Sprol

In the 1970’s the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture made a bold — though shortsighted – stroke when he enabled the development of a compound called High Fructose Corn Syrup. The American farmer had lost a great deal of profit due to overseas imports, and the U.S. government was therefore charged with coming up with a more profitable way for farmers to use their corn surplus. At the same time, groundswell pressure from consumers was rampant to keep grocery prices affordable.

With that great American crop, corn, threatened, so was the livelihood of our all-American corn farmers. Enter High Fructose Corn Syrup – the new sweetener that would drive up demand for corn and provide a super cheap new form of sweetener for packaged foods, breads, cereals, sodas, spaghetti sauce, ketchup – you name it, HFCS would be in it. The future looked sweet indeed.



More stable than sugar against the disintegrating elements (such as moisture), foods with High Fructose Corn Syrup can literally travel thousands of miles and sit on the shelf of your local convenience store forever and (almost) never go bad. Cheaper ingredients meant cheaper groceries for the good American consumer. A win- win situation, it seemed.

Because of the unusually long shelf life of HFCS, store-bought cakes, cookies, brownies, mixes, breads, sodas, juices, tomato sauce and all of the rest could be sold with practically no expiration date. HFCS, despite misleading labels that read “all natural,” is an ENTIRELY man-made substance. It’s almost indestructible. Like Styrofoam, eternal and immortal.

The pornographic underbelly of all this (and there always is one, it seems, where money and government and conflicting desires come into play) is that in laboratory tests High Fructose Corn Syrup causes male rats to never fully develop their testicles. And High Fructose Corn Syrup also causes the hearts of female rats to expand until they burst. Exit pornography, enter horror flick.

But is this a rat tragic story or a human tragedy? Well, hold into your seats because the seemingly innocuous little sweet nothings that Secretary Butz so gracefully introduced to our bellies in the seventies are now linked to obesity, diabetes, and yes, even cirrhosis of the liver. And as if the above were not enough, there is also some preliminary evidence that HFCS is carcinogenic.

In his groundbreaking book FatLand, Greg Critser breaks down exactly how HFCS is metabolized by the human body. In short, because our bodies have absolutely no way of understanding this highly engineered substance…they convert it into storage material and chuck it away…hence we are fattened up.

The explanation goes like this: glucose molecules, which are the building blocks of sucrose, can be metabolized (used, eaten) by any and every cell in the human body. This is not so with Fructose. It has to be metabolized through the liver. Hence, your liver ends up releasing triglycerides into your bloodstream and generally has trouble dealing with this weird substance. Fructose, which used to be advised for diabetics because it did not stimulate insulin production, really does appear to do a lot of fancy footwork with enzymes and other hormones, too. It does not allow the release of the hormone that tells the brain you are full. Hence, you overeat.

Now, what about the HFCS advocates who maintain that High Fructose Corn Syrup really is an “all-natural ingredient” because, they say, it is made from corn and fructose is the sugar naturally occurring in fruit? Well, wine and isopropyl alcohol both contain alcohol. However, the rubbing stuff for cotton balls should never go in your wineglass. Get it?

Let’s look a little more closely at how this stuff is made. Saying that HFCS is an all- natural substance is like saying two celebrities naturally bumped into each other and fell in love – when more often their PR agents set them up. HFCS is set up as follows: Corn starch is boiled, distilled, and generally messed with until you get a corn syrup with a big jacked-up amount of fructose…HFCS could have as little as 45% fructose or as much as 85%…the “hard stuff”…

So, the absolutely spine-tingling fact is that shortly after the 1970s, and especially throughout the 1980s, HFCS began to replace sucrose (table sugar, cane sugar, or beet sugar) in almost everything. This means that for the last 25 years — a lifetime for some reading this — this jacked-up, messed up “all-natural” toxic sweetener has been in all of our foods as we developed into the fat ADD-riddled little monsters that we are.

Too often we as consumers are under the spell of the idea that our health depends on our own free will. That is, what we do or do not do for ourselves makes all the difference in our health. Watching a new commercial for Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers on TV, I am struck by how easy, offhand and rampant this assumption is. If only each American could do their part to reverse the obesity epidemic through personal self-control and initiative? And yet this is not entirely true. What we don’t know can hurt us.

I heard recently the claim that health depends less on how we take care of ourselves than how we take care of each-other. This speaks directly to the need for more accurate public health and nutrition information and corporate responsibility. The Land of the free? I don’t know. Freedom from accurate information, freedom from healthy food…these do not really seem like freedoms at all.

Watching the food channel, I recently heard that the most delicious pork comes from Spain, where the swine are fattened up on an all-corn diet. This little tidbit reminded me of we Americans. Surely Americans are often enough referred to as pigs, but who knew we held so much in common with this lowly animal? It seems we and they are being fattened up for some strange slaughter yet to come.