Is High Fructose Corn Syrup Turning Us Into Mad Hatters?
In an attempt to reclaim its reputation a few months back, the makers of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) created a few sneaky commercials, which were really hard for us in the food community to take seriously. But now HFCS is in the news again -- and this time the reason is much worse. It turns out that many foods sweetened with HFCS contain mercury, left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, a key ingredient in HFCS. And worst of all, the FDA and the industry have known about this potential toxin and has continued serving it up since at least 2005.
The HFCS industry has been shrouded in mystery since it began in the 1970s, essentially the result of "get big or get out" record corn harvests and subsequent plummeting commodity prices for farmers. What to do with all that excess corn? The answer was not to decrease yields, but to find a way to get that corn into our stomachs. This has led to the proliferation of HFCS in nearly all processed foods you find in the grocery store. The industry has lacked transparency, and our government has refused to mediate our current health crisis -- an upswing in diabetes and obesity resulting from cheap calories like HFCS -- with regulation. So its not surprising that it took so long for the news to reach the public eye.
The initial study [PDF] led by Renee Dufault, a now-retired Environmental Health Officer-cum-whistleblower, was published yesterday in Environmental Health, and found that nearly half the samples of HFCS tested contained mercury residue. The impetus for the study was to find approximately 58 tons of mercury that was reported missing in 2000 (and it is assumed yearly) from the chlor-alkali plants (makers of chlorine and caustic soda) in operation in the U.S.
Where has it gone? apparently some of it has gone into our veins and tissues.
Before now, our greatest threat for mercury exposure was through fish, followed by mercury amalgam in dentistry and through vaccines, as it is sometimes used as a preservative. But Dufault's study estimates that exposure via HFCS could be up to 50 times that of mercury amalgam exposure in children age 3-19, as this age group is the largest consumers of HFCS.
Of course we know that mercury is a cumulative toxin, especially dangerous to pregnant women and children, and that those with high exposure (Jeremy Piven among them, from eating too much sushi) show signs of sensory impairment, sensation loss and lack of coordination. This disorder was formerly referred to as Mad Hatter's Syndrome, because haberdashers who produced felt hats in the 18th and 19th centuries used a mercury compound in their process.
We too have had a potential day to day exposure to the heavy metal, just by choosing our food from the boxes and bottles in the center aisles of the grocery store. Aside from the case against us for improper nutrition, we could be slowly poisoning ourselves.
A second study, by David Wallinga, M.D. and his co-authors entitled "Not So Sweet: Missing Mercury and High Fructose Corn Syrup," [PDF] tested products directly from the supermarket. One in three tested positive for mercury residue. These included products like Smucker's Strawberry Jelly, Hunt's Tomato Ketchup, Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, Nutra Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars, Pop-Tarts Frosted Blueberry and Coca-Cola Classic.
The reason Wallinga cited for his extension of the original study was that:
Many of these products are specifically marketed to groups vulnerable to mercury. Soft drinks, fruit juices, and other junk food are successfully marketed to children not only through Internet and television advertising, but also in school vending machine and cafeteria options. People who rely on food stamps or who live in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods are also a special target for junk food manufacturers, because they offer the most accessible and often least expensive calories in the grocery store.
He went on to criticize the FDA for not doing its job, and urged for mercury, which is not required to produce HFCS, to be taken out of the process. I agree, but I would like to see our government push the corn refining industry further: They should be shouldering responsibility for our declining health in this country, and as such, should be more adequately regulated. If it were up to food justice advocates, the substance would be banned outright. But corn refiners should at least be held accountable for misleading advertising, and consumers should be aware of what they are buying, through better transparency on labels.
So the question is, what will the FDA do with this new found information? Dufault urges the creation of a mercury surveillance program, that monitors foods besides fish, along with additional public health evaluation of the exposure to mercury through HFCS. But can we really keep avoiding the deeper problem, that HFCS, as a product of the human imagination, could possibly be a failed experiment? For the sake of our health, it might be time for the government to finally intervene.
Originally posted on Civil Eats
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What about class action law suits?
The Cockroach Catcher
No matter what the corn growers tell you, HFCS is not 'Natural' it is genetically modified - and products with it can't be labeled natural. It's time to follow the UK's example and prohibit the sell of it in the US. Bet America would thin down pretty fast without this horrible chemical in everything we buy.
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Have a laugh when you read the response on industry's PR site. Their defense is specious, to say the least
My favorite:
"Our industry has used mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, for several years."
SEVERAL? So you stopped as little as three years ago, when you have been manufacturing this product since the 70's? Yea, only SEVERAL million kids have been exposed to Mercury residue for SEVERAL decades?
This should be the lead story, respectfully, bump Washington politics down a single step and please reveal out loud the fact of the people being POISONED wittingly and knowingly for SO MANY YEARS. The FDA is one issue, the fact of these companies spewing out solid blocks of mercury for mass consumption is Attempted Murder, and may very well be the source of so many developmental issues in young children, along with vast amounts of spikes in cancers globally.
We are drowning in a sea of mercury, from every conceivable food outlet in the world, that will eventually end up having shaved months or years off of our precious lives and health.
The outrage cannot be contained in media, in politics, in reportage. The reaction to this on the side of the public should be as violent as if someone were trying to directly inject mercury into you or your family's bloodstream. The Lies!!!
The tiniest bit of mercury is capable of phenomenal damage to any living organism.
To PULL All High Fructose Corn Syrup TAINTED & POISONOUS Food & Drink Products is A GIVEN.
But this is not enough. Accountability, from every conceivable responsible party, and STRICT PUNISHMENT for those who committed this insane form of MASS POISONING and were Complicit in their SILENCE, must be conducted immediately.
Otherwise we are asking for ourselves and our children for disease, for the destruction of our sacred temples, for even our deaths.
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Agreed!!! As a parent of 2 kids with child-onset bipolar (ages of onset 2 and 4.5) I feel this most definitely needs to be explored. If you account for increased understanding that BP manifests itself completely differently in children than in adults (thus increased rates of diagnosis) and adjust for population growth, there are still more people/kids with bipolar than 50 or 100 years ago. Because the rates have been increasing for so long it could not all be due to HFCS, but it could be a factor.
If you have a biological propensity toward BP, either as a carrier of BP genes or of developing it yourself, things like use of stimulants for ADD treatment can lower the age of onset. HFCS/Mercury may well be one factor in this decrease in onset age.
My BP/OCD kid w/sensory integration and executive functioning issues fell into a suicidal depression at the beginning of the school year, has been unable to eat much food since He dropped 10 lbs/was almost hospitalized. The doctors said to feed him whatever he could eat, even junk food. :( He has regained the weight and still eats a very limited diet. He won't eat fresh peaches(too squishy) or oranges(can't deal with the white "strings") so his fruit always comes by way of fruit cups. The fruit is packed in tons of HFCS.
A Global Boycott on the entire Food & Drink distributing system may very well be the only way to save our health, demanding that alternatives to mercury saturated products be on the shelves TODAY, not tomorrow, will be our only hope against this insane crime against our humanity worldwide.
Our leaders let us down.
If companies can form a way to poison us through nearly everything there is to eat and drink, wouldn't it be feasible for them to be capable of creating food & drink that won't literally destroy our bodies?
This is all about Profit, and nothing more. The people's very lives have been sold out once again to gild the throne of consumerism.
If we're not expendable for the mistakes of Wall Street, losing homes, jobs and sometimes our families or our very lives, we are for the treachery of Washington and being sent into needless and feckless wars, dying alone in the sand far from our families for a businessman named Cheney, we are for needing basic and simple medical care but not surviving the waiting room or whatever we pick up in the hospital due to lack of sterility, and we are for our primitive hunger and thirst to keep our hearts beating another day, we are expendable in our faith that human beings would not consciously poison every other single human being willingly and hide the evidence when they claim it was discovered.
How were the scientific and medical communities silenced. Money?
Population control,
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so the govt agency responsible for monitoring this and notifying the public failed in their responsibility and the solution to this is more govt?
We should eliminate the FDA entirely. Having the FDA and SEC and other regulatory agencies creates a false sense of confidence in the consumer. "It must be safe or else the FDA wouldn't allow it." mentality. By eliminating these agencies the free market would create their own that would be held accountable to the consumers. Look at Underwriters Limited. They are much more careful about the products they endorse because their reputation has value. If they endorse a faulty product people lose faith in their label and producers are less likely to pay for their endorsement. The FDA does not have this problem. They have a monopoly and we get products like this or meat with salmonella because the regulatory agency suffers no repercussions.
I think it's more of an issue with bad management. Doesn't matter if it is governmental or private, proper management is the key. Perhaps the FDA could be privatized, but who would fund it? The same companies whose products they test? Oversight and profit are often a poor match with a lot of potential for conflict of interest. Personally I would rather not see a privatized FDA anymore than I would like to see a privatized CDC.
If we're all lucky, we can look forward to a whole new set of nanny laws to force us to comply with a small minority's desires. Yay!
Keeping known poisons out of our food supply is not a "nanny law", nor is it the desire of a small minority. Do you actually want mercury in your food? If so, then you are in an infinitesimally small minority.
If you actually understood the historical events that necessitated the creation of the FDA and EPA, I don't think you would be so cavalier about their importance.
nanny laws, you know, like potable drinking water, limitations on fecal matter in food, seat belts. I guess one could always move to China, plenty of freedom for producers to poison the food over there.
The reason they do this is because they cant be seen dumping it as a waste product without severe Fed penalties so they repackage the waste product and dilute it into other products, that way their is no waste!. Welcome to corporate America!, we make, you buy & die!
We are a dumping ground for the junk but they make us pay extra for the good stuff.
Contrary to the image promoted by PR campaigns, omega 6 corn oil is pretty much a "bad fat". It is a precursor of arachidonic acid which promotes joint inflammation and probably heart disease.
Sugar prices in the US are maintained at a level above world market prices by tariffs. There are now only 2 major refiners of sugar in the US and soon there will be only one as the state of FL is buying up one producer/refiner to add 100,000 acres of cropland to the Everglades.
Corn production is subsidized by price supports to the producers (cornbelt and Big Ag), enabling corn products to be sold to consumers at very low prices.
this needs to be on the front page instead of brad and angelina and kids
Dr. Oz is on Oprah today and he was just talking about HFCS and how it causes obesity and organ failure in our children. We need to get rid of this sweetener in our food supply. It was dumped there in the past due to an excess supply and now its just a way for the corn farmers to get subsidies. Why are our tax dollars paying to keep this toxic substance in the food supply? Dr. Oz says it causes a multitude of health problems in our children. Read the labels and stop buying food with HFCS in it and we can cause a real excess in the supply so the manufacturers will get the message that we won't buy their poisoned food just because its convenient and cheap. The medical bills are not cheap. We still pay, just in a different way. Otherwise, we are no better than the Chinese who poisoned the baby formula.
This is just one of the many evils of HFCS. It can contribute to heart disease, raise cholesterol and trigliceride, make blood cells prone to clotting, affect mineral absorption and increase mineral loss, increase free radicals, contribute to insuline resistance & diabetes, more easily converts to fat, fool your body into hunger, gastric distress, etc. In addition to the new mercury concerns, HFCS damages and ages the body, and may also inhibit the healing process (affects white blood cell action). (And I find I tend to feel icky when I consume it.) This is just bad stuff used to make food production cheaper. We'll be better off sticking to what nature produces and not what mankind tinkers with.
Thanks for covering this! I work on Oceana's Campaign to Stop Seafood Contamination, which has been working since 2005 to get the chlor-alkali industry to go mercury-free. Since then, 5 of the 9 plants that were using outdated technology at that time have announced plans to stop using mercury. To email the companies that own the remaining four plants and ask them to switch to modern technology, go to http://tak
In the last couple of sessions of congress, we have worked with then-Senator Obama to introduce legislation that would ban mercury in chlor-alkali production by 2012. We will be working to make sure the legislation passes this year!
I believe coal fired power generation is also a significant source of mercury in the environment as air pollution. That is where a lot of fish get it. I imagine humans get it from breathing it too. That is much more significant than any mercury from dental work or vaccines.
So, the FDA knew that there was mercury in the food and drinks that millions of American children eat and drink and that mercury in any amount is harmful to these children and they covered it up and didn't tell us.
If the industry people and the government is not held responsible (huge lawsuits, at a minimum), then the U.S. is worse than China. China at least held someone responsible. I'm not holding up their system as an example to follow, but rather to show how far we have slipped. In my mind, China is near the bottom of the list in terms of government corruption and lack of accountability, but the U.S. may have sunk even lower.
Our government has been sold to large corporate interests. It doesn't serve the American people- it serves these large corporate interests.
Yup. We now look to China for guidance. Sad.
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