While I do not dispute that corn is carcinogenic, I have been asking Ray
for months to provide me a reference to back up that point.  Do you have
one, Troy?  You mention "Ames" and "Ames" study--can you please give
specifics?  As in, full title of study, full name of "Ames," date of
publication, name of publication published in, volume and issue #, etc.?  I
very, very badly want this (and in fact need it for some things I'm working
on).

As for the rest: while corn syrup may indeed be a potent carcinogen, I
repeat that if you are talking about two ounces taken once in an entire
year, it is a lot to get worked up over.  It is, if I may say, like
worrying that a single puff of of a single cigarette (or hell, let's go hog
wild and say it's one entire cigarette) will cause you to die of cancer.
Not a rational fear unless you fear the addiction that -might- result.  And
in that there -may- be a worry, since there is the troubling possibility
that the people ingesting two ounces of corn syrup water will have an
addictive reaction so strong that they go back to ingesting that kind of
stuff all the time.  However it strikes me as a small worry; I suspect that
the ill health and feelings of discomfort that are likely to follow such a
move will prompt return to healthy eating quick enough.

As for chaos: the suggestion that the human body is a chaotic system is
interesting, but I think it's far too possible to romanticize chaos
mathematics excessively, just as many excessively romanticize quantum
mechanics.  If the body were truly a completely chaotic system then likely
no drug would ever have predictable effect (when in fact almost all do),
the very idea of blood clots forming in response to a cut would be
laughable, and in all likelihood the very existence of anything called a
"living organism" would be impossible.  Indeed, of chaos mathematics ruled
everything, then the Earth would likely have been thrown out of its orbit
and into the sun or out into freezing space long ago just from all the tiny
movements of organisms walking around on its surface.

There are certainly chaotic things -about- biology, but there are also
quite predictable patterns that do not amount to open-ended equations.
When human sperm meets human egg, the result is very rarely a gazelle.  I
have seen no reason to suggest that going onto a natural diet and then
abandoning it for a very short and minor deviation is highly likely to
result in complete ruin.  If it were the case then there would be no point
in ever going onto a completely natural diet in the first place, if you
weren't born eating that way.  We might say that since the human body is so
chaotic, and has managed to survive for decades on an un-natural diet, then
returning to the "natural" diet might cause the complete metabolic system
to collapse, resulting in severe illness and death.  But of course we know
that is not the case.

Ray Audette, our brother who invented Neander Thin, has admitted in print
that every once in a while he cheats and has himself a little Haagen-Dasz
(which I believe I'm mis-spelling).  He also got caught out once in an
interview with a reporter in which he went ahead and ate a little bit of
deviled egg at a restaurant even though he knew it probably had some
vinegar and soybean oil in it from the mayonaise.  Philosophically I have
no trouble with this, nor do I see any hypocrisy to it; life's too damn
short to be so religiously anal about any diet that you never, ever, under
any circumstance make even the tiniest deviation.

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to the view that it's better to err on
the side of caution and advise people to be as strict as they possibly can
be.  The road to ruination is often that small deviation that we allow to
grow into more and more deviations to the point where we've effectively
abandoned what we set out to do.  This -is- a serious issue.

Perhaps my lack of concern really comes from the fact that I personally am
not enamoured enough of Coca-Cola to be afraid that it would cause -me- to
lose my discipline.  I suppose if I had to take part in a ritual that had
me eating a full plate of spaghetti with garlic bread and a Snicker's bar
for dessert, I'd be a lot more concerned about it.  %-)