The setting sun splashes warm hues across a ripening cornfield as a man and his daughter wander through rows of towering plants.Like any parent, the dad says in the television commercial, he was concerned about high fructose corn syrup. But medical and nutrition experts reassured him that in essence, it's the same as cane sugar.
"Your body can't tell the difference," he says. "Sugar is sugar."
That key claim, made last year by the corn industry as it tries to rebrand high fructose corn syrup as simply "corn sugar," was weighed for the first time by a federal judge Tuesday after a group of sugar farmers and refiners sued corn processors and a lobbying group.
Their lawsuit alleges the father-in-the-cornfield advertisement and other national television, print and online commercials from the corn industry amount to false advertising because sugar is not the same as high fructose corn syrup, the sweetening agent now found in the bulk of sodas and many processed foods.
Somewhat ironically, the day I read this article I went to a Meijer's store where they had an end cap display of Mexican soda's. Soda bottled with real sugar and not the high fructose stuff.
Has it ever occurred to anyone as to why so much processed food in this country is not made with sugar? If you want anything made with sugar in this country it's almost always made outside of the country. Most high end chocolate is produced in Canada and of course, soda made in Mexico.
Sugar tariffs were designed to protect domestic sugar farmers but at what cost? Food production using sugar has almost all been moved out of the country and if you're a believer that high fructose corn syrup is partly responsible for our obesity problem it's also cost us our public health.
But hey at least some domestic sugar farmer still gets to live high on the hog.
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