Try finding a Coke with real sugar, and try getting a week worth of food without any corn syrup in them.
This is easy enough. Red Bull makes a cola with real sugar (expensive, but pretty tasty).
It's easy to avoid corn syrup when you don't buy processed foods. Go to your local organic market, and you'll find a whole store that contains no corn syrup what so ever. (A little bird told me that you can cook your own food, and if you don't want to add corn syrup, you don't have to.)
Anyway, corn syrup is really cheap, so that's why it is in really cheap food. Most people think of food and think "more", not "more nutrition", so that's why it's popular. But fortunately, there are plenty of (mainstream) places that will sell you better food, so there is no reason to complain.
Every story I read mentions that real sugar is cheaper to produce, but corn syrup comes from corn which is subsidized by taxpayers.
Secondly, it is likely that much of real food (as you call it) would be cheaper than it is now, if it were not considered a premium product.
Third, HFCS, more than corn, is the problem. It is put in many products, even hot dogs. Avoiding products with HFCS might be a good strategy to get in shape simply because a person may have to go out of their way to find healthy food they can afford. But a biological reason is that the human body is not designed for processing fructose.
> "But a biological reason is that the human body is not designed for processing fructose."
Actually that's false, it's perfectly designed for processing fructose. HFCS wouldn't be a problem if you didn't process the fructose but it still tasted sweet. The problem is we're biologically designed so that fructose doesn't trigger the same processes as regular sugar.
The reason for this? Well primates formed a symbiosis with trees, they gave us fruits with lots of energy in the form of fructose, and in turn we killed the species that threatened our trees.
The most interesting thing I learnt was on the whole question if humans would have evolved if dinosaurs had been around, and the answer was yes. It's yes, because we didn't evolve by chance, we evolved because the trees 'chose' us to. The response to large herbivores that strip-feed was primates, because we protected large areas of land and specifically the trees we fed from. The prime example of this is that when fig trees are ripening, it can be dangerous for camera crews because a 150lb chimp is likely more dangerous than a 150lb man.
So essentially the key problem with HFCS is that we're designed not to respond to fructose. We simply store all that sugar as fat, which again is the problem all humans face. Society is trying to fight biology, and it sure as hell isn't an easy battle.
I don't think the problem is the HFCS itself. If you used sugar in place of HFCS in all of those products, it wouldn't be any better for you. Simply, too much sugar of any kind isn't good for you.
There's pretty solid evidence that fructose is particularly damaging if you get it in large quantities without much fiber. Eating fruits is fine, but HFCS is dangerous.
"A high flux of fructose to the liver, the main organ capable of metabolizing this simple carbohydrate, perturbs glucose metabolism and glucose uptake pathways, and leads to a significantly enhanced rate of de novo lipogenesis and triglyceride (TG) synthesis, driven by the high flux of glycerol and acyl portions of TG molecules from fructose catabolism. These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models. Fructose-induced insulin resistant states are commonly characterized by a profound metabolic dyslipidemia, which appears to result from hepatic and intestinal overproduction of atherogenic lipoprotein particles. Thus, emerging evidence from recent epidemiological and biochemical studies clearly suggests that the high dietary intake of fructose has rapidly become an important causative factor in the development of the metabolic syndrome."
You can also find sugared Coke if you live near the Mexican or Canadian borders in the US. Or if you look for the bottles of Coke sold around Passover. [Correcting my earlier misnomer - Coke with corn syrup is perfectly "kosher", just not appropriate for Passover.]
(I don't actually like either type. Weirdly, I only like the taste of Diet Coke, and not even Coke Zero.)
Right, but unless they specifically source it from Mexico (as that link seems to for that outlet), it might be Canadian Coke, which also has sugar and which you can also buy in glass bottles.
This is easy enough. Red Bull makes a cola with real sugar (expensive, but pretty tasty).
It's easy to avoid corn syrup when you don't buy processed foods. Go to your local organic market, and you'll find a whole store that contains no corn syrup what so ever. (A little bird told me that you can cook your own food, and if you don't want to add corn syrup, you don't have to.)
Anyway, corn syrup is really cheap, so that's why it is in really cheap food. Most people think of food and think "more", not "more nutrition", so that's why it's popular. But fortunately, there are plenty of (mainstream) places that will sell you better food, so there is no reason to complain.