Wednesday, March 23, 2011

I can no longer be nice or gentle

To the Editor:

I am furious.

I find it impossible to believe what I saw in the papers last week.

Coca-Cola bottles featured in a Heart Health Fair? That is stupid. Sorry I can no longer be nice, or gentle, about this.

High fructose corn syrup is grown with e. coli in the seed. E. coli is bad for all hearts. E. coli cannot even be digested; that’s why so many of us carry extra flesh around our middles. We cannot digest it, so it just packs on our bodies.

Even if the industry succeeds in getting the name switched to corn sugar, it will still have e. coli in the seed, so that it is Round-Up ready when planted.

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Monday, March 21, 2011

High-Fructose Corn Syrup Turning Sour?



With the continuing controversy surrounding HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup), CPG houses are quietly switching to alternative sweeteners.

The move is expensive, but consumers perceive cane or beet sugars as “natural” and HFCS as “processed.” Kraft, ConAgra and PepsiCo have all switched some of their products, with Kraft saying consumer comments had led to the decision. While there is little nutritional difference between sugar and HFCS, recent reports have linked the latter to the epidemic of obesity.

The health controversy and a decline in soft drink sales have cut profits at HFCS manufacturers Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Corn Products International Inc. with sales off 1/3% last year.

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Friday, March 11, 2011

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup In Beer?

My father is not a man of eclectic beer tastes. For years, all I remember him drinking was Stroh’s. Then it switched to Miller High Life. And, on special occasions and all vacations he would break out the Corona.

In the last few months, my dad came to the conclusion that all beers that use high fructose corn syrup in their recipes were bad for him. He started calling and emailing different breweries to find out if they use high fructose corn syrup. If they said yes, he stopped drinking them. If they didn’t respond, he stopped drinking them. And if they said they did not, he put those brews on his “acceptable” list.

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Monday, March 7, 2011

Consumer groups urge FDA to reject ‘corn sugar’ label for HFCS

Consumer groups have petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), urging it to reject a Corn Refiners Association bid to allow ‘corn sugar’ as an alternative labeling declaration for high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) asked the FDA in September last year to consider the alternative name for use on product labels.

The CRA argued that allowing the use of ‘corn sugar’ on ingredient lists would help consumers understand that HFCS is simply a sugar made from corn.

The CRA - a trade association that represents the corn refining industry in the United States - has repeatedly stressed that HFCS is not high in fructose, even though that is what the name may suggest.

In fact it contains proportions of fructose and glucose similar to those of sucrose, but it has been the subject of a spate of bad publicity over the past few years, and food and beverage manufacturers have increasingly switched from HFCS to beet or cane sugar (sucrose).

However, consumer groups including the Consumer Federation of America and the National Consumers League have written to the FDA claiming that if food makers were allowed to label HFCS as corn sugar, it could obscure an ingredient with which the majority of consumers are already familiar.

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Sign the Petition To Keep High Fructose Corn Syrup Named HFCS Instead of "Corn Sugar"

High fructose corn syrup is like a third rail for food writers; when Brian was writing about "the mounting pile of evidence that high fructose corn syrup is unhealthier than ordinary table sugar", Marion Nestle was writing "HFCS is not poison. It is just a mixture of glucose and fructose in almost the same proportions as table sugar, sucrose....Let's give the Corn Refiners credit for calling a sugar a sugar." Michael Pollan was saying in Food Rule 4 that "sugar is sugar." I was writing "being natural doesn't mean better....We all consume far too much sweetener, wherever it comes from" and got fifty comments calling me an idiot.

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