3,561,596 members
12,429,752 petition signatures
$19,571,785,510 diverted from Big Pharma
Formerly Known as High Fructose Corn Syrup…
Submitted by Lois Rain on September 30, 2010 – 4:19 am6 Comments
The CRA (Corn Refiners Association) are now calling high fructose corn syrup by what they insist is an accurate term for a “natural” ingredient: corn sugar. Although they are not authorities on bio-chemistry, they claim that our bodies do not know the difference between high fructose corn syrup or any other sweetener. As more information on its ill effects and the rise of obesity continues the CRA scrambles to find a “nice” term to deflect negative views. There is talk that the name might not have too much legal ground but we are already being barraged with commercials promoting the new name and PR. Will America buy the new name?Check out our articles on high fructose corn syrup here.
Fortunately, ‘Corn Sugar’ Has Become a Sticky PR Mess.
Recently, Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times interviewed several food-quality activists, including me, about a Sept. 14 petition by the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) to change the name of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to “corn sugar.”
Her question: What new name would you suggest?
I thought all of the responses had merit – for example, writer Michael Pollan offered “enzymatically altered corn glucose” which has an appropriately frankenfoodish ring about it – but my vote was to disallow any change. My reasoning: the name as it stands is accurate, and the industry should not be allowed to circumvent the well-earned distrust HFCS has engendered. (Putting aside my concern that HFCS may be metabolically worse than table sugar – I think the research behind that notion is debatable – my main worry is that the syrup’s cheapness, due to corn subsidies, allows manufacturers to sweeten a huge percentage of the American food supply. I believe that’s been a significant contributor to the obesity-diabetes epidemic.)
Now, several days after the petition to the FDA, what remains striking to me about this whole episode is how public, how incredibly visible, this attempted subterfuge has become. The CRA clearly hoped to do this quietly – as it might have in, say, 1994, when the story might have garnered only a few inches of type buried deep in the Times’ gray pages.
Instead, in the web age, the name-change petition quickly became an appropriately sticky public relations mess. After just nine days, a Google search for the twin terms “high-fructose corn syrup” and “corn sugar” garnered 143,000 results, and asking social media posters for their own alternate names became a raging meme. I happily joined in, posing the challenge on my Facebook page and Digg profile. Hundreds volunteered tags including “liquid suffering,” “cellulite syrup,” and several that can’t be published in a family website, despite my instruction to avoid profanity.
It’s too soon to predict the outcome of this net-centric protest, but even in the worst case scenario – the term “corn sugar” replaces all instances of HFCS in commercial parlance – it’s clear that the CRA’s Orwellian plan has been at least partially turned back. Far fewer people will see the term on a label and be reassured by this short, relatively innocuous name. But I think it’s more likely that the process has been significantly derailed, and “corn sugar” will never gain much legal traction. One can hope.
To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary “surfing” and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.
But sunlight, it has been said, is the best disinfectant. The web’s ability to dredge duplicitous schemes from the corporate-governmental shadows into the noonday glare is a great advance, one with implications that reach far beyond food policy. Any problem – including, ironically, the problems caused by the web itself – is better dispatched in an open forum, and the web is quickly becoming the most open forum the world has ever known. That is sweetness we can celebrate.
Andrew Weil, M.D.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/fortunately-corn-sugar-ha_b_738324.html
My wife and I have long been concerned about the dangers of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup and do not buy it. We try to buy products w/o either type when we can find them. Fructose is said to be a contributor to Diabetes and unfortunately soft drinks, ice cream, cookies, pies, and most prepared desserts contain these syrups. We’ve become readers of labels on food products. Every supermarket deli we’ve been in uses the stuff unless you go to a store like Earth Fare or Whole Foods. White sugar is another killer and not good for human consumption. We need to get back to more natural products like honey or dark brown (turbinado) sugar.
They are only wanting to change the name to deceive the public, HFCS is not healthy and they want to continue their profits. This is just a fraud campaign to boost sales, promote their product as natural so they can get their products in a larger share of the grocery store and products. It is what it is, it does what it does, and the effects are the same. Should they get to change the name, it should also carry :formerly high fructose corn syrup on the label. We are educating ourselves to seek out products with undesireable ingredients and they want to change the name so we will be tricked into buying it.
Great article on HFCS… Thanks for staying on top of it!
2 issues w/ HFCS: 1) it’s GMO because it comes from GMO corn and 2) Princeton has proven that HFCS produces obesity:A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
Posted March 22, 2010; 10:00 a.m. by Hilary Parker http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
And this: Study Proves Three Monsanto Corn Varieties’ Noxiousness to the Organism
Friday 11 December 2009
by: Le Monde with AFP | Le Monde
http://www.truthout.org/1215091 http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/12/11/une-etude-prouve-la-nocivite-pour-l-organisme-de-trois-mais-monsanto_1279552_3244.html#ens_id=1269926
[...] And check out the new marketing scam for high fructose corn syrup (they now want to call it “corn sugar”): Formerly Known as High Fructose Corn Syrup… [...]
Why is it that anything these filthy corporations want to do is
always approved even when it is obviously a health threat. But
when people want healthier raw milk, then raw milk is labeled
a health threat which historically is not. Definitely something
wrong with this picture.