancreas overworking,
eventually pooping out, and that’s where the diabetes comes from.
So that’s all a part of the same process. There’s a linkage to hypertension, through the nitrous oxide cycle that also happens, there’s a linkage with cancer because these high insulin levels predispose cancer cells, which have lots of insulin receptors to preferentially take up the glucose rather than your own cells, so it promotes cancer growth.’
