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Obesity epidemic looms within cornfields' sweet syrup

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Kym Levesque

I have a morbid curiosity about the obesity epidemic that causes me to read books like "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser and "Fatland: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World" by Greg Critser.

The first book has kept me out of nearly all fast food restaurants for over six months. "Fatland" has prompted me to kick my addiction to Coca-Cola.

One of the subjects discussed in "Fatland," which recently popped up in the L.A. Times, concerns high-fructose corn syrup. Critser chooses corn syrup as one of the underlying reasons for the current obesity epidemic.

After everything is said, the reason Americans are fat is because they eat too much and are not active enough. However, certain things like high-fructose corn syrup can exacerbate the problem because corn syrup has caused increased portion sizes.

Larger portions are bad because people don't realize how much more food they are eating. The problem gets worse if those portions include high amounts of sugar and fat.

Corn syrup starts out as cornstarch. Its glucose is converted to fructose, making it sweet. Since the '70s, high-fructose corn syrup has been used to sweeten nearly every product sold in grocery stores, from cereal to ketchup to baked beans to soda.

According to Critser, the problem started when there was more corn grown than eaten. To save the corn farmers, the U.S. government advocated the use of a new product - high-fructose corn syrup.

If corn syrup was used, the farmers could sell more corn and manufacturers could pay less than they would for sugar for an equally effective sweetener. Not only does corn syrup sweeten, it also acts as a preservative. So the cheaper, just-as-sweet foods last longer as well.

After manufacturers began using corn syrup rather than sugar to sweeten, they were able to offer customers larger portions because they were spending less on production.

Nowadays, it's more difficult to find a food without corn syrup than one with it.

New studies are showing the body does not metabolize high-fructose corn syrup well. Once the fructose hits the liver, the liver drops everything to metabolize the fructose. The fructose encourages the liver to promote fat by activating enzymes that create higher levels of cholesterol.

A news brief in The Arizona Republic put that in simpler terms by saying it "is more readily converted into fat than other sugars".

It should be noted that all sugars are stored in the body as fat. Once that is considered, it begs the question of how high-fructose corn syrup can be worse than the other forms of sugar.

Without all the complicated science that may be proven wrong in a month, the prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup in American food remains a cause for concern.

Fructose is not bad in itself. That's the form of sugar in fruit, after all. But having it in everything overloads us with fructose. In May's Shape magazine, University of Kansas researchers found fructose intolerance is increasing, causing intestinal discomfort similar to lactose intolerance.

The availability of foods that use corn syrup calls for a large amount of individual responsibility when it comes to eating.

Corn farmers aren't going to cut back on their planting because they aren't concerned with the increasing levels of heart disease. Food manufacturers aren't going to return to expensive sucrose just because larger portions are causing a rise in juvenile diabetes.

Since they won't stop making the food, it is up to Americans to stop eating it.

Kym Levesque is a journalism junior. Reach her at kymberly.levesque@asu.edu.


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