Would you like some candy, little boy?
I about tripped over the irony of seeing my first “HFCS is good” campaign ad on television during the RNC. Not only was the premise of defending High-Fructose Corn Syrup as being fit for human consumption completely appalling, the actual story line of these ads is downright insulting. Person A is presented with some processed food item by Person B. Person A reacts negatively because said item contains HFCS. Person B pushes Person A for reasons why HFCS is bad and Person A all of the sudden can’t remember — as though the bad reputation of HFCS is simply hype and hear-say. Implying that because this person can’t articulate what’s bad about HFCS, then there must not be anything wrong with it. Furthermore, that people who object to or abstain from HFCS are ill-informed and ignorant of “the facts.” We’re then encouraged to visit their website and get better informed. Such a public service. Here’s one of the ads:
I for one, do recall reasons why HFCS is bad. Here are just a couple key points:
- It reeks havoc on your blood sugar, just like any processed sugar does
- It shuts off the receptors in your stomach that tell you that you’re full — causing many people to eat much more than they normally would before feeling full.
I hope I’m not the first person to tell you not to trust advertising messages, lest you mistakenly think that the right flavor of chewing gum or body spray will get you spontaneously laid. And just for full disclosure’s sake, I work in advertising. You’re being marketed to here, plain and simple. This is no public service announcement by a tragically misunderstood group. What’s particularly disturbing about this set of ads is the clever little trickery they’re pulling by carefully choosing the wording of their claims. From their website:
- “High-fructose corn syrup has no artificial ingredients”
Neither does Ivory soap, but that doesn’t mean you should eat it. The natural = nutritious = safe fallacy has been a mainstay of deceptive food industry ads for generations. Sure, milk contains calcium, but not in a form your body can readily absorb. Regardless of the nature of the original ingredients, HFCS has been artificially produced and manipulated from the original corn. Your body was not built to consume it, especially in the amounts and ubiquity that it’s found in foods today. Whisky is made from water, grain, yeast, and a handful of other fully natural ingredients. But the process of refining those ingredients into hooch is hardly natural. As great as it might be, there is no beer tree. There’s also a reason the bartender asks you to “pick your poison.”
- “Nutritionally, high-fructose corn syrup is the same as table sugar”
Sure, but this is another clever slight-of-word that relies on the assumption that you should ever be consuming table sugar in the first place. Point of fact, table sugar is awful for you. It spikes your blood sugar, contributes heavily to your chances of obesity, kills your body’s ability to naturally regulate your energy level, and contributes to type-2 diabetes. Sure, the nutrition is the same in that the nutrition is zero! It’s a comparison between two equally empty calorie sources. Aside from the fact that our bodies can use it as energy, refined sugars offer no nutritional value. Your body naturally creates the sugars it needs from the carbohydrates you eat, so it isn’t like salt or essential vitamins or minerals. If you never ate refined sugar again there would be zero health fallout. There aren’t any medical conditions that result from a lack of sugar. You won’t get a goiter or rickets. We simply shouldn’t be eating it in any significant amount. So saying that it’s the same, doesn’t actually make an argument that it’s okay.
- “High-fructose corn syrup has the same number of calories as table sugar”
Yup, lots of them! So what if it’s the same? That still doesn’t make it fit to eat. The “same as” argument is fundamentally flawed on both the calorie argument and the nutrition argument because the baseline measure is still table sugar — something we shouldn’t be eating in the first place, especially at the levels we’re consuming it on average. The whole reason there is a sugar substitute industry is because we shouldn’t be consuming sugar, yet we love our sweets. This argument is akin to saying that a tire fire doesn’t produce any more noxious chemicals than car exhaust. Both are still pollutants and shouldn’t be in the air!
At the root of this issue isn’t even HFCS, but rather this idea that as a special interest they can simply try to advertise away their shortcomings and brainwash people into believing that their actually very harmful product or service is just fine and no big deal. Remember cigarettes? There were a plethora of ads up through the ’50s that actually claimed smoking was good for you — that it was healthy and essential for living a vibrant life. Who paid for those ads? The tobacco companies. But what was the reality? Tobacco, especially as the tobacco industry had artificially refined it, was not only debilitatingly addictive but carcinogenic in almost every conceivable way. But to hear the advertising, it was good for you. This was not ignorance on the part of big tobacco either, this was a willful misleading of the public. See a pattern?
But let’s bring it closer to the topic at hand. Ever heard of Splenda®? Have you seen the cheery ad campaigns? Remember the key points? “Zero calories.” “It tastes like sugar because it’s made from sugar.” Sounds great, except that it’s untrue. Splenda, or sucralose as it’s chemically known, is not synthesized in any way from anything that could even be chemically classified as a sugar, let alone sugar as we know it. Splenda is literally tasty pesticide. Let me repeat that. Pesticide. It was synthesized by a graduate chemistry student in India who was looking to perfect a better bug-killer. His instructor told him to “test it”, but he misheard and thought he’d said “taste it.” When he found it to be surprisingly sweet and told his instructor, the instructor put a spoon full of it in his coffee. Concerned about the toxicity, the student protested, but the instructor said “Eh, we’ll live.” Unfortunately, the instructor not dropping dead was the extent of the toxicity testing done on sucralose. The name is even made up — made to sound like a sugar-related chemical — when in fact it’s not a sugar at all. We’d all hope that the FDA would have done some sort of testing to this effect before approving it for consumers, but alas no. With billions of dollars to be made off a sugar substitute that didn’t have an aftertaste like iron filings, it was quickly approved by the FDA without a single toxicity test. The only tests cited in the FDA approval were related to blood sugar, not toxicity, and even those are reported to be sloppy and inconclusive. Numerous people have had very negative blood sugar and other (including neurological) reactions to sucralose and other artificial sweeteners. (You can find this and more great information about the business and chemistry of sweets in Sweet Deception: Why Splenda, NutraSweet, and the FDA May Be Hazardous to Your Health by Joseph Mercola and Kendra Degen Pearsall)
HFCS and splenda are just sweeteners. Don’t even get me started on hydrogenated oils – or “trans fats” as they’re known to most. Again, made from natural ingredients, but completely artificial in their synthesis and simply horrible for our health.
All this ranting is intended to one purpose, sharp and guarded skepticism on the part of anybody who eats anything that wasn’t plucked off of a tree or grown in a field behind their house. Beware. These people do not care about you. All they want you to do pay a good price to eat their cheap food. And make no mistake, the only reason HFCS exists is because it’s cheaper than cane sugar. Period.
I love sweet stuff, don’t get me wrong. I always want ice cream after I’ve been to the gym. The point is that even though these ads talk about “moderation” that’s not a concept understood by the average american consumer. What’s more, HFCS, Splenda, partially or fully hydrogenated oils, and other harmful substances are sneaked into our foods where we least expect them. If you want to avoid these toxins, you’ll need to get proficient at reading labels. It’s really not that hard, just a matter of being intentional about it. But don’t trust the food industry to have your best interests in mind. They want you to eat and eat lots.
What’s also key is that we consumers have immense power. The market will provide for us the things we continue to buy from it. There’s a booming market for natural and organic foods precisely because consumers have risen up and demanded it. Do so, and the market will reward you. You get what you pay for.
Other reactions and information on this subject:
AdFreak
TakePart
Washington Post
The Ethicurian
Men’s Health (search for “high-fructose corn syrup”)
