Yet another Dirty Little Secret

The world's businesses are driven by the profit question to such an extent that we regularly encounter dirty little secrets being kept from the general public. We saw this with a number of products ranging from tobacco to various additives and processes. We can thank the FDA for helping control the worst excesses, but as with all other parts of the administrative world, the FDA too is heavily influenced by politics and the profit question, and so ends up pressured, under-staffed, and incapable of pro-actively dealing with many of the issues that it faces.

The latest one on the radar, and one getting increasing coverage (at least at the grass-roots level) is the presence of High Fructose Corn Syrup in practically everything, and its effect on human growth and development.

More and more studies indicate that the fructose component of sugar is extremely bad for the body. When it appears in HFCS, fructose has no obstacles from very quickly and directly being absorbed by the body, enabling it to wreak havoc on our systems much more easily.

I won't get into what HFCS does to the body, or what studies are out there to document this. Many documents out on the web already take care of this. For example, http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/cornsyrup.html, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8003-2003Mar10?language=printer, and of course the ubiquitous wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup.

What I wonder about is why nobody is making the connection here? If you look at the rise in obesity in this country, and the rise of diabetes, and unhealthy children, and a variety of other nutritional problems, you will see a parallel for all those things with the proliferation of HFCS in our foods. Some will argue that lack of exercise, less movement, larger portions, etc., are to blame, and one can't pin the problem on just one thing.

Yes, I can agree with that, but one has to notice the warning signs which all point to a common factor, and start to wonder about it. Tobacco isn't the only cause of lung cancer. But heck, we know for sure that it is a leading cause.

Look at the comparison. Most European countries as well as New Zealand and a few others still use sucrose or other sugar forms instead of HFCS. The economies still make those a better choice for businesses there. (Here we have a HUGE corn farm glut, probably with appropriately large and strong lobby for D.C.) And in those countries the rates of obesity rise are nowhere nearly as high as those in the United States. We're known worldwide as a country of fat asses. There is no diabetes epidemic in Europe. The kids, who don't get that much more exercise than those in the US, are not lard butts from a young age.

Unfortunately even in those countries the landscape is changing as American food production business concepts make inroads into different cultures. Still, the progress of these problems is much slower, and will hopefully be nipped in the bud before it's too late for them as well. For us, all we have to look forward to is a country where subsequent generations end up with shorter life spans than this one, and with medical costs rising to the point where the country will no longer be able to sustain them, even if it didn't decide to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars on random wars half way around the globe. Let's hope the FDA catches on sooner rather than later, and starts introducing restrictions that at the moment are spearheaded by cities instead. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15020846/)