Image by Steven Vance via FlickrThis High Fructose Corn Syrup topic is really bugging me. I guess it’s because I never realized it was in so many consumer products until fairly recently.
One of my kids wrote a paper this past school year suggesting a “sugar” tax on products containing high fructose corn syrup.
He watched the video “Food, Inc.,” which almost made me sick…literally. It showed how our farms are all run by big businesses now, and how government subsidy programs encourage “farmers” to grow corn, lots of it. In fact, there’s so much of it that it’s in almost everything you eat or touch, from animal feed, to cardboard, to containers, to almost all processed foods.
Thanks to genetic modification, corn is really fast and easy to grow and largely disease resistant. In fact, high fructose corn syrup became a substitute for white sugar in the ’70′s, thanks to the generous government subsidies for corn ($73.8B since 1995) . Not only is high fructose corn syrup cheaper than white sugar, but it also extends the shelf life of processed foods, explaining why so many food manufactures use it.
Check out this chart which strongly suggests a correlation between obesity and high fructose corn syrup consumption.
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| Source: http://www.diabetesdaily.com/edelman/2009/05/chart-obesity-high-fructose-corn-syrup.php |
In a recent study by Princeton University, animals that were fed high fructose corn syrup gained 48% more weight than those on a normal diet.
I would encourage you to watch Food, Inc. It will change how you look at everything you eat.
