You are right about all the other foods being present way before the obesity epidemic and the rise in prepared foods contributing to obesity but you didn’t get into why. French fries are a simple food. They should be potatoes, cooking oil, and salt. But McDonald’s has just been sued because they advertised their fries were gluten (or wheat) free. A person with Celiac’s disease, who is supposed to have no wheat, ate the fries and had an extreme reaction. McDonald’s later admitted they put wheat and milk in their fries as “seasonings”. To the average person, they think of milk and wheat and say “no problem”. You can imagine what I thought of their “seasonings” and why they lied about it.

The average American has been trained to think that obesity is 99% due to the lifestyle choices of the individual. I think it’s probably closer to 1/3 genetic, 1/3 chemical, and 1/3 lifestyle choices. If it were 99% lifesyle choices, then diet pills and surgery wouldn’t work for obesity, and they do.

But getting back to John’s original point, why are we subsidizing milk, corn, and wheat and not fruit, vegtables, and meats while in the middle of an obesity epidemic? That policy makes no sense.

You know, when I cook, I’m always amazed at how few ingredients I use. I always cook from raw ingredients. 6-8 items in a dish is a lot. Usually, its more 3-5. When I read a box of processed food, it’s just deplorable. I made homeburgers… ground beef and pork, onions, bread crumbs salt-and-pepper, some cayenne and an egg. Even the egg is optional! But that’s it. Delicious!

Pasta salad – pasta, red onion, cukes, red pepper, olive oil, salt-and-pepper, oregano, feta cheese. That’s all! Good food is simple. Simple food is great!

I think at least part of the problem is that there is a lot more prepared food than there was a half-century ago. It’s just so easy to eat these days. You just grab a bag of chips out of the cabinet, or nuke a frozen dinner, or drive down to a fast-food joint, or dial up Chinese or the Hut and have them deliver. None of this spending hours assembling raw ingredients, chopping, mixing and slaving over a hot stove anymore.

Of all the deplorable acts by the government, though, the worst has to be corn syrup. Sugar or sucrose is a naturally occuring substance; corn syrup was originally invented by the Japanese in the ’70s.

Corn syrup, including high fructose corn syrup is not an “act by the government”. Corn syrup is made by grinding the endosperm (white heart) of the corn kernel, yielding corn starch. A series of acids and/or enzymes (also naturally occuring substances) are then added to the cornstarch, converting it into corn syrup, which contains glucose and fructose, both of which are both naturally occuring substances. Fructose occurs in fruits, and glucose is plain old natural cane sugar.

High fructose corn syrup is created by using a particular set of enzymes when converting the cornstarch, to yield a syrup that has significantly more fructose than glucose. It is popular with food manufacturers not just because of US agricultural policy (cane sugar monopolized and expensive; corn syrup subsidized and cheap) but because it is sweeter and more soluble than glucose.

But all of those foods existed for millenia prior to our sudden obesity epidemic in the past 30-40 years.

And #16, Bruce, you are correct, sir. Blame it all on corn syrup…..

http://www.dublindrpepper.com/

Of all the deplorable acts by the government, though, the worst has to be corn syrup. Sugar or sucrose is a naturally occuring substance; corn syrup was originally invented by the Japanese in the ’70s. In one study, mice were fed the same number of calories of either sugar or corn syrup and the ones consuming corn syrup were far more obese than their sugar eating cousins. Corn syrup does not stimulate insulin secretion which induces satiety, and it has been shown to be toxic to the liver. And to top it off, corn syrup is more expensive than sugar, so why on God’s green earth are we using corn syrup instead of sugar?

Politics. The tariff on imported sugar makes corn syrup a cheaper alternative. The U.S. is the world’s #1 producer of corn but it cannot compete with the likes of Brazil or Mexico on the price of sugar, so we tax the crap out of sugar once it enters our country. The bottom line is the U.S. is paying for a more expensive, artificial, and unsafe sweetner all courtesy of our polticians in Washington. How fucked up is that?