The best thing you can ever do for your family

Take the corn syrup challenge.  Unlike the Special K challenge, you will lose more than inches.  You will lose a lifetime of future health problems and gain a happier, healthier child.  It’s true, high fructose corn syrup has no nutritional value and robs your body of nutrients in order to be metabolized.  But it gets worse… To illustrate the impact of the intense heat and refinement process required to produce corn syrup, I’d like to share a story I came across in my early days as a journalist covering the ethanol industry.

Ethanol, as you may know, is a bio-fuel that can be made from processing corn.  The corn industry in the U.S. is flat out brilliant.  They receive a government subsidy for growing corn and they have managed to get corn syrup included as an ingredient in a shocking number of products.  The most obvious, and most lucrative, is soft drinks.  But this creates a distribution challenge, as consumers purchase significantly more soft drinks in the warm summer months, leaving a surplus of corn syrup in the winter months.

Since the corn lobbyists are brilliant, they realized that they could solve this problem and collect another government subsidy at the same time.  If corn syrup is processed just a little bit further it becomes Ethanol, a biofuel.  The corn industry cleverly inserted a mandate in the 1992 Clean Air Act that fuel in the winter include a 10% blend of ethanol into the gasoline.  This was an especially impressive feat since adding the ethanol to the gasoline actually increased pollution, but I digress.

Since the corn lobby is so brilliant and so ambitious, they decided to push the 10% envelop, creating dedicated ethanol fleets in key farm states like South Dakota and Nebraska.  Why, you may ask, have we never heard of cars that run on 100% ethanol.  Great question!  It’s because the ethanol corroded the cars from the inside out.  Basically, ethanol, which is corn syrup, can eat through a car AND WE’RE FEEDING IT TO OUR CHILDREN!

If you do one thing, and one thing only, for your family, do this:  Read the labels and get rid of the corn syrup!