CtTaxed.com

Is Corn Evil?

Is the epidemic in obesity in large part caused by corn?

The rise of the use of fructose seems to mirror the rise in childhood obesity. Sugar is Sugar, right? At least one researcher disagrees.

Sweetener fructose used in almost every processed food we eat and is usually derived from corn, why …. because it’s cheap. Not cheap to you and me, but cheap to the food processors. It is cheap to use in food because we have already paid for it via our taxes.

From the Cato Insitute:…

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30

From ABC News: (That is Australian Radio!)

Norman Swan: What is it about this, it’s got more calories than ordinary sugar weight for weight hasn’t it?

Robert Lustig: No, actually it’s not the calories that are different it’s the fact that the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let’s take 120 calories of glucose, that’s two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc. directly with no interference. Now let’s take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what’s in orange juice. So it’s going to be all the fructose, that’s 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that’s another 12 out of 60 — so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.

That bolus of extra substrate to your liver does some very bad things to it.

…..

I do want to mention that the American food industry produces 3,900 calories per capita per day. We can only eat 1,800 calories per capita per day. In other words the American food industry makes double the amount of food that we can actually use. Who eats the rest? We do, through this mechanism, they actually know that by putting fructose into the foods that we eat, for instance pretzels — why do you need fructose in pretzels, why do we need fructose in hamburger buns?

…..

Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.

One Response to “Is Corn Evil?”

1. turfgrrl Says:
   July 18th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

   The evils of high fructose corn syrup. The sad part is that real sugar in stuff makes food taste better too.

Leave a Reply