This should make it all better.
The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten its image with a new name: corn sugar.
The Corn Refiners Association applied Tuesday to the federal government for permission to use the name on food labels. The group hopes a new name will ease confusion about the sweetener, which is used in soft drinks, bread, cereal and other products.
Americans’ consumption of corn syrup has fallen to a 20-year low on consumer concerns that it is more harmful or more likely to cause obesity than ordinary sugar, perceptions for which there is little scientific evidence.
However, some scientists have linked consumption of full-calorie soda – the vast majority of which is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup – to obesity.
[…]
There’s a new online marketing campaign at and on television. Two new commercials try to alleviate shopper confusion, showing people who say they now understand that “whether it’s corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can’t tell the difference. Sugar is sugar.”
This ain’t going nowhere.
Sheeple believed that “high fructose” meant you got a lot of bang (fructose) for the buck. I mean, if it’s advertised as “high fructose” it implies that fructose is a good thing, right?
Let’s examine another sheeple observation with washing detergent – “the blue crystals” !!
Yeah, we add LOTS of blue crystals. Now, new improved with 50% more blue crystals!!
Sugar is bad. Minimize it’s use in your diet.
I giggle when people say Highfuckedtoast.
@ #3 –
Sugar is bad. HFCS is poison.
“The group hopes a new name will ease confusion…”
No, they hope it will increase confusion and make people think that this crap is the the same as real sugar.
It’s seriously time to look into banning this stuff.
“Americans’ consumption of corn syrup has fallen to a 20-year low… try to alleviate shopper confusion…”
They won’t alleviate the confusion (evidenced by Mr Kilowatt in #6) by using the term corn syrup. Corn syrup has been around since the turn of the 20th century. Most frequently found as Karo Syrup, it is a glucose-based product. Glucose syrup is further “refined” into fructose which is sweeter and denser. We might as well give up and die if we can’t have some pecan pie made with good ole Karo syrup and molasses.
HFC syrup has been shown to elevate blood sugar more dramatically that cane sugar. There is plenty of scientific evidence for this.
No one has yet mentioned that it just doesn’t taste as good. Get your hands on a some of the Coke from Mexico made with cane sugar, or a Dr. Pepper from Dublin made with sugar, and compare it to the crap they sell to everyone else. High fructose corn syrup is clearly inferior.
I wish we, and I mean us Americans, would stop blaming the sugar, blaming the high fructose corn syrup, blaming the TV, blaming, blaming, blaming. We’re fat because we don’t exercise enough and we eat too much, It really is that simple. You can put HFCS in everything, and if you just ate enough to give you the energy you need for the day and went out and walked, ran, rode a bike, whatever, you’d still be healthy.
HFCS isn’t evil, we are, for looking at everything but ourselves to place blame on.
Mmmm, Karo syrup!
In other news, the cigarette industry is applying to change the name “cigarettes” to “lung enhancers”!
#10 Hector said “HFCS isn’t evil, we are, for looking at everything but ourselves to place blame on.”
A) For all the touting that HFCS is evil, show me where the Government is stepping in and banning it or even removing price supports for corn. Corporations rule the day.
B) Americans are moving away from HFCS (20 year low, remember). It’s the corn industry that is trying to rebrand to snooker its way back into our hearts (and livers and arteries.)
@12 Milo,
Don’t give them ideas.
Great, it’ll save me some syllables when saying its bad for you.
HFCS, or CS as they would like is to call it, is processed crap that would die a rapid death in the marketplace if it wasn’t a heavily subsidized product.
It was created by chemists for the corn growing minority (like Cargill) and is supported by your tax dollars, as a cheap substitute for cane sugars which came from Cuba until Castro went and threw the gangsters and oligarchs off the island.
I buy my soft drink with cane sugar because sugar cane (and maple sap) actually contain real sugars. I don’t care that I have to pay the real price.
Once we get rid of the subsidies due to budgetary constraints, the real price will immediately be felt in the marketplace and we can look forward to REAL sugars instead of sucking corn kernels through a a whole bunch of filters, pipes, heaters and finally out through a straw.
This article makes me want to watch the movie King Corn again.
Did you know that they use Sulfuric acid in the production of HFCS.
# 13 Hyph3n “show me where the Government is stepping in and banning it or even removing price supports for corn. Corporations rule the day.”
Hym3n – HFCS is just one result of the US Gov’s support for the corn industry. We grow far more corn than we can use so the Gov either pays farmers NOT to grow corn or they look for alternative ways to use the grain. I don’t remember the exavt percentage (and I’m too damn lazy to look it up) but the vast majority of corn isn’t even edible (without processing) by humans. We either process it thru animals and create steak or send it to the lab to make HFCS and lots of other products.
Pepsi came out with their “throwback” drinks this summer and they were a big hit. I tried a couple and they do taste better than the Pepsi with HFCS. I think the drink companies use the most HFCS so the corn companies must be getting worried.
I also think a large part is that Americans are drinking more diet drinks, which I think are worse for some people than the normal versions. I saw on discovery channel they had a program about a woman who weighed over 300 pounds and she just drank diet coke the entire day (I think she drank around a dozen cans a day) and then at the end of the day she would eat a meal. The meal did not have enough calories to cause her enormous weight. After she stopped drinking diet drinks and started eating five meals a day she ended up losing half of her previous weight. I also notice how the fattest people are usually the ones drinking diet drinks.
Kinda reminds of of our local state children’s services. Seems like every couple years they change their name, due to the bad rep they get.
The name change was Eric Schmidt’s idea.
High glycemic processed carbohydrates over time interfere with the bodies processing of insulin leading to various bad health effects including premature death. These could all be overcome by 8 hours of moderate exercise per day which is not harmonious with a cyber life.
High glycemic processed carbohydrates: raw sugar, hfcs, wheat flour, etc.
If you aren’t going to exercise 8 hours per day, minimizing high glycemic foods is one mostly ineffective response as these cheap food items are “everywhere.” For instance: “Fat Free Garlic Seasoning” for popcorn shows HFCS as the second most common ingredient.
Its difficult to get consumers to even read a label much less understand what the label says. Certainly this is the tip of the iceberg in a grand corporate design to extract money from consumers while slowly poisoning them.
Silly Hoomans-giving it all to corporate interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Syrup
Stop making HFCS the bogeyman.
Don’t eat too much, control your calorie intake and excessive to burn off more then your body needs naturally. Don’t get fat. It’s simple math.
Cornholio lives! (Need TP for my bunghole.) HFCS comes from Lake Titicaca in Nicaragua. The streets shall run red with the blood of the nonbelievers!
Do they think the public is so dense? It’s still HFCS no, the body wouldn’t tell any difference. Well, for them this is better than sulking in corner.
How about calling it “HCCS”
High Cost Corn Syrup.
Businesses who use sugar are fleeing America to escape the ultra-high sweetener prices here, all put in place by a government protecting their friends who grow expensive corn and beet sugar.
Last year, sugar in world was selling for $18/ton, US High Cost Corn Syrup costs $32/ton.
Do the math.
HFCS also seems to make you fatter than consuming the same amount of cane sugar, according to this Princeton study.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
Read The Omnivore’s Dilemna, it explains how HFCS became mainstream in early 80’s.
Try this experiment: don’t eat anything that lists HFCS among the first 3 ingredients.
Voila: you will avoid most processed food and by a process of elimination (no pun, honest) wind up with a fairly healthy diet. Stop eating anything with artificial sweeteners and you’ll find yourself less hungry. G’head give it a shot for a week or 2.
#10 Hector, get a clue.
The overall amounts of CORN and SOY in our diets is way out of whack. Both are in everything. It’s crap food, that is horrid for people, dogs, cats, whatever.
We need to stop eating this stuff, and get it banned. Not rename it and go ‘la de dah’ on our merry fat way
I used to eat tons of cane and beet sugar when I was young, I was always skinny. When HFCS came on the scene, my weight has steadily increased over time.
I now avoid it whenever possible, and my weight has dropped. Its pretty tough though, as food makers are sneaking it in everything.
#30. I agree completely. Haven’t eating a processed food in over a decade. No more depression, among other things.
The joy of foods that have flavor. YUM. Now just the smell of a Big Mac makes me want to puke.
In addition to HFCS, avoid Acid-hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, (from wiki) is produced by boiling cereals or legumes, such as soy, corn, or wheat, in hydrochloric acid and then neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-hydrolyzed_vegetable_protein
Crap is in everything. It’s cheap. It was also one of the biggest salmonella recalls in history, only the news forgot to report on it:
http://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls/majorproductrecalls/hvp/default.htm
So, if those chips you were eating caused some loose bowels a day later, joke is on you. The CDC doesn’t keep track of “gastroenteritis” but newspapers across the country had articles about the widespread gastroenteritis from January through April in 2010.
Hmmm, coincidence?
#33–diane==so what’s wrong with HVP? Your link concludes it is safe. A few years ago I looked at Braggs Liquid as a source for amino acids and reading its label couldn’t tell the difference between it and regular Soy Sauce so at 10 times the price, I passed. I’m sure there are many differences, but its not clear what they are.
Something as basic a FOOD: and we don’t really know what we need or what we’re getting outside of generalities and impossibilities: eat a balanced diet and exercise to burn it off. Would that such could be true.