Hot Buttered Corn Syrup and the Changing Public Taste

Time was when you eat or drank something sweet it was usually sugar cane or honey that made it that way. Your sodas, ice cream, cakes, whatever were made with sugar, unless you bought it at the emerging health foods stores. Then it might have been made with honey or molasses. Occasionally, maple syrup escaped its role as topping gourmet pancakes and waffles to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Corn syrup was rare. Corn syrup was the poor man’s sweetener. And then the food and beverage companies realized they could save a few cents per serving, and they started added corn sweetener to your snacks and drinks. Corn syrup was not only cheaper, they needed less to make food and drink as sweet or sweeter than sugar would. High fructose corn syrup–nothing like it.

Which is true. Apparently, it has no source in nature and the body has difficulty recognizing it as food and tends to store it more as fat than the body would store sugar cane or honey. At least that is the theory or argument posed by the alleged health nuts of the world. The Corn Refiners Association says otherwise. As do the companies who bought high fructose corn syrup and used it in their food and beverages. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, captures the controversy pretty well.

But then, as some argue, when you look around, people are fatter. Forget the nice words like obese and overweight. People are fat. The fat rolls over their waistline, pudges out their arms and legs, extends their rear ends and causes their jowls to hang like a Bull Dog’s. And people have gotten fatter since we started consuming corn syrup in grand style. At its peak, the individual in America consumed almost 64 pounds of corn syrup a year. Now it is down to just over 56 pounds per person. That’s a lot of sweetener.

Diabetes is up, people are fatter, and related illnesses has climbed significantly. The purveyors of corn sweetener will tell you the obesity increase is due to caloric increase and the sedentary life. We are fat because we are couch potatoes, is the prevailing wisdom. It has nothing to do with the corn syrup we ingest every year.
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Well now a lot of people aren’t buying it. Literally. They haven’t been buying it for a number of years. So the good people who have been giving you bad foods are turning back to making their foods and beverages with sugar cane. They even boast their food products are “natural” and some even trumpet the health benefits of the sugar cane compared to corn syrup. Hey, anything for a buck.

I have to marvel over the miracle of the free market. This is the law of supply and demand at its finest. People no longer want something they fear is unhealthy in their foods and drinks and the manufacturers are forced to respond. The vendors re-arrange the furniture, so to speak, and spend the extra few cents on the ingredients and take the extra trouble to ship and store the more cumbersome sugar cane. Pretty amazing, eh?

But what is also amazing is that it took this long. For years now there have been health concerns about corn syrup. As the nation grew larger, the controversy stayed small. Until recently. As it has been said so many times over so many conditions, a change has come at last.

In the Highland Park section of Los Angeles, Galco’s a little Hispanic grocery has been for years carrying soft drinks with real cane sugar for many years. It is in fact the absolute Mecca for cane syrup soft drinks with aisle after aisle of cases of soft drinks from all over the world. Galco’s carried everything from the popular blends to the obscure. The owners let you mix and match. Galco’s serves excellent sandwiches, too, which presents a good excuse to wash them down with a bottle or two of Mexican or Irish soda pop.

As for the corn syrup, turn it into ethanol and put put it in your car. If your car gets fat, then you will know what to blame.

Author: Gordon Basichis

Gordon Basichis is the Co-Founder of Corra Group, specializing in pre-employment background checks and corporate research. He has been a marketing and media executive. He is the author of the best selling Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, a non-fiction novel that helped define exotic behavior in the late twentieth century. He has recently published The Cuban Quarter, The Blood Orange, and The Guys Who Spied for China, dealing with Chinese Espionage in the United States. He is the author of The Constant Travellers. He has been a journalist for several newspapers and is a screenwriter and producer.