The corn industry is scared. High fructose corn syrup has a bad rap. Health conscious yuppies everywhere condemn its...adverse health effects. Foodies wax rhapsodic about cane sugar soda. Consumption of the chemically-constructed sweetener is down. So Big Corn has released a series of commercials meant to better the additive's image. The ads have, ahem, a kernel of truth to them. Most folks don't know why they're supposed to dislike high fructose corn syrup. On some level, there's a simple discomfort: Why replace sugar with a similarly caloric sweetener you need a lab to produce? Then there's the sense that the syrup is in some vague way related to obesity. For instance, there are studies showing it gets converted more quickly into fat. But that's not the real problem with high fructose corn syrup. The bigger issue, which the industry neither can nor particularly cares to rebut, is that the product exists at all. We pump absurd quantities of cash into subsidizing corn (we also have a huge tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, incidentally). Over the past 10 years alone, Congress has appropriated more than $50 billion to encourage farmers to grow the stuff. But people don't want to eat $50 billion in subsidized corn. And if the cobs just sat around developing mold, Congress would cut off the spigot. Enter high fructose corn syrup, which sucks up the subsidies and created a world in which calories from a sweet, highly caloric additive have become the cheapest of all energy sources. That's the primary way the syrup contributes to obesity: Not by being more fattening, but by being so heavily subsidized that it makes it far cheaper to sustain yourself on sweetened carbohydrates than on nutritious food. That might be fine if the sweetener were naturally cheap, but instead, taxpayers are funding a concerted effort to flood grocery stores with unnaturally cheap, utterly unhealthy, foods.
