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I just quit sugar last month in an effort to help with my infertility, and it’s been quite the adventure adjusting my palate and finding natural replacements. I couldn’t survive without medjool dates!

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I'm so with you on the medjools, they are one the staples of my diet. Very nutritious, and almost pesticide free even when not organic. And very cheap, at least here in the Middle East. Great choice!

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If you like, I can point you to research from the Mt. Sinai Medial School, New York on how sugar changes as it is used in cooking and what results.

Such results do not appear on processed products' ingredient lists as they only list inputs, not outputs.

Constitutive outputs can be vastly at variance with input ingredients.

Most miss these things in their understanding about sugar, so-called.

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Definitely, it's important to learn the zillion names that sugar hides behind.

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Feel free to forward any content to thehealthyjew@substack.com.

Be well!

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Just reminded me - I wrote this ~ 10 years ago . . . https://gooneatit.wordpress.com/

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- You definitely deserve more commentary. Name the names Shmuel. Some below.

- I consulted to the US Processed Food Industry for some years. As one honest nutritionist observed, the majority of what is sold in supermarkets now is not fit for human consumption. One's great grandmother would not recognize a great deal that is passed off for food.

- Sugar, strictly Sucrose, Fructose-Glucose Polysaccharide, is a real problem for sure and entirely unnatural in one's diet as a refined, concentrated source. Dr. Otto Warburg, Nobel Prize biochemist who demonstrated how cancer cells energized (1932), considered processed sugar a cause of cancer but was unable to prove this - now been demonstrated.

- The American processed food industry introduced fructose sweetening decades back, Fructose defeats the G.I. Glucose Test and enables processed foods to be falsely classed a "healthy heart", as one sees here in Australia, an entirely fraudulent manoeuvre by those who award such classifications, for a fee and so mislead the consuming public.

- Fruit does not mirror strictly pre-history fruit which was no sweeter than a carrot and the biochemistry of sweetness, the little there was, was different, taken with more fibre and nutrients. Orchard fruit is bred for sweetness, first via selective breeding and now vectored via biochemistry. Much modern fruit is not fit for human consumption and fruit juice, includingy passover grape juice, is a major fructose dose and damaging to children's health, coming as it is sanctified by rabbinically sanctified food rituals.

- Confectionery manufacturers have all at some time marketed their products as healthy. Cigarette companies did the same and the processed food industry uses identical techniques to defend themselves as did the cigarette manufacturers and their attorneys. Both marketed to children and industry executives, some of them, went off to church or the synagogue so they could feel quite good about themselves.

- Some kosher sweet products from Israel (do not recall the brand) and marketed to children are essentially solidified fructose. Toxic waste is good for them. They get the kosher label and fools buy these products. More generally, cardboard boxed breakfast cereals are bad for children's health, an invention by the Kellogg Brothers. I see all this at other people's homes and frankly they are educated fools.

- I have noticed they are none too keen on having this pointed out to them. Most prefer the fraudulent marketing by their media faves. Such fools they are. What fools they remain. As for general practice medicos, their health profiles are as bad as most and they know little of nutrition.

- Check: Heinz, General Foods, Kraft, Cadbury-Schweppes, Nestle, Lindt and hundreds more - the biscuit manufacturers, chocolates, boiled sweets, jellies, sauces. Shut them down and so goes your economy.

- Refined white flour is similar to sugar in the biochemistry. So goes your sanctified matzos.

Les in Melbourne . . . https://les7eb.substack.com

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Thanks for the detailed comment!

I've learned from the great food journalist Michael Pollan to define food as things which my great-grandmother would know, which, as you wrote, would exclude much of what people eat today. I plan on exploring in another article this not-so-obvious issue of how to define edible food.

I didn't know sugar was thought to be a carcinogen almost a century ago, interesting.

Another really important point you mentioned which I plan on exploring in detail is an expansive understanding of kosher that fits the spirit of Jewish law and not just the letter. Indeed, solidified glucose might be labeled Kosher, but is it really kosher?

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I see your point.

The principle being one of Kosher meaning safe and healthy.

One sees these sucrose or fructose concentrated products that are labelled as such, directed to children.

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Once hooked on sugar, it is difficult to get off it.

So-called hidden sugars are in many processed products.

Everywhere one looks within the Great Western Liberal Experience, children are overweight and their parents generally are.

Generally is not always, a pointer to shifts in the food chain, engineered as it is.

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If you are to make an impact, you have to mention products that are not to be consumed.

Run out the list. I'll see if I can find some. This includes matzos - a most denatured product.

You know when you are effective when food processorss start attacking you . . .

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Thanks for stopping by! Indeed, everything in our material world comes with a spiritual message. Genesis wrote that the entire human being - body and spirit - was created "in the image of God," because He doesn't speak to us in abstract concepts alone, but in how those ideas are expressed together in our bodies and spirits, as one. Our disposition for excessive sweetness is a particularly telling example of this.

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