Reading my post on the subsidies and sugar tariffs that made high fructose corn syrup into such an -- ahem -- sweet bet, George asks:
HFCS, for the record, appears almost exclusively in processed foods, so what you're really seeing there is the rise in processed foods. It's possible, of course, that we could end subsidies for corn and knock down sugar tariffs and folks would consume the same amount of sweetener but more of it would come from cane sugar and the public health effects would be minimal. There's a good argument that the proliferation of sweetened foods heightened the public's sweet tooth, and now people like their hamburger buns to contain a shot of sugar substitute (which, to be clear, they do). It's really hard to say. But what's easy to say is that there's no reason, either from a public health standpoint or an economics standpoint, for taxpayers to pay money to encourage consumption of a corn-based, lab-created sweetener, or to make processed, nutritionally hollow foods cheaper.
Not sure what your [high fructose corn syrup] argument is here. Is it that more sweets are consumed because HFCS is subsidized so the sweet thingy is cheaper? If left to the market HFCS and sugar would be more expensive so less of both would be consumed?If so I agree. If you are arguing that HFCS is worse for us than sugar, then I do not agree.The first one. There's some evidence that high fructose corn syrup metabolizes differently and is converted into fat more easily than sugar. But there's also some evidence that that doesn't happen, and I've not seen anything suggesting the impact is particularly profound. As you can see in the YouTube above, this is what the corn industry worries about. A vague sense on the part of the public that high fructose corn syrup is some laboratory abomination (true) that's much worse for you than natural sugar (not clear).But the actual problem with HFCS is that the corn industry's successful lobbying campaign to subsidize the sweetener made it so artificially cheap that all manner of processed foods that contain it became artificially cheap, not to mention loaded with a high calorie, nutritionally empty, sweeter. As a result, societal consumption of processed foods shot up, and the evidence we have suggests that folks got fatter and sicker. For some evidence on this score, the following graph (thanks Tom!) tracks sweetener consumption. And it's not because people are using two packets of sugar in their coffee rather than one. Notice how closely total consumption and high fructose corn syrup consumption track each other over the last few years.
HFCS, for the record, appears almost exclusively in processed foods, so what you're really seeing there is the rise in processed foods. It's possible, of course, that we could end subsidies for corn and knock down sugar tariffs and folks would consume the same amount of sweetener but more of it would come from cane sugar and the public health effects would be minimal. There's a good argument that the proliferation of sweetened foods heightened the public's sweet tooth, and now people like their hamburger buns to contain a shot of sugar substitute (which, to be clear, they do). It's really hard to say. But what's easy to say is that there's no reason, either from a public health standpoint or an economics standpoint, for taxpayers to pay money to encourage consumption of a corn-based, lab-created sweetener, or to make processed, nutritionally hollow foods cheaper. 
