High Fructose Corn Syrup

Many Americans want to eat healthier but I suddenly realized why many do not. Because it is many times more expensive to eat fresher, healthier food? I bought three medium sized peaches at the store the other day for two dollars!! Holy shit!! I could have bought two McDonald’s Big & Nasty hamburgers for two dollars; and they would have cooked them for me too.

Basically, eating fresh should be cheaper but cheaper is not what corporate American wants; they want you to spend more buying their chemically enhanced products. They use catch words like “fresh” and “handmade” but these are just marketing words and do not represent what is in the package. Do they put these additives into our food so they can charge us more?

After the origin of HIV post, I started thinking about other areas where corporations save money at the expense of the health and welfare of society and I found more examples of it within the food we eat everyday.

The definition of poison is:
Substances that cause injury, illness, or death to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale. Some poisons are also toxins, usually referring to naturally produced substances that kill rapidly in small quantities.

Basically the food we eat is poison. Hydrogenated vegetable protein, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, BHT, monosodium glutamate, phosphoric acid, sodium benzoate, modified food starch, high fructose corn syrup are just a few of the poisons we eat in our food everyday. In my opinion high fructose corn syrup is the worst poison of all.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is produced by processing corn starch to yield glucose, and then processing the glucose to produce a high percentage of fructose. It all sounds rather simple—white cornstarch is turned into crystal clear syrup. However, the process is actually very complicated. Three different enzymes are needed to break down cornstarch, which is composed of chains of glucose molecules of almost infinite length, into the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

Consumers may think that because it contains fructose—which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food—that it is healthier than sugar. A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered just the opposite.

Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy—that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.

"The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Dr. Field, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic."

HFCS contains more fructose than sugar and this fructose is more immediately available because it is not bound up in sucrose. Since the effects of fructose are most severe in the growing organism, we need to think carefully about what kind of sweeteners we give to our children. Fruit juices should be strictly avoided—they are very high in fructose—but so should anything with HFCS.

Interestingly HFCS is used in many products aimed at children. So avoid eating or drinking this crap and especially avoid giving this stuff to your kids. Frankly, I don’t know how these corporations get away with this.

As of October of 2005 nearly 21 million Americans or roughly 7 percent of the population have diabetes. If you can imagine a standard diagram you can see how the use of HFCS and the diabetes rate increase in parallel since 1970. Today, HFCS are engrained into our society. The well funded corn lobby and corporate America has managed to mortgage the health and welfare of our population to cheaply manufacture their goods.

Millions of Americans get diabetes as millions of dollars flow into the coffers of the super rich food corporations which in turn pay off politicians through the lobbyists to keep the cycle going. I don’t want to eat this stuff but I have no choice because it is in everything. Unless you buy fresh produce (if you can afford fresh produce) there is no way to avoid these ingredients.

Most of the America’s farmland is owned and controlled by corporate American now. Is this why fresh produce so expensive? The individual farmers don’t get any of that money so where does it all go?

Just remember that corporations don’t give a squat about you. All they care about is the money in your pocket. In this case, they are getting rich by selling us poison and the government is allowing it to happen. Just as we have created HIV, we have probably created diabetes with our poisonous additives in the food.

More about the dangers of HFCS as it pertains to soft drinks.

I would like to give credit to Linda Forristal for the scientific analysis of HFCS.