High Fructose Corn Syrup

Chances are, whether you were aware of it or not, you have eaten corn today. This is because high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is found in a lot of different foods that used to contain sugar. HFCS is a very common ingredient in processed foods and drinks in the US, including many items that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being sweet, such as breads, lunch meats, yogurts, soups, and condiments.

HFCS is extremely common in the US, but is not nearly as widely used in other countries – to illustrate this, it is interesting to note that soft drink manufacturers such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola use sugar in their products in all areas of the world with the exception of the US and Canada, where HFCS is used. This is because economic conditions unique to the US make the production of HFCS much cheaper than the production of real sugar. Thanks to some sugar tariffs and quotas introduced in the US in 1977, imported sugar prices in the US increased to twice the global price. And since domestic sugar production is very low and does not receive any government subsidies, domestic sugar is also rather expensive to food manufacturers. Corn, on the other hand, has remained a very cheap commodity due to massive government subsidies: in 2009, the government spent almost four billion dollars on corn subsidies. Thus, thanks to the exclusion of the global sugar market and the subsidized corn industry, HFCS has become the main sweetener in the United Sates.

A lot of people are very opposed to this. One reason they offer is that HFCS is worse for your body than natural sugar. There is a lot of conflicting research about the safety of HFCS, but none of the claims put forth by opponents of HFCS have yet to be conclusively proven, and it is classified as “generally recognized to be safe” by the US Food and Drug Administration. Regardless of its safety as compared to regular sugar, the cheap production of HFCS has been a major factor in the formation of the fast food culture in the US, as HFCS’s cheapness has allowed food production companies to offer more unhealthy foods in bigger quantities for less money. HFCS shows how the US excluding itself from the global sugar market has caused many tangible effects.

Want more information?

http://www.sweetsurprise.com/ - a website devoted to taking away the stigma associated with HFCS

http://www.sweetdisguise.com/ - a website devoted to discrediting HFCS

And of course you can’t go wrong with Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup