American Towmanis billed as "Towing’s premier magazine," and they’ve covered the industry for decades, primarily focusing on emergency road service. Here their Field Editor Terry Abejuela provides a simple, easy-to-grasp demonstration of different configurations, how they work and what they do:
If any of you are interested in pulleys, sound off, and I can make a video showing you how I use them in my photo studio to make tasks easier.
Since the beginning, our aim with G Suite has been to help companies transform the way they work with our suite of cloud-based collaboration and productivity apps.
Today we’re announcing major updates to help the more than 4 million paying businesses that use G Suite work safer, smarter and more efficiently. This includes an all-new Gmail, with a brand new look on the web, advanced security features, new applications of Google’s artificial intelligence and even more integrations with other G Suite apps. We’re also introducing a new way to manage work on the go with Tasks.
Keep sensitive data secure with new Gmail security features
Keeping your data secure is our top priority, which is why last month, we introduced new phishing protections to help address Business Email Compromise (BEC) threats—or when someone impersonates an executive to get sensitive information. With these new protections, Gmail has helped block 99.9 percent of BEC attempts by warning users or automatically moving messages to spam for them.
Today, we’re introducing a new approach to information protection: Gmail confidential mode. With confidential mode, it’s possible to protect sensitive content in your emails by creating expiration dates or revoking previously sent messages. Because you can require additional authentication via text message to view an email, it’s also possible to protect data even if a recipient’s email account has been hijacked while the message is active.
New confidential mode in Gmail lets you set expiration dates for sensitive information.
Built-in Information Rights Management (IRM) controls also allow you to remove the option to forward, copy, download or print messages. This helps reduce the risk of confidential information being accidentally shared with the wrong people. Confidential mode will begin to roll out to consumer Gmail users and a limited number of G Suite customers in the coming weeks (broader rollout following).
We’ve also redesigned our security warnings within Gmail so that they are simpler to understand and give a clear call to action to employees. These bigger, bolder warnings will help you be even more informed when it comes to potentially risky email.
Bigger, bolder security warnings help you keep your company’s confidential information safe.
And it’s always worth a reminder: we do not scan Gmail for the purposes of targeting ads, and there are no ads shown in Gmail for G Suite customers.
Stay on top of email effortlessly using artificial intelligence in Gmail
New AI-powered features in Gmail, like Nudging, Smart Reply and high-priority notifications, can now help you spend more time on work that matters.
Most of us get more emails than we can deal with at one time, and sometimes things slip through the cracks. With Nudging, Gmail will proactively remind you to follow up or respond to messages, making sure you don’t drop the ball.
Now Gmail will intelligently (and subtly) “nudge” you when you need to prioritize actions in your inbox.
Last year, we introduced Smart Reply to our Gmail mobile apps. Smart Reply processes hundreds of millions of messages daily and already drives more than 10 percent of email replies on mobile. Today we’re bringing Smart Reply to Gmail on the web to help you respond to messages faster.
New notifications on mobile help you stay focused on what’s important (and eliminate clutter, too.).
We’re also introducing new features on mobile to help you minimize interruptions and clutter. High-priority notifications is a new setting that only notifies you of important messages, keeping interruptions to a minimum. Gmail can also recommend when to unsubscribe from mailing lists. Using intelligence, unsubscribe suggestions appear based on cues like how many emails you get from a sender and how many of them you actually read. You’ll start to see these notifications show up in your inbox over the coming weeks.
Over the past few months, Salesforce has tested the new Gmail to collaborate on global projects. “As the global leader in CRM, the ability to quickly and securely communicate with our stakeholders around the world is critical,” says Jo-ann Olsovsky, executive vice president and chief information officer of Salesforce. “Gmail’s new easy-to-use interface and built-in intelligence enable our employees to collaborate faster and smarter, spending less time managing their inboxes and more time driving our customers’ success.”
Gmail’s new easy-to-use interface and built-in intelligence enable our employees to collaborate faster and smarter.Jo-ann Olsovsky EVP, CIO of Salesforce
Accomplish more from your inbox with easy-to-use tools
We redesigned the Gmail web application to help you take action even quicker. Now you can see and click attachments in your inbox before ever opening a thread. You can also hover over messages (you don’t have to click into them) to do things like RSVP to a meeting invite, archive an email thread or snooze an email until the time is right.
Gmail’s new design helps you take action quicker.
As a part of the redesign, we’re also tightly integrating Gmail with other G Suite apps you use every day. Now you can quickly reference, create or edit Calendar invites, capture ideas in Keep or manage to-dos in Tasks all from a side panel in your inbox.
The side panel also makes it easy to access Gmail Add-ons, too, like third-party business apps you might use. This way you don’t have to switch between tabs or apps to get work done. You’ll start to see the new side panel integration in other G Suite apps in coming months—like inside of your Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides apps.
Use the new side panel in Gmail to access all of your favorite G Suite apps, like Google Calendar.
New native offline capabilities in Gmail on the web can help you work without interruption when you can’t find Wi-Fi. Search, write, respond, delete, or archive up to 90 days of messages, just as you would working online, but offline. Teams can start using offline capabilities in coming weeks.
Track projects and meet deadlines with Tasks’ refreshed design on the web and brand new mobile apps.
Like we mentioned, we’re introducing an all-new Tasks on web, as well as new mobile apps to help you handle work on the go. You can use Tasks to create tasks and subtasks, and even add due dates with notifications to help you stay on track.
And because Tasks closely integrates with G Suite, you can simply drag and drop an email from Gmail into Tasks to create a to-do. Tasks with due dates can also appear in your Calendar. You can download the new Tasks mobile apps from the Google Play Store or iOS App Store today.
The all-new Gmail experience is available for businesses to start using today in the G Suite Early Adopter Program (EAP) and can be turned on in the Admin console. Heads up: you’ll start to see offline support, confidential mode (limited release), Nudging, high-priority notifications and unsubscribe suggestions appear in the coming weeks. Keep up with the latest news on these features in the G Suite Updates blog.
Personal Gmail users can opt-in to the new experience, too (Go to Settings in the top right and select “Try the new Gmail.”).
Email is a necessity for most of us. We use it to stay in touch with colleagues and friends, keep up with the latest news, manage to-dos at home or at work—we just can’t live without it. Today we announced major improvements to Gmail on the web to help people be more productive at work. Here’s a quick look at how the new Gmail can help you accomplish more from your inbox.
Do more without leaving your inbox
Gmail’s new look helps you get more done. Click on attachments—like photos—without opening or scrolling through large conversations, use the new snooze button to put off emails that you just can’t get to right now or easily access other apps you use often, like Google Calendar, Tasks and Keep.
Gmail will also “nudge” you to follow up and respond to messages with quick reminders that appear next to your email messages to help make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
We’re also adding Smart Reply to Gmail on the web to help you reply to messages faster.
New features on mobile, like high-priority notifications, can notify you of important messages to help you stay focused without interruption. Plus, Gmail will start suggesting when to unsubscribe from newsletters or offers you no longer care about.
And you might notice new warnings in Gmail that alert you when potentially risky email comes through.
Finally, a new confidential mode allows you to remove the option to forward, copy, download or print messages—useful for when you have to send sensitive information via email like a tax return or your social security number. You can also make a message expire after a set period of time to help you stay in control of your information.
Get started
You can start using these new updates in Gmail on the web today, with some features appearing within the coming weeks. Go to Settings (the cog wheel in the top right corner of your inbox) and select “Try the new Gmail.” If you want to switch back later down the road, you can go to the same place and select “Go back to classic Gmail.”
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use Gmail in the workplace, check out our G Suite post which has more detail on all of the ways Gmail can help you stay productive.
I used to think I didn’t like asparagus, but it turned out to be—as these aversions often are—a textural problem. Their stalks would remain fibrous and tough even as half the stalk and the tips turned to mush. My mind was changed a few years ago when some restaurant dish I ordered came with a salad of pleasantly al dente asparagus, the tips tender but not mushy.
At home, I tried blanching the stalks, grilling them, baking them, but nothing recreated that texture—until I learned of a combination boiling-steaming method involving a mason jar and very little kitchen skill. The technique came to my attention via Ari LeVaux’s cooking column in my local newspaper Missoulian. (Strange coincidence: When my boyfriend and I visited Missoula to decide whether we wanted to move here, we stayed in LeVaux’s AirBnb, not knowing we had the food-writing beat in common. He had a solid-looking backyard garden.)
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Anyway, LeVaux recommends a method for cooking asparagus that he gleaned from the translation of an ancient Latin cookbook compiled in the first century A.D. Known as Apicius, it’s a tome that’s inspired cooks for centuries all the way until the present-day. But though it’s often called “the world’s oldest cookbook,” the Apicius collection is not really a cookbook in the modern sense. Its instructions are more guidelines than recipes, lacking precise measurements and of course, baffling modern readers with lost-in-translation Latin terms.
It’s a good thing LeVaux did the asparagus research for me, scrounging up a mid-1930s translation that helped illuminate this ancient cooking method. Basically, it recommends cooking the asparagus in boiling water “rursum,” which is translated to mean “backwards.” Apicius’ instructions call for a bunch of asparagus to be stood stalk-side down in boiling water that doesn’t reach all the way up the stalk. This way, the boiling water tenderizes the thicker stalks while steam merely tenderizes the tips. No mushy tips, no tough stalks.
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To recreate this, I placed a bunch of asparagus—I cut about 1/4-inch off the bottom—in a dry pickle jar. (You could use a mason jar, but a pickle jar is slightly fatter.) I boiled a few inches of water in a large stock pot, then carefully placed the jar in the pot. The water bubbled about halfway up the jar while the steam swirled around the tips. After 25 minutes, I removed the jar. Now, I know what you’re thinking: 25 minutes?! For asparagus?! But it’s a passive 25 minutes—I started cooking something else while this was happening—and it’s worth it to nail the perfect texture for both tips and stems.
Success! The stalks were the same texture as the tips—tender but not mushy. Levaux added cream, butter, and garlic into his jar to infuse some flavor into the asparagus, but I left mine plain since they were destined for this sweet-tart balsamic, asparagus, and pecan salad.
Now that I know of the Apicius method for cooking asparagus, I’ll never go back to my failed grilling or blanching or sautéing. If someone could solve my next kitchen conundrum—how to devein shrimp in under two hours and without being bored to tears—I’m ready for it.
If you’ve recently received a concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit, you probably feel ready to start carrying your firearm everywhere. Just because you’ve been issued a permit doesn’t mean you’re immune to legal or other kinds of trouble with your handgun. There are some common mistakes gun owners make which can easily be avoided. Instead of risking an incident which could have serious costs and consequences, keep the following tips in mind to be an effective and responsible concealed carrier.
1. Take Carrying Seriously
From the start, you need to be in the proper mindset to carry a firearm. Having a handgun carries with it a lot of responsibility with potentially serious consequences. It’s too easy when you first start to carry to feel invincible because of your weapon.
Instead, always see your pistol as a tool for self-defense and be realistic about scenarios you may encounter. Your ultimate goal should be to avoid conflict if at all possible. Your firearm is a last resort, not a show of force.
2. Stay Trained with Regular Practice
In most states, obtaining a permit requires proper firearm training to cover the basics. But just because you’ve taken a class doesn’t guarantee success using your firearm in a real-life situation.
Seeking out more training – and practicing those skills – is essential to being effective if and when the time comes. Following through with regular practice in a secure situation like a gun range will ensure your skills stay sharp. This can also teach you more about how your weapon performs, how to handle a malfunction, and reloading under stress; all of which are critical to know before a dangerous situation occurs.
3. Pair Your Firearm With the Right Holster
Choosing the right firearm for your situation is only part of the job; you also need a proper holster. It’s best to test a few options to find the perfect fit for your weapon and body type.
Selecting between an inside the waistband (IWB) or outside the waistband (OWB) holster is a good place to start. You’ll also want to find one that is made of a durable material which will be comfortable to wear all day.
Whatever holster you choose, make sure it offers good retention while allowing a fast, smooth draw with the firearm you plan to carry.
4. Make Carrying Second-Nature
If you intend to carry a gun, you should make it a point to carry as often as is appropriate. Make your handgun a part of your normal routine so you can become more comfortable wearing it. This will help you be accustomed to it so that strapping on your holster will be as second-nature as fastening your seatbelt when you drive.
5. Avoid Unnecessary Attention in Public
The advantage of a CCW permit is that you can carry your weapon without anyone being aware you’re armed. But that advantage is lost if you behave in a way that draws attention to your firearm in public.
People new to carrying often focus too much on their gun and may constantly reach back to check their weapon. They may fidget with their holster if it isn’t secure or slips out of position.
Both of these common behaviors should be curbed as much as possible. The last thing you want is to lose the concealed part of concealed carry. Having a high quality holster that’s comfortable, and limiting any adjustments only to private settings can keep everyone calm.
6. Consider Your Clothing When Carrying
Speaking of being comfortable, when you carry, it’s important to consider your holster’s impact on your outfit. Form-fitting fabrics may cause you rig to “print,” making the outline of your weapon visible.
Certain styles of clothing, such as overtly tactical or camouflage gear can also impact your ability to stay discreet. Instead, try to wear loose-fitting styles and fabrics. Not only will they make concealing your weapon more effective, but they provide better draw access.
7. Keep Informed About Local Laws
As the debates regarding gun ownership and carrying continue, changes to laws are bound to happen in various jurisdictions. One of the most important ways to be a responsible CCW permit holder is to stay up-to-date about the laws in any area to which you plan to travel with your weapon. Make sure you’re 100% familiar with restrictions about where you can legally carry and use your firearm before you get there.
Brian Ford is a freelance writer and blogger based in Austin, Texas. With a love for hunting, hiking, and the great outdoors in general, he often writes outside. In his free time, he enjoys spending afternoons at his local range.
MSNBC host Joy Reid is making national news—not for revving up her fans in the anti-Trump Resistance, but for homophobic remarks that have surfaced from her now-defunct blog and years-old tweets.
If it feels like you’ve heard this one before, it’s because you have. The issue is bubbling up yet again—and this time, Reid’s excuse for the comments has taken a turn toward the truly bizarre.
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First, some background: A full decade ago, when she was still a morning talk show host in south Florida, Reid edited a politics blog called The Reid Report. She used that blog to write, among other things, an ugly string of posts attempting to out then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist as gay, repeatedly referring to him as “Miss Charlie,” calling his marriage to a woman a fraud, and even speculating about their sex life and wondering if Crist’s wife had to cope with him “ogling the male waiters” on their honeymoon. She also suggested that if Crist somehow made his way onto John McCain’s 2008 ticket, he would be too preoccupied doing things like picking out “flamingo-shaped napkins” to get anything done in the White House.
A lefty Twitter user laid all these findings out in a November 2017 Twitter thread, with receipts from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:
Days later, Reid, who was by then hosting her own weekend politics show on MSNBC, apologized for the posts, which she called “insensitive, tone deaf and dumb.” She also pointed to her friends in the LGBTQ community as evidence she’s not homophobic. Crist accepted her apology on Twitter, and everyone seemed to move on, satisfied that Reid—like many Democrats—had simply “evolved” on the issue of LGBTQ equality in the intervening years.
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But on Monday, things got weird again. After the same Twitter user unearthed even more offensive content from Reid’s old blog using Wayback—which archives publicly available internet content even if it’s been removed or deleted by its author—Mediaite published an extensive story about the latest posts. Among the deeply offensive posts contained therein (and far from an exhaustive list):
Reid defending the former NBA star Tim Hardaway saying that he hates “gay people,” by saying “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing…Does that make me homophobic? Probably.”
In the same post, she went on to write that it’s “intrinsic” for heterosexual people to believe that “homosexual sex…is…well…gross.”
A 2006 post counting down the “totally not gay celebrities of the year,” a list that included Clay Aiken, Tom Cruise, and Anderson Cooper at No. 1.
Idly floating an “interesting question” about whether you could “manipulate the genes of your unborn child” to make sure they’re not gay.
An obsession with the movie Brokeback Mountain (its premise of a love story between two men was “too out there” for her, and she said again that she just didn’t want to watch a sex scene between men).
When Mediaite reached out to Reid about those posts, things took a strange turn: Instead of just apologizing, as she’d already done once before, Reid insisted the blog posts published under her name were the work of “unknown, external” hackers:
In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.
I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.
So Reid is arguing that hackers wormed their way into the Wayback Machine to edit her archived posts to add more anti-LGBTQ content to smear her. Splinter has reached out to Reid and MSNBC for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back.
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In response to Splinter reaching out for comment, an Internet Archive staffer pointed to a new blog post on their site repudiating Reid’s claims that malevolent forces manipulated her site (emphasis added):
When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.
We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out at The Intercept, basically any security breach is theoretically possible, although Jeffrey Carr, the cybersecurity expert he spoke with, said: “I’ve never heard of that happening but it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen, I guess.”
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It would also seem that—if hackers were routinely able to penetrate Wayback—it could carry serious implications for the integrity of the internet’s archives, which includes news stories. Reid’s blog is now deleted, and the site’s robots.txt—a file websites use to communicate with search engine web crawlers and other web robots—currently blocks the Wayback Machine from displaying its own copies of the site and from creating any new ones in the future. The Internet Archive has a long-standing policy of retroactively removing websites whose robots.txt files block its web crawler.
It’s a bizarre development given Reid’s past comments about the LGBTQ community, which she owned up to and apologized for. She’s also clearly been forgiven; she’s even slated to be honored by the LGBTQ rights organization PFLAG, which is giving her its Straight for Equality in Media award on May 9.
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As harsh as the new crop of blogs are, they aren’t far off from homophobic messages that she’s tweeted from her verified account:
Reid also previously attacked Chelsea Manning in a transphobic Twitter thread, and framed Manning’s reports of torture as complaints about needing a “pillow.” All of this would seem to cast doubt on Reid evoking the “I’ve been hacked” excuse, which is such an old, widely-recognized dodge that it’s become a Twitter meme.
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The MSNBC host is clearly trying a new tactic to face down embarrassing old comments coming back to haunt her this time around. Unless we’re presented with some concrete evidence that such an elaborate hack of Reid’s archives transpired, let’s hope she doesn’t get away with it quite so easily.
J.K. Trotter, a reporter with GMG’s Special Projects Desk, contributed reporting to this piece.
macOS: It’s important to know how to fine-tune your wireless router, because not every router can just auto-adjust your wireless network’s settings to give you the highest quality connection. That, and a great wifi-analysis app can help you figure out the areas of your house or apartment that might need a little more wireless support—either by adding another access point or adjusting your existing configuration.
This App Is Worth It
Though it’s pricey, the $20 macOS app WiFi Explorer is worth the price of a few burritos. It does a perfect job of showing you every wireless network your laptop can find in a particular area. More importantly, it drops these all onto two handy graphs—one for the 2.4GHz band and one for the 5GHz band—to show you which channels might be saturated with competing networks.
WiFi Explorer
Why is this important? Where possible, you want your wireless network to be on a channel that’s as free from interference from other wireless networks as possible. If you run your wifi network on a channel that’s packed with other wifi networks, your speeds can suffer. As MacWorld described in a 2013 article:
“To test this theory, I brought that same outdoor suburban distance test indoors to a long hallway in our seven-story office building in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. At my home, the MacBook detected 25 networks; at the office it saw 150.
At a distance of 6 feet from the Time Capsule, our average throughput was 489 mbps, 11 percent less than the suburban network speed. At 26 feet, the office speed dropped to 305 mbps, 33 percent less than the suburban test result from the same distance. At 54 feet, the indoor test was 44 percent slower than in my quiet neighborhood. And at 78 feet, the speeds in my office were down 51 percent from the speed I got in front of my house at the same distance.”
Choose Channels Manually
If your router can’t pick the best channel for you, or its selection is terrible, then you should manually adjust your wifi network’s settings within your router’s interface. Try sticking to channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4GHz—the three non-overlapping channels—and one of 5GHz’s 23 different non-overlapping channels. (You have a lot more flexibility there.)
If You Don’t Want to Pay
And if you truly don’t want to shell out $20 for a lovely app, you can sort-of accomplish the same channel scanning in macOS itself. In Spotlight, type in “wireless diagnostics” and load the app that pops up at the top of your results. Ignore its on-screen prompt; instead, click on Window, and then click on “Scan.”
While you won’t get any pretty graphs, you can sort all the found wireless networks by channel to get a sense of what’s crowded and what isn’t—remember, lower RSSI numbers indicate a weaker signal, so a channel with a lot of weak wireless networks might be a better choice for your wireless network than a channel with one or two strong, competing networks.
In this video, Paul Harrell asks and answers the question of whether a log cabin offered any true protection against “old west” guns and cartridges that were popular during the time when more folks lived in log cabins.
The intro to this video is tough to listen to, due to the amusement-park music in the background. But bear with it, because like most PH videos, the shooting will begin soon enough.
They built a “block house” of 4×6 lumber, which is a bit on the wimpy side for replicating a sure-nuff log cabin, and started shooting it.
Cartridges used on the block house include 38 S&W, 45 Colt, 44 WCF (44-40), and 45-70 Gov’t. Only one went through; can you guess which?
After that, he takes on an actual wall of six-inch-diameter logs. In addition to 45-70 and 44-40, he tries a .54-caliber muzzleloading rifle.
Enjoy.
Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started… [Learn More]
For as long as artificial sweeteners have existed, people have been warned about their supposed health risks such as cancer and multiple sclerosis. But while these claims are routinelydebunked as nothing more than junk science, some research—including a new study presented this week at the annual Experimental Biology conference—is beginning to indicate that sweeteners could actually contribute to health problems like type 2 diabetes.
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Marquette University used rats vulnerable to developing diabetes for their experiments. For three weeks, different groups were fed high doses of two sugars, glucose and fructose, and two common artificial sweeteners, aspartame and acesulfame potassium. They then studied the rats’ blood using a large-scale technique that tracks minute metabolic changes, known as metabolomics.
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“Just after three weeks of giving these sweeteners and sugars to our diabetes-susceptible rats, we saw biochemical changes in the blood that could potentially lead to alterations in fat and energy metabolism,” lead author Brian Hoffman, a biomedical engineer at both institutions, told Gizmodo.
Diabetes is what happens when our bodies become unable to maintain proper glucose levels in the body—a process that’s largely regulated by the hormone insulin. This breakdown causes people to either stop responding to insulin as easily as they once did, or to stop producing insulin altogether. Excessive sugar in our diets is thought to help cause diabetes by overtaxing the body’s insulin-producing machinery, since it’s used to bring high blood glucose levels back to normal.
Because of that, artificial sweeteners have long been advertised as a way for people to eat treats and soft drinks safely and lose weight, without raising the risk of diabetes. But rates of diabetes and obesity have continued to skyrocket regardless, even as sweetener-rich foods and drinks became widely available starting in the 1950s. (There are currently six FDA-approved artificial sweeteners.)
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As a result, Hoffman and his team have not only tried to understand how sugar sparks the chain of events that leads to diabetes, but also tried to suss out whether sweeteners could do the same.
If sweeteners can raise our risk of diabetes, Hoffman says, they probably do it differently than sugar. Rather than overwhelming the body’s machinery, his and others’ research suggests, fake sugar wears it out. “Sweeteners kinda trick the body. And then when your body’s not getting the energy it needs—because it does need some sugar to function properly—it potentially finds that source elsewhere,” Hoffman said.
In the rats’ blood, his team found evidence of protein breakdown, likely meaning their bodies turned to burning away muscle as a source of energy. They also found higher levels of lipids and other fats, which over time could contribute to obesity and diabetes. Other research has suggested sweeteners alter the community of bacteria that call our guts home—the microbiome—in a way that could lead to harmful metabolic changes. And still more research has shown that diets high in artificial sweeteners are associated with a greater risk of diabetes and obesity.
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Hoffman is well aware of past efforts to tie sweeteners to dire health risks, but he says things are different in this case.
“Most of these sweeteners were approved well before we had the technology to perform studies like my lab is doing. So they weren’t able to look as in-depth at some of the potential effects being caused,” he said. “By knowing what biochemical changes these are causing through these large-scale studies, we can take a unbiased approach and see what’s changing to give us a better direction.”
Hoffman’s team plans to submit their current findings for consideration in several peer-reviewed journals, but they’re already in the middle of studying their sweetener-fed rats for longer periods of time. Future studies are likely to involve taking a peek at the rats’ microbiomes too. Ultimately, he believes their study method could be relatively easy to use with people, since all that would be needed is a blood sample to study small metabolic changes.
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In the meantime, though, he doesn’t necessarily want to scare anyone away from their diet drink habit.
“What I like to tell people is that most things in moderation are going to be fine. So if you enjoy your diet soda here and there, than have your diet soda here and there. If you like your normal soda here and there, have it here and there,” he said. “It’s when people start to chronically consume these—say, a person drinks two, three, four of [these drinks] everyday, that we should start to be concerned. Because you’re starting to introduce these biochemical changes and the body has no time to recover.”