Corn Syrup

Canada and the World

Current Events with a Canadian Perspective

Last update

19 November 2010

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Corn Feeds the

Profits of Agribusiness

Corporate agriculture has increased crop yields and dramatically lowered the price of food. It has also radically changed the way we feed ourselves

Just look at what’s happened to Zea mays; that’s a giant tropical grass better known as corn.

In North America, we eat about ten times more wheat flour than corn flour; that’s our European cultural heritage at work - bread, pasta, and pastry was always made from wheat flour because corn was an unknown plant until Europeans stumbled on the Americas.

Yet, when scientists examine our bodies at the molecular level, they see a different picture. They see bodies constructed and fuelled by large quantities of corn.

Todd Dawson is a University of California biologist who’s done research in this area. He says, “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs.”

Corn Turns

up in Most Foods

Corn, pummelled and processed, finds its way into much most foods. Sometimes, it turns up in quite surprising places.

Livestock that once grazed on grass is now fed on corn. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and turkeys all turn corn into meat. Eggs, cheese, yogurt, and milk often start out with corn as a raw material.

The central aisles of the supermarket are a corn-rich zone. Turned into corn starch, corn flour, corn syrup, and many other ingredients derived from corn it’s hard to find a food product that doesn’t have corn in it. Corn flakes (duh!) and just about every other boxed cereal. Virtually all pop and most fruit drinks are sweetened with corn syrup.

In his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan lists of few of the other products that contain corn: “Everything from toothpaste and cosmetics to disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.”

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Humans are hard-wired to seek out sweet flavours; that’s why we gulp down so much HFCS. Never heard of it? It stands for high-fructose corn syrup and you’d be hard pressed to get through a day without ingesting some of it.

HFCS came on the market in the 1970s and has become wildly successful. It is a low-cost sweetener used in most fast foods and in a very wide variety of prepared grocery items.

Dr. George Bray is a professor of medicine at Louisiana State University and is an obesity researcher. He says that HFCS is at least partly responsible for the obesity epidemic that is sweeping much of the Western world. And, this obesity problem has been documented by Greg Critser in his 2006 book, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.

Corn Attracts Subsidies

One corporation, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), controls about 35 percent of the high-fructose corn syrup market.

ADM is a much-criticized company for the way it operates.

The Cato Institute (a right-wing U.S. think tank) says the company “has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties (Republican and Democrat) with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers.” Those handouts come in the form of massive government subsidies to corn producers.

Richard Manning documents this in his 2004 book Against the Grain. Manning says that in the early 1980s, Archer Daniels Midland paid for a huge lobbying effort in Washington. The goal was to persuade the U.S. government to limit the imports of sugar. The campaign was successful. Cutting the amount of sugar imported into the country had the effect of forcing up its price; exactly what ADM wanted.

The price of sugar was now higher than high-fructose corn syrup causing a wholesale switch to the ADM product. Today, HFCS is the dominant sweetener in North America; 42 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. goes into making it. If it weren’t for ADM’s lobbying efforts, no market for it would exist.

Image credit: Eduardo Mueses

Sources

“High Fructose Corn Syrup: just another Sugar?” CBC News, March 18, 2010.

“Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare.” James Bovard, Cato Institute, September 26, 1995.

“High Fructose Corn Syrup: How Sweet it is.” Bill Chameides, The Huffington Post, April 2, 2010.

HEALTH CONCERNS

The average can of pop contains 10½ teaspoons of sugar – only it isn’t sugar. The sweetener is high-fructose corn syrup.

According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian consumed 85 litres of pop in 2007. Clearly, with all those calories in the sweetener, this amount of soft drink consumption contributes to obesity.

Other health concerns are being raised about the high levels of HFCS many people are consuming.

According to CBC News (March 18, 2010) “At the American Chemical Society conference in August 2007, U.S. researchers suggested soft drinks containing high-fructose corn syrup may be linked to the development of diabetes, especially in children.”

Other researchers suspect HFCS may be a factor in heart ailments and liver disease.

Writer Kevin Millard advises how to cut down on HFCS “While shopping, read the labels, if HFCS, fructose, or modified corn starch appears within the first five ingredients place it back on the shelf and move on. Sounds easy right? Wrong. As you make your way through the store you will begin to realize just how much of what you have been eating on a daily basis contains HFCS.”