Hey expectant mom, cut out the licorice.
Expectant mothers who eat excessive quantities of liquorice during pregnancy could adversely affect their child's intelligence and behaviour, a study has shown.
A study of eight year old children whose mothers ate large amounts of liquorice when pregnant found they did not perform as well as other youngsters in cognitive tests.
They were also more likely to have poor attention spans and show disruptive behaviour such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
It is thought that a component in liquorice called glycyrrhizin may impair the placenta, allowing stress hormones to cross from the mother to the baby.
We need to know all the food constituents that cause harm to developing fetuses. Surely more are waiting to be discovered. The one I'm curious to know more about: high fructose. Our ancestors consumed about an order of magnitude less fructose. Could it be messing up fetal development?
By Randall Parker at 2009 October 08 06:23 PM Brain DevelopmentI would imagine that there would be a lot of other complicating factors which I wonder if they controlled for:
where the high liquorice mothers of the same IQ, social class, marital situation as the low?
did the mothers increase or decrease their consumption after they became aware of their pregnancy? i.e. was there no change in consumption, a conscious effort to reduce liquorice or was it some sort of craving?
are the high liquorice mothers feeding their kids more liquorice/sugar than the low liquorice mothers after birth? i.e. are the diets of the kids the same after birth.
My understanding is that the Finnish have a fairly unique set of genes - ie. European/Asiatic mix and therefore this result may not apply accross the board.
That said, if I were a woman who was pregnant and had seen this study I wouldn't be overloading on the liquorice.
Errr, the difference between corn syrup and table sugar is minor & since people have been eating refined sugar for a while now, I doubt that it is a problem in itself. The amounts are a problem, not the substance itself.
to quote Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., CNS
"Let's get something straight. Both table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup have the same two ingredients: glucose and fructose. The more damaging of the molecules is clearly fructose, but check the proportions: High-fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Plain old crappy garden-variety sugar, now being sold as the "healthy" alternative to HFCS, is 50/50.
The problem with HFCS wasn't so much the extra 5% fructose, but the fact that the sh*t is so cheap that manufacturers now use it in everything, including foods that were never even sweetened before. This deeply increases the fructose load on the body, not so much because of the little bit of extra fructose, but because we're consuming so much of the stuff."
I knew I hate that crap for a reason...
HFCS-55, used to sweeten all national brands of soda and many other beverages is more than 5% extra fructose. You need to do the math correctly. HFCS-55 is 55% fructose:
45% glucose. Any ratio can be expressed as a quotient, therefore 55%:45% = 55/45=1.22.
This means in every can of Coke (bottled in the US)there is, compared to glucose, 22% extra fructose. In common terms this means that if you drink 5 cans of Coke sweetened with HFCS-55 it is equivalent to drinking 4 1/4 cans of sugar (sucrose) sweetened soda and 3/4 can of pure fructose. Yes, one of the issues is that HFCS is in most processed foods and we are awash in the stuff. However, even though the CRA claims that HFCS is "essentially similar" to sucrose, HFCS-55 is not. Approximately one third of HFCS ingested is via sweetened beverages. Ditch HFCS, especially HFCS-55. To your health.
Licorice can be dangerous when eaten in large amounts. A woman in England collapsed after eating 200 grams a day for a few days.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3733757.stm
Thats bad news for us licorice addicts, as I can put away 100 grams of the stuff in one sitting. Im trying to phase it out now.
Interestingly enough, licorice as a plant/botanical extract is already known as an abortifacient in herbal medicine.
I forget the name of the publication but a very large study was published in the 1970's regarding various chemicals documenting types of toxicity and in particular the potential effects on the unborn from maternal use. I ran across it when countering a thimerosal nutjob.
The one stark lesson I got from it is: Every chemical ever devised for making anti-bacterial soap increases the risk of birth defects when used by pregnant women. Antibacterial soap is more dangerous than bacteria.