Healthy Food, HFCS & Marketing, Part 2

Continued from Part One

Because HFCS is extremely sweet - much sweeter than table sugar - the other major claim to its health drawbacks is that it stimulates appetites, and specifically appetites for salt. Salt plays well with sugar. And together, the duet performs a co-dependent dance on the pancreas. Eat salty food; wash it down with soda; another salty bite; thirsty again? Drink more soda. And so it goes.

So the Corn Refiners Association, instead of petitioning to decrease the levels of HFCS in drinks and food decide it's a better idea to just redesign the marketing for HFCS to read simply as "corn sugar" in effort to disambiguate the confusion. Well, it seems that it might just further the confusion on an already reasonably confused consumer base.  One might also wonder if by following the lead, Maple Syrup will eventually be called "tree sugar".

Healthy food isn't about  marketing, it's about common sense. Sugars are not the devil, but they should be eaten with care and consideration. Maybe marketers should consider the idea that actual marketing is partly to blame for the obesity epidemic. With so much false or misleading information about what things are, it's extremely difficult to decipher between types of sugar that are natural, like fructose, which is found in many foods naturally, and High Fructose Corn Syrup: just because HFCS has fructose in the name, doesn't make it the same thing, no matter how one markets it.

It has been suggested by many food watchdogs that the labeling of HFCS is simply an indicator to overly-processed foods; that the syrup itself probably isn't a serious threat to health, but the overall consumption of highly processed foods, over time, is the biggest concern and more likely a considerable cause to the obesity epidemic in the United States and other developed countries.

Further, the corn industry is married to the oil industry (and in many ways also the biotech industry with genetically modified corn, which, without doubt is instrumental in the production of High Fructose Corn Syrup). Without oil, corn couldn't be produced in the same quantities as it is today. Corn is planted with oil, harvested with oil and processed with oil by machinery. This makes for a very inexpensive and abundant product, so long as crude oil is both inexpensive and abundant. Something that will probably change within the next ten years. We can probably calculate that as the price in oil increases, the level of general obesity will decrease.

It's understandable how healthy food is confused in the media marketplace. Corporations that have, literally, billions of dollars in advertising power that can easily mislead an unsuspecting consumer base by showing happy, energetic and thin actors enjoying soda and fast food without effect, because in moderation, this is an appropriate scenario. But step into almost any fast food chain and observe the cashier line: It's a completely different scenario.  The problem is in the over-consumption of cheap, abundant food (including sugars); it is our responsibility to teach our children by example what is and what is not healthy food.

Photo Credit www.thehfcs.com