Looky-loo links

I ain’t got much to say here, so I thought I’d share some fun links and nutritional research. Wee, fun!

Breakfast From HELL
I just don’t know what to say. I mean, can you imagine someone actually eating this? These people need help.

The Gallery of Regrettable Food
The anti-food-porn.

In the spirit of funwithyourfood, I thought I’d share a few things that I learned about my good friend xylitol. I’ve been using xylitol as a sugar replacement for some time because it’s natural, lower in calories than sugar, and has a low glycemic index score. Thanks to Harmonia’s link to this article I am now aware that GI isn’t everything, and thought maybe I should read up on this xylitol stuff to see if there’s really any benefit. (all these tidbits are just stolen from the Wiki article, so if you read the whole article just skip this)

Well, it turns out there is. First of all Finland is considered the “home country” of xylitol, so hey, sisu! This stuff must be good for you.

Xylitol can be produced from birch, raspberries, plums, and corn.

Xylitol, gram for gram, is roughly as sweet as sucrose, but contains 40% less food energy. (I think food energy is a fancy name for calories. Yay, less calories!)

It also turns out that xylitol is good for your teeth, for use by diabetics, may be a potential treatment for osteoporosis, may abate ear and upper respiratory infections, and may help control oral infections of Candida yeast.

Negative side effects: can have a mild laxative effect at high doses. Also very toxic and potentially fatal to dogs, so keep this stuff safely away from the pups!

I use xylitol to sweeten my coffee every day and have used it as sweetener in cake and quickbread recipes. However, since it interferes with the yeast micro-organism and others, xylitol is not useful for making bread, for instance.

Wow, wasn’t that so much more than you ever hoped to know about xylitol?

In other wikipedia news, it seems that their article relating to elephants has been locked for editing due to its mention in the Colbert Report’s “WØRD” segment last night. How are we to impart the Wiki with truthiness with this kind of censorship?

Good Tuesday to all.