High Bullshit Corn Syrup

[t3knomanser]

When I first saw the "Corn Syrup isn't evil" ads, I was curious. I mean, the people who make high fructose corn syrup were telling me it was just like sugar- what motivation could they have to lie

Comments

[manycolored]

Refined sugar is bad for you if you try to metabolize so much of it that it gives you hyper- or hypoglycemia. The amount that does that varies from person to person. I'm one of the unlucky ones. Fructose is metabolized even faster than sucrose, so if your sugar metabolism is wonky, it'll affect you more. Such people shouldn't drink much apple juice either, so it's not like HFCS is unique in its bad-for-you-ness.

The Big Deal about HFCS is that its existence as an extremely cheap sweetener caused the market to be flooded with more and sweeter sweets. With so much readily available, cheap, high-sugar food, our palates and appetites adjusted. We become fatasses, not because HFCS is more fattening than honey, but because we eat sweeter foods, and more of them.

The best diet is snobbery. HFCS tastes like ass. Foods made with it are bland, uniform, textureless drek.

[t3knomanser]

I think it's hardly fair to blame HFCS for making food taste like drek. It's used as a sweetener because, as you pointed out, it's cheap and plentiful. One would imagine foods that get a heavy dose of cheap sweeteners are also getting other cheap ingredients. Generally, in double-blind taste tests, people can't tell HFCS and traditional sugars apart

[manycolored]

It's true they do use crappy ingredients with HFCS. But HFCS also tastes like ass on its own. I've checked. *lick* "Yep, ass."

I agree on the corn subsidies too. I also wonder whether more corn will be diverted into ethanol fuel and make HFCS more expensive.

[lutraphile]

The real fix to HFCS is to cut corn subsidies. The main reason it's so damn cheap is that the government keeps the price of corn low by investing your tax dollars in it and it keeps the price of sugar high by putting steep import tariffs on it (we pay about twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world).

yes, this is exactly what I was going to say. And also, more crop diversity! Rah rah!

[moonchylde]

I've scripted a parody piece of that I'm going to draw up soonish... the next sentence is, "fine in moderation huh?" and then proceeds to show how many items at the kids birthday party have HFCS in them. Including the ketchup, hotdogs, buns... wonder if those presliced pickles get dosed too.