Saturday, January 31, 2009

High Fructose Corn Poison

Those huge fat asses waddle to and fro
Or ride on scooters, from row to row
Not speaking here of Michelangelo

We are not a nation that has gotten fat. No, we are a nation that has been made fat!

I want all of you to look at pictures from the seventies. Do you notice how absolutely thin everyone is? And do you think that we were taking better care of ourselves then? Hardly! We probably drank more sodas, smoked more cigarettes, consumed more sugar, and downed more fat than the nanny state would ever allow now. And yet everyone was thin.

How could this be? The fattest person back then would be considered of average weight today. What has happened is appalling, but it isn’t because people fundamentally altered their lifestyles (as the deniers would have you believe). Something else happened to change the nation’s weight.

That thing is something that was introduced into the food chain, and that thing became a part of nearly everything. The eighties saw the beginnings of a fundamental change in the average weight of an American, and then it accelerated in the nineties and into the new century.

So, what is this thing that has been foisted upon the public? It is the creepiest, most insidious change in food of all time—it is the evil witch’s brew known as High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Oh, don’t think this stuff is some kind of benign sweetening agent made somewhere in Iowa by peasants stomping corn kernels. This is something more akin to a chemical whipped up in a KGB lab somewhere in Russia to render the capitalist agents of the West inert and incapable of fighting back.

But the KGB didn’t make this stuff. It is the product of the unholy alliance between big agriculture and government that came about as a result of greed and government meddling in agricultural price manipulation. It is, in short, the result of our decaying republic’s corruption and blindness.

Government, you see, protected sugar producers to the point of making their product artificially expensive. Business responded by looking for ways to replace sugar at a fraction of the price. Big agriculture in the Midwest also wanted to shore up corn prices.
Voila! Corn slurry is chemically transmogrified into a new blend of sucrose and fructose, and it can be made for less than sugar can be grown (at the artificially government mandated prices that Congress ensured). What wasn’t to like about this product?

Through the eighties, this new brew spread like wildfire through the food manufacturing industry, providing cheaper sweetening, longer shelf life of manufactured food products, and happy corn farmers. But the dark side began to appear, gradually, as a growing waist size started happening in America.

The average waist size began creeping up, attributed to the maturing of the baby boomers, but it wasn’t what it seemed to be. This wasn’t a natural expansion. It was being fueled by the new product that had become ubiquitous (and unnoticed by all but a few).

Year after year, the extra pounds were adding up until it was becoming quite noticeable—Americans had become really a lot heavier. And, instead of being rare, truly obese people were just about everywhere. Oh, hands started wringing that Americans were just failing to exercise, eating too much fast food, consuming too much fat. Everywhere villains were spotted, but all the villains were the consumers themselves.

But the truth was that even people following the healthiest of regimens were becoming heavier, with more body fat. When filming the Civil War battle scenes for the movie Cold Mountain, the cast of extras had to be from eastern European countries that didn’t have HFCS in their diets. American soldiers just were way too heavy to look believable as Civil War soldiers!

Kids are fatter, adults are fatter, even thin people are fatter. And it is NOT because we have lost our moral way. We have, and I can’t state this strongly enough, we have been POISONED!

This stuff is worse than any carcinogen in cigarettes—this stuff is truly insidious, for no one knew this would be the side effect of the toxic brew. An entire nation, and increasingly and entire world, made fat without their consent because of bad government policies and greed.

We must not tolerate this poison in our lives. We must write to every company that uses this poison. Hershey’s (can you believe it? Chocolate syrup just full of this crap!!!). Heinz (not ketchup, too!! Sadly, yes). Little Debbie Snack Cakes (the infamy!). Write to them and tell them (and mean it) that you refuse to use any of their products with HFCS in them.

At first, they will think you are just a lunatic who has nothing better to do with his life. But enough of these letters will start a small ripple on their complacent lakes of bottom lines. But soon enough the words “Contains No HFCS” will become the hot selling ticket, and the stuff will disappear from the shelves as quickly as Olestra, that crazy oil substitute that created uncontrollable anal leakage. Remember Wow! potato chips? One serving of those things, and you’d better not sneeze in public!

We’ve been eating this stuff without noticing for over twenty years. The results of stopping aren’t going to be seen for, well, perhaps decades. We just don’t know what kind of long-term damage has been done to our systems by HFCS, so we don’t know how long the reversal will take to show results.

I want to be optimistic, but if you are like the average American, struggling to keep weight off but just can’t, remember to thank the wealthy farmers, politicians, and chemical manufacturers who poisoned us for the two decades of the fin de siecle for keeping those pounds on. We really must start fighting back and insisting that our food contain nothing that wasn’t available in 1970.

Can you believe that food was better for you then than it is now?! Start today consuming nothing, and I mean NOTHING, including ketchup, that has this poison in it. It’s the only way to begin the reversal.

And start writing to companies and talking to people. Remember, there are huge forces out there with a lot of money and power who want this poison to continue. But this is the new fight for our century, just as Upton Sinclair attacked the meat industry at the beginning of the last century.

1 comment:

Robert Zeman said...

All that about HFCS and nothing about Partially Hydroginated oils?

The combination of the two is deadly.