Highly fructo-licious

I’ll get off my soapbox (for a while) and not tell people what to do other than — read your food labels! High fructose corn syrup is gross. It is subsidized by the federal government so it is cheap to use. It’s in everything — ketchup, pancake syrup, bread, frozen lemonade.

According to the Mayo Clinic, it hasn’t been proved that the syrup is responsible for America’s obesity problem or the increase in diabetes and high cholesterol, but “the fact remains that Americans consume large quantities of high-fructose corn syrup in the form of soft drinks, fruit-flavored beverages and other processed foods. These types of foods are often high in calories and low in nutritional value. This fact alone is reason to be cautious about foods containing high-fructose corn syrup.” Read your labels! I buy organic ketchup to avoid the syrup, but if you want pancake syrup without it, you have to buy real maple syrup which is better, but super expensive, almost $7. I used to buy Sara Lee whole wheat bread, until I read the label. Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee? Here’s someone. You can keep your bagels, too.

Someone at work just handed me a bag of McDonald’s apple dippers and a container of caramel dip. The first three ingredients in the caramel are corn syrup, sweetened condensed whole milk and high fructose corn syrup. Those are followed by water, butter, and sugar. And then you have your disodium phosphate and ethyl vanillan.

I tasted it for purely scientific reasons to verify my thesis that all that fake, sugary stuff is yucky. Ummm...they sure make yucky stuff taste good; perhaps it's the disodium phosphate.