Taking Out the Corn Syrup

It is a wonderful life when visions of sugarplums resonate with the lyrics of a Beatles song inside your head. I guess I am a strange Loop too, Mr. Hofstadter. Or at times I am just strangely loopy about all of the young kids in the world. Sometimes I can even remember being one for a minute or two.

 

We hadn’t developed the corn syrup approach to sweetening our toxic soft drinks yet when I was young. Sugar was widely used and only began to be reviled later as our nutritional guru’s caught on to the grim effects of too sweet on our health.

 

When the merchants of our fatness found that people wouldn’t buy it anymore if sugar was on the label they discovered High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). That solved their marketing problem and made us all a little fatter.

 

Now it looks like High Fructose Corn Syrup didn’t actually help, duh. Diabetes is epidemic and growing into a massive culture wide disaster. The cost of eating and drinking all of that sugar, whether Fructose, Sucrose or Glucose, is to sink the Islet’s Of Lagerhans under a toxic cloud.

 

There was an old and grim book called, Sugar Blues that told us all about that odd conspiracy to sweeten us to death. I don’t see that book in the health food stores anymore but it may be time to trot it out once more. HFCS is on the way out and sugar is waiting in the wings to take its place.

 

There I’ve expunged the Beetles. Now the lyrics that go, I’m as Corny as Kansas in August are roiling around in there. Of course Iowa would have been more realistic but the lyricist probably couldn’t tell corn from wheat anyway.

 

The Beatles have the beat and the beet has the sugar. And the beet goes on. Diabetes costs us a huge amount of our health care budget annually. I wonder when we’ll get a clue. Maybe someday when we can grow a new Pancreas in a mason jar we’ll solve this problem. “Honey, where did you hide the candy from Valentines Day? All of that talk about sugar made me hungry.”