And yes, if you cook/bake at home, you'll use much, much less sugar. The problem with HFCS (and sugar in general) is that it's extremely functional in many products. In many cases the food industry needs to use it to be able to deliver the kind of processed foods that (some) people expect - they're not doing it just to be unhealthy. Processed foods have a LOT of crap in them that gives them a long shelf life, or allows them to be frozen for months on end, or makes them tolerant to temperature changes while being shipped across the country. If manufacturers could leave this stuff out and still make the same product, they absolutely would because it would mean huge dollars in cost savings. Please note that I'm not trying to defend them here - that's just how the industry works, for better or (usually, for America in general) worse.

Dervish

Or BOTH?

Solid snake fights his evil enemy, Kinda Flabby Snake, and his army of brainwashed rice-zombies. Enter MetalGear Moob, the largest metal gear ever, sporting a wife-beater, a pair of mantits each the size of a water tower, and carrying a six-pack of some piss-water american beer.

Thrust

Jesse in Japan

Wubbytoes

There are a lot of ways to look at this issue, one of which is property rights. What about the organic farmer whose crop gets cross-pollinated with Roundup Ready corn or some other genetically engineered product? That person is going to be out of business. What's their recourse?

jrford8

This sort of thing would bother me a lot more if there were any scientific evidence that these modifications are dangerous. I haven't seen any.

McKay

Monsanto
[www.vsocial.com]

WTF are GM foods?
[www.vsocial.com]

~Tally~

Mom2Talavera

Rusted

Yes there are some small number of people who are fat for serious genetic abnormalities and illnesses. They would amount to less than .001% of the population. Now OF the fat people out there, I'd guess at 50+ % of them think they are part of that .001%. And even for those who DO have such conditions, it's not a case of "I'm gonna be fat so lets see how big I get before they declare me a dwarf planet", GET your asses off the couch and it can be controlled. You won't be the next Mila Jovovoich, but there's no point being Roseanne Bar just because you can't be Mila.

I see women walk around the street with asses wider than the bench seat in the back of my matrix. There's a lardass couple who I knew working at the pizzaria... They ordered 4-6 large cheese-stuffed-crust pizzas (typical toppings would be all five meats, or four meats plus feta), four to five cheese-stuffed crazybreads, three normal crazybreads (all the above mentioned, with extra butter on the crust/breads), and a pair of 2L cokes. They ordered this huge feast once pretty much every week. These fatasses were only barely able to squeeze into the restaurant, and then when they had the grub, they would pile into this mid-90's Grand Am. Mr Lardo driving, with the wheel tucked between his moobs and thighs, and Mrs Gojira in the passenger seat with all the food on her lap, or more accurately, plastered onto the windshield. Sick sight to behold.

Thrust

Still, even with Americans consuming less sugar overall than our European neighbors, HCFS is still considered a cause for our obesity. Why? Because it's in everything, and not just candy bars and other desserts. It's in ketchup/sauces/salad dressings, jams/jellies/peanut butter, sodas/juices, luncheon meats, and most prepackaged meals as a flavoring. Anytime a recipe calls for a pinch of sugar, they add a bunch of HFCS. Every premade meal you eat, and this usually includes all fast food, has unnecessary sugar. This sugar produces an insulin response, which leads to an "energy storage" response, first as glycogen, then as body fat.

If you made the same meal at home, you would consume less sugar. This means a lower insulin response and less energy storage. So, check your labels for one day and look at how much sugar you're consuming. Forget the starches and other carbohydrates. Just look at sugar. The FDA suggests that you keep your added sugar intake under 48g.

You may be surprised with how much sugar you eat in a day. Cutting down on your sugar intake is a good idea, avoiding HFCS is just one way to make avoiding sugar easier.

Schorin MD. 2005. High Fructose Corn Syrups, Part 1: Composition, Consumption, and Metabolism. Nutrition Today 40, 248-252

Schorin MD. 2006. High Fructose Corn Syrups, Part 2: Health Effects. Nutrition Today 41, 70-77.

lincolnparadox

Dervish

TechnoDestructo

The odds of me getting anything fatal or debilitating (more debilitating than the screamin shits at least) from food is much MUCH lower than dying on my commute to work. If it's not driving that will kill me, it's the sun, my allergies/athsma, some random shooting, gang violence, a sawblade from the factory below me could come loose - shoot up through the floor - and split me in two, or there's airplane accidents... Not so much being IN one, but a jet engine from an unknown passenger liner could strike my house and crush me and my bedroom in the middle of the night, then I would hallucinate about creepy evil rabbits named Jack... Or at the end of the day, just maybe, falling debris from the ISS could burn a path through the sky, and a flaming toilet seat from the wreckage could literally vaporise my body upon impact (It's a couple years too late for it to be Mir's toilet seat, but I think someone else got that one).

So yeah, not going to worry about food unless it's from a place with a creepy clown mascot.

Thrust

See the movie "Children of Men"
(Hopefully Clive Owen will still be around to save us)

snwbrder0721

Joewithay

But yes, you also have many roundup-ready/liberty-link crops that are specifically engineered to work with the company's herbicides.

Dervish

But Having food modified to be insect resistant, seems better to me than having the food blasted with pestisides."

Would be interesting if they actually did that. But then they can't sell their pesticides. Rather, they make the GM crops to be pesticide resistant, so that more farmers are blasting more crops with pesticide. Nice, huh?

Organic all the way.

anatak

leftistcoast

Sherryness

Please speak for yourself, as I don't purchase products containing HFC.

Amelie

allstarecho

Thrust

ancientsociety

I'm not worried about the health risks of trangenic plants, but the spread of genes from crop to non-crop species (including weed/nuisance species) is a real risk.

brilliantmistake

This honestly keeps me awake at night worrying. And cursing Monsanto.

Eyebrows McGee

I'm not actually aware of a case where a GM crop "escaped" via apomixis, which would present the true parallel to animal parthenogenesis. It was clearly not meant as a scientific explanation.

Eyebrows McGee

sonichghog

You're right on the money, however, when you say "anything you modify in the food chain will affect something else." Not only do you have to worry about BT-susceptible insects (which are food for something else) being killed off, but what happens when the insects evolve to become resistant to BT, one of the world's great natural pesticides?

I'm not against GM foods from a food safety standpoint, per se, but I am from a biodiversity point of view. That, and I don't trust Monsanto and the like to do anything they promise.

Dervish

Yet.

Danilo Campos

Chaosium

While I agree that we should not turn a blind idea to the Pandora's box of GM crops, I feel the need to remind you and subsequent commenters that Jurassic Park was a work of complete and utter fiction.

Arguing against GM foods by using the imagination of an ill-informed science fiction writer is not going to help the case against GM foods. There are plenty of more compelling reasons to resist the march against non-GM foods.

CaliforniaCajun

Sherryness

bohemian

B

Insect-resistant crops usually produce a posion in them that is supposed to *only* effect the insects that eat them. In reality it never, ever works out that way. Anything you modify in a food chain will eventually effect something else. I'm going to play devil's advocate here. What happens when GM'd poison produces sterility in humans in the 10th generation or so?

Jaysyn was banned for: http://consumerist.com/5032912/the-subprime-meltdown-will-be-nothing-compared-to-the-prime-meltdown#c7042646

Somehow? Somehow? Plants have sex, people. It's like when they made only girl dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the girls parthenogenesized. "Nature finds a way." (Cue dramatic music.) You can engineer a plant to be infertile or fertile only to your patented pollen, but whether or not the plant gets the memo is an entirely different issue. Allegedly non-reproducing GM crops have been "escaping" since they've been available. IT'S NOT A PROBLEM THAT'S GOING AWAY!

Continuing to approve the same types of GM crops with the same mechanisms of reproduction containment is going to result, surprise surprise, in the same genetic escapage. What's that line about insanity is the doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

Eyebrows McGee

But Having food modified to be insect resistant, seems better to me than having the food blasted with pestisides.

sonichghog

Europe has the right idea this time & we should be following their lead.

Jaysyn was banned for: http://consumerist.com/5032912/the-subprime-meltdown-will-be-nothing-compared-to-the-prime-meltdown#c7042646