Deadly Artificial Sweeteners vs. God’s Honey

The lyrics in the gospel song go like this: “He is all we have, but, Thank God, He is all we need.”  God’s children of faith are often mocked with something like this: “To these simple-minded Christians, Jesus Christ is the answer to everything!” Of course, He is and even God thinks so.  Colossians 1:16-20:

16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

18 And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.

19 For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell;

20 And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.

Jesus Christ is the power and authority to perfect all of life’s situations; He is even the center of our very molecular structure.  Without Him, nothing exists and if He is not the center of my life, I would be living a lie. 

Have you been born again?  Are you ready to embrace the single-source solution to every problem you will ever encounter?  Are you ready to have your sin and shame washed away and begin a life full of promise and purpose?  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Psalm 19:9:

The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.

GOD SAID, Deuteronomy 26:15:

Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

MAN SAID: Honey is just another nutritionally empty sweetener like sugar. 

Now THE RECORD.  Men have good but nevertheless ill-informed intentions that regularly produce devastating unintended consequences.  A couple of examples from GodSaidManSaid features leading up to today’s latest debacle follow. 

In the late 1940s and forward, the U.S. government began pushing margarine as the “healthy substitute” for God’s highly-endorsed butter made from raw milk.  Speaking of Jesus Christ, Isaiah 7:15 reads:

Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.

From the GodSaidManSaid feature, “Margarine and Nutritional Armageddon,” you’ll find the following:

Part of the sub-headline in a feature article in Better Nutrition reads, “How the Margarine Craze Brought America to the Brink of Nutritional Armageddon.”  Margarine is partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil.  According to Dr. W. Willett, PhD, MD, of Harvard, “It can be conservatively estimated that approximately 30,000 deaths per year in the U.S. are attributable to trans fatty acids from partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil.”  That is exactly what margarine is.

In the over 40 years that American medicine has been pushing margarine down the throats of its followers (if the rate has remained constant), over 1,200,000 deaths are attributed to its namesake—partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil—and that is just in America, which is about 5% of the world’s population. 

The following was printed in Health Immunity Digest:

Warning: Hydrogenation is dangerous to your health.  Hydrogenated foods such as margarine, shortening, and partially-hydrogenated oils:

• Cause heart disease;
• Increase LDL, the bad cholesterol, and lower HDL, the good cholesterol;
• Increase inflammatory responses;
• Cause toxicity in the liver;
• Promote aging and free radical damager; and
• Inhibit immune function.

The esteemed British medical journal, The Lancet, reported on a health study that followed 85,000 nurses since 1976.  The study shows that the consumption of just four teaspoons a day of partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil margarine increases the risk of coronary heart disease—and how about this: butter has no adverse effects! 

The health periodical Second Opinion had this to say:

I’ve preached for years about the dangers of eating margarine as a substitute for real butter.  Now the devastating results are starting to hit hard.  In addition to it being nutrient-free, margarine is a saturated hydrogenated fat that causes our neurochemistry to go into a tailspin. 

The doctor continues:

In contrast, essential fatty acids (such as butter) are just that, essential.  The difference between trans-fatty acids and essential fatty acids is the exact difference between depression and a normal emotional state of mind.  It’s also a major factor that needs to be considered in greater detail in Alzheimer’s and other brain illnesses.  [End of quotes]

In God’s Word, in Leviticus 25:2-7 and numerous other passages, God commands the Sabbath of the land.  Leviticus 25:3-4:

3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof;

4 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.

A few excerpts from the GodSaidManSaid feature, “The Land, Its Sabbath, and Your Table,” follow:

As a result of rejecting the Sabbath of the land, the overworked soil suffers mineral depletion which results in deficient crops as well as pest infestations.  The work-around remedies include chemical fertilizers, dangerous pest-control chemicals, as well as genetically manipulated seeds.  Unfortunately for the people of the earth, the work-around has serious detrimental side effects to man and beast. 

Dead Zones are what they are being called.  The world has 58 known Dead Zones and 13 of them are off the coasts of the United States.  These Dead Zones are swaths of sea void of life and they are expanding.  The cause of Dead Zones is fertilizer and sewage runoff which feeds the runaway growth of algae.  As the huge quantities of algae plants die, they decompose, drawing the water’s oxygen.  Fish can escape the oxygen-starved waters, but creatures such as mussels, lobsters, clams, and more cannot.  They just die.  Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science predicts a doubling of Dead Zones in the next decade unless something’s done.  He claims that half of all American estuaries are oxygen-starved. 

God’s most highly-touted sweetener for the dinner table is raw honey, but you should suspect that man has a better way.  The headline in Science News, October 18, 2014, reads, “Artificial Sweeteners May Tip Scales Toward Diabetes.”  A few paragraphs from that feature follow:

Consuming artificial sweeteners may spur the very health problems that dieters try to avoid.  A new study of mice and a small number of people finds that saccharin meddles with the gut’s microbial community, triggering metabolic changes associated with obesity and diabetes. 

Other zero-calorie sweeteners may cause the same problems, researchers say September 17 in Nature. 

Though the finding is preliminary, four of seven human volunteers eating a diet high in saccharine developed impaired glucose metabolism, a warning sign for type 2 diabetes.

“This is very interesting and scary if it really does hold for humans,” says Robert Margolskee of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, who was not involved with the work.  “There could be unintended consequences of these artificial sweeteners.” 

Until recently, most sugar substitutes were thought to pass through the intestine undigested, exerting little to no effect on the gut.  As ingredients in diet soda, sugar-free desserts, and a panoply of other foods, the sweeteners are touted as a way for people with diabetes and weight problems to enjoy a varied diet.

But the new study, led by computational biologist Eran Segal and immunologist Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, suggests that rather than helping people, the sweeteners may promote problems. [End of quote]

The headline in the October-November 2014 issue of Crusador reads, “Artificial Sweeteners Trigger Spikes in Blood Sugar, Induce Diabetes, and Cause Obesity-Related Changes.”  A few excerpts from that feature follow:

A groundbreaking new study published in the prestigious journal Nature has revealed how non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS) drive obesity- and diabetes-related changes in both mice and humans. 

The study, titled “Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbial,” states:

Here we demonstrate that consumption of commonly used NAS formulations drives the development of glucose intolerance through induction of compositional and functional alterations to the intestinal microbial. 

Ultimately, tricking the body with chemicals made to taste like nutrients is simply not a good strategy. The taste for sweetness is as ancient as biological time itself, and even from our first taste of breast milk, it is imprinted deeply into the human psyche.  The key, perhaps, is moderation and training the palate to respond to natural sweetness found in wholesome fruits, berries, and honey—which is so much healthier than sugar—and evading the ever-present meme of a chemically dependent society that thinks it can outsmart nature.  [End of quotes]

God said raw honey, but man chose another way laden with unintended consequences—deadly consequences. 

This feature is being published in the cold and flu season.  The following information has been lifted from the GodSaidManSaid feature, “Breaking News -- Honey, Breast Feeding, Circumcision, Pork:”

Sixty-two times, God speaks of raw honey in the Scriptures, commenting on its multiple benefits including its power to supply instant energy.  He compares it to the soul’s appreciation of wisdom and its involvement in the ability to choose between good and evil.  He even names the Promised Land “The Land of Milk and Honey.” 

In an AP story from January 2008, under the heading, “Cold Meds Send 7,000 Kids to Hospitals,” the following paragraphs were found:

Cough and cold medicines send about 7,000 children to hospital emergency rooms each year, the U.S. government said Monday in its first national estimate.

About two-thirds of the cases were children who took the medicines unsupervised.  However, about one-quarter involved cases in which parents gave the proper dosage and an allergic reaction or some other problem developed, the study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. 

The study included both over-the-counter and prescription medicines.  It comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned parents that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines are too dangerous for children younger than two. 

Many of the ER case reports were not specific about symptoms, and the researchers did not follow cases through to conclusion.  So they did not know if—or how many—deaths resulted, said Schaeffer, an epidemiologist who was the study’s lead author. 

For the children whose symptoms were reported, allergic reactions like hives and itching were most common, and neurological symptoms like drowsiness and unsteady walking were next, she said. 

Most of the medicines involved were liquid combinations of cough and cold treatments, CDC researchers said. [End of quote]

Now this paragraph from a February/March 2008 issue of USA Weekend:

In January, the Food and Drug Administration advised that children under age 2 should not be given over-the-counter cough and cold medicines because of potential side effects that include rapid heart rates, convulsions, and death.  Instead, soothe your child’s cough with a teaspoon of honey.  A study done by researchers at Penn State Children’s Hospital in Hershey, PA compared a teaspoon of buckwheat honey, honey-flavored cough suppressant, and no treatment in 105 children with an upper respiratory tract infection and found that honey worked best at calming coughs.  However, do not give honey to babies under the age of 1.  [End of quotes]

The following paragraphs are from the GodSaidManSaid feature, Raw Honey--Get in Line!:”

The subject of the honeybee is one of those marvels we have been privileged to observe.  Science hasn’t accomplished anything so dramatic as creating a colony of honeybees that lives, procreates, builds, and functions perfectly in the ecosystem.  But it has begun to uncover some of the marvels of this marvelous creature:

• • When a Russian professor associated with The Longevity Institute studied centenarians of Russia’s famed Caucasus Mountains, he found they had one thing in common.  They were mostly beekeepers, and their principle foods were products of the hive.  They kept the raw honey and sold the processed honey to the general public.  Some lived to be 150 years of age. 
  • Raw honey is the perfect food, and a source of rapidly-supplied energy.  It requires no intermediate steps for proper digestion. 
  • White sugar is a killer.  Americans consume 150-pounds-plus of it each year.
  • Many of man’s sugar substitutes are highly dangerous.  The disclaimer on the “Sweet ‘N Low” package reads, “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health.  This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.” 
  • Raw honey is a living food containing a host of powerful nutrients.  It has twice the sweetening power of sugar. 
  • Raw honey is a powerful deterrent to gastric ulcers.
  • Raw honey promotes the rapid healing of wounds. 
  • Research claims that raw honey even protects against tooth decay and gum disease.
  • Raw honey may prevent certain cancers from recurring.
  • Raw honey is anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, and an antioxidant. 
  • In 1994, Australia approved honey as a medicine. 
  • Raw honey increases calcium absorption, can increase hemoglobin count, and treats and prevents anemia caused by nutritional factors, and more.

In God’s owner’s manual for man, the Holy Bible, honey is given a position of great honor.  Even the land of promise is dubbed “the land of milk and honey.”  Honey and the honeycomb are mentioned in the Word of God 62 times.  Long before modern science had the foggiest understanding of the phenomenal benefits of the products of the beehive, God said YES!—an insight that only the Creator could know.  Raw honey should be on everyone’s supper table.  [End of quotes]

Concerning raw honey, BodyUnburdened.com lists the following:

• All vitamins, nutrients, and enzymes intact
• Anti-viral and anti-fungal properties
• Contains powerful antioxidants
• Helps ward off allergies
• Helps stabilize blood pressure and balance blood sugar levels
• Boosts immune function
• Helps heal skin conditions
• Promotes digestive health [End of quote]

When God endorses a product, use it!  There is no better way.  Thousands of years before man’s science begins to understand why, God’s Word is already there.  God’s Word is true and righteous altogether—a place to build a life that will last forever. 

GOD SAID, Psalm 19:9:

The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.

GOD SAID, Deuteronomy 26:15:

Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

MAN SAID: Honey is just another nutritionally empty sweetener like sugar. 

Now you have THE RECORD. 

 

 

 

References

Authorized King James Version

BodyUnburdened.com, “Honey vs. Raw Honey”

Ehrenberg, R., “Artificial sweeteners may tip scales toward diabetes,” Science News, October 18, 2014

GodSaidManSaid, “Breaking News--Honey, Breast Feeding, Circumcision, Pork”

GodSaidManSaid, “Margarine and Nutritional Armageddon”

GodSaidManSaid, “Raw Honey -- Get in Line!”

GodSaidManSaid, “The Land, Its Sabbath, and Your Table”

Sayer, J., “Artificial Sweeteners Trigger Spikes in Blood Sugar, Induce Diabetes, & Cause Obesity-Related Changes,” Crusador, October/November 2014

 

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