Susan's Scribblings the Blog

High fructose corn syrup:  more deadly than nuclear war, more insidious than a Dark Lord of the Sith and the blood supply of every grocery chain CEO vampire in the world.

If you haven’t been reading about all the funky gunk inside our food, you’ve either been chowing down on chips and couldn’t hear the television, or you’re in denial.  HFCS and the digital television conversion are both life changing things, but the latter will just affect your TV viewing while the former can kill you.

HFCS, for all intents and purposes, is a sugar product designed to make foods taste irresistable.  Studies are linking it to obesity, and it isn’t surprising since it appears in your ketchup bottle, your orange juice, your diet soda and even in some things you normally wouldn’t put suger in, such as soup.  Seriously, would you drop a spoonful of sugar into your soup?

Sugar and salt have a common effect:  as you consume it, you find the need to consume more of it as its ability to stimulate your taste wears off.  Think of the cigarette habit:  people start at one or two and move up to a pack a day.  Alcoholism makes drinkers up their intake.  So it is with these two partners in seasoning or sweetening.

I went cold turkey on salt once, and it took about 48 hours for foods to start tasting good again, but I can tell you that I actually tasted the salt naturally present in the food after I stopped shooping the table salt on everything.  The same thing can happen with sugar:  cutting back or out can affect the taste of foods for a bit, but then your body adjusts and sugar in its natural form can be tasted more readily.

I don’t know how difficult it may be to lessen the amount of HFCS in my grocery shopping, but I’m taking a shot at it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.