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4 words: High Fructose Corn Syrup. It's in everything.
I know that it is, and I believe it to be a big contributor to the increase in incidence of obesity and diabetes in the US.
My husband is allergic to corn, though he only reacts to it in concentrated sources - corn syrup, corn oil - and he is also allergic to soy. These are mild allergies, but still quite inconvenient to avoid, since corn and soy are in virtually every processed food out there. This means we do a lot of cooking from scratch. Better for you, yes, but sometimes I miss the convenience factor.
Seriously, I'm allergic to aspartame, HFCS, aldehydes and petrochemicals.
And I'm currently lactose intolerant, cut out wheat and am vegetarian.
Good thing I like Thai, Indian and Middle Eastern foods.
That's an interesting point. But haven't people all around the world always consumed meat, dairy products, and sugar? My question is how much of the current problem is directly related to that corn, and how much it has to do with the chemicals and preservatives we pump into our foodstuffs.
I suspect it is both the over consumption of nutrionally devoid foods and the ingestion of lord knows what kinds of various chemical and biological additives.
The author did mention the transformation of moving cows from free ranging and grazing to a feed lot method of cattle raising which was more cost effective but also used a great deal more petroleum products to produce the corn to accelerate cattle growth. The axiom of "you are what you eat, eats".
While in the past people certainly consumed plenty of grain, dairy, and sugar, one only has to look today to nearly anything purchased in a box or in a can from your grocery to see that high fructose sugar is pretty much in everything and to look around at the amount of population that is overweight, we can certainly see the correlation.
I have celiac disease & lactose intolerance from 1 parent. I bought myself 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes
by Carol Fenster, Ph.D. for Christmas; she has a gluten-free flour recipe that doesn't taste like cardboard.
Current archaeology suggests that humans were healthier as hunter-gatherers; the switch to settled agriculture decreased the amount of naturally-occurring foods and was detrimental to the human body in many ways.
the increase in population destroyed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Companies like Monsanto with their genetically modified foods that are "round up ready" are horrid.
We're killing ourselves.
Sometimes I think, with some relief, I'm old, I'll be dead soon.
That's an interesting point. But haven't people all around the world always consumed meat, dairy products, and sugar? My question is how much of the current problem is directly related to that corn, and how much it has to do with the chemicals and preservatives we pump into our foodstuffs.
The two problems are intertwined, and both play to an agricultural structure that rewards a glut of corn and a food processing structure that values shelf-life and non-filling foodstuffs that allow you to eat more. Literally.
We're limited, in the eyes of food processors, by the fact that we only consume about 1500lbs of food a year. Empty calories are a way for us to buy food, eat it, not feel full, and buy and eat more.
This sounds conspiratorial, but it's just good business. Food companies, like every other corporation, are expected to grow continually. Since people can only eat so much food, you have to figure out ways to grow your business faster than it would grow naturally with population.
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