There's also a movie called King Corn that I haven't seen yet that seems to cover much of the same ground.

Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." --Former Nixon counsel John Dean

Those bastards are pernicious.

I have learned to recognize the unpleasant, sticky aftertaste that high-fructose corn syrup seems to give to things:  More than once I have said to myself, that was good at first but now it is sticky and yucky--let me read the label!  But I don't know why HFCS has this property.  

I'd buy that book.  In fact, I'd buy any book you decided to write if you'd only get off your ass and write one ;)

Help me raise money for Jay Nixon, the next Democratic governor of Missouri

Corn syrup is a syrup, made using corn starch as a feedstock, and composed mainly of glucose.

The startling rise in diabetes is perfectly mirrored by our mounting consumption of refined carbohydrates, a new analysis reveals. The study adds to evidence that sugary foods should be eschewed and that public health advice to cut back on fat may have backfired.

Levels of obesity and late onset diabetes have risen slowly over the last century and accelerated in the last 40 years. While the problem is most acute in developed countries, there is evidence that rates are starting to increase in developing countries too. Most experts agree that worsening diets and increasingly inactive lifestyles are responsible, but the exact cause is hard to pin down.

Simin Liu of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and his co-workers collected information on consumption and food composition for the period between 1909 and 1997. They compared this with data on disease incidence rates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The climb in diabetes goes hand in hand with the rise in total calorie intake, the team reports in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition1. This fits the idea that obesity places people at risk of diabetes.

But when Liu broke down the figures into proteins, fats and carbohydrates, a different picture emerged. Neither fat consumption nor protein seem to be the root cause of the problem.

Instead, the diabetes rise best matches dropping fibre consumption and escalating consumption of corn syrup, a ubiquitous sweetener in today's processed foods. "It is quite striking," says nutritional scientist Cyril Kendall of the University of Toronto, Canada.

Foods high in refined carbohydrate, the argument goes, send blood sugar soaring, requiring the pancreas to pump out insulin. Over time, the body's tissues become resistant to the excess insulin and pancreatic cells wear out, resulting in diabetes.

Liu's analysis does not prove that corn syrup caused the increase in diabetes, experts are careful to point out. But the finding bolsters the idea that this and other highly refined carbohydrates such as white flour, white rice and sugar put people at risk of obesity and diabetes.

link.

This post on the sugar shock blog is a decent summary:

[...] Washington Post journalist Eviana Hartman points out.

"Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops," she writes. "This maximizes yields, but at a price: It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil."

Hartman then quotes Pollan, who says in an e-mail:

"The environmental footprint of HFCS is deep and wide. Look no farther than the dead zone in the Gulf [of Mexico], an area the size of New Jersey where virtually nothing will live because it has been starved of oxygen by the fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi from the Corn Belt.

    "Then there is the atrazine in the water in farm country -- a nasty herbicide that, at concentrations as little as 0.1 part per billion, has been shown to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites."