People Wake Up! -October 2010 blog Over the course of my life, I’ve seen an intrusion creep into our day to day existence that is killing each one of us little by little. Like the “death of a thousand cuts”, this torture affects us all as we blindly go by just as lemmings to a cliff. I’m talking about way we eat in America. Let me share my own personal experience beginning last February when I decided to give up eating or drinking anything with “High Fructose Corn Syrup”. I was addicted to soda pop. I easily went through 12 cans everyday. It was hard, but my plan included mega-dozing on citrus fruit to over come the cravings the first 30 days. I also increased my water intake. It worked and since then I have lost 30 pounds and is has stayed off. I now hover around 220 lbs which is territory I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Now in recent news, I see where the food distributors have asked the FDA to change the name of high fructose corn syrup to something more appealing such as “corn sugar”. This the same thing that happened a few years ago with artificial sweeteners. Now those poisons have attractive names like Splenda or Equate (for more information go to http: //www.buzzle.com/articles/sucralose-vs-aspartame.html ). The fact remains that these are artificial substances that the body doesn’t know how to process and often stores in the tissues rather than eliminating them. Long term effects are not known or just becoming noticeable because these substances are relatively new. In the case of corn syrup, these pleadings with the FDA were supposedly initiated to overcome the bad press that corn syrup had gotten in recent years. Shakespeare said, “a rose by any other name is still a rose.” However, the ad rep’s from Madison Avenue have found that consumers are willing to accept any product that is cleverly packaged, so the food brokers have come up with strategies that increase profits while substituting natural ingredients for far cheaper artificial ones. All the while, our supposed “watchdog” agencies in the government play a complicit role, AS DO YOU! After all, most people don’t read ingredients on packaging or do the have the degrees in chemistry to decipher complex names, the just purchase products because of the leprechaun or rainbow billed toucan. We don’t market the same way as other countries where people buy fresh foods daily, we have been trained to stock up for weeks or longer, so shelve life and preservatives govern what is available. I remember going to the market in Mexico and all the chicken was yellow, quite different from here where the chicken is bulked up to twice the size of natural. Fruits and vegetables are picked before they ripen on the vine and have full nutrient value, so they ripen in crates on trucks or warehouses. Here’s a little history lesson just to show one dimension of how we have been manipulated over the years. After world war 2 the baby boomer generation spread quickly from the cities into the suburbs. The little corner market became a thing of the past, the interstates were built, advances in electric appliances (no more blocks of ice), and population became spread out of greater distances. Between greater demands by consumers and the need for greater shelf life, food products became juiced with preservatives and competition required more elaborate packaging. In the late 50′s Castro took over Cuba where a huge chunk of our cane sugar was imported from, in the next decade revolutions and unrest also had an effect on sugar costs. First attempts at sugar substitutes were pretty awful with heavy aftertastes. Even the reports of lab rats getting cancer from saccharine didn’t deter the food industry. Why? What was at stake?…money, lots of money. First convince the American public that sugar was bad for them. Convince them that getting used to the after taste in substitutes was worthwhile. Replace sugar with the far cheaper corn syrup all the while justify the increasing price hikes because of the cost of sugar. In a few short years, they had successfully replaced sugar with soft drinks that cost many times more using ingredients that cost far less. Profits for Pepsi, Coca Cola and the rest went through the roof. Pepsi bought chains like Taco Bell with these new profits. Introduce new sodas that have additional ingredients like caffeine such as Mountain Dew and people began to become addicted to sodas sweet or sugar free and consume even more. No body protested, in fact people sang along with the jingles like “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” or “Whatever shape you’re in”(seven up), how could something be bad for you that is named after a doctor? In recent years, there has been a huge corn shortage because of ethanol fuels. Suddenly, the soda companies are trying to give sugar a come back because now it’s cheaper than corn syrup, coke even promoted a vintage version made with real sugar last year. Oh by the way, long time tobacco companies who had a longtime history of making a product that was bad for you seem good (Winston taste good like a cigarette should) diversified many years ago to over come the government’s regulation of their industry by buying out many of our major food companies such as General Mills. Think they would change their ways? Are you mad yet? Like being manipulated? All this happened in my lifetime. Check the facts, read the labels, think about what you are putting into your body and into your sweet children’s bodies. Then get mad and start the change.