America is fat.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. At current rates, half of the nation will be morbidly fat by 2030. Not only does obesity cause many health problems, like heart disease and high blood pressure, but extra pounds also amplify genetic issues like diabetes and cancer.
Politicians seek to girdle the ballooning obesity problem with awareness campaigns and programs that limit access to unhealthy food. Just last Wednesday, First Lady Michelle Obama introduced a new strategy “to leverage the power of marketing to promote healthy products and decrease the marketing of unhealthy products to kids.”
But the government is playing a two-faced game by telling people to avoid high-sugar, high-calorie junk food while guaranteeing that food is the cheap. Every year, the government pumps between $2.5 billion and $10 billion into the industry that produces junk food’s secret ingredient: corn. Michelle Obama, Michael Bloomberg, and other politicians demonize the very same junk-food industry they support by driving down corn prices.
Corn fillers and additives are everywhere because subsidized corn has been cheap for decades. When grain prices collapsed due to overproduction during the Great Depression, New Deal farm policy established a system of nonrecourse loans and price target ranges to prevent grain from flooding the market. This continued with relative success until Richard Nixon started feeling political heat from increasing food prices. And so, in 1972, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz birthed the idea of direct payments to farmers. Instead of lending famers money, the government wrote checks. Since then, corn farmers have received the lion’s share of farm subsidies. American can-do kicked in to handle the resulting surpluses and corn ended up in almost everything we eat. Farmers have even begun feeding corn to farmed fish.
“Because of the subsidies, the cost of soft drinks containing [high-fructose corn syrup] has decreased by 24 percent since 1985, while the price of fruits and vegetables has gone up by 39 percent,” said Paolo Boffetta, deputy director of Mount Sinai’s Tisch Cancer Institute.
The legendary Twinkie, for example, has 37 ingredients. At least 14 of those come directly from corn. Corn products can be found in cookies, candies, soda, ice cream, bread, cereal, Pop Tarts, flavored coffee, and more. Corn is the primary ingredient for almost every product marketed as a breakfast food for children, providing them with the all of the empty calories they need for a nutritious breakfast.
Corn also dominates American fast food. The cheap beef and chicken come from corn-fed animals. French fries sizzle in corn oil. Desserts and sodas are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. A study from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu found that almost every product from fast-food chains comes from corn.
“Out of the hundreds of meals that we bought, there were only 12 servings of anything that did not go straight back to a corn source,” said study lead author Hope Jahren.
No single straw broke this obese camel’s back. But the superabundant calories from the highly processed corn in American food certainly added a lot of weight. Food companies isolate corn fructose, or corn sugar, to create HFCS and other popular food additives. But human stomachs cannot process fructose and, consequently, pass it off to the liver. The liver then processes the majority of that content into fats, leading to obesity, liver and heart disease, and diabetes. And the US leads the world in HFCS consumption at 55 pounds per capita every year, reports a study by the University of Southern California and University of Oxford.
“Most populations have an almost insatiable appetite for sweet foods, but regrettably our metabolism has not evolved sufficiently to be able to process the fructose from high fructose corn syrup in the quantities that some people are consuming it,” said study co-author Stanley Ulijaszek.
The government’s farm policies should reflect its health policies by ending the perverse incentive of corn subsidies. Two weeks ago, the House and Senate conference committee began long-delayed talks to create a new farm bill by the end of the year. This new bill must stop skewing the market in favor of products made with inexpensive corn additives. To stop undermining its health goals, the White House needs to take an aggressive stance on subsidies, instead of harping on marketing techniques.
The government should take the corncob out of its eye.
