LovelyA72If you have the power will you ban high fructose corn syrup?
MTLion3Can I ban surculose instead? Both are bad, but the distinct lack of regulation on surculose baffles me.
Sure, I don’t care. Don’t think I ever had it.
Just removing subsidies on corn would solve the core problem. There are lots of things corn is used for that shouldn’t be corn that also get fixed by that.
Pet food
Came here to say this. HFCS is used so much because it’s so cheap for companies to use it. Get rid of the corn subsides, which have long outlived their purpose, and there’s not much incentive for using HFCS anymore and you solve the problem without a ban.
krayjHigh fructose corn syrup is over-used because it’s dirt cheap to produce, and it’s only dirt cheap to produce because corn is subsidized.
As much as I love my bourbon whiskey, I’ll accept the fact that prices will go up if corn stops being subsidized, but that’s what’s desperately needed in this country.
Not sure about an all out ban but its usage should definitely be reduced. 39g of sugar in a 12oz Coke is ridiculous.
WahotsEven relatively normal stuff like yogurt has a staggering amount of sugar (look at the weight in grams, and how much of that is sugar, also in grams. It’s insane)
I just buy unflavored yogurt now, which is sugarless. And make smoothies with it. Can freeze berries and spinach for drinks :)
LucidlethargyI mean, 100% agree, but not by force. If people want to drink sugar, that’s their business… It’s stupid, but sure, go for it.
FuckyWucky [none/use name]maybe not a complete ban but definitely more restriction on all sugars in general. obesity issue in the U.S. is not just due to HFCS, there are many reasons for it such as the car centric design, lack of availability of healthy food for the poor, abundance of cheap fast food etc.
Straight talk about high-fructose corn syrup: what it is and what it ain't - PubMed
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a fructose-glucose liquid sweetener alternative to sucrose (common table sugar) first introduced to the food and beverage industry in the 1970s. It is not meaningfully different in composition or metabolism from other fructose-glucose sweeteners like sucrose, honey …
Why? It’s just sugar packaged differently.
No, people should discipline themselves to eat responsibly. If you don’t want to eat HFCS don’t buy shit that contains it.
Thank you… What’s wrong with people? Jesus Christ.
No, because just banning things rarely achieves the desired results.
And whether it’s cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, too much sugar in general is the problem, much more so than the subtle differences between the two.
Carighan MaconarInstead, tax it enough. And maybe do that with sugar/fat/etc in general, so that inherently sweeter and fattier foods can’t be sold as cheap. It works in some countries already.
Maybe. A possibility for sure. I’m just not really into policies of trying to save people from themselves.
For me? I do what I can by just avoiding it as much as I can.
No man is an island and policies that aim to better the nation’s health are rarely for the benefit of the individual and rather are a way to benefit the masses by increasing productivity in the labor market, reducing healthcare costs, and generally making the nation more competitive on the international stage
Right and I get that, and I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but again I just get a really bad taste in my mouth for policies that aim to save people from themselves. It just feels like the government being a parent instead of a service of the people. Secondly, it doesn’t really fix the root of the problem, which doesn’t always have to be the goal in policies obviously, but reluctantly making people make decisions with higher prices. Where should the government stop then in using higher taxes to get us to do what it wants?
Again, I’m torn on this because it may be the correct thing to do to cut down sugar consumption, but I hate the precedent it creates.
From a practical perspective, cane sugar just tastes better.
That is true
No. It’s not quite harmful enough. If I banned that, I’d have to ban a lot of things if I wanted to keep a fairly consistent position.
Cigarettes would be the first I would consider.
But I probably wouldn’t outright ban any of it.
I’m fairly certain cigarette usage is at historic lows. However, we could go after DUIs a lot more aggressively by bolstering public transit and then applying a much more German-style approach to DUIs.
I think we just need a way to incentivize corporations to provide healthy alternatives as well (and not just HFCS, but high sugars in general, etc). Not sure of the best approach, but the bigger issue is that when every corporation is pushing cheap sellers that are addictive, its no wonder most people eat them. Like, McDonalds alone isn't responsible, but corporations in general because their basically saying they can't be held responsible for being successful. But they're putting so much money into being successful and trying to be successful, that it's difficult when you have such large entities pushing that way but then saying "it's not our fault people are going in the direction we push"
Incentivizing a company to do anything besides turn a profit is impossible. You must beat them into submission so that the only choice they have is to conform with the overall public health policy. Removing subsidies on Corn would be a good idea to specifically address HFCS in everything. An even better idea would be to just socialize food production and remove the profit from it and instead prioritize healthy affordable food for the citizenry.
I mean, if we're talking about impossible things, changing the world economic structure is one of them.
You can't socialize food production without socializing the entire economy of the world. Many countries rely on food production as their number one source of income. So you can't just socialize one industry. Let alone getting the world to play along.
An incentive could be "offer healthy alternatives otherwise something bad will happen." It requires meddling with the system and ignoring the free market, but sounds like I don't think you'd disagree with disruption in the free market.
One country, the US, could absolutely take it’s food off the world market and if I had the power to “ban” HFCS, I would 100% socialize US food production.
That's not the way any of this works. You can't just change a portion of the system. The US imports a ton of food. Banning something is actually a realistic ability. Ingredients have been banned before. Creati ng a system that is doomed to failure due to not thinking about it for 3 seconds is a different class of ability. We're talking about changing the laws of a country, not breaking the laws of math and physics. I'm pro-socialism but this is an awfully thought out take. It would cause worldwide economic collapse and less to starvation around the world due to such an event.
TIL portions of systems cannot be changed, ergo all systems are static unless they are destroyed.
No, you can change parts of it, but you can't just arbitrarily say any part can simply be replaced willy nilly. That's just childish. Changes have impact and consequences. You're literally ignoring cause and effect. I can see nothing is worth discussing with you though if you're going to respond with something a child would say. So we're done here.
The premise is magically banning something. What do you expect?
I wouldn't ban HFCS, I would just remove added sugar and HFCS from grocery items that don't need sweeteners or cconventionally never had sweeteners in them (it adds a lot of unnecessary calories, makes it harder for diabetics to shop, and usually tastes worse than unsweetened versions).
For example, I found pita bread with sweeteners in it (why? And yuck). Or most jarred tomato based pasta sauces (they typically make the sauce taste too sweet).
This seems to be a mainly American problem, though.
Sure, why not. Gotta ban something.
Yes, my brother’s allergic and I don’t want him to have to worry about it anymore.
paraphrandHuh, I didn’t know one could be allergic to HFCS.
CorkyskogThey would need to be very allergic to all corn products.
He can eat corn just fine, but HFCS gives him a migraine. I’m not sure why, but it happens consistently even when we don’t notice it on the ingredients list at first so it’s not psychosomatic or anything like that.
I have a cousin who’s allergic to peanuts, let’s ban those, too. Oh, and a family member who’s allergic to milk (lactose intolerance). So, let’s get rid of milk.
Oh, and actually another cousin is anorexic, so can we just get rid of all food? I have a great feeling about this!
Peanuts and dairy are usually possible to spot without checking the ingredients list, and they serve a distinct culinary purpose. They have valid reasons to exist, and are fairly simple, if a little annoying, to avoid.
HFCS does not serve a distinct culinary purpose (it’s pretty much just sugar but it benefits from corn subsidies), and is impossible to identify without careful scrutiny because it’s included in all sorts of foods that it has no business being in.
I wouldn’t ban it but I would ban subsidized corn. The thing is, humans want a sweetener and sugar is just as bad if not worse. Actually the history of sugar is worse then the history of any drug or evil empire. More humans have suffered because of sugar that anything else ever created by man.
I feel like landmines and rape and staphylococcus (and drug resistant variants after that) could give sugar a run for its money if we are talking about the worst things of all time xD
If you want to see for yourself the absolute horror that is sugar, i suggest this CBC documentary
The Secrets of Sugar - the fifth estate
Thanks, I’ll have to check it out!
Yea, but I’m fructose intolerant and in it’s in nearly everything so I’m biased
No I don’t believe in nanny states. If someone wants to produce it and someone else wants to consume it, they should be able to.
TostiThe thing is that if you are subsidizing the other end you are still interfering with the market.
I’ll bet you would dislike the government pulling back more and leaving even more to the morally bankrupt to abuse even less.
The government should be a strong regulator as a counterbalance as corporatations do not suffer repercussions for the worst externalities they produce.
A good example is Crisco, a 100% transfat cooking oil that corporations pushed for decades.
OP’s comment isn’t directly exclusive with stopping subsidies, though. I could agree with not subsidising corn but not having to regulate a fairly harmless product.
I think government should be a strong regulator in terms of breaking up monopolies. I also agree that the subsidies impact the free market. It’s a bit of a complicated subject because price of food being volatile has often lead to revolutions in the past.
So governments have a lot of incentive to subsidize food staples like corn or dairy. Without the subsidies we may see a sharp increase in inflation, at least temporarily. And whichever administration carries this out is virtually guaranteed to lose the next election.
Perhaps a better solution is instead of subsidies, we have a sort of basic command economy for staples while still allowing a private market for luxury food items. Not sure. Haven’t thought about this much.
No because things shouldn’t be banned unless they cause unavoidable harm.
That’s a bit glib. A pest control company can sell a chlorine gas spray just because it says it on the label?
Yes. People have a right to take risks.
And that’s exactly why we should be talking about banning HFCS content.
You know chlorine gas is bad, and that’s just a risk you think people should be allowed to take. But you clearly don’t fully understand just what chlorine gas is or what it does to your body. And that notion that a the ‘risk’ part of ‘health risk’ diminishes its severity is like believing the ‘thoery’ part of gravitational theory means we shouldn’t take that seriously.
Let me be more clear. People have a right to 100% totally fuck themselves up, to the point of grievous injury or death.
So the problem with hfcs is that it’s everywhere. And not just like juice, I’m talking like canned goods, deli meat, peanut butter, crackers, bread. So it’s really hard to avoid unless you just make everything from scratch. And not I’m advocating for a total abolishment but it’s easy to go over your daily sugar with it being in everything. I would try to limit it or maybe have a warning on packages. For the other person that linked a study, I looked into one of the guys that did it, and he does just like a lot of hfcs studies, like a weirdly amount and I found that kinda sus lol This site lists papers for and against the safety
It’s not as bad as all that, I’ve cut it out of my diet for about fifteen years. It involves A LOT of reading ingredient labels but for just about everything it’s in, there is an alternative without. Sometimes it does come at a premium, though. In the past ten years or so a lot of food manufacturers realized there was a market for foods without it and often advertise it on the label (breads especially). With some things like soda, you can get real sugar, glass bottled sodas which are expensive, but another alternative is drinking water which you should be doing anyway.
I agree that you can avoid hitting the daily sugar thing (and avoid hfcs) by reading ingredients but I don’t think many consumers do that. I certainly did not expect it find it in canned tomatoes and I use that in a lot of the recipes I found online. It makes sense why it’s in there though if it’s acting as a preservative.
It's Maddie!I mean, not ban, but certainly restrict.