Word: sweets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Cutting out sugar sounds like a winning strategy for a country that's 66% overweight or obese, but are sugar substitutes in fact good for you? The scientific record is less than absolute. Past studies of saccharin and aspartame, packaged as Sweet'n Low and Equal, respectively, suggested that large doses could cause cancer in rats, although human studies have shown no such link. The Food and Drug Administration says these high-intensity sweeteners--along with sucralose (Splenda)--pose no threat to human health. Most nutrition experts are willing to go along with that--with caveats. "I suspect that...
...nature, the sweeter the food, the greater the calories. Humans have adapted over millions of years to seek out food that tastes sweet, and not just for survival. Eating sweets can reduce levels of stress hormones, calm babies and relieve pain. Some experts suspect, however, that our desire for sweet things has been reinforced--and perhaps even intensified--by our environment. Susan Schiffman, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center, has found that African Americans and Hispanics like their food significantly sweeter than the rest of the population--a result she suspects is from campaigns that market...
...with a spoon, trying to get him to eat," says Dr. W. Allan Walker, a professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Harvard Medical School and the author of Eat, Play, and Be Healthy. Many parents come to rely on snacks eaten on the go, which tend to be salty, sweet or otherwise unhealthy. At mealtimes, instead of offering whatever the parents are eating, moms will provide "kid food"--easy-to-prepare child pleasers like pizza, mac and cheese and chicken nuggets...
Babies and toddlers are also learning early on to indulge their sweet tooth. FITS found that 10% of 4-to-6-month-olds consume desserts, sweets or sweetened beverages daily. By the time they are 2, 60% of toddlers eat some kind of pastry every day. Although added sugar was removed from most jarred baby foods in the mid-1990s, baby-food companies continue to offer dessert lines with flavors such as vanilla custard pudding and peach cobbler, loaded with sugar and starch. Early exposure to intensely sweet foods has long-term consequences, says Amy Lanou, a senior nutrition scientist...
...nutrients during a weeklong journey from soil to supermarket. But to Barbara Fisher, an Athens cooking teacher, there's a more primal motive for choosing a homegrown variety over the "beautiful, flavorless, plastic" kind shipped from California: "When people bite into ripe strawberries from a local farmer and the sweet juice bursts into their mouths, their eyes roll back into their heads, and they moan...