I’m staying home from work today with a lingering flu-like thing so I was luxuriating in the glory of Golden Girls on Lifetime. (Picture it: Sicily 1922…I was home from the vineyard with a Miasma…) During a commercial break, I saw one that was unnerving to me. A man and a woman are sitting on a picnic blanket in a park. She offers him a bite of a cherry-red Popsicle and he says to her, “I thought you loved me…that has high fructose corn syrup in it.” She asks him what is so bad about HFCS and he stammers while he tries to name something wrong with it. She finishes his thought by saying, “what? That is has the same calories as sugar and no proven health dangers?” (I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t remember it word-for-word). Then he quips, “You only brought one?” The commercial ends with a link to a website called sweet surprise or something like that and states that it was paid for by the Corn Refiners Association.
Corn Syrup, and especially High Fructose, is in a shocking amount of processed food. Many of them, like ketchup and bread, that you would never expect. Most sodas and “fruit” juices are almost entirely water and HFCS, and it is found in almost every cookie, dessert, and sweetened cereal in the grocery store. There are a lot of signs that it’s very bad for you, and indeed diabetes and obesity have climbed to harrowing numbers ever since it was introduced in the 1970s. Admittedly, none of these issues have ever been linked directly and unequivocally to HFCS, but there is clearly a connection.
The fact is, it isn’t good for you and we are consuming it in very, very large amounts. It isn’t an innocuous ingredient.
Here are a couple of articles about the problems with HFCS:
One, about the environmental impact of a country consuming millions of gallons of the stuff and one about the move to eliminate an unhealthy additive to our collective diets.
(Full Disclosure: As I’m writing this, I’m drinking a 7UP that of course contains HFCS. I don’t drink soda frequently, but it makes my tummy feel better. I’m not saying that we should be giving it up 100%- though I’d like to- I just don’t want people to see propaganda while they are watching Golden Girls and think that it isn’t something that they should be concerned about.)
Give up the HFCS / 7UP and brew a gallon of iced tea. My wife and I always have a gal. of tea in the fridge and it can be sweetened with HHBS (High Honey Bee Syrup aka Honey).
GarlicMan76458 on http://www.FreedomGardens.org
One of the thing Michael Pollan mentioned in OD about HFCS is that when it was introduced you would have expected that maybe the consumption of normal sugar would have gone down, but that wasn’t the case. The consumption of normal sugar stayed the same, and all of the HFCS that people consume now is just on top of that!
Here in Europe we don’t have nearly as much HFCS, and they are not bold enough to call it by the same name. Here it’s usually called Glucose-Fructose syrup.