So, I have a lot of opinions about the food industry in this country. (In a nutshell, I think it sucks.) The food industry makes billions upon billions of dollars by taking simple foods, processing them, “adding value,” and selling them to us in various forms. They take cheap ingredients like corn and turn them into expensive crap.
The food industry could care possibly less about your health, my health or anyone’s health. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a shining example.
Giant corporate food producers - like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co. and CPC International – grow huge quantities of corn. Your tax dollars subsidize these crops. In the 1970’s corn was primarily used for processing into margarine and other fats. But soybeans were easier to grow and process. So the soybean took over the processed fats market. What to do with all that corn?
Someone got the idea of concentrating the fructose in corn in to a syrup. This was cheaper than using cane sugar, and cheaper is really all that matters to the food industry. So High Fructose Corn Syrup started replacing cane sugar in just about everything.
Fructose sounds a little healthier than sugar. That’s because fructose is the sugar found in most fruits. When you eat fructose, it leaves your stomach and heads for the liver where it’s turned in to glucose or triglycerides (the building blocks of fats). When you eat real fruit, the fiber slows down the absorption of the fructose, so the liver can convert more of it to glucose. Your body can handle this.
When fructose is concentrated in High Fructose Corn Syrup, it hits the liver like a fructose bomb. Since there’s no real demand for that fructose to become glucose (unless you’re in the middle of some intense exercise), your body turns most of the fructose it gets from High Fructose Corn Syrup into fats. In many people, this just may lead to elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels. And of course you know that these blood factors are related to heart disease. (You may have seen a commercial or two selling drugs to lower cholesterol.)
Anyway, the moral of the story is this – avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup. If you start looking, you’ll see the stuff is EVERYWHERE. If you read labels, you’ll see it’s in sodas, ketchup, most breakfast cereals, almost every kind of bread, cookies, pizza sauce, etc. So start looking and start avoiding.
If you want to read a GREAT book on this subject, check out Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. You can also get a pretty good movie called King Corn.
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