I’ve had just about all that I can stand of these feel good about high fructose corn syrup commercials. The most frustrating thing about them, other than the fact that the corn lobby isn’t being prosecuted for deliberatly trying to hide the problems with the product, is that they illustrate another very real problem, that of an uninformed and misinformed public. Just look at the dumb guy on the picnic blanket, totally speechless, when his girlfriend challenges him on the safety of HFCS!   

Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food does a great job of explaining why so many people know so little about nutrition and food safety, so I won’t even try and paraphrase that here. Read it if you haven’t, its short. Nevertheless the problem remains; people don’t know enough, but live mostly in ignorant comfort that federal agencies have ‘got our back.’ All this faith despite a nation of people that prove we’re eating ourselves to death. The FDA would rather try to solve it with a pill, however, than address the core of the problem: industrial produced pseudo-foods, though they’re good for the bank-accounts of those who make them, are no replacement for the real thing. 

HFCS has problems that range from almost complete ecological unsustainability, to a very real link between foods that contain the product and obesity. Let me explain the latter. Different carbohydrates create more or less extreme insulin responses when we ingest them. HFCS is at the top of this scale - our blood insulin goes way up when we eat the stuff, much higher than regular sugar. This is a problem (and I’m paraphrasing here) because after all the food is digested, if there’s still insulin in our blood, we need to get it out, otherwise it will interfere with getting energy to our brains, among other problems. So our body says “Hey, we need more food, eat more.” Yes, that’s right, HFCS makes people hungry. It may have the same calories as sugar, but that’s like saying eating a serving of Lays potato chips is as good as eating a garden salad, with dressing, because they have about the same number of calories. 

Some researchers argue that there’s even more to it than the insulin response, that, like MSG, the extreme sweetness characterized by so many products that use HFCS triggers an evolutionary response that says “good food, rich in energy, eat as much as you can now in case there isn’t any food tomorrow.” This might just be the reason for the way our insulin response works, but there’ll be many more years of research before we understand it that well. 

But today we need only look around to know that something is afoul in our food supply. It seems to me that players in the food industry, if they want loyal customers in the long term, should already be trying to do something about it, rather than sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting ‘NAAA NAAA NAA’ when people criticize their products and ask for responsible reform. 

I could rant all day about these people but will save you that (for now). What I ask of each of you, is that you don’t be that guy in the commercial, and don’t buy the industry misinformation. Instead, tell at least one person that you think might not know about the real dangers in foods sweetened with HFCS. Research it yourself first, if you like; I would be happy to point in the right direction of some of the research.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 4:22 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.