The economic demise of high fructose corn syrup?
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If you follow the commodities market, all the yap yap this week has been about corn - namely the escalating price of corn.
Demand for ethanol is projected to equal the entire corn crop. The price in the futures market has been taking the grain elevator up.
Perhaps corn will get too expensive to make high fructose corn syrup financially desirable.
This entry was posted on Fri, 19.Jan.2007 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
6 Responses to “The economic demise of high fructose corn syrup?”
As far as I have understood the problem, corn syrup is a kind of unproductive consumption. The US’s overproduction of corn needs to be dumped somewhere to keep up wages of corn farmers, so laws have been passed to force producers of products that contain sugar to use corn syrup instead. If demand for corn increases due to ethanol demand, why wouldn’t government try to shift the existing corn crop towards production of ethanol and subsidize production of normal sugar. Would this not reduce future spending on healthcare as a result of corn-syrup-bound obesity ?
Well that would be some good to come out of it, but I don’t know that’s likely. Corn and soy are HEAVILY subsidized. Currently because corn is getting shifted more towards ethanol, all prices related to corn are increasing… it’s used in cattle and chicken feed so dairy, meat and poultry prices are rising.
HFCS was originally discovered in the 1970’s. It’s extremely sweet so much less is needed compared to sugar. Even if the price increases, it’s still likely to be cost beneficial.
Funny thing is, Brasil - a huge sugar producing country - has largely converted to ethanol. Their ethanol uses sugar rather than corn. It’s more efficiently used in ethanol production. However, to protect the corn industry, the US put a large tariff (I believe 35 cents a pound) on sugar from Brasil. Hence we continue to use corn.
As well, farmers are shifting crops. So there will be shortages in other crops as farmers elect to go for those ethanol corn dollars.
instead of using sugar and hfcs which is not good for your health
but cost effective for the food industry.
STEVIA is 5 more times sweeter than sugar an good for
diabetics but of course the food lobysts for the food and sugar
industry would never let that happen…. money over the health
of the people is more inportant. Thank you PMO
I have been reading an article about the affect that all the Corn Syrup has on the liver. I have another reaction whenever I eat something with corn syrup. I break out in a rash in my armpits. I have been very careful lately to read everything that I eat or drink. I have been using stevia for a long time to sweeten my coffee. It is amazing that corn syrup or another form (dextrose) appears in so much of our food. Also the fact that Corn syrup converts to fat more than sugar does, it is no wonder that our Country has become so fat. We need to get rid of this horrible sweetener. Beet sugar, Stevia and many other sweeteners besides sugar are available. No wonder we also have so much Diabetes. This all started when they enacted the Corn Sugar legislation back when. Just felt like giving my 2 cents. Turn the Corn into fuel and give us back our health.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
I agree with Paul Orley. Everytime I drink a fountain drink,which is my weakness, I break out with a terrible rash on my feet and sometimes my wrist. It’s similar to poison oak or sumac.
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