New Name, Same Old Crap

 I was watching some TV this morning while working out. I saw a comercial for the brand new "corn sugar." Yes, you heard me right. Corn sugar. During my weight loss experience, I have trained myself extensively in nutrition, but I had never heard of corn sugar before. Since this piqued my suspicion, I decided to do a literature search on the topic. The result did not surprise me.

As it turns out, corn sugar is our good old friend High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). The very same friend that gives us obesity, diabetes, bad teeth, and many other health problems, just under a different, friendlier sounding name.

How, you may ask, were they able to do this? Thank the USDA. The USDA, who controls how food and beverages are labeled, granted permission to the makers of HFCS to call it "corn sugar." They did this because of the (well deserved) bad press that HCFS has gotten lately. By calling HCFS corn sugar, the manufacturers are hoping that lay people will not be able to recognize it, and the stigma will vanish. Its almost as if cigarette manufacturers got permission to relabel their product "happy sticks," and sell them to children.

Corn sugar is not the first example of creative product relabeling based on public opinion. About 40 years ago, it turned out that rapeseed oil was not very popular due to the unfortunate name, so it was changed to canola oil in order to improve marketing. There are other examples as well.

The corn sugar debacle seems somehow more sinister. They are not just changing the name because it no longer matches the time, but because it is associated with significant problems, and rightly so. I feel violated and misled. If there are health problems associated with a particular product, we know about them, and changing a name to prevent that seems sneaky.

The HFCS manufacturers do have a point. Their product is not any worse than sugar. In reality, you should try to avoid both, especially when they occur in abnormal quantities in processed foods. The only place that sugar is really OK for you is naturally occuring in fresh foods (i.e. fruits). The problem I have with all of this is that a conscious, health minded consumer looking for safer processed foods may be fooled into thinking that corn sugar is somehow safer than HFCS, and be tricked into eating processed crap.

This is my attempt to raise public awareness of the name change, so that we can all avoid being victims of advertisers and manufacturers, and make independent healthy decisions. Good luck!