Subsidizing The Obesity Epidemic

Subsidizing the Obesity Epidemic

It is a fact: Americans grow larger every year. Evidence of this widening girth is everywhere: in the staggering weight loss product sales, the "low-anything" health food consumption, the endless procession of fad diet crazes, the lawsuits against fast food companies, and the news coverage on the American "obesity epidemic."

This fattening of America is blamed on a smorgasbord of factors: portion size, lack of exercise, bad food choices, eating late, eating the wrong foods, too many carbohydrates, emotional issues, genetic predisposition...the list goes on and on, but the truth is rarely heard.

What is the truth? High-fructose corn syrup, subsidized by the U.S. government, has created the obesity crisis in this country. Americans should STOP obsessing over weight loss products and fad diets, and instead rebel against the massive amounts of high-fructose corn syrup pumped into food by the U.S. government via billions in corn subsidies and controlled sugar prices.

The Skinny on Obesity in America

Obesity in America has steadily increased for the past two decades. Two-thirds of U.S. adults are considered overweight (Crawford, 2004). Two decades ago, that statistic was less than 50% (Lemonick, 2004). An even more alarming statistic says that 31% of the population is considered obese (Crawford, 2004). Obesity is generally defined as weighing 30% or more over one's ideal body weight.

To fight the fat, Americans have responded by throwing money at the problem, spending more than $33 billion per year on weight loss and diet products (ADA, 2003). To put that in perspective, that is more than $110 for every man, woman, and child in America per year! The obsession with diet programs, diet aids, exercise equipment, diet food, etc., has reached an all-time high.

Ironically, the more Americans spend on weight gain remedies, the more the obesity crisis intensifies. That fact suggests that something else is causing the problem of nationwide weight gain. That "something else" is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

HFCS: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Genetic creation of HFCS began in the 1970s and became widespread in the 1980s (Wikipedia). According to Prof. George Bray, one of the world's foremost experts in obesity science, the increased use and consumption of HFCS progressed in tandem with the rise in obesity in the United States (Bray, 2002).

HFCS is a sweetener found in foods such as soda, fruit juice, cereal, fast food, health foods, and many processed foods. Soft drinks consumed by Americans are no longer sweetened by sugar. That role was taken over by HFCS, which is now used exclusively as a soda sweetener.

HFCS comes from corn - more specifically from genetically modified corn syrup, a complicated, chemical-intense process. (See Appendix for a description of the process.) The outcome is that HFCS contains about 5% more fructose than table sugar. According to Dr. Meira Field, who led a team of USDA investigators in a study on the effects of fructose on health problems, "...all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic" (Forristal, 2001, para. 16).

Defenders of HFCS contend that because HFCS is not much different from table sugar in its percentage of fructose, it is irresponsible to blame HFCS for rising obesity. However, critics of HFCS point out that the amounts of HFCS used in over-consumed foods, such as soda, tend to be higher, which makes the 5% even more pronounced.

HFSC has been linked in several studies to weight gain, diabetes, and other health problems. Its dangers have been presented on national news, in well-respected publications, and by countless doctors in prestigious journals. However, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) maintains that HFCS is safe and cites one report issued by the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at Virginia Tech that concluded, "there is currently no convincing evidence to support a link between HFCS consumption and overweight/obesity" (CRA, 2005, para. 2).

Sugar and HFCS: A Tangled Political Web

Despite the complex conversion of corn syrup into HFCS, it is inexpensive to mass produce. In fact, due to the U.S. Government taxation of sugar imports, HFCS is cheaper to produce than sugar (Sanda, 2004).

The U.S. Government controls the cost of sugar to U.S. food manufacturers by requiring foreign countries to pay a tax on all sugar they import to this country and by limiting the amount that can be imported. According to the USDA, "The USDA's Sugar-Containing Products Re-Export Program is designed to put U.S. manufacturers of sugar-containing products on a level playing field in the world market" (USDA, 2005, para. 4).

According to the Economic Research Service for the USDA, the raw sugar market price in the U.S. is currently 21.10 cents per pound, while the price in other countries is 11.59 cents per pound (ERS, 2005). Without this taxation, and with a free market, the cost of sugar in the U.S. would decrease, which would be detrimental to the U.S. sugar growers, who could not compete with lower foreign prices, as it costs less to produce sugar in other countries than it does in the U.S.

However, the real losers would be the corn growers and refiners. If the U.S. government allowed the cost of sugar to dip to world market prices, it would cost the major food manufacturers less to buy sugar than HFCS. This means that the billions spent on HFCS as a sweetener would be spent on sugar, preferably from the foreign countries that can produce it cheaper than can sugar farmers in the U.S.

Because HFCS is growing rapidly as a substitute for sugar, in what some estimate to be 50% of the food consumed by Americans today, it follows that producers of HFCS, in addition to the sugar farmers, have a heavily-vested interest in keeping the price of sugar higher than HFCS. So long as the price of sugar remains higher than HFCS, the corn sweeter business thrives.

According to Forristal (2001), four major companies dominate 85 percent of the $2.6 billion corn sweetener business: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co., and Corn Products International. The largest producer of HFCS is ADM (Marks, 1997). It should come as no surprise that the Federal Election Commission reports that ADM has contributed more than $860,000 to political action campaigns since 1996 (FEC, 2005). Some estimate that the addition of soft contributions boosts that figure into the millions.

Together with congressional vote trading and lobbying by the special interest